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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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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!

I’ve always been a small, lightweight person. My height is barely above five feet, and my skeleton is narrow, which once caused my maternal grandmother to note that I looked more like a southern Chinese person than a northern Chinese person. (My mother is northern, while my father hails from a province that is as southern as Maryland or Virginia is in the United States. Stereotypically, southern Chinese are smaller than northern Chinese.)

I am frequently mistaken to be a teenager. My hands and feet are even smaller in proportion to the rest of my body, which means I can’t reach tenths on the piano and often look in the boys section for shoes. I even carry myself in an airy manner, having trained myself since childhood to walk almost silently and land on the balls of my feet when I leap.

Yet my body is changing. I’ve gained a significant amount of weight since graduating from college, not enough to be considered “fat” by other people (especially since I prefer looser clothing), but enough that I am quickly growing out of my collection of pants. And I’m not sure how to feel about it. I suppose that I don’t have to feel anything about it, but I certainly do. I feel — too many — conflicted.

There are so many different messages that I receive about my body. My father, who rarely is home with the rest of us, actually pretty recently believed that I had grown thinner, when I did not believe that to be the case. Chinese culture traditionally warns women against being too thin, as that suggests undernourishment, but Westernization has brought in the fear of being fat as well. One time when I was in college, my mother told me that I was too thin. Several months after, she told me that I was too fat. There is no winning against my mother, who feels compelled to protect her children from the world by enforcing all its oppressive rules.

How to piece these together. How to pull them apart. I can try thinking over it all, but ultimately, I need to feel it in my body.

There is a traditional Buddhist meditation on 32 parts of the body. These include commonly discussed parts like skin, the heart, bones, and the brain, but they also include parts that many of us would prefer to ignore in the everyday, like phlegm, feces, and fat. The traditional practice is to go through all the 32 parts one by one as an exercise of mindfulness over what is evoked physically, mentally, and emotionally within you regarding these parts. I have not done the entire 32 part practice, but it did inspire me to try meditating upon my body fat:

What and where is my body fat? It is adipose tissue that is distributed throughout my body, though I have particularly noticed it expanding around my stomach and hips.

What is the purpose of my body fat? To store energy, to cushion my body, to keep me warm. (This reminds me of an incident in a high school maths class, in which I mentioned that eating ice cream made me feel shivery afterwards. The teacher said something to the effect of, “You need to grow more fat on your skinny body!” The implication being that I did not have enough fat to keep myself warm while eating ice cream.)

How do I feel when I consider my body fat? Conflicted, as I have received and thus must process conflicting messages about it. I wish to be fat-positive, but it is hard to shake off society’s value of thinness and the medical profession’s fixation on BMI as a measure of health. It also is simply hard to adjust to a changing body. I get annoyed at my clothes not fitting as they did before, as that means I need to purchase more clothes, which means spending money and quarreling with my mother — or just submitting to her gendered judgments — regarding my clothing preferences. Additionally, I am afraid of feeling heavy, as someone who was always small and light. Yet there is also part of me that takes a bit of joy in my tendency to store fat at my abdomen, as it neutralizes the stereotypically feminine “hourglass” shape that I would otherwise have.

Now that I have identified the thoughts and feelings that come up for me in relation to body fat, can I let them go? Temporarily, yes, especially if my concentration is good during a particular day’s meditation. But often I feel like I am fighting myself over and over. I am fighting change, when change is the only constant.

There is a good reason for my growing adiposity, actually. One of my bipolar medications, Seroquel, can cause weight gain, by impacting your metabolism and your appetite. Prior to the past few months, it hadn’t affected my body weight very much, but my dosage has greatly increased since the start of the new year, and I can tell that I am craving food more frequently than before. I don’t think it’s mentally healthy to avoid eating when I am craving to, but I also have a sense that I am sometimes eating when I am not physically hungry.

Besides the medication side effects, I also have long had a tendency to stress eat. Given that I’ve been quite stressed in the past few months due to the political situation in the United States, it makes sense that I would eat more. Even as a vegan, it is quite easy to gravitate towards calorie-rich foods — such as peanut butter and nuts — when I seek a dose of pleasure to ward off my fears. Eating vegan does not inherently lead to a low-calorie diet.

Given all this, my body fat is a mark of my survival. I’m heavily medicated and would rather not be — I mean, who would want to take high doses of antipsychotic unless they needed to — but my meds protect me from entering a crisis again. My larger body accommodates an expansive ocean of peace. My changing bodymind does not abide by social nor medical norms, yet it carries my being and becoming. I only get one body in which to experience this life. How boring if it didn’t change. The so-called fountain of youth, in reality rigid ice.

Many have said something similar, but I like the phrasing attributed to filmmaker Akiro Kurosawa: “In a mad world, only the mad are sane.” To not be emotionally affected at all by the increasing authoritarianism in the U.S. federal government is either to be denial or perhaps to uphold values that, however good-intentioned, are murderous in practice.

The sanity of madness is the tears that make the ocean of the womb. It is the fire that burns in the heart when gunfire breaks out nearby or far. It is an excess of joy of dancing to your own drum, or a strong bitterness to your spirit like unsweetened dark chocolate. In Mandarin, the English word “queer” is translated by sound: “ku-ar” (酷儿). Literally, it means “the bitter one,” the one angered by oppressive and normative social demands. No, queerness isn’t madness, but mine is — bitter and mad.

For the meditation course that I am taking in my grad program, I need to meditate for at least 5 minutes every day. Usually I try for 15-20 minutes, but sometimes I get restless or emotionally overwhelmed and cut off the session. Frequently my meditations leave me in tears. This is not a problem. Humans cry. Even Buddhist monks and nuns cry. But as mentioned in my class, emotions last only 90 seconds before they start to dissipate. The only thing that elongates their presence is your clinging onto the emotion. If you just observe it and let it be, it goes away. It is not your essence. It has visited you, but it is not your essence.

