The Sun's Coming Out, But I'm Feeling Colder

The view outside my bedroom window in San Diego, California

Over the weekend, I visited my grandmother in Los Angeles.  

I don't see her often. Over the years, she made some attempts to keep a familiarity between us, like remembering my birthday every year (then every other year), but I wasn't able to love her like I love to love: I never had the opportunity to love her specifics, or the way she holds books while she reads, or the way she hosts parties.  So I missed her from afar.

Being in her home two days after Christmas, I take in as much as I can.  Every lampshade and candlestick, every noise I hear, every fabric I feel: maybe I could burn them into my memory, keep these as treasures, store them in my head for whenever I feel like recalling the atmosphere she creates.

My grandmother opens her mouth wide when she laughs, as if she's surprised at herself for saying something so deliciously against the norm of conversation.  My grandfather has a voice that melts me every single time I listen to it.  I see him once every two years, and I always think it's much rougher than it actually is.  He lets me kiss him on the cheek to greet him, and he taps my back awkwardly with his right hand, the hand that has two of his fingers missing, which he had taken from him in a maquiladora accident.  

I make note of the fact that their house seems smaller than it did when I was a toddler.  I thought it was endless, a myriad of undiscovered places and rooms I wasn't allowed in.  Now it feels like each floor is one big room with tinier designated spaces separated by walls.

I don't visit the house often, but I know exactly where everything is.  I know which shelf the outdated picture of my sisters and I sits.  I know which drawer the cutlery is in.  I remember the secret passageway I used to go through on the side of her house, where the palm trees and the banana leaves grew into each other, making a green ceiling.  I'd hide there, pretending I was lost in a jungle, until it was time to leave.

I pay attention to the way my grandmother tells stories.  She captivates everybody.  She is the master of The Conversation.  She asks the questions, people respond to her.  The responses are short on my part at first, because I selfishly don't want to reveal anything about myself.  But then she starts asking more personal questions that I have to lie to, and I wish I didn't have to lie.  And I wish I was able to be 100% transparent with her.  I regret keeping mum during the simpler questions before.

My grandmother tells us a story about the time her and my tata met.  She also tells us her about her experience meeting the Pope in Washington D.C. earlier this year. She continues to be the master of The Conversation.  When the chatter dies down, she asks someone else a question.  My mother makes the mistake of trying to become the master of The Conversation by expanding on a story.  But she is, unfortunately, interrupted--my grandmother becomes the master again.  She interrupts my mother's story with a personal anecdote of her own.  There are no hard feelings; it is just the way the world is meant to be.  My grandmother was not meant to be on the receiving end of a talk.

We're all sitting in my grandmother's living room.  I sit next to the fireplace.  It exudes an intense heat, which I'm grateful for because I'm wearing a short skirt and kitten heels.  I don't know if it's the warmth of the fireplace or my growing melancholia, but I begin to feel sleepy. I grow intensely quiet.  I stare at the carpet while I listen to my family exchange memories.

Delivered Italian food arrives.  We eat pizza, and pasta, and chicken wings, which strikes me as completely informal and contrary to my idea of how seriously my grandmother takes the idea of guests in her home.  I silently eat and listen to the adults speak.  I, of course, am also an adult-- but nobody there sees me as an adult.  How could they-- the more acute memories anyone in that house has of me is me as a child.

I slip away from the commotion in my grandmother's kitchen and I sneak into her backyard.  I have a view of the Los Angeles skyline.  I take pictures.  I feel happy.  I feel good seeing a pink sunset.  It feels familiar, it feels like my house back in San Diego.  I pretend that this means that maybe my grandmother and I are connected after all.  

I hear them all laugh inside.  My heart softens.  I am pleased that my father is getting along so well with his parents.

☾

I am back in a hotel room later that night.  I am very quiet still.  I'm not sleepy.  I'm just sitting.  My sisters and I are all barefoot and we're listening to disco music coming from the speakers of one of our phones.  After a while I stop feeling sorry for myself and I dance, too.  I look at myself in the mirror, having fun, and I decide that it's true that a smile is the best accessory.  I accept that I look pretty having fun.  I make note of this.

