How do you know when you need to simply try harder using the current system or to step back and start from scratch?

Imagine that things stop going your way. For some reason, you keep getting denied from the paths you want to travel. In a physical sense, like walking down a path, this makes intuitive sense to us. However, what happens when it takes place in an abstract sense? How come your projects at work aren’t reaching their milestones? Why have your relationships not been meeting your needs for several weeks? Why has your health not jumped to the next level when you put in so much work? We can sense this disconnection, the rejection, but it’s not as clear when and how we should solve these problems. Is it a small hurdle or is there a fundamental crack in the foundation that requires a breakdown and rebuild? How can you tell the difference?

I say this from my own experience just prior to Carrie going to grad school. In my mind, things were working out just fine overall. We both had good jobs with good pay, we had a full social calendar, we participated in charity and spirituality, we had interests and hobbies. However, when we were truly tested by Life, lots of things fell apart, and seven years out, I feel like a very different person. Why was I so blind to all of the failures and weaknesses that are so obvious to me now? How was I supposed to know that the little tweaks and modifications to my lifestyle weren’t going to pan out and that I needed to make a deep, fundamental change?

I have a friend that grew up in China, and they shared their experience in grade school, highlighting how different it was from the one I grew up with. In Alberta, there has been talk recently about updating the curriculum which has been around for several decades.

For my friend, their school kept overhauling the entire curriculum every one or two years. They felt that it was very destabilizing because every year you’d put so much work into adjusting to this new educational framework, only to have it replaced by another, even one you had already been placed in and had to abandon several years ago. That is, there are a lot of wasted resources, distracting from the end goal of preparing young people to survive and thrive in their future worlds. At what point do you have to say that this system isn’t perfect, but it’s better to maintain the status quo and fine-tune it along way?

I’ve been pondering this question for the better part of a year, and the best response I’ve been able to come up with so far is “does it work?” Pragmatism is a very limiting philosophy, so I deign to recommend it broadly or integrate it deeply into my life, but that’s my best guess so far. There is a very specific focus on the after-effects of making certain decisions, which is almost intentionally myopic. Another way of saying it is “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” That also largely depends on what you mean by something being “broke” and whether you consider the frequency and magnitude of an imperfection to be a non-ideality or reality.

At some points, I have to flip a coin. In Vietnamese, we say “thử cho biết,” which roughly translates to “try it to find out.” You can’t predict all the long-term effects.

Early on, I learned to watch the examples of others in order to avoid having to re-invent the wheel, or in a word, empathy. I placed myself in the shoes of the people around me so that I could skip ahead past the basic lessons.

I’ve found that my life has so many challenges that I can’t simply take my time, making decisions that have “only” one or two benefits. I’ve had to play chess, ensuring that decisions interact well with others, combining anywhere from five to ten benefits with respective to the short- and long-term impacts. The big, recent example is how we moved to a bigger condo. Moves can be pretty straightforward. Folks can be seeking safety from harm, looking to save on cost. Maybe they just want to experience living in a new city or there’s a temporary work contract in a different country. Certainly, one’s home touches on multiple facets of their life, and working from home is now a common occurrence because of the pandemic. For us, relocating wasn’t merely about having more space. We had to strategize saving up for a house for several years down the line, think about how exercise and activity would look like, be realistic about socializing and entertaining. Cost is obviously a factor in getting more room, so we had to discuss logistics for the move, furnishing the place and purging old belongings, and planning our family’s mobility around the city. Bleh. Certainly, moving is a big decision for most people. However, it felt especially tricky for us because we also had to factor in what was on supply in the market, having very little time to plan and execute the move, and having limited energy and resources. Decisions have to succeed on multiple fronts in order for me to keep going.

A lot of this naval-gazing has been motivated by my newfound ability to rest and recover from The Struggle. Knowing what I know now, how could I have made better decisions over the past seven years? Would I have invested so much into certain relationships or jobs if I had known how and when they would end? Where could I have optimized my resource allocation? When was I supposed to figure out that the ship was sinking and make a better exit plan? It’s easy looking back having the benefit of time, emotional separation, seeing how scenarios and people would turn out, so it can quickly become a fruitless exercise if you’re foolish enough to ignore the new lens you’re using.

In short, I’m still pondering this question, whether I need to change gears or to change vehicles altogether. Do I keep driving this road in my car or do I take the trail on my ebike? I wish I had a good answer, or even a better answer than “does it work?” How can I take what I know from my past and use it to make better decisions in the future? I don’t know. Thử cho biết.

Something I’ve been working through is writer’s block. I’ve still been journalling during a lot of the silence for my own sake, but the system I built up for blogging over the past few years has not kept up with me. I’m loathe to write about writing, but this time, it feels appropriate to do so. When I was deep in my therapy, thoughts and emotions were pouring out of my head like a dam that burst. All sorts of unprocessed experiences were catching up to me as I could no longer keep stuffing everything down that I didn’t feel like dealing with. There was a backlog to go through, new things that were happening that joined the pile, and I was setting myself up for a more comfortable life where my emotions were dealt with mostly in the moment and didn’t control my behaviour. Past, present, future. With everything gushing out all at once, it was necessary to write everything down because it helped me to analyze what was all going on by organizing my feelings.

Then in September 2018, I had to get back in the game. I wanted to work my way back up to an engineering role appropriate to my level of experience, which meant redirecting my energy from addressing my mental health. The emotional wounds were in such a state that it made sense to work on other areas in my life, such as my physical and financial health, maintaining My Survival as the ultimate end-goal. I plugged the leak on one side, so it was time to address the new ones that appeared. What this change meant for the blog was that the underlying assumptions powered my writing changed drastically, and it’s taken some time to rebuild to return to the point where I could write again.

What’s different now? My audience has changed. Since I started blogging some years ago, I left Facebook and Instagram. They were my main sources of traffic, so if you’re reading this post, you’re one of the few. I’m also going to try posting more frequently in shorter posts. The amount of work and production I had to put into past posts was a deterrent to my new emotional state. I’m now in a place where I can contain my big heavy problems, take them out when I want to, and put them away when I feel like it. That’s no small feat, but it also means posts will be smaller feats. Life is more stable and quiet now, and I’m learning to truly rest, which means emotional processing will pick up again. I’ve developed a new backlog of items to sort through, though it’s not so overwhelming this time. My war is over, so now there will be fewer big battles and more contemplation and reconciliation.

Thanks for tuning in. Talk to you soon.

This is just a quick post to let you guys know that I’m still here. I’ve been going through a lot of significant changes over the last few months, but I haven’t yet had the time to write something in the way that I want. I have been crafting and drafting posts in my head and on my iPad this whole time, but the stars haven’t aligned yet for me to push something out that I’m happy with. I will say that I’m working on a post that’s been in the works for a some months, so stay tuned!

Four months of silence from me is a bit long, so I apologize to the (I’m guessing) very few readers out there who are hoping for something. I appreciate your patience and continued visits to my page. You could be out there doing anything else, but you spent the time to check on me, which I deeply appreciate.

Talk to you soon.

I started 2019 with a simple goal. I wanted to listen to my body more, which has been quite the fruitful exercise. There have been times over the years where my body was complaining, maybe my muscles were far too sore or my gut was telling me something was wrong, and the old me would have acknowledged those feelings and then dismissed them just as quickly. Trusting myself, treating my body as a wise and sensing organism, has only helped me. Being a victim of years of gaslighting, where my grasp of reality and sanity were questioned and challenged for years, has generally taught me to not believe or trust my own senses as much as I need to, so reclaiming ownership of the driver's seat has been extremely rewarding. 2014 was when my life started to fly off the rails, and 2019 was when it got back on track. I now have the privilege of working with an amazing company and team (and vice versa 😛), and Carrie has established her private practice enough that we get to spend quality time together again.

My new goal for 2020 is to see myself more clearly. An example of how I had a distorted view of myself is how I only recently discovered that I'm a physically attractive person. (Oh, this paragraph is going to be indulgent, so if you're feeling grossed out like I already am, please be encouraged to skip it.) My self-esteem has always been so low that when people took second looks at me, I always felt like an ogre that they were staring at out of fear. I have this piercing gaze, no doubt caused by my childhood trauma and the resulting hyper-vigilance, I'm tall-ish, I'm have dark skin in a province that’s 3/4 white, so I always felt like this menacing figure even from a young age. In response to people looking at me, I would try to diminish myself, take up less space, avoid looking at people, or leave the area. Turns out that at least some of those people were checking me out, and I wasn't always the only one introducing awkward energy into those interactions. Carrie has been helping me for quite some time with rebuilding my wardrobe and taking better care of my health -- she taught me how to take care of my skin, along with the true meaning behind the saying "moisture is the essence of wetness, and wetness is the essence of beauty." After I bought a sweater earlier last year and showed it off to her at home, she said that, for the first time in our relationship, I was better-dressed than her. (Our friends didn't even believe me when I told them.) That's all well and good, but the deeper, underlying mechanism that I'm more interested in is having an accurate, truthful view of myself. I‘m okay with not being attractive, as 30 years of my identity and self-concept can attest to, but what's going to move me forward in this universe is maintaining an updated understanding of who I am. Confidence comes from knowing yourself, knowing who you are and who you aren’t, what you're capable of and unable to do. Now that I've established how to listen to my body, this next year will be time for me to see myself more clearly.

This new perspective acts in service of the larger goal of dealing with more of my childhood baggage. r/raisedbynarcissists calls them FLEAs; a backronym that stands for frightening, lasting effects of abuse, originally from the adage "lie down with dogs and you are bound to get fleas." One example is how I often felt ignored or dismissed, regardless of the arguments I used or how genuine I was. This pervasive feeling has developed into this overwhelming sense of defeat when it comes to low stakes, non-confrontational discussions. I feel like most people just don't get what I'm trying to say, when clearly there are tons of brilliant people in this world who not only understand my arguments but whose thinking in the area is much further developed. It shows up in small little areas like when deciding where to eat out with others. People will toss out ideas and see how the group reacts, and since the stakes are so low, there isn't that much of a risk beyond not having the best food of your life for that particular meal of the day. Instead of contributing, I'll bite my tongue and refuse to make a suggestion because the fear of being rejected, of being told as a kid that nobody cares what I think, is still very much alive in my psyche. Instead, I'll just go with the flow even when I have something to share. This particular shortcoming appears everywhere, and in some non-linear, meandering way, I’m going to address it by working to see myself more clearly in 2020. It could be as easy as regularly reminding myself that I have valid ideas to share, and sometimes what that could even look like is by not sharing anything at all.

Another FLEA is the voice of criticism living in my head. I'm so used to it that I don't realize just how absurd it sounds most of the time. Sometimes when I'm out with friends, during the part of the night where you drunkenly open up and share your vulnerabilities and honest thoughts, I've shared some of my self-talk, how I see and treat myself, and observing people’s reactions to it has been enlightening. I'm very harsh and critical of myself, even after several years of therapy, and gauging from the reactions of those close friends, it was like they were personally hurt and offended by how mean I was being to myself. Saying it out loud can be enough for me to catch it, but it's like when you listen to music through headphones, your brain pictures the music as coming from the centre of your head. Almost every other type of sound in this universe comes from outside of your body, but somehow, we don't think anything is off when a full band performs from within a single point source located perfectly symmetrically in the centre of our skull. This voice of criticism is where my perfectionism comes from, the generator of many of my anxious and stressful moments. It sounds a lot like my own voice when I know that it’s really my dad’s, but that's part of the deception that sustains its existence. It sneaks up from behind me and whispers in my ear, pretending to be me, whereas even the basic act of acknowledging that it‘s not me can rob some of its power. Much of life's joy is found in the imperfect, from suspending the expectations and polish and allowing things to be as they are. I've learned this from coding at work, following the Test Driven Development philosophy. The start of the programming cycle focuses on just making things work, as ugly and spaghetti-like as your code can be. After getting your code to achieve its purpose, then you rewrite it to fall in line with best practices, like making it more readable, efficient, easy to maintain. Even still, depending on what you're writing, sometimes you never need to rewrite things to meet any established standards; maybe you only run the code once every few months or maybe nobody will ever look at it besides you. I spent a lot of my life trying to perfect my execution and technique before even reaching my basic goals, also known as premature optimization. The critical voice follows you around at every step, telling you that nothing is ever good enough. Whatever I happen to be doing could somehow be too much or too little, and somehow both at the same time. I've learned now that it's okay if I never learn to fly so long as I can fall with style. (Yes, I recently rewatched Toy Story on my Disney+ trial.) I know the voice of criticism doesn't belong in my head, it's not my voice, so unless it's ready to start paying rent, it’s time to go. It’s not going to leave willingly, unfortunately.

As much as I’ve craved for years to reach this level of stability, one unexpected byproduct has been that my brain has been flushing out all sorts of random feelings that I’ve put into storage since childhood. It’s wild, considering again that I’ve spent years actively diving into this storage area to declutter my emotions. I half-expected that once we reached this place, we would live happily ever after, which feels silly to even admit. There are some days where I’ll wake up to a panic attack, heart racing and pounding through my ribs, with no discernible threat in sight. It’s like my body started spring cleaning early, and I’ll have flashes of the most random and remote memories without any prompting whatsoever. I see myself as a designer, so I always try to be creative, to remove myself from echo chambers or bubbles, to grow and push my boundaries, to reach outside of myself, but even still I’m surprised by how absolutely out of left field some of these memories are. The common thread through all of them is that I felt emotionally overwhelmed, whether it was shame, pride, fear, awkwardness, anything really. It’s like cleaning up the toys scattered around a child’s playroom, where each toy has no connection to the others besides that they’re out and about. Some of these experiences include:

- a kid in my brother’s class laughing at the colour of my skin when I was in elementary school;

- some unfortunate words that were exchanged with a rando at a friend’s wedding; and

- being laughed at by my entire class for saying something (even though I discovered nine years later that I was right all along).

Sometimes it’s a generalized feeling of pain rushing through me, sending goosebumps and chills down my spine. I view the compartment in my brain for emotional storage like a can of Pringles chips, with the last one in being the first one to come out. As much as I want to just move on from the previous chapter, to be able to get into fun projects and hobbies again, to learn new skills or do nothing at all, it’s been interesting to adapt to this new phenomenon which has no appearance of going away anytime soon. Even though I’ve plugged the leaks that introduced all sorts of stressors into my system, there’s still a bunch of cleanup to do before I can go back to whatever “normal” looks like. Nevertheless, I’m grateful to be where I am now, and I’m trying to understand how, even when things were at their worst, my life was still better off with respect to income, health, safety, and overall life satisfaction than billions of people will ever experience.

Finally, I forget if I mentioned this before but I’d like to write more about myself and less about others. I generally try to be vague in my writing with regards to the people in my experiences, but I have written a lot about my family and my wife. Even though I feel wronged by my family, even I get exhausted from all the whinging and complaining I do in text. As much as possible, I’d like to stop faulting them for the way I turned out. I’m always trying to maintain the forgiveness I gave to them, even as strong feelings still bubble up from time to time. I don’t want bitterness to reign in my life like it once did, so I’d like to move forward. In addition, it has been made known to me by several people that I have been quite harsh on Carrie on this blog, and my weak excuse for that is that I had always pictured most of my readers knowing the both of us fairly well, that I’m still head-over-heels in love with her, that she takes great care of me, and that I’m still alive today in large part because of her. I have this fault where I sometimes don’t see the positive things in my life, and that has come through in my writing in respect to how well Carrie has taken care of me all while I was blogging these past few years. The power of words means that this correction isn’t nearly strong enough to undo the damage I’ve caused, and even though I know well enough what’s it like to be on the other side of the fence, I also understand that I can never really understand the harm and pain I caused her. I’m sorry, baby. I hope that I can stop making this mistake by writing less about my family of origin and my wife.

Overall, 2020 looks to be a more hopeful year. Things aren’t perfect, but it’s quiet enough that I can get back to being me. I get to spend quality time with Carrie again, chatting and processing the events of the day, existing together — being. After the success of 2019’s goal of listening to my body more, I’m going to work on seeing myself more clearly in 2020. I’d like to be less mean to myself, acknowledging and silencing the voice of criticism. Meanwhile, as my brain continues to flush out useless memories and emotions, I’ll continue processing my experiences on this blog without implicating others as much. 2020 looks to be a good year.

Apologies for not posting anything in a while. I started a new job a little over a month ago, and both the hunt and onboarding have been quite mentally and physically consuming. I’m pleased to announce that I’m working for an amazing company and team, and I’m already seeing huge benefits from the transition. There’s a gym and locker room at work, so I’ve been starting my days earlier, getting in a half-hour workout before I hit my desk. I’m still skipping breakfast in a shoddy implementation of intermittent fasting, and I’ve been losing the stress weight from the past six months or so. I feel healthier, my mind is clearer than ever, and people have been noticing the lightness and energy in my overall presentation. There have been three job transitions in our home this year, coupled with hundreds of hours of studying, so for what feels like the first time this year, there was a weekend this past month where I didn’t go out and get trashed. 

[pause for applause]

I know, right?

This has been quite the interesting time for me. Because of how supportive and awesome my new work has been, my body is still emotionally guarded because of the drastic change. I fully understand that my coworkers and team are just genuinely kind and supportive, but my heart has been slower to accept it. It’s unusual but extremely welcome. On top of this, the company is so forward thinking and innovative, it’s liberating to not have to convince people to make small, simple investments into their job in order to make everyone’s lives easier. People are just engaged and willing to learn and grow for their own sake. What a concept. I’m still zeroing in on my job responsibilities, recalling processes and training, but I also have a lot of leeway to train and grow. There is an internal library of books and training courses, along with plenty of freedom to try new things. And that’s just how interesting things have been on the work side.

At home, I’ve been able to approach several items in the low-urgency, high-importance quadrant. Performing maintenance on our electronics, rearranging the Wi-Fi and networking. I set up a new backup system for Carrie’s computer. I’m also taking over some of her chores, and we’re puttering through the week with fewer hiccups. I have the capacity to hang out with friends again outside of when I’m partying on the weekends. I’m still eating out for most meals, but we’re starting to cook and pack lunch more frequently. I’ve been vaping with a particular strain of cannabis to fall asleep 😴, which has been my superpower through these past few months. Instead of taking an hour or more to fall asleep each night, I’m out like a light within about 30 minutes, and I stay asleep through to the morning. I still feel like I’m walking on a tight rope, but it’s much easier when I get such good rest that I barely even use my alarm anymore. In the mornings, I still have roughly an hour to get out of the door, and I do most of my morning routine after the gym. I’m technically at the office for more hours every day, but it’s way more efficient and cost-effective to not have to travel to a secondary location for my exercise.

Boredom. Carrie and I are even getting to play video games together again. I’m getting back into 3D printing. I’m even thinking about what my costume will be for next spooky season. Instead of numbing my mind with the same TV shows I’ve rewatched several dozen times, I’m starting to turn off the TV to simply sit in silence. I’ve started reading for pleasure again, and I started playing Mario Odyssey. When you’re up to your eyes in stress, you don’t really have room for new things. There isn’t as much creative space for voluntary projects because your ability to learn and retain new information is decreased. I’ve been handling all these changes a lot better than I used to, which is a welcome change and a really positive sign.

I’ve already started reflecting on 2019 because I recently closed with my psychologist. She was shutting down her practice, but I also coincidentally have been doing so well that it was time to close my file anyway. Last year, we were faced with rising costs of living, which forced me to find new work at reduced stress and higher pay. This year, I found new work at reduced stress and similar pay. When I stepped out to begin the job hunt, three or four projects ambushed me and demanded my immediate attention. As I juggled them all alongside the daily chores, there was little room for error. It felt a lot like show time. This was the performance I had been training for over the last several years, and it was time to bring all my techniques from therapy into the real world. Our tradition of enduring an annual crisis has been going on now for five years strong.

I missed a counselling session back in September because I was so hungover from going out the night before. Not ideal. My psychologist emailed and said it was unusual for me to miss an appointment and that she wanted to say in person that she was closing her practice. It was a bit of a shock for me, but I was still supportive and understanding of her need to do what was best for her. The next day, I don’t quite remember what I was looking at, but the weight of her email finally clicked in for me, and I started to weep. We had both gone through so much over the years and we had a unique relationship and connection, so I started to mourn the loss of one of my bigger supporters. I later told her that I felt like a pilot pulling out of a nose dive, and I wouldn’t have made it through if she weren’t in the air traffic control tower. 

However, the timing serendipitously worked out that our closing session was shortly after I started the new job and my overall situation started turning around. There were quite a few little issues that I would have liked to discuss with her in September and October, but I was on my own. It was time to rise to the occasion. I’ve written enough about my troubles in gory detail, so at a high level, there were some travelling; some large, unexpected bills; and helping family with income. We got through it all, and it feels amazing.

This journey started back in 2015 when I started therapy to better adjust to the stress of work and marriage. I initially wanted to sort through the decades of grief in order to set myself up for the next couple decades, but it turns out I was saving my own life. There was a lot of fallout following the decision to get help, and though I don’t want to declare victory just yet, I can say that we’ve definitely turned a corner this past season. I think I’ll be stabilizing quite a bit with this new setup. My body is readjusting its rhythm to my new schedule and energy distribution. I’m sleeping well for a change. I got a new job at an amazing company with an amazing team, and I get to spend more time with my loved ones while I’m sober. I managed to get through a difficult passage starting from this past summer, and I did it mostly without seeing my psychologist. And rather than needing to go out on the weekends to blow off steam, I’m choosing to go out simply to have fun instead. I get to feel bored again. It’s quiet, almost to a spooky degree, and I can’t wait to finally close this chapter.

Carrie and I are in a good place these days. One of the leading indicators is our stress level, but to talk about stress is usually a reductive, simplistic exercise. It doesn’t fully capture the reality of the situation, and understanding it is important because doing so gives you more predictive power, better informing your next moves. Stress, and emotions in general, are multi-dimensional.

Early on in my counselling back in 2015, one of the ways my psychologist helped me through my trauma was by helping me feel my way through it. Remember that emotions only disappear after you feel them, and putting off that emotional processing merely puts them in storage — they don’t just go away if you ignore them. As I talked to my therapist about my adverse childhood experiences, she could see that I was wincing from the pain. She asked me to describe the physical feeling. It was a tightness in my chest, right in the middle of my heart and slightly to the left. She pushed me further, to not let go of the pain but to hold it close until it was ready to be let go. What did that feeling look like? What colour did it have? What does it smell like? Does it have a physical texture? Is it smooth like glass or is it rough like sandpaper? Is it soft or hard? In that moment, I described it as the Symbiote from Venom, a black, sticky, oozy substance that could change shape, like a spiky, hearty durian. It was heavy, pulling my shoulders forward and down. That tightness in my chest lasted about 5 minutes, which doesn’t sound like a long time but it certainly felt like it. I was sitting in her armchair, clenching my fists and teeth because of how much it hurt. 