It is such a hard time for me to try to establish a regular meditation routine, given just how destabilizing national and global events have been. I’ve not been in a distinct mood episode or crisis, but I do feel myself teetering on instability. As is frequently the case for me, I start entertaining suicidal ideation with various degrees of seriousness. But even those thoughts are not inherently threatening. I can meditate and let my death drives be my friend.

The interplay between the sanity of madness and the wellness of Buddha nature is nuanced, but I think they complement each other. Because meditation isn’t about draining yourself of thoughts and feelings. The purpose and activity of the human mind is to think and feel. To deny that is to succumb to delusion. Instead, meditation opens us up to the true intensity and variety of our inner lives and helps us to more clearly discern a way forward.

So far in my meditation practice, I have been able to achieve some degree of awareness of my inner experience and even some inner peace in the eye of the storm. I haven’t necessarily been feeling the positive effects continue after the meditation session concludes. But these things take time.

My psychiatrist has also adjusted — mostly increased — my medication dosages to help me avoid a crisis. I wish that I did not have to rely on medications, which have side effects and which can be hard to wean off of once you’ve taken them for a while (and one of my as-needed meds has particularly strong addictive potential, so I avoid using it unless I really need to). If I had been properly taught meditation as a child, and supported in practicing regularly, perhaps I would have strong enough skills to ground myself through the power of my own mind and not through pharmaceuticals.

But given my recent history of crisis and my only nascent skills in meditation (I began trying meditation as a teenager but never had a consistent practice), I think it makes sense to have multiple sources of support. The meds, hopefully, instate an upper bound for the amount of instability I experience. Meditation then reinforces for me that the instability that I do experience can become more tolerable and within my awareness as I practice. Yet being in touch with my madness, such as when I cuddle with my plushies while crying in despair, reminds me that I am human. I can feel the sorrow, or even the thrilling joy, and then let it go.

I can have peace even while I experience distress. My mad distress about the world must motivate my action, but peace is what gives me strength to act.

Yet if you look at the history of social oppression, young people are often the most impacted — and the most powerless to do anything about it. Anti-youth ageism is so baked into society that we frequently don’t even talk about the rights of young people directly, but rather use parent rights as a proxy. This leaves young people vulnerable whenever their parents — or other adults with power over them in their lives — abuse their power and neglect young people’s wellbeing.

Any young person may be affected, but this is especially true for disabled, queer, and trans youth, as they tend to be more isolated and misunderstood within their families and are vulnerable to society as a whole as well. When we can only speak of parent rights, which parents’ rights do we support? Those who affirm their queer and trans children’s identities, or those who push conversion therapy? Those who recognize the dignity and autonomy of autistic children, or those who try to force them to be “cured”?

For a brief period in late 2020, I was president of National Youth Rights Association. During that time, I organized a virtual conference called Age of Youth in which various speakers discussed issues relating to youth justice. For the conference “packet,” I wrote out a list of Principles of Anti-Ageism. Later, I posted these principles on my website and eventually retitled them Principles of Youth Justice.

Given all that is occurring politically in the United States right now, I think it is timely to reshare these Principles to my Substack audience. The list is ever-evolving, so please comment if you have a suggestion for how to improve it. And please share this widely, so that it belongs to everyone and not just me.

We all begin our lives as young people. Many of us grow up and forget what it is like to be young in a world designed for the middle-aged adult. I hope these Principles allow you to reflect upon your experience of childhood and youth and how you can support the young people of today.

Q: Which principles in this list do you most resonate with? Is there anything missing? Anything that you did not expect?

Principles of Youth Justice

• Youth Justice is deeply connected with the fight against ageism of all forms, including that towards young and towards elderly people. However, at a systemic level, young people are particularly disempowered and oppressed in our ageist society. The following principles attempt to take into consideration both of these truths, focusing upon justice for youth but also honoring people of all ages.

• Older people should give space to young people and respect and support them as equal partners in change.

• Young people can take space and take charge even and especially in places where they historically have been left out.

• When conflicts arise between older and younger folks, openness and respect are paramount for all involved. In particular, older folks should examine their attitudes and actions for ageist assumptions, such as a belief that they are right because of having general “experience” (distinct from particular expertises, which anyone, younger or older, can have and which should be respected).

• Younger folks should encourage older folks in breaking down their internalized prejudices with compassion and, when feasible, help them to correct their problematic language or behaviors.

• Avoid using words like “kids” and “children” when referring to non-adult people as a whole, as some find them belittling. Try “youth” or “young people” instead.

• Avoid romanticizing youth, such as thinking of youth as a time of “innocence” or of being “carefree.”

• Youth should not be sexualized or sexually exploited, by older people or by other youth. Youth should be empowered to make informed choices about their own bodies; to explore their identities, desires, and self-presentation such as in relation to gender and sexuality; and to independently seek and receive support and care in regards to (physical and mental) health, identity, and relationships.

• Avoid equating “young people” with “students.” Some young people are not in school, perhaps instead unschooling or working a full-time job, and some older people are enrolled in educational institutions. All of us, however, are forever learners, always striving to grow into more socially aware, critically and creatively thinking persons.

• Ageism is deeply intersectional, tightly intertwined with other forms of systemic oppression such as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, classism, xenophobia, etc. Young people are BIPOC, young people are queer, young people are of various genders and of no gender, young people are disabled, young people are poor, young people are immigrants and migrants — just like older people. When we fight against ageism, we also commit to fight against oppression in general, for young people can only be fully liberated when ALL people(s) are liberated.

