I can't sleep, again, so I'm here to tapoter un peu so that hopefully all the thoughts running around in my brain have somewhere to go instead of my head.

I've started rereading Do Not Say We Have Nothing and it is still exquisite. In novels people are always quoting stuff, like they know a ton of Literature by heart. Obviously I know that, especially in the past, people were probably able to quote stuff a lot, but there's a part for instance in this book where Zhuli, in a moment of crisis, thinks of a quote from Faust that she heard orally just the other day. In contrast I feel like words come in from one ear and out the other. I'll remember ideas and events (though as the start of my previous post attested I seem to forget really important stuff as well) but I could never just quote a whole chunk of text from something I read or heard in passing.

The closest thing I have to that is this single-line poem from Yanyi, which I'm not even sure I have word for word: "There are places I can't go, like outside my body." It really struck me when I read it and I've thought about it a few times in the few days since I've read it, not only in terms of my heart palpitations but also how I hate things like mindfulness/yoga/Headspace/meditation because they make me acutely aware of my body which is an extremely uncomfortable feeling and also how I often imagine myself in the third person as I'm experiencing events.

I actually don't really have that much to write about, which is annoying. There's a rabbit hole about social media I could go down but I'm not sure if I really have the energy to do it right now. But I know that if I clamber upstairs back into bed I'm going to start wildly jumping from topic to topic in my head again, so now I'm not super sure what to do. I suppose I could go back to reading but I'm kind of scared to get sucked back in too much and sleep too late and be tired all of tomorrow.

august

My mom won't let me re-read The Bell Jar because she thinks it'll be bad for my mental health, which kinda sucks because I was really looking forward to it. Jia Tolentino talks a bit about it in part of Trick Mirror and it made me realise that I really remember nothing from that even though I think I read it twice when I was 13/14. It's funny how little I remember from stuff: I've seen Inglourious Basterds at least 3 times but when I rewatched it this summer I realised that I always forget that LaPadite betrays the Jewish family in the tense opening scene, and also that Christoph Waltz ends up doing a deal with the Americans. I guess that's a good thing, because I can keep revisiting stuff and get new things out of it each time. I managed to read about 5 pages of The Bell Jar before my mom took it away and whaddaya know, zero recollections.

Heart palpitations, still. I ended up sleeping 5 hours last night because I had a dentist appointment, and then fell asleep on the sofa from 6-9pm which doesn't bode well for my sleep schedule. Right now my heart is just beating too fast and strong for me to really want to turn off the lights and just lie there, so....

Earlier I laid on the floor for a while looking at the light fixture in our living room. It's the same one that we first got when we first moved into this house in 2006 and I'd never noticed it before, really. It's kind of ugly, this Dalek-looking assemblage of concentric rings with golf-sized crystal balls hanging off of it. It felt good to lie on the floor because of the cool tiles. I'd wanted to do it back in Palo Alto but most of the Airbnb was carpeted except for the toilet, and I wasn't going to lie on the poop and pee floor. Also, the toilets are shared, and it would've been pretty weird for someone to see me. More specifically, I remember the evening when I had the strongest urge to go lie there I really didn't want O to come and see me because it would look like some massive desperate cry for attention. I didn't want attention, or at least not more than usual. Just that nice cool feeling. The next morning I sat at the kitchen island, which is covered in these beautiful deep turquoise tiles (but that make the surface of the counter uneven) and just pressed my face against it. I did look crazy, and I felt it, but it was more acceptable. I could just say, "I'm really tired" (which was true because I'd had a Breakdown the evening before and not gotten that much sleep). That's something you can just say and people will accept it. In the movie The Farewell, which I saw twice, they say that a lot so that family members won't probe. In late-stage capitalism I guess everyone's just always tired and other issues are, to some extent, about being tired anyways. Or is that a reach. Anyway, I had my arms on the counter in this frame-like shape and placed my face into the center, like at the massage places where they have a hole in the cushion. Then I took my arms away and pressed by forehead there. After O finished his breakfast and left I cried a little bit, still with my face there. I didn't know what I wanted or needed. I had Mitski's "Crack Baby" stuck in my head because I'd been listening to it on repeat. The most dramatic moment, I'm sure.