The next day, we must leave Los Angeles.  My sisters and I eat complimentary breakfast at the hotel.  The entire time we eat, I can't focus on the conversation at the table.  Instead, I'm thinking about how breakfast in hotels scare me.  It seems I've had more anxiety-induced episodes in hotel breakfasts than I should have to count.  I can't concentrate.  Instead, I'm wondering whether I'm going to have an episode this time around.  My guard is up.  I am on edge.  I get sensory overload.  The scraping of a knife on a plate, the clanking of forks, the loud chatter, the chewing, the warmth of too many people, it becomes too much.  I become easily irritated.  Suddenly, a darkness takes over me.  A sadness, a heaviness, in which I attempt to have a pity party.  But I don't know what I'm pitying-- there's nothing to complain about.  I try my hardest to connect my dissatisfaction to something.  I wonder whether there was something wrong last night that I missed.  I begin to scavenge my brain for anything negative that occurred the night prior to attach all my dark energy, so that it can make some sense.  I can't find anything.  I attach my darkness to my inability to find any meaning in my darkness.

☾

As I write this, I'm sniffling because of a flu I acquired all thanks to hotel air conditioning, I suspect.  I'm thinking about how lucky I am to live in San Diego rather than Los Angeles.  I'm thinking about how I don't want to have an overbearing darkness within me.  It's five in the afternoon, the sun is setting.  The sky is hot pink and orange.  Familiarity.  Connection.  A pattern.

I was giggling happily earlier today. Now I'm solemn. Trying to make myself happy seems fake.  I need to give myself space to be sad.  But how big should this space be?  How long should I allow myself to be in it? I'm tired.  My body is weary.  I don't want to carry this sadness any longer.

The lobby of a hotel I visit twice a year

Chucks

The view from the room

So many palm trees

Bloody Los Angeles sunset

A home

Someone wealthy lives up there

Avoiding revisiting myself

For The Unloved Broken People

✍ CURRENTLY WRITING FROM: SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

Every time I try to write the first sentence of this post, it gets erased, and an even more passive-aggressive one takes its place.  I think I have to check within me one more time and accept that there's nobody to attack.  Because that's the whole point of this essay.

Being a broken person is not pretty.  Being broken does not equal being found while you're wandering a city by yourself at night, doing "broken person" things.  Someone will not find you and think that you're just weird enough for them to love unconditionally.  How could they?  When you're so broken that you're too ashamed to let any one in.  How could any one know?

That's the thing about there being something wrong with you.  There's so much shame.  Because people do love you.  But your inherent self-hatred prevents you from feeling that love.  It feels like people are doing their homework, taking care of you.  You can hear the strain in their voice when they tell you for the hundredth time that there's nothing to panic about.

There's been a culmination of events.  (Isn't there always?)  I'm frightened a lot these days.  It's as though my body knows that there's a slow unraveling happening within me, but my brain doesn't yet.  I can sense it.  When I wake up, I stare.  It's been taking me longer to get out of bed.  I pace a lot.  I'm not thinking of anything particularly important, but I pace and I pace and I pace and I worry about something that needs me to worry about it.  I fall asleep in baths.  I can't bring myself to cry much anymore.

Last night I attended a candlelight vigil for a girl I used to go to high school with.  I went to support her parents, because both of their daughters had passed away in the accident.  I didn't expect to cry.  I didn't feel my boots get heavy during the vigil.  I didn't feel my boots get heavy as I walked away, listening to people cry in the distance.  I didn't feel my boots get heavy in the car ride home.  It wasn't until I arrived in my room that I felt my shoulders, my feet, my hands, my head get heavier.

Since January, I've realized how much death horrifies me.  You know how there's many things you know are horrible, but your innate naïveté helps you not freak out about them?

You know you're going to die, you know your parents are going to die, you know accidents happen, you know the world is unsafe, but there's many distractors (I know, it sounded harsh as I typed it) in life that remind you that there's no use being afraid of them every waking moment.  That's not what living with a panic disorder is like.  I won't even try to explain what that's like, because I'm completely done with reading generalizations about this, as though we all think the same and have the same triggers and are phobic of the same things, but that's not my point.

I studied books for months, swallowed pills, went to yoga, kept a journal, opened up to friends, took up new hobbies, and somewhere at the beginning of fall, I felt better.  That's the one thing all the books and all the therapists warn you about: don't assume it's gone forever.  It might come back, it might not, but it might, and you can't admit defeat.  "Fight just as hard as this time."

But the books and the online self-help essays can't help but work on those damned generalizations.  It took me months to admit I needed help, it took me half a year to see results.  Now I'm back in square one.  And I wish asking for help didn't feel like the most selfish thing in the world.

To the people who have been lied to and told that their pain is pretty, I'm sorry.  Something I've read over and over in my books is that one of the best ways to help someone with anxiety or depression is to avoid giving unrequited advice.  So this is me acknowledging your pain.

For the broken people who feel like love is something that people have to give to you for you to stay alive.  For the people who have to be mindful of everything that they do, not to live a happier life, but because letting your mind be free has catastrophic consequences.  For the people who fear emotional intimacy because they know that people leave.  Because they don't want love to feel like a chore, too.