Last February, when I was hospitalized for three weeks due to a manic episode, I created over 170 pieces of visual artwork to pass the time during insomniac nights and make use of my huge outpouring of creative energy. The hospital staff gave me a paper box, which was originally the manufacturer’s packaging for printer paper, to store my artwork when I went home. Initially I left the box on a table in my parents’ house, but eventually, someone moved it to the garage. I had a vague intention to look through the artwork after cleaning up my room so that I could perhaps hang up some pieces, but I procrastinated on this task for months. So the box stayed in the garage.

I was really upset when I couldn’t find the box. I searched everywhere in the garage for it, as I had no idea what system my father used to organize everything. This was actually the second time that someone likely threw away a box of items that I wanted to keep; years ago, my mother had me put my childhood writings and other treasured items into a box for safekeeping, but later, the box was missing. So I became increasingly upset and agitated.

I asked my mother if she remembered seeing the box. She said no and seemed unaware of there ever having been a box of artwork, so then I texted and called my father, who didn’t initially respond. When my father finally called me back, I was sobbing. I asked him if he remembered seeing a printer paper box that contained artwork. He said that he did not remember seeing it or throwing it away, but he thought it was possible that he did throw it away when he organized the garage. I explained that I felt really upset about this and that if he had seen the box, he should have checked its contents before even considering throwing it away, and seeing that it was artwork (or even if it was something not as deeply personal), he should have asked whose it was and should it be kept.

My father responded by repeatedly telling me that whatever happened was past and that all we could do was try searching more for the box. He also said that I should have placed the box elsewhere and not in the garage, which definitely would have been wiser in hindsight, but the garage stores plenty of things that we want to keep, and I didn’t keep the box in my room because my room had been so messy and full of too many things. Ultimately, I just didn’t imagine that someone would believe that it was trash and throw it away without permission. Even though my father gave a brief “I am sorry,” his response felt dismissive of my feelings, which frustrated me even more.

I then went to my mother again to explain what my father said and that he had made me more upset. My mother tried to console me by saying that she and I could make more art together. She asked me if the artwork in the box was coloring sheets, which were a popular activity in the hospital. I think she was wondering if perhaps my father thought that coloring sheets were probably not so sentimental and thus easier to throw away. I explained that no, the vast majority of the artwork was my original creation. There were even some oversized papers that didn’t completely fit in the box, that were paintings that I made during therapy groups, so those should have clearly been artwork that I would likely want to keep.

I could definitely make more artwork with my mother; although my mother does not usually engage her creativity, she does seem to be more comfortable making visual art than say, writing a poem. But that box of manic artwork was really meaningful to me. The artworks were not necessarily any good in a technical sense, as I have never received training in visual art beyond elementary and middle school art class, but they were expressions of a time of combined euphoria and struggle that has shaped who I am now.

There is still a chance that the box wasn’t thrown away and is just hiding somewhere, either in the garage or elsewhere in the house. If it was thrown away, I think it is most likely that my father did it, as he reorganized the garage and has a tendency to be inconsiderate of what others might want. But for now, I have to accept that the 170-plus artworks may be completely lost. All I have now from that hospitalization are some journals, which I keep in my desk.

I am still crying over all this. I’ll probably continue to search for the box in the next few days, but I really doubt that I will find it. Throughout my life, I have repeatedly lost items that I wanted to archive, partly because of other people throwing them away, but also because of my own disorganization. When I tried to transfer my college Google Drive files into a different Google account, the transfer process halted because the destination account didn’t have enough space. I tried again with a new account, but again there wasn’t enough space. I gave up, believing that most of the items were transferred. But later, I tried looking for some of my college essays and could not find them. I got angry at myself for not being more persistent and diligent with the transfer. Another time when I lost items was at the end of eighth grade, when all students had to make a portfolio of their work from all their classes. For some reason, I did not take home the portfolio, though I wanted it. Later I asked if they still had it, but it was thrown away.

I think of people in Los Angeles who have lost most of their possessions. I read about artists there who have lost their artworks, their studios, their livelihood. I’m lucky to have never suffered such a comprehensive and devastating loss. But the world is increasingly in multilayered crisis, and someday I may end up losing everything.

Yet life goes on, and what I lose materially, I carry in spirit. All that I have written and created in my life has shaped the person I have been and am becoming. Though it is painful to lose these material reminders of meaning and beauty, every loss trains us to accept that the circumstance of life are ever-changing; nothing and no one is permanent. I think of Tibetan Buddhists who create gorgeous mandalas with colored sand and then intentionally destroy them. Materials erode, and memories fade, but the sands of time flow on, like a river in the wind.

So yes, I can create more art. Naturally I will want to cling to everything I make. But nothing is permanent. And perhaps it is not the purpose of life to create what lives beyond you, but rather the purpose of creation to give life to a fleeting moment.

It started because of a huge conflict that erupted between my parents over the holidays. I’m not going to share many details. I will only say how it impacted me. And basically, I ended up feeling simultaneously that I was a burden to my parents, but also that I was exhausted in my lifelong role as the family peacekeeper.

My mother, like many Asian women, tends to experience distress somatically. She felt unwell for a few days after the conflict. I had to take care of her because no one else would. She’s now feeling much better. But I’m kind of feeling worse. Because it’s not just the family matter that has been distressing me. Somehow, the conflict caused this ocean of despair to arise within me, and now I’m crying about the world and about my future.

But this is not clinical depression. Or rather, I refuse to label it as such. This is a moment of great uncertainty in my own life and in the world. It makes sense to despair over what we have lost, and what losses are to come. It doesn’t mean that we should wallow in our despair with a sense of righteousness for what we are feeling. But to pathologize this despair misses the point.

