In my last post I had said that one of my hopes for 2020 is finally kicking my depression to the curb. But it’s occurred to me that my struggles with depression and my struggles with anxiety are two distinctly different fights. Sometimes they show up in similar ways, but these are separate entities. It’s never a fair fight; most of the time they tag team. They have the same effect though, both things make me feel shitty about myself. I guess that’s why I’ve had so much trouble ridding myself of either issue. Seems obvious, but it makes so much sense.

I’m the type to get easily overwhelmed. When I’m trying to concentrate on two things at once it’s hard for me to focus. This isn’t to say I’m a bad multitasker. That’s yet another discussion. But when it comes to addressing a defining moment/issue/plan in my life, I have to tackle it one thing at a time. It took me way too long to figure this out, but I know better now. I’m hard-headed. I’m stubborn. I don’t like asking for help. Maybe this is why it took me so long to understand, so long to change. But change is happening, slowly, but surely.

This stubbornness usually ended up with me trying to do things my way, but trying & failing and trying & failing. As they say, doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results is craziness. I mean sure, people can have multiple “my ways,” but my way was usually the same way. In 2014, I was getting ready to graduate college, but due to my lack of motivation, focus, and effort early on in my career, I was going to need an extra semester to do so. I was and am a smart kid; I just didn’t see it, I didn’t know my self-worth. I don’t know about many other cultures, but Chinese immigrant parents stress education more than anything else in the world. To be educated is to show the world that brawn is not worth more than brains. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing, education objectively is extremely important. But is it everything? Of course not! Or at least it shouldn’t be. That’s what I was told as a kid. But actions, behaviors, mentalities, beliefs all speak louder than words.

Growing up as an Asian-American Christian is not something I regret. After all, there’s nothing I could’ve done about it. All I can do is take the lessons I learned and apply them to my life and pass them on to my children. That being said, I wouldn’t want my kids to have the same upbringing as me. The culture that I grew up in was extremely sheltered. I understand my parents were trying to do what they thought was best for me. We attended one of the best public high schools in Massachusetts, one that was named a Blue Ribbon school in 2009. Grades were the main focus for everybody. If you didn’t get straight A’s, it was almost like you weren’t worth anybody’s time. But I didn’t have focus, I didn’t have drive. I was the kid who didn’t study or stress, but still ended up with mostly B’s and a handful of C’s. I was also delusional. I was convinced the world was going to end really soon, and thus I didn’t take things seriously. I didn’t develop good friendships in my high school years. Every so often I’ll come across a picture on Facebook and I’ll be like, “wow. These kids from high school still hang out.” I never had that, and I never will. The school mentality and the culture of the school was, unfortunately one that told you that, “great is not good enough. Only perfect is.” There were kids complaining about their 2100 or 2200 SAT scores, saying things like, “I was so close. So close. Just a few questions off.” How do you think that made me feel, sitting here with my 1870? It made me feel like a real dumb ass.

So you can sort of see why my sense of self-worth was so skewed right? Well if you can’t, let me make it more clear. Growing up in an ethno-specific church was pretty damaging for me growing up. I’ll get more into the specifics on a later post. And because I wasn’t actively making or keeping friends at school, it kept me very closed off to people of other races and ethnicities. I was ignorant and sheltered. I didn’t know the way the world worked, or understand that people are mostly garbage. I think maybe my habits and behaviors helped to reinforce my shelteredness. But probably the biggest issue with going to a Chinese church is it’s hard for a young kid to distinguish between the different things that are taught to you there. What is a faith-based doctrine originating from the Bible vs. what is based on Chinese culture? It’s hard to tell. There’s usually a fine line between it all. Yes, some Chinese culture based concepts are also in the Bible, such as familial piety and respecting your elders. But is it as important in the Bible as it is in Chinese culture? Probably not. As a kid, you don’t really question these things. You don’t think about your faith. You inherently believe that everything your parents teach you is right. Everything that you learn in church is doctrinally sound. But that’s not the case. Once you’re old enough to understand, you have to find your own truth.

Growing up in an evangelical Chinese church in what is often called a spiritually dead state was tough. I don’t know how other Chinese churches are like, but looking back on it, it feels like there was some overcompensation involved in the teachings. It was always stressed how dangerous the pleasures of this world are. So much so that it felt like one of the main goals was learning how to not be bad, as opposed to learning how to actually be a good person. I feel like that value was missed. This inevitably led me to have an insane amount of guilt constantly. It had me striving for perfect, when perfect was unattainable. This quest, as stated, was further reinforced at school. This was the mindset, so don’t be surprised when I tell you that I felt like I could never live up.

