I again skipped a month, and I apologize for that. I have been having a lot of trouble getting work done at the right times. I suffered from extreme paralysis and procrastination with my classwork this semester, turning in essays very late because I could not get in the flow of writing, or I kept second-guessing what I was doing, or I got stuck in a rigid order of homework completion where if I didn’t get one assignment done, I could not move on to a different one even though that might have helped me to at least get something done.

Part of the problem is actually that a lot of professors in my program are neurodivergent themselves and also chronically behind on stuff, so they are exceedingly flexible towards us students, which doesn’t help me oftentimes because a firm deadline can help me be more motivated and at least somewhat organized. Many people with ADHD feel a surge of motivation right before a deadline, which helps them get work done. But the other problem I have is that running up against a deadline can also make me start panicking to the degree that I cannot work. It’s a delicate balance and years of schooling have still not taught me how to manage it all. I honestly think I’ve gotten worse over time, as my neurodivergence has bloomed in ways that are hard to control.

So I kept attempting to establish firm deadlines with my professors to try to work with my needs. But then when I did, I panicked and broke down and still turned things in late, and in one class I even took an incomplete. I think the incomplete is very justified though: this is the class that was troubling me all semester because the content was related to my breakdown in January, and even though I eventually got over the triggers, it’s been a lot of effort to try to catch up on work that I had initially set aside. Plus, the stress of the end of the semester seemed to get to me, and I somehow got sick with two bad colds in succession (and I’m still recovering) and also had the unusual-for-me, partially psychosomatic symptom of repeatedly dry heaving and even occasionally throwing up over the last month. I figured that it was a signal that I’ve become very worn down and need a break.

The other sign of my overall exhaustion and unwellness was my suddenly having no interest in intellectual or creative activities for a few days last week. I did not want to do anything except play Hogwarts Mystery on my phone (somewhat embarrassingly, I have recently developed a highly absorbing special interest in Harry Potter, despite my knowing very well the problems with its creator and the series itself), which is not a particularly mentally stimulating game because much of the time you’re just tapping objects to spend energy and stuff. I was stuck at home because of being sick and had a “boredom headache” from not being able to do anything. I seem to be reemerging from that uncomfortable state and also starting to recover from my illness.

I have wondered, though, at how I have been feeling more on the low side a lot this whole academic year. That’s not very characteristic of me. My bipolar has always manifested as more leaning towards the high side, enhanced by the excitability of my ADHD. Even before I developed the “disorder,” I was an energetic and hopeful person. A fellow violist in my high school orchestra, who experienced mental illness themself, once commented to me that I had a lot of brightness in me. They then expressed a hope that it would stay with me always. They said it knowing very well the neurotic tendencies that would also show up in me sometimes. I happened to be tasked with leading the viola section, which was a small group that seemed to be half neurotic artists and half people who didn’t like to practice. It was an interesting experience that taught me a lot of things.

At my most recent psychiatry visit, I decided to be honest with my psychiatrist about how I feel about my medications, which is very complicated. I do hope that I can decrease my amount of medication over time, if not get off of meds altogether. Bipolar used to be considered a lifelong condition — and many clinicians have not updated their understanding — but there has been evidence that many people who develop the disorder in young adulthood find that it starts to settle down in middle adulthood, when many aspects of their lives might be also becoming more stable (such as career paths or building a family). And then there are also people for whom bipolar may not be strictly a mood disorder, but perhaps more of a circadian rhythm issue that can be addressed with specific sleep regimens, or an autoimmune issue that might improve or even clear up with the appropriate treatment. This is all to say that nothing is certain in how things will continue for me. Things could persist and things could change in ways that I can’t fully imagine in the present. I view my madneuroqueerness as one fluid entity that evolves throughout my life, manifesting in different ways at different times. (They say that autism and ADHD are neurodevelopmental disorders, but isn’t bipolar, which most often emerges in late adolescence or early adulthood, just as “developmental,” only at a different time period?)

I also spoke to my psychiatrist about what I have been learning in my classes about cultures in which madness is considered a spiritual gift. Malidoma Patrice Somé, a healer from the Dagara tribe in West Africa, wrote about how when he visited a psychiatric hospital in the United States, he saw spirits trying to communicate with the patients, who were prevented from accessing the spiritual world due to a lack of support and likely a lot of trauma from the hospital. He decided to bring a youth who experienced psychosis back to his village, and through participating in the tribe’s rituals, the youth recovered enough to then return to the US for college, which he originally was not expected to be able to attend.

My bipolar has felt spiritual from the very beginning, and that is a large part of why I’m studying East-West Psychology and getting the spiritual counseling certificate in particular. I feel that I need to learn to face my intensity and learn to work with it, not just suppress it. But in order for it to be safe for me to do so, I need to have strong supports put into place and a crisis response plan so that nothing destructive happens and I don’t end up in the hospital again. I do think it’s possible, but now is not the right time. I have too many commitments to keep up, and I deal with chronic suicidal ideation even with my medications. The purpose of my meds is to preserve my functioning enough so that I can get a foothold in this demanding and often hostile world. It makes total sense for me to be on them right now. It still makes me sad.

I am lucky to have a psychiatrist who is open to discussing challenging and liminal topics such as these. She is analytical and erudite herself and is the first psychiatrist or psych nurse I’ve had who’s actually able to think ahead of me. Previously I felt like I was often coming up with diagnoses myself, and then just trying to verify them with clinicians, only to then doubt myself or blame myself because I thought I was making things up. But my current psychiatrist has taught me a lot from her specific expertise, which, from her bio, includes autism, LGBTQ issues, and gifted students. She told me that the autistic shutdowns I have, which often leave me unable to stand up or otherwise physically weakened or slowed down, are common among highly intelligent people whose bodies forcibly slow down their active minds due to overwhelm. It had not occurred to me that they had to do with intelligence, or rather a particular way of experiencing the world that high intelligence often brings. I suppose there are not many psychiatrists who have the clinical experience to see such a pattern in their patients, especially since there are so few who understand autism in adults.

This summer I will be taking a course for my program, along with getting the work done for the course I took an incomplete in, as there is a type of course that is required for the degree that I haven’t been able to fit into my schedule. This month, I am also auditing The Collaborative Piano Institute’s summer program online, as I have been wanting more training in collaborative piano, but the program conflicts with commitments I have, so I couldn’t attend it in person. (I also find music and performing arts intensives to be sensorily overwhelming and stressful and have tended to need a lot of rest when attending one, so the online option, which allows me to watch whatever videos I wish whenever I want throughout this summer, is more accessible.) I’m trying to get some rest as well, but there are always so many things that I want to do! I will be getting a massage at least — my mother decided to return to me the gift card that I gave her a couple years ago for a massage at a spa because she didn’t feel comfortable getting a massage from a stranger. I’m not entirely sure how it will feel for me given my sensitivities, but I'm willing to try.

I’m also starting as a piano teacher with Artistic Elements LLC. I’ve never done piano teaching before, but in my shadowing/training sessions I have been finding that I have good intuition for how to coach students in improving their technique and artistry. There are some general pedagogical skills from my maths tutoring experience that also apply here. My more analytical approach may not work for students who are just beginning or are more casual learners, so I will have to learn new strategies for them.

Announcements

On June 11th, I will be performing The Legend of Yuliang once again as part of the Global Performance + Sound Lab happening at Arts, Letters, and Numbers in Averill Park, New York. I previously attended the Creative Music Intensive at that place, and I am excited to return to share this show, which is a combination of personal narrative and collective ritual, with the other artists and whoever else will be in attendance. The exact time hasn’t been announced yet, but it will be posted on the linked site when it is!

On June 28th at 10:00am, Johnson Memorial Methodist Church in Mayfair, Philadelphia is having an outdoor worship service. They have invited the Christian band Descendants of Noah to perform, and I as their staff musician am also singing/playing a few songs. We will be congratulating two high school graduates, and we are welcoming anyone interested to attend. It’s a small church, so it would be great to have some newcomers, regardless of whether you stay with us in the future.

A Contemplative Offering

Josephine McCarthy, a magician whose ideas we explored in my Jung the Magician class, wrote that with practice and close attention, you can predict when you are becoming unwell. The day prior to getting sick with the first of two bad colds, I had an autistic shutdown at the karate studio. I consider it a sign that when my energetic boundaries are penetrated, my immunological boundaries might be as well. What are some of the earliest signs of your getting unwell (whatever that means for you)?

When I was in the psych hospital in January, I met a person who was very spiritual and told me that he could see a spirit communicating with another patient. This person also happened to never appear distressed, always rating his depression, anxiety, and pain at a zero. I have no idea why he was in the hospital in the first place. He didn’t seem manic or particularly ungrounded either (though maybe he was at some point prior to when I arrived? But then why did I still manage to get myself out of there before him?). When he saw my initial reaction of confusion at his statement, “That guy’s in love” (with a spirit), I responded that I did not perceive what he did, but that I believed him. Would you ever believe someone who perceived something you did not? How would you respond to them if you did not?

Harmony, health, and happiness,

Margin | 天涯

I skipped the February update because there was just too much going on inside of me that I didn’t feel like writing about at that time. The primary thing was that somehow the gender issue progressed to essentially repeating the sequence of “stages” that I underwent the spring of my sophomore year of college, except just more rapidly and without intense bipolar mood swings. I went from having the OCD fixation and fear that I might be lying about my gender, to feeling a depressive guilt that I was lying, to then oscillating between confidence and doubt about my identity. In my sophomore year, this then eventually lead to a mental crisis intensified by bipolar, resulting in my first ever psych hospitalization. But this time, instead, something else happened.

During my Spiritual Counseling class, we were discussing the theory of Internal Family Systems. In one class, the professor was talking about disowned parts. While she did so, a little girl self emerged from within me and urged me to put on a dress. I put on the dress, and for the rest of class, she was just beaming. I felt so light and at ease, as if something had been released in me. My classmates even noticed a difference.

But then, at some point, the little girl self — whom I also call “pink little butterfly” because that is how she is like — saw a drawing I drew a week prior, while at the retreat in San Francisco for the Spiritual Counseling class, and wanted to rip apart the drawing. This drawing was of myself as an infant swaddled in a purple blanket. I drew it out of an inspired and restful state because of an activity that we did. The infant felt like a symbol of my nonbinary self and my need to be gentle to this self. But the little girl wanted to destroy the purple baby. Why? It seemed that to her, there was no room in my psyche for both her and the baby.

So I pleaded with my little girl self, saying that she could take all the space she wanted in my psyche, but just don’t destroy the baby. It was hard, but also telling. Firstly, this seems to illustrate the root of my gender struggle: two parts of me that feel at odds to each other. My little girl self is not just distinctive in gender, but she is also thoroughly unserious, frivolous even. She laughs at gender norms and says “why not, it could be fun!” She exists as a counterbalance to the part of me that normally narrates myself, that uses that narrative power in the manner of a philosopher-poet, courting suffering and chasing beauty. And she really is little; she definitely has some relation to my fourth-grade self who tried to be a “girly girl” for a year and a half until they lost interest, but I think that she really originates from before my school years, before I learned to be so serious (if there was such a time!).

Here’s the other thing though: the existence of the little girl self within me strongly validates my overall nonbinary experience. That I could feel her presence as some “other” part in me that “took over” meant that there was something else as well, something utterly contrasting. I find that my relationship to gender is so complicated, but that complexity is exactly what makes it queer. It’s not the standard narrative of trans identity that is told in the media, but non-standard narratives like these are more common than one might think. Especially among people who are also neurodivergent.

I don’t quite know how I “disowned” this part of me more recently, as I actually have been aware of little girl/pink little butterfly for a few years. Perhaps she just wanted to articulate herself a little more strongly. (She has in the past demanded attention very loudly, only to fly away once I attend to her.) I could try experimenting more with feminine elements in how I present myself. Yet I have been finding that sometimes I just need to imagine a space within me for little girl self to dwell freely, without my having to put on a dress or otherwise perform femininity. I get the sense that androgynous me and pink little butterfly want to be separate from each other rather than blending in some way, and I just have to be more flexible with when each one wants to express itself.

It’s hard for me to do these experiments though while living at home with my mother. She does not permit anything too transgressive of gender norms. But if I am suddenly feminine, she also pokes fun at me, for example saying to my father that I’m making myself so stinkin’ pretty with makeup (that’s the direct translation of the Mandarin). And she also keeps buying clothes for me! I feel like I should have more control over my closet regardless of how I present. (Like, let me choose my feminine clothes too — perhaps especially those, as I am pickier with them and only want what would actually feel really good to wear.) I think she buys things for me because 1. she’s always scouting for good deals and 2. she might think that she is a better judge than I am for what is nice-looking given my track record of transgression.

The gender stuff was affecting my ability to engage in my class relating to Carl Jung, due to the anima/animus concept having triggered me. But after emailing my professor about it and having a chat with him, the issues seem to have resolved. I still have to catch up on a lot, but at least all this that got brought up during my crisis in January is settling down. I feel nervous that I might jinx myself by saying that. I doubt that I will ever fully escape my psychological burdens. And it feels so vulnerable sharing all this to you all here, as some part of me still irrationally worries that there’s something wrong with my experience (or that someone else might think there is). But I’m feeling better for now. And the spring is beautiful and warm (hopefully consistently now?) and I haven’t been too (hypo)manic either as I sometimes am in this season.

Other happenings

I performed my interactive solo show, The Legend of Yuliang, for my church to mark the Lunar New Year. It went well, but differently. With interactive performances, different audiences cause different results. This audience seemed more nervous about in-the-moment creativity, and I had to adapt one activity and somewhat abandon another. Another performance date is in the works for this summer, and as I prepare to present this again, I’ll definitely give some thought to how audiences with different characteristics might respond differently.

My mother came with me to San Francisco where I attended the class retreat. We had been discussing the possibility of my traveling alone, but after my recent hospitalization, she decided that she needed to go with me. We spent a full day sightseeing, which was fun, although I didn’t understand why we had to go both under the Golden Gate Bridge (on a boat) and over it. It’s not even golden, it’s red! I did get to see Chinatown though and encountered some street musicians, who let me try out their traditional Chinese musical instruments.

The class retreat was full of deep conversation. We had six spiritual counseling dyad practice sessions over three days, three sessions in one dyad and role and three in another. So I was the counselor to one person first, and then I was the client to a different person. I can be insecure about my social and oral communicative skills due to being told I didn’t have “emotional intelligence” as a child, but I found in these sessions that I have strengths to offer. This makes me just a bit more optimistic in my dreams for how to put these skills to practice.

I have been regularly attending karate classes since January, and just last Thursday, I earned my yellow belt! I earned it a month earlier than adults are usually given to earn it (children are given twice the adult amount of time for this first belt promotion). I honestly feel like I could have used some more time to practice — as evidenced by my board-break test, where I think I took four tries to break a wooden board. But the instructor kept saying that I was a very good student and was learning very quickly. And I have been putting in effort outside of class to practice as well as to condition my body overall. When I started, I could do four push-ups and zero sit-ups, but now I can do twenty push-ups and nine sit-ups. (I don’t know how I suddenly figured out how to do sit-ups. I hadn’t been able to do one since mid-elementary-school, and it seemed to be a problem of coordination rather than just lack of core strength.)

A Contemplative Offering

Is there a part of you that asks for a little (or a lot) more attention right now? What do they look like, sound like, feel like?

Harmony, health, and happiness,

Margin | 天涯

My autism has granted me talents in mathematical reasoning and musical expression. These two capacities, one logical and one poetic, induce in me two competing impulses regarding language. On the one hand, I crave the precision of words that describe exactly what I mean. On the other hand, I yearn for the suggestiveness in words that reach beyond what mere letters can contain.