I spend my days trying to survive while carrying suicidal feelings daily. Chronic suicidality exists, and its presence doesn’t necessarily signal crisis. In some way, it becomes an existential friend. It is a reminder that, if I am to continue to live, that I must imbue life with meaning of my own.

I’ve been playing a lot of iPhone games recently. In the past few days specifically, I’ve been playing puzzle games that have poignant narratives. These include Monument Valley 1 and 2, Songs of Bloom, and Evergarden. I very much recommend them. They stimulate my mind in just the right ways and also feed my soul.

How are you taking care of yourself in this tulmultuous time? Share in the comments if you’d like.

At one of those gatherings, we did an activity involving two U.S. maps. On one map, we were asked to place Post-It notes that expressed our hopes for the country. On the other map, we stuck Post-It notes that expressed our fears for the country.

After all the Post-Its were placed on the maps, the facilitator asked, what happens if we reverse the maps? What happens if you meet a person for whom your hopes are their fears, and your fears are their hopes?

It was an odd question that shocked many of us. We then gathered in small groups to discuss. I remember one young woman spoke about her being a lesbian and was distressed at the thought that some people would be afraid of her hope for LGBTQ acceptance. She said something like, “They’re afraid of me! Me! A young woman!”

Then I said to her, they’re not afraid of you exactly. They’re afraid of their world turning upside down. What they’re afraid of is an abstraction, a monster in their mind. The facilitator then indicated that that was the key takeaway from this exercise: that the shared psychological experience of hopes and fears, even when the contents are contradictory, can form the foundation for understanding one another better.

At least this is how I remember this incident. It’s very hazy in my mind. I forget the exact words that anyone said, including myself. I was also a very different person then. I did not identify as queer — although I sometimes wondered if I was asexual. I was a kid who worried about political polarization and our loss of empathy for one another. Correspondingly, I had a habit of trying to empathize with everyone, including those whose interests were against mine. Now, I realize that ideological polarization is not necessarily a bad thing — though I would still say that emotional polarization often is 1 — and that without strong political commitments for myself, I fell too easily for both-sides-ism.

Would the current me, having embraced various social identities that are marginalized in society, have the psychological flexibility to make that same discovery that high school me did in the hopes and fears exercise? I’m not so sure. But I do know that the empathy I had, though at times problematic, is also a crucial skill for connecting with people and potentially changing their beliefs. People won’t want to change if they’re being attacked. But if they feel understood, they can become more curious to learn more.

As a radical leftist, how do I practice compassion towards people of other political orientations, even when they are working against my existence? One key thing to understand is that no one is born awakened. We’re all conditioned by society to uphold neoliberal, capitalistic institutions and ideals. And we all experience resistance to change, especially change to our belief systems. But underneath that web of beliefs, we are all humans just trying to survive and live well.

Our true enemies are not people, but rather the delusions in our minds. It takes continual inner work to escape the grip of these delusions and avoid being trapped again. A lot of politics today is quite delusional in a lot of senses — for example, the mass paranoia towards immigrants and anyone else considered “other.” No person or group is immune to these forces that play on the vulnerabilities of our psyches.

Some of my most satisfying conversations when canvassing were with hardline Republicans. Even if I couldn’t change their minds, I could understand how they tick, and they might be talking with a trans person or a leftist knowingly for the first time in their life. And in order to change as a society, we need more of these conversations between people who disagree. It’s definitely really hard and vulnerable — I’ve been delaying on confronting my otherwise progressive neighbor again about her Zionist beliefs — but it’s necessary for our relationships to grow.

When applying, I had to write an autobiographical statement explaining what led me to be interested in the program. I decided to be honest about my mental health journey, as I knew that my lived experience has given me much to offer to the world. That the admissions staff and the faculty reviewers appreciated such honesty confirmed for me that this school and program was the right fit.

Below is the autobiographical essay I wrote for the application. Those of you who have been subscribing to my newsletter for a while will find several parts of this story familiar, but there are other parts that I haven’t written about before, or wrote about here in a new way.

When I was in eleventh grade, my AP English teacher had everyone in class choose three words that described who they were and write them on a name tag.  This activity was inspired by Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, stating that she was a “reader, writer, and teacher.”  Many of my classmates wrote that they were things like a “soccer player” or a “violinist.”  The three words I wrote down were “philosopher, artist, awakener.”

It was the first time I strung those words together in describing myself, but from that day, the triad took root in my spirit and became a motto for who I was and wanted to become.  Philosopher, as in a person who seeks wisdom, who practices the courage to explore thorny issues to unearth complex truths.  Artist, as in a person who creates, not just with paints and melodies, but with spirit itself, living as a composer of life.  Awakener, as in a person who awakens themself and others, always in the process of growth and enlightenment.  

All of these are ways of being rooted in introspection, in understanding the world by first understanding oneself.  All of these are practices of the spirit-worker, the holistic psychologist, the citizen of the Earth.

I can trace back my interest in psychology to when I was in fifth grade and read the book The Gifted Teen’s Survival Guide.  This book explored in-depth the thorny topic of what are giftedness and intelligence and provided guidance on school and life for students considered as “gifted” in some way.  I was labeled “gifted” as a student, so I became obsessed with trying to understand what that meant for me and my experience in school and elsewhere.  I identified with the concept of “intensities” or “overexcitabilities,” which are sensitivities and intense experiences that many gifted people experience.  Without the language of neurodivergence, I delved into the idea of intensities in an attempt to explain my social and emotional differences.  But eventually, I became frustrated with the concept of giftedness and how elitist it had caused me to become.  