So I didn’t push myself very hard. I did just enough to get a grade that everyone would be content with. This was a precursor to the anti-risk-taker that I’ve become. Boy, was I in for a surprise when I got to college. I actually had to do work. I needed to study, and do the homework. Make sure I kept up with the workload. Most importantly I needed to make sure I understood the course material as I was going through. If I didn’t understand, I needed to go over the homework and do the practice problems until they made sense. I ended up getting a D in Math my first semester. By far, the worst grade I ever got. The rest of my college career was spent making up for this poor grade. My grades were all A’s and B’s going forward, so my GPA was steadily improving. But that one grade, falling behind on my track, and accidentally taking courses I didn’t need made it so that an extra semester was necessary. Long tangent aside, Stony Brook University only lets you live on campus for a maximum of 8 semesters, so I had to find off-campus housing with some friends who were basically in the same boat as me.

I ended up living in a house near the campus for two years. Some of the roommates rotated out after the first year. This was the spring of 2016. This was when work started getting bad. I had already found out that my current roommates weren’t planning on renewing the lease, so I needed to find something else. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but I eventually settled on moving to Queens, and I somehow made the decision to look for a job and look for an apartment at the same time. Surprise, surprise, it didn’t work out. My eyes were looking two directions at once, so neither thing had my focus. The lease ended at the end of July, it was now the beginning of July. I got lucky in that I had a friend who was also looking for a place, and he proposed that we live together. This was the first time I made this mistake, but wouldn’t be my last.

Fast forward two years, it’s August 2018. Work still sucks. My roommate has told me that he’s moving across the country. He’s going to live with his sister for the month of September, and he’ll be 5000 miles away in October. The month of August I was getting duped by that shitty realtor who kept bait & switching me, telling me he had an apartment for me when he really didn’t. Again, for some odd reason I had decided to look for a job and look for an apartment at the same time. Which, as we know, didn’t work out the first time. That realtor was at least gracious enough to find something temporary for me. But I was still being hard-headed. I had it imprinted in my brain that I was going to stay in Queens. Don’t ask me where I got that notion from, but I was pretty firm in saying, “no way I’m going back to Long Island.” But I’m a suburban kid, my girlfriend is on Long Island, and my work is also there. What am I gonna do? Eventually I was talked into making the logical choice. But the depression bug was hitting me hard at that point.

And he called his friend anxiety into the fray as well. Looking for an apartment was stressing me out. My accident with that lady and the subsequent contemplation of suicide had driven my thoughts deeper into an increasingly darker place. I had returned from a vacation in Europe at the end of July feeling like I was being haunted. My mind was spinning out of control. My friends depression and anxiety were clamping onto my brain and my heart like a vice. My life was falling apart. In October, I went on a weekend trip to Vermont with my girlfriend. I was still in a weird mental headspace. I had just recently started seeing a therapist every other week, but I wasn’t at the point where I was fully comfortable with her or where I took everything she said to heart. It was a new experience for me. I had seen a therapist in college on and off for a bit, but it wasn’t anything consistent, and therefore we weren’t able to uncover and unpack the brokenness, the pain, and the lack of control in my life. My mom, being the way that she is, whether consciously or subconsciously, took advantage of my broken state. After my suicide attempt, she, like any sane parent, wanted to keep an eye and an ear on me. We talked on the phone regularly. I was having issues with my relationship (mostly my fault). My mom somehow got it into her head that it was appropriate to ask me if we had sex when we went to Vermont.

I cursed her out, and didn’t speak to her for a month. Other instances of my mom exerting her control on my life include the time she tried to get me to break up with Katie (this may have been part of the same conversation or an entirely different incident, I don’t remember); or the time I first told her about Katie and she was upset cause she had someone she had wanted to introduce me to; or the time I told her in high school that I wanted to be a musician when I grew up, and she told me that it’s hard to make money as a musician and basically shat on my dream; or the time she told me nobody reads anymore after I told her I wanted to be a writer (granted, this was after I started taking everything she said with a grain of salt). Her hold on my life was unhealthy, both my therapist and my girlfriend had told me as much. At first I didn’t want to believe it. For a long time I denied it. You’re telling me my mom doesn’t always want what’s best for me? You’re crazy! But as time went on I started to see it. This was a new revelation to me. My mom wasn’t infallible. This new realization on top of everything else I was dealing with caused my anxiety to peak.

I’d like to say that the main nuance between depression and anxiety is that one of them affects you internally, and the other one affects you externally. Depression makes you withdraw into yourself. All your negative emotions, your lack of purpose, your lack of passion, your nihilism make you clam up. They cause you to create a protective shell, you don’t let other people in because they can’t help. Anxiety, that tricky devil, sees your depression looming behind you and pushes you back into him. Anxiety tells you that you’re not good enough, tells you that your friends don’t like you. It makes you so afraid of disappointing that you’re not willing to take risks. If I had realized there were two battles going on, maybe I would’ve approached things differently. Trouble is, you could probably say that I didn’t even know I had anxiety. That wouldn’t be a false statement. How do you fight a struggle that you didn’t know you had? The depression was apparent and right there in front of me. I knew since 10th grade. Anxiety though? I don’t know if I really caught on to this until last year or the year before. The whole time I just lumped them together. I thought my confidence was shot because of my depression, but it was more than that.