Early in my gender identity journey, I fell into a firestorm of linguistic existential struggle. Something drew me towards the language of nonbinary gender, I knew. But something about it also made me uneasy. The poetic part of me loved the opportunity to broaden my sense of self and refashion my wardrobe. The logical part of me worried that the label did not exactly fit. According to my terribly honest autistic brain, trying out a label that did not fit equated to lying about my identity. So eventually, tortured also by my first bipolar episodes, I broke down, believing that I was a liar.

Trans people often say that they always knew they were trans, that they were born trans and had no choice. I cannot say the same. Not that I wasn’t born with propensities that might lead me to embrace trans identity. But language, for me, is not merely a descriptive tool, but also something that shapes identity itself. It’s like how measurement of a photon in quantum mechanics influences the photon, creating a new reality. The more I spoke of myself as nonbinary, the more I became so.

It took me several months of intensive psychotherapy for me to reconcile the competing linguistic impulses within me. I eventually decided that language is inherently imperfect, but the possibilities it generates are delightfully infinite. I didn’t have to be trans or nonbinary in the same way that others were. I could make the words my own.

Even now, I find that the words I use to describe myself—nonbinary, queer, autistic, ADHD, bipolar—inherently alienate me from myself because none of these characteristics are separable from one another in my experience. When gender norms agitate my spirit, is it my nonbinary gender sparking a rebellion, or is it my autism rejecting social norms in general? When I undergo intense mood swings within several days, is it rapid-cycling bipolar or the dynamism of ADHD?

As a spiritual person of East Asian descent, I find myself identifying less with these discrete terminologies and more with the concept of yin and yang. Yin and yang are present within me as feminine and masculine, as intuition and reason, as autistic order and ADHD chaos, as bipolar highs and lows, as the biculturalism of East and West. Yin and yang feel less like labels and more like an orientation towards the cosmos.

I believe that although social identities and psychological diagnoses are excellent for facilitating communication and understanding about our diverse human experiences, we must not limit ourselves with language. There cannot be a standard way of being trans, autistic, or human. We must stay aware of the dual powers that words carry, noticing when they constrict our potential and when they inspire liberated ways of being. Crucially, we must realize that it is our attitude towards language that determines how it affects us.

Being autistic and highly verbal has given me a load of trouble with language. But by reconciling the logical and poetic aspects of my relationship with words, I have become more at peace with the limitations of language and am better able to connect with the nonverbal truths of self and universe.

It has been a very weird month for me. I had been feeling depressed for some while, so I thought that doing a short personal retreat at Pendle Hill, a Quaker study and retreat center, would help matters. But somehow it instead triggered a mental and spiritual crisis that eventually escalated into extreme suicidality that led me to decide to admit myself into a psych hospital. Yet after just two days, once the suicidal feelings subsided, I realized that the hospital had the potential to make me much worse, so for the first time, I signed the 72 hour notice form in order to leave earlier, formally “against medical advice.” After coming home, I remained prone to disorientation for a few days, which was a bit concerning since some aspects of it were new to me and may have pointed towards an increased likelihood of psychosis. Currently, I feel more recovered and have extra supports for the time being.

How do I explain everything? I suppose I shall elaborate a bit on each item in that paragraph:

short personal retreat: I’d been to Pendle Hill once before when I was a student at Haverford College, and it was a nice place, so I thought it would be an excellent setting to have a bit of respite. I initially was going to focus on creative projects, but then I decided to focus on spiritual reading, in particular Carl Jung’s Red Book, which is recommended reading for a class I’m taking this spring, as well as various Pendle Hill Pamphlets, which are about all sorts of Quaker topics. I also chose to digitally detox, not using any screens, and to minimize talking. All this felt amazing until I was reading the introduction of a book I found in the library by a Jungian analyst, which was about four female ancestors of Jesus (well, technically of Joseph, who in the biblical story is not Jesus’s father by birth). I don’t recall exactly what happened in my mind or what the thought sequence was, but somehow what I was reading triggered intense panic about my gender possibly not actually being nonbinary — an anxiety that I struggled intensely with in my sophomore and junior years of college and which I had not felt with such intensity for years.

mental and spiritual crisis: When that happened, I was terrified. It felt like all my personal growth since that time of intense tumult in college was all going to collapse. Immediately I recognized that the Pendle Hill campus was very similar to Haverford’s campus in that both were arboretums and the room I was staying in looked like an old college dorm room. I knew that the environment I was in could shape both my cognitive processes and the actions I might take, so to avoid eloping or other actions that I did as a stressed-out college student, I quickly returned to the containment of my room. There, I realized that although Jung’s concepts relating to gender (for example, the idea that a man has an inner feminine — anima — and a woman has an inner masculine — animus) were radical in his time, they are outdated now and are not entirely inclusive of queer, trans, and nonbinary people. That realization immediately calmed me down, which was a good sign and suggested that that may have been what triggered me (in combination with being depressed and in an environment that looked like my college campus).

The next day began alright, as my emotional stability returned. But then, in the afternoon, while perusing the bookstore, I read a pamphlet about Peace Pilgrim, a 20th century American woman who walked on seven pilgrimages for peace, never asking for food or shelter and only taking what others freely gave, her only possessions being the clothes she wore and anything in her pockets, which did not include any money. Reading the pamphlet made me think, why couldn’t I abandon my life as it is and do something like this? It was at that moment that I realized that my breakdown the previous day wasn’t about gender at all, and I then broke down even more severely, my whole body shaking as I cried. Luckily the bookstore person found me someone to talk to, who happened to already know me from when I attended Quaker meeting as a Haverford student. I decided it was necessary to break my silence (which already had been broken a couple of times because of people trying to chat with me) so that I could receive support, and I talked with that person for some while until my bodymind settled down somewhat.

I went home the next morning, which was what I had planned anyway. On my last night at Pendle Hill, I broke my digital detox rule in order to attempt calling my therapist, psychiatrist, and spiritual director, but none of them could be reached. (I had been a bit stubborn about that rule — if I had been more flexible, I could have un-cancelled a session with my therapist that would normally have been the morning after the gender-related breakdown.) In the days after that, I met with each one of them to try to process what happened. I tried to do relaxing activities, such as making this mosaic at an arts studio:

going to the crisis center: But then, something happened that caused me to rapidly get worse. My gender anxieties got inflamed, while at the same time another part of me became terrified of losing myself to my vicious brain. The distorted reasoning in my mind was: “I’d rather die than lose the vibrance of my nonbinary self.” So I was more suicidal than ever before, and thoughts that I had never thought before began to fill my brain. I met with my psychiatrist for a second time that week, and she asked me if I preferred to go to the hospital or to stay at home. She values my agency and so avoids pushing me towards a particular choice, but I almost wanted her to decide for me. Psych hospitals can be awful and often don’t really do much for healing; they are more of just a physically safe place to wait out an acute crisis. But when my psychiatrist suggested that we could wait two days and then reevaluate, I realized that I could very much kill myself within two days. So I chose the hospital.

My mother was very stressed out at my decision, so much so that she felt physically unwell and we needed to wait for her to recover a bit before she could take me to the crisis center. She wanted me to reconsider my decision, but I told her that this voluntary hospitalization was meant to avoid possible involuntary hospitalization due to a suicide attempt, which would be a whole lot worse (and has never happened to me). Once we got to the crisis center, I was evaluated and hospitalization was recommended, and I signed the voluntary hospitalization form. Then, unexpectedly, I was sent to the ER for medical clearance. I thought that going to a crisis center rather than an ER would allow me to avoid the sensory overwhelm and chaos of the ER. When I got to the ER, I was told to put on scrubs, and in the process of getting dressed, I ended up on the floor and couldn’t get up because I was shutting down from the overwhelm. A staff member found me and yelled at me to get up, not believing me that I actually couldn’t stand up. Then a group of people swarmed around me and grabbed me to get me to sit in a chair, which almost caused me a meltdown. They also took away all my belongings without telling me, which felt very rude.

psych hospital: All this time, I expected that I would be able to go to Malvern Behavioral Health, a hospital in Philly that has an LGBTQ ward and which I was at the last three times I was hospitalized. But they rejected me, apparently not because they were full (they likely weren’t, based on my experience there), but rather because they thought that my behaviors were too “high risk.” The social worker who was looking for a place for me could not explain to me what they meant by that. My guess is that either I was too chaotic in my mania last time I was there, or a particular detail relating to my suicidal ideation this time, which I do not wish to mention here, was considered particularly dangerous, even though I do not consider it so and others had been hospitalized there for quite violent stuff. Either way, it’s awfully unfortunate given that part of my issues were gender-related.

I suppose that in part because of “high risk” label, I ended up at a place where there was a lot of psychotic people. Some of these people had compulsions to ramble very loudly to other people or to themselves. I initially did not feel averse to interacting with such people, instead feeling quite curious about their circumstances. But then I realized that their behavior was definitely getting on my nerves. There were other people who presented in a more socially acceptable way, but who at times would express unusual or strong beliefs, sometimes spiritually related. These people started to make me disoriented. By the end of my second day at the hospital, I had an intense moment when suddenly everything and nothing was true at once. I felt like a sponge soaking up everyone else’s craziness. I am so empathetic that other people’s delusions seemed like they could rub onto me. Because of the disorientation, I realized that the hospital could worsen my condition. So that night, I signed the 72 hour notice to voluntarily leave, which is available for those who voluntarily admit themselves to the hospital (called a 201 in Pennsylvania) and do not have a backup 302 (involuntary hospitalization). Since I was no longer suicidal — that subsided just with a little thinking-through in my head — I felt that the hospital had done its job for me.

It turned out to be very much the right decision for me, not just because of the spirituality-related distortions, but also because the large amount of idle time in the hospital, especially over the weekend, caused my brain to ruminate about gender very intensely. The anxieties fit an OCD pattern: I would have an intrusive thought that I was not nonbinary, and then I would be compelled to defend my identity against myself, which would only make me feel more vulnerable because why would a stable identity need to be defended? But that is just how OCD obsessions work: your brain fixates on the bits of uncertainty that are just inherent to everything in life, which makes the uncertainty feel larger and larger. Because my object of obsession is gender, an entirely internal experience, it can very much feel like I have no concrete ground to restabilize myself upon. The only solution is to embrace the uncertainty without panicking, distract my brain away from my ruminations, or just wait for my brain to somehow get bored of its obsessions. None of which was going to happen while I was stuck restless in a hospital where no one gendered me correctly and even the one nonbinary person who was there for a few hours on my first day didn’t understand the nature of my gender-based OCD (they thought my problem was about others being mean to me about being nonbinary).

returning home: Leaving “against medical advice” felt really scary, as I had never done it before and the “experts” wanted me to stay longer. One nurse said that it was not a good sign that I was continuing to ruminate, even though I did not believe that staying longer would help with that. The hospital psychiatrist claimed that my own psychiatrist wanted me to stay longer, but it later turned out that the two had not talked about my decision to leave at all. Other patients, however, seemed to readily understand my reasons for leaving early. No one wanted to stay any longer than they needed to.

Once I got home, I occupied myself with anything that could distract my mind from the gender obsession. The OCD had gotten so bad that I started to imagine reclaiming my birth name (when it was never in doubt that I like my chosen name better), and my brain even started to simply repeat the word “gender” over and over, which felt utterly ridiculous and torturous. After a few days, the obsession began to fade, although it still feels near to me, as if I could slip any day. Sometimes, within a few minutes, I go from feeling intense gender dysphoria regarding some of my female sexual characteristics, to disidentifying with they/them pronouns, to suddenly everything being back to normal as I lie down under my weighted blanket (which, by covering my chest, might have reinforced my nonbinary identity). It’s utterly disorienting, and often I end up worrying about worrying, the fear of going crazy taking me to the edge. And all the time, I have to be open to anything about my gender identity changing (otherwise my OCD yells at me), while also holding onto the reality that most likely nothing has changed much, especially because my identity is already broad and fluid.

Disorientation persisted for a few days in other ways as well. A week ago, just out of curiosity, I read an article online about the second miracles that a few Catholic saints are said to have performed (and which are part of why they were made saints). I began to believe in the miracles, which caused my brain to wander into what if I could be a Catholic?, which then made me actually feel like I could be a Catholic, and then I looked at myself in the mirror with hair disheveled, and my brain went, that’s Dorothy. No idea where that name came from (though etymologically it means “gift of God,” so my brain could have unconsciously made the religious connection), but basically I ended up in a mental space where I was a Catholic named Dorothy, when normally I do not consider myself a Christian and my name has never been remotely similar to Dorothy. It felt very strange and I got distressed. But then the melatonin I took started working on me, and I was able to calm down enough to sleep. The next day, I had another moment of disorientation in which I felt that I was nineteen years old (I am twenty-four). Which makes some sense, as that is the age at which I developed bipolar and struggled with the gender stuff the first time, but the feeling of being displaced in time was significant.

So, I don’t know if all this means that overall I’m getting closer to having a true psychotic episode — previously I have only had brief versions of psychosis during mania and possibly small “blips” of perception in the everyday, none of which involved delusions. Disorientation seems to be theme of everything that has happened in my recent crisis: regarding the connection between the gender breakdown and the Peace Pilgrim breakdown, I articulated to my psychiatrist, “I felt like I could be this white woman.” And given that there are spiritual themes and triggers as well, my academic studies might feel difficult in the next few weeks as the semester starts. It was suggested to me that I replace the course Psychology of Death and Dying with something less potentially triggering, but oddly I don’t think that course would be as triggering as some other courses that were suggested as substitutes, that were more focused on transcendental spirituality. Death is a reality, so it feels grounding even if it’s heavy. Transcendental spirituality is more activating to me because it goes beyond what is sensibly real. Plus, I already have to engage quite frequently in discussions of death and grief in my work as a peer supporter (most often relating to suicidality, but also the loss of loved ones or the grief involved in becoming disabled), so that course would provide me a space to process what happens in that work.

But most importantly, I feel more recovered this week, and my classes so far have felt okay. Indeed, it sometimes feels to me as if the crisis was just a gust of wind that blew over and then quickly passed. Surely there is more that I must emotionally process about what happened, but to me my quick recovery is a sign that I have grown stronger and more resilient and am better able to use psychological tools to cope with my freakishly intense mind. And probably I need to be more careful next time I consider doing anything like a spiritual retreat or intensive. They can be activating for many people, not just those with existing mental health diagnoses, and it might just be that I’m not yet ready to go “all-in” with such things.

Positive things in my life

I will be performing The Legend of Yuliang again next month, on Sunday, February 15th! It will go in place of regular church service that morning at Johnson Memorial United Methodist Church in Philadelphia (where I’m the staff pianist). It will be from 10am-11am, which is early for a show, but I do hope that some of you wake up early and attend. This show premiered in the Philly Fringe Festival last September. The pastor at the church wanted to attend but couldn’t, so she invited me to present it just ahead of the Lunar New Year. Here’s a description of the show with a few photos from the Fringe run: https://philosopherartistawakener.com/ritual/

There will very likely be another performance of this show later this year as well, currently in the planning process. I’ll let you all know when information for that is posted!

I have started doing martial arts! (The studio calls it karate, but I’m pretty sure it is actually closer to taekwondo because we use Korean words and focus more on kicks.) I’ve been looking for a physical activity that I feel motivated enough to do regularly and that does not overwhelm me as an autistic person, and it seems so far that this fits me well. I learn skills quickly and enthusiastically, even faster than some of the kids at times who have done it a bit longer, and I even feel more motivated to work on my push-ups and sit-ups for the purpose of getting better at the martial art. There’s a bit of a cultural adjustment that I haven’t gotten used to yet, as there are many rituals in which you pay respects to those who are higher in rank to you. For example, you must respond to whomever is actively instructing you with either “yes sir” or “yes ma’am,” words which do not roll off my tongue very easily as someone who never really understood the point of gendered honorifics and has a preference for non-hierarchical language. The instructor is very kind and understanding of my needs as a neurodivergent person, and he does at least sometimes try to gender me correctly, which has manifested as erratically calling me “girl,” “sir,” and “ma’am” at different times, which honestly feels a bit charming to me.