It was a turning point though. There was a moment where she could see my face relaxing, my breathing getting deeper and slower, my body leaning back into the velvet upholstery of her chair. She asked what I was experiencing in that moment. “Describe how what your pain looks like now.” It felt like it was evaporating, like cotton candy being pulled away in the form of a thin, wispy cloud. The weight lifted, allowing my back to straighten. My fists stopped shaking. It was there that I learned I couldn’t suppress my feelings indefinitely. If you want to permanently remove those powerful emotions, you have to fully experience them. Sometimes they have to overwhelm your whole body and spirit. It took several sessions like this one to slowly drain those pent up feelings like a blister, but within a few short months, the weight I had been carrying for twenty years was finally out of my life, never to return. (Well, it’s been about four and half years, and so far so good.) It’s not all gone, but enough had been taken out for me to move on with my life.

At first blush, it might make sense to fully experience all your emotions within a shorter time frame, but there can be a lot of good reasons to delay. In emergency situations like during a hurricane or flood, emotions can become uncontrollable, throwing off your judgement and putting yourself and others at serious risk. Some of these encounters in life are way beyond our capacity to understand or interpret in that very moment, so there are times when it’s perfectly acceptable and healthy to wait a few years before you can let them go. In my therapist’s office, I could barely handle the pain of childhood trauma as a grown-ass man, so how was the kid version of me supposed to know how to handle it on his own? When people give advice, sometimes their full solution is “don’t think about it” or “don’t let it bother you,” which is the equivalent of telling a hungry person to stop being hungry when they just need some food.

These days, Carrie and I are talking a lot about the shape of our stress. Here, I’m using shape to describe not just its imaginary physical form but as an overarching summary of many qualities. Before the summer, we were both in the learning stages of our new jobs, and she was studying in the evenings and on weekends. The shape of our stress then, and for some years prior, was such that required me to party on the weekends. All of those coping strategies meant for cute, cuddly, soft stress wouldn’t work for me. A cup of tea, a walk, deep breathing, they might smooth out the rough edges, but employing those tools was like paying a few bucks towards an American medical bill. That was okay for the time because that was the shape of our stress then. It was spiky and painful, suffocating. It was cloudy and foggy, reducing our vision to just a couple days ahead. It felt like no matter how much we worked at addressing our issues, there was little to no movement or visible progress, which fed back into the cycle of despair.

These days, there is more breathing room, and our body’s defences don’t have to be on high alert at all times anymore. Taking action towards our problems actually produces results, mostly because the big battles have already been fought. We’re allowed to make mistakes, to change our minds on a whim, to cancel or reschedule plans now. The stressful emotions are smaller now, leaving room for softer, quieter ones like gratitude, tranquility, boredom.

Abstract Conceptual Model

Let me be silly and put on my engineering hat here to approach the concept of stress shapes from a more nerdy and bastardized mathematical perspective. A lot of the time, we talk about stress in a single dimension, where it’s high or low. This level is where we talk about eustress, distress, and crisis. The model is like flying a kite, where there’s the good amount of wind, eustress, that allows the kite to fly, being pretty and exciting for the whole world to see. When there’s too much wind however, distress, the kite becomes hard to control, and it’s at risk of being damaged. When there’s a hurricane, that would be a crisis for the kite. This single dimension is typically how people talk about their stress, and that’s usually sufficient for small talk or quick updates. In the physical world, we’re all quite familiar with the three dimensional model of Cartesian coordinates, with orthogonal unit vectors in the x, y, and z axes. Herein, we would typically define values in [x, y, z] format. 

Even still, stress is more complex than that. Biologically, there are multiple systems involved to describe and handle short-term and long-term stress, with hormones like cortisol and adrenaline as well as indicators like heart rate, blood pressure, digestion, and sweating. Mathematically, linear algebra teaches us that we can analyze relationships with more than three variables. Thus, we can define a system where stress, as an example, can be defined in terms of texture, smell, colour, weight, location, etc. Let’s limit our exercise to those dimensions for now. For this blog post, stress has exactly five dimensions.

Stress =
[texture,
smell,
colour,
weight,
location]

Thus,

Stress_Jon’s childhood trauma =
[hearty durian,
odourless,
black,
25 lbs.,
left chest]

This on its own isn’t anything terribly fancy, merely a rephrasing of my description into a vector form. However, let’s imagine what it’s like being in a relationship where each person’s stress can interact with their partner’s. As I’m unpacking these old memories with my counsellor, Carrie is in school and working, both full-time. Let’s just make up some values for the shape of Carrie’s stress at this time:

Stress_Carrie =
[brick,
campfire,
blue,
30 lbs.,
lower back]

Therefore, Stress_Lês =
[durian brick,
campfire,
dark blue,
55 lbs.,
lower left back]

Managing stress is a lifelong exercise, directing energy at both the sources of stress and the resulting symptoms. In linear algebra, homogeneity is an important concept in dimensional analysis. (This will be the last bit of math, I promise.) You can see from the table above that the weight of my stress interacts with the weight of Carrie’s stress. It doesn’t impact the texture, smell, or colour of her stress. We know that carrying an object with considerable weight has an impact on where in your body you feel that stress. I described above that the weight of my stress pulled my shoulders down and forward. However, in my five-dimensional model, we’ll simplify things to just focus on how each dimension interacts within itself, which has direct implications on how stress interacts within the marriage and how to manage its shape together.

To assure your short-term survival, you need to manage the symptoms so they don’t throw you off your centre. There are some tried-and-true methods for getting through it. Some of the healthier ways include exercising, eating, socializing, entering a state of flow, practising gratitude, mindfulness. Some less healthy ones include smoking, drinking, and binge-eating — no judgement though. It then becomes a practice of understanding the current shape of your stress and learning what are the best ways to reshape it or process it into a form that you prefer. This area is also extremely personal and unique. I even wrote a blog post to remind myself what worked during that period. However, these coping strategies don’t erase the sources of your stress, so you need to also take meaningful action towards them. If someone is suing me, then I need to find a good lawyer. If someone is being mean to me, then I need to talk to them. If an anonymous person keeps discarding my clothes, then I need to tell Carrie to stop ripping my old underwear and throwing them away and to buy me new ones.

We know that in reality, stress can multiply, it can procreate. If Carrie is studying for exams and I’m overloaded at work, the stress in the marriage takes on a life of its own, more than simply the sum of its parts. Linear systems with three variables are tough to calculate on paper, though it’s possible. Adding in more dimensions means that solving those equations usually requires a computer. Nobody ever taught me how to handle an object that feels like spiky durian bricks and smells like a campfire. One method we employed in those days was to, in engineering parlance, design and verify, or in simpler terms, guess and check. I tried dancing at the stress. I threw a regular gym routine at it. Multiple types of food were smashed against the dark blue durian bricks. To borrow language from the one-dimensional stress model, we were both up to our eyes in it.

In those days, the shape of our stress was so large and unwieldy that we began to lose hope. As we tried our best strategies, and even stretched to creatively try untested, unverified methods on these new threats, we felt that progress was far slower than we would have wanted. It was a discouraging time. We’d hammer away at it, trying to reshape it into a more manageable form. I used alcohol extensively, which often hurts as much as it helps. Without belabouring the point, the only thing we could do was to persevere. It’s a pretty illogical approach, when you have lots of empirical evidence telling you that nothing you’ve tried is working, but it’s the only effective method that got us through. As the years wore on, my prayers changed, from praying that the sources of stress would disappear to praying that I would become stronger and more capable of dealing with it all. My vision narrowed from thinking about my five year plan to plotting how to survive the next five hours. Sleep, whenever it was possible, was always a sweet escape, even as anxiety choked the breath out of me while I lay in bed, dreading what the next day would bring.

So What?

Since the end of that war, I’ve been looking back at the wreckage, trying to make sense of it all. My memory was so punctuated from that era because I was dealing with so much all at once, though that hasn’t stopped the feelings from being stored in my body. It will take some time to parse through every little thread, but one of the themes that really stood out was this concept of the shape of our stress. As we return to civilian life after being in The Struggle for years, we’re making a lot of transitions, even from the way things were just a few months ago. I’m partying less, sleeping better, drinking less, losing weight, even feeling optimistic and hopeful for the future. The shape of my stress has transformed dramatically, but my coping strategies haven’t caught up so quickly. I’ve headed into weekends ready to party, but my motivation was totally different. My heart wasn’t in it like it was just a few weeks prior. That’s when I started wondering what was so different since my behaviour didn’t really make sense in my new circumstances.

Briefly, there were some stressful events that I faced over the summer, and as I employed my strategies to combat them, I was genuinely stunned to see that my actions were having an effect. Even as I was making moves, I felt hopelessness, pessimism, skepticism that anything I did would matter. I’m not fully recovered from it all, and this mentality is one of my battle scars. A psychological casualty. It reminded me of that feeling of stepping out after the last final exam of my degree. In an instant, the source of my stress disappeared, but the symptoms of those stressors still remained. Shortly after, I drove down to Calgary to see Carrie, and I had a nightmare one night where I spoke with my academic advisor. She said I didn’t enroll in the correct courses that semester, so I couldn’t graduate just yet. I freaked out because I distinctly remembered talking to her at the beginning of the semester to verify that I had done just that, but in my dream, she was like “Oops. Oh well! 🤷🏼‍♀️” Fun way to wake up. Similarly, I’m still dealing with the fallout from The Struggle. Making sense of the chaos, the concept of the shape of my stress is a valuable tool that has already become relevant as a new source arrived this past summer.

Stress is a complicated beast. We refer to it in different ways, typically as a single dimension, high or low. In psychology, one very useful tool is to describe emotions as physical objects, taking on different characteristics like texture, smell, colour, weight, and location, among others. Looking at stress with this lens can help to provide new understanding in managing its sources and symptoms. In a relationship, your stress can also interact with your partner’s, sometimes taking on a life of its own. Once upon a time, the shape of my stress had grown to be so unmanageable that I was losing hope that I could influence it at all. Nowadays, it’s a lot easier to work with, much to my surprise. Looking back, it almost feels bizarre why I needed to go out and party as much as I did in the past few years, but remembering the shape of my stress at the time and understanding how differently I feel now, there were only a few strategies I discovered empirically that could actually manage it. I’m still sorting through the wreckage from that time, so even though I feel different now, I also don’t want to judge my past self so harshly as I continue to reshape my stress and emotions moving forward. Learning what works for you is such a personal endeavour that there isn’t much room for moral judgement as we each struggle to survive and find our own way in this world.

Heeey what’s up guys. Welcome back to my channel! Don’t forget to hit the Like and Subscribe buttons just below the video.

- Me, if I were a YouTuber

Wow, it’s been almost a year since I last wrote for this blog. So much to catch up on, but who knows how much energy I have for all that. Let’s try to breeze through the highlights.

About a year ago, I started looking for a new job. In November, I left Apple for a small company that manufactures electronic equipment. I wasn’t super qualified for the position, but I did have some skills they were looking for, so the following six-month probation period was filled with me working my ass off to learn the technical side and basically ensure I kept the job. In the same time, Carrie started a new job, studied for a few months for her licensing exams, quit that company, and went full-time into her private practice, which was the completion of a 10-year effort, roughly. To say the least, we were both very busy during that time. While we had three sources of income, we splurged on ourselves to compensate for the rough couple years prior, but since then, we’ve paid down debt, restructured some of it, and have begun to live more sensibly. Things are comfortable again, though we still have our struggles.

I started therapy again back in the spring. I had to take a break a couple years ago so that I could shift the focus from my emotional and mental health in favour of my financial health. Carrie carried us through a lot of those years with her income, so it was time for me to begin contributing again in a meaningful way. Now that our finances are back in order, I’m slowly dipping my feet back into the psychological waters, with the main difference being to sustainably balance all the areas of my life at the same time. It’s like when you walk a tight rope and lose balance. You have to shift your weight all the way to the right, then to the left, and slowly you have smaller shifts and swings back and forth until you reach that balance in the middle. From my monthly appointments with my psychologist, the contents in my mental pot have all gotten stirred around again, so I need to start externalizing my thoughts again in order to make sense of the mixture. It also doesn’t hurt that I’ve heard from a couple people recently that they missed my writing. With that quick recap, let’s dive right back in to see what’s on my mind.

An idea that I’ve been chewing on is about two aspects of our relationships with each other. You have to make judgements about both the person’s character and your connection with that person. Using my fuzzy memory of high school chemistry as an analogy, you study characteristics of different molecules on their own as well as their bonds with other chemicals. There are well documented properties shared by all kinds of chemicals, like melting point, colour, texture, reactivity, density, and mass. In addition to that, there are also well-known interactions when they are placed together with other substances in certain environments, like the reaction when dissolving in water or alcohol at standard atmospheric temperature and pressure. Without dwelling too much on the analogy, there are certain types of characters when it comes to humans, as well as known interactions between these types of people. You have the best friend relationship, the parent-child dynamic, employer-employee, classmates, the frenemy. I’ve been taking inventory of my relationships by examining not only how I get along with another individual, but also what kind of person they are as well. I don’t mean to say that I typecast people into rigid categories, but it is worth evaluating the nature of the person with whom you’re in a relationship. Are they honest, mean-spirited, ethical, self-centred, hard-working, interesting, open-minded, considerate, troubled? What’s their schedule? Where do they live? What’s their energy like? What’s their vibe? These are all questions we inherently answer for the people in our lives, so it’s worthwhile to make it explicit and to be conscious of what those answers are and how they change with time.

Why am I thinking about relationship dynamics and people’s characters? Oddly enough, it stems from my recent commuting experience to my current job. I drive to and from work most days now, some 15 minutes per direction. I’m fortunate in that sense because it’s in the opposite direction of most traffic in the city, so I can drive quite quickly with minimal cost relative to the people sitting in bumper-to-bumper gridlock on the other side of Deerfoot Trail. I used to be quite ruthless on the road, driving quickly, tailgating, cursing, zooming around people, retaliating against those who tried to skirt the unwritten rules of the road. Now that I’m a bit older, I don’t have the energy to get so upset at people. I actually don’t enjoy driving anymore, which has become such a chore even with my easy route. The main insight that got me thinking about relationships is how I would so quickly and permanently judge someone based on their maneuvering on the road next to me, while I was also making mistakes and being rude to others at the same time. These days, I’m actually quite anxious on the road, fairly conservative relative to Calgary drivers with my speed, and I’m mature enough to see how I would sometimes hate driving behind me if I were in those drivers’ seats. I’m no longer the young, hot, brash male driver who needs to be in the fast lane to get to my destination two minutes earlier. I can take my time, let others pass, even show up late, and accept that I’m not a race car driver despite winning a race against coworkers at go-karts once. I’ve judged people harshly on their driving, but I realized how I wouldn’t want to be judged that way, based solely on a single aspect of my entire being during a short timespan on the road with another person. 

Not long ago, I was driving in the fast lane on my way home after work, changing the music on my phone to suit my stress level, when I noticed a coworker driving behind me. He decided that I wasn’t driving the way he wanted me to, changed lanes to pass, looked over, and was a bit shocked to see that it was me. After changing my music, I caught up to the normal speed and passed him, but that moment gave me pause. What would he think of me? Did he really notice it was me? Did I undo my faux-pas when I sped back up to everyone’s speed in that lane? Would he judge me forever on that one moment and interaction?

More seriously, I realize that the way I’ve interacted with people in the past could deem me in one moment as the most evil person they knew as well as the kindest angel on earth in another. For example, when I was working in the Genius Bar at Apple, there were many moments when I made a customer so happy they were in tears, later emailing my managers about the depth of my empathy and humanity, while in the same hour I could have been another customer’s worst, rudest customer service representative ever who would later turn them off of the company’s entire product line for the rest of their lives. Both of them could have been correct about me. Now, would it matter to them that I think I’m really a nice guy? Would it matter to them what my overall score was on customer surveys and coworker feedback? That’s also one of my fears in writing for this blog, that someone would take a single line or post out of context, vilifying me irreversibly, judging me accurately or otherwise without considering the other data points of who I am. That’s the inherent risk and asymmetry of this kind of interaction though, so I have to own that. Once upon a time, I was a bully in elementary school. Would any of my victims care to know that I was bullied at home? Does it undo the damage that I did or pay for the ripple effects I contributed to in their future relationships? Would it matter to them that I no longer behave that way, that I sought treatment and processed the negative and toxic influences in my life to seek to help others much later in my life? 

Carrie and I have been talking lately about the impacts of today’s Cancel Culture, where someone is completely written off today for a previous mistake. Cancel Culture says that anyone can be silenced at any time for an oversight in the past, which is at the same time the best and worst policy depending on how you feel about who it’s pointed at. Is that fair? Is there room for growth? Can I disavow my past self for doing or saying something I now regret? Can I apologize and ask for forgiveness even when I don’t deserve it? If you’ve followed my blog for a minute, you know how I stopped talking to my family because of how our dysfunctional system drained the life out of me. Was I wrong for cancelling them? Should I allow them back in my life if they apologize? Should they cancel me in return for missing recent weddings and funerals? Should I cancel myself?

I do miss my family, at least the aspect of the bonds we shared. It’s hard to replace, having people who have known you for so long, who have your history, who aren’t afraid to call you out. However, the big turning point for me was when I looked deeper at what kind of people/molecules I was interacting with. Asian culture can strongly emphasize the family bond at the cost of everything else. I’ve heard numerous stories of families sweeping major crises or scandals under the rug. That’s a value that was often repeated to me when people commented on the dirty laundry I aired, that family comes above all else. However, I couldn’t carry on with my immediate family relationships. There are people whose characters are asbestos, nicotine, poisonous lead. There are those that are highly reactive and volatile, weeds that behave like grass but suck all the nutrients out of your environment. There are species that eat their own young. I didn’t base my decision on a single interaction or moment, but there has been some decades of both good and bad times. I also don’t cancel relationships when friends do bad things. I have close friends who have committed egregious acts in their past, while their other friends have cancelled them, based on those very sins. I continue to stick beside them because I’ve seen who they are across numerous scenarios and situations. I know them as much as I’m able to with the time given us.

There’s more to an individual than a single decision, but admittedly some are much worse than others. My point is that we need to make these decisions on an objective level, not solely on how great our dynamics might be with certain individuals. I can’t be friends with someone who is actively evil and oppressive just because we can laugh at the same jokes. But I also need to take into account that we’re all human, that we all make mistakes. And though we should all be allowed to be imperfect and have room to grow and change, we cannot blind ourselves to the need to judge ourselves and others based on the content of our character.

This year is when I felt like everything started making sense. All the work I put into my future, whether that was my marriage, career, personal development, it’s all coming to a head right now, and moving forward, I feel like I can live a fulfilling and meaningful life. The combination of the privilege I enjoyed, the suffering I endured, and the choices I made all seem to have converged into this state of balance. Everyone’s “age of convergence” is unique. Even within families, it can differ because of each person’s unique experiences and personalities. I think parents like to think they love and treat all their kids equally, but we all know that’s not true. Looking back, getting it together meant that I had to process what it meant to grow up in a narcissistic home and then to choose how to reconcile that in my own life moving forward.

What does it mean to “get it together?” It’s pretty subjective, but you could relate it to Maslow’s self-actualization. You know what you want to do for a career. You get the education and training you want. You know where you want to live. You have the friends and support you need. One of my mentors said they found their thirties to be their best decade. All the awkwardness and silliness of their teens and twenties was behind them, so their thirties were simply focused on staying the course and smoothing everything out. 30 is not the new 20. I can relate, as many things have lined up for me recently: hobbies, marriage, friendships, living arrangement, work, health.

Some people’s lives never converge. Some kids are shot and killed in gang fights. Children of anti-vaxxers suffer an early and easily preventable death. School buses full of children are blown up by missiles in wartime. Victims of abuse may never find the right balance of treatment, therapy, and other supports in order to survive and live a life of dignity.

I played a lot of catch-up in the last few years. I felt like I was falling behind in a lot of ways because of my dad’s over-emphasis on my success in my career. I was socially awkward, self-sabotaging, mentally and physically unhealthy. Going into therapy and quitting my job all contributed towards me catching up and reaching a balance earlier than fate had in store for me. Essentially, it meant untangling all the implications of living in a home with narcissists, including removing those tendencies within myself.

Normally, I try not to think about my family and their problems. That’s kind of how I grew up, taking on their issues since they didn’t take responsibility and spilled them all over the place, so nowadays I try instead to focus on my own stuff. As one does these days, Carrie was bored, so she went on YouTube looking for something to watch. I don’t know why YouTube’s algorithm suggested it, but there was a video that popped up called “Dating a Narcissist.” She shared it with me, not because one of us is a narcissist but because it shed light on what it felt like to be in a relationship with my family.

One of the lessons I learned from this video is that narcissists are made, not born. One of the conditions for making a narcissist is when a child is both overindulged and underindulged. A parent will cheer on their child at their team’s sporting event but won’t get involved with the more mundane, daily activities of the relationship like helping with homework. It’s both too much emotional involvement in one moment and too little in the next. We felt that in our childhood home, with both my parents working a lot to provide a good life for us. There was always a vacuum for attention. No one was getting the support or quality time they needed. With so many people in the house, and as the kids entered their teenage years, our individual schedules started to fluctuate and diverge. Dad was always away on mission trips, Mom was stretched between working at the hospital and taking care of the home, we mostly attended different schools in any given year. Being the pastor, my dad would always take people in if they needed a place to crash for a while, anywhere from a night to a couple years. It wasn’t all bad, but it certainly contributed to most of us feeling neglected and unheard. My personality developed as the peacemaker, often volunteering to step out of the situation so that others could get their needs met, usually by lending a listening ear, so being ignored is a veritable sore spot for me.

Narcissists feel empty inside. They don’t have a rich inner life where they process emotion in a healthy way and accept who they are and who they aren’t. There isn’t that sustainable, dependable emotional feeding that happens like in normal people, so there’s this feedback loop that grows the emptiness inside while simultaneously increasing how much praise and validation they cultivate from others. You could see this trait in my family through our interactions with strangers, especially with those from the service industry. Because of the natural power dynamic of receiving service, my brothers and I would hold these poor folks hostage with our awkward small talk, pressing and reaching until we received validation that we were funny or charming or witty. When we were in university, many people would say “Oh, I know your brother!” Chris, Josh, and I all had our own forms of popularity, with my circle of influence being the smallest of the three. We became known as The Lê Brothers, an identity I began to shun after I graduated as I started the process of ghosting and eventually ending contact with my family. Even these days, I struggle with this reflex, this learned instinct to demand more attention for my accomplishments. A sentiment that was often repeated in our home was “One day, they’ll see. They’ll all see.” It became ingrained into our psyches that there was this unjust absence of recognition, which I think a lot of us can relate to in this noisy world. However, repeating this mantra too often can over-inflate the ego and turn it into this superhero complex, hence why narcissists’ self-identity can never be fully fed.

