#and i usually just. think of my generic before bed imaginary situation scenario and go with vibes

[djarinova]

if you can make selfship lore and have it all make sense and link and work well with your character. i envy you because that sounds like hard work but respectfully i am not doing all that 🫣✋ making lore is too much like making an oc and i have no interest it that so i just make it up as i go and most of my "lore" is forgotten the minute i hit post because it's basically really specific reader fic in my mind. me if i could kiss levi and have him love me. me if i was in space and had a reason to be on the razor crest. etc . like i dont wanna figure out why din would ask me to accompany him in his ship. im just gonna put myself there and imagine scenarios

[ninamontagutbordas]

HOW CAN WE MAKE AMENDS WITH OUR EXPECTATIONS? THIS IS WHAT MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE HAS TAUGHT ME

I don’t remember the last time I woke up past nine A.M. Usually (and my friends will confirm this just because I know they make fun of me all the time), I’m in bed by 9 or 10 pm. But, like with everything in life, there’s a good side and a bad side to it. In my case, the perks of going to sleep before my friends are even home from work, is usually that, between 6 and 6:30 am, without the need of setting a terrible alarm, I’m awake. It doesn't matter if I go out until late, I always wake up early.

Don’t get me wrong, I know there are times where, going to bed early, is a terrible thing to do, because, if I have so many hours of sleep, it gets to the point where I’ll wake up at 4:45 or 5 am and never go back to sleep. (Bear in mind that, whenever I wake up in the middle of the night, almost every two days or so, I start writing for a bit because I have so many things running through my mind I feel the most creative). So, even if I fall back to sleep, I never sleep straight from 9 pm to 6 am.

A few weeks ago, I woke up at 5:57 and I thought to myself: “This is a great morning to go for a walk, nobody will be around, so I won’t be bothered by the terrible noises of a stressful Monday morning in the city”.

I go for walks by myself many mornings, usually, around 6:30 or 7 am. I’m generally wearing headphones but of course, this was the one morning my phone battery died halfway through for no other reason than my phone goes crazy from time to time, so, as you can imagine, the picture of the perfect walk was already being damage by my own expectations. At this point, I was a bit grumpy but decided to keep going a bit longer because it was still very early.  

I like to have breakfast after my walks, it’s like a religious routine for me. I come home, I shower and I have breakfast. However, I never leave home without my daily dose of caffeine (I take my coffee black, no sugar, no milk), but, of course, this very morning, I was running off coffee at home so you can imagine how desperate I was to find somewhere to buy my first double espresso of the day.

I didn’t think this through, clearly, because ridiculously, I was “such in a rush” to leave my bed for NO REASON. There were no open bars at the time and the ones where you could stop by and grab some coffee “to-go” didn’t open until seven or eight.

So now the situation is like this: No battery, no coffee – just sleepy Nina wandering around doing exactly what she didn’t want to do, alone time with “me, my thoughts and I”. Sometimes when I listen to music I tend to analyze the writing of the songs and see if I can learn something from it and that gets me pretty distracted. No open bars to sit in either because if there were, I would have been smart enough to carry a book with me in case my battery died, as it did.

If you know me, you know I’m a pretty foresight person. I can’t control if my phone dies but I can control it if I bring a book with me “just in case”, because “just in case” is what I always do. It’s what I know to do.

I feel like I should explain myself just because you don’t understand how important my morning walks are for me. Also, I just explain this so that you understand how much I dislike when things take a south turn and I didn't see it coming.

I hate meditation (well, hate is a strong word and I promised myself long ago I wouldn’t use it, so, I will GLADLY correct myself). I don’t like meditation, I’ve tried it several times because I suffer from severe anxiety but it just never worked for me. If it works for you, great. I’m happy to hear.

My kind of therapy is usually writing or walking. Or writing while walking. Or walking while writing, if that makes sense. Or having coffee after a walk while writing. Or having coffee while walking thinking about my writing. Whatever. The point is, my morning walks are usually what gets me through my day. I am home before everyone else is awake, so I feel like I already accomplished something.