Today I finished reading The Idiot and read through Yanyi's The Year of Blue Water, which Lis gifted me and said was similar in some ways to Elif Batuman. I definitely enjoyed it a bit more than I normally enjoy poetry, since I don't really understand much of poetry and feel kinda bad that I don't. Some of the lines in there were good. He talked a lot about writing -- writing as a way to survive, writing as something that he had to do like it was just bursting out of him, he needed it to make sense of his life -- which is also something Jia Tolentino talks about and just stuff I've been thinking about lately. Like, do you have to need to write to be a writer? I don't know if I need to write or if I just write because I don't really have anyone to talk to / writing as a way to force someone or something to listen to me. I feel like writing the blog post yesterday helped in some way. Proper punctuation and capitalisation and all that. I guess writing stuff down like this feels better because I'm not really expecting any kind of reply from the void, whereas I tend to be frequently disappointed by interpersonal exchanges.

Sidenote: Why does Min Jin Lee have to retweet basically every mention of her on Twitter? I mean I see why, but she always does them in a huge batch when she comes online and it just floods my feed. I suppose I should just unfollow her.

Thinking, now, about the man in the Economy check-in line at SFO who got upgraded to First Class because the San Francisco - Zurich flight was hopelessly overbooked. As he walked away from the red-carpeted counter he had that expression where you're trying really hard not to smile. First Class -- First, not Business!

I told O that I was trying to be more generous to my friends, which is true. I'm usually quite stingy and get stressed about spending money, but I tell myself that buying gifts for friends, whether it's their birthday or I've just been thinking of them, is a good thing. I said this when he protested about me buying him boba, even though I had said I would because I'd lost a Love Island bet. I hadn't thought Amber would pick Greg over Michael, but she did. When she did, it was a moment of absolute euphoria. We screamed and cheered, and O threw himself onto the floor, I think. It was carpeted. I find that a bit gross, because carpets have accumulated years and years of dust whereas at least you can scrub down toilet tiles. But yes, generosity. My friend E, who to be honest I don't know super well but who is just an absolute darling, very sweet and adorable, had a birthday picnic back in May and I went and got her some stuff from Lush. I even paid for a little handkerchief to wrap it in. And it felt really good that I was doing this for someone else.

What I'm trying to say is I'm trying to be kind and generous and open-hearted, partly because I feel like have a slight mean streak or at least used to, partly because I always feel like I'm too self-absorbed and selfish and self-centered, partly because people are always talking about how important friendship is and I agree but I don't know if I really have that kind of Perks of Being a Wallflower type of thing going on and I try to invest in the people I'm around. I always try really hard to not try and expect anything back because interpersonal relationships aren't transactional, they're built over time -- like how whenever E (a different E from the Lush one) pays for me at mealtimes and I try to pay him back, he shrugs and says "I'm sure it'll even out in the future. At some point you'll spot me for something." It's annoying, but it's also very moving. What he's saying is that he likes me, that we're friends, that we're going to continue to hang out a lot in the future and continue to be friends and he'll continue to like me. That's a pretty nice thing. Nevertheless, it always hurts a bit when I feel like I haven't gotten back what I've given. Like how when I'm depressed and it's pretty clear that I could do with some help (sometimes I specifically ask for help, like for help making soup or something) and my friends don't really show up for me. Or I'm just not asking properly. Or I'm isolating myself on purpose. I sometimes don't have the energy to talk, but I always kind of need someone there to absorb the unspoken energy that I have, if that makes sense. I don't have any study buddies.

I'm making myself a bit sad writing this. I hadn't expected to go into how I'm really lonely or whatever. Basically I shouldn't have such high expectations about anything and I should stop trying to make stuff into things and just let it be, and I should be kind. I was telling O (and this is again something like what I wrote on Tumblr like 2 weeks ago and I'm annoyed at myself for wasting time re-hashing stuff but I guess I've led myself here so) that if we'd met in some more organic situation like if we attended the same university, I would've probably made some kind of snap judgment and dismissed him and we would never have been friends. He says he thinks we would've been friends but not best friends, but he thinks that because he's good with people and somehow adapts to whoever he's with. I think he's very different in different contexts, and I would've seen the way he behaves when he's with others just categorised him as some typical American dude who's way too much in his comfort zone, who moved with too much ease. Or, I don't know, I can't really imagine what I would be like at an American university -- probably I would've just become an Asian-American which is depressing as fuck. "So if we weren't friends, it would be your fault", he said, and yeah, basically.