Yet still I wanted to understand myself and the people around me.  So in the next few years, especially in middle school, I became passionate and curious about psychology in all its forms.  I read Scientific American Mind and other popular science literature, watched National Geographic’s TV show Brain Games, and listened to NPR’s podcast Hidden Brain.  Fascinated by psychoanalysis, I read Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents and Frankl’s The Will to Meaning in eighth grade and tried to understand the dynamics of my neurotic family.  I learned about the DSM, as well as its critiques, wondering if I was actually lucky to not be labeled with a diagnosis at an early age, even as I knew that I needed support.  Frustrated at the ineffective pedagogies of some of my teachers, I studied concepts of educational psychology, dreaming of perhaps becoming a teacher myself one day.  

Given my passion for psychology, why did I not study it in college, choosing to double major in music and mathematics instead?  I did not even take a psychology course in high school, rather choosing to just take the AP Psychology exam and getting a 5 on it without even studying that much because I already knew most of the material.  In part, my choice of undergraduate studies had to do with feeling like I was held back in my musical and mathematical interests as a pre-college student.  I wanted to compose music, but had no access to a composition teacher; I wanted more challenging, proof-oriented maths courses, but was forced to take courses that were too easy.  So I wanted to study these subjects in college to catch up to where I should have been if I had had the freedom to decide my own education.  But also, the psychology department at my college was focused on the experimental science of psychology, and my interests were starting to lean towards more of a humanities-based perspective.  Western psychology frustrated me in how it attempted to prove things that were true about everyone but only could be demonstrated as true in WEIRD societies.  The replication crisis also concerned me, and I became irritated at how the juiciest, most important research questions were often the hardest to rigorously study.  So I ran away from psychology, academically.  But soon, my personal life returned me to matters of human.  

I began my sophomore year of college in the fall of 2020, after months of quarantine due to the pandemic.  Despite the solemn circumstances, I was ecstatic.  I had recently come out as non-binary, and now that I was away from home again, I could express myself fully and create a vibrant new self.  I also was taking really interesting courses that semester: two challenging maths courses, a music composition seminar, and the introductory course on education and community-building.  I was so excited, I was beyond myself.  I wasn’t sure of it at the time, but this was likely my first experience of hypomania.  

As the semester progressed, things started to fall apart.  I began to have periodic panic about my gender identity, worrying that somehow I was “faking it.”  Eventually, when winter break came, I fell into a depressive episode, fully believing now that I had been a gender fraud.  I began psychiatric treatment, having already been seeing a therapist through my college.  When the first days of spring weather came, I became vibrant again, my confidence in my non-binary gender having returned.  But then I’d lose it again, then regain it, then lose it yet again.  At the start of May, this oscillating distress escalated into crisis, and I was hospitalized for the first time.  

It was at this time when I was officially diagnosed with bipolar 1.  In hindsight, my oscillating gender struggle was partly influenced by my changing moods.  As I experienced both gender and mood as relating to the yin and yang energies within me, whenever I was manic or hypomanic, I found it easier to identify as masculine or androgynous, and whenever I was depressed, it was easier to consider myself as feminine or a woman.  But this took a long while to fully figure out.  A new college therapist, a queer person of color herself, helped me through my junior year to feel more secure in my non-binary gender identity.  But although I was hospitalized a second time in the fall of my junior year, it wasn’t clear to either my therapist or me that my struggles fit the diagnosis of bipolar.  Was I experiencing ultrarapid cycling, or was I just a creative person with frequent highs and lows?  It was only when, after I had graduated from college, I was hospitalized three more times between Oct. 2023 and Feb. 2024, that I finally began to accept the bipolar label and commit myself to regularly taking my medications, which have now moved me to a much more stable place.

Though I struggled with mental illness and executive dysfunction in college, I chose not to take a gap semester or year because the environment at college was more conducive to my health than my home environment.  This meant that I was thinking about the nature of my struggles while immersed in student activist circles that spoke the language of social critical theory.  I learned about gender studies and disability and Mad studies.  I began to think about what accommodations I needed as a person with a psychiatric disability and a neurodevelopmental difference.  In the past year, since graduating from college, I have developed a certain Mad Pride in having bipolar, while also grasping the dangers of letting my Madness run wild.  Having just recently been also diagnosed with autism and ADHD, I now view my mixed neurodivergence as a not-so-hidden power.  My bipolar imbues me with intense spirituality and creativity; my AuDHD makes me sensitive and idealistic, eager to break free from social norms and instead pursue authenticity.  

Years ago, my father told me to avoid careers that involve working with people, as he believed that my social skills were lacking.  Today I know that that is misleading.  I have social and emotional differences that I can cultivate into gifts to give to the world.  My experiences with distress and crisis inform my compassionate approach to people and my understanding that our world needs urgently to heal, in community.  

Since I was a teen, I’ve had an interest in alternative forms of education, such as unschooling and types of schools that value community and self-directed learning.  During my pre-college years, I did not have a choice in what kind of schooling I received, due to my close-minded parents; even when I applied for undergrad, my parents limited my choice of colleges to those that ranked highly and thus had prestige.  I felt very lucky to have ended up at a college that, though in many ways a traditional liberal arts college, had an exceptionally caring culture and, very importantly, offered unlimited free therapy and psychiatry for students, as for some time I had to seek mental healthcare completely independently from my misunderstanding parents.  But for graduate school, I finally have a chance to decide for myself my educational path.  And what is most important for me in my education is my personal growth, as I believe that if I am able to become the person I want to be, then in whatever I choose to do career-wise I will be more successful and fulfilled.  