For the people who can't remember whole days, whole weeks, whole months.  For the people who are afraid to be alone.  For the people who are afraid of public transport.

For the broken people whose phobias get mocked on television.  For the people who get the message that everyone else sees how unreasonable they are.  For the ones who feel everyone walks on eggshells around them.

I don't know how to comfort us yet.  But I understand you.

Compare and Contrast

✍ CURRENTLY WRITING FROM: SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

According to Eckhart Tolle, a man who I've come to (perhaps irresponsibly) consider my spiritual guide and one source of truth ever since an inevitable mental breakdown in August of 2015, we should always live in the present moment.  The future doesn't exist, and the past is nothing but a source for our guilt, shame, sadness, longing, and other negative emotions.  However, he makes an exception: our pasts are good to reflect upon to learn lessons, not make the same mistakes, remember how we handled a difficult situation.  I make two: looking back is good for succeeding, and also... to give yourself a confidence boost.

I'll expand on where both Tolle and I agree first: in light of NaNoWriMo, I decided that this was the year I was not going to fuck up, and I was going to gather my previously mentioned newfound stamina and inspiration to write a novel in thirty days.  Just in case you haven't gathered the obvious, it's 7:42 pm on November twelfth: across the country, responsible creative youngsters are hitting their 20,000 word count limits.  I couldn't find a way to close my prologue, so I decided to procrastinate on that, and now I'm writing this piece.  But that's not the point: if I was going to spend the next thirty days stuck in a room with my own writing, it better be something good.  So, I pulled out all my old journals.

I've been keeping a journal ever since I was six years old.  My first journal was pink, hardcover, and had Barbie on its front flap.  My first entry reads: I went to church today!  It was not very fun.  Monica was being a show up. [Author's note: I believe my six-year-old brain was trying to phonetically spell-out "show-off".]  Then we went to D'Volada and I got a chocolate cake and chocolate milk.  I spilled chocolate milk on my dress and mom yelled at me.  She is so angry.

It's a compulsion (one that I'm very interested in observing through a psychological lens--perhaps later) of mine, writing things down.  I don't know why there are some people who are able to live their life by living in it in the present, and not feeling the itch to translate the experience into an art form to immortalize it, and others who can't do this.

I write everything down, and one could argue (shooting a pointed look at you, Joan Didion) that this means I take myself too seriously: I think I have something to say, that the way I look at things is important and/or better, therefore I record my thoughts.

This has proven to be helpful to me, however.  I was reading through the journal I kept when I was fourteen and found this gem:

As I flip through my journal, it seems funny to me how many different times I wrote "I want to die" or "nothing can rain on my parade today!" And I was probably selfish most of those days.  Friends probably wanted to talk about something that bothered them, and I would change the subject to myself, repeating the same problem.  The school year is closing... I wish I could go back to so many times I could have been a better friend, a better daughter, and a better student.  But oh well, I'm not looking back today.  It's going to be a good day today.

That's as close to a literal pat on the back from my past self as I'll ever get.  Not only am I introspective and I keep myself accountable for a mistake, I also tell myself that it's okay to forgive myself and move on.  Learn from my mistakes.

This is what Eckhart Tolle has in mind: use the past to help your present.

Another good reason to look back on your past, according to me, is to compare your growth as a person.  This doesn't do anything essential other than it helping give yourself the credit you deserve.  I used to believe I was born without rhythm.  I couldn't dance in my own room because I'd stop before I began, cringing at the mental image of me trying.

I'm a good dancer, actually.  I'd say I'm in the slim area between being a good dancer and a great dancer.  This isn't the growth I made, though: I stopped hating myself so aggressively.  One day I'll be able to figure out why I was never on my side as a teenage girl; for now, this is a mystery.  But what's important is that I am on my side now.  I can dance in front of others and I can dance in the privacy of my own room because I now know that dancing is an extension of my joy: I don't do it as a performance.  Much like everything else in my life.  I believed that my own life was a performance piece.  I romanticized myself.  Unhealthily.

But life requires a balance.

Eckhart Tolle would like me to live in the moment at all times.  And who am I to disagree with a spirit guide?  But I particularly like to revisit my past because  in it there exists a dark person living in a tiny girl's body.  She visits me in the present with hostile intentions.  I want to help heal her so that we can be in the same room, in harmony, in the future.