A Contemplative Offering

How does place evoke different states of being for you? Do different places destabilize or strengthen you, or take you back to your past?

When have you gone against “expert” advice in making a significant decision? How did the decision play out?

Share your responses to these prompts in the comments if you’d like!

Harmony, health, and happiness,

Margin | 天涯

I know I skipped the November monthly Update — I was simply quite busy and overwhelmed. I struggled a lot with getting my final papers done, mostly because I found it very difficult to get started on each of them. Task initiation is one of my executive function weaknesses, and it gets even harder when I’m facing waves of depression as well. Additionally, the prompts for the assignments were sometimes vague and confusing. For one paper, I had to “articulate your orientation within the East-West-Earth-World encounter.” (East, West, Earth, and World refer to the four “directions” of study in my East-West psychology program, where East is Asian contemplative traditions, West is European depth psychology, Earth is Indigenous, and World is decolonial and global.) It was supposed to be more of a reflective essay, but I ended up taking a slightly more academic approach, simply because it was easier to do. Well, not really. It was easier to conceptualize, but a lot more work to complete. Same for the Trauma and Spirituality essay — it was supposed to just be about what we learned in the course, but I asked the professor if I could research trauma and spirituality in the context of autism specifically, and she said yes, so I went all in and spent way too much time and effort.

I eventually got everything done, but nothing on time. I don’t want that to happen again, and it should be better next semester now that I have an academic coach through disability services. I kept accidentally missing coaching sessions this semester and also there were scheduling difficulties in part because of only being assigned to the coach later in the semester.

And now that the semester is over, I realize just how exhausted I am. I didn’t fully believe my psychiatrist when she said that I seemed to be more depressed recently. I had even decided to decrease one of my meds and thought that things were okay. Or rather, I thought that everything that was not okay was simply the stress of the end of the semester. Yes, I was feeling more suicidal to the point of even identifying a potential method, but it was overwhelm caused by something external. But maybe it doesn’t matter so much for me whether it is an external or an internal cause. Either way, my energy reserves were waning. So, as my psychiatrist recommended, I went back up on the medication.

I’ve been struggling at times even to command the focus to play normally addictive phone games. When I was supposed to be practicing for the piano concert I played for my church on Saturday, all I wanted to do was sleep. I didn’t even feel anxious about the concert; my motivation level was that low. The concert went okay — people seem to enjoy my playing even while I mess up half the piece and improvise sections that I really should have practiced better. I didn’t even smile after playing most of the pieces; I was just getting the task done (Wait, do I smile after I play a piece? I’m not sure, but I very much felt like I was too drained to smile after playing the pieces at the concert). I confessed to a vocalist who also performed at the concert about my depression and the loads of mistakes being due to not having the motivation to practice. He just told me to hold my hand out, palm up.

“Do you see a hole in your hand?” he asked.

“No?” I said.

“Well, then, you’re not Jesus, and the only perfect person was Jesus.”

Which befuddled me for a moment, until I put the pieces together in my head and started laughing with him. (If you didn’t get it: Jesus’s hands were nailed onto the cross.)

After the concert, I began to feel more energized. I just started working on my novel again, which I had planned to work on as part of the Pathfinders Writing Collective challenge, but academic overwhelm and depression meant that that got put aside. Which is okay. I do want to get it done, though, and it’s just so frustrating for me that that takes time and effort to do. I love writing, but I write painfully slowly because I am utterly unable to write a rough draft. I am always unconsciously editing my words as I write them — the most free-flowing I can be is when I write confessional stream-of-consciousness “I need to get this out of my head RIGHT NOW” type of things that I’ve sometimes sent to specific people (these newsletters are maybe a somewhat less vivid version of that), but that’s very different from a novel or any other type of writing I have to do, including academic. The basic idea for this novel took root when I was in high school, so internally I’ve been working on it for a long time, but I just started writing it! And finally finished the first chapter. My outline is so detailed though, necessarily so because each of six characters has their own narrative that is interwoven with the others. You can’t write that kind of novel “from the seat of your pants” (if someone could, I’d be very impressed).

But overall I’m still pretty exhausted. I thought the creative burst was going to last longer and bring me out of the murkiness, but no, after around 2000 words written, my body felt weak enough that I actually worried that I was getting sick. I don’t seem to be; I’m just energetically drained. I might take a short creative/spiritual retreat next month so that I can give myself time to work on some musical compositions that I’ve been meaning to finish and just generally have a little space to breathe. You know what, I will take that retreat, I just haven’t told my mother yet and she still kind of rules my life. I will not ask her for permission, I will just say that I’m doing the retreat and I’m paying for it so she can’t stop me.

I have had a recent victory in my negotiations with my mother, however: for the Pennsylvania Youth Chorale concert (I’m the accompanist), I wore a black dress shirt and pants and put on a nice red tie. While at home, I took a selfie and sent it to the director, asking if she liked it. She said yes (as I expected), so I told my mother that I wanted to wear the tie and that the director said she liked it and also it’s actually a “women’s” tie (kind of true: I got it from Peau de Loup, a store that sells androgynous and masculine clothing mostly to people assigned female at birth, including cis women). Somehow that convinced my mother, so I wore the tie to the concert and was very happy. I hadn’t worn a tie in a long while, a least a year but probably more.

There’s more that I could add here, but I think I need a nap (or if I can’t nap, at least just some mental rest). I’ll end this with a little Contemplative Offering as usual:

How can you give yourself the rest you need in the coming year?

How can you care for the needs of others, especially those you may not usually think about, who might be different from you and may not have the same privileges that you do? (I think particularly of people with various kinds of disabilities. Disability justice is not as commonly discussed as other forms of social justice. And, as an Ontario hospital reinstates a mask mandate and New York urgent cares are overwhelmed due to a surge in flu cases, maybe some of the community care practices that the majority of people have dropped since the the pandemic’s so-called end ought to be reincorporated into our lives.)

Harmony, health, and happiness,

Margin | 天涯

When I thought you might be dying
I cried for all we’d never be
But there’ll be no more crying
Not for me

“Maybe,” from Next to Normal

As a child, I was jealous of my classmates who had relatives living in the United States. All my extended family resides in China. Only my mother’s parents have visited the United States — three times: when I was born, when my brother was born, and when I was ten. Yet even them I barely remember. They must not have spent much quality time with me.

I was also jealous of my Chinese American classmates, some of whom had grandparents who lived with them, and some of whom visited their family in China every few years or so. My parents only took my brother and me to China once, when I was fifteen. They were afraid of us getting sick and of my brother’s selective eating being a problem. Well, we did get sick because of our bodies not being accustomed to the water and the environment, and my brother’s distaste for most Chinese food was still a challenge. I still think the trip was worth it. It’s the only time I met any members of my father’s family.

So I never developed much of a relationship with most of my extended family. As my grandparents are growing older and more frail, I have been thinking of the limited time left to get to know them. My mother’s father died in 2020. It was not of COVID, but because of the pandemic, when he became hospitalized and it was clear that he would die soon, my mother could not go visit him, which was very hard for her. Shortly before he died, he asked to see each one of us on the phone. I remember my last words to him, in Mandarin: “I am in college now. I am very happy.” He knew very little about me and could understand very little of my American young adult life, but at least he could appreciate that.

One of my friends recently cut contact with his parents.
He said that it might be a necessity for me someday.
I had never considered that option.
I knew others had chosen it,
I knew there were good reasons to choose it.
But I was made to be an eldest daughter,
The one who cares for all.
And I am akin to the eldest son,
The bearer of the family name.

My parents are planning to visit their parents in China next summer. They do so out of obligation, as children in a Confucian culture. I cannot publicly write much about how they actually feel, but let’s just say that the generational wounds run deep. But regardless of how well a parent cared for a child, the adult child must care for the aging parent.

I want to go with them. I want to see my remaining grandparents one last time. But my mother tries to dissuade me from this. China would be too overwhelming to you, she says. That is probably true. Too many crowds, a lot of smoking and drinking, and a whole lot of other overstimulation in the environment. I could probably manage it with support, but my parents do not know how to support me. They also do not want our family to know about my “problems.”

But I care about my grandparents, I say. And my mother tells me, they don’t care very much for you. In particular, my father’s father cares for me mostly because I am his son’s child. But by that logic, my younger brother is more important than I am, as he is the only son of the only son. So I am the lesser, but it’s not like my grandfather actually cares much about my brother either. We’re just theoretically the important ones, according to Confucian tradition. My cousins who live in China — all children of daughters — get to have closer relationships with our grandparents than we can have.

And I just cry, and cry, and cry. Even if I met with my grandparents, we’d barely have anything to say to one another. The cultural and generational gaps are unfathomable. My father’s parents even speak a different mother tongue, a regional dialect of Chinese. The connections we can make in Mandarin are only elementary school level.

Autistic as I am, I have never yearned so much for small talk. I wish I could just chat with my grandparents about anything, even the weather or their favorite animal. Just to hear their voice, to know the cadence of their spirit. Before they are gone.

What is there to Confucian values?
My mother sometimes accuses me of not caring for family.
Cultural conflicts make understanding hard.
But I do care for family, perhaps excessively.
I care even if they do not care.
I care even if they do not care for me.

I don’t know if I will go with my parents to China. Either way, I won’t get what I want with my grandparents. There’s no way to make up for never getting to know each other earlier. For no storytelling from grandparent to grandchild, no sharing of traditional recipes, few memories made that I can nostalgically remember.

(I keep trying to remember my mother’s parents who visited the U.S.. I have some isolated memories, but very few pieces of who they were. They last visited when I was ten — why don’t I remember anything? They did not even help my mother care for me when I was born. They changed not a single diaper. Most likely, they did not know how to engage with me when I was older, either.)

My mother tells me that there’s more hope with my cousins. I can continue to connect with them through WeChat, as I have very occasionally (although only my two girl cousins, as my mother sees no reason for me to be connected with my boy cousins and thus hasn’t given me their contact info). In the future, I may be able to visit them in China. Perhaps some of them might visit the U.S. as well.

When I began my masters program, during one of the orientation sessions, someone led a meditative exercise in which we had to imagine walking through a street market. Somewhere in the market, we would find something that we had been looking for. I found a guinea pig whose spirit was my mother’s father. I wept at this unexpected discovery.

My mother has a story from her childhood, when she had to travel in the countryside to visit her grandmother who was seriously ill. One night, she dreamed of her grandmother. Once she got to her grandmother’s home, she learned that her grandmother had already passed, precisely on the night during which she dreamt that dream.

I believe my ancestors are with me, even across distances, even after death. Telephones and internet only make distance connections more salient for those who might otherwise reject them as supernatural. Even if I never see my grandparents again, I will encounter them somewhere. I will hold them in my heart.

For the truest relationship is not in conversation, nor in the touch of hand to hand, but in being with being, and that already is.

I’ve been obsessed this weekend with watching episodes of Lateral, a comedy panel game hosted by Tom Scott in which contestants have to solve lateral thinking problems together. It is so fun to guess along, and I highly recommend it.

At the beginning of the month, I went to San Francisco for a weekend in-person intensive that was mandatory for the Spiritual Counseling 1 course. My mother tagged along because she worried about my health and also wanted to have fun in the city. The city was marvelously affirming in multiple ways, starting from when I saw “Harvey Milk Memorial Terminal” printed on the wall of the airport. Since the hotel breakfast’s vegan options were limited to sugary breakfast cereal and small apples of a cultivar that I do not favor, I went looking one morning for a suitable cafe and serendipitously discovered one that was an queer-centered space and had a few vegan food options. There were multiple vegan restaurants for various Asian cuisines in a small area, which was a delight, as it gave me a sense that it was encouraged to be progressive and Asian there.

The intensive was very interesting, and it was also really great to finally meet some of my classmates in-person. Many of them live in California (but not necessarily local to San Francisco), while others live elsewhere in the country or even in other countries. We practiced therapeutic listening several times in dyads, exploring topics relating to our personal spiritual journeys. I started to discover my own way of listening to and connecting with people. Presence is not only communicated through eye contact; I often do “ear contact” instead, tilting my head so that my left ear is slightly more directed to the person I’m listening to. My dyad partners let me know that they could feel my presence even though I might have communicated it differently from other people. If someone personally finds eye contact important as a mode of connecting, I’d try my best to offer it. But knowing that my neurodivergent ways are also effective eases some of my anxiety about “doing it right.”

In the last dyadic practice, we were supposed to lead our partner in an exercise of exploring a safe space in their mind — typically a visualization such as a beach or a place of pleasant social connection. As my partner led me through the exercise, I was seized by a sensation that the world was not safe for me. It was terrifying, even though I felt safe in the classroom. So, from lying down on my back, I curled up into a fetal position, as if I were inside an egg. I stopped responding to my partner and began crying, so my partner called over the instructor and TA. Eventually, as these three people spoke some soothing words to me, I slowly came out of the egg. My partner commented that an egg is indeed a safe place to be in, so in a sense I was actually doing what the exercise asked me to do. But the feeling of being unsafe was so strong. I can sometimes be in denial of how the world is unsafe to me, perhaps because I see my relative privilege in various senses and think that my situation is not as bad as other people’s; therefore, I shouldn’t worry as much. Maybe the feeling of being affirmed in San Francisco had a flip side of making me realize that I am not so affirmed in other places (and that even in that progressive city, there are movements towards reactionary politics).

Next semester I will be taking the second course in the spiritual counseling sequence, which will also require an in-person intensive. I want to go alone next time, but my mother insists that she wants to come again and that we should get there a little earlier or later so that she and I can have fun in the city together. While that might be nice, I really need to practice navigating the world independently, which I know I can do as I have done so many times during college and afterwards until I had to move back to my parents’ house during my last severe manic episode, but now it’s as if I’m a teenager again fighting for my agency. My brother, four years younger than me, is permitted more independence than me, unfortunately in part because he is a cis man.

“Girls need more care,” my mother said to me yesterday. If my brother and I eventually live in places far enough away from each other, my mother will choose to live closer to me because of her frustrating beliefs that I am a girl and that girls need protection. We were arguing about whether or not I should live in Philadelphia, like in the actual city. I believe it would be advantageous and convenient as an artist to live in the city, while my mother claims that the city is dangerous and poor and compares it to the Bronx, where my family lived until I was five. She did not seem to understand that just as the Bronx was a poor section of New York City, Philadelphia has its wealthier and poorer areas as well as safer and not-as-safe areas. The one good point she does have regarding the city is that it might be sensorily overwhelming for me to live in it. I can only hope that living in the city and being exposed to the sights and sounds long-term would help me learn to tolerate it, whereas living outside of the city, I still have to go to the city occasionally for events, and that can become a problem because I have not developed that tolerance. Regardless, this is all just hypothetical right now.

After I got back home from San Francisco, things became more rough for me emotionally. At one point, I was even seriously considering some sort of inpatient or residential treatment. I was at a low point, having fallen behind on coursework and had some depressing realizations about how my disabilities impose limits on what I can sustainably do in my life. I had a lot of music gigs in a short period of time, and it caused my ears to hurt and me to feel drained and more prone to shutdowns and panic attacks, which suggests that I have to be careful with the amount of performance activities that I do. I lost interest in approaching academics from a more traditional scholarly standpoint, such that I felt that I could only approach writing assignments from a purely introspective angle. It was as if my soul was calling to me away from intellectualism and into an inner world.

