Dear friends,
I feel like I’ve been playing catch-up all this month, and I’m exhausted. Having my Philly Fringe show be right when school started was definitely difficult, not so much in time conflicts but rather because the post-performance let-down affected me as I then tried to reorient myself into the semester. Last semester I felt energetic and focused and felt like I had a grip on the material. Now I keep feeling restless and distracted in class and often only manage to do the minimum, and also I somehow am feeling intellectually intimidated by my classmates, which I was not expecting in this subject realm, but historically I’ve known imposter syndrome to pop up when I’m just not feeling good about myself and cling onto some sort of justification for that feeling.
However, my show, The Legend of Yuliang, was overall a success, even though there were some hiccups. I actually froze up at the very beginning of the first show, which was awfully embarrassing, but the audience was compassionate and still found the show to be meaningful and touching as a whole. Here are some photos:
I’m planning another performance of this show, likely in the new year. This is in part because my mother refused to take sufficient photos and videos of the show, when having documentation of one’s performances is really helpful for getting future opportunities. (She complained that she couldn’t get good photos and videos on her phone and thus only took like five photos and two minutes of video.) So next time I am definitely not relying on her.
A medical mystery
In August, I had a strange collection of physical symptoms which led me to go to the urgent care. Initially it felt like possibly a mild stomach virus or food poisoning. Nausea, diarrhea, a headache, and for some reason getting really sleepy earlier at night than usual and then being unable to sleep despite that because of nausea. But then, one day, I had sudden onset joint pain, all over my body. This concerned me, as joint pain could be occupationally disabling for me, so I went to the urgent care. The doctor was confused, but she listed out some possibilities for what it might be, none of which seemed a close match, especially because I never had a fever. So she had me get some blood tests done, saying that she would test me for rheumatoid arthritis, Epstein-Barr virus, and Lyme Disease. I had already taken two at-home COVID tests that resulted negative.
The basic blood tests plus the rheumatoid stuff came back the next day, and the only thing off was that my platelet levels were a bit low. The doctor called me to tell me to get the platelets retested in a week. I asked her about the Lyme and Epstein Barr results, and she said that they hadn’t come back yet.
So I waited 1.5 weeks, and then I started calling the urgent care to get an update. Only after 2.5 weeks from the appointment did I finally get a call back saying that the doctor never ran the Lyme and Epstein Barr tests and that she chose not to do the Lyme in particular because I’m “not outdoorsy.” Which is ridiculous, because you do not have to be a regular hiker of the woods to get Lyme, and I do take regular walks through the neighborhood and sometimes at a local woody park. So I ended up asking my psychiatrist to order the tests, and she promptly did so and the complete results came sooner than expected. Luckily, I tested negative for both Lyme and Epstein Barr. Based on patterns I found in my white blood cell counts, it seems likely that the culprit was a virus of some sort: maybe COVID (though I didn’t have respiratory symptoms), maybe a stomach virus (though why would that cause sudden onset joint pain?). More importantly, it seems that I’ve recovered — the joint pain lasted for a few weeks, but now I’m feeling okay.
How important it is to have a meticulous doctor!
Learning to support others
I just finished training to be a peer supporter with THRIVE Lifeline. Their actual lifeline is down right now as they move to a platform that will help them to scale up their operations, but they have a Discord server where people support one another, and peer supporters are trained to provide support in that server. I’ve long thought about volunteering for a crisis line, as I’ve used them before myself, but picking the most suitable one was important to me. I chose to volunteer with THRIVE because they use a non-carceral approach, which among other things means that they will not call emergency services on you without your consent. Another non-carceral hotline, Trans Lifeline, has a good Q&A about why non-consensual interventions can be harmful.
As I’m starting my first real shifts as a peer supporter, I’m realizing that there is still so much for me to learn. I can get perfectionistic, trying to craft the absolute best response to someone. But there is no perfect response, and it’s human to mess up sometimes; I just need to correct myself and try to re-establish connection.
Tomorrow, I will be flying to San Francisco for a weekend retreat that kicks off one of my grad school courses. The course is Spiritual Counseling 1, the first of two foundational courses for the spiritual counseling specialization. I have so many readings to prepare for the retreat, and it’s been stressful because my mind wants to do other things (for I’ve often been feeling either that I don’t want to do anything or that I am fixated one particular joyful thing that is outside of my responsibilities). I am excited though, as the course seems interesting and I also have never been to San Francisco before.