I had to shed many of my narcissism early on in my relationship with Carrie in order to keep her around, but there are some bits that remain. Much of the work that I did has been well-documented on this blog over the past three odd years. I still have delusions of grandeur, fantasizing about being famous or world-renown for something, giving interviews like I were a celebrity promoting their latest product. I still struggle with needing far too much praise from those around me. Far too often, I’ve done so much to impress others only too find that their appreciation and praise of me was lacking. In a classical conditioning way, I learned that the only way to get love and affection from my dad was to do and be what he wanted, so I sought that validation in others as well. I’ve written a few times before about how I would fish for compliments from people, and then when I got them, I wouldn’t be able to internalize or accept that praise. Even when Carrie tells me how much she loves me, sometimes my walls shoot up and I emotionally shut down. It’s a reflex where, due to the fluctuating emotional support I received as a child, I have a hard time trusting what people are saying about me. I’m afraid of it being true, that there are people who love me and have good feelings about me. Growing up, my core belief about myself was that I wasn’t good enough, where my dad constantly reminded me that I didn’t meet his expectations. Even though it feels way better to accept these compliments, the skepticism and hesitation comes from the disagreement with my core identity. I’ve struggled over the past five years to change my core identity, so it’s getting easier to accept those compliments. I know in my head that I’m worthy of love, but it’s harder to convince my heart that it’s true and to integrate that belief into the entirety of who I am. It sounds weird, but it can be terrifying to feel good about myself. I think there’s a lot to like about me.

According to Dr. Ramani, she’s rarely ever seen a narcissist turn things around, let alone seeing a relationship with one survive. If you remain in a relationship with a narcissist, she says you have to really lower your expectations from that person, plus you have to get your emotional support from everyone else around you. In my situation, it’s not worth the trouble; I don’t have the energy for them. It’s been about two and a half years since I stopped contact with my family. My parents have been reaching out lately, probably because of our wedding anniversary. People still want us to try to patch things up with my family, but it’s not happening. We were asked if we’d remain no-contact even until my dad dies, and the answer is yes. He’s been dead to me ever since I was a teen, so not much will really change once he physically dies. I will be sad, I might cry, but it’s been over for a long time. They’re not changing. I’d be open to letting them apologize if it were genuine and not just lip service, but even that’s just not happening.

I’ve gotten my shit together lately. My life has converged in a way that I like, and I’m quite happy about that. Many of the components have fallen into place, and the larger theme running through them is how I handled the narcissism I lived with around me and inside me. It’s been some two and a half years since I stopped talking to my family, and nothing’s about to change. I’m still working on the narcissism within myself, and the simple yet terrifying way I’ve been doing that is by learning to accept compliments and to feel good about who I am. Ya, I’m pretty lovely.

I’m no longer overextended. I’m able to truly rest and take on extra things only when I’m capable. It’s amazing. I don’t have so much to untangle or juggle or multitask or squeeze. Everything happens more or less in its own time, and it’s a welcome change. I haven’t been this free in probably five years.

The main reason for my new freedom is because we just got a portable dishwasher. It’s perfect. Normally I would take care of buying home appliances as a house spouse, but Carrie took the initiative. Our place is too small for a traditional one, which left us with only a few countertop options. We were prepared to spend $300 to buy it brand new since there weren’t many listings on Kijiji. However, Carrie found one going for $200. The seller was super nice too. They’d used it for a short while but didn’t need it anymore. They even included the little faucet adapter, and they communicated clearly over email and in person. It fit perfectly on our countertop and under our cabinets, and it’s surprisingly spacious inside. Noise is a huge factor for us too since we live in such a small space, and the dishwasher runs super quiet while we sleep. We had a bigger one in our old condo and it was noisy as hell, even with the bedroom door closed. Everything about this new one is just amazing.

As an engineer and technology enthusiast, I feel strongly about automating basic tasks to the robots. Computers and machines taking over menial tasks for humans unlocks our potential to do better things. Hans Rosling discusses how he could receive an education because the washing machine took over laundry duty for his grandmother, who then taught his mother how to read. I highly recommend watching his talk.

Picture Carrie washing almost all of our dishware for the last 5 years while I put them away once they dried. I probably helped to wash them about 10%-15% of the time. Throughout Carrie’s full-time work and school, she would still wash dishes for 30 minutes to an hour every day while simultaneously pushing out 80-100 hours of labour every week. I’m a great husband, eh?

I have lots of little issues with dishwashing. I hate getting my hands dirty, even if it’s to clean. Putting on rubber gloves doesn’t really help either because it gets hot and uncomfortable and tight, and I’m slightly claustrophobic and hate confined spaces. The amount of dirty dishes we generate is quite a bit for a family of two since we cook and eat at home more nowadays. The corner where our kitchen sink sits isn’t spacious, and it’s not terribly well-lit either. I’m not great at stacking dishes in the drying rack. I also generally like to over-clean them, so I take extra long to scrub simple things like chopsticks. These speed bumps can all be overcome, meaning it just takes a lot more energy for me to approach this particular chore, but there’s a larger reason why I hate it. Surprise, surprise, I have some childhood issues around dishwashing.

The first time I tried to help my mom wash the dishes was when I was around five or six years old. I wanted to help her clean up after a meal, so I asked if I could wash some bowls. I scrubbed them down, rinsed them, and put them in the drying rack, very proud of myself for helping out the family even though I was just a kid. Then my mom did some quality assurance inspections on my work and found that there were some defects. She pulled me over and pointed out the soap bubbles still sliding off the white bowls.

“Why didn’t you rinse these bowls?”

“I don’t know. I thought I did. I can do it again.”

“Why did you do this? How come there’s still soap on the bowls?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t see it. I’ll do it again.”

“Do you want us to eat food with soap in it?! Is that why?!” she asked, pulling me by the arm to the drying rack so I could see my handiwork.

“No! I didn’t know. Please just let me fix it.”

I cried and never forgot that experience. I never fully processed it over all these years, so it has come up several times in unexpected outbursts. My mom has no recollection of it. That’s just a heartbreaking image to me. A child trying their best to help out their parents and then getting absolutely fucking reamed out for a little mistake. As a result, I’ve always hated the chore my whole life. I get that my parents were probably stressed while raising us, stretched too far due to being poor refugees raising four little devils. I still want to know why my mom treated me like that. Even to this day, if I have to wash the dishes at home or at a friend’s place, whether by hand or by loading the washer, I have flashbacks to that day in the house where I grew up in Edmonton. I can see how tall the countertop was relative to how short I was. I can see my mom looming over me and shouting at me. I can still see the white bowl, covered with bubbles.

Some will argue that this is the best way to teach children. Bring the hammer down on them early on, and they won’t forget the lesson. I think that’s true, but there are certain scenarios where it’s more appropriate. Studies show that encouraging young children on their efforts rather than their intelligence teaches them to work hard and keep trying, having a growth mindset and learning how to learn, whereas the inverse causes them to perform worse long term. You could crack the whip on your kids to produce immediate results, but you pay the price by testing the relationship and weakening the child’s long-term adaptability. I was always told by my dad and others that I would understand their lessons once I was older. Well, I’m 30 years old now, and I hardly ever washed dishes until I got this dishwasher. How much older do I have to be for them to admit they were wrong on this one?

It didn’t help that over the years, my brothers and I fought over chores all the time. My parents had to cook elaborate meals for four growing boys, so there was always a mountain of dishes every day. If we weren’t forced to do it, we would leave them alone, though that was our general attitude to most of the home chores. After I moved out and before I stopped contact with my family, I visited maybe every couple months. Some years ago, they actually got a dishwasher installed, after probably 15 years of having a cutout under the counter specifically made for one but left empty in favour of storing things like the garbage and various cleaning supplies. I was beyond enthused for the household. “This,” I thought, “would finally end all of the strife over this chore.”

Wrong.

They still forced the kids to wash dishes by hand. At this time, my younger cousin had moved in, and she was made to spend a lot of time at the sink. My brother and his girlfriend were living there temporarily as well, and she also was made to help out by scrubbing dishes, amongst other things. Even Carrie had to help out whenever she visited, which was a misguided effort by my parents to teach the girls how to be responsible wives. Both women were already far more mature and responsible than the four of us boys. Seeking to put an end to all this misery, I tried to encourage/force my parents to use the dishwasher. I thought they just needed someone to teach them, so I showed them how to load it and run the cycle. Nope, didn’t take. Okay, so maybe they were just older and need time to adjust because they had older habits carried over from decades of momentum. Hm, well, they took really strongly to their iPhones and learned quickly how to take photos and send emails and texts, despite the larger learning curve, so clearly they could learn if they were properly motivated. Okay, so maybe they were just old school and distrusted machines doing a proper job versus good old human dexterity and skill. Well, I don’t know, my mom had so much back pain from working on her feet for 30 odd years that she used the massage chair almost every day. So no, they didn’t have some distrust of machines. I thought maybe the prices ere too high for all the detergent and rinse aid, so Carrie and I bought them a few large tubs to get them started. They appreciated it a lot. Probably one of the better gifts I ever bought them since it was practical and they didn’t like receiving decorative or fancy things. Well, that still didn’t get them into the habit of using the dishwasher. I shared studies and facts about saving water, how much cleaner the dishes would be since humans can’t handle the higher temperatures and stronger detergents and higher water pressures, how immigrants associated hard labour with soul redemption, and on and on until I was blue in the face. Couldn’t convince them through logical arguments either. So what was the hold up? Why wouldn’t they change their ways to make the home a much happier place?

Power and control. The patriarchy was alive and well in this house. Since they couldn’t really vocalize their objection despite me constantly peppering them with questions, the only thing left to conclude was that they delighted in making the kids do the hard work. Part of it is from receiving that treatment when they were children. They must have been forced to do all sorts of crap jobs because that’s the social structure in Vietnam. Chores were used as punishments, so maybe that’s why it was impossible to transition them to using the dishwasher. Sometimes my dad wouldn’t even let us help each other out by splitting up the jobs between rinsing, scrubbing, and drying. It was the one lever they could pull to remind the kids who was in charge, and it worked. My parents cooked, paid the bills, so the kids damn well better wash the dishes. It’s the least we could do! The unfortunate part is that the argument worked. I was the only one who really wanted to rebel, which was easier since I didn’t live there anymore. I came in and rocked the boat, told my parents to use the dishwasher so the kids wouldn’t have to suffer. I think the suffering was the whole point of the exercise.

Everyone has to decide whether to pass on the pain they experience or to prevent it for others. When driving, I’ve personally given up on moving out of the fast lane on Deerfoot Trail. There, I said it. It isn’t enforced here (as far as I know), and there are jurisdictions that ticket you if you drive slow in the fast lane. I get that by driving slowly in the left lane, I create an unsafe driving condition because people that want to pass me have to change lanes, zoom ahead, then get back into the left lane. On the other hand, every time I move out of the fast lane to make way for the speeders, I encounter five other people who’ll never move out of my way when I’m in a hurry, even though I politely keep my distance and avoid tailgating them. I’ve driven tens of thousands of kilometres on the highway in my 15 years on the road, and I’m just fed up with people not reciprocating my proper road manners. Even more, it’s a systemic safety issue for the government and traffic law enforcement because they haven’t created and maintained a culture of consideration, with driver re-testing and public service announcements and enforcing the numerous signs they put up that say SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT. In short, I have often acted safely on the road by moving out of the fast lane when people want to pass, but since almost nobody does it for me, I just maintain my speed in the fast lane now, even if big, mean-looking trucks tailgate me aggressively. That is, since I have to suffer behind slow people in the fast lane, I pass on that suffering to people behind me. So I understand where my parents are coming from with the chores. They grew up in an extremely strict, conservative environment. Now that they’re older and in charge, they’re relishing the opportunity to force the kids to do their bidding.

Every one of our parents does considerable emotional damage. And from what I've heard, it just might be the best part of being a parent.

Dr. Perry Cox

Stopping the spread of suffering. This is where I try to demonstrate that I understand both sides of this coin. I’ve done a lot in the past few years to ensure that I don’t pass on the suffering I endured. I had this massive ego cultivated in a narcissistic environment, and I’ve done a lot to humble myself and to try to see myself more clearly. That way I don’t hurt the people around me because now I have a smaller, more accurate boundary around my self-identity, and those boundaries aren’t violated as much since they don’t take up as much room. Growing up, I was mostly praised for what I could produce instead of for who I was, so now I’ve switched up a lot of my work and hobbies to be an outpouring and reflection of my intrinsic value rather than a perpetual pursuit for meaning through my productivity. Again, I did this so that I won’t require so much validation from the people close to me for my acts of service because I’ll help out from a place of love instead of neediness. Further, instead of constantly asserting my brains and wit over everyone to remind them how much better I was than them, I’m learning to hold my tongue and to let others shine. I take on mentorship and coaching roles whenever I can because I felt so lost growing up as a kid, with no one really taking me under their wing to develop and nurture my potential. I’ve chosen my relationships over my work, time and time again, ensuring I don’t repeat the devastation my dad caused on our family by picking his career over us. I know that, in their own way, my parents worked hard to give us a better life than they had. They worked very hard to give us a large and comfortable home, vacations, cars and fuel, and an education. However, I would have traded it all just to spend more time with them. Now that I’m a little older, I see some parents provide that same type of lifestyle to their kids as a form of overcompensation, when really the children are happy to just have their parents’ time and attention. Maybe that’s all my parents could manage in their own version of protecting us from the suffering they faced, and I’m just an ungrateful little prick. This is just another example of how we couldn’t get along. Maybe it’s not a dealbreaker on its own, but I fought unsuccessfully to protect my siblings from my parents torturing them with a chore when it was completely unnecessary. Regardless, I have my own family to protect from suffering, and disconnecting from them protects me and Carrie, as well as our future children. Having a dishwashing machine is another way I’ll protect my family from suffering.

When I shared the news of the dishwasher with my friends, some of them were confused why it was such a big deal. When you’ve always had a dishwasher, it’s hard to empathize with those who’ve struggled without one for years, so I can understand why they couldn’t match my enthusiasm. However, for me, buying the dishwasher was a big blow to the mental and emotional complex I had surrounding that particular chore. It’s a rebellion against the power and control my parents always sought to have over us. I tried to free my siblings and cousin from it during the few years of contact I had with them after I moved out, but my parents weren’t having it. I hope I’m wrong about them. I hope they’ve shifted to using their own dishwasher more often, changing the arguments from who will wash the dishes by hand to who will load or unload the dishwasher. I don’t even know who lives in that house now anymore, so maybe it’s a moot point altogether. I sincerely hope so. Maybe my approach was entirely wrong, trying to change the house rules when I wasn’t the one paying the mortgage. Maybe it’s only okay for them to deeply violate my boundaries and maybe it’s not okay for me to do the same to them.

This dishwasher is saving our lives these days. I feel grateful to be able to hand over some grueling chores to the robots. It’s addressing some deeply painful experiences from growing up with my family, from a traumatizing first attempt at helping my parents wash the dishes as a kid to the frequent arguments and struggles every week with my brothers over who would take the dishwashing bullet for the team. For some reason, my parents really wanted us to do them by hand even though there was a perfectly functioning machine that could do a better job and provide some peace in the home, but I can only think that they wanted to exert their power and control. They must have needed to pass on the suffering they experienced as kids, even as they protected us from other forms of suffering in their provision as parents. I can’t really know since they could never really explain why anyone had to be miserable washing dishes in the sink instead of delegating to the robot. It doesn’t matter anymore since I’ve stopped talking to them. Now Carrie and I spend more time together at night, saying how much we love each other and our new dishwasher.

We’re managing really well these days, and it’s mostly because of my down time. It may not look like we’re thriving, but we are. Most of our recent financial challenges are behind us now, we’re showing up for our friends and family, we’re getting enough sleep, we’re eating well, we’re getting out and partying with our friends plenty. We haven’t moved the line much on our debt, but we stopped it from growing, a worthy accomplishment on its own. To the untrained eye, it may look like we’re leading a fairly normal life, but we’re accomplishing quite a lot with what we have. Sometimes we’re tempted to just cut back on enjoying ourselves, like not partying two or three nights a weekend, but that’s a knee-jerk reaction that doesn’t really help us long term. People also get really caught up on the fact that Carrie makes most of the money while I make so little working part-time. We’re non-traditional. We do what we want. I work full time, but I only get paid for about half of it. Being a house spouse is a job too, but like Ali Wong says, there are no coworkers and I don’t get investment matching for my retirement.

Lately, I’ve been trying to quantify how much nothing I need to do every day. Not all down time is made equal. Sometimes I’ll close my eyes and sleep. Other times, I’ll let my thoughts roam and wander. Deep breathing is key too, which does something to my parasympathetic nervous system and lets the rest of my body know that everything is going to be okay. It’s almost like I’m wrestling myself every morning, and I win by slamming my body onto the couch or bed and staring out the windows at the sky. I wouldn’t quite call it meditation, which I understand to be quite focused. My down time is usually aimless and wandering. Sometimes it’s five minutes at a time peppered throughout the day. Other times it’s a single session for multiple hours. People tell me it takes quite a bit of discipline to do, which never really occurred to me. I get that it’s hard to get around to it, but the word “discipline” has come up three times now. I’ll have to unpack that eventually. In my mind, the benefits are so clear that it’s crucial. Non-negotiable. Both our lives right now are hinging on me taking down time. I’m so busy that I urgently need to do a lot of nothing. When my anxiety pushes me to do too much and I don’t know how to proceed, I lie down. I’ll only get up once it becomes clear how to proceed. An important milestone once I’m laying there is feeling like I’m returning to my true self. It’s like I snap back to reality. That’s partly why I’m not writing so much these days. I’m not so mixed up emotionally, so doing nothing is often a better use of my time than writing. I can’t write unless I create space by doing nothing. Half an hour a day seems pretty good. I stop when I get bored. This practice is all based on the underlying assumption that I’m always trying to do too much, so if that ever changes, then this system stops working. An hour a day is a fine goal. Half an hour a day seems attainable, though each day is so different that an average is practically meaningless.

Money is still kinda tight. I don't like to be stingy because it's usually a short-term improvement that costs us again in the medium-long term, but it's hard to argue when you need to squeeze every dollar. Considering our cash flow is pretty decent, we resort to penny pinching a surprising amount. These past few months, we’ve made a lot of behavioural changes like cooking more, using what we have, saying no to new purchases, cutting our grocery bills, checking insurance plans and details so we can maximize our benefits. There was a point where I had become so fixated on activities like skipping snacks at work to save money that I started to lose sight and feel discouraged. It didn’t really feel like we were moving the needle in any meaningful way, and then randomly one day, Carrie asked how much I weighed. I hadn’t stepped on the scale for months because I made a decision a while ago to stop focusing on getting healthier, so I thought it was pointless to check. Alas, after ignoring my weight for a couple months, I lost 10 pounds! I haven’t weighed this little since 2014. That was a nice feeling. I’m not even really that unhappy with the way I look or feel, but it showed that we had made some progress somewhere. Looking at our budget as well, we’ve cut a ton of costs and made much smarter purchases, and every little bit counts. Sometimes we treat ourselves to candy or a bag of chips, but I think that’s okay.

There are lots of ways where I’m not fully healthy. There was a time where I stopped everything just so I could focus on working on myself, which I refer to as The Struggle, but nowadays I have to move on and manage things along the way. Here are some of those things I have to manage.

I’m still more extrinsically motivated than I’d like to be; that is, I seek external validation more than I think is healthy. I’m taking better care of my body, but I’m doing it for other people’s approval. I exfoliate, moisturize, and groom mostly because I want to look better to others. It’s not because I care about taking better care of myself and to live longer and to nourish my skin because it’s my largest organ and needs so much care to continue functioning. I want to have a very muscular build, even though I’m not going to the gym right now. I think it’s normal and healthy to want to improve our appearance to be more appealing to others, but I know the way I’m motivating myself now is not sustainable or ideal. I’ve kept it a little too real in the past, which wasn’t great either because I would feel bad about my appearance. It’s currently not a balanced mix of doing it for myself and others. There are some areas now where I’m solely doing it for external validation, so even if I have some work to do here, it’s not so severe that I have to pause my life to work on it.

Anxiety. Right now I picture how much energy it would take an emotionally healthy person to perform a task, and then I imagine that I have some 10-15% tax on it that makes it harder for me. Sometimes I have to check information a dozen times. Whenever I start or end anything, I like to take my sweet precious time to transition smoothly between activities. Take laundry as an example. I’m very particular about the order in which I perform certain chores. I like to have all the dirty clothes with me, already separated into different loads. Then I start the water, grab the detergent, open the laundry machine lid, put in the detergent, close the lid, put the detergent away, open the lid again, put the clothes in, close it again. I like for the detergent to disperse in the water so that it’s more gentle on the clothes, and it takes some time for the water to fill up enough to spread it around. That doesn’t seem too different from other people’s laundry routines, but the trouble comes in when I curse myself for doing things out of order. Sometimes I toss the clothes in, start the machine, then grab the detergent. No, that doesn’t work for me. Sometimes I want to start the machine before gathering up the clothes. No. I yell at myself, and then I have to step backwards to start over again. That’s my anxiety requiring extra control of my behaviour because I have too much fear around doing it wrong. This goes for other things like making coffee, cooking, cleaning, my morning routine, traveling. The anxiety tells me that there will be life-altering consequences if I do things in the wrong sequence, but even if I know in my head that those fears are patently false, I can’t always fight the voice. You know you’re not supposed to scratch those mosquito bites, but sometimes you have to, even if it causes more bleeding or damage to the skin. It just feels good to give in sometimes, and that’s how I live with anxiety. I can’t fight it all the time, so I have to take it along for the ride.

I also have this pervading feeling of defeat, of brokenness. There were multiple large battles that I fought during The Struggle where I feel that I mostly came out on top, but you can’t help but take some painful blows during a war. Nowadays I can barely raise my hands in protest when I know I should. I can’t even haggle or barter for simple things like buying and selling secondhand items. Right now I just hope and pray that conflict doesn’t come my way because I know I won’t win the fight. I have so little energy that I categorize most conflicts as “not worth the trouble.” That isn’t to say that I can’t or don’t fight back at all. I do, but only on essentials. I still have to hold a really hard line with my family of origin because sometimes they try to contact me even though they haven’t changed. I’ve blocked or filtered them from most possible means of ingress, but they still come knocking despite not doing the work I need them to do. Every once in a while I’ll miss them too and think to reach out. Then I have to give my head a shake and cuss myself out. That doesn’t leave much nerve or audacity to haggle over $20 with someone from Kijiji. It also takes a lot of risk to keep an open posture. Not just a physical one, but an emotional, mental one, an attitude of openness to the possibilities left in life. It’s easier for me to be bitter, to feel betrayed and think that the world owes me. It’s also a dark and lonely place that isolates me from the goodness and joy in my everyday experience. I used to live in a perpetual pity party, and it only feels good for a short while. I think the only way I can respond to injustice and pain is through art. I have to talk, write, and dance it out. Retaliation isn’t the answer, tempting and satisfying as it is. All these things leave me feeling too drained to sweat the small stuff, so I have to keep on.

I’m still very much traumatized. I still have these vivid moments of dissociation where I visualize myself in grave danger when there is clearly nothing threatening me in that moment. I’ll walk around the corner, and I’ll imagine that someone is lurking there, ready to stab me to death, and I have to figure out a way to defend myself and disarm them. Sometimes I’ll host these ridiculous arguments in my head, where my opponent randomly comes up to me and shouts obscenities, somehow knowing all my weaknesses and saying everything I would hate to hear about myself. I know those are echoes of my family, taking logically absurd stances in shouting matches just to get their way. That’s not really going away, and as far as I can tell, I would need to go back to see a therapist in order to settle some of that stuff. Is that PTSD? I’m functioning, but functioning, or even succeeding, isn’t ideal given the news of people like Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain. It’s possible to be successful and have mental health issues. To be confused about that is like wondering how successful people can still break their bones. That’s what I focused on mostly during The Struggle, disarming the trauma so that I could carry on with a “normal” life, like having a job and maintaining my marriage. It’s not all gone, but it’s at a level where I can keep an eye on it week by week.