When I was in high school, I was interested in potentially becoming a teacher with a social justice mission, perhaps working at a non-traditional school with a non-hierarchical learning community.  When I was in college, having begun to engage in Quaker circles, I became interested in the idea of community itself and how to healthfully live in community even when challenges inevitably arise.  The work that I want to do in this world is to build community in some way, whether it is a learning community, an interfaith worship community, a peer-led respite for people experiencing Madness, or whatever else calls to me.  I want to be thoroughly anti-oppressive in my work, as well as to reach back into my ancestral Chinese heritage for liberatory ways of being.  I already in my artistic practice express myself through the Chinese concept of yin and yang, and since learning about Buddhism at age 11, my sense of morality has been influenced by the main principles of that religion.  So I want to delve deeper into what Asian as well as indigenous cultures say about the human condition and have that shape the course of my life.  

The years since I started college have been full of rapid psychological change and growth.  I hope that the MA in East-West Psychology and the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Writing will help me to continue to grow in my capability to care for myself and others and make a difference in this world.  

To be clear, the diagnoses were no surprise. In particular, I first wondered if I was autistic when I was in seventh grade. I was having some social struggles and knew from my psychology readings that autism was a possibility. I even mentioned it to a friend (well, acquaintance) in class. “No, of course not,” she replied, reassuringly. I felt miffed and misunderstood. Even then, I had no shame about neurodivergence.

What is surprising to me, however, is how obvious my autistic traits apparently are. I’m basically a magnet for neuroqueerness, and autistic people in particular seem drawn to my utter lack of social camouflage. Yet I assumed, incorrectly, that autistic people who are not diagnosed in early childhood are necessarily those who mask their traits a lot. So when I read through the results of the ADOS-2, a diagnostic test that is often called the “gold standard” for autism, I was intrigued. The assessment generally uses the ADOS-2 in combination with the CAT-Q, a psychometric for how much effort a person uses to socially camouflage, to assess the effectiveness of a person’s camouflage. Some people may, for example, be very preoccupied with camouflaging, yet their camouflage still does not cover up some of their autistic traits.

I scored fairly low on the CAT-Q, below the threshold for autistic camouflaging, and just below the average for neurotypical women (who camouflage the least of all groups; note that nonbinary people are included as a separate category in the study I am referencing, which is important as typically nonbinary people camouflage more than people of other genders). This meant that my behavior in the ADOS-2, which was conducted as an interview, would clearly show whether or not I had significant autistic traits. I easily met all the ADOS-2 criteria for autism, which actually confused me a bit. I usually think of myself as an expressive person (I must be, as a performing artist, yes?), but apparently I used fewer gestures and facial expressions than a neurotypical person would. I thought that I didn’t have a problem with eye contact, but the assessor noted that though I did use eye contact, it was not synchronized with the communication in order to emphasize what I said or to indicate that I was listening. (I didn’t even know this was a consideration!). I also demonstrated significant self-stimulatory behavior, which I did notice in one moment of the interview when I rocked back-and-forth in my chair.

During the interview, the assessor explained that autistic people and neurotypical people differ not just in the amount of gestures and body language they use, but also for what purpose. Neurotypical people align their body language and tone of voice with the social context; for example, they may ask, “How are you?” in a dramatic and melodic manner simply as a social overture, with their expressivity not indicating a genuine concern for the wellbeing of their conversational partner but rather being “just the way they say it.” Whereas autistic people’s body language actually indicates what they are feeling, which can seem unnerving or even rude to those who do not understand. I think this explains why I can be both expressive and not in different moments. When the conversation is primarily informational, I’m likely too focused on the verbal communication to gesture much. But if my emotions are stirred up, then I wear my heart on my sleeve. (This is the first time I used that idiom. It was on one of the autism psychometric tests. It’s very peculiar to me, as many idioms are. My emotions don’t leak out of my sleeve; they emanate from every dancing joint of my body.)

The assessor told me that it is obvious that I am an AuDHDer, a person with autism and ADHD. But if is so obvious, why wasn’t I assessed as a child? This question weighed upon me soon after I was diagnosed. One part of me wanted to deny it, even claim that I must have “lied” in the assessment, even though I was my natural self during the interview. Another part of me was in grief, feeling like I should have been identified sooner and thus given more support as a child. I was always seen as different, but my challenges tended to be seen as side effects of my gifts. This had the positive effect of my barely feeling any shame or stigma to struggling, but the negative effect of people assuming that I could compensate completely with my intelligence and obsession with researching psychology. In my adulthood so far, I have suffered so much from not understanding key social concepts (such as boundaries), having poor executive functioning, and getting easily overwhelmed sensorily and socially. I wish I had been supported and taught requisite skills as a child, when responsibilities did not yet burden my capacities so greatly.

I’m not yet sure how my new diagnoses will change my current mental health treatment. Stimulants are an option for ADHD, but they are riskier with concurrent bipolar and anxiety. I’ve thought of getting a ADHD coach when I start graduate school. OCD tends to come and go for me, and when it’s affecting me more, my therapist is a helpful support. But the biggest problem for me right now is autistic shutdowns. And unfortunately, there is no treatment for that, only prevention: try to avoid overstimulating environments and situations. Which is hard when you’re a person who tends to push themself to their limit.

About a week and a half ago, I witnessed someone overdose on heroin. I had been trying to support her in what appeared to be a mental health crisis, but then I found her passed out in the bathroom. This really freaked me out. Initially I thought that she was dead, until someone nearby pointed out that she was subtly breathing. I have developed a certain skill for helping people who are in distress or crisis, but this felt outside of my domain. I hadn’t even seen anyone black out from alcohol before, being avoidant of alcohol-centered spaces.

Luckily, emergency services arrived swiftly, and the person who overdosed was taken to the hospital. I went to accompany her until she woke up. As it was late in the evening, I made sure to take my psych meds early in order to prevent an episode developing from the stress. Very quickly, I recovered from my initial state of shock and took on a sense of responsibility for my acquaintance. I described the whole situation as I understood it to the hospital staff, and I patiently waited for my acquaintance to come to, believing that she might feel a bit more hope in her situation knowing that someone cared.