Initially I told one professor, with whom I had established a strong relationship, about my depressive feelings. He connected me with the care coordinator, who recommended that I try TimelyCare, the service that the school had just started to use this semester in order to offer limited mental health services to students who are not physically in California. (Previously, only students in California could access counseling sessions due to the school being physically in California, and there also were no on-demand sessions offered for crisis situations.). I tried using an on-demand session once, and I immediately got frustrated. First, there was a technical issue, and I had to call technical services to resolve it. Then, when I started the session with the counselor, the counselor had to do a questionnaire with me before we would chat about anything. The questionnaire had some standard questions inquiring about suicidal ideation, plus some other questions that I found oddly specific, like “Do you feel like you can’t stop worrying about things?” (paraphrased because I forget how it was phrased). Based on my answers to the questions — at times given hesitantly, as I was not sure how honest I should be with a service that may have some sort of mandated reporting policies relating to suicidality — the counselor had to go through a suicide safety plan with me after our brief chat.

Both of these required processes irritated me, as I have done way too many questionnaires and suicide safety plan stuff and did not find them to be useful in that moment. I wasn’t in my worst crisis, I just wanted to test out the service before I might become more desperate. The chat with the counselor was itself fine, certainly better than some other supposedly therapeutic interactions I’ve had. But the standard procedures of the questionnaire and the safety plan left me feeling like the time could have been used more effectively. It reminds me of how every patient in the psych hospital is forced to take the PHQ-9 questionnaire at intake and discharge, presumably for the hospital to measure its effectiveness. It’s called the Patient Health Questionnaire and has 9 questions, but it is primarily designed to measure depression. I had to take that questionnaire even while I was manic, which felt really stupid. Technically, someone experiencing a euphoric manic episode as defined by the DSM-5 is likely to score high on questions 3, 5, 8, and maybe 7, but only because depression symptoms can vary for different people (for example, question 3 asks about whether you are struggling to sleep or sleeping too much; both are possible in depression, while the former is much more likely in mania). But still, it’s a really stupid standard procedure.

So TimelyCare didn’t really help much, and I mostly remained in a low state. Atypical of me, I became deeply ashamed of falling behind academically and was scared of letting my professors know that I was behind, even though I knew that the professors in my program — at least the core professors, since adjuncts might feel more compelled by the tenuousness of their position to more strictly abide by the rules — were generally very accommodating. That was a sign that something was really wrong. So I decided to reach out to the disability services coordinator. He wrote me an accommodation letter that said that I could work with an academic coach to help me catch up and to keep on track in future semesters. This has been helpful so far, and since last week I have been feeling less depressed, although still a bit wacky as my mood and gender state have been unusually labile. (I am genderfluid to an extent, but gender lability tends to go along with some sort of mood change and often feels very disorienting.) I am glad that I was able to avoid going inpatient/residential, as either of those treatment options would be disruptive and expensive.

However, I have been feeling a strong urge to explore some sort of psychological underworld. I view my period of mental health struggle after college to be a time of spiritual exploration that eventually gave me the conviction that I wanted spirituality to be the center of my life. But some part of me feels like there’s more to explore. I did not do anything for Halloween, but the spooky vibes have been getting to me a bit. I have been wondering if there are spirits about and if I might be able to perceive them. On the evening of Halloween, as I was driving alone, I thought I heard some really soft sounds of a radio, when I never have the radio on in my car. It freaked me out, as I worried that I might be hallucinating. I still don’t know what I was hearing — perhaps a misinterpretation of a combination of the car noises with my tinnitus. I’m taking note of what happened, but I’m trying to not be too worried, as stressing out about psychosis doesn’t help whether it is the case or not.

Yet part of me is not scared at all, but rather curious about psychosis as an experience and as a mental ability. Obviously it is disabling for many people — I do not deny that. Yet in some cultures, what we would call hallucinations or delusions are considered a gift of spiritual connection or communication. I have experienced some mild forms of psychosis before — though I can’t list all the ways, as the boundary between psychosis and simple imaginativeness is difficult to discern especially as I almost always have insight, as in, some observing part of me that rationally knows what is and isn’t real. Recently my therapist claimed that they observed me having delusions at some point while manic, but when I asked them to explain what the delusion was, they couldn’t verbalize it. So [hands in the air] I can’t really say either.

What we call mental illness is only one way of accessing the underworld, though. Some people go on wilderness vision quests; others document and explore their dreams. In an ideal world, I would have more time for free exploration in the late adolescence stage of Bill Plotkin’s model of human ecosoulcentric development — and I probably would have been permitted that exploration earlier in my life as well. Instead, I am forced to travel quickly from the “thespian” identity explorations of early adolescence that concluded with my college years, to the “apprenticeship” of early adulthood in which a person begins to hone the requisite skills for their soul’s work. Perhaps I was able to complete, at least partially, the task of late adolescence — discovery of one’s soul, one’s true place in the world — relatively quickly, but it feels to me that there are more discoveries to be had. Some of these may come to me in my academic work, but I suspect that eventually I must go on a spiritual journey of another type, such as a vision quest. If I don’t intentionally seek it out, it might eventually overwhelm me, which would be quite inconvenient and potentially dangerous.

Recommended Readings

I’ve been doing more reading through my Substack app, and I would love to share some of my favorite articles from the past month:

Dissentient

You're probably a eugenicist

Let me start this essay with a love story…

Read more

3 years ago · 469 likes · 83 comments · Diana Fleischman

From a few years ago, “You’re probably a eugenicist” argues that pretty much everyone engages in eugenicist logic some way or another. According to Fleischman, the issue may not be eugenics itself, but rather the specific situations in which that logic is applied.

TJ from Nigh Functioning Autism

Autistics Who Don’t Know Their Own Bodies Are Causing Harm to the Most Marginalized in Our Community

You only *think* you understand autism. You only superficially understand it though. You talk about sensory differences, masking, executive dysfunction, communication differences (which coincidentally sound exactly like the traits of dyspraxia by the way…

Read more

8 months ago · 38 likes · 21 comments · TJ

This article is a call for autistic people who speak to reflect on whether they are denying nonspeaking autistic people the same rights that they claim for themselves. TJ busts the myth that “high functioning” autistic people do not have movement differences, demonstrating that the struggles of speaking and nonspeaking autistic people are more similar than many people assume.

Autistic Standpoint Theory

Autism as a Linguistically Created Disorder

Abstract…

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9 months ago · 700 likes · 168 comments · Autistic Standpoint Theory

In this article, Isha Snow applies linguistic anthropology to make the case for autism as caused by English-dominant colonialism. According to Snow, the linguistic peculiarities of English amplify the pathologizing methods of Western psychiatry, turning the collection of traits that used to be the driving force of human intelligence into the psychosomatic dysregulation that autistic people experience today.

Matriarchal Blessing

Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping?

“Nearly 60 percent of all college students today are women. That’s an all-time high… U.S. colleges and universities have lost about 1.5 million students in the past several years. Men accounted for 71 percent of that loss…

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2 years ago · 5741 likes · 707 comments · Celeste Davis

Celeste Davis of Matriarchal Blessing analyzes the data to show, shockingly, that men are abandoning college in droves because now, the majority of college students are women. Apparently even the dudes on Freakanomics didn’t consider this possibility.

As you can see, I love reading essays that express challenging perspectives. Let me know what you think about these articles and whether you’d like me to share more like these in future months!

A Contemplative Offering

How have you connected with the underworld in your life? What purpose does it serve for you?

What are some ways that you communicate presence to other people when they are in need of connection?

Harmony, health, and happiness,

Margin | 天涯

I feel like I’ve been playing catch-up all this month, and I’m exhausted. Having my Philly Fringe show be right when school started was definitely difficult, not so much in time conflicts but rather because the post-performance let-down affected me as I then tried to reorient myself into the semester. Last semester I felt energetic and focused and felt like I had a grip on the material. Now I keep feeling restless and distracted in class and often only manage to do the minimum, and also I somehow am feeling intellectually intimidated by my classmates, which I was not expecting in this subject realm, but historically I’ve known imposter syndrome to pop up when I’m just not feeling good about myself and cling onto some sort of justification for that feeling.

However, my show, The Legend of Yuliang, was overall a success, even though there were some hiccups. I actually froze up at the very beginning of the first show, which was awfully embarrassing, but the audience was compassionate and still found the show to be meaningful and touching as a whole. Here are some photos:

I’m planning another performance of this show, likely in the new year. This is in part because my mother refused to take sufficient photos and videos of the show, when having documentation of one’s performances is really helpful for getting future opportunities. (She complained that she couldn’t get good photos and videos on her phone and thus only took like five photos and two minutes of video.) So next time I am definitely not relying on her.

A medical mystery

In August, I had a strange collection of physical symptoms which led me to go to the urgent care. Initially it felt like possibly a mild stomach virus or food poisoning. Nausea, diarrhea, a headache, and for some reason getting really sleepy earlier at night than usual and then being unable to sleep despite that because of nausea. But then, one day, I had sudden onset joint pain, all over my body. This concerned me, as joint pain could be occupationally disabling for me, so I went to the urgent care. The doctor was confused, but she listed out some possibilities for what it might be, none of which seemed a close match, especially because I never had a fever. So she had me get some blood tests done, saying that she would test me for rheumatoid arthritis, Epstein-Barr virus, and Lyme Disease. I had already taken two at-home COVID tests that resulted negative.

The basic blood tests plus the rheumatoid stuff came back the next day, and the only thing off was that my platelet levels were a bit low. The doctor called me to tell me to get the platelets retested in a week. I asked her about the Lyme and Epstein Barr results, and she said that they hadn’t come back yet.

So I waited 1.5 weeks, and then I started calling the urgent care to get an update. Only after 2.5 weeks from the appointment did I finally get a call back saying that the doctor never ran the Lyme and Epstein Barr tests and that she chose not to do the Lyme in particular because I’m “not outdoorsy.” Which is ridiculous, because you do not have to be a regular hiker of the woods to get Lyme, and I do take regular walks through the neighborhood and sometimes at a local woody park. So I ended up asking my psychiatrist to order the tests, and she promptly did so and the complete results came sooner than expected. Luckily, I tested negative for both Lyme and Epstein Barr. Based on patterns I found in my white blood cell counts, it seems likely that the culprit was a virus of some sort: maybe COVID (though I didn’t have respiratory symptoms), maybe a stomach virus (though why would that cause sudden onset joint pain?). More importantly, it seems that I’ve recovered — the joint pain lasted for a few weeks, but now I’m feeling okay.

How important it is to have a meticulous doctor!

Learning to support others

I just finished training to be a peer supporter with THRIVE Lifeline. Their actual lifeline is down right now as they move to a platform that will help them to scale up their operations, but they have a Discord server where people support one another, and peer supporters are trained to provide support in that server. I’ve long thought about volunteering for a crisis line, as I’ve used them before myself, but picking the most suitable one was important to me. I chose to volunteer with THRIVE because they use a non-carceral approach, which among other things means that they will not call emergency services on you without your consent. Another non-carceral hotline, Trans Lifeline, has a good Q&A about why non-consensual interventions can be harmful.

As I’m starting my first real shifts as a peer supporter, I’m realizing that there is still so much for me to learn. I can get perfectionistic, trying to craft the absolute best response to someone. But there is no perfect response, and it’s human to mess up sometimes; I just need to correct myself and try to re-establish connection.

Tomorrow, I will be flying to San Francisco for a weekend retreat that kicks off one of my grad school courses. The course is Spiritual Counseling 1, the first of two foundational courses for the spiritual counseling specialization. I have so many readings to prepare for the retreat, and it’s been stressful because my mind wants to do other things (for I’ve often been feeling either that I don’t want to do anything or that I am fixated one particular joyful thing that is outside of my responsibilities). I am excited though, as the course seems interesting and I also have never been to San Francisco before.

The catharsis in pain

Sometimes, when I feel really bad about myself, I want to self-harm. And at one point this month, I managed to do so with enough severity that my friends urged me to go see a doctor. But my mother did not want me to see a doctor. I had merely told her that I hit my head, not that it was intentional. Luckily, the nausea went away after 2 days, so it probably wasn’t too bad. I was angry at my mother for not letting me see a doctor. (Normally I might have just gone myself, but it would not have been a good idea to drive if I had a concussion.) But perhaps it was for the better. If I went to the doctor, they would have asked me how I hit my head. If they managed to pressure compulsive truth-teller me to say what actually happened, they might have forced onto me an emergency psych evaluation. Which would have been dangerous, as I needed help, but not that kind of help.

Realizing that the self-harm urges are not going to depart so easily, I decided to try to redirect them in ways that were less harmful. Like, instead of hitting my head, why not hit my arm. And also, I recently found that eating spicy food is very cathartic. I suppose because spicy food activates pain receptors, so it kind of does the same thing that hurting myself would.

If self-harm is something that you deal with too, I would love it if you could share some of the strategies you use. Comment on this post, or reply to the email.

Working on my first novel

I’ve mentioned this novel idea previously, although it was just recently when I had a surge of ideas for how to improve the narrative. The Gift of April Showers follows the psychological journeys of 14-year-old twins April and May (one born on April 30th and the other born on May 1st) and their family and friends in a world of magical realism. Their mother, who experiences chronic cyclothymic mood swings, named them after the soothing proverb “April showers bring May flowers,” and the twins’ personalities are according to the proverb. When quiet April stops speaking entirely, everyone becomes worried about her, but it’s actually everyone else who’s falling apart.

I planned to write the novel as part of NaNoWriMo in 2023, but mental health interfered. Now, NaNoWriMo has shut down (partly from controversies, partly from loss of funding). But I found a new group, Pathfinders Writing Collective, that offers a more flexible challenge and a community of writers to support one another. Instead of having to write a whole novel (or 50,000 words) within just the month of November, writers get to choose their own goals as well as whether they want to do 1, 2, or 3 months of the November through January challenge.

Yesterday was Pick Your Path Day, when people started announcing the projects they want to focus on. This month is PathTober, a time to prepare for the challenge in whatever way you need. Since I am obsessive planner with whatever creative projects I take on, whatever time I spend on my novel in PathTober will be focused on making a list of scenes. Then, for the actual challenge, I will tackle writing scene-by-scene, most likely not going in the order that they will appear in the novel.

I am not great at following through plans, and I will be prioritizing schoolwork of course until the semester ends mid-December. But I’ve been obsessed with planning my novel recently, so this is also a way of saying to myself, “Okay, you can work on this in the near future, just not now.”

This novel idea has been with me since I was in high school, although it looked very different then (April and May were initially supposed to represent my brother and me). I haven’t ever been able to write much of it though, rather writing about it in my extensive plans, so getting myself to actually write any amount during the challenge will be a success.

A note on paid subscriptions

I’ve decided to disable paid subscriptions to my Substack newsletter for now. One reason is that I’ve not been able to write essays as often as before. Another reason is that Substack allows fascist writing to proliferate on its platform. Now, I do generally support free speech and would worry about my own freedom to discuss challenging topics such as those relating to mental health if Substack took a harsher censorship approach. But for now, I would rather not let Substack have its 10% cut on my earnings. If you want to support me financially, please “buy me a Ko-fi” at this link (which is also at the bottom of this email): https://ko-fi.com/marginzheng

A Contemplative Offering

What is your relationship with police and other emergency services? Do you primarily see them as helpful or harmful? Where does that impression come from? What would lead someone to have a different perspective from yours?

What stories brew in your our psyche? Perhaps a tale from your own life, or something related to what you observe in the world. Not everyone may gravitate towards making up stories, but I think everyone has a story to tell. And, fundamentally, every story is partially an invention. Yet every story is also partially a truth.

Harmony, health, and happiness,

Margin | 天涯

Just before I entered the party room, I went to use the restroom. It was an all-gender restroom, as the people involved in this festival are typically very accepting of different identities, and many of the artists are queer or trans themselves. I wash my hands in the restroom, and then a tall man starts washing his hands right next to me.

