My parents don’t listen to music. I’ve never asked them about it. I didn’t really even question it. It’s not something I ever thought about. Frankly, I’m not even sure if I really noticed it growing up. When we were young, car rides had classical, news radio, or nothing at all. When we got to high school, the pop station would be playing softly in the background, but this was more for my sisters. My parents didn’t sing along, didn’t dance, didn’t rock out, or say, “this is my jam.” The radio was on, so that we weren’t sitting in silence. We usually didn’t talk in the car. Our stereos weren’t blasting on the weekends. We didn’t have loud house parties. When we had people over, there was the sound of talking, and eating, and laughter. We lived a quiet, suburban life and I guess for the most part we preferred it that way. Looking back on it, it was a little bit odd. Not the quietness, but the lack of music.

Everyone listens to music. Music brings you through the good times and the bad, the easy and the hard. Music unites people, brings them together from all walks of life. It’s the great equalizer. Race doesn’t matter, neither does sexual orientation, nor gender. Music gives people things to talk about, things to meditate on, something to listen to, something to dance to. At a concert or a music festival, you don’t look into the crowd and see carbon copies of all the same people, clone of a clone of a clone. There’s diversity, it’s not homogenous. Music speaks to people in different ways. The message is specialized for each individual. Music, like most art is subjective. You’re allowed to make your own opinions, you’re allowed to come to your own conclusions. The artist, the originator, may choose to clarify the meaning behind the music, the meaning behind the lyrics, but it’s not necessarily required. The song may have been written in dark times, but reminds the listener of good times. The song may have been written in a happy moment, but evoke only feelings of sadness. The music may be good for your soul in one stage of your life, but not another. The meaning may change between stages. Music is versatile, and variable. I know I speak for many others, when I say that music is the soundtrack to my life.

It started when I was in 4^th or 5^th grade. Now, my parents had a rack of CDs, mostly classical music, and albums of old hymns and praise songs, but we never listened to them. They just sat next to the TV collecting dust. One day, my mom came home with two CDs that she said she had bought for us to listen to. They were called WOW Hits 2001 and WOW Hits 2002. They were collections of the most popular Christian pop and rock songs for each year. My younger sister, and I listened to these CDs almost non-stop. First on the boombox in the family room, then on our Discmans that we would receive as gifts later that year. This was the start of something new for us. My mom had bought these CDs from a place called Christian Book Distributors (CBD), a wholesale warehouse that sold Christian books, music, apparel, and gifts. They opened their doors two or three times a year, and allowed the general public to go and purchase whatever it was that they needed or wanted. So every time the doors opened, we would buy a handful of CD’s. That continued on for several years.

At that time, I started listening to the radio as well, to get a better mix of genres. I had a friend who had a Discman with a radio tuner that he listened to during recess. He introduced me to MIX 98.5 and JAMN 94.5, the local pop and rap stations respectively. I had reached the first act of my rebellious phase. I don’t know if this was ever blatantly stated to me, but at some point I had picked up the notion that secular music was bad, and capable of rotting your mind. It was unhealthy to listen to too much of it, and hip hop was the most unhealthy of them all. So naturally, I gravitated towards it. When I was in 6^th grade, my dad was growing tired of coming home to me playing videogames all day, so he decided that I was going to have a productive summer. I went to a day camp for a week where I created a 64bit Flash or Java game (I honestly don’t know what the difference is). After completing this, I was shipped off to China for three weeks. One of his coworkers had developed a short-term study program to educate pre-teens and teens about Chinese culture. It was based solely on word of mouth communication. I knew several of the kids from the monthly potluck get-togethers that a group of my dad’s coworkers hosted. We stuck together because we were the only ones who were not in high school.

Our days consisted of doing tai chi, eating traditional Chinese meals, sightseeing, and taking various classes such as history, calligraphy, and learning about the arts. But there was plenty of free time. I spent a lot of it observing, interacting, and soaking up information passed down from the older youth. It was a welcome hiatus from my closed-off, sheltered bubble of an existence. As a kid, I wasn’t allowed to go to sleepovers, so this was my first extended sojourn with non-Christians. This was a novel experience for me, to say the least. I wouldn’t say I came back completely changed, but I was certainly open to influence. 