I told my boss at work what happened, and he was very understanding. In the next few days, he frequently checked in with me in case I was struggling. But strangely, I felt fine, being energetic, motivated, and cheerful for the four days following the incident. I didn’t think much of this, as my affective state was not totally out of the range of my normal. However, now I think that it may have been a mild hypomania considering the circumstance. I mean, why would I feel “fine” after such a traumatizing event? My meds probably significantly restrained the degree of mood fluctuation, but I can still have mood episodes while medicated. (Plus, I accidentally missed a dose a few days before the incident, which caused a two-day period of hypomania and then depression.)

On the fifth day after the incident, I ended up in tears during my canvassing work. I was already feeling low, and then someone chastised me for knocking on her door too loudly. And since then, I’ve been experiencing moodiness, autistic shutdowns, and increased OCD anxieties. Initially I wanted to push through, as technically I’m not supposed to take off from work this close to the election. But after several days of clear distress and dysfunction, I decided to take the day off today to rest. Mental health is far more important.

I just find it very interesting that my psyche processes — or refuses to process — the trauma of the overdose incident in the manner of the hypomanic defense. Initially, I consciously and subconsciously denied the trauma, as I felt “fine” and considered that to be a healthy state. But then, as I could no longer deny and defend against the distress I was experiencing, the chaos came up to the surface and manifested as a variety of psychical ailments. Even then, I didn’t fully grasp that the overdose incident was the source of my unwellness until my psychiatrist and my therapist both pointed out the traumatizing nature of what happened.

It is usually assumed in the psych world that treatment for bipolar disorder centers on medication. But having read some psychoanalytic texts, I think that understanding the dynamics of one’s psyche is also important. By becoming more aware of when I am using the hypomanic defense, I can get more in touch with the parts of myself that are traumatized or grieving and care for them better.

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Dear Margin,

My name is Rule-Abider.  I have been with you since age 5, when you started school.  I try to protect you from other people’s criticism by mastering their rules and even prejudices and urging you to abide by them.  Indeed, I make you think that those rules and prejudices are your own.  I sound like you, but I speak as an echo of your parents, and sometimes your teachers.  I cause you to be anxious that you are not being your “genuine” self so that you then fall back on the “default” self that society taught you to be.  

I want you to know that you are not me.  I merely protect you so that you can know how to mask, how to function as expected, if that is the right course of action for the moment.  I do not decide actions for you; I only echo commandments from your parents and from society.  I am systematic and masterful, but I am not your master.  I am just deeply afraid of shame.  I don’t want you to be hurt by the outside world.  The outside world is chaotic and unpredictable, and rules are how I feel safe.

Sincerely,

Rule-Abider

We are still in the COVID-19 pandemic. Many people have “moved on” from the earlier pandemic restrictions upon everyday life, but the virus has never gone away. It still claims many people’s lives and livelihoods, especially but not exclusively Disabled people, who often depend on other people’s hygienic choices to stay well and survive. You may unknowingly be among the many people who are at higher risk for severe disease: on the CDC’s long list of conditions with confirmed higher risk are asthma, diabetes, pregnancy, being a current or former smoker, and even mood and psychotic disorders.

The danger of COVID is not just the acute illness, as Long COVID may happen for anyone who is infected, even if they had only mild or even no symptoms. I recently found this article about cellist Joshua Roman’s harrowing experience with Long COVID. In summary, he went from being able to practice for many hours a day to only being able to practice for a couple minutes at a time. There are many, many other stories out there of people now having to navigate debilitating symptoms of Long COVID — you are sure to find one that resonates with you. Perhaps you even know someone yourself who has had some sort of continuing symptoms following a COVID illness. Again, if you have any sort of chronic illness — even something as seemingly unrelated as migraine — COVID may worsen it.

But staying COVID-safe is not just about protecting yourself. It’s about practicing community care in a capitalist world that has never truly cared about our wellbeing. It’s about understanding that access for Disabled people means access for all. It’s about creating safer spaces where we keep one another accountable to our ideals, compassionately calling people in when they fail to act in ways that foster a healthful community.

It’s okay if you stopped masking for some while, skipped a vaccine or booster dose, didn’t test for COVID when you were sick with a “cold,” etc. I’ve been negligent at times as well and often feel very bad about it. But we can always make better decisions today. And I invite you to consider how you can be more COVID-conscious in your actions as this summer surge continues on and the flu season also approaches. Here are my suggestions:

• Get the updated COVID vaccine, accessible at pharmacies or at your primary care doctor’s office. This will help you stay protected against the newer variants of COVID and especially help to prevent severe disease and Long COVID. Yes, the side effects can be uncomfortable, but in the vast majority of cases, they are temporary, will not harm you, and are a sign that your body is learning to fight the virus.

• Wear a well-fitting respirator mask whenever you’re in public, especially when in crowded or confined spaces. Choose N95, KN95, and KN94 masks over surgical masks. Make sure that the mask makes a tight seal onto your face. Here is a guide on checking for and fixing gaps in your mask.

• Especially if you live with or interact a lot with people who are less COVID-conscious in their actions, take a look at stevie spring’s zine, The Swiss Cheese Model for Layered COVID Protection. It lists additional strategies and medicinal tools you can use to bolster your protection against COVID.

• Talk with the people around you about making more COVID-conscious choices. If you can convince someone to take even just one step towards living in a more socially conscious manner, that is still an improvement. For example, my parents are adamantly against getting the updated COVID booster (even though they received the original vaccine), but I was able to convince them to mask in public during this summer surge.

• If you are eager to take political action, check out this list of resources for resisting mask bans, which are becoming increasingly popular in the U.S. If you are in an area that has implemented a mask ban, please do continue to mask, especially if you have socioeconomic privilege; note that there might be an exemption for health-related masking, such as in Nassau County, NY. Here’s the ACLU’s explanation of your right to mask in New York.