Obsessive cleaning. I never really knew it was a problem, but when I was in counselling, I would have to fill out surveys (also called scales) every four sessions so they could track my progress. One of the questions asked if I washed my hands too much, which I thought was a bit odd, but I figured they probably had a good reason to ask. Fast forward to reading the book on “Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families” these past months. They mention that obsessive cleaning is a byproduct of dysfunctional families, needing to control your environment when you’re feeling uncomfortable. I tend to hate getting things on my hands. I hate washing dishes, I don’t like wearing my wedding or engineering rings, I hate putting wax in my hair, and I tend to wash my hands a lot throughout the day. I’m not quite OCD, as I understand it to be quite debilitating, but it’s probably another symptom of my anxiety. From a moral stance, there could be an aspect of feeling guilty and wanting to wash the sins from my hands. From a biological perspective, the hands are one of the most interconnected body parts with the brain, so they’re a pretty good indicator of what’s going on in the old noodle. When I wash my hands with the expensive, smooth, and fragrant lemongrass self-foaming hand soap, it allows me to wring my hands together, which is one of those behaviours you associate with people who are terribly worried. This area probably deserves its own treatment, so I’m not really gonna work on it for now.

To keep balance, I party a lot. Even though I talk a lot about feeling the squeeze with money, we have a big line item in our budget reserved for going out with friends, boozing, and traveling to and from parties. It doesn’t look like it should fit into the overall priority of saving money, but this is how I live my best life. I work hard, I play hard. I work full time like everyone else, but I only get paid about 20 hours a week. House spousing ain’t easy. Partying is necessary, and apparently I’m not slowing down even though I’m an old man.

When in doubt, it’s better for me to be safe than sorry. I take the lower risk option. We’re currently committed to getting Carrie through this next year to become fully registered. Trouble’s gonna find me regardless, so I need to do what I can to not find any more. The trade-off when I take the safer route is that I sacrifice potential gains. It’s hard for me to choose to be less efficient in the moment, but with everything on my plate at the moment, things are more efficient in the grand scheme.

Now that I’m embracing being a house spouse, housework is more liberating and fun than it used to be. Feels weird to even say that. I take pride in my work, which enables me and Carrie to work a lot and party so hard. It allows us to show up for the important people in our lives. I know my purpose in doing such menial tasks, which makes it more fulfilling. I’m sure it’ll get old again with time, but it’s interesting feeling so rejuvenated by chores by dedicating myself to this supporting role. I’m having a lot of fun with our new dishwasher, which will require an entire blog post of its own. I’m surprised at myself for enjoying housework so much now that I’m embracing being a house spouse. It restores me.

If I’m not working on my problems so much, what am I doing with all that extra space I’m creating?

After months of doing nothing each morning, it feels safe to start processing The Fiasco. I had to pause the emotional processing about a year ago, but now that I’ve quieted my life down again, I realized that it was safe to engage in it again. It’s very densely layered, mixing in shame, sadness, self-hatred, self-esteem, betrayal, trauma, all the hits. Thus, there’s a lot of repetition while I process it. I have to just keep revisiting the thoughts and feelings, and slowly they’ll fade out of existence as I bleed them dry by letting myself feel overwhelmed for a short time every day. An important aspect for me to experience is letting my body feel the pain. It’s not simply a mental exercise. It’s a full body experience, feeling tingly all around my arms and neck, down my back. Tuning in to the alarm bells that have been ringing in my head ever since. It’s a delayed reaction, but you can’t delay it forever. I used to think it was so terrible when I would lay in bed, trying to fall asleep, and all sorts of embarrassing memories would pop up in my mind, out of the blue. Now I understand that to be my brain releasing some of the unnecessary emotions bottled up inside, which creates room and capacity for future potential. Pain is weakness leaving the body, and now it’s time for The Fiasco to stop taking up so much space in my body. It’s different from wallowing in my pain. It’s not the same as marinating my brain with toxic emotions. It’s about slowly releasing these powerful feelings in a sustainable way so that I can gradually open myself up to the randomness of life in the present and future. I’m letting go of the past in a way that doesn’t make me crumble. Suppose for a second that I had been able to go to therapy years ago before I actually did. Then maybe the pain wouldn’t have overlapped so much with Carrie’s schooling, which was a challenge enough on its own. Maybe I wouldn’t have needed to quit my job unexpectedly. That’s what I’m trying to avoid in the future. We have many challenges to address, like having kids eventually, moving into a new home at some point, and who knows what. If so much of my emotional capacity is tied up with The Fiasco, then I won’t be able to adjust to the wild mood swings of this world.

With some urgent bills behind us, we’re settling down and getting things sorted out. Budgeting, taking down time, having lots of fun, and even unpacking The Fiasco. This time around, I’m able to sustainably approach my own form of recovery, and part of that means living with whatever is “wrong” with me. I’m still anxious, traumatized, defeated. Carrie will be provisional for another year, which means we can’t take big risks right now. Therefore, instead of stopping everything to address some of my trouble areas, I’m moving on, and it hinges on me doing nothing for as long as possible.

It’s spring, or somehow in Alberta we skipped it and went straight to summer weather. Sadly, it’s still allergy season. I can barely breathe, and I’m always mere moments away from sneezing. Plus constantly scratching my new mosquito bites.

A couple weeks back, I quit Facebook, and it feels great. I don’t miss it at all. I never have that worry or fear of missing out, even if I am missing out on something. If there are important events, people will find a way to tell me. I’ll take all that energy back so I can hide away from the world and mind my own business.

Went to Edmonton for a friend's birthday, then went to see Gareth Emery. It was an amazing show, and I was with amazing friends. And yet, there was this moment where I felt my heart weighing me down heavily. Whenever this happened in the past, it was because of a specific event or painful memory, so I would process all the emotions and thoughts surrounding that memory, letting it all out while I danced like a maniac. This time, it was a generalized pain. Nothing popped out at me, no deeply hidden experience from my past. Just a heavy weight in my chest. A slightly younger version of me would have embraced it and dove in head first and ripped the wound open, but instead, the 30 year old me just let it be. Didn’t get too invested and didn’t run away either. The moment passed, and then I kept dancing like normal. This followed several days of going out late with friends. These feelings only seem to burn and pound in my chest only when I'm in the safest place I can be — the dance floor. It was a grounding moment to remind me where I am in my progress.

Recently, I applied for a new job, but I realized in the interview that I didn’t really want it. I made a calculated step to test the waters, to see how I would feel if I tried to take on more work, and the experiment provided a very clear answer. It’s hard for my ego and identity to accept, but I have it really good right now. I make enough money to pay the mortgage every month, and all things considered, I probably have the best part time job I could ask for. I have good friends at work, I have my availability and schedule just the way I like it, and I have enough time off to perform my main job as a house spouse. I’m so used to being a workaholic that it’s been a hard transition for me to be comfortable in my current situation. Normally it takes me six months to settle in to a new role, but it’s taken me about a year for this one. In preparing for the interview, I reflected on my time at the company so far, and it slowly dawned on me just how great of a chasm I crossed in getting here. After about 10 years of corporate office work, it’s been a big transition to retail. It was a big change having to punch in and out on time for work. Even while I was working in engineering, compared to some of my coworkers, I only had to report exception time, meaning I only had to file my hours when I was either on vacation or working on a specific project. Otherwise it was always assumed that I was at work on time, doing what I was supposed to do. As well, I’m so accustomed to working with the same 10 or so dudes, but this job is all about customer-facing work, and every day is a new mix of coworkers too. I have a ton of variety in my day, which I enjoy and prefer, but my mind has been solidified in the Dilbert routine for the last decade. As a result, in this past year I’ve grown personally and professionally at a rate I never have before, and I love it. I’m working on parts of myself I never knew needed work, and I’m even finding skills I never knew I had. After a year, I’m only just now getting settled into this job, so I shouldn’t be so quick to rush off and start new adventures just because of my pride. I should sit down and be humble.

Is there anything left for me to do now that I’m trying to stay out of trouble? Of course there is. There’s plenty.

This year I’ve embraced my responsibilities at home as a house spouse, and now that’s starting to pick up. As Carrie gets busier with her private practice, there’s more for me to do around the house, especially as we try to get out with the nice weather to see friends. I’m cooking more and experimenting with new recipes and cuisines. Supercook is a life saver right now, filtering recipes by what ingredients I already have instead of me starting with a recipe and going out to buy more ingredients. It’s spring cleaning time, so with the added daylight, there are tons of things we need to do to prepare for the summer, like flipping the closet or changing filters or killing bugs (eek!). Just finished up the last bit of car repairs for a long while (I hope), which has cost us a pretty penny. We just went through a small bout of financial emergencies for a couple months, but things are levelling off finally. We’re changing a lot. Not buying so many things on a whim anymore, making lots of little decisions that hurt in the moment but give us more oxygen in the future. Tightening the belt during the week and responsibly letting loose on the weekends.

It’s been six years since I started working on my posture, and I’m finally starting to see some progress. All those years of school and office work turned my back into a crescent moon, but now I’m catching my bad posture more frequently at the source. I remember to pull my shoulder blades down and together, arching my spine in the right direction. I’m doing a lot more stretching and strengthening of various muscle groups so that my baseline posture is closer to the ideal position. I’ve also been getting monthly massages for almost the entire past six years, which helps to reset most of my muscles because stretching on my own can’t cover everything. It’s an interesting project that’s stuck with me through all this time, even as I went through the Struggle and my New Three Years Resolution. Even when I hit rock bottom and during my time unemployed, I was still trying to work on my posture. Existing is such a painful experience for me sometimes. While I was writing about the worst emotional pain I had ever experienced, I was trying to sit up straight in my office chair, correctly aligning my elbows and forearms with my desk at a 90 degree angle. Feels good to finally see some improvement.

With the passing of my birthday, it’s also really nice to know that I have love. Abandoning my family of origin and creating my own family of choice has been a long and painful process, but I now have people who I can count on to show up for me when I need it. After recently visiting some in Vancouver and Edmonton, it’s reassuring to actually feel the love after years of cultivating a mass of relationships. I made a lot of those new friends after meeting them through mutual friends, and I’m still able to make new friends even now, with all the challenges of adult relationships. There was a time when I felt stuck with the same miserable people in my life, which was a very depressing fate to encounter. However, by sharing my experience openly with others after moving away from home, I learned from my peers just how dysfunctional and bizarre my childhood experience really was. I worked a lot on myself, and consequently, I started attracting different people. I have a full roster of people who stick by me, and Carrie still seems to like me despite all of my strong odours and weak puns. I am loved.

Even though I sorta just finished my New Three Years Resolution, I have to put myself on ice again for a few more years. I'm not back to a position of strength. It vaguely seems like I still have a few years left yet before I stop feeling so vulnerable. What's the rush? I have nowhere to be, no one to impress, nothing to prove. I've already shown up to the critical battles, and now's the time to eat and sleep. Doing nothing each day is the best, whenever I can get around to it. I'm an old man now, at the ripe old age of 30. I've been through some shit, a sentiment which Kendrick captured in the song "Mortal Man" with an interview he staged with Tupac. He puts it like so:

In this country, a black man only have like 5 years we can exhibit maximum strength, and that’s right now while you a teenager, while you still strong, while you still wanna lift weights, while you still wanna shoot back. 'Cause once you turn 30 it’s like they take the heart and soul out of a man, out of a black man in this country, and you don’t wanna fight no more. And if you don’t believe me, you can look around. You don’t see no loud mouth 30-year-old motherfuckers.

Tupac Shakur

Obviously there are huge differences between the African-American experience and my own, but that passage hit me hard. Everyone has the potential to do the impossible. On one end of the spectrum, some kids can launch startups in their teens and make millions, and on the other end, they quit school to find work and feed their families. I don’t feel bad for myself as though I never had that potential. I tried to start businesses numerous times, unsuccessfully. I juggled far too many activities at once while I was in school, and once I graduated, I worked extra hard at my jobs so I could feel better about myself. As a result, I don’t have that same energy anymore for getting ahead, to leapfrog the competition. I don’t have the energy to go back to school, or spend my spare time developing my skills using free online courses. Even though I heard about Bitcoin a long time ago, I didn’t have the risk tolerance to make the leap and invest even if I wanted to. I feel like I spent my best years trying to survive, and this is where I ended up, which is great by all measures. Still, it's a struggle for me because I always pictured having more by now, but the problem with those expectations is that I never calculated the impact that years of abuse would have on my trajectory. I'll always have this rebellious spirit, thinking for myself and standing up for what I believe in, but I don't have the rocket fuel anymore. I know life isn’t over yet, that there’s still hope for me, as all the recent graduation announcements for people in their 50’s to their 90’s have shown on Twitter. It isn’t the end for me yet, but now is not the time for getting ahead. Now is the time to stay put.

All I wanna do now is stay out of trouble, get by, and have fun with my friends. Who knows how long I need to recover? That's Future Jon's problem. On today’s to-do list is popping some anti-histamine pills and going outside to enjoy the sun and mosquitoes.

I’ve been slowly upgrading my wardrobe, one article at a time. Got a couple good items so far, like sneakers, coats, and what my friend affectionately refers to as my “ass pants.” I don’t like to rush my clothing decisions because there are too many hypebeasts who buy whatever new trend there is and look terrible. They don’t wear their clothes, but the clothing brands wear them. That is, the clothes don’t enhance their personal look and style, but the people wearing the clothes enhance the brand’s value through their endorsement. The next item I was thinking of getting was something in camouflage, and in my nerdy way, I wanted to read up on the subject before landing on a pattern, colour scheme, and which article to get it for. It’s a pretty fascinating subject. There are different domains for animals and military vehicles to hide themselves, like the water, sky, forest, desert. There are different methods of achieving this depending on the milieu, like trying to not cast a shadow, trying to blend in with your surroundings, trying to hide your tracks. Fish will countershade by having a bright belly and a dark top, so predators looking from above and below have a harder time seeing it. There are planes that can avoid detection by radar or other sensors, and animals mask themselves to bypass the physical senses of the prey or predator. Interesting stuff.

It made me ask a few questions. What does it mean to pay homage to the military industrial complex which forced my parents to leave their home country? What does it mean for me to camouflage myself as a human? What purpose will the camouflage serve in my survival? Physically, I stand out from the people around me because of my skin colour. Not only that but I was blessed/cursed with this quick brain, so even if I could look the same as people around me, I sound and act different. That’s something I’ve accepted as I’ve gotten older, that there really isn’t a chance for me to blend in. That being said, I have always been a little secretive with my goals. I generally try to present as plain and unassuming, but in the background, I’m actually working really hard to level up. It’s like the zebra’s camouflage. It’s very easy to spot them, but their striping makes it hard to see where they’re going. If you’re chasing one, it’s hard to tell by looking at it whether it’s going to suddenly cut left or right. For the longest time, I would work my regular job and finish the work assigned to me in an orderly fashion. But outside of work, I’d be reading up on industry trends, researching the next technologies, comparing how different regions handle our company’s problems, not the typical concerns of a worker bee. I was in power transmission, providing power quality reports, but I was reading stuff like how electrical vehicles would impact the country’s infrastructure and how billing would work on a smarter grid, especially as many Canadian parking lots already have some sort of free electrical outlet for block heaters. I tried to make it look effortless, like I just knew this stuff because it was common knowledge, not because I was ambitious and obsessively curious so I could get ahead. As far as clothes go, I’m trying to look more like the streetwear folks, so even by the simple fact that I’m dressing like them, I’m camouflaging to blend in like the kids these days. Maybe I don’t even need the camouflage pattern at all.

There are several ways that I blend into my surroundings. I use my language to sound like a Canadian. I try to be well-read so I can understand what people are talking about. I dress like people here. Nevertheless, I’ve always stuck out my whole life. I’m a person of colour in a province that’s only some 25% visible minorities. Growing up in church, I was the pastor’s kid, so right off the bat, I was different. There was a pretty clear delineation between kids of different ages, and there was only a couple people the same age as me. There were multiple families which shared the same few grandparents, so I stuck out because I wasn’t part of the fam. I was always the smart kid up until high school, where everyone was quite smart, but until then, I stuck out because I got good grades and didn’t struggle as much as my peers academically. Most of my junior high friends went to to high schools with their friends, but I went alone to a different one. Although I later studied engineering, the way I got there was a bit odd because there was my first year where I had to take the Faculty of Science equivalents of the Engineering courses before I could transfer over for second year. When I was 21, I started dating Carrie over long distance for 3.5 years, so there weren’t a lot of people I could relate to for relationship advice. My experience with my family of origin is super unique because there’s probably under 1% of the population that suffers from narcissism, and even if narcissistic family members are bothersome, there are still many people who stay in contact with them. I don’t mean to sound like I’m playing a tiny violin for my pity party, but over the last two weeks thinking about this topic of camouflage, the thought keeps popping up that I can’t really blend in.

Another important theme in camouflage is whether I am the predator or prey. I would say that I’m the latter because most of my significant experiences amounted to me getting away from people trying to attack me. I fought back against the man who sexually abused me as a child. I escaped my father who tried to bleed me to death slowly through emotional abuse. I quit a previous job when HR wanted to play chicken with my mental health. These days I try to just mind my own business. It’s not like I’m from a wealthy family that flipped businesses or homes, swallowing up the little guys, running the show. I have friends who are sharks, making tons of money, pushing their way to the top of the corporate ladder, overtly and aggressively asserting their power and influence to get what they want. Me, I try to slip through amongst the shadows. If I’m ambitious, I play my cards very close to the chest. I’m hyper vigilant due to my trauma, so I notice lots of minor details that most people miss, which I use to sneak around undetected. When I do reveal myself enough to make a move, it’s kind of confusing to most people. These days, people ask me why I work in retail when I’m an engineer. I tell them I do a lot of nothing at home to rest up from accomplishing too much too fast in my youth, which is true, except that I’m really resting up as much as possible so Carrie and I can blaze forward and survive. It helps us a lot when I can do some of the house chores which just require time and a little concentration, so working less and being a house spouse is truly an outworking of my extreme ambition. That doesn’t mean that I’m trying to run this town one day. My goal is still to slip by undetected.

Despite my use of camouflage, I’ve still collected some battle scars along the way. It increases your chances of survival, but it’s not a perfect defence. There are some frightening, lasting effects of abuse that I’m still working on. It’s hard work taking on the predators of this world and trying to escape unscathed, and I’ve taken some big hits along the way. At this age, it feels like there’s a direct trade-off between well-being and financial stability. I know people who got their paper but they’re not happy or well. We’re on the other end of the spectrum, where we’re emotionally and mentally stable, but our money ain’t right. Considering what we’ve been through and where we came from, we’re doing really well. It’s my feeling that with my upbringing, I wasn’t really meant to be happy and healthy, that the chances were really slim that I could live a fulfilling life. Things have stopped getting much worse, and we’re close to a standstill. We’re slowly climbing our way back up, but it’s a week by week process. Every little thing we do needs to be scrutinized, and now’s the time to do it. Any kind of debt should be treated as an emergency, so we’re getting ourselves organized before the long and arduous journey up from this valley. Making more money isn’t exactly a viable option right now, so we’re left with having to cut costs and change behaviours. There is hope. We could always sell our home or sell 3D prints in my new shop. We’re both very employable, so now it’s about reducing the frequency and size of our mistakes and avoiding unforced errors. I can cook like two or three dishes pretty well, and it hasn’t gotten boring yet. Financial responsibility is like 20% knowledge and 80% behaviour, so I’m taking better care of myself so that we can turn this ship around. There are a lot of good resources out there like Mr. Money Moustache, Dave Ramsey, Reddit Personal Finance Canada. Tax returns came in already, which helped us get over a recent hurdle, and now we’re on the right path for the long trek back up to zero. Week by week. Years back, we could have decided to stick with the money instead of our well-being, and we would have crushed our debt by now. Who knows if we would still be together though. It’s going to be really difficult, but it’s possible.

That all being said, there are a couple qualifiers I’d like to attach to our new project. As much as we’re focusing our attention on debt, I don’t want to talk about it all the time. I’m writing about it here so that it helps to process ideas and emotions on the topic, but I hate when money dominates a person’s life. You know those people that are always talking about money, when their life falls apart when gas goes up by half a cent per litre, when they complain about every extra penny they have to spend. I don’t want to be like that. And as much as we’re trying to treat it like an emergency, I’m trying to keep a cool head about it. There’s no use in panicking and worrying about it constantly since that leads directly towards making more mistakes. Staying calm and collected doesn’t exactly make a ton of sense when you look at the amount, but it makes perfect sense when you keep it together enough to consistently make progress on it. Life is more than just money, though money management is an essential part of life. We’re giving ourselves grace and being strict at the same time. We want to use up everything we’ve already bought. We’re saying no more often to all those little $5 to $20 purchases which evaporate your money so easily. There are a lot of direct and indirect moves we’re making right now to slowly inch our way towards stability. We’re doing our homework by budgeting. We’re keeping each other accountable with spending. We’re reaching out for support where we need to. Even being able to talk about it openly helps to take off some of the pressure so we can see a bit more clearly. That all being said, I really wouldn’t have done it any other way. I would rather be in this situation than to owe anything to my family of origin. I think it’s a clear difference between millennials and the previous generation where our parents would rather work and be miserable so they could save up for retirement. Millennials live more for experiences, and they take foolish risks like quitting a well-paying job. Being emotionally stable now allows me to have better judgement, whereas I was making tons more money just a few years ago but I was making way worse mistakes because my emotions were highly volatile and sometimes unpredictable. Money is very important in regards to having a self-regulating existence, but cash doesn’t rule everything around me. My debt doesn’t own me, I own it.

When looking for the next clothing item to buy, I did a little reading on camouflage in hopes that it would inform my purchase. It got me thinking about how I’ve masked myself from detection in my life, and though I had great success in certain areas, I also accumulated some serious battle scars along the way. My emotional and mental health were impacted by my family’s dysfunction and my childhood sexual abuse, and while it took some time to sort that out, now I’m turning my attention to our financial situation. It takes a toll when you have to quit your job unexpectedly, when you have to stand up to your attackers and choose the hard path to go out on your own. Even though it’s not such a great look, I’ll wear my battle scars with pride.

It’s time for me to #deleteFacebook. Not just deactivating, but deleting it permanently. I did a bit of a purge this week. I was having some problems with my phone, so I reset it to factory settings and didn’t restore my backup, which was easier than going through and deleting everything I didn’t want. I’m cleaning up and trying out what those consequences mean. Instead of filling my time with junk from the Facebook, Reddit, and Instagram, I’m disconnecting. There’s only a finite number of connections a person can have, and I’m happy with the ones I have now. Nobody ever really needs to get in contact with me that urgently, and there are still like 10 others ways to reach me if you really wanted. By removing social media, I’ll have more brainpower left over for the things I want to do. I’m ready to disconnect.

