Aug 2025: Trusting myself

Come see my Fringe show!

Dear friends,

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

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

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

A few asks relating to the show:

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

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

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

Student Union

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

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

Writings

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

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

Pride & Poetry

Spirituality and religion

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

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

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

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

Random other stuff

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

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

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

A Contemplative Offering

How do you regain trust in yourself after setbacks?

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

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

Harmony, health, and happiness,

Margin | 天涯