“What are you doing here?” he asks me.

“Uh…”

“Oh, I’m just messing with you. I've rarely seen a woman next to me in the bathroom.”

“But I’m not a woman.”

“What do you mean you’re not a woman?”

“I’m nonbinary.”

“What?”

“Nonbinary, like…between man and woman?” (technically the definition is “not fully a man or a woman,” but I was struggling for words here.)

“Just tell me, are you a woman or not?”

At that point I was tempted to just say yes and get the matter over with. I was terrified, especially because he was a tall man. There was a possibility that he was just completely ignorant about nonbinary identities and not actually transphobic, but his words were still unnecessarily confrontational.

Finally, I just said, “Okay, let’s go out and party!” And then he laughed and dropped the matter, and we both exited the bathroom. Luckily, he appeared to have soon left the building. Perhaps he wasn’t an attendee of the festival at all, only entering the building to use the restroom.

I normally do not experience harassment in bathrooms, as I typically use the woman’s restroom and am safe in it as someone who is read as feminine despite my attempts to not be seen that way. The only issue, which can still be an irritating one, is usually an internal feeling of annoyance or dissonance with the idea of gendered toilets; because of that, I sometimes will use the men’s restroom when I expect that no one is in it just for my own satisfaction.

So this incident really disturbed me. The only reason why the man started harassing me was because I assumed that he was a typical Cannonball artist or attendee who would be open to learning about unfamiliar identities even if they didn’t initially understand. Luckily, nothing bad happened, but worse things have definitely happened for trans people in bathrooms.

I need to keep my guard up. I tend to easily trust people, because I function according to “innocent until proven guilty,” and even when people are proven guilty, I still can feel a lot of empathy for them. I am planning future steps in my gender transition, and each change will impact how I navigate the world. Best to get used to being cautious, especially in an increasingly fascist country.

What are ways that you protect yourself in this world of violence and surveillance?

Oh, and if you haven’t bought your tickets for The Legend of Yuliang, do so soon, as the first show is tomorrow at 8:00pm! Or, you could just show up and buy your tickets then. The benefit of buying ahead of time is that you make a commitment and I know about many people will attend. The benefit of buying just before the show is that there is no FringeArts cut, so all the money goes to me.

Show info and ticketing link are here: https://phillyfringe.org/events/the-legend-of-yuliang/

Hadley has also shared some interesting conceptualizations of grief and dying. She uses her box and ball analogy to describe the progression of grief after loss: the grief (a button in the box) is always there, to be triggered by the bouncing ball, but the box, representing your life, continues to expand, allowing the button to be triggered less and less, but it will always have a non-zero likelihood of being triggered. And she uses another analogy, inspired by a 99-year-old patient, to explain why some people might feel ready to die.

The analogy, explained in this video, is the Party Room. Imagine that there are two rooms: the Earth Room and the Afterlife Room. When you are born, all the people you interact with are in the Earth Room. As you grow up and progress through life, more and more people get added to the Earth Room, making it more and more of a lively party. Simultaneously, there are people moving from the Earth Room to the Afterlife Room. At first it’s just a couple people that you know, but then it’s more and more. Eventually you find that most of the important people that have made your life what it is have moved on to the Afterlife Room. You enjoy the company of grandkids, new friends, and others in the Earth Room, but you increasingly long to reunite with the people in the Afterlife Room and join their party. Thus you might get to a point where you simply feel ready to die, to be again in the company of the people who have joined the Afterlife Room.

When I first watched the video on Instagram, I made some interesting assumptions about what the analogy was. Initially I thought party analogy was about getting tired with a party and wanting to leave. That’s how I feel at most parties, after all: I might be able to enjoy myself a bit if I try, but eventually I get overstimulated and need to leave the room. But that’s not what the analogy ended up being, which made me realize that my views on death may be slightly unusual.

Hadley used the analogy to explain what many of her patients experience — and she, as someone with a Christian background living in Florida, probably works with a lot of patients who are also Christian and thus believe in a particular kind of afterlife. But she and other hospice nurses say that even many atheists, as well as people of other beliefs, start to experience spiritual or even paranormal phenomena when they are close to death. They start to interact with people who have already died, as if those people are welcoming them into an afterlife, and might be somehow clairvoyant or otherwise know something that others don’t. (For the skeptics: In my opinion, such paranormal phenomena may individually be hard to verify from a scientific perspective, but when many hospice nurses and others report similar things happening to a diversity of dying people, there is something going on, even if we do not or cannot know what.)

What I mean to say is, it seems that a lot of people, in the United States at least, have a particular viewpoint on death and afterlife, and I don’t share that perspective. My views, which I admit are not definite facts but rather feelings that I live upon, are informed by developmental psychology and my spiritual preference for pantheism and other religious beliefs that emphasize the sacredness of everything in the universe. When you are born, you do not have self. Your existence is indistinguishable for you from the world that you live in. You only learn the distinction between Self and Other in your early childhood development. You then further develop a distinctive sense of self through childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Development never ends, although in our dysfunctional society, it might be arrested at some stage.

Bill Plotkin’s Developmental Wheel is a model for human development throughout the lifespan. Actually, he has two different models: one for the eco-soulcentric ideal, and one for the ego-centric reality that most people in the United States live. In the eco-soulcentric ideal, a person develops a healthy sense of self from childhood through adolescence, ultimately finding their soul, which briefly speaking is their unique purpose or ecological niche in life, and pursuing that mission for the rest of their adulthood and early elderhood. In the ego-centric version of the wheel, a person becomes arrested at an early adolescent stage, thus never achieving a healthy sense of self and being unable to discover and embody their soul. Read the article I linked and/or his book Nature and the Human Soul to learn more about his theory. A key thing to note is that his stages do not correspond to chronological age: most adults in the US are developmentally early adolescents due to their arrested development.

One thing that happens to a healthy person in the eco-soulcentric wheel is that as they enter early and then late elderhood, they start moving away from an existence centered on soul to one that embodies spirit. Spirit is universal connectedness, something that infants naturally embody, having not yet developed a self or encountered their soul. Healthy elders become more and more connected to the universe and less and less devoted to matters of self or soul, thus psychologically transitioning into death, at which their self fully ceases to exist.

Plotkin’s theory does not speculate about what happens afterwards. It could be nothing, it could be something; all are technically consistent with his developmental wheel. But I find it particularly poetic to believe that if babies are born full of spirit and empty of self, and elders become more and more connected to spirit and less and less concerned with self, that we are born from spirit, and we die to spirit. As in, we were once connected with the whole universe, and we will soon yet again be connected, but in this brief period of time we get to have a sense of separateness, which if we abuse will go rotten, but if we cultivate it with an understanding of our true, connected nature, our life will be meaningful.

I actually encountered Hadley’s analogy years before I read about Plotkin’s theory, but I use Plotkin’s ideas to specify in greater detail what I have long already felt in my intuition. I imagine death to be a release of Self into Other, thus dissolving all binaries (and ternaries and quaternaries) and reconnecting us to everything. I imagine it to feel good, even though I do not believe we’d have feelings at that point. But I long for connectedness now, so how amazing would it be to be connected to the whole universe? I suppose I’m already connected to the whole universe, but I still have that pesky thing called self that distracts me from that connectedness. Maybe it would feel good to die, to be finally free of self.

So, this is a problem. Hadley shared her analogy in part to assuage people’s fears when they hear old people saying that they feel ready to die. Wanting to leave the dwindling crowds of the Earth Room to join the Afterlife Room party sounds like a continued commitment to life, just of a different kind. Whereas my desire to leave the exhausting Earth Room party and release my self into the universe sounds kind of like the fantasy of a depressed person.

And indeed, it is. I have felt the desire to die, many times, chronically even. I have felt exhausted by the nonsensical, overstimulating, even terrifying Earth Room and fantasized being connected with the universe, even being connected to those who’ve already died (but not in a traditional afterlife sense: I don’t imagine interacting with these people, just being spiritually connected with their stardust). Depression has definitely shaped my beliefs about death and afterlife. But is that bad? Must I change my beliefs to something more life-sustaining?

I write this after having cried a lot for two days and felt more melancholy than usual. I got very upset watching a Chinese TV drama with my mother, as there were so many mean characters in that show, which reminded me that there are so many mean people in the world and so many terrible happenings in the world. So I’ve been feeling somewhat suicidal, but it’s not really a concern at this point. Suicidal thoughts do not mean that someone will die or even that they truly want to die. It’s just how my brain sometimes reacts to stress and meaninglessness.

But thinking about death more often has made me wonder if I might want to reshape my attitude towards death starting with my beliefs about it. It’s fine to believe in connectedness with spirit before birth and after death, but it is not fine, for me that is, to value that higher than the sacredness of soul — the unique value of myself. It can be hard to imagine sometimes, but I do have something to do in this world. I can be pretty driven by a sense of mission when I am not feeling lost for meaning. Whatever death will be like, I shall be ready when it’s time. But that time will come on its own. I don’t need to help it along.

Our society does not like to talk about death or grief in general. My family is the same: we haven’t talked much as a whole family about my grandfather who died in China in 2020, nor participated in any ritual to honor him. I actually had never attended a funeral until I played for one as a pianist a few months ago. So I think it is natural for a spiritual person like me to be curious about death and to wonder about what it would be like to witness it or experience it.

I feel that I must in my life at some point witness a birth and a death. Obviously, it would be a person inviting me to the event; I wouldn’t just pop into some random person’s sacred process. But it must be truly special to witness the miracle of both events and to hold in your heart that you have once been born, and you will at some point die. (We don’t usually talk of death as a miracle, but is it not equally so as birth? If you believe in an afterlife, it is your second birth; if not, it is the sunset of the soul, and are not sunsets beautiful and godly?)

I suppose if I were to truly respect death and the dying process, I would aspire to grow into a true elder, a healthy person who has earned their chance to embody spirit for the good of all. I am far from that. I am most likely at the late adolescence stage of eco-soulcentric development, although by societal necessity I also partake in activities of young adulthood. That is a bit farther along in development than most people in the United States, according to Plotkin, who are fixated at an unhealthy form of early adolescence. But soul development is not a race: everything comes in its natural, idiosyncratic rhythm, especially when a person is well-nurtured, or they figure out a way to be nurtured in an unhealthy society.

In the meantime, I shall cultivate the virtue of patience when hope is lacking. There is no need to rush dying. There is no need to rush deciding to die, either, and most of the time, after a wait, people find that they didn’t actually want to die after all. And there is no need to fantasize about the afterlife. It will come and show itself, and most likely, it will surprise us.

I’ve decided to do a mid-month update again because of my upcoming Cannonball Festival show. If you missed last month’s update, I am presenting my show, The Legend of Yuliang, in the Cannonball Festival at the beginning of next month. Cannonball is a hub of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, and the Fringe is a collection of a whole lot of different shows and other artistic events that happen each year in September and typically are of an experimental character. My show is part solo performance, part collective ritual, and it is based on my family history, in particular my father’s family’s folk religion, which existed for 100 years until the Chinese Cultural Revolution caused many folk religions to die out. Here’s the flyer!

And here is the link with more information on the show and how to buy tickets: https://phillyfringe.org/events/the-legend-of-yuliang/

To be honest, I’ve been very nervous about my show as it is unlike anything I’ve done before. But as I create my material, I’m realizing that I do have the skills to make it happen; I just need to trust myself.

A few asks relating to the show:

1. Please attend if you can! Ticket prices are variable/pay-what-you-wish. There is a standard price ($25) and a subsidizing price ($50) that is recommended if you can afford it, but there are subsidized options as well, down to $5.

2. Please spread the word about my show! Feel free to share the flyer image and the event info link.

3. I’m fundraising to cover some of the costs of doing the show, as my being an emerging artist means that I can’t count on ticket income to be sufficient. Please contribute whatever you can to my Ko-fi campaign, especially if you can’t attend the show but still want to support. If you can’t attend the show, I suggest contributing the amount you would pay for a ticket.

Student Union

For the 2025-2026 academic year, I am serving on my grad school’s Student Union as the Institutional Liaison. I don’t like it being called Student Union, as it is not a union in the sense of a worker’s union, and that discrepancy has confused some students. It is more like student council, except that we applied and were appointed to the positions rather than being elected to them, and there is quite a variety of positions — ten of them in fact — covering various aspects of student life and school governance. My role, as written, is to be involved in the school administration as a student rep. But all of us collaborate to make sure that student voices are represented in university leadership and that students are supported in various things they might want to do, like start clubs or attend conferences.

Again, I feel like taking on this role is an exercise in trusting myself. I’ve taken on leadership roles before, but I have a history of being unreliable due to my mental health struggles and general mode of being. I’m painfully aware of that and want to try my best to be a responsible leader, which may at times mean communicating and delegating when I might be feeling overwhelmed. But I am excited to be in the Student Union. The other students seem to be passionate about supporting their peers.

Writings

I wrote a post about what happened when I told my younger Chinese cousin about my mental health/neurodivergent conditions:

Also, I forgot to share the Qstack post in which my subtly queer poem “The Fool” was featured in June, so here it is now. It’s one of my favorite poems that I’ve written.

Qstack | The LGBTQIA+ Directory of Substacks

Pride & Poetry

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a year ago · 25 likes · 12 comments

Spirituality and religion

Playing at the Methodist church on Sundays has continued to be enjoyable. I mean, performing music is enjoyable for me. And spiritual practice has a certain allure to me. But I’ve been feeling a certain resistance at church that I don’t typically feel with other religious activities that I’ve tried. The problem is, Christianity is the default in the United States, such that for the sake of psychical freedom it feels like I have to suppress the spiritual feelings that arise for me, even though I experience such feelings with pretty much any form of religion or spirituality. My personal concept of the divine is broad enough that any language, anthropomorphic or abstract, can stimulate a deep sense of connection to the universe. (I might describe my beliefs as pantheistic, but I don’t concern myself with the exact metaphysics of it all, as to me, religion is fundamentally an expression of humans’ need for meaning and not meant to be a matter of absolute truth even if for some, absolute faith is a psychological necessity.)

I grew up in an non-religious family that celebrated Christmas simply by putting up a tree and exchanging gifts. I remember when I was in second grade, my classmates and I had to choose to make either a Christmas booklet or a Hanukkah booklet, and I chose the Christmas booklet because I “celebrated” that holiday. But then I realized that I did not know words such as “nativity” and thus could not illustrate them. (Honestly, “nativity” is a hard word to illustrate for a second grader. What do you draw? Mary holding baby Jesus over his manger?) So my relationship with Christianity has been characterized by discomfort, especially once I was older and learned about just how many atrocities Christians have done to the world in the name of their religion.

I used to go to Quaker meeting as a way to connect with my own spirituality, but I haven’t been in several months, and I can’t go to the local Sunday meeting anymore because of my church job. But I can attend Pendle Hill’s daily hybrid meetings in the early morning. I just have to get back in the habit of waking up early. (I used to be a natural early riser, but my meds ruined that for me. I can wake up early if I go to sleep early, but I get so excitable in the night somehow. Even when I was an early riser, I got excitable in the night and often slept late. It just meant that I didn’t sleep enough, which is bad for bipolar.) And there is also a Won Buddhist temple about thirty minutes away that has services in English on Saturdays. (Won Buddhism is a Korean religion that is somewhat distantly related to Buddhism similar to how Quakerism is somewhat distantly related to Christianity. They actually have a lot of similar concepts: Quakers believe in that of God/the Light in everyone, and Won Buddhists worship the Buddha nature in everyone.). So, I am going to attend these services to feed my spiritual hunger. Perhaps once I reground myself in spiritual traditions that resonate with me more, I will feel less resistant at church. I won’t have to keep proving to myself that I’m not a Christian, as I will be grounded in who I am.