I’m expanding my morning ritual of doing nothing. Sometimes after doing a challenging chore, I’ll need a bit of time to clear it out of my brain with video games, TV, and the like. Obviously there are things that need to be done, but when there isn’t, I’m going to lie down in silence. I accomplished a lot these past couple weeks. I fixed a shelf that had been sagging, pulled out the stove and cleaned the floor underneath it, changed the filters on my humidifier and HEPA filter, unclogged the drain (3D modelling and printing a custom drain snake in the process), sold some jewelry, wheeling and dealing on Kijiji (Canadian Craigslist), and fixed the car. All sorts of odd jobs, all in line with spring cleaning, taking the initiative instead of just not doing it like I used to. Carrie said that in the past few months, I’ve done more than in the past few years. Calming things down and breathing deeply helps the body enter into a relaxed state, so it’s easier to enter into a productive mode when you need it. Less really is more.

In line with preserving what little energy I have, it was reflected to me a few months ago that I have too much empathy. It’s a skill I over-use, and I’ve started to notice when I get too absorbed into another person’s perspective. It comes from being gaslighted by my family over the years, having my grasp on reality questioned conveniently timed with when I was confronting them with their mistakes. As a result, I’m prone to being absorbed into other people’s perspectives, even when it conflicts with my own. That perspective-taking is an essential skill for surviving as an adult, but I sometimes take it too far. I have felt bad for people who were maliciously attacking me, when really I should have been directing that energy to protecting myself. Now, I’m trying to value my own perspective and stick up for myself. Sounds selfish, but I’m really trying to stop being so much of a pushover.

Saturday, I had a pretty bad anxiety attack brought on by an especially stressful day. I lost sight of things and just started doing chores like crazy. Feels nice to complete a lot of work, but then I ran out of fuel by the middle of the afternoon. I was trying to sell something on Kijiji, and something that a buyer said triggered a memory of my dad. (Believe it or not, I try to talk or think about my family as little as possible, but whenever it does happen, I process the thoughts and feelings until it goes away so I can go back to dealing with more important things.) So when the buyer reminded me of my dad’s bargaining, I started venting to Carrie, but then something different happened. Instead of the feeling going away, it started amplifying. It got worse and worse, and then my body went into a panic. Heart was aching, chest was tight, struggled to breathe. I tried to carry on with my day, but by evening, all I could do was lay down until I drifted off into sleep.

It was a reminder that even though I’ve regained some productive capacity in recent weeks, it’s still quite limited overall. I always seem to forget it, or maybe I just don’t want to believe it because I’m used to being capable and strong and I don’t like operating from this weak position. But alas, I have to reconcile with this new version of myself. This is who I am now. I wrote the other day about how I still have so much darkness left in me, and what I meant was that I still have a lot of delayed emotional pain to process from the abuse. Feelings don’t go away until you feel them, often requiring physical sensation and paying interest on the delay. Essentially, I just need to feel sad. So far this year, I’ve cleared my schedule, simplified my life, and done a lot of nothing, but I eventually need to address all these bottled up emotions. About a year ago, I stopped seeing my counsellor because I had run out of free sessions; 25 is extremely generous, and it saved my life. I could have sought more therapy, but I put a cap on it so that I could refocus my efforts on tidying up the rest of my life and marriage. I’ve been able to do that, but now that cap seems to be leaking from the pressure. It seems like stress triggers these little panic attacks, so I need to be especially careful to not put a chink in my own armour.

Occasionally, I still wrestle with suicidal thoughts. When I get extremely stressed and overwhelmed, all my mind can think to do to remove the pain is to end it all. When the stress dissolves, the thoughts go away. I really don’t want to die, and I know I have options and places to turn to if I need. It seems like it’s time for me to pick up my shovel and continue digging into the shit-clogged storm drain of my past. I keep thinking of myself as a kid interacting with my dad, who was vastly more powerful than me, and how he repeatedly put himself first. Maybe he wasn’t capable of loving me. The human body is pretty remarkable in how it can delay emotions by bottling them up. My buffer is full though, and the only way to clear it out again so that I can adjust to the normal ups and downs of everyday life is by processing everything one by one. It helps to keep reading the book “Adult Children - The Secrets of Dysfunctional Families” because it explains so much of my family dynamics. If I’m ever going to survive, I need to continue dealing with the emotional abuse from my family. This go-around, I want to focus less on what they did and more on what happened to me.

Finances. This is one of the final hurdles for us. All that schooling, job changing, buying a place, it all adds up after a while. We have a lot of debt. It would crush lesser persons, but even though it doesn’t quite look like it, we’re in a much better position than previous years. All of our problems have gotten out in the open, and now it’s time to pull up our socks. I’ve more or less dealt with my childhood stuff. We both had our big spending years where we were soothing our inner children who grew up poor. We had our travels, our fun parties. We paid for our educations, and we had an awesome wedding. We made the timely job changes to escape burnout and misery, and now it finally feels like we’re settled. No need for big trips anymore. No need for super fancy status items or clothes because we already have way more than we need. Time to just buckle down and work on paying off our debts.

I never really meant for it to happen this way, but it’s time to grow up now that I’m entering my 30’s. Time to disconnect from the wasteful social media timelines and newsfeeds. Time to open up my capacity by resuming the process of cleaning out the closet of my childhood. Time to settle down, save money, and pay down debt. Time to see myself as a tired old man, and savour every moment I have because it could easily be my last. I’m disconnecting from the mental junk food of social media so I can reconnect with myself.

I started a special discussion group at a previous job. The industry was changing and moving so quickly that I thought it useful to discuss and process the implications of all these quick moves made in the industry and by competitors, so I selected a handful of brilliant minds that could debate these ideas and figure out what our next moves should be. There wasn’t anyone asking us what direction the company should take, but it was a mental exercise to learn where the puck was moving. Topics could range from global industry trends, technical innovations, regulatory consequences, and philosophy and morality. It was quite a beautiful group whenever we could meet. One question posed by one of our members was “what is your purpose in life?” Some people answered things like taking care of their families, to be the best person they could be, or to be a good steward of the earth’s resources. I couldn’t really pin it down to something specific because I was and still am trying to figure it out, but the answer I gave was that I’m trying to survive. With Carrie and I both coming from refugee backgrounds, there’s only so far we could reach in our new lands, especially since our parents could only guide us so much while they figured out their new homes at the same time. Maybe our kids will be able to dream big and make those dreams into reality, but we have to be a bit more realistic. I’m still very much an optimist, but I like to keep my feet on the ground. I’m playing the long game, so what does it mean for me if I exchanged survival for short term success? What are the trade-offs of dedicating my youth to making as much money as possible? What’s the point of getting rich if it all just slips away and jeopardizes my longevity? Through my morning ritual of doing nothing, I realized that though I have all the time in the world, I have very little energy. With what I do have, I have to be hyper efficient and effective with it because the stakes are high. Let’s examine some of the implications of fixing my goal on surviving.

My main job now is to be a house spouse. Sorry, I meant to say trophy husband. Everything else takes away from it, even if it’s a good thing or something I deeply enjoy. A friend pointed me to a great cooking app called Top Chef University, which has everything I was looking for that I mentioned in my last post. Videos that cover all the topics I want, from the basics to some of the finer skills, and the writing and editing are superb. Not too long, not too short, not condescending either. Friends at work were asking if I was going to apply for any new jobs, but I haven’t. Yes, it would be nice to get paid more, but I want stability right now. I love a challenge, I love to learn, but anything that takes away from my home responsibilities right now is a negative. I have this terrible recurring thought that “I have all this free time, so I should do something productive with it.” It’s one of the ghosts of my old lifestyle, where my only value was my output, and it has caused me much suffering throughout my short time on this earth. Why should I always be productive? What’s wrong with doing nothing? Isn’t it enough that I rest? Am I not productive enough at other times? My to-do list is basically the same every week, but it’s becomes an interesting challenge when you pepper in all the sudden changes brought on by life. I’m enjoying being a house hubby.

Being healthy can even be a distraction. There are lots of stuff I’m supposed to do in order to keep myself healthy, but are they all absolutely necessary? If my pursuit is to survive, does good health contribute or take away from it? The answer is that it depends. These are most of the things I’m supposed to do to be healthy:

• Floss every day.
• Roll feet with massage roller and hockey ball.
• Exercise rotator cuffs.
• Strengthen deep neck muscles.
• Stretch out my chest in the doorway.
• Pinch my shoulder blades together once per hour.
• Exercise my medial glutes.
• Don’t eat bread.
• Eat organic even though the term isn’t regulated and it costs more.
• Raw, natural sugar instead of refined, processed sugar.
• No binge eating late at night.
• Do nasal rinse twice a day.
• Weigh myself once a week.
• Do yoga couple times a week.
• Moisturize.
• Use sunscreen.
• Eat yogurt to replenish gut bacteria.
• Get a full night’s sleep.
• Hit the gym couple times a week.
• Keep the humidifier running.
• Wash my face twice a day.
• Use a heat pack on my neck before stretching.
• Eat fruits and vegetables.
• Cook healthy foods.
• Eat more meals with smaller portions.
• Drink less.

That’s a long list of things, and they’re all nice to do. They aren’t absolutely essential for my immediate survival though. It’s easy to get caught up, running around and burning all my time and energy focusing on these things. I wind up feeling dizzy at the end of the day, wondering what I even accomplished. It doesn’t necessarily hurt to check off this entire list every single day until it starts getting in the way of my survival. I find that when I try to keep up with these little health tips pretty strictly at the start of the week, I crash really hard by Thursday. I take random naps, I binge eat, nothing gets done around the house, and then I feel guilty and pick myself up again at the start of the following week. Carrie likes to ask “What are you going to do with that extra life?” It’s fine if practising these things helps you to feel better because that’s what they’re for, but right now, I’m not just that interested in every moderate increase in health. Instead, I’m trying to be more adaptable as the situation requires. I don’t work 40 hours a week on my feet anymore, so it’s not absolutely essential that I spend time with the foot massage roller every single night. I abhor the wastefulness of the disposable dental picks, but as my dental hygienist says, it gets me flossing instead of not flossing. Raw sugar is expensive, so I’m using the refined sugar that we already have at home. Instead of doing all of them all the time, I’m trying to do some of them only on certain days. I’ve done a lot of things to increase my health, but if I focus on it too much, it gets in the way of my survival.

While I continue to start my days with boredom, my heart sometimes aches for seemingly no reason. With no impending deadlines or duties, my chest just pounds and hurts while I lay there doing nothing. The best way for me to understand it is that general anxiety is flushing out of my body. When you stop suppressing your natural alarm bells, all the little worries come out of the woodwork. I feel like I’m going through withdrawal from the stress and adrenaline or something. I’ll have nothing to do for three days in a row, but my heart will simply ache and pound through my chest the entire time. I’ll be exhausted by the end of the day, but I’ll also be confused because I hadn’t really done much visible work. However, I’m learning that letting the pain ache in my chest like that is considered emotional labour. I try to soothe it with the usual self-regulating processes, but for the first time in a while, I went on a raging snack attack. Grabbed the keys, jumped in the car, and roamed the earth until I ran into some food with high caloric density. It’s a terribly confusing period. Carrie reassures me daily that I don’t have to do anything unless I can handle it, so it’s fine if I do absolutely nothing all day. Not really sure why it’s happening, not sure how to make the pain go away.

Doing nothing every morning started off as a cute, light-hearted exercise. I was satisfying a years-long thirst for peace and tranquility. It was like taking a picnic by myself, drinking in the sunshine, patting myself on the back for doing the important and non-urgent work of genuinely resting. Then as I was sitting there, minding my own business, I slowly developed a sneaking suspicion that something was watching me. I was partly right. In fact, there were a couple things staring at me. Slowly turning around to identify what was stalking me, it was all of the long and winding storylines that were watching me with anticipation, waiting for a satisfying conclusion. It’s like I’m in the final season of Game of Thrones, wondering how these huge, distinct subplots should crash together into an unpredictable and penultimate climax. If we take the last five or six years alone, there’s my move to Calgary to start a new life with Carrie. There’s the one where she felt stuck in her old job of four years. There’s the one where I went to counselling to save my life from my own childhood. My spirituality is shifting, having burned out from going to church events 3 or 4 days a week for most of my life. Keeping to just the years we’ve been married, Carrie and I have taken many huge risks: paying our own wedding costs, buying our home, changing jobs (I’ve worked three, she’s worked nine), traveling, partying, escaping a dysfunctional family system, paying for and surviving grad school, and launching the private practice. By comparison, we have friends who’ve lived in the same place, worked the same jobs, and hung out with the same people. There’s nothing wrong with that necessarily (in fact, that sounds like a mighty fine life), except until they judge our position as being as simple as theirs when really, we’re walking on thin ice. Years back, I craved stability. All I wanted was to be bored, to work the same job, to have the exact same schedule every week. A lot of that was motivated by my trauma, being unable to adjust to the shifting tides of everyday life. Now that I’ve processed a lot of it through therapy, I’ve been able to let go of the notion of a “normal” life, the 9-5 Monday to Friday glamourized by big corporations and skewered by Office Space. The universe is messy, and surviving it means being able to roll with the punches. By doing nothing every day, I’m paying tribute to all the vastly different and interwoven storylines, allowing the plot to thicken before they all get sorted out in dramatic fashion, where I’ll probably still be doing nothing every day.

I still have so much darkness inside. When I take a moral inventory, I see that I still have much pain and misery from my childhood. I’m managing, I’m doing a lot better, I’m self-regulating, all that good stuff, but at the same time, there’s only so much goodness in store for me in the future. There’s an upper range to how much better it can get for me, as good as it already is. If you were physically assaulted, you might have injuries that stay with you forever. I was emotionally abused for a long time, so I have to reconcile with the fact that it will take a long time to recover from it, if I ever do. That’s pretty much why all I can really hope to do is survive. That’s why I quit my previous job and why I’m not looking for engineering work right now, so I can work somewhere that doesn’t work me into the ground. I don’t want to get rich or die trying. That’s why I want to do stuff like learning how to cook better so I can take care of my family. That’s why I parted ways with my family of origin. I’m just trying to survive.

From trial and error, the road gets a lot bumpier when I want to thrive instead of just surviving. When I think that since I have so much time I might as well take a little excursion or detour, that’s when I get into trouble. Some of it is unavoidable, but I can help myself by not being distracted with things like getting too healthy. I’m a house spouse now, and focusing on the home will help me to survive by conserving what little energy I do have. Even though there is still a lot of pain and darkness in me, I’m doing really well. I have people I love who love me back, health, education, income. When I get greedy, I’m never happy because I’ll never have enough. When I remember that all I need to do is survive, then I can see that I already have everything.

Last I wrote, I was doing nothing with my life. I start my day by doing nothing, and what’s developed from this ritual is a reminder to fuel my activities with boredom. It’s an under-appreciated motivator, but it’s responsible for a great many successes and serendipitous discoveries. I’m not saying that my life is boring and uneventful; quite the opposite. There are a lot of large moving parts at the moment, so I have to force myself to be bored in order to filter through the unimportant parts. It’s like when my piano teacher repeatedly told us that in order to perform quickly, you have to practice slowly. Some days I don’t get around to doing nothing. There’s an avalanche of tasks and anxiety at the start of the day, and I don’t have enough strength and willpower to take my timeout. Sometimes I can only manage to do nothing for 30 minutes, which doesn’t sound like a long time but it sure feels like it. Items have popped up on my radar that I didn’t even know were lurking, but really, they’re things that have been hiding under the surface for years but have been essentially invisible as I kept myself too busy. In these past two weeks of doing nothing, I cleaned up my contact list on my phone, I deleted photos from my library, I rearranged the layout of the home, I jumped on some home chores that would have normally been procrastinated for months, and I’ve been printing and modelling more in 3D.

While I’m learning to use boredom as a tool, I’ve been driven too long by anxiety. It’s too powerful and draining as an energy source. It’s a sticky feeling, taking quite a bit of both physical and emotional strength to peel yourself away even if you’re mindful that you’re having a panic attack. It makes me squirrely, turns my focus into tunnel vision, and I rush and make tons of mistakes. It’s like driving with nitrous in rush hour traffic. I’ve learned over the years how to profit off of my anxiety, like using the worry and fear to study for school, but it’s not fun and sustainable. Sometimes I’ll play video games, go to the gym, or play with the 3D printer out of anxiety, and that’s just not fun. The activities themselves aren’t so much the problem as my nervous energy. Once my anxiety is done with me, I’m left lying down on the bed or couch, heart pounding, mind racing, dazed and confused.

On the other hand, boredom is a special kind of fuel. Some of the best games we played as kids were invented when we were bored, like Night Crawlers. It’s a much gentler, powerful, long-term motivator, and I’m using it these days as the antidote to my insecurities and fears. It reminds me generally of adults who think bored kids should be doing something more useful with their time, but I don’t think so. Boredom is unpleasant, but it’s necessary for balance. Even though there are large impending changes currently underway for me, it’s easier to adapt and transition by essentially saying “No!” to all the unimportant things that want my time and attention. It’s not really that magic.

Some years ago, I had the brilliant idea of using an app that would download my contacts from numerous sources. I pulled contacts from Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn, so for something like 4 years, I’ve had to sift through random usernames when looking up a person, and my autocorrect has just been a nightmare this entire time because of the odd names people use on Facebook to hide their profiles from coworkers and customers/clients. In one day, I deleted over 1000 contacts and trimmed down my list to around 250 people. In the process, not only did I remove contacts from those social networks like my best friend Barack Obama, but I also removed the people I stopped talking to years ago. feelsgoodman.webm. It may not have the same physical weight of cleaning your home and taking out the trash, but it certainly reduces the emotional weight of having digital crap piling up, taking with it some dust bunnies along the way.

Another activity I got around to was deleting photos. Storage costs money, on top of just feeling bulky. I had some 18,000 photos going back to 2009, many of which had lost their significance. I deleted around 2000. So many pictures of homework assignments and food. It was nice, strolling down memory lane with a machete. I found some old photos that I sent off to my brothers before they were deleted forever. Some photos not only lost their emotional significance, but some I couldn't even remember why I took the picture in the first place. That's when you know they truly become junk. There are the moments I won't ever forget, regardless of whether I captured it in a picture, so it was a nice reminder, reviewing hilarious or emotional memories. I haven’t picked up the exercise since, but I’m sure I will at some point. I foresee lots of boredom in my future.

Carrie just started a new job, and with my minimal hours at work, I’m resuming my role as house spouse. From my practice of doing nothing, I realized it was time to improve my cooking skills. I’m still operating off of the information I learned from home economics class in grade eight, so I think I’m due for an update if I’m trying to take care of two adults. I know the basics, but I want to learn stuff like how to properly chop different ingredients and how different flavour profiles interact and how to stock the home. There doesn’t seem to be a central place someone can learn these things, so I’m pulling from a bunch of different sources. I was told in Home Ec that you should refrigerate food right after cooking, but I was also told later that it can ruin certain foods like rice if you chill it while it’s still steaming. I have little understanding of the source of this principle besides that bacteria like warm places, but this is just one example of an area where there are so many unknown unknowns. I took a cooking class for fun once, but it was really just a bunch of people cooking different dishes and eating it at the end. There was no technique or lesson, just people cooking with and for each other. I could always watch YouTube videos, but the problem with that is you could watch five different people who say five different things, each of them adamantly insisting their methods are the best without any real reasoning. The limit with these videos as well is that there is only a one-way communication, so if I have questions, I have to hustle to find out the answer. I honestly don’t even know where to go from here. Luckily, I have a coworker who’s willing to teach me his professional skills. I haven’t given us food poisoning yet, but I’d like to level up my cooking so that it can turn from a chore into a fun activity. If you have any suggestions on how to improve my cooking game, I’m all ears.

Starting my day with nothing also helped with home improvement in these past two weeks. There are certain tasks around the home that take months of procrastinating before you get around to them. When Carrie was in school, one of the more important lights in our studio burned out, and due to the 12 foot ceilings and our lack of a ladder, we just left it alone for a long time. A while ago, we needed some plumbing work done in our place. I guess for safety, they install locks on the faucets so the boiling hot water doesn’t pump out during testing, but they forgot to remove them before they left. I noticed it immediately in the shower, so with some googling, I disassembled our shower knob and took out the little lock within the first day. With the kitchen sink though, I had no idea why it would only turn halfway. I didn’t clue in to the fact that it must have been locked from the little bit of work they did, so we just lived with it for months. Our problem was partially solved when our building upgraded the water heater, so even though our faucet could only go to half of the full range, it was hot enough to wash dishes. I didn’t even know what style of faucet we had, which was a rather minor mental barrier that only added to the problem. Once I actually had the capacity to face it, the whole thing was fixed in like 10 minutes. The problem wasn’t a lack of time since I was unemployed then, but I just didn’t have the emotional margin left over from quitting my job and supporting Carrie in her studies to deal with what felt like a small issue. I did this sometime late last year, but in the past two weeks alone, I rearranged the record player and vinyls, relocated the networking equipment, and reorganized my closet. These are the types of fixes around the home that I can get around to when I start each day by boring myself to tears. It’s a life changer.

I’ve been 3D modelling a lot lately. Here’s a picture of one of my projects.

I often feel bad when my printer isn’t being used all the time because it cost so much money and I should use it whenever I get the chance since it’s a fixed cost and a depreciating asset that needs to amortize with each print and provide value to all my friends and family and potentially turn into a business if I can find the right niche to market and sell to because it’s fun and it makes me happy to make other people happy, and I like to find areas of interest in people’s lives where they would appreciate getting something like pop culture or a sports team they’re into or sometimes specialized tools can be cool too. That’s an annoying run-on sentence to read, but imagine if your mind operated like that on a regular basis. Ugh. I often fool myself into thinking I’m playing with the 3D printer for fun when in actuality, I’m doing it from fear and feeling like I’m running out of oxygen. The same goes with most activities. My autopilot is set to run off anxiety and shame from my traumatic childhood and history of abuse. It robs me of joy, so I have to slam the brakes with both feet before I get carried away. Boredom is the cure.

Boredom is good. Most of my adult life I’ve been only trying to climb higher and higher, but even roller coasters need to come down at some point. Starting my day with nothing is super hard, but early results are really positive. The fast lane is fun when you need it, but it’s taken me six years so far to learn how to get out of it. Boring myself is honestly such an amazing feeling. It’s incredibly restorative and cathartic, and the young me didn’t think I’d make it here until I was in my 40’s or 50’s. I would picture myself sitting in my recliner, pulling up a vinyl and some headphones, glass of wine in hand, soaking in the tunes. My hair would also be grey in that image, and the kids would be out for the evening. But here I am, pushing 30, learning to self-regulate, speeding up when I need to, slowing down when I choose to. I had always been trained to just keep going faster and faster, regardless of things falling apart like my health, but I was able to escape that state of carnage thanks to my counselling. Even though there are still some large moving parts shaking the ground around me, I’m able to recover and adapt faster than before. Forcing boredom on myself (aka foredom or borcing myself) is just being extra rigid about saying no to less important requests. No means no. Less is more. Boredom saves lives.

I’m adjusting to life without my new three year’s resolution of not starting any new side projects. One of the ripple effects was that I got used to participating in much shorter transactions. I stopped watching movies and kept to TV shows. I mostly 3D printed little one-off models in favour of multi-part projects like helmets. Career-wise, I stopped aiming for bigger jobs and took on less and less responsibility. Now that I’ve taken off the leash, it’s a bit intimidating walking out into the world again. I more or less calmed the compulsive need to work insanely hard to feel worthy, but it’s a bit like learning how to ride a bike again after a collision.