I’ve never been a big fan of people, and after 28 years of life, I don’t think that’s going to change much, if at all. People suck. People will almost always let you down. Yes, you’ll find a few that are true blue, your real ride or dies. But they are few & far between. I have a bad habit of being too trusting of people. Believing people at their word. Maybe my expectations are too high, maybe I’m too sensitive, maybe I take things too personally, or maybe I’m just playing the victim. But it used to seem like I would always end up getting hurt. It didn’t occur to me until recently that some of it was my fault and a lot of it wasn’t.

Growing up, I didn’t have many friends, nor did I want them; at least in my younger days. I was a very shy kid, I kept to myself mostly. I wasn’t exactly a loner, but I was introverted to a T. As I got older, I started being more open, more trusting. I wanted to make more friends, but I wasn’t entirely comfortable with myself, and I found that the more I opened up, the more vulnerable I was (I mean no shit, that’s how life works). Imagined or not, I felt like I was being attacked and made fun of if I exposed too much of the real me. I felt like it was bad practice to let people get too close. It was an endless cycle of wanting friends, opening up, feeling scared and hurt, then shutting down. Whether or not my fear was warranted was besides the point, I always took it as, “oh no. Someone got too close, it’s time to withdraw back into my shell.”

You could say I was the harbinger of my own failed friendships. I always had a thing, I guess you could call it a complex, where I just never believed I could have something good, and keep it or maintain it. Every so often I would realize that I had ignited a great friendship with someone. I had discovered someone who was like a brother to me, but the nagging thought in my mind would be, “but the going’s too good. This is going to end.” And guess what? Things did end. People did leave. Time and time again. But it never occurred to me at the time, that things sometimes ended because I caused them to. Things ended because I pushed people away. Things ended because I didn’t put in the effort to maintain it. The thought never crossed my mind until I got to college. I never truly cherished the ones I had, and some of the ones I did have, I didn’t want to have.

And I guess, that’s where it went wrong all these years. I always somehow fucked it up. I figured it would be better to do the hurting than to be hurt. I dropped people, so that they wouldn’t drop me. Yes, I am too trusting of people, but by the same token, I see the worst in people and expect the worst. I used to call myself a realist, but maybe I was really just a pessimist. I had gotten it into my head that people were out to get me, or that people I liked didn’t reciprocate the feeling. This was my anxiety come to life. It’s been a long journey to come to this conclusion, and it took many others to show me this. But I see clearly now how much I care about what other people think of me, and how important my image is. Going back to our horoscopes, you can clearly see that I’m a Leo, albeit an introverted one. I’m stubborn, lazy, self-centered, and inflexible. I like being admired, I hate being ignored, and I hate facing difficult reality. And this isn’t to pin it solely on my nature. I don’t like generalizing like that. It feels too much like being boxed into the corner, like you have no choice. That’s not it. People are capable of change. People are able to go against their nature, either on an individual basis or on the regular. You don’t have to buy into the stereotype. You don’t have to be what they say you are.

So as an add-on to my hopes for 2020, I still expect to tell my depression goodbye. Overall I’m in a better mental state. I’ve reset my middle ground. I’ve let go of my anger, my bitterness. My job is no longer weighing on me. I’ve learned new coping techniques, positive thought processes. My brain is no longer mired in self-deprecating muck. I feel fully confident for the first time in my life. I feel like I’m in control. On top of the world. The devil can’t bring me down to the pits I used to dwell in. But anxiety will have to stay a little bit longer. I can’t battle both foes at once. On the way to discovering my best self, I can, however stop giving a fuck about what other people think. The only person who will look out for me more than myself is God.

It doesn’t matter what people think. They’re going to think what they want to think. Not everyone is going to like me. Not everyone is going to support me. Some people are going to pretend to be supportive, but fall away when the going is rough. Some people will be there through thick & thin. Some people will be friendly & kind forever and always. Some people will be more generous and accepting of me than I deserve. It’s not up to me. Whatever they think is always going to be what they think, and how they treat me is always going to be how they treat me. That much is out of my control. All I can control is myself, and that’s what I intend to do for 2020. Live my best life, and not give any fucks. Love me or hate me, but I’m going to start being true to myself. Do things my way. Danny Brown once said, “I did it my way. I ain’t nobody ho.” It’s time to stop living life how my mom wanted it to be. It’s time to stop living the safe life. It’s time to stop living to please others. It’s time to stop doing what I think others expect. It’s time to stop feeling sorry for myself. It’s time to stop worrying so much. People suck. I ain’t a ho. It’s time to start living for me.