I’m also meeting with a spiritual director once a month to plot my spiritual journey in the long term. I haven’t told my parents about this. I think my mother would react, “You already have therapy — what is this?” Honestly, I don’t know either, but it feels like the right direction to go. The person I’m working with is an older adult, and I feel like I haven’t had enough nourishing interactions with older adults in my life, especially since my grandparents are all in China. And having not grown up in a religion, I also did not have a spiritual leader to guide me through life. Some might say that’s not necessary, but since I was very young, I’ve been drawn to mentors of various types who could feed my soul. (They’ve also sometimes been drawn to me, I think: my elementary school guidance counselor decided to meet regularly with me, perhaps being drawn to my natural introspectiveness, even though my best friend at the time was having severe anxiety — unbeknownst to me, but apparently known by the school nurse — and didn’t get as much attention.) It’s important to me to define and develop my own spirituality, which draws from multiple traditions, in order to grow into a spiritual guide myself one day.

Random other stuff

Some friends and I did an escape room for my birthday. None of us had ever done one before. We escaped with two minutes to spare. It was fun, and I hope to do it again at some point.

Philadelphia’s public transit system, SEPTA, is in danger of having to implement severe service cuts due to state politicians’ refusal to agree upon a budget with sufficient funding for SEPTA. If you are in the area, please speak up for public transit by contacting your representatives using this tool (or the many others available).

I got a rubbery seat cushion with small bumps on it, a tool designed to help people with ADHD to focus. I like it so far. I might seem like a person who’d be quite bookish, but I actually have since childhood had difficulties focusing while reading. I will feel like I have to move around or end up reading the same paragraph multiple times. So I’m experimenting with strategies to alleviate that restlessness. It does calm me down to read while lying on my back or my stomach, but my mother tells me it’s bad to read while supine, and my elbows end up hurting while prone.

A Contemplative Offering

How do you regain trust in yourself after setbacks?

What secrets do you hold that you have been meaning to tell somebody?

I’m a person who’s generally very open about many things, including topics with much social stigma, and then quite secretive about certain specific things that I idiosyncratically feel ashamed about. I keep a lot of secrets from my parents, though, and unfortunately, they end up finding out about some of them without my intending them to. I mean to tell them about things, but at my own pace, and I delay the telling, until they end up finding out. My mother is aware that I write some sort of newsletter, but she has never gone looking for it. I don’t know what I’ll do if my parents discover this Substack. They don’t want me to write about mental health and certain other topics. I try not to lie when I can avoid it, as I hate lying and will even play linguistic tricks to technically avoid lying while still hiding what I want to hide. So if they directly ask or confront me, I’ll feel like I have to tell.

Harmony, health, and happiness,

Margin | 天涯

Yet months ago I told my one older cousin about my bipolar, and she was very understanding, agreeing not to tell anyone what I told her and even offering to let me talk to her about my struggles if I needed. So I thought that my younger cousin, who is in college and thus, I believed, would be exposed to new perspectives that open her mind, would be just as understanding.

But unfortunately, she was not. Firstly, when she read what I shared with her on WeChat, she responded with shock and immediately started asking me how someone would develop such conditions. Was I bullied in school perhaps? Apparently she once had some curiosity about psychology herself, but her questions to me showed that she was quite clueless about the subject. I tried to explain, as best I could with my not completely fluent Chinese, that these conditions did not have singular causes and that genes were likely involved. But unlike my older cousin, she did not offer any support, only ask me these questions that felt oddly intrusive (although I do appreciate her willingness to learn about these things).

The next day, my mother told me that my cousin told her mother, who is my mother’s sister, about what I told her. I was shocked that she blabbed despite my instructions to her not to share. Apparently immediately after she told her mother, she said that she felt guilty for sharing because I told her not to. But what use is such guilt? She has not confessed or apologized to me herself; I only know because her mother told my mother. I thought that even if my cousin did not understand psychology, I could trust a nineteen-year-old to keep a secret from her parents.

My mother was angry at me. She did not agree with me about the importance of sharing mental health history with one’s family members. She had always assumed that I was unique among our family members in my intensity, despite my brother also having experienced depression and my father being clearly autistic (autism is genetically related to bipolar and schizophrenia, both conditions that most frequently emerge in late adolescence or early adulthood). But if my mother was unwilling to talk to our relatives about mental health, then our relatives might also hide their children’s mental health information. So at the very least, I thought that my cousins ought to know for their own benefit.

My mother was upset that I potentially caused her whole side of the family to know about my differences, as according to her, her family members all have a tendency to blab. And in hindsight, I do think I told my cousin more than I needed to, detailing my experiences in such a way that she might have gotten scared somehow. I have a tendency to overly trust people, and I also was feeling enthusiastic in my attempts to figure out how to explain psychological phenomena in Chinese.

Unfortunately, the language used in Chinese in relation to mental health sounds much more severe than its equivalent in English. As my mother explained to me, Chinese people understand mental health troubles in a sort of binary: either you get a little stressed out because you were bullied in school or some other external thing happened to you, or you’re absolutely “crazy” and “can’t live in normal society.” My cousin’s mother reacted to learning about my conditions in the same way as my cousin did, assuming that I must have been bullied in school. This fascinates me, as it suggests that Chinese people tend to assume that, at least for most people, nurture is what shapes a personality. Which makes a lot of sense. I’m sure that plenty of Chinese people could be diagnosed with ADHD, but with just how strict school in China is, even children with ADHD have to become extremely disciplined through daily conditioning. Confucian culture puts a lot of emphasis on cultivating character, and the assumption is that the majority of people — those who are not absolutely “crazy” — are capable of balanced character development according to societal standards.

My cousin’s mother apparently worried about me for the whole day after being told about my mental health difference and said to my mother that it would be better if I lived in China and could interact with my cousin more. Which doesn’t make much sense. It is not helpful advice, and it seems to rather express my aunt’s desire for our family members to all be physically and emotionally close to one another. My mother attempted to calm her down by explaining that I am simply a more sensitive person and that my mental health is currently fine, but it’s unclear if that did anything.

Clearly I caused a bit of a mess by telling my cousin about my diagnoses, but I am still glad that I told. I believe that mental health is important to talk about, and if Chinese culture currently does not often permit these conversations to happen, then it is good that I have initiated such conversation. Perhaps my cousin, if she continues to be interested in psychology, looks up these diagnoses on the internet and educates herself. If she doesn’t connect with these experiences herself, she might still recognize them in people around her and perhaps be able to help a friend.

One thing I am worried about though is that I might be imposing a Westernized perspective on mental health. Chinese medicine treats mental health as an aspect of physical health rather than as something separate. Someone who experiences what could be called bipolar in a Western context might be diagnosed as, for example, having too much fire either in the heart or in the liver, and then be given herbal medicine to treat specifically heart-fire or liver-fire. My impression, however, is that most Chinese people do not know much about Chinese medicine’s view of mental health, and the increasing popularization of psychology in China is mostly centered on Western psychology. Perhaps some awareness through one model is better than no awareness through any model.

In the fight against stigma, my habit has often been to act as if the stigma does not exist. Thus I tend to be very honest about my experiences, perhaps too honest sometimes, in order to educate others and to inform them about my needs. My assumption is that dialogue about mental health is important even if it is difficult or uncomfortable. But my mother certainly understands her family’s dynamics better than I, and I’ve agreed to not discuss mental health with my relatives — at least on her side — in the future. We certainly do not need family members uselessly worrying about me and repeatedly lamenting that we live so far away from each other.

Have you ever had to navigate difficult topics with extended family, especially family members separated by distance or culture? Share your story in the comments.

Last time I wrote, I was in a period of near-crisis and trying to figure out how to take care of myself while my father, a stressful presence, was home for the 4th of July week. I managed to get through, but there were unexpected obstacles, in particular my mother’s differing perception of my needs. I wanted to stay over at a friend’s house for a few days, or at least hang out with them during the day. But my mother allowed neither of those while my father was still at home. First she claimed that I was safer with her than with my friend. I can see why she would say that, for I normally am more subdued at home since I do not feel the freedom to be my fullest, wackiest self, but in this case, feeling suppressed at home was making my depression worse. Then, she insisted that I should accompany her to places during the day so that she herself could also avoid being stuck with my quarrelous father.

I know that some young adults would just do what they want to do and disregard what their parents say, but it has become difficult for me to do so. I could do whatever, be whatever when I was in college. But since coming back home after my last hospitalization due to a manic episode triggered by autistic burnout, I have gradually become more dependent on my mother again and not really wanting to assert myself or to rebel. For example, initially I would drive myself to places, but after a panic attack during a choir rehearsal left me unable to safely drive myself home, my mother started driving me instead — and I let her.

It is kind of strange and uncharacteristic of me to not insist on independence. My parents have always been extremely protective of me, their delicate-seeming “daughter.” As a kid, I fought against their restrictions on my freedoms, knowing that I could face any challenges that came before me. What pains me, what panics me now is the dread that I may be just as delicate as I look. I start to be afraid for myself, knowing the difficulties I have faced especially when in public, and I lose confidence in myself.

After my father left, I finally was able to hang out with my friend one day. And then, I was able to stay at The Ferns peer support respite last weekend. It took a lot of work to convince my mother to let me go. I thought a no-cost, non-carceral alternative to a psych hospital was clearly a great option, but she expressed fears that I might be abducted or even killed. She made a comparison to how in China, tragedies happen when young people go to hospitals for relatively minor issues and then are forced into comas and their parents are told that they are brain dead so that their organs can be harvested. I have no idea how she made that far-fetched connection. She’s not even a generally anxious person; she’s extremely emotionally stable, seemingly in all circumstances except for parenting. She said it wasn’t about the specific place, but rather that she is anxious for me whenever I am not with her. We agreed that I would text her immediately after I arrived there, but I forgot to do so until four hours after I arrived, and during those four hours, my mother worried that someone had abducted me or done something else bad to me.

The peer respite was a nice place, although I probably should not have socialized as much as I did while there. There was one other guest for the weekend, and there was always at least one staff member present, and we chatted, played games, and watched videos. At one point, after we played a game, someone asked me a question, and I found myself unable to answer, as I was starting to shut down from all the social interaction. So I grabbed my weighted blanket and took a long nap on the couch, only afterwards explaining what had happened. Yet they were very understanding about my needs. Even if they didn’t know why I stopped speaking, they knew that I should be given space to do what I needed. I became more energized and hopeful during my time there, and I also wrote out a plan for how to manage distress or crisis in the future.

What I also realized while there is that I need to move out sooner than later. It is nice that my mother and I can support each other, but I think we’ve both become a bit too dependent on the other. She uses me like a therapist, and when I neglect household chores, she is too willing to do them for me. (My parents never gave my brother and me chores when we were children.) But I will need to figure out my support system in order to move out, creating plans for how to respond to various challenges that may come up. It’s possible that I will live with a friend who is also disabled in various ways and with whom I’ve had a mutually supportive relationship. I find that relationships with other disabled and neurodivergent people are easier for me to manage, not just because of similarities in how we approach social skills, but also because if we both have support needs, we are less likely to end up in an imbalanced situation where one person is always supporting the other.

Playing for church

I have started playing for a small Methodist church in Philly. It is indeed very small, as we meet in the chapel rather than the sanctuary and still don’t really fill up the room, but they thought that hiring a musician might help their congregation to grow. I play on a digital keyboard and also sing a solo song each service.

Additionally, I have been taking lessons on organ, in preparation for playing on that instrument for churches. It is a bit of a sacrifice for me to take on a church job, as that means I cannot attend Sunday Quaker meeting anymore (though I could attend meetings for worship on other days, such as the daily Zoom-accessible morning worship at Pendle Hill). But I think it is worth it, partly for the money, but also because of the opportunity for spiritual learning and growth. Even though I am not a Christian and do not imagine myself becoming one, I do feel a connection to the Spirit that I can share with others. And it is also interesting for me to learn how Christianity works and what draws people to it. As I hope to offer spiritual counseling to people in the future, it is helpful to get to know various religions from the inside. Regarding church rituals, I pick and choose what I want to participate in: I’ll join in Communion (if that is permitted), but I won’t recite the Creed.

But about learning the organ: it has been an enjoyable and sometimes frustrating journey so far. My experience with harpsichord somewhat transfers to playing on the manuals (i.e. the keyboards played by the hands), in the sense that for both instruments, expressive technique requires greater focus on articulation and phrasing than it does for piano. One key difference is that I have to play notes on the organ for exactly the right length of time, whereas that is mostly irrelevant for harpsichord and not as exceedingly important on the piano. And I am getting used to playing with my feet on the pedal keyboard, although there are two annoying obstacles that I face with that because I am short and have small feet! The organ at my teacher’s studio does not have an adjustable bench, and I find myself straining to stay balanced on the bench and not fall onto the pedals. Organ shoes, which have a high heel, sort of help with that, but I made things harder than they needed to be by not getting exactly the right shoes.

The thing is, most organists seem to get their shoes from Organmaster Shoes, but when I browsed the website, they only had Mary Jane style shoes available in my size, and I don’t like Mary Janes. So I pre-ordered size 4 women’s Oxfords, which will be restocked in — January — and decided to get cheaper jazz (?) shoes that had a similar-shaped heel, since some people do wear dance shoes as an alternative to the more expensive organ shoes. But now I’m wondering if I should have just gotten the Mary Janes, as the slightly tapered heels of the dance shoes somehow keep falling in between some of the pedals, although improving my precision on the pedal keyboard should help prevent that. My teacher, who is a cis man with closer-to-average-sized feet, just wears socks, which some sticklers for technique say is a no-no, but it works for him.

Announcing…The Legend of Yuliang, a Philly Fringe Performance!

In September, as part of the Cannonball Festival (which happens within the Philadelphia Fringe Festival), I will be performing my solo show The Legend of Yuliang. Taking as a point of departure my father’s family’s folk religion, which lasted 100 years until Chinese Communism eliminated many folk religions, it is an interactive, interdisciplinary show in which the audience and I together work together to figure out who is Yuliang, the deity of the religion, and participate in a collective spiritual and creative ritual. Because the audience plays a big role in determining the content of the show, each of the three performances will be unique.

I was feeling overwhelmed for some time about preparing for this show, as I felt that I — yet again — dove into a really challenging project unlike anything I’ve done before, but knowing that I have successfully made huge creative leaps before helps me to trust myself and the process. My mother was telling me not to do something like this ever again, emphasizing that I am a musician and not a theatre artist or something like that. But I can do theatre, or dance, or performance art, when I want to, and besides I also do have some amount of training in each of those, even though the bulk of my artistic training is in music. And my musical work increasingly has mixed with other disciplines and has involved things like chance elements and performer participation in the creative process, so a show based on collectively-created spiritual ritual does have some similarities with work I have done before.

If you’re interested in experimental performance and creative participation, this is definitely the show for you. If you feel more hesitant or anxious about the interactive process, this show accommodates you as well. You can always choose to sit and observe and only join when you feel ready.

The Legend of Yuliang will have three performances: Sep. 4th at 8:00pm, Sep. 6th at 3:30pm, and Sep. 7th at 7:30pm. They will be at the Louis Bluver Theatre at the Drake. Tickets are on sale now through FringeArts here. More info about the show can be found here. I encourage you to buy tickets earlier if you can, as it will help me get a sense of how large of an audience to expect, which will impact how the interactive process works. There are Standard, Supporter/Subsidizing, and Pay-what-you-can/Subsidized ticket fee levels available.

Posts from June

I didn’t share these in the last newsletter, so I’m sharing them now.