Plus, If I wake up at 5 am and I'm at home doing nothing, I get stressed. To be honest, I enjoy a lot being alone, but I’m not a calm person at all, so I try to always seek quiet places to surround myself with because it’s something I need.

THERE IS A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A WANT AND A NEED (Quoting my friend Selena Gomez in her latest song “I Want a Boyfriend”).

So, at this point, I’m 40 minutes away from home, with no battery, no coffee, no book, no bars, no writing. Nobody around but myself, the picture of the perfect nostalgic character that feels like an idiot and blames everything on the external factors instead of blaming it on herself. I could write a script about that character.

I didn't want to be like “you should have stayed at home”. I hate the word “should”. My relationship with it is pretty complicated because I try not to do things that lead me up to “I should have bla bla bla”.

I don’t have many regrets. I make choices and live with the consequences and this is probably because I always try to express my feelings and be as vulnerable as possible. And, by doing that, I can be brutally hurt sometimes, but in the end, I always find internal peace in it.

Also, I don’t like to give advice, but, if I have to sometimes, the only two things I  say are the following:

1.     Would you rather:  Be awake because of pain or because of restlessness? Because the pain eventually goes away, but the restlessness, unfortunately, sticks with you for a very long time.

2.     Don’t ever judge how a person’s feeling. You can have different opinions but a feeling is something intuitive and you can't disagree with it. Feelings are facts.

But, contrary to what I’m writing, that morning I was like “Should I sit down and just wait?” But then I was like “Wait for what?”. Again, I felt like an idiot, and unfortunately, I didn’t understand why. Did I want to go home? Yes, of course, I wanted to go home but, to get there, I still had almost an hour without music, coffee, phone battery, or a pen and a notebook, and that made me angry.

For some reason, I couldn’t stop thinking about the way I felt during and after my walk. During that time, I had stopped writing for a while (I usually write every day but there are times where I have to distance myself from my writing), but if I tried to write something down, this was the only thing I could write about.

Of course, none of it was good enough because I still didn’t understand what was I exactly feeling. To be very clear, I never consider my writings are good enough if I don’t understand where they come from. My therapist always makes fun of me because he’s like: “You really know yourself well so what are you exactly doing here?”.

What is the emotion that comes after anger? That's what I was feeling, and that's what I was asking myself repeatedly.

So I googled the question (yes, googled as in a verb, not a noun) to see if I found a comfortable answer. “Common emotions known to trigger anger are anxiety, shame, sadness, fear, frustration, guilt, disappointment, worry, embarrassment, jealousy and hurt. All of these emotions are experienced as negative and are perceived as threatening to our well-being”.

SO, WHY WAS I ANGRY?

Suddenly, it clicked for me. When do I usually feel like this? When have I felt like this before? I feel like this when I get things wrong, and by getting things wrong, I mean when my expectations about something or someone are far from the actual scenario. I’m a pretty good judge of character so, when I get it wrong, it makes me angry, and all the following emotions that come with anger.

But this wasn’t new. Many, many times before I had experienced this feeling, however, it had been a very long time since this has happened to me again in such an obvious way, so that’s why it took me a while to figure out where this was coming from.

The truth is that, whether it's hard to admit it or not, this is a problem I deal with constantly. I don't forgive myself when I get something wrong because of preconceived ideas that create an imaginary narrative in my head. Sometimes because I don't want to admit that some things will never be as I want them to be, and sometimes because it's hard for me to let go.

I felt something similar recently with a whole different experience than my morning walk, but, again, it felt pretty much the same. I got it wrong.

And, it got me thinking.

I always thought that, when it came to situations I didn't have full control of, I had to make a truce with people or moments I was involved with, but it wasn't until now where I realized the only one I have to be in a truce with, is myself.

And, by myself, I mean my expectations. I have to make amends with my expectations. Nobody but me is responsible for it. And that’s because I am the one who’s disappointed at the end. I have to accept the fact that sometimes I have lost (and will continue to lose) to my expectations. Expectations 1 - Nina 0. 

Again, I don’t know regret so I’m glad I now can learn how to protect myself from this kind of feeling and take a bit of distance from situations that will tempt my imagination.

I now see very clearly what will make me feel good, and what will not. I went on a walk again this morning. This time, no phone, no book, no coffee, deliberately. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.