Past-me is pretty funny, too.  I kept distracting myself in between writing this post by reading journal entries from when I was an eighth-grader.  I used to precede news by saying "And get this!", and according to a journal entry from March of 2009, I discovered the pronunciation of the word "hyperbole":

Also, finally I found out what a hyperbole was.  Except it's not pronounced how I thought it would be.  I thought it was "high-per-bowl", but apparently it's "high-per-bowl-ee."  What?  Then why not spell it that way, then?  How stupid!  I need to remember to look up whoever made up that name.

In Honor of You Three

✍ CURRENTLY WRITING FROM: SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

Sometimes, ten minutes of pressure is all you need.  Regardless of what your goal is, if there is pressure to be done in ten minutes, you are closer to achieving it than if you had set a more impossible goal.  For example, I've just woken up and I almost rolled back into the covers.  But I remembered the distant call of this space in the internet, and I remembered that I've vowed to myself to write for ten minutes every single day.  Ten minutes doesn't seem like enough time for a person who plans to make writing their life-long career, but it's a silly kind of reverse psychology, see?  Ten minutes actually is enough: it's lengthier writing than I would have written had I not even bothered to write at all that day.  Which I don't, sometimes.  But by the time I start writing, I tell myself not to look at the stopwatch for a while.  Usually, when I do look at the watch, we're seven minutes in, so I continue and don't look at it again for a long period of time.  As ten minutes rolls in, however, I've become too immersed in what I've written to stop at this point, causing me to write longer than ten minutes.  You and I, we both win.

Sometimes I do stop at ten minutes and that's okay, I think, because sometimes you need to fall under pressure and tell rules to go to hell because you don't have time for this today.

I've always told my closest friends that they should attempt having friends that are significantly older than them and friends that are significantly younger than them.  These are friends whose wisdom I cherish the most.  I have friends my age, and I have friends that are two years younger than me (meaning, they've just begun college), so we're all on the same platform of experience.  We're all learning together.  Having adult friends and even young people as friends is very powerful.  (I would like to point out that I checked my stopwatch just now and it said that I've been writing for seven minutes and ten seconds.)  Adult friends have a sense of authority that they've received from their years of experience, so they don't let you off easy while caring about you in a motherly way.  Young friends are still excited about the things you've forgotten to care about years ago, and they add a spark of naiveté to life, keeping you on your toes.  There's also a pressure to not be as pessimistic around them (after all, they're children, how could you possibly think it'd be okay to bring their energy levels down to yours?), so you inevitably became a little more optimistic.  Which makes me wonder, why do we feel like children are stupid and have not developed any wisdom?  I don't know the answer yet, but I feel it's because of our human brains' need to create problems and complicate things, because it gets off solving them.  There's the universal wisdom that every problem has a solution, and I'm pretty sure adult problems are much stupider (if you try really hard to look at it this way and it you're feeling humble), so children know how to solve problems and how to discard them the quickest way, but they just hold much more gravity to adults, so they have trouble feeling so blasé about problems.

As always, this post ends as abruptly as it would if we were having a conversation in person.

Local Time in San Diego is 7:26 am

It's almost...  irresponsible, how completely by the wayside this place on the internet was left.  Not because the things I have to say are important and necessary, but because it is important and necessary for myself to continually get things out of my system, and this was a pretty nice way to do it.  Plus, there are hardly any places left in social media-sphere where people you personally know don't follow you.

It's 7:26 in the morning in San Diego, California.  It's 3:26 pm in London, England.  It is 10:26 pm in Beijing.  I wonder whether it's socially acceptable to eat oatmeal at three or ten p.m.  Regardless, no other soul is awake on in this cul-de-sac other than myself and my microwave.

There is something about beginning again that doesn't let you get too personal too abruptly.

I don't live in New York anymore.  Nothing personally against New York, New York just had something personal against me.  I'm twenty rather than eighteen.  If I'm not mistaken, I've definitely been on the blogosphere for the past seven years of my life (not that there's any record of this, considering how routine self-awareness over the years has caused me to compulsively delete anything that showed even a trace of my youth) and it seems irresponsible to disregard this part of myself. I've spent at least one-fifth of my life these past seven years keeping record of my life somewhere on the internet, and it's only natural that I feel intimately close with it.  Like a close family member who went away for a couple of years, but upon return, we both remember our inside jokes.  Except this is the internet and the internet doesn't care about me.

I've been writing writing compulsively again for the past couple of months, and I've been allowing myself to share some of that writing writing on places such as Tumblr, but this is the first time I've allowed myself to write write something on an official blogging platform, which gives me an elusive sense of authority.  I think it's the layout of Blogger's "Create a new post" page.  It brings back memories of when I took myself seriously before.

The oatmeal is gone and so is my need to express myself any further this morning.