A Contemplative Offering

Two principles that The Ferns peer respite is founded on is that distress is a common human experience and crisis opens up to opportunity. When has crisis led to opportunity for you in the past? And how can you prepare yourself to grow through distress or crisis in the future?

What would your experience of the world be like if you were of a different height?

Harmony, health, and happiness,

Margin | 天涯

This usually is my monthly post to summarize various happenings and successes in my life. But today I just want to write a bit about how I’ve been feeling, as I seem to be facing an unusual amount of blockage, which is why this post is late. All this month, I’ve been wanting to work on intellectual and creative projects, yet I have mostly been unable to do so, having trouble focusing and feeling intimidated by what I want to do. Instead, I have felt numb and have been obsessively reading Harry Potter fandom wiki articles and playing Project Makeover. It is possible that I never quite recovered from the PYC choir New York trip, which went well but was definitely exhausting for me. If that is so, I feel a bit despairing over how ill-adapted I am in facing this stressful and stimulating world.

But there’s another aspect of this. I’ve been living at my parents’ home for over a year now, having moved back after my last psych hospitalization. I have no plans for when I will move out and live on my own again, as it is contingent on my being able to financially support myself and generally take care of myself, and I don’t know when either of those will be feasible. When I was in college, especially my sophomore and junior years, every time I went back home for breaks, the home environment would disorient me and force me to confront the ghosts of prior selves, present in photos of me on the walls and in the well-worn patterns of my social role in my family. Now I am more resilient, and I can act as my parents’ well-behaved “daughter” without too much distress most of the time.

But recently I have been breaking. Perhaps because it was Pride month. Perhaps because I have been painting dreams for myself that go well beyond what my parents could envision for me. Perhaps because I am more of a thinker than my mother, and more of a feeler than my father, and more of an introspective person than anyone else in my family, and that all just gets so frustrating. Perhaps also because I don’t hang out with other people enough to give me a break from my family. It feels like I don’t really know how to, though that is also a bit silly as I certainly can use my brain and figure it out.

Two days ago I had a near-crisis incident, triggered by my father’s total insensitivity when I was just trying to take care of myself. It was terrifying, actually, for a moment. I only just managed to keep under control, while my father yelled at me and my mother yelled at him. And yesterday I was considering if perhaps I might benefit from some respite.

I don’t want to go back to a hospital, but I found two local alternatives: the Lodge, run by Lenape Valley Foundation in Bucks County, PA, and Ferns, a peer-run respite in Montgomery County. I have been curious about peer-run respites, even thought about perhaps working at one or being part of starting one in the future. They value the agency of their guests and thus do not mandate any particular treatment and keep their doors unlocked for guests to leave and return throughout the day as they wish. The Lodge isn’t a peer-run respite, as it does have a clinical team (while Ferns only has non-clinical peer specialists), but it also has peer specialists and is unlocked and offers a home-like environment to guests. I contacted Ferns and found out that it is a no-cost option, but it is only open Fridays to Mondays, on the weekends. Unfortunate for me. I was looking for support sooner, hoping to protect myself while my father is home this week.

Knowing that The Lodge would definitely not be free (it seems likely comparable to the cost of a hospitalization), and that my parents would probably complain even though it is not technically a hospital, I am going to try out my therapist’s suggestion of hanging out with a friend instead. Perhaps I just need to get out of the house for a bit. Sometimes I just need to get over the peak of a crisis and let it pass on its own. I am also considering the option of staying at Ferns for the weekend of the 11th, which is their next availability. But first I need to get through the next few days.

I think I’ll write another Update in maybe a week or two to share the positive things that have been going on for me, for there have been successes — it just pains me to write about them right now. I have often felt that with success comes the burden of pursuing more success, and I think that’s weighing on me right now. I feel like freezing time instead of becoming the person that I want to be. But I’m definitely dealing with this challenges more effectively than before. It helps that I have such a strong shutdown impulse, actually. Instead of acting on desires to hurt myself, I often just freeze up or fall asleep. I know myself better, and with that knowledge I am better able to survive.

Harmony, health, and happiness,

Margin | 天涯

Enough for me to die on her earth
be buried in her
to melt and vanish into her soil
then sprout forth as a flower
played with by a child from my country.
Enough for me to remain
in my country's embrace
to be in her close as a handful of dust
a sprig of grass
a flower.

(source: https://allpoetry.com/Enough-For-Me)

The spirit of the Palestinians, and their love for their country, persists through all these challenges and all this injustice and oppression.

When composing the song, I read a little about Arabic music theory and tried to imitate a modal sound, such as by using E half-flat rather than E flat. I thought that I was using the mode Maqam Nikriz, but now when I look up that mode, it doesn’t seem to match up with what I was doing, so I don’t know if I somehow mixed it up with a different mode. If you happen to be more knowledgeable on this topic, please enlighten me. Nevertheless, I mostly followed my own melodic intuition and did not really try to imitate a particular musician even though that was encouraged in my class assignment.

Here are some ways that you can support Palestinians in Gaza: https://afsc.org/news/6-ways-you-can-support-palestinians-gaza

And in the United States, I believe it is also important to have conversations with family members, neighbors, friends, etc. on the situation in Palestine and nearby nations. It is hard to change people’s minds about an issue, but we still need to try. Traditional media is very powerful and has shaped American’s opinions very strongly, but we the people can fight against that and offer a different narrative.

I hope you enjoy the song! And please share!

I decided to tag along with one group of kids and their chaperone, since I didn’t have chaperone duties but also didn’t want to end up alone in a stressful situation. While they visited one store, I found a station where a person who claimed to be a psychic was selling her services and crystals. I had never had a psychic reading before, so I was curious what it would be like. Given that I am a sensitive person myself and was feeling overwhelmed in the mall, I wondered if interacting with this “psychic” could feel supportive, like we could connect concerning our sensitivities. I didn’t really care so much about hearing a prediction of my future or something like that, but I did want emotional care in that present moment.

I agreed to a $20 psychic reading, despite finding the cost high. It ended up being the only money I spent at the mall other than lunch, so I don’t feel so bad for spending it. The psychic told me to sit down and think about something that I wished for. I thought about my wish for good mental health, given how anxious and overwhelmed I was. It felt like that she was glaring at me, like she was trying to peer into my soul. The beginning of the reading was totally vague, things like “You are a good person” and “You are on a journey this year.” Immediately she seemed to me an obvious fake, but I was stuck listening to her bullshit.

Then she said, “There is a man in your life whom you are confused about. Who is he?” The question irritated me. Clearly, she was assuming that I was a cishet woman who desires romantic love. Although I can be attracted to men, I am quite indifferent about sex and romance, not because I am asexual or aromantic, but because I am autistic and emotionally detached. So I refused to answer, saying instead “what?” and “I don’t understand.” She persevered with the question for some time, but then she gave up.

Her next statement was, “You see a doctor for something. Is that right?” I decided to answer truthfully, that I see a psychiatrist for bipolar. At first I believed that this was the only perceptive observation she made of me, assuming that she saw how anxious I was and made a guess that I had a psychiatric condition. But later, other people pointed out to me that most people do see a doctor for “something,” even if it’s just an annual checkup. Still, I doubt that she was expecting an answer like I have diabetes or asthma or something else physical, as she then began to aggressively sell her $90 “chakra cleansing” to me, claiming that it would heal my psychiatric malady.

After I refused the “chakra cleansing,” saying that I was with the choir and did not have time that day to do a cleansing, she went back to the topic of love. She claimed that I will marry someone and have two kids. When I truthfully told her that I do not want kids, she said, “I know you don’t. But you will have kids.” This really triggered me. My parents have both repeatedly insisted either that I should have kids or that I might change my mind about not wanting to have kids. I don’t want kids because it would not be compatible with the lifestyle I want to have, as I want to have the freedom to follow my interests without having the lifelong responsibility of taking care of my own kids. I could work with kids as part of a job, but I don’t want my own kids. But the psychic’s statement triggered my OCD, which fixates on the inherent uncertainty about the future and persistently asks me, “But what if I do want kids?”

For the rest of the day, I had to fight back against the superstitious, obsessive belief that the psychic might by chance have predicted my future in regards to kids. Added to the overstimulation of the mall, it made me feel quite unwell, and I ended up being escorted out of the mall so that I could rest inside of one of the choir vans.

This “psychic” was obviously a manipulative fake earning money from preying on people’s vulnerabilities. She also was very unobservant and kind of cruel with how insistent she was with forcing cisheterosexual norms onto me. I’m sure that there are others who call themselves psychics who do better work with clients, using whatever perceptive skills they have, regardless of whether they are “true” psychics. I have experienced psychic phenomena in my own life, so I do believe that they can happen, but I also believe that people can be observant in ways that may not be actual extra-sensory perception, so they may still give helpful readings. But now I know to be more discerning, to verify a so-called psychic’s authenticity before proceeding with a reading.

The moral of the story: if you want to have a psychic reading, do some research on the person before proceeding. And if there are topics that can trigger you or make you freaked out, a psychic reading might not be a good idea.

As my first semester in my grad program has ended, I have been reflecting upon my psychological growth since I graduated from college. A lot has happened — that’s been the theme of my young adulthood starting from when I started college. But more recently, I feel like I’ve had more clarity about myself and what I want from life than I’ve ever had before.

A little while ago, my mother surprised me by asking, why aren’t you doing a grad program that prepares you to be a therapist? And actually, I sort of did consider that possibility, although I specifically was interested in becoming a psychoanalyst, as I am passionate about depth psychology perspectives and most counseling programs emphasize things like cognitive behavioral therapy. (My interest is partly due to the intensive, psychodynamic therapy that I received through Haverford College’s counseling services, but I also was already fascinated by psychoanalysis by age 13). But I did not consider myself ready to undergo such training, not just because I am still in the midst of figuring out my own struggles, but also because I did not feel ready to commit to a Western perspective on what it is to be human. This is why I chose the East-West Psychology program. I am able to explore different global perspectives on psychology and spirituality, while receiving training to offer spiritual counseling as a complement to psychotherapy.

In the year after I graduated from college, I also considered at least two other options for my future education and career. Several people in my life encouraged me to continue my studies in music. The most likely possibilities at that point, based on my skills and interests, were music composition or collaborative piano. But I did not feel that I needed more formal training in those subjects. My creativity was expanding towards something much broader than just music composition, and my many years of varied collaborative piano experience already was sufficient to land me jobs.

I thought of applying to the one-year secondary teaching certificate program that Bryn Mawr College offers to graduates of Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges so that I could have the option of teaching mathematics at schools that require a certification. I even met with the program coordinator to discuss. But then my third psych hospitalization in four months happened, and I missed the deadline to apply. Honestly, I think that was fortuitous. I already knew that working at traditional public schools would not be suitable for my idealistic personality. The program might have helped me to hone in my personal teaching style, but it wasn’t the best choice for me.

It was during that last, lengthy psych hospitalization that I decided, perhaps influenced by the soaring self-confidence of mania, that I would apply to the MA/MFA dual degree program. Given my instability at the time, I did not apply to start that fall (2024), choosing to wait until my mental health was stronger. And although I still did have mental health issues in this first semester, I managed them much better than I could in undergrad. Plus, the learning community values honesty about your personal experiences, for as scholar-practitioners, we are not just academically studying things of the psyche and spirit, but also applying what we learn to our own lives.

On Friday, I presented a paper in the East-West Psychology department’s annual student symposium. My presentation was called, “Circles of Practice: Approaching Meditation as a Person with Bipolar.” It interwove anecdotes from my personal experience with concepts from my research on adverse effects of meditation. I was nervous about the presentation, especially when I realized, while watching the previous day’s presentations, that “presenting a paper” did not necessarily mean reading your paper to the audience. On the contrary, everyone who presented used slides as a visual aid, and many of them presented organically rather than reading from a script or a paper. This misunderstanding is characteristic of my autistic literalism: I believed the instructions were exactly as I was told. So I created a PowerPoint for my presentation but stuck with reading from my paper as it helped to both lessen my nerves and to keep my presentation within the time limit.

I am using every opportunity in my grad program to prepare myself to offer psychospiritual care to people who experience madness or neurodivergence. Next semester, I am taking the first in a two-course sequence on spiritual counseling, along with a course on trauma and spirituality. There is a certain way that I tend to overintellectualize in my understanding of psychology and in applying psychological concepts to my life, so I try my best to dig deeper and be honest with myself about my blind spots. This is one reason why I never took a psychology course in undergraduate: although I would have loved it intellectually, it would have been a distraction from the deeper psychological journey that I was undergoing. (The other reason is that I simply did not have room for more than a couple of electives due to double majoring in maths and music and having to take two extra maths courses because mental illness led me to pass/fail one course and withdraw from another.)

There are other ways that I am intentionally training myself for my career goals. Some things I will share later when the time is right. All I will say now is that my summer will be quite busy with creativity and independent study. My pathway is perhaps idiosyncratic, but for me it is most logical and even practical. For me, practicality cannot just consider things like how much money I make, but also things like is this choice going to be sustainable for my mental health, and does this help me to live the life I want to live. I do realize that I also am just more of an idealistic rather than practical person, so I try to balance the two virtues, but I do believe that a lot of what society tells us is and isn’t “practical” is bullshit.

Yesterday was the Pennsylvania Youth Chorale’s recording day. Recording my musical performances makes me so nervous, as it feels like I have to be perfect, and I can never be perfect in performance. (This is why I never won in any of the few solo piano competitions I participated in as a child.) It went alright, however. I think part of it was just my bodymind getting acclimated to the level of nerves I was experiencing, such that I could eventually ignore that constant nervousness. I’ll be going to New York City with the group next weekend on their concert tour.

My concert at Friends Home in Kennett Square on May 24th also went well. I am learning that retirement homes can be a bit peculiar of an audience to perform for. The PYC performed for one on our Ocean City day trip, and the audience kept talking and complaining that they couldn’t hear the kids singing over the piano, which might be partially attributed to hearing loss in the upper frequencies of sound that would make the kids’ already soft voices even softer. After I played a piece in my solo concert, an audience member spontaneously started singing “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” I believe she was also the person who, prior to the concert, kept repeating, “Where’s Dad? I don’t know where Dad went.” I played a bunch of piano works and also included a couple of songs that I sang while accompanying myself.

Over the summer, when not working on my own projects and delving into psychology books, I hope to have some fun with family and friends, whatever that means for us. I think my family might go hiking some places. I just hope it doesn’t get too warm…but whatever, I shall enjoy the days I am given!

And yes, I yet again went a month without writing an Essay for this newsletter…it’s so hard for me to get back into a rhythm after I’ve gotten out of it. But to prove I have plans for future essays, here is what I plan to write about in coming weeks:

• Bill Plotkin’s theory of ecosocial human development

• Trying to figure out my Enneagram type (4w5 or 5w4???)

• A song I wrote in support of Palestinians

• Exploring types of suicidal ideation and the flaws of many suicide prevention programs (this essay has been in my drafts for a while, for good reason, but I do wish to share it once it’s ready)

And other topics relating to psychology, spirituality, and related interests of mine. So check your inbox!

Oh, and also — a new poem I wrote will be featured this month in a post on Qstack, a publication that shares the writing of queer and trans people on Substack! I will link it in my June Update, but I’m sharing with you Qstack’s Pride Month post in case you want to subscribe.

Featured Creator

Kiyaana Cox Jones is a native of Newark, New Jersey, and a dynamic force of grace, compassion, and inspiration. With over a decade of experience as a speaker, writer, director, actress, singer, and creativity coach, Kiyaana ignites the spark of creativity within every soul she encounters.

As an educator, advocate, and certified Restorative Practitioner, she has served in Higher Education and K-12, and now instructs and coaches at the International Institute of Restorative Practice and the Touchstone/Moravian MFA program. She is a narrative coach and leader in Restorative Self Practices.