Actually, It wasn’t bad at all, because when I came back home, I wrote this essay.

[beardyallen]

Here we go... (Part 2 of 3)

Alright, so let's talk about April.

[Warning: This is mostly just about my mental health. It’s not super interesting. You won’t learn anything about Beijing. Many of you will probably read this and imagine me sitting here whining. I prefer to call it venting. Feel free to skip this and go directly to Here we go... (Part 3 of 3). It’s where most of the fun stuff is. But...there’s a pretty dope comic about halfway down, so if you also suffer from depression, you should check it out. It’s a good comic. And it makes me smile when everything is gray.]

I generally only talk about my depression with a few people, but I think we could all benefit by having more open discussions about how it affects us. Too many people struggle with this illness, it's stigmatized, and future generations need to know that what they experience is more common than they think. Plus, I imagine that making this beast something that we can talk about will reduce its power and prevalence.

I'm not going to try to talk about the root cause of my issues as I'm not entirely sure where to even start, so I'll just share how it all manifests. And how that's changed over the years. If my mental illness is in fact something that I've been struggling with my entire life, I imagine that it manifested as anger when I was child, usually in response to anxiety around my social situation, exacerbated by end-of-the-semester stress. Why do I think this? Because it seems that I only really got in trouble for acting out in early December or late April/early May. And I was usually retaliating towards a feeling of isolation, invisibility, or worthlessness. It's a pretty strong pattern.

I'm not gonna share any sob stories about how I didn't fit in as a kid, or how moving into a tight-knit community in fifth grade led to a strong feeling of isolation that persisted through middle school and high school. I'm not going to talk about the bullying or harassment. These are things that happened, but they aren't the point. And I'm just as much, if not more, to blame for my circumstances as anyone else.

The anxiety is the point. The feeling that I've had at every stage of my life that I don't matter to the people around me if I'm not always around. That they don't think about me. That if I vanished from their life, they wouldn't notice. That I was replaceable. Or that I was a burden that they would rather shirk off. As far as I can tell, I've felt this way since kindergarten, and all of the anger I felt as a child was in response to stimuli that reinforced this notion.

And in April, the intrusive, invasive thoughts started up again. Yes, of course there were people who wanted to know what was going on with me. There were people who frequently checked in with me to see how I was doing in China. I had every reason to believe that I matter, that my presence was missed, and that I'm still important to people. And in spite of that, it's not how I felt. It even led me to start questioning whether or not my best friend cared about me, which is absurd because of course he does. Life happens. But the voice in my head is a prick.

On top of that, every source of stress in my life spiked. Complications with my teaching assignment manifested, including (but not limited to) issues with my paychecks. Financial reimbursements for my health insurance policy have not been disbursed despite repeated messages to those responsible. Since I'm currently not enrolled in any course credit, my student status was revoked and now those entities which own my student loan debt are looking for payments. My dissertation research stagnated as my collaborator has other super important grad school obligations to deal with, and my Masters Project has been put on hold again for reasons outside my control. It also seems to just get bigger every time I try to make progress. There's also a nagging voice in the back of my head constantly whining about how much more complex my project seems to be in comparison to other Masters projects I've seen from the department. But when the voice pops up, I do what I can to pummel it into submission. I can't live my life in comparison to others.

Beyond that, I randomly wound up with a case of insomnia. For three nights in a row, I laid in bed for hours staring at the inside of my eyelids, watching imaginary scenarios play out as my consciousness jumped from random topic to random topic. In spite of how exhausted I was, I just couldn't get my brain to turn off for more than 30 minutes at a time; during the one or two brief naps, I was privy to some of the most vivid dreams and nightmares that I've had, and my baseline dream/nightmare is already more vivid than most.

So work sucked, minor frustrations related to living in Beijing, no sleep, missing my friends, trying to not freak out about the fact that I'll be effectively homeless all summer (insomuch as I won't have an apartment that I'm officially renting or anything), worrying about the fact that I'm not making as much money as I projected, and just being sick and tired of being sick and tired. April was super fun, guys. Can't you tell?