When society does not care for us, we take care of one another. Please spread the word; don’t spread COVID 😷.

My mother used to be harshly critical of my singing voice. Sometimes I’d sing for joy at home in her presence, and she would tell me to stop with much annoyance. When she did permit me to sing for her, she rarely would offer any praise. Instead, she would tell me to just sing for fun, as if to imply that I did not have the ability to sing as a career. I never wanted a career as a vocalist, but this comment still hurt. It’s as if there’s no middle ground between just liking to sing without caring about technique and devoting yourself to a pre-professional regimen of training.

One time when I was in high school, she compared my voice to that of another high school student who was involved in musical theatre. That student had a great voice, she said. But my voice was only “good.” This baffled me, as although I did believe that that student was a better singer than I was, especially in the musical theatre genre, I attributed our difference in skill to my lack of training and experience. Yet my mother would not permit me to take vocal lessons, since she would only let me pursue singing “for fun.” It was only during my fourth year of college when I finally convinced her to let me take singing lessons because it would be useful for me as a composer. And once I had some training and began to improve, my mother stopped criticizing me as harshly (though she still doesn’t really give me praise).

When I was in fifth grade, I was put into speech therapy at school. Apparently I had a mild stutter and did not consistently pronounce my th’s correctly. The latter was true because no one in my family could say th’s, but upon starting speech therapy, I obsessively practiced the phoneme with made-up phrases like “Meredith’s birthday is on Earth Day” until I had it solid. The former may have been exacerbated by anxiety, especially as I was starting to be told that “communication” was a weakness for me, just as “social skills” in general were. My father, who himself struggles with communication and social activities, began to berate me for making social errors like saying “no” too enthusiastically or standing alone rather than socializing with the girls; repeatedly he preached and yelled about the concept of emotional intelligence while showing very little willingness to improve his own skills. Even though in fourth grade I gave enthusiastic school presentations with ease, recruiting my expressive skills as a performer, in fifth grade, my public speaking skills plummeted due to my shattered confidence. I was in speech therapy for only one year, but it took many years after that for me to fully regain confidence in speaking.

My father, who is so misogynistic that he seems to appreciate some of my androgynous characteristics, frequently tells me to speak with a lower-pitched voice in order to sound more confident. I find this advice so frustrating because, aside from it being misogynistic, it interferes with my attempts to figure out how I personally feel about my voice as a non-binary person. I actually do like to speak at a lower pitch and with more resonance in my voice for some occasions, but what matters isn’t how confident I sound, but rather how grounded I feel. On the other hand, there are occasions where I’ve found that I naturally take on a higher-pitched and perhaps more melodic voice, sometimes as a form of masking or social performance, but also at times simply because that is how my spirit wants to move. For example, when my father’s anger becomes out of control, my instinct is to defuse the situation by speaking in a gentle, high-pitched voice that sounds as non-confrontational as possible. The strategy has been stunningly effective.

But how do I feel about my voice? Does it cause me gender dysphoria? Are there characteristics that my voice does not have that would give me gender euphoria? Right now I’m still in a stage of exploration, seeing what my current voice is capable of. As a sophomore in college, during mood episodes that caused my body and spirit to express themselves in new ways, I discovered joy in speaking in a playful, high-pitched “child voice,” which I did not feel was gendered but rather had the buoyancy of an infant sailing the clouds of daydreams. The following year, I acted in a student production of Hamlet, taking on the role of the Ghost of Hamlet’s father. During the audition, when asked to do a cold read in that role, I spontaneously began to speak in a deep, intense, resonant voice that felt freaky and delightful at once. I did not know that my voice could carry such weighty, androgynous power.

Generally, regarding my gender identity, I have found delight in experimenting with all the hues and values of the gender palette. I joke that my aesthetic is “femme gay man,” but even that can mean different things on different days. I have a sense that it is similar with both my speaking and singing voices. In my vocal lessons, I am exploring both extremes of my range and having a lot of fun overall. My voice type can be perhaps best summarized as a light soprano with strong lower extension, which basically means that soprano roles work best for me in the classical style, but mezzo roles in the contemporary musical theatre style make the lower part of my voice shine. I like singing roles of different genders, sometimes transposing a song written for a low voice to fit my range. As a performer, and as a person who in many ways approaches life as performance, I delight in manipulating the contrasting energies in my soul like a sculptor of dancing clay.

If I could choose, maybe I’d prefer having a somewhat lower-pitched voice, as I have often wished that I could access lower notes that currently I cannot. But even just considering going on testosterone to biologically change my voice scares me, because unlike other medical procedures for gender transition, there’s no way to determine the exact result, as hormones affect everyone in wildly different ways. I did sign up for Renee Yoxon’s online course “Mix & Match! Designing Your Nonbinary Voice,” which teaches you different ways that you can manipulate your speaking voice with or without hormone treatment, but as I can be really terrible with self-paced online courses, I have only so far gone through the intro module. It’s there though for whenever I feel like diving in again and experimenting with my vocal instrument just as it is. I think of experimenting with my speaking voice as similar to the task of the voice actor, whose vocal expression can transcend age, gender, and even species.

But vocal training, whether for singing or speaking, isn’t just for preparing for a particular profession. It’s a journey of becoming intimate with the unique qualities of your own voice, your personal palette for expression. I think everyone can benefit from exploring what their own voice can do and encountering previously hidden abilities that can be a surprising source of joy. Many people are insecure about their voices, until they learn that the standards by which they have been judging their voices simply don’t apply to everyone. And since the human voice continues to change throughout the whole lifespan, the journey is lifelong.