Kiyaana's expertise extends beyond academia; she's a fervent advocate for the transformative power of the arts, curating workshops and productions that blend creativity with healing and community building. Kiyaana is also the founder of the Sisterfriend Circle, a community of healing, empowerment, and sister connection. Embracing the power of connection, Kiyaana fosters relationships that inspire growth, healing, and transformation.

https://kiyaanacoxjones.com/

A Contemplative Offering

What key choices have led you to where you are now? How do you feel about them looking back?

I titled my paper “Circles of Practice” not just because of the bipolar reference, but also because I find my meditative practice to be circular: I will lose focus in a session and have to return to the breath, or I will lose the daily meditation habit and have to work through the ensuing shame in order to get myself back into the routine. But so long as I return, the circle is complete.

What circles of practice support the rhythm of your life? How do you return in each cycle?

Harmony, health, and happiness,

Margin | 天涯

Somehow, I burned myself out to the point that I am now sick with a bad cold. I don’t normally get so sick unless I am also psychologically drained. I didn’t think that I had exerted myself very much, but somehow after a day of accompanying my mother on errands and taking a long walk at a local park, I felt very fatigued and tearily depressed. I hadn’t even gone with her into the stores that she needed to visit, just stayed in the car. She has been trying to get me to acclimate more to stimulating environments, but right now it doesn’t seem healthy for me to do so. I spent a lot of time last week trying to rest and ended up turning in some assignments several days late — which was fine with my professors, who urged me to take care of myself — but somehow it has not been enough to let me recover.

Probably it has been a slow burn. I don’t feel that my coursework is what’s causing the stress, but it is a responsibility I’m having to uphold, while the changes of spring wreck havoc on my system and U.S. politics looms in the background. For some reason, my father has been long convinced that it is winter that affects my moods the most, a common pattern for people who have seasonal affective disorder, but I feel that spring is worse for me — and it is for many who have bipolar. The beautiful awakening of nature both intensifies mania and painfully contrasts with depression, and combined with outdoor allergies, it makes me feel like my whole bodymind is inflamed.

At this point I’m taking the maximum dosage of both my bipolar meds, but I am still struggling with mood fluctuations, a sign that maybe the meds are not working as well as before, or perhaps I’m just being subjected to more stress than before. Because of some breakthrough instability, I was recently made to take a benzodiazepine daily, which I had initially refused because benzos pose a risk of difficult withdrawal. But after a worrisome incident at a local library in which I got so disoriented by the rumbling heater that I fell down and the library staff almost called emergency services, I needed to do something to stabilize myself.

I’m mostly okay now, having tapered off of the benzo. Just trying to be gentler with myself, which is hard at the end of the semester when I have projects to complete and my curiosity and ambition can lead me to overdo things. But I also have some music activities to prepare for. The Pennsylvania Youth Chorale (PYC), which I accompany, not only has its spring concert in mid-May, but also trips to Ocean City and New York City (the latter in early June) as well as a recording session. And I am performing a solo piano concert at Friends Home in Kennett Square on Saturday, May 24th. I’m not overly anxious about the performing, but I do need to be careful to preserve my energy.

To help with pacing, I’m trying out the health app Visible, which is designed for people with energy-limiting illnesses like Long COVID, ME/CFS, and POTS, but may be helpful for other people as well. Their flagship product is an armband that tracks your physical state and warns you if you are overly exerting yourself. I don’t have any of the listed physical conditions, but it occurred to me that my mental health/neurodivergence, especially my tendency towards autistic shutdowns and burnout, does act as an energy-limiting condition. I asked their help team about whether the product would help with autistic burnout, and they suggested that I could use their free app to test it out and decide if it’s helpful for me before considering the armband addition. The app measures your heart rate variability (HRV) each morning using your phone camera, as HRV has been shown to be related to your body’s adaptability and thus your health. You also can track various symptoms and your sleep quality in the app. Here is Visible’s website, where you can find more information if you’re curious. The HRV measurements do so far seem to be correlating a bit with my health while I have been facing some depressive symptoms and a bad cold.

Now, in other news:

I played for a Good Friday church service — the first time I played for a church, other than the time when the PYC sang for a service. It went pretty well. The pastor told me that Good Friday services are different from typical services and are harder to play for, and he seemed impressed that I was able to match the mood. I have found that I enjoy religious music even if I do not subscribe to a particular doctrine. I think in a society that frequently avoids thoughts of grief and death, a ritual like one that retells the death of a religious figure might feed the soul in a much needed way.

Since the craft store chain JoAnn is having its closing sales, my mother and I went to see if there was anything we wanted. She bought some yarn for herself to use in crochet projects, while I got a high-quality oil pastel set. In the psych hospital, I discovered a love for oil pastels because of the beautiful results of smudging and blending, even though it is messy on your fingers. I’m practicing my skills by copying from images that I find online or around the house. Here’s a drawing that I made, copying from an online image (I forgot to save the image):

My mother has already completed several crochet projects, and I am so glad that she now has a creative hobby that she enjoys. She’s definitely much better than I am at it.

I have also been experimenting with makeup. I like a genderqueer approach in which I combine masculine contouring and penciled facial hair with colorful eyeshadow and lips. But I can’t do that when my mother’s at home, so I mostly do regular “feminine” makeup for practice. Even with that, my mother’s criticizes my approach, as I like bright colors and a more dramatic look, whereas she prefers a closer-to-natural look. I also just don’t have strong skills yet with makeup, having rarely used it in my life, so some of her critiques are quite valid. (One would think that I have steady hands as a pianist, but I am currently terrible at applying eyeliner without smudging it all over.) I have a bit of a shy dream of being a transmasculine drag queen, or otherwise a genderqueer drag artist. The world of drag though is frequently overstimulating, so I’d want to find ways of exploring it that are more accessible to me — but this is not for anytime soon.

I didn’t get to write any essays for Substack this month because of how hectic things have been and how unwell I’ve been in the last week and a half, but I do have some things to share, including a song I wrote for my arts course! Stay tuned.

Featured Creator

Joseph Ahmed (he/they) is a mixed-race Asian theater artist and arts administrator whose work spans theater, circus, dance, and interactive performance. They are a co-founder of the nationally-recognized worker-owned cooperative Obvious Agency, which creates interactive performances and advocates for democratic practices within the arts ecosystem. As a playwright and solo artist (Half Magic, Philly Fringe 2023) he creates dynamically physical and genre-defying work, often infused with nerd culture and fantasy, to explore how the world sculpts us with stories and how we can use stories to sculpt it right back. They are a major collaborator with Philadelphia Asian Performing Artists, a former company member with the Barrymore Award-winning Tribe of Fools (2018-2020) and of Almanac Dance Circus Theatre (2016-2018). He co-directed ikantkoan’s Chaos Theory which won Immersive Nation’s Best Social Immersion award in 2019. As a performer and director he has worked throughout Philadelphia with companies such as the Arden Theatre Company, Theater Exile, Philadelphia Artists’ Collective, and Asian Arts Initiative. He has toured nationally as a teaching artist, and is a former youth circus coach at the Philadelphia School of Circus Arts. They hold a BFA in Theater Arts from Boston University.

www.josephahmed.com

www.obvious-agency.com

A Contemplative Offering

How is your relationship with the weather and the seasons? My mother said that the spring tends to make her drowsy. Or maybe it’s her allergies, but either way, it contrasts with my tendency to get energetically feverish from the warm, fragrant air. Funny how Merriam Webster defines “spring fever” as “a lazy or restless feeling often associated with the onset of spring.”

What aspects of nature are you most craving to connect with? How might you do so?

Harmony, health, and happiness,

Margin | 天涯

Spring weather has settled in where I’m at, and I have been more settled as well. Buddhist meditation has been very good for me. Even though I do not meditate for as long as some of my classmates do — they sit for often half an hour or more at a time — it has a grounding effect that I’m starting to really appreciate. I feel tempted to deviate from my routine at times, but I try to remind myself of how pleasant it actually feels to be in the meditative state. The inertia of my AuDHD can make it hard to initiate activities that I’m “supposed” to do even if I enjoy them. Yet during a whole-day singing festival that the youth choir I accompany hosted, I found that taking just a few minutes to meditate before the concert refreshed my energy and allowed me to play with more attentiveness than I otherwise could have. So I’m keeping up the routine as much as I can, along with meditating for brief periods throughout the day as needed. My class has been looking more into Daoist meditation now, but the professor has instructed me to stick with the Buddhist practices as they are more grounding and thus more suitable for people like me who are apt to get excited or agitated. Even Buddhist meditation can sometimes be too much. Today I wanted to meditate for additional sessions, but my bodymind is already too excited with spirituality and creativity. So I spent some time lying under my weighted blanket, which helped.

The first of several items of good news: I have officially been accepted into the Spiritual Counseling specialization within my graduate program. This means that next academic year, I will be taking courses in counseling skills and global wisdom traditions. This specialization is not a licensure program, so it will not prepare me to offer licensed psychotherapy. But I think that might actually be an advantage for what I want to do. I have an idea of working as a spiritual counselor using more of a peer support approach to guide people whose experience of mental health conditions interacts with spirituality to safely explore and integrate their experiences. I would work specifically with people who are already in psychotherapy, so that I can offer a complementary service and really specialize in this type of spiritual care that is normally missing in conventional mental healthcare. I myself can have intense spiritual experiences when manic, and I have longed for some sort of guidance on how to safely explore spirituality when I am prone to potentially dangerous — or at least disorienting — altered mental states. That is part of why I’m doing this graduate program. But then, when I realized how difficult it is to find care practitioners who are experienced in working with the intersection of spirituality and madness, it occurred to me that I could grow to become such a practitioner myself. Thus I am seeking training in various ways to be able to help others, which also requires me to be attentive to my own spiritual and emotional growth.

I had an essay published online by Friends Journal, a Quaker periodical, as part of their March issue on neurodiversity. “A Person of Yin and Yang” is about my spiritual journey as someone with mixed neurodivergence and includes suggestions for other Quakers for how to be inclusive towards neurodivergent Friends. (Despite the similarity in title, this essay is very different from my essay “Reclaiming My Yin and Yang,” which was published by Mad in America in 2023 and which explores a way that I have understood my madness and neurodivergence independently of diagnostic labels. I proposed a different title for the Friends Journal article, but they changed it to one which probably is more eye-catching than the one I had proposed.) I was pleasantly surprised that the essay was accepted for publication and am also pleased that this is my first published piece of writing for which I received more than just a few dollars of compensation. I encourage you to read my essay and explore the other articles on neurodivergence even if you’re not a Quaker, as much of what they say about neurodivergence applies everywhere. (Shout out to my fellow young adult Friend Daniela Salazar Monárrez for their enlightening essay, “On Hating Music”!)

Last Friday, I tried indoor rock climbing for the first time! (Or at least the first time in a long while — I vaguely remember climbing some rock wall as a kid, probably as part of some special event.) This is part of my exploration of what physical activities are currently suitable for me as an autistic person sensitive to environmental stimuli. I had a lot of fun both with low free climbs and high belayed climbs. I got to the top of one of the high walls that was more suitable for beginners, overcoming my initial panic about reaching such heights. I do not currently have a lot of arm strength, so I tired pretty easily, but I was surprised at how much I already can do. My arms still feel a bit sore from the exertion, but I am looking forward to climbing again. There are two points of caution, however, for figuring out when is best to go. It probably would feel stressful for me to go when there is more of a crowd, but the only time when there would not be a crowd of kids and families would be Friday afternoons, the only weekday afternoons they are open. Additionally, as a pianist I need to be careful not to hurt my hands or wrists, and even without getting hurt, having just worked out my arms makes playing piano feel a little weird. When you climb, your arms work against gravity, but when you play piano, your arms must work with gravity and not hold extra tension. Perhaps the physical sensations will just take some getting used to, but for now I should best avoid climbing when I have a bunch of piano activities coming up, such as the upcoming weekend, when I will have two separate gigs to play at.

Indeed, I signed up for a lot of piano playing in the next couple months. I have to learn a bunch of mostly new music for my gigs next week. One of them is a rehearsal for a musical theatre cabaret that is happening on April 11th at the Media Theatre in Media, PA. I’m playing for the performance of an excerpt of Judia, a new musical about social drama in the context of the Spanish Inquisition. The music is mostly modern-sounding with references to the Baroque. Tickets for the cabaret and other events for the New Musicals Festival can be purchased here. I will announce a few events coming up in May in the next Update.

I finally convinced my mother to explore something creative: learning to crochet. Unfortunately, she picked a project from a crocheting book that ends up being more complicated than it initially seemed (it’s primarily single crochet stitches, but it involves diagonal stripes, so the first few steps are unusual and confusing). I ended up having to try to help her with the project, but to no avail. Learning crochet with the Woobles was so much easier because they had video instructions. How does one learn such things from a book, even one supposedly designed for beginners, especially when the projects use crochet shorthand without accompanying pictures? If we can’t figure it out from the book, I think I’ll encourage her to find an instructional on Youtube, maybe even one in Chinese. But at least she’s trying.

My mother has long wanted us two to have a strong relationship as mother and “daughter.” Regardless of what we call it, and even with continuing difficulties with understanding each other’s worlds, we’ve definitely grown closer, supporting each other in our personal endeavors and with our unique health needs.

This Month’s Essays

Since I haven’t been posting Featured Creators for a while, I decided to feature a friend of mine who is just starting to write on Substack. The Irish-like tune adapts and expands text written by my friend Derek to make a pretty and somewhat melancholy love song.

A Contemplative Offering

Some people critique the concept of neurodivergence, pointing out that no one is perfectly “normal” and everyone has unique qualities that can conflict with social expectations. “Special needs” ultimately are just needs, and everyone is something special. What are your special needs? Are they currently being met in your life?

Given the practically infinite diversity of human minds, how can neurodivergence be usefully defined? I have my own ideas, but I’d love to hear yours.

Harmony, health, and happiness,

Margin | 天涯

This song is called “Sandy, oh Sandy” and is meant to imitate the sound of Irish music. The text is written by my friend Derek Nolan and me. Derek is just starting to write his own Substack newsletter, Biology with Derek.

Derek is a neuroqueer lover of biology, music, and sonnets. Born in Iowa and currently attending Kenyon College, he hopes to spread his love of literature, poetry, and science through his Substack newsletter, Biology with Derek, which updates weekly on Tuesdays.

His first two posts are a poem and a reflection on a concept from biology:

Biology with Derek

"Nothing"- By Derek Nolan

The blackness in my heart is everlasting…

Read more

a year ago · 2 likes · Biology with Derek

Biology with Derek

Panspermia: Life's Big Bang

Early last semester, in my intro biology course I remember how we talked about how all things are connected. That organisms are made up of carbon-based bonds that lead to chemical reactions causing the production of energy and metabolism within organisms, permitting life to develop. I was deeply fascinated by this concep…

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a year ago · Biology with Derek

Derek would love it if you could read his posts and subscribe for more! Just a first-year in college, and he is already quite profound in his writing.

After we wrote the first stanza of the poem together, I realized that the poem sounded like the lyrics of an Irish song. So I wrote a melody to go along with it. Then I wrote more stanzas, which ended up becoming kind of melancholy, which I suppose is pretty consistent with it being an imitation of Irish songs.

Initially I wasn’t sure what I wanted the accompaniment to be like. But my ukulele is pretty handy, even though it’s not an Irish instrument, as I can play and sing at the same time. (I find ukulele easier to play than guitar because my hands are small.) I decided to re-tune the ukulele to the pitches G4, A3, D4, A4, instead of the usual G4, C4, E4, A4. This allowed me to use open strings more frequently, which created a sound that was more similar to how string instruments are used in Irish music.

Here’s the score, for anyone who wants to try it themself!

I hope you enjoy this song!