The only reason why we became so close is because we were in this weird situation where we only had each other, 24/7, and saw each other all the time. It made me sad when we both left (and still sad, now, because he's a terrible texter (he had warned me) which doesn't help my attachment issues) because I felt like this was one of the deepest friendships I'd ever had, and it had only lasted around a month, and I was basically never going to see him again and that was that. I knew, again, that the only reason we were so close was because of this highly unique and almost artificial context... like being the only two people on a spaceship, or being stuck at an Arctic science lab during a blizzard, etc etc -- fanfiction setups, almost. In a regular situation everyone has many acquaintances and you kind of cycle them around. Given the choice I would've obviously hung out with different people instead of giving O this impression that I was some kind of unhinged suicidal witch who needed to be looked at all the time or else she would evaporate, like how the Weeping Angels from Dr Who turn into stone when someone is looking at them so you just have to keep your eyes on them all of the time and not blink. So because it was so unique, I know that I shouldn't see this as some kind of indictment of all my other friendships, but I can't help but feel like my regular friendships don't really match up to this. At university, aren't you actually supposed to have breakfast together, watch Love Island in the evenings together, go out for a weekly dinner on Saturday night, late night talks every once in a while, have banter inbetween? I mean these are regular things you do with your so-called best friends, so when you distill it, it does feel like I'm missing out on something because I'm doing them with a handful or rotation of individuals. Like how when I told E (a third E!) that I ate alone all the time and had no hangups about it, it was just convenient, and she said she couldn't conceive of it -- even if she was at home making pasta she had to take it into her friend's room for a chat. This is a weird example but I think I'm bringing it up because my month in Palo Alto I was a lot like this E.

Here I am again talking about how I "don't seem to be able to make connections with my peers" when I was trying to talk about something positive, about how I'm trying to be kind. My point was that I wouldn't've normally given O a chance and so I should give more people chances; and that I shouldn't let my quick closeness with O make me feel bad since it's such unique circumstances and so I should stop fretting over my other friendships' "deepness" and just let them be; and finally that I shouldn't fret about my friendship with O now, because I know a lot about being a terrible texter and bad at maintaining a friendship over text and not having energy and not wanting to, so I shouldn't let dry texting give me the fatalistic impression that he now hates me/never liked me, wants nothing more to do with me, and that I should just disappear altogether, because what does that achieve, really. What's the point of playing hard-to-get when we're already friends and he already knows I'm needy as fuck? Reading about Selin's exchanges with Ivan I wondered if I could relate to her feelings, and turns out I can't, not at all, because we're in very very different situations. I was mainly thinking about how I spend my days waiting for a Whatsapp notification and then pretending like I wasn't, and feeling excited every time I'm hit up proactively. The only similar thing I guess is just that excitement and uncertainty, like having a crush, but a friend crush -- or since we're already friends, a friend continuation crush? It's not crazy that I'm like this, because underneath is the very human desire to feel like you matter, that you still matter even outside of those extenuating circumstances, that Airbnb bubble, that turquoise kitchen island, that TV room with the HDMI cable unplugged from the DVD player, Stanford campus and its ugliness and all that unhappiness, Emerson Street, carpeted corridor, Philz Coffee, boba, Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, Salt and Straw. That you weren't just someone he was stuck with. Just like when I meet people through activities like Isis and really want to become friends beyond that but don't know how to make it work. I need to stop playing this bitter and ugly game of viewing friendship as transactions, why didn't you hit me up first it's because you don't really care about me, it's awful. I'm a terrible friend online, to others, so why freak out when it happens to me. If I see a meme I should send it. If I think of anything I should say it. What's the point of angst and nervousness, it's not like I'll ever express it, it only stays on the inside of me so I might as well just... not. I should give and give and give and give and give and ultimately it evens out in a way that can't be calculated. It's scary because women always do that and get trampled and flattened completely, but surely that's only in romantic relationships, not friendships? I think people need to talk about friendship a lot more.

On one of our last nights in Palo Alto, O and I hugged and he was like, "You're pretty great, I care about you a lot." Obviously people have showed me direct affection before, but not as direct as this. It was a pretty great feeling that this was said, out loud, to me, friend to friend. I just need to be as nice to everyone, be honest and direct. Kind and generous, as I've said about a million times in this post already.