The catharsis in pain
Sometimes, when I feel really bad about myself, I want to self-harm. And at one point this month, I managed to do so with enough severity that my friends urged me to go see a doctor. But my mother did not want me to see a doctor. I had merely told her that I hit my head, not that it was intentional. Luckily, the nausea went away after 2 days, so it probably wasn’t too bad. I was angry at my mother for not letting me see a doctor. (Normally I might have just gone myself, but it would not have been a good idea to drive if I had a concussion.) But perhaps it was for the better. If I went to the doctor, they would have asked me how I hit my head. If they managed to pressure compulsive truth-teller me to say what actually happened, they might have forced onto me an emergency psych evaluation. Which would have been dangerous, as I needed help, but not that kind of help.
Realizing that the self-harm urges are not going to depart so easily, I decided to try to redirect them in ways that were less harmful. Like, instead of hitting my head, why not hit my arm. And also, I recently found that eating spicy food is very cathartic. I suppose because spicy food activates pain receptors, so it kind of does the same thing that hurting myself would.
If self-harm is something that you deal with too, I would love it if you could share some of the strategies you use. Comment on this post, or reply to the email.
Working on my first novel
I’ve mentioned this novel idea previously, although it was just recently when I had a surge of ideas for how to improve the narrative. The Gift of April Showers follows the psychological journeys of 14-year-old twins April and May (one born on April 30th and the other born on May 1st) and their family and friends in a world of magical realism. Their mother, who experiences chronic cyclothymic mood swings, named them after the soothing proverb “April showers bring May flowers,” and the twins’ personalities are according to the proverb. When quiet April stops speaking entirely, everyone becomes worried about her, but it’s actually everyone else who’s falling apart.
I planned to write the novel as part of NaNoWriMo in 2023, but mental health interfered. Now, NaNoWriMo has shut down (partly from controversies, partly from loss of funding). But I found a new group, Pathfinders Writing Collective, that offers a more flexible challenge and a community of writers to support one another. Instead of having to write a whole novel (or 50,000 words) within just the month of November, writers get to choose their own goals as well as whether they want to do 1, 2, or 3 months of the November through January challenge.
Yesterday was Pick Your Path Day, when people started announcing the projects they want to focus on. This month is PathTober, a time to prepare for the challenge in whatever way you need. Since I am obsessive planner with whatever creative projects I take on, whatever time I spend on my novel in PathTober will be focused on making a list of scenes. Then, for the actual challenge, I will tackle writing scene-by-scene, most likely not going in the order that they will appear in the novel.
I am not great at following through plans, and I will be prioritizing schoolwork of course until the semester ends mid-December. But I’ve been obsessed with planning my novel recently, so this is also a way of saying to myself, “Okay, you can work on this in the near future, just not now.”
This novel idea has been with me since I was in high school, although it looked very different then (April and May were initially supposed to represent my brother and me). I haven’t ever been able to write much of it though, rather writing about it in my extensive plans, so getting myself to actually write any amount during the challenge will be a success.
A note on paid subscriptions
I’ve decided to disable paid subscriptions to my Substack newsletter for now. One reason is that I’ve not been able to write essays as often as before. Another reason is that Substack allows fascist writing to proliferate on its platform. Now, I do generally support free speech and would worry about my own freedom to discuss challenging topics such as those relating to mental health if Substack took a harsher censorship approach. But for now, I would rather not let Substack have its 10% cut on my earnings. If you want to support me financially, please “buy me a Ko-fi” at this link (which is also at the bottom of this email): https://ko-fi.com/marginzheng
A Contemplative Offering
What is your relationship with police and other emergency services? Do you primarily see them as helpful or harmful? Where does that impression come from? What would lead someone to have a different perspective from yours?
What stories brew in your our psyche? Perhaps a tale from your own life, or something related to what you observe in the world. Not everyone may gravitate towards making up stories, but I think everyone has a story to tell. And, fundamentally, every story is partially an invention. Yet every story is also partially a truth.