Mental illness blows. Depression blows. Intrusive thoughts blow.

So I spent an absurd amount of time doing very little. Laying in bed. Reading comic books and rewatching Community. Not writing. Not researching. Being pathetic.

Wondering if I should reconsider my stance on medication. So let's talk about that.

From a philosophical standpoint, I don't much care for the idea of needing a medication to get myself on track. My mental illness is a part of who I am just as much as my intellect and sense of humor are a part of who I am. I'm no genius, but let's consider those individuals who have been described as such and think about just how many of them are suspected to have been depressed or grappling with some sort of mental illness. I'm not going down in history as anyone whose mind is something to admire, but I know that I'm smarter than your average bear. I'm a PhD student studing theoretical mathematics, probability and statistics. I'm simulataneously working on a dissertation related to subgraph density problems and a masters project centered around reconstructing familial networks in forensic databases. These topics are not related, nor has the coursework had very much overlap. Balancing two different graduate degrees is not common among people in my department, but I know that I can handle it.

So if I seek out medication as a means to balance my life, what sort of unforeseen impact will that have on my studies? It is not uncommon for the process of finding "the right medication" to take months, and as your life changes, so too does "the right medication." I have one year left in my program (maybe two if I'm unlucky, and that seems to be how my life goes), my diet is fucked, my sleep schedule has been jacked up for the last few months, and I haven't had regular physical activity excepting the 2 mile walks to and back from Wudaokou several times a week. My work life is tumultuous at the best of times, and all of this is changing in the not-so-distant future. I have been in academia my entire life, living on the same stress-rhythm for the past 24 years. What happens when I'm suddenly a research or data scientist?

Medication is off the table for the time being. I had bi-weekly counseling last semester which seemed to help with my stress levels, but at some point I would like some sort of diagnosis. But before I can seek therapy, I need to be back in the States, with some sort of stable life. That means August of September at the earliest. Probably September. In the meantime, I bounce between feeling like I've got everything figured out and feeling like I'm holding my sanity together with scotch tape. All the while, I question all of the things I thought I knew about how I wanted my life to look as I see more clearly every day just how messed up the world is. Ignorance definitely wasn't bliss, but knowing doesn't feel much better.

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Damn. That was pretty bleak. But I needed to get it out of my head.

Enjoy this dope little comic that I think about every Sunday to help me get through the week.

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Now back to it. I'm open to therapy, I know that it will help. It's part of my long-term plan for mental stability. And I'm open to talking about medication with my future therapist, once the "big issues" in my life that I can control are worked out.

In the meantime, I'm okay. Or at least that's what I'll say whenever someone asks.

Of course I'm not okay. For some reason that I haven't yet worked out, my brain focuses on the negatives waaaaay too much. I do my best to combat it, but generally I've just managed to make this work to my advantage throughout my life, planning for worst-case scenarios, being comfortable with failing when I try to solve a problem, being the skeptic in my research groups. It's made me a better mathematician. It's made me push myself further towards excellence. But it's also inherently held me back.

Before I really had a grasp on my mental illness, I would have periods of numbness. I would get absorbed by these intrusive thoughts and mistake them for my authentic voice. I would see everything around me as gray and conclude that my friendships weren't as wonderful and remarkable as they are, that my relationship is doomed to fail because I don't feel a spark or magnetism anymore, that I'm not actually supposed to be a graduate student and that I'm not good enough and that I've only made it this far as a fluke and eventually everyone will figure out that I'm a fraud. And I've made mistakes because of it. I've let friendships die, relationships fail, and...alright, so I've pretty much been kicking ass at the grad school thing, but I guess my response to feeling like a fraud is usually to push myself super hard until I start burning out. This actually happened last school year when I was preparing for my comprehensive exam, which led to my oral exam, which led right into the end of the semester, with several conferences that I was running and attending, and then a research workshop and then...my seizures came back. Maybe "seizure" isn't quite correct, but I'm not sure what else to call it when my body has a stress-induced reaction that feels like someone swinging an icepick in the back of my skull.

So I'm not okay. But for the time being, that's just going to have to be okay. [Queue i'm ok. by Judah and the Lion]

I could use a nap.