It's past midnight and my mom keeps coming in to check on me because she's worried I can't sleep. I eventually had to admit I was writing a blog post -- I don't think my mom or anyone really has been reading my blog posts recently since I've been so inactive -- but now she's going to read this which is annoying because it's going to change the way she sees me. I've been more vulnerable in this post than I've allowed myself to be -- to myself and to others -- in a long time. I hope she pretends like she never read this.

heart palpitations

I got back from California the other day and I've just read half of The Idiot again because I'm jetlagged, and I'm thinking about how fiction (especially debuts) seems to always be autobiographical to an extent, and about the interview I did with Jessica J. Lee where she said writing about her experience in her (non-fiction) book Swimming actually ended up helping her resolve a lot of her baggage and learn how to let go, and how my response was to invoke Elif Batuman and how it made me think that all I have to do is survive and write about it later and it'll all be worth it. It's 3:38am and raining outside, thunder and lightning, and I can't sleep at all, and Twitter is dead (impossible!) and I'm just so full of anxiety. I'm sorry, mom, because she totally thought that I would be all cured and ok once I got home because my unhappiness always has some distinct cause (like antihistamines maybe) that can be subtracted from me like pulling a blanket off. But I don't know if there is a "real me" underneath all this, just like, um, how there might not be a "real", essential culture in a non-Western context untainted by colonial and postcolonial Western ideas that you can just uncover and reveal if you tried hard enough. 

I spent some of today watching this ASMR Youtube channel, it's a young Korean housewife who makes really high-quality videos detailing her daily life, cooking, cleaning, laundry, and highlighting the small joys in her everyday routine. Apart from the fact that aesthetically it's really pleasing, I also think I really connect to it because (at least based on the English translations of her subtitles) it's clear that she's deeply depressed and using these videos to try so, so, so hard to find something that will make her feel happy, or at least good, something to live for, like the sizzling of oil in a pan, her son's little feet standing on a stool, an ant crawling across a tree root, a folded towel. And while that's all and good, it's also pretty depressing, still, to me. I've been following this poet on Instagram and Twitter who is totally awesome, half-Sino, in her twenties, MFA, doing a lot of great creative stuff, loves nature, posts a lot about the tomatoes she grows on her windowsill. And she's friends with Jessica, who's just turned 33 and whose social media is basically the same stuff. Cooking with friends. Swimming. You'd think looking at these posts is really calming and nice, but there's something about it that makes me lose all hope... This life is probably a pretty accurate picture of what my life is going to look like in the coming years, my twenties, my thirties, maybe even after that. Just going to work, doing something creative whether that's for my job or just on the side, coming back and watering the plants by the window and taking a photo of something nice. And that's... just as good as it gets. I mean, it's nice, but that's just it, for the rest of my life, tomatoes on the windowsill. A trip to Italy every once in a while. And I mean it's good, it's good to love the little things, but is that really just going to be how I live, waiting for that next little fleeting thing that will make me feel like not-shit for 2 fucking seconds and grabbing onto that for dear life, until I die? 

Thinking now about this quote from Gabrielle Calvocoressi. Rachel recommended the essay after I posted about the poem she'd had in the New Yorker, one of the only TNY poems I ever read when I had my subscription. That poem was called "hammond b3 organ cistern" and the quote from a different essay is this, specifically the bolded part:

Why did my mother kill herself and I didn’t that year and have not? This is a question I ask myself almost everyday, though never during moments of despair. The thought never comes to me then. I ask myself at the farmer’s market when David shows me the black radishes that I use in risotto or when Sarah takes me to the ranch and the horses press in on me so I’m nothing but warmth and breath and their snot on my hair. Is it this? Is this the reason? I ask myself at the rodeo and the rowdy square dance when the rain starts to fall. I don’t mean for it to sound romantic. I have questions about what keeps us alive. I don’t believe it’s a phone call or trying harder. I don’t believe it’s an act of cowardice to take your life. Or that it’s brave. I think it’s the most natural unnatural thing in the world. My analyst said, You have to decide her story is not your story. Even if it’s the last place you know to find her and you really have to say goodbye.