Unsure of how to proceed after the resolution ended, staring into the void, I resolved to wait until I knew what to do. I went to work, slept, tidied the house, hung out with friends. Didn’t take on any major projects like home renovations, finding engineering work, fixing up the car, reading x number of books in y amount of time. I let the dust settle and spent a lot of time laying in bed and breathing deeply. What came of the endeavour was that I now start my days by doing nothing at all.

It’s the first thing on my daily to-do list. You could call it by many different names, like mindfulness, meditation, zen, grounding, containment, solitude. I’ve changed my availability at work so that I don’t start before noon except one day, so most mornings I can take as long as I want for breakfast, workouts, creative work, and doing nothing. This also only works because Carrie is the primary breadwinner now. It’s like my own micro-vacation. I’m in the same mode as laying down by the pool or beach; not a care in the world. There’s no music, no TV, no books, no social media. Only lying in bed and observing what’s happening around me. There’s still a lot of value in packing up and changing countries so your mind can’t be tricked into slipping back into your regular routine, but that also costs money and time. Doing nothing at home feels like I’m coming up for air, and it helps me to adapt to quickly changing needs. Some days call for an audible and throwing out the to-do list entirely, and I can only sense that when I start the day by doing nothing.

Because of my trauma, it takes me a lot longer to chill out compared to the average person, if it happens at all. I have to manually power down. My heightened sense of danger stays on red alert unless I repeat to myself that there’s nothing to worry about. In the past two weeks, I’ve been writing lists of things to look forward to, things to anticipate or prepare for, all just so I can see that there’s nothing urgent to take care of. I have to check with Carrie if I missed anything on my list or if she wants me to add anything for her. I have to sit still and force the chills to run up and down my spine until I feel my body opening up and breathing deeply again. It’s uncomfortable, but if I don’t do it for myself, who will? I don’t know about you, but relaxation is an active process for me.

Doing nothing looks different for everybody. Zooming out, what I mean by "doing nothing" is that I don’t need any special projects to make me feel worthwhile. No losing weight, no starting up a business, no trying to beat Trial of the Sword in Breath of the Wild on Master Mode (so impossible!). It’s fine if some of these things happen as a byproduct, but it can’t be from a unified goal that I set for myself. I unknowingly learned this behaviour of working on the side from my dad because he left a lot of his main responsibilities to start side projects. Instead of staying at home and helping out our family, he was always flying to different countries to take care of other people. Instead of staying focused on his job at the church, he was off doing missionary work for a good chunk of the year, and as I hear, he’s doing more of the same now. The way this pattern looked in my life was when I had bad but passable grades in school, I would find refuge in side quests. I would later use them as excuses for why I wasn’t meeting expectations in my main job, a form of denial and self-fulfilling prophecy. While in university, I had my headphone amplifier project that I was selling online, I was in a long distance relationship with Carrie, I was volunteering several days a week at church, I was the Electrical Engineering Club’s co-president, among other things. These initiatives helped me feel better about my grades. It’s normal and healthy sometimes to work on multiple things at once because only having one job gets pretty boring. I took it too far though by using them to justify my poor performance at my one job, and then it would only get worse as I wrestled more with my self-worth being tied to my output. Lots of people have to work multiple jobs, and they can only carry on this way so long as those jobs don’t interfere with each other. As for me, my main responsibility now is to keep my family going, and that’s all I want to focus on. It’s full-time work keeping the home stocked and running smoothly, and we’re just two people.

The last remnant of this old lifestyle was my lifelong dream of designing products at Apple. I had a warped view of success due to my dad narcissistically manipulating me into being a shinier trophy so he could brag to people. I would weaponize my hobbies to boost my eventual application for the position of hardware engineering intern, which sucked the joy out of my hobbies and proved to be quite toxic for my health. I still enjoy designing and making products on my own, so I’ll keep my 3D printer and soldering iron handy. But as far as pursuing it seriously as a career option, I’m giving that up. I’m sure I could still do it at some point, but I always had the wrong reasons in chasing after it, basing my self-worth in my work. I can hear it now, people saying "Don’t give up, you can do it, you just need to believe in yourself, it can still happen." I don’t disagree, but when I look on the horizon and then at the road immediately in front of me, I can’t really reconcile the two. There are some very obvious and pressing needs that are presenting themselves right now, and it helps my imminent survival if I let go of that pipe dream. If all I ever did was marry Carrie, had kids, and took good care of all of them, I would be proud to live such a life. I no longer look back on my career and think "Don’t use your childhood as an excuse for not achieving your dreams." I know now that privilege plays a real role in people’s development. I’ve accomplished a lot in my short 29 years, but since I started a lot further back than many of my peers, it can look like I’m just humming along. (That’s also why it’s pointless to keep score with your friends.) The lifeforce needed to ramp up my resumé and experience to join Apple engineering within so many years, that’s all energy that would be better used towards taking out the garbage and picking up the dry-cleaning today. Also going dancing and partying all-out once a month with my friends.

I’ve been on a three year mission to escape the frightening, lasting effects of abuse, and the last major pillar of this endeavour was to stop finding side projects to boost my self-esteem. They were distractions that looped back toward a toxic motivation to find self-worth, which choked the life out of me. I can see now how it was a pattern I adopted from my dad, which I don’t want to continue. It’s all I can do to keep my own family going, so I’m giving up my dream of working for Apple engineering so I can focus on my daily chores, which starts with doing nothing. And now all I aspire to do with the rest of my life is taking good care of my family. In other words, nothing.

I wrote about my new three year’s resolution on January 4, 2015. Back then, I was so miserable with life and bored at work that I would find side projects to preoccupy myself, which only made me more unhappy. I had a pretty bad case of performance orientation, which is another way of saying that my self-worth was only associated with my productivity. I felt that I had no inherent value for being me. I was working myself into the ground just to feel like I meant something, so my new three year’s resolution was a leash I put on myself so I would stop doing the only thing I knew to boost my self-esteem — working myself to death.

I’ve referenced that post quite a few times along the way, which is pretty impressive considering most people drop their new years resolutions within a few weeks. Re-reading it now has helped me to see how much I’ve changed and where I haven’t, so I feel like reviewing some of the lessons I learned and changes I made along the way.

Space

This is probably one of the biggest lessons I learned through the last three years. Essentially, my resolution was to create space for normal human experiences and to catch up on lost time. Contrast that with my default strategy at the time of working until I felt good about myself. By creating that space, I left my free time as a blank space and trusted that I would fill it in as the need arose. I had no idea I was going to seek counselling or to quit my job. I had no clue that important people in my life would disappear and that better people would take their place. I never imagined I would process so much trauma and get this healthy.

You need energy to solve problems. We all have a finite amount each day, and for most of us we waste it on entertainment and distraction; for me, that’s TV and reddit. It’s the part of the discourse I dislike about things like personal finance. “Just cut costs, then you’ll be rich.” The focus and attention required to examine every expenditure and income doesn’t come free. If you’re struggling to get by, it’s not just because you’re sitting around and doing nothing with your free time. You’re supporting extended family members, maybe you’re battling your own demons, maybe your job is too toxic and stressful for you to always be frugal. Those who have the capacity to help themselves look at those who can’t and think they’re lazy. Maybe the system is stacked to favour the few, who can’t see the struggles that the rest have to contend with.

Cycles

There are virtuous and vicious cycles. My trauma had me stuck in a cycle where I allowed people to hurt me, then I would pick myself up and go back for more. It’s really hard to break out of a cycle, but it’s possible. Along the way, we’ve seen quite a few brave souls in this world taking a stance at great personal cost in order to break the cycle:

• Beyoncé’s Lemonade album
• Edward Snowden
• #metoo

I also have a virtuous cycle of writing this blog and thinking out loud. I’ve gotten amazing feedback and support from the people in my social network with only a few rotten experiences of trolls flinging mud. Maintaining a few healthy cycles keeps me out of the vicious ones.

Mental Health

I never knew I had anxiety and PTSD (undiagnosed, but I have the symptoms) until recently. I’ve always been able to turn on the turbo jets in order to get more work done, but never really had a plan for slowly descending back to earth. No wonder I would seize up with anxiety for some unknown reason and never knew how to work myself down except by crashing. I wrote a post called Every Day I’m Hustling where I listed things that calmed me down. I like to resort to it when I have a panic attack. I made a new friend who also has pretty bad anxiety, and it was interesting to compare experiences as I watched them have some four panic attacks in one outing.

I didn’t get the support I needed from the health care system. My previous employer wanted to play chicken with my mental health because I presume it was cheaper for me to quit than for them to help me get healthy and working again. Canada is pretty good with universal healthcare, but it’s murky with mental health. No one bats an eye when you stay home from work with a cold, but it’s not as easy to even say what kind of mental health issues you’re struggling with. Systems and agencies are all disconnected and uncoordinated, so people easily fall through the cracks despite waiting months. It looks like on a macro scale the public is opening up to the idea that mental health is important and that it needs to be treated and funded, but it’s very gradual. I don’t think it’s moving fast enough to support people in the way they need right now, but I don’t know how to speed it up. The most vulnerable people with the least energy have the hardest time getting help.

Kindness

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is to be kind to myself. I used to treat myself brutally. I got this from my parents, who probably had to in some ways treat themselves harshly in order to sacrifice and provide a better life for their four children and the revolving door of people who they also supported.

From what I can tell, people don’t really change long-term when you crack the whip. You can easily change the behaviour for a short time, but you never get as far as changing their minds and hearts. Most genuine change comes from a place of love and kindness, when the sources of pain and strife are exposed and examined so that healing can begin, but the tradeoff is that it takes a much longer time. In my own case, kindness has helped the most in these three short years. I’ve always been my worst critic, and I never held back any kind of criticism or abuse of myself. I used to push myself so hard in the gym that I would throw up, but now I have a more holistic approach to physical and mental health as facilitated by exercise and diet. Counselling and therapy helped me to be kind to myself and to brave the murky waters of my emotions and childhood trauma, whereas cussing and yelling at myself for making mistakes only ever made me commit more mistakes.

Emotional Labour

I learned about this topic firsthand while Carrie went missing from our marriage. I would clean up the home, I would do all the groceries, I would fuss and worry about our relationships with friends and family, all sorts of stuff. It was an eye-opening experience for me. I made Carrie take care of these things in the past, like remembering people’s birthdays and other significant dates, replying to people that reached out to us to hang out or to say hello, making sure the home was fully stocked. We’re back on track now, splitting up responsibilities based on care and ability, but it was a dark period for me the last couple years. I’m terrible with finances, starting later in life with managing my own money and expenses whereas Carrie moved away from home to go to school at 18 and already held several jobs by then. I was super worried about money when I quit my job and went on EI, then lost it only to be backpaid after three months, then started a job in retail. I wanted Carrie to focus only on graduating on time, even though she was willing to take a break from school to ensure we made enough money to stay afloat. Before my resolution, the emotional labour I usually took care of was to make money, drive, and talk with Carrie, but now I see how unfair it was for me to not grocery shop, tidy, plan events with friends, share the TV, be attentive in general to the needs of our relationship. It was hard doing most of the emotional labour, but I also know that my hands aren’t clean.

Rock Bottom

The two year period where I sought counselling is what I call The Struggle. I was juggling work, Carrie’s grad program, and counselling. I could probably handle two of those at a time, but somehow I thought I was strong enough to handle all three. A lot of my worst case scenarios played out during that time, all within a fairly short timeframe, and I hit rock bottom. I stopped contact with my family, a good half-dozen friends moved away for work within a few months, Carrie had a couple terrible semesters, and I had to quit my job to preserve my mental health. All of the burdens fell on me at once with few supports in sight. I crawled out of the wreckage eventually, but it was bleak. During that time, I wrote:

Counselling made me a lot stronger than I realized. There's a confidence that comes from hitting rock bottom. You know how bad it can get, and you also know that you survived. Even though I thought I had duct taped together a nice little comfy life by my mid 20's, I almost lost it all. That's made me less afraid of the world, and it also deepens my gratitude.

Suffering

What’s the meaning of suffering? One takeaway I have from all these experiences is that everybody suffers to varying degrees, and it creates common ground between us if we talk about it. The internet and technology in general have given voices to many that never had it before, which has both positive and negative impacts, but for those that are suffering, it’s a lifeline. When you mention you’re depressed on social media, someone around this world will reach out and offer assistance, whether by mentioning local resources and professionals or simply by empathizing. My blog has become a bit of a lightning rod for people who are in pain because every once in a while, I’ll get a message saying that a passage or phrase reached someone’s heart and eased their suffering. By describing what I’m going through, people can relate through one of their past experiences, or they at least know where they can turn to if it happens to them or someone they know in the future.

For those of us who don’t suffer as much, or for those times when we thrive and stop suffering, I feel it’s our responsibility to help reduce the pain and strife that others experience. Meanwhile, I have to fight the temptation to keep focusing only on myself and my inconveniences.

Trauma

When your body faces a threat and gets charged up to address it, there can be an interruption, causing that energy to stay in the body even after the threat disappears. Maybe the problem resolves itself, or the person’s body backfires and freezes up because the threat is too overwhelming. I did a lot of work in therapy to discharge the heightened energy of trauma stored in my body. There’s still some leftover in my shoulders, which requires the slow painful work of strengthening the surrounding muscles and massaging out the evil and darkness. When you’re a hammer, you see everything as a nail even when it’s not. I know I’ve been traumatized multiple times, so I tend to misdiagnose others as having been traumatized as well. Even still, I think it’s a valuable lens in examining why people are the way they are. There are tons of movies predicated on a character being traumatized and resolving it by the end.

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Some of you are thinking “Okay, Jon, we’ve read all this before. There’s nothing new. Why did I come here? Give me something worth my while because that was all a waste of time.” To that I would say, “Hey chill out, dude. Why are you being so critical? Go fly a kite and stop riding my ass because I’m trying to be kind to myself and not let my inner critical voices dominate my experience. But you’re still right. Here’s something new.”

Leap of Faith

If you’re constantly growing, you have to take a leap of faith every once in a while. If you’re doing it right, you’re taking big risks on a regular basis; for me, I’m taking about one a year. I’ve found that there’s really no end to these big leaps if I want to be whole. If you shy away from the opportunity, then it’ll catch up to you eventually in a longer and more costly way. It was terrifying moving homes when we were already so comfy, but we were validated only three weeks later when the #yycflood hit our old place. It was scary taking a 25% pay cut moving jobs and industries in 2014, even while the oil industry in Alberta was riding high. It was nerve-wracking to buy our home when we had already decided earlier that year to not buy any real estate. My new three year’s resolution was a scary proposition because it meant sacrificing any elevated self-esteem I would get from doing more of the work that was killing me. It was scary sharing with the world that I was sexually abused as a child.

You have to be scared. Sometimes you have to suspect that the grass is greener on the other side and go for it even though everything is telling you it’s the wrong decision. You just have to trust your gut that you’ll land safely on the other side, even when there is plenty of evidence pointing to the opposite conclusion. My three years resolution made a lot of assumptions: that I would live another three years; that Carrie would graduate; that I could find wholeness. Doing the right thing requires courage to take the leap of faith.

Moving Forward

Was three years the right amount of time? How do I feel coming out the other side? I’m happy, and I don’t only find my self-worth in my work anymore. I derive worth and meaning from numerous areas, I do things for fun and to fulfill my life’s purpose. I know I have inherent worth and value even while doing nothing, which back then is something I could say for others but never for myself.

I don’t have the need to do important work in order to validate my existence. I don’t need to reach some title or position in order for my dad to be proud of me. I can be proud of myself even though I’m certain he’s disappointed in me now. I don’t need to attain some randomly assigned measure of greatness in order to feel accepted. I also don’t feel like I need to take a huge break to work on my problems anymore. The three years was a way of catching up on lost time, but moving forward, I can work on my problems day by day. I’m good enough the way I am, and as long as I live each day to the fullest, I’ll be okay. I’m going to follow my heart instead of my greedy eyes.

I’m a much happier person now, and my friends are noticing. As a result of numerous conditions, I’ve been less consistent about posting since the summer, which kind of confused me for a while. Recently, it clicked in why I don’t write as often. I stopped attending counselling, so my old wounds aren’t being ripped open as often. I’m employed now, so I’m getting my weekly fill of conversation with both customers and coworkers. I was working full time for the past six months, where I was feeling drained after work most days. I’ve also been ill for most of the fall season. Not resting like I needed, combined with abusing my body in order to go out and have fun. Going to part time at work has cleared my mind a lot. Critically, Carrie is available to chat with me a lot more now, whereas she couldn’t process as much with me when she was in school. I’m always trying to write some big emotional and meaningful post, but I’m sure that gets exhausting for some of you. I haven’t written a silly and pointless post in years now, so it’s a little scary worrying that I’ll lose some readers over it. In the end though, I have to do what’s right for me, not necessarily what will get me more clicks or make me more popular. Sometimes what’s inside me is a silly joke, and sometimes facing the meaninglessness of pain and suffering. I hope things line up for me to sit down to dump my thoughts online more frequently.

Starting to find balance in recent weeks. Now that I’m getting my needs met better, I have some room to see what’s going on and areas where I need some work.

Discomfort is a signal. It means things aren’t right, but the discomfort itself isn’t the problem. It points to a conclusion which requires work to arrive at. Lately, I’ve had a couple things fall into place because I accepted the discomfort for a time. There are also times when I’ve lost big due to my unwillingness to engage with an uncomfortable situation.

Ordering my iPhone X was an ordeal. I bought it and chose to have it delivered to my home. I was quoted two weeks, but then I was pleasantly surprised when it shipped a week early. I spent the day at work, frequently checking my tracking, but then in the middle of the day it said there would be a delay due to extreme weather conditions. Disappointed and stranded, I had no choice but to wait. Luckily I had the next day off, which was a Friday, so I could wait at home so as to not miss the UPS delivery person. The tracking never updated to tell me whether it was out for delivery or when it would arrive, so by 5 o’clock, I called UPS to ask if they had more detailed delivery information that I couldn’t access. The agent told me that since there was no indication that it was out for delivery, it must still be waiting on a pallet inside a truck, meaning it would deliver by Monday. Frustrated from waiting anxiously all day, I couldn’t handle the cabin fever anymore and went for an angry and cold walk around the neighbourhood. About an hour later, I got home and found a UPS delivery notice that said they attempted delivery around 10 minutes after I left for my angry walk. Fortunately there was a UPS Access Point nearby, so I walked there and picked up my phone. Much discomfort.

Massage. I’ve been to several massage therapists and physios over the years, even one acupuncturist, but only recently have I met one that truly connected with the trauma present in my body. I’ve mentioned to all of them that my trapezius muscles house deep, dark secrets, but only this new one actually connected with them. I don’t understand how multiple people and techniques can operate on the same muscles with only one reaching the emotional knots. At the very least, that one person processed their own trauma from a past injury. Some mind-body connection shit. I’ve always felt better after all of my previous appointments with the other specialists, but I hit a new level after this latest one. It was deeply uncomfortable and painful having some years-old problems twisted out of my neck and shoulders, but I felt better immediately after.

I still have the tendency to overestimate my abilities. I’ll take care of a huge task early in the day, and I won’t realize the toll it took on my until after I’ve overcommitted the rest of my day. I’ll wonder "WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ME?" It’s like my body has seized up and I can’t really function anymore. When my discomfort levels rise, that’s when my cravings set in. Sometimes it’s used to ease the pain in my chest, sometimes it’s a compulsive behaviour. When I work long stressful days, I need to watch hours of TV to bring down my anxiety enough to fall asleep; usually Futurama helps. Nowadays, I’m learning to live with general discomfort. Pain can’t always be avoided. Sometimes it’s fairly straightforward to take the time to process a feeling, but in the moment, it can also help to live with it. Driving in the winter here in Alberta can be quite messy because of the sand, gravel, and salt, so it’s not a great use of time to wash off every single little spot. Lump it together into a carwash on a warm day on a later date. I spent two years during The Struggle processing all my emotions bottled up since my childhood, but now I’ve put a cap on it in order to move on with my life, which has allowed me to process it little by little. When you have a backlog of work to do like that, it helps to work overtime and weekends to reduce the burden, but you can only do that so long before you start creating new problems which reduce your longevity. I’m done working on the backlog, so now I’m also trying to enhance my day-to-day by not obsessing over every little wrinkle. Life is messy, and not every painful experience needs to be treated as a tragedy.

I use my dependencies like fixing a leaky roof using cardboard boxes. Sure, it doesn’t always rain, so I may not always need resilient infrastructure. But in a real downpour, I’m unable to comfortably withstand the storm. Whenever I resort to my coping mechanisms, each can of fizzy sugar water and each bag of instant noodles, it’s like throwing newspaper over the cardboard. Temporarily patching over the holes in my roof can fool me into believing I’ve fixed the underlying problems and that I’m a self-regulating adult, but it’s actually a very costly and draining way to live. Sometimes that’s all I can afford to do anyways. Maybe a full remodelling of the roof isn’t a project I can afford right now, so all I can manage is to quickly patch over the problem while I deal with issues in the basement. What I’m trying to do differently these days is to withstand the discomfort of not relying on a quick fix. By resisting the temptation of my distracting vices, I can more clearly see the reality of the underlying problems driving my compulsive behaviours. With all the fading and crusted cardboard and newspaper lining the roof, it’s hard to even see where the leaks are coming from. How many holes are there? How big are they? Is my problem stress-related? Is my marriage part of the problem? Are my friends healthy for me? There are many similar such questions that I can’t answer until I can handle a higher level of general discomfort.

If I continue to avoid most forms of discomfort, I won’t achieve anything meaningful. On the other hand, is that so bad?

A friend recommended a book called “Adult children - The Secret of Dysfunctional Families” by John and Linda Friel. (Warning: I’m going to talk about my family. Leave now if you’re tired of it.) It’s firing off so many connections in my brain, helping to explain so much of how and why my family turned out the way it did. For instance, families with no clear chemical dependencies can still operate in the same dysfunctional ways, and you resort to certain tactics as a child in order to cope and survive. The simple and impossible trick is to undo those compulsive behaviours once the environment changes when you’ve been doing things a certain way your whole life. I stopped talking to my family who sometimes ganged up on and gaslighted me, which taught me indirectly to follow the crowd. I want to quote many long sections from the book, but one particular passage gave me permission to cut out my family:

This happens all the time unless the whole family eventually gets help. Little brother will continue to act out in more and more serious ways until he either grows up and leaves home and gets help, or until he gets put in jail, or dies of alcoholism, suicide or in a reckless auto accident. If he's lucky, when he leaves home, he'll try to get help on his own.

If the family still resists getting involved in treatment, his therapist will recommend that he stay away from the family as much as possible and that he develop a "new" family system to replace the old dysfunctional one. This new system may be a therapy group, a 12-Step group, such as A.A., Al-Anon, ACoA or some other structured support system that follows a functional set of rules in which little brother does not have to "feel crazy" to fit in.