Every time I pass by a pretty flower or smell tapioca when I walk past a boba shop or witness golden hour I'm like is this why I'm alive? Is this why? Is this just what I have to keep waiting for? And this is supposed to be worth it? This is supposed to make it all ok just in this one moment? 

I didn't really mean to make this post be about death again. It's pretty embarrassing to be so earnest and vulnerable and sincere, and not just because this is the Internet and anyone that I know could read this even though nobody reads this someone could see it, someone who usually knows me by a Cool Girl reputation I've tried hard to build up so that boys in high school would be scared of me. (I wonder if they still are. Probably not.) I probably couldn't even write it down in private. This is especially true when it comes to talking about other people, my friends, people I think are cool, because god is it not the worst thing ever to want, to feel, to take oneself seriously? Thinking about the part in The Idiot where Selin is mortified to read her story at the magazine event even though it won first prize because "I didn't want anyone to think I thought it was good." (150) 

Like how I used to have a mild I'd-be-down-if-you-were-but-otherwise-I-don't-really-care crush on M when we'd banter over Messenger, both measuring our intellectual dicks, and continued to think he was hot even after I was no longer single, but when I saw him again for the first time in over a year after we'd both spent 4 terms at Oxbridge I immediately, suddenly, and irrevocably lost all interest in him. Emily (not abbreviating because I think Emily actually does still read this so it would be weird to act like she needs anonymity due to me writing without her knowledge or whatever, plus, there are like a billion people named Emily just in my life) and I met up with him briefly and when he came to pick us up because we were lost in Downing College I didn't recognise him at first, in that oversized black cardigan, those tight black jeans, those black Dr Martens, that comically posh accent, God, who had he become, I mean really? The point wasn't that he was now a total softboy, since I happen to be quite attracted to that kind of man (I know, I know), but that he'd become this kind of person overnight after having spent years as some nondescript, cerebral, slightly nerdy dude who hadn't seemed to care what others thought about him at all. It turned out that he really, really did, because clearly he'd felt some desperate need to remodel himself based on the latest trends, to change who he was (at least externally, which of course is the most immediate and important facet) in order to please others' standards. Emily and I had very different views on this: she thought that it would be vindicative to come back changed, new, suddenly Cool, and to see the looks on the faces to those who had scorned or ostracised you before. I think that's the worst thing, to give in, because doesn't it show that they, whoever they are, were right all along, that you were wrong and all you had to do was change to be accepted? That what they'd done had indeed hurt you, struck some deeply buried internal chord? I would much rather they realise that I was the one who was right all along, that the things I'd liked were suddenly cool. And I still don't really know what that means, specifically in what ways Emily's and my stances differ and what that says about us. I do know that it means I think showing you care is really, really fucking lame. 

All this is to say, again, that I find it so hard to be personal in part because I'm constantly assuming that I have an audience. In a way, I can't really exist without an audience: all of my thoughts only really get crafted when I imagine in my head that I'm saying them to someone, writing them down somewhere, posting it on my blog... otherwise they kind of just float around as concepts, some weird fog with no substance. 