In more and more cases nowadays, what happens is that the entire family does get involved in treatment; and not just for little brother's sake. Enlightened therapists and an enlightened general public are helping families to see that problems like these are really symptoms of problems in the entire family system, and that when one member of the system is displaying a serious problem in adjustment, it means, in most cases, that all of the other members are experiencing problems, too. It's just that these other members' defenses and roles are more socially acceptable and less troublesome on the surface.

I still get blamed for the problems of my family when really I’m a signal of problems lurking underneath the surface. I blew the whistle because I saw something going wrong, and people treat the whistle as the true problem. Because of the narcissistic nature of the issues, most outsiders can’t see past my family of origin’s carefully crafted external appearance (or they believe there can’t be anything deeper since they know my family better than I do). It’s been two years since I stopped talking to them, cutting off the primary source of the turmoil and discomfort in my life, and now I’m doing better than ever. People still wag their finger and warn me I’ll need my family when life gets tough because their own families are probably supportive people, but mine were the biggest reason why my life was tough in the first place. People still ask when I’ll soften up and let them back in to my life, but this book has helped solidify my position in waiting for them to change. If I were to let them back in my life, we’d all resume our roles, and maybe I wouldn’t be around much longer after that. Now that they’re gone, I can preoccupy myself with more important and uncomfortable problems, like helping Carrie with her private psychology practice.

This all comes from trying to deal better with aggressive people. Two people at work have pulled me aside to offer mentoring and assistance with whatever I needed, and this area arose as my main weakness. I’ve had numerous encounters where I sensed my discomfort rising, so I went with my instinctive reactions to run away and shut down. I distrusted the feeling of my spidey senses sounding off, assuming it to only mean danger. Leaving your comfort zone isn’t positive or negative necessarily. Just means it’s uncomfortable.

Part of the experience of trauma is that it’s difficult or nearly impossible to regulate intrusive thoughts. I never knew this was a phenomenon until I grew older and sought professional help. It explains why my whole life I’d heard criticism that no one was really voicing.

One example right now is how I’m paranoid about privacy. Part of that comes from growing up in church where adults scared me into behaving because Jesus was always watching. Nowadays, our society hands over its privacy for free so that corporations can monetize it. Data is the new oil. Whether it’s a fitness tracker, social networking app, or a personal blog, we don’t seem to mind how we broadcast intimate details about our lives. We’ve taken on these risks for decades prior, but only recently have they been weaponized against us. Edward Snowden helped reveal to the world how governments are tracking citizens of their own country or those of others, and in a large sense, there was a collective shrug and dismissal. Yes, it’s a crisis, but a lot of people continued on their merry little way. And with the critical mass that social networking has reached, choosing to not participate isn’t enough. People will still take photos of you and post them online. We live in the Orwellian world of constant surveillance, but instead of having it forced upon us, we invited it into our homes.

One aspect of mass surveillance that I take issue with is when it’s used to oppress the already-marginalized. Activists for the queer community, women, and people of colour are closely monitored while white supremacists roam free. One aspect of personal security audits is to evaluate your risk profile. There are different security requirements for an average citizen and a politician. In general, I think I’m twice as cautious as I need to be due to my trauma. I put a lot of effort into never breaking any traffic laws while driving because I never want to encounter a police officer. I make several backups of my information, both locally and remotely, such that I don’t expose myself to the risk of data loss. Friends have poked fun at me for wearing my tin foil hat when it comes to privacy, but I also don’t think they understand at a deep level the degree of vulnerability I feel on a daily basis. Feeling even a little exposed is a frightening position for me. A quick fix is to stop blogging so openly about all the ways people can and have hurt me, but that’s not the life I want to live. I must write. I must express myself. There are numerous areas of risk where I feel exposed, and though privacy is just one of them, it’s an important one.

Counselling helped me to realize that even though I feel a certain way about my personal safety, grounding myself in objective facts and reality can keep my mind from running away with anxiety. Reminding myself of ways that I’m able to protect myself, as well as how I’ve done so in the past, is a great way to empower myself and to lower my fears. It’s important to distinguish the hand-waving and minimizing people often resort to in order to slap a band-aid on an emotional wound.

"I had a rough day at work."

"At least you have a job."

There’s a time and place for taking perspective, and that’s after the emotions have been acknowledged and normalized. However, not only do I have to give credibility to my intuition and emotions, but I also have set up guideposts for them with cold hard facts.

After acknowledging my childhood abuse, I was faced with a decision. Either I could live a quiet and restricted life, or I could blast through it and try to live life to the fullest. I chose the latter, and I paid dearly for it. It’s still a constant battle for me to feel comfortable in my own skin because of the physiological impacts of my trauma. I have the tendency to get so absorbed in video games to escape the uncomfortable feelings that it can hurt other areas of my body. Sitting on the couch with controller in hand, playing for hours at a time, it becomes very painful once I finish a gaming session. I played Starcraft II for the first time in a while, and I left after one mission because I was feeling super dizzy. Sometimes we need to talk about our problems, and other times we need to shut up about them. Due to how my brain works, it’s better for me to resort to escaping my problems since I’m a bit obsessive.

My coping mechanism can be both the solution and the problem. If I don’t sleep well, I’ll feel disconnected from my body all day. Then I’ll turn to obsessive behaviours in order to feel reconnected with myself. I’ll eat delicious junk food until my tummy hurts from stretching. I’ll drink the hyper sweet fizzy sugar beverages. Binge eating and video games tend to exacerbate my anxiety, which leads to worse sleep. Sleepiness and exhaustion enhance our cravings for fatty and sugary foods, and Coke is my productivity drink of choice when I didn’t sleep well. Then it ruins my sleep. Right now, the gym is my saving grace because of how effective it is at tearing my mind away from my intrusive thoughts. Failing that, sometimes I need to zone out using various news feeds, but it only works when I’m bothered by small to medium issues. Otherwise, I would have to read for so long that my eyes hurt, which simply shifts the problem and usually still leaves my brain hurting from the original issue. That’s why dancing is so important to me. It combines physical exercise, friends, delicious drinks, good tunes, and tons of fun. Dance therapy.

We can dance if we want to, we can leave your friends behind

Cause your friends don't dance and if they don't dance

Well they're no friends of mine.

• The Safety Dance

There is a positive aspect to having obsessive thoughts. I’ve learned to use it to my advantage, especially in aspects of design. I’m able to look at a problem and walk around, asking a hundred questions in order to crack the puzzle. It’s helped me design electronics and 3D models, and it helps me to learn and improve my performance in various areas at work. On the same token, it can be a challenge to turn off the designer’s mindset. It’s super annoying to look at everything and wonder “how would someone use this if they were hearing-impaired or colourblind?” While it’s a useful and worthy perspective to take at times, constantly thinking can be really annoying. Brains are stupid. What good have they ever done on this earth?

I’m happy to be in this space. I know what I need, and now I simply need to follow through. I never used to be able to escape those nasty feelings, and they would pile up week after week. That’s probably why you’ve read so much on this blog about what’s bothering me. Every once in a while I try to write about what I’m grateful for or what’s going right for me, and it’s a practice I’m trying to do more regularly. Healthy minds already fixate more readily on negativity than on positive thoughts. You could receive 20 compliments and feedback on one “area of growth,” and you’ll forget all about the nice things people said and only remember the bad one. It requires more effort for me to appreciate the little bit of life I got left.

I’m going to part time hours at work. I’ve been working too hard both at my job and in my marriage, so I’m going to let Carrie carry me for a while. I’m burning out. I feel like my mind is sending commands to my body, and all my body responds with is a shrug.

Me: "Let’s go brush our teeth and sleep at a reasonable hour."

Also me: "Nah, let’s eat instant noodles and watch Futurama until we pass out on the couch instead."

Not everyone gets a life partner who’s willing to pick up the slack. Carrie is fortunate to have me, and I’m lucky to have her. That’s a pretty good thought to allow to intrude on my mind.

Picture the worst suffering you ever experienced. Now imagine that you went through it just so someone else didn’t have to. Like Redbull, martyrdom gives you wings -- angel wings. Life’s hard. Marriage is hard. To make things easier, I use a sacrificial mentality. I may not enjoy carrying out certain chores, but doing it for someone else makes it easier. That perspective can help in a pinch, but it also gets old.

I’m a firm believer that if you sow generously, you’ll reap generously. If you put out good energy, you’ll get it back. I don’t really worry much about getting paid out immediately for everything I do. Sometimes I should. When you realize you’re suffering in order to help another person, you get an instant boost from that simple shift in perspective. It’s a mentality that can be abused, especially when the martyr needs validation and credit for their suffering. Sometimes people suffer when they don’t need to, and they start crying out for attention when they realize no one is praising them.

People usually live in a disconnected way. I used to work extra hard in order to be happy, whereas if I had stepped back to take an inventory of my life, I could have been happier with way less effort. When I earned more, I spent more, which required me to work more, then I bought more stuff to compensate for the extra stress. It’s normal for our lives to become inconsistent and hypocritical, like when I hit the gym and immediately follow it up with a bucket of fried chicken. We aren’t perfect, but we can make our own lives more comfortable by trying to be more connected and consistent. I’ve been playing the victim lately in order to keep us going, but now I’m running out of fuel.

It’s heroic to be viewed as the bad guy when you’re really the good guy. You’re the champion that the people need, not the one they deserve. You’re giving up the credit due to your name. The praise you receive for being a martyr is so inviting that some rush into suffering just for the look. The narrative is so powerful that even someone who has it all can look very sympathetic to the less fortunate. It frames the situation to give you a very flattering look. It’s more impressive to say I lost 15 pounds than to say I never put on that weight in the first place.

There are only a few times in life when we can exert superhuman strength. Turn on the turbo jets and get things done. We all have that capacity. Parents fend off wild animals to protect their kids. People can lift cars when they’re trying to free someone from a collision. Others work three jobs in order to provide a life and education for their siblings. The trade-off is that the turbo boost is limited. You can only use it a short time before you need a rest. Even Goku can only go Super Saiyan for a limited time.

Carrie and I have at least one crisis per year, and we’re just wrapping up the 2017 edition right now. It’s been a tough couple months. I’m tired. I don’t daydream anymore, but I do have stressful nightmares. The work that I’ve been doing this fall is hard to see. I listened to Carrie vent even though I wasn’t in a good space to listen. I held her when she cried. I took care of myself when she couldn’t support me. It took a lot of energy, and I drew strength from being a martyr. By pushing my own limits of suffering, I was helping Carrie through her storm.

And now I’m ready to collapse.

My high school friend got called to the bar recently, so we had a mini high school reunion. Following weekend had a wedding for a friend from university, whose reception was actually at the university. Even ran into an old professor randomly that weekend, so I guess the theme for this week is nostalgia. When I went to Edmonton, I felt like driving around some old roads. I hadn’t visited in some six months, but even prior to that, I only really stuck to a small portion of the city where my friends and I hung out. There’s a whole bunch of the city I used to drive through or spend time in which I hadn’t really seen in years, so it was nice just driving around the neighbourhood I grew up in, taking the routes I used to take to go to church or school, all those little connecting roads. There’s been lots of development in the city, and lots of interesting construction. I don’t like to live in nostalgia, but I appreicate being able to visit the feeling every once in a while. It keeps me grounded, reminding myself of my roots and where I came from. At the same time, I realize that not speaking to my family anymore means I cut off access to a lot of where I came from. I’ll miss looking through photo albums of when we were kids.

Lots of little anniversaries this time of year:

• Hernia surgery.
• Friend got married.
• Pokewalks. Still got 9 eggs waiting to hatch.
• Started going to the gym.
• Some friends moved away.
• Quit my job.
• Employment insurance.
• I bought Philips Hue light last year to help regulate my sleep by syncing it with the sunrise and bedtime. I only just got around to doing that just a few weeks ago.

What’s the purpose of nostalgia? How does it fit into people’s lives? Why am I feeling it now?

There’s value in tradition because it’s a foundation we can build on. Friends often introduce us to new ones. We can derive new information based on information that we already know. Small machines are created to make micro machines. Once we have a stable base, then it’s easy to take risks so long as they don’t threaten our headquarters. Our brains can’t handle new stimuli all the time. It’s overwhelming when nothing is familiar, so the brain filters out the known variables so that we can better handle the unknown.

I’m living a new life. I’m turning my back on my family. I’m not pursuing engineering work at the moment, even though I just started wearing my iron ring again. Carrie is done her four years of school, and now we’re both making money again. I’m finished at the moment with counselling and working through my mental illness and trauma directly, but I’m maintaining it daily. In a couple years, Carrie and I will start having kids. Feels like we’re starting a new chapter here, and before moving on, sometimes it’s good to review and even re-read the previous chapters to remember what happened. It provides context and history to new situations, which inform how you should feel and respond moving forward.

Nostalgia is comforting when the world changes too quickly. I’m going through a lot of changes. I re-watch a lot of old TV shows because there aren’t that many good ones out there, but it’s comforting to hear the same old funny jokes. I like to eat the same foods. Some adventurous types like to only eat at new places, whereas I prefer to eat places that are consistently delicious.

Part of why I spent two years in counselling was to increase my adaptability to change. I could barely handle working full-time, so when there were changes to my regularly scheduled programming, like leaving town for the weekend, I did not recover quickly. I’d work, and that was about it. I couldn’t help Carrie with groceries or cleaning. I’d be watching TV for pretty much the entire evening, barely getting ready for bed before passing out. I did almost nothing on the weekends, whereas now I’m learning to cook new recipes so Carrie has good food to pack for lunch. Probably not a big deal for you well-adjusted adults out there, but it’s a big accomplishment for me.

I’m normally not really a nostalgic person, so if I’m feeling it a lot right now, that tells me I’ve been more stressed than usual. My three year resolution runs out in January. I used to be chomping at the bit to take on extracurricular activities, but I banned them almost three years ago in order to retain my sanity. Even after it expires, I may just want to keep chilling. A couple more months and then I think I’ll be healthy again. Sometimes I get wild ideas that need to be brought into this world, but I just feel tired right now. I don’t even feel like drawing some deep, grand conclusion from this whole experience into this post. It could also be this cold that I recently caught.

It’s tempting right now to prepare to hit the ground running once the resolution expires, but if I’m feeling stressed enough to feel nostalgic right now, I’ll take that as a sign that I should keep resting.

Whenever I can, I do nothing at all. There’s only so much you can do to tidy, file away, reserve, pick up. I don’t really have an urge to do much on my days off, which is a new experience for me. I don’t really feel like playing Breath of the Wild. There’s nothing terribly interesting on social media. I have enough new music on my to-do list that I don’t need to get too adventurous. Nothing I even really feel like printing these days. This is how life calms down. Back when I was in the corporate rat race, I felt like I was never doing enough. Even on my weekends, I had to relax extra hard because I worked extra hard and I was extra miserable. Now, I try to not be so extra. Eventually I want to get back into reading more books.

My schedule now is pretty light. Work five days, get two days off. On my days off, be productive during the day. Otherwise, if I sleep all day, I won’t sleep at night. Part of that productivity means writing on the first day, editing on the second, then hitting publish. About once a month, I go out with my friends, and we go hard. Sundays, there is family dinner. Every night before bed, I stretch my feet and neck so that the simple act of existing isn’t so painful the next day. I’ll meet up with a friend once a week or so. Any more than that, then my structure falls apart. Any changes to that structure puts pressure on everything afterwards, and then I stop functioning. I’ve found my rhythm. Steady state. Homeostasis. This is what I’m capable of for now, and I need to protect my schedule dearly.

Sleep solves and creates many problems, so it’s a matter of using sleep effectively as a tool. Through my worst days, sleep was usually a way for me to escape my situation momentarily so that I could recharge and attack it again. Thomas Edison famously napped whenever he was stuck with a problem. Sleep serves a couple functions, one of which is to improve your memory. Your memories are rearranged during your REM cycle, tossing out information you don’t need and consolidating the data you use more regularly. Even now, when most of my bigger problems have been put to rest and my day to day problems are smaller in size, sometimes the only way to solve an issue is to sleep on it.

This week, I somehow got around to processing a painful experience from a previous job. I was tasked with recreating someone’s work but in a format that was easier to audit and understand. I was given ample time, but the problem was much more complex than it seemed at a high level. Hint: they always are. I delivered it late, but I never heard anything from my manager. He never mentioned anything about it being late, asked why, checked in to see if I needed more help. That’s fine, but I also expected him to be more of a leader than that. He went to great pains to make sure the rest of the team was in check and had the resources they needed, but I was left out in the cold. I never knew he was upset about it until I got my annual review. I knew that I didn’t communicate my struggles and needs, so he wasn’t wrong about my performance. Nevertheless, the pain stuck with me. I was blind-sided, and I felt betrayed. I knew he was taking jabs at me behind my back with other coworkers. For some reason, that popped up this week. I had been thinking about it unconsciously for the past little while, but ultimately it was an unresolved issue that kept hurting me until I dealt with it. If I hadn’t created the space, the peace and quiet at home, creating structured unstructured time, it would have gone on continually hurting me.

“Don’t take it personally.” You hear it all the time, and it isn’t always helpful. “Just get over it.” This advice comes from people who currently aren’t hurt by whatever it is you are complaining about. There’s no empathy there. There’s no understanding that you’re human and that your reaction is understandable. It’s how Barney deals with getting sick:

It’s like when you’re rock- or wall-climbing. You’re supposed to rest the majority of your weight on your legs, but when you’re more experienced, you can use your arm strength and claw-like grip to lift yourself up. People with weaker upper body strength can’t “just do it” compared to someone with more developed abilities. Emotionally, we all have some ability to muscle through whatever is bothering us, and each of us has different strengths for dealing with different emotions. However, the energy to do that eventually runs out, and then suddenly you’re the one that snaps when you least expect it. You can’t always tough it out in every single situation. Since I’ve dealt with a lot of my deeper wounds, I’m less sensitive now. I still have to be aware that everyone has a different level of sensitivity, so I can’t just assume that since I’m okay now, everyone else should be too. People like to say that "time heals all wounds," but that’s not true of trauma.

There was a dead bee laying in our building’s basement. We go down there maybe once or twice a month, depending on what we need to put into or take out of storage. This huge fuzzy bumblebee died and laid itself to rest in the hallway on the way to our storage closet. Now, it’s already a creepy basement with poor lighting and fading architecture, and I was traumatized as a child by a bumblebee. We had this apple tree in our garden, and I went outside to pick an apple to sate my appetite on a hot summer day. I grabbed a juicy apple and bit into it, and as I was walking back to the house, a bee decided to pollinate my ear, which I guess must look like a flower to them. I was stunned for about 5 seconds, then I started freaking out and batting at my ear, shaking my head, screaming, and running inside. Pretty quick series of events, but ever since, I haven’t been able to get rid of the heightened fear whenever I hear a buzzing sound close to my ear. I wasn’t stung or anything, but I simply can’t handle little flies, mosquitoes, and especially yellow bugs like wasps or hornets. Anyhow, seeing that huge fuzzy bee in our storage area triggered that fear. I could have dealt with the trauma directly, I suppose, but I don’t think it’s the biggest worry I have, especially living in the frozen wasteland of Canada. After seeing it about three times over a couple months and reacting the same way every time, freezing up in fear for a second, I decided to remove it. I didn’t have a broom or anything, so I just kicked it with my sandals until it was outside, where the cleaner would remove it that night. Ugh. Gross. Blech. I shudder thinking about it now.

I think trauma leads to addiction, and I’m pretty sure I’m addicted to orange soda. It pulls me into the moment. The bubbles burning, coupled with the sweetness, makes my mouth taste the cold, tingly, citrus nectar. It draws my mind out of the troubles that might be plaguing me from the past or the future. It’s also super warm in our place most of the time, so it’s partly just another way to cool down. There are many things we do to draw our minds into the present, like playing on our phones, watching TV, going to the gym, taking a walk, video games, drinking and smoking. As long as the pain or pleasure is strong enough, it transports our headspace from wherever it currently is towards the present. I’m not drawn by the thrill of gambling in a casino per se, but that feeling still exists inside me, just in different areas. Taking questionable risks, betting on shaky ground, feeling a hot streak. Sometimes it happens when I’m 3D printing a detailed model. Addiction is incredibly complex, and I don’t claim to have much insight into how it works. However, I’m trying to play with ideas in order to get a better grasp on the parameters and impacts of my behaviour. Some nights I can’t sleep until I’ve snacked a bunch and drunk an orange soda. When I get stressed, all I want is a fizzy sugar drink. That can’t be great for my health long term.

Freedom. Why did I go through two years of counselling and let my world fall apart? Why did I go to school? Why do I write? Why do I fight so persistently with Carrie and not give up until we find a resolution? I wanted to be free of the trauma that trapped me, and now I have more control over how I regulate my emotions. I’m free from my family now, whereas I used to feel so poisoned with toxic stress and anxiety when I talked with them. I worked through my PTSD so I could live a normal life. I think addiction and trauma are so interrelated because they both point to a feeling of being stuck, trapped in a cycle. There’s a way to break out of the prison, but it’s really difficult when everything is falling apart at the same time and you can’t catch enough of a break to get ahead. My two most recent examples of creating some room was from a painful experience at work and a traumatic childhood experience with bees. Not only did I need to create space in order see the problems, but I also needed to deal with those emotions in order to create more room. The purpose is to live freely. Now I’m not afraid of going downstairs. I know there won’t be a monster hiding down there to terrorize me. It’s a straightforward mentality dealing with physical wounds, but we tend to ignore our emotional wounds.

It’s a new experience being able to peel away my mind and heart from an emotional situation and to decide whether or not I want to proceed. Being so sensitive before, most overwhelming scenarios would max out my anxiety and stress, and it would take days or weeks just to calm down about it. Now I can negotiate my emotions in the moment. Instead of thinking of a witty comeback three weeks later in the shower, I can come up with a response almost right away (or the day after). It’s a remarkable change. I used to just tell myself positive messages like “don’t let it bother you” or “you’re better than that,” but it never really started working until now. I used to need several hours a day to put my emotions on ice, and as a result, I was completely unavailable to Carrie after a work day. Now I can bounce back much quicker using several coping methods, and I’ll even clean up the home and get ready for bed early instead of simply passing out on the couch. I’m crashing and burning a lot less. Way less boozing. Eating my emotions less. I’m even being proactive and intentional with my free time, figuring out ways to get ahead for tomorrow’s needs. I spend less time feeling confused about what I’m feeling, why, and what to do about it.

I’m functioning better. I’m staying within my window of tolerance more often. Before, my stress would rise quickly and fall slowly, but now it rises slower and falls quicker. I can even avoid stressful situations altogether! Imagine that. Instead of letting my addictive tendencies derail my life, I’m creating balance through sleep. By taking the time to deal with my emotional wounds, I’m free to operate in the ways that I like, such as using my free time to do my chores and run errands. With that free time, I can do whatever I want, like doing nothing at all. That allows me to see new problems, and dealing with those problems creates room so I can sleep or do nothing at all. It’s a healthy cycle. It’s liberating.

I wrote a little while ago about how we can choose our responses to everything that happens to us, but going further, sometimes we can choose our emotional state. For instance, even though I was unemployed and searching for work only a few months ago, I didn’t want certain types of work, like the service industry, factory jobs, construction. These are all things I could have considered, but I didn’t want to because of the emotional tier I wanted to occupy. I didn’t want to work in something I’d find too embarrassing to talk about. In fact, I quit my previous job during a time when people were being laid off and moving back home. When my dad fled from the Viet Cong, I’m sure that any job I had over my lifetime would be better than living under their regime. Some people are content with being miserable at their jobs. They take in a lot of abuse in order to get that paycheque or pat on the head. At some level, I have to appreciate that some people can raise a family on my retail salary, whereas I’m just preoccupied with buying better clothes and a new 3D printer.

I’ve observed that satisfaction with your life starts with a decision. As a kid, I knew that when I grew up, I didn’t want to struggle to find work or money. I knew I would go to school, but later on, I learned that getting myself into a relationship would also provide financial relief (and responsibility). Even through the unemployment, I could have done a ton of things to escape financial hardship. I could have not quit my job in the first place. I could have stopped counselling. I could have moved in with my in-laws. However, I refused to leave my emotional tier. I was relatively content with my setup, such as my living situation, my transportation strategy, my food intake. Instead, I refused to change up a lot of things which would have helped my finances. It was more challenging to get by because I didn’t want to lose any ground, even temporarily.

On one of my days off last week, I went for a nice meal, biked around the river through the yellowing autumn leaves, and laid in the grass with the sun shining on me. It was a beautiful day, but I still had to choose to be content. Even though I wasn’t over the moon or having the best time of my life, that kind of peace and quiet is hard to attain. Things aren’t always perfect, but when they aren’t bad, that’s great. We can’t always escape to Hawaii and stare out at the ocean or take a long weekend at the cabin, but there are pockets in our everyday spaces where we can transport our minds and stop worrying about everything. Presented with this kind of peace and quiet, it’s tempting to complain that I’m bored, but compared to just last year, my life’s amazing now that things aren’t blowing up anymore. I have to make intentional decisions to be glad because otherwise, I would be unhappy with my life no matter how good it got. On the flip side, there is no pleasing some people, who find any reason to be unhappy with themselves and others.

I’m feeling better about myself. I’m receiving more compliments for my work and my looks, which is a new experience. I’m sticking with a hairdo that works for me instead of buzzing it, I’m buying nicer clothes for my wardrobe, and I’m moisturizing. A friend patted me on the back the other night, and they were like “Whoa, someone’s been working out!" I have been working on my back, but I never thought anyone would notice. That compliment will probably stay with me for weeks. Each nice word I receive now feels like someone taking a brick away from the walls built up around my old identity. I was a perfectionist growing up, so I was never good enough for anyone, especially myself. I was awkward and nerdy (an awknerd), so I felt like I never fit in with most people. I hated myself, so I was ashamed of who I was and what I did. Most times when I would receive a compliment, I would correct the person by making a self-deprecating joke about how lame I truly was. Now people say I’m cool or I’m awesome, and it’s all terribly humbling and terrifying. Look how hot I am:

New profile for every account.

A post shared by Jon Lê (@jonle_) on Sep 28, 2017 at 1:42pm PDT

The compliments spike my anxiety. This goes back to a topic I covered while in counselling. My core belief about myself fits a certain definition. People tell me what they think of me, and if their comment conflicts with my own definition of myself, it’s physically and emotionally upsetting. I tend to have low self-esteem, and people saying such nice things about me is scary because it doesn’t usually fit in with how I identify myself. I have a distinct fear that they’re manipulating me to gain favour and to eventually screw me over. Ya, not a great response. I’ve never considered myself good-looking, but now that I think about it, there have been a decent amount of girls that had crushes on me based on only my looks. I don’t know why it is, but it’s usually people my parents’ age that say I’m handsome. I’ve never really accepted these nice words before. I used to fish for compliments and then reject them once I got them. Now that the counselling has helped me change my self-perspective to be more positive, I’m getting better at receiving compliments. I want to find other ways to feel good about who I am. Apparently it’s common that when people finish therapy, they start dressing better. Feel good, look good.

When you get to take control of your life, it takes a decision to be happy (plus a lot of time) before you reach that emotional tier. It doesn’t simply fall into your lap. Even when bad things keep happening to you, it takes a willingness to fight back and refuse to be broken down in order to eventually be content. It doesn’t happen right away, but given time and persistence, it’s attainable. I used to think I was supposed to be miserable. I was supposed to suffer being around people who brought me down, and I was resigned to my fate of misery. The situation only improved once I decided I wanted to be happier. It took years of hard work and support from my loved ones, but I’ve dealt with a lot of my emotional baggage, which has allowed me to feel better about who I am. I’m dressing better, working out more, and people are starting to notice. Not only that, but I’m noticing that they’re noticing, which feeds back into my goal of wanting to feel better about myself. Instead of criticizing, I’m being compassionate with myself and allowing myself to feel good, to reap the rewards of the hard work I’ve put into fighting my demons. Being in this emotional tier makes me want to cry.

Lately, I’m feeling grateful for living when and where I do. Global politics seem to have been tossed into a blender, but even then, I feel very fortunate to have my life, warts and all. I feel like I’ve dodged a lot of bullets in recent years, with great effort, and now I’m trying to just take care of myself and appreciate what I have. I’m thinking lots about what “value” means, in relative and absolute terms, with respect to my happiness, and I’m learning to breathe my way through my problems.

When I hit the lowest point of The Struggle, I had lost a lot of good things in my life, relatively. But in absolute terms, I was still doing great. I still had my education, my marriage, my home, some family in the city. I could still speak fluent English, conversational French, and broken Vietnamese, so I could still navigate the system around me. Even though I shunned my family of origin, I know they would still be there to help me if I really needed it; at the same time remembering that their help comes with strings attached that I wouldn’t like later on. I still had friends and a network of people in town on whom I could lean if I needed a place to stay or other assistance. My lowest point was a lot higher than most people ever reach in their lifetime, and I still had my whole life ahead of me. I’ve already won several jackpots, whereas some would be grateful for just one of mine.

I tried to remind myself of all these facts while the pain burned in my chest. Most of the time it wasn’t that comforting to hear. By all accounts, I experienced a deep emotional loss, which was difficult to reconcile with. Meanwhile, I observed many people in my circle who had lost much more at some point but still rebuilt their lives and moved on. I didn’t have to leave the country because of war. I didn’t lose a loved one. I didn’t have to move back home because of the downturned economy. I didn’t let down my kids because I was laid off at work. Transportation can easily cross distances in timespans that our ancestors never dreamed of. I have a bike I don’t use much, which I bought just because it would be nice to have. I can sample cuisines from all around the world within my own city. We have bathrooms with indoor plumbing. I can access the knowledge of the world without having to travel to some person in a distant land. I don’t have to print MapQuest travel directions on paper before going to a new place. I can have McDonald’s delivered to me using UberEATS. If I don’t feel like walking somewhere in my neighbourhood, I can fire up my car to get there, even though I have two good feet and a bike. To listen to music, I can choose the floorstanding three-way stereo speakers; the wireless one with the subwoofer; the portable Bluetooth waterproof one; the small wireless headphones or the large wireless ones; the wired headphones tuned for rock and roll or the top of the line headphones that sound better for most genres of music. I have clothes that not only fit my body and my sense of style, but I can easily replace items that don’t express my true identity as closely as I would like. To launder them, it takes a few dollars and crossing the hallway, which is sometimes even better than for those with a washer-dryer in their basement. I don’t have to carry everything in a big plastic bag and drag it across the neighbourhood or go to the local well and hand-wash them. My doctor’s office is literally on the same city block as mine, so if I don’t feel well, I can cross the field to be examined.

Louis CK puts this perspective in a more humourous way:

When I mentally keep score with my friends, I have to remind myself that we all started in very different places. I think I pushed out a lot of absolute value, but relative to others, it may not look as impressive on the outside. I have friends whom I love that had much more privileged upbringings, and they couldn’t help but to be raised in their environment any more than I could. I just have to remind myself that I started a lot further back than some people, so it takes a lot more for me to get ahead and keep up with them. At the same time, I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for my parents, my mom’s income and health insurance, Canadian healthcare in general, my dad driving us to and from school for years, taking us to piano lessons and allergy shots and to get our braces tightened, and on and on. We all face different challenges and receive different assistance, so the uphill climb is steeper at varying stages. With a large relative loss, my emotions needed to be soothed, but looking at my absolute geographic and historic place in this world put a limit on my pity party.

Breaking out of my structure. I had set up a bunch of rules to manage my old way of life. I was unemployed, Carrie was in school, and I was stressed out of my mind, so I went to the gym for several hours most mornings to pump it all out. Moving to this new world where Carrie and I are both working, I didn’t fully rearrange my routine to thrive better. There was a moment not too long ago where I had to simply call off all my rules. So many of the underlying assumptions which created those guidelines had completely vanished, so it made very little sense to hold my patterns in place so strictly. For example, I was writing every week because my heart used to be constantly ripped open, whether by counselling, struggling with not working, or feeling isolated from Carrie. In this new stage, we both started new jobs this spring and summer, I stopped counselling earlier this year, and we both started having a lot more fun than we used to. I had less material to write about, and I had less time to process everything anyways. As a result, it made little sense to force a post out every week. In general, enough of my life completely flipped such that it required that I rewrite a lot of my routine.

Focus, fire a gun. I started going to the gym almost a year ago to help my mental health, but sometimes along the way, I changed the focus towards improving my appearance or my physical health. Truly, I still need to exercise to serve my mental health, but I can easily waver and shift my attention slightly towards what’s good for my body. There are lots of exercises I can do that’s generally good for me, but then my brain gets neglected. I tried doing more yoga when I noticed that I had so many problems with flexibility. For that reason, I stopped going to the gym and just followed a yoga video at home. Then the stress slowly piled up, and then I had to go to the gym again to pump it all out. It’s a subtle distinction, but it’s really important for me to see the difference. Since counselling ended, I decided that I would stop processing my childhood trauma emotionally in favour of focusing on the physical aspects. That still means that I have to focus on the emotions and the trauma, even though I’m working out the physical issues of my shoulders always being tight and knotted.

Traumatic re-creation. Part of the cycle and trap of trauma is in the victim re-attempting to overcome the initial traumatizing situation. Entering the boss battle, losing, powering up, and trying again. We all do this, but trauma victims lose over and over. Part of what that looks like for me is shrugging my shoulders. When I was sexually violated as a kid, my shoulders seized up in a freezing response to protect me. However, that energy never really got released until very recently, so because of the traumatic tendency to revisit situations, my shoulders will usually seize up in response to overwhelming situations. Until I can fight back against the attacker in my mind, my body will keep looping that initial stress response until I can overcome the enemy. Without fail, every time I visit my massage therapist or my physiotherapist, they always say “your neck is reeeally tight.” I like to cross my arms over my head when I sleep, which might seem normal to most people, but to me, it forces my already tight shoulders to tighten even further. Sleeping on my side does the same. These postures might not be so bad for most, but when I have a history of tight trapezius muscles stemming from a traumatic event, I have to be more careful to avoid injuring myself. I’ve played whack-a-mole with my flexibility, focusing on my flat feet, locked hips, or tight neck and shoulders depending on whichever hurt the most that week, but now I think I need to focus on my shoulders for a while. I still have to maintain a level of maintenance on the other areas, but I can only focus on improving this one area. I’m doing it this way because of my emotions and trauma, not simply because it’s good for my body.

Catching my breath.

I stop breathing whenever I get nervous. It’s not great. Right now, I’m taking time to manually pump air back into my lungs when I sense some anxiety. My dad was a bus driver when he was younger, and he said there were certain bus stops that were timing points throughout your route. If you were early, you sat and chilled out at your timing point so that you didn’t arrive earlier than expected at the next few stops. If you were running behind, then you had to skip past your timing point to catch up on your schedule. I’m doing this throughout my day now by taking a few deep breaths, and it’s helping me a lot. I’ll take a minute to myself to just shake off any scratchy emotions and take breaths between 10 and 15 seconds long. It’s very soothing. On my days off, if I don’t do anything productive, I’ll get antsy and feel the need to work on problems into the night. That doesn’t really set up my next day for success, so I’m trying to be more productive earlier in the day while still making time to rest and get ahead. To enhance my sleep, I have the HEPA filter running alongside the humidifier, which makes it easier to breathe in the dry Calgary climate and which makes my slumber more restful. Morning and night are starting to feel as important as planes taking off and landing. Those are the riskiest moments of every flight, so I’m learning to give my morning and bedtime routines my full attention to ensure a safe voyage. Breathing plays a big part in both, and it’s been the antidote to my anxiety as of late. An ex-girlfriend taught me that toddlers know how to breathe properly, but somehow as we get older, we only take quick shallow breaths that only fill up our chest and not our bellies. It can take years to train yourself to breathe properly again. I can quickly get worked up from all the varying layers of challenges thrown on me, and it physically pushes the air out of my body. It’s tough work making sure I breathe with my diaphragm. It’s a simple concept, but it’s hard to remembering to do it when I need to.

I’m not well yet. I’m not doing worse, and I’m not suffering as much anymore. I stopped tumbling down the hill, and now I can start climbing again. I’m adjusting better, I’m hurting myself less, and I’m taking better care of myself. I still wouldn’t say I’m well. I still feel damaged and broken from my experience growing up in my family. I drink lots of fizzy sugar water. I feel better, and I’m starting to dress better as a result. Feel better, look better.

I miss my family. I missed Chris’ wedding and birthday, and it was Josh’s birthday recently too. Judging from the little communication I still somehow manage to receive from them, they don’t get what they did wrong. They think I’m just trying to live a better life, so I’m just optimizing certain parameters to their best values. No, I’m still trying to survive because they were negligently trying to kill me. Their inability to take responsibility for their shit spilled over into my life because I tried to keep the family running. Instead, I’ve had enough and need to protect myself before I die. It still makes me sad that I can’t be there with and for them, but it has to be this way if I want to keep going.

My three year resolution is still in effect. I have lots of projects I still want to start, like losing weight, working on debt, and picking out some hot sneakers, which is in direct opposition to the prior point. However, I’m not allowed to start any such long term, large scale projects until 2018. I’m still looking to stabilize. It’s tempting to think that I’m fully ready to start building up again, but I’m still in clean-up mode. A lot of people who start off with unfortunate childhoods never end up turning things around, so I don’t want to get cocky and start off on another adventure before I’m done wrapping things up. I don’t feel ready right now, even though I quickly and frequently get anxious to start working on new projects.

This week I want to talk about vibing with people. When you’re on the same frequency, you resonate with each other. Waves show similar behaviour. When they have the same frequency, they can add up. When waves are 180 degrees out of phase with each other, they subtract.

Constructive interference

Destructive interference

Destructive interference is what happens when we’re out of phase by 180 degrees. But what happens when we’re in between those values?

When we’re at different frequencies, in physics, it’s called a beat.

freq_beat = |freq1 - freq2|

That’s how we harmonize in music, when complementary notes are played together. Some combinations sound better than others. They can sound beautiful or terrifying depending on where we are in the greater context of the song.

Time domain measures in [seconds], but the frequency is the inverse, 1/[seconds]. If it takes me 10 minutes to eat a Big Mac (time domain), then I can eat 6 Big Macs per hour (frequency domain). Frequency domain is weird. It’s like the Upside Down in Stranger Things, and just as terrifying. Rules that apply in the time domain that we all know and love all look very different in the frequency domain. It’s the same world but a different way of looking at it. There’s a limit to how we can intuitively visualize waves in the time domain. Observe:

I’ve been thinking about frequencies and vibing as it pertains to relationships. Some people you get along with, and some you don’t. If you look from the time domain, waves kinda all look sorta similar after a while.

However, when you start looking at your interactions with people as waves in the frequency domain, it’s a lot easier to see that you’ll never get along with everyone. This is a stark reminder because I think I’m so great that everybody should love me.

When someone stands with you, they’re choosing to be on your wavelength. We all have some emotional range, so we can adjust ourselves based on who we’re with. I laugh more around certain people, and around others I don’t talk much at all. Our identity is fluid based on the circumstance. At the extreme end, some characters are very rigid and don’t adjust themselves for anyone. On the other end, there are those that morph so much that they’re almost unrecognizable even by their loved ones. Last week I wrote “This is Me,” where I decided to stop accommodating others so much by inconveniencing myself. I’m still the same agreeable Jon you know and love, but I’m not bending over backwards anymore just to artificially boost a connection.

How do you know if you’ll harmonize with people around you? With waves, having the same fundamental frequency allows for resonance. If a guitar string vibrates, another string at standstill will begin to vibrate because of the first string’s energy. The fundamental frequency of 100 Hz will resonate with any whole multiples, like 200 Hz, 300 Hz, 400 Hz, etc. What does this look like in daily life? We can observe this at pretty much every concert, where the musician plays a song and everyone grooves to it at the same time. On a personal level, I’m friends with people who differ in age from me pretty widely, and even though we have very different experiences, we still get along great. Some people are a few years younger, some more than 10 years older, but we can still find ways to relate with each other. We’ll have similar values, senses of humour, personalities. Your physical rhythms might even be similar, observed by such behaviours as a head nodding in agreement.

I’m using age here as one filter for the entirety of a person, but we can generalize each person’s unique vibe into the concept of timbre. Most musical instruments can play the same frequencies, but they all sound different. Even instruments manufactured one after the other will sound different, and that’s all summarized as its timbre. Everyone has their own unique voice, but those voices can be grouped into similar sounds like how instruments are grouped into brass, strings, wind, etc. People will vibe with each other based on similarities. Shocking insight, I know.

We attract types. There are people who I think are amazing, and I wonder how their coworkers don’t feel lucky to be around them all the time. Some friends always seem to date jerks. There are people who I think I should be friends with on paper, but for some reason it just doesn’t work out in reality. We have similar values, experiences, compatible personalities, and yet it doesn’t really click. I met someone new with whom I thought I should get along, but they have too many connections already to fit in someone new, regadless of compatibility. He’s a spitting image of somebody that I used to know, with whom I had a similar problem.

Let’s say you have only a few slots within your inner circle of friends. There are those that only allow people in if they’re the same as them. Think "Mean Girls" or the cliquey popular kids from high school. You have to be from the right race, gender, socioeconomic class, physical ability. I don’t necessarily care to argue with my friends all that much, but agreeing with someone all the time gets boring. Besides which, my head gets a bit dizzy from nodding in agreement so much. I like surrounding myself with people who have vastly different experiences from me. I don’t exactly know what’s the common thread between people I attract, but I have noticed a trend of people who have been deeply hurt before but who also overcame the pain. I used to suppress my troubles, so the people I attracted back then also did the same. But now that I’ve processed a lot of it and come out the other side a kinder, more compassionate person, I’m starting to befriend those kinds of people.

We need all sorts of friends at any given time, and we need to be these kinds of friends to those who’ve enlisted us as well:

• We need friends to roast us and keep our egos in check.
• We need people who respect and admire us.
• Someone to be in love with.
• The hard OGs to kick our asses when we act a fool.
• The soft and cuddly types that we can be real and vulnerable with.
• The homies that peer-pressure us into trouble and shenanigans.
• The all-day friends who know far too much about what’s happening in your schedule.
• The responsible friend from whom we can copy homework and assignments.

Sometimes you meet a person that fits a role in your life, but they don’t want to connect with you. It’s ambiguous and painful because everyone has a different way of telling you they aren’t interested in you the way you are in them. You can get the cold shoulder or direct rejection, unreturned messages. Overall, there’s tons of awkwardness. You might try to convince them you could be good friends, but no response. Maybe it’s the other way around and someone wants to befriend you, but you’re too nice to turn them away. We all have a roster of our go-to people. There’s a nasty way of letting go of people who bring you down. Some go to school and think they’re too smart to hang out with people who have lower education. Some get rich and leave their less wealthy friends behind. Some get married and ditch their single friends bnecause they don’t have a guest to bring along to dinner parties. Some people settle down, and they judge people who haven’t done the same yet. It hurts being rejected, but I think it evens out because we’ll all get to be on the other side of the fence eventually.

I’ve been pretty deliberate over the past few years about surrounding myself with better people. Part of the challenge is in finding the right people, but I think the harder part is letting go of the decent ones. There isn’t room for great friends when your bench is full of good friends, old friends, friends of friends, acquaintances, family friends. With my music collection, I go through phases of repeating songs and playlists for a month or so, then I’ll hunt for new songs for a week. However, there are only so many songs I really care to have in a playlist, and sometimes it means deleting songs that I loved for a time but eventually which I got tired of. Similarly, relationships have seasons. When you’re in school, you generally make friends with people who are physically near you and are forced in to the same schedule as you. As you get older, you move schools, you live in different places, and then you just stop talking to a lot of those older friends. Social media gives the illusion of connection and intimacy. We can cast a much wider net of friends compared to people living before the Internet, but our hearts haven’t really changed as humans. We can still only manage to have a few really close friends.

Listening to new songs, I can tell pretty quick whether I’ll love this song or not, so I skip through them pretty fast. I made some new friends recently, and it stunned me how we’ve all quickly clicked. Normally I’d be really apprehensive about adding someone to the fold, trading numbers, figuring out the whole social network thing. (Who should initiate? how long should I wait? do I really want them to see my old pictures?) You’ve read on this blog that I was worried about losing a bunch of friends, and now you’ve also read about how some of those spots got filled up after about a year.

We have these job postings created for friends to fill, and we have to take care in crafting those job descriptions if we want to derive true enjoyment and satisfaction from our relationships. Sometimes we have ideas in our heads about what we want, but our bodies might know better than us at times. I’ve had a few friends for a long time where my body was shouting at me to stop being around them, but I didn’t get the message until a few years into it. Now I’ve had some positions vacant for about a year, only to be filled when I gave up on them. What I learned is that it’s an area where you can’t really force anything to happen. It starts and ends organically, so having my type A personality doesn’t really speed up the process by trying to control everything. It’s one of those instances where I had to use a light touch. I needed to stop being such a nice guy and to be assertive in rejecting certain applicants, but I also just needed to let it happen on its own. When I meet friends of friends and they ask how I know our mutual friend, it usually goes something like "Um, I don’t really know. We met through another person and just started hanging out, I guess." Desperately trying to fill the void did nothing for me. It took lots of deep breathing and returning my focus to living my life, and then it kinda just fell into place. Things worked out when I accepted the discomfort enough to carry on, even if it felt like an open wound. You eventually figure out who’s on the same wavelength as you, and it’s something you can’t really change about a person. If one of you decides to make a big change, then that’s how people naturally grow closer and drift apart.

Not long ago, I was worried I would lose all my friends. I thought I was going to drift into my 30’s and fatherhood with no one noticing while I kicked and screamed because I still wanted to party. I was putting out good vibrations and energy all on my lonesome, thinking no one would pick up on them until after I faded into obscurity. Things haven’t turned out as grim as I expected, and even more, they’ve turned out better than I ever imagined. A difference in frequency is called a beat, and some beats work better together. We attract types, so given enough time, we’ll fill our lives with people of similar vibes. I don’t need a ton of friends, but I do need the right ones. Life’s too short to have mediocre relationships, and the road to happiness is paved with a hundred “no’s” for every “yes.” I had terrible results when I tried to force some relationships to happen, and despite learning to let things happen organically, I also had to be deliberate in letting some friendships go and in showing up for the people that showed up for me.