Back to California, which is the reason why I was makin this post that has just turned out to be a collection of some of my recent concerns (ie better-phrased versions of my panicked Tumblr posts). I was feeling so listless in part because my experience there was so liminal: a vacation but not; work but not; alone but not; far away but not; my own boss but not... One Monday, after a weekend of allowing myself to do nothing productive since it was "the weekend", I found myself unable to decide precisely what I was going to do for lunch: every option seemed to entail some kind of loss, cost, or reveal some kind of failure, and deciding precisely what to do after lunch was also absolutely paralysing -- I had become Chidi from the Good Place, unable to even move, unable to do anything -- I ended up missing appropriate lunch times and missing the movie that my boyfriend was trying to get me to go watch even though it was a Monday -- it was one of those awful depranxiety attacks where I really just could not do anything at all -- eventually I calmed down enough (after crying in front of the cleaning ladies) to go back down to my room with a bowl of plain tortillas and gear myself up for dinner -- which turned out to be poké, a huge portion of it because this was America, I felt suddenly dizzy and ill and light-headed so I picked out the rest of the fish and threw the bowl away in a trash can outside so the employees wouldn't see what I'd done -- I passed by Trader Joe's to pick up some groceries and try to turn the rest of my week around -- I ran into my only friend and housemate O who was boycotting Whole Foods because of the Prime Day strikes. Later that evening after watching Love Island, O, who was in much of the same situation as me except he really did have a boss who assigned him tasks and expected him to complete them at a reasonable time, had been there for a month already, and also wasn't a crazy dumb bitch who hated being alive, told me that ever since I'd arrived it had thrown him off his groove, because seeing me drift from coffeeshop to coffeeshop had made him realise that he could kind of just dally around too. I was like, "Um, okay, well I had a breakdown today because I'd run out of food in the pantry but also didn't think I deserved to spend money on a lunch. I have way too much freedom." And indeed every morning I woke up filled with emptiness and unhappiness and dread because there was basically nothing stopping me from just lying around in bed all day watching Jake Gyllenhaal interviews. Who cared what I did with my time, I was spending half my stipend on this Airbnb and flown halfway across the world just to sit around and do the same shit I'd do back home for free, which is be depressed and scroll on social media. I needed to be working and that had a lot of other complications. For the second time in my life (the first time being September 2018 when I briefly broke up with my boyfriend) I had heart palpitations, or maybe my heartbeat was normal and I was just overly aware of it, but basically, even after I'd cut caffeine, I would just feel my heartbeat all the time and it would drive me crazy and I would just wish it would stop once and for all. This is just to provide a bit more context. I tried to express this jitteriness over poetry but mostly failed. 

So anyway, I was increasingly, 'ow you say, losing it, and increasingly crawling into O's room after Love Island to just sit and stare and talk because I could not stand being alone, just really really needed some other human being to be there and absorb all of this energy I had, which was difficult because I had only 1 friend whom I did not know super well and needed to constantly limit myself so that I would not come off as an absolute psychopath. I had to set myself a quota on Depressed Anxious Bitch Hours With O and it was hard because I felt like that all of the time. (I put O through a lot, I felt awful about it but I also just really needed to. But there's a lot there.) One night we were talking and I made a comment about how I'm either emotionally numb or having a breakdown -- but that I doubt the authenticity of my breakdowns because it feels like I'm doing it for attention, but not someone else's, my own. His insight (and thank you God for a male friend with EQ, finally) was: "Do you feel like your feelings don't matter unless it's a disaster?" And I was like, wow, yeah, probably. He asked if there are moments when I do think about myself or prioritise myself, and I said I talk about myself quite a lot when I'm with others, and maybe that's because being-yourself and making conversation is an inherent part of being friends with someone. When I'm hanging out with someone I identify these moments as worthy because I'm socialising, and anything I do within that framework is productive and net-positive because I'm contributing to the strengthening of my relationship with this person. So that brings us back to me existing only really in terms of others, or allowing myself to do so. I don't really know what to do about it though, because I tried "spending time with myself" and "focusing on myself" -- California was basically an experiment of this -- and it fucking sucked, because there isn't really a me, again, without all the stuff I'm doing all the time, so what does spending time with myself even mean, apart from hearing my own heartbeat at night and getting really freaked out and crying? 

Going back to the start again. I had a terrible and confusing and highly liminal time in California and I feel like the only way I can make sense of it, and also the best way to feel like it was all worth it, is to write about it and then profit from that, in every way possible. Jia Tolentino says she hasn't got that much to say about her year in Kyrgyzstan because she really didn't take that many notes, and now I'm like, shit, do I have to take notes while it's still fresh in my memory? Or can I just get away with posts and Instagram story archives and stuff? Because I feel like it's much too fresh to start writing about it now, I certainly don't feel comfortable writing about the friendship I formed with O because it feels a bit like a betrayal and also is way too much vulnerability for me. What parts am I meant to fictionalise and what parts am I meant to add and.... I don't know. I guess I was gonna try to take notes but I really just can't, not just because it's traumatic, not just because to put it into words out loud or written down, whether in private or online, feels dirty and crass, but because it's just, god it's just so embarrassing to have feelings, real feelings, about myself and about others, and to write about them, as if every thought that came tumbling through my head was so important that it would be a crime not to publish (loose paraphrase of Rooney Mara in The Social Network, which I saw both on the plane to and from San Francisco), as if I thought it was good. And it's 4:40, the rain has stopped, and I'm still not tired.