Earlier in the year, I had purchased Kanye West’s The College Dropout after hearing ads for it on the radio and seeing it in the advertisement booklets included with the newspaper. I wouldn’t fully understand the impact this album had on me until nearly a decade later. For the next several years I listened to JAMN 94.5 diligently and watched music videos on BET in the years that we had cable TV. My parents were cheap(er) back in the day; every two years or so, when the contract expired they would renegotiate our Internet/phone deal. Usually the package would include free cable for a limited time as part of the bundle. Once the trial expired, we’d keep the internet, and cut the cable. These days would also introduce me to my first forays into writing, social media, and blogging. We had the precursors to Facebook and the like, in Myspace, AIM, and Xanga. I didn’t know it then, but the writing would stick with me. I wasn’t very good at it, but my first attempts at creating original content were writing some bars for rap songs that I had created in my head; influenced by then current-day classics as Drop It Like It’s Hot, Candy Shop, and Jesus Walks. But things changed pretty quickly after that.

The following year, in 2005, when I was looking through the CBD catalog, the cover art for a particular album caught my eye. It was Demon Hunter’s The Triptych. I’m not sure what exactly it was. Maybe it was how badass I thought the demon skull on the cover looked. I don’t really know, but regardless I knew my mom wouldn’t let me buy this album, so I didn’t try. But it stuck in my mind. Fast forward to August 2006, I had just returned from a family vacation and had found out about Facebook and Limewire earlier in the summer. Demon Hunter, along with The Devil Wears Prada, As I Lay Dying, and Becoming the Archetype were the first bands I would look up on Youtube, as well as download. I fell in love. I had discovered the anthem of the angsty teenager and the misunderstood youth. I still listened to rap occasionally, but metalcore, post-hardcore, melodic death metal, and other “scene” music was my go-to. Little did I know, but I unwittingly let the emotions of the music reflect deeply on the emotions of my life. The anger in these lyrics and these guitar riffs did not alleviate the anger I felt in my own head, heart, and soul.

Hindsight is 20/20, and as you get older you start to see past experiences and events with increasingly more clarity. I don’t know where it started to go wrong, but before I knew it, the depression started. From 10^th grade on, it was something I would struggle with on and off. It would come and go, ebb and flow. Winters and summers would be the worst. You know how Biggie once said, “birthdays was the worst days?” That was the story of my life. The months of July and August were by far the worst months of the year for me. The moodiness typically lasted anywhere between three to eight weeks, leading up to and away from my birthday. The cause was a composite of things including anxiety, insecurity, doubt, and pessimism. I didn’t have very much self-confidence, self-awareness, love or respect for myself. For some reason things didn’t exactly click for me after I went through puberty. I guess I didn’t fully grasp the changes going through my body and my brain, and there was no one there to explain them to me. I was pulled from sex ed, and my dad was always lost in his own world. A mother is not a very great teacher for a growing boy (in certain aspects), and my youth pastor had some sort of superiority complex that greatly inhibited his ability to instruct me properly. And thus I had no suitable role model. I had lost my way on the journey of life, and I didn’t have a mentor to keep me on track. So music became my guide. Music gave me direction, gave me a focus. But unbeknownst to me, not only did heavy music help me through my pain and the darkness, but it also held me down at the same time. I didn’t see or understand the duality in this. This music was my life blood, my driving force, but also my crutch, and my encumbrance.

Heavy music kept me just strong enough to keep going. Naturally I’ve always been shy and introverted, but this type of music made me introspective as well, and I became more and more withdrawn. As evidenced by the number of childhood friends I kept in touch with after leaving for, and graduating from college (a grand total of 1!). But as luck would have it, I found a group of friends in college that accepted me for who I was: an enigma. Not only was I misunderstood and a mystery to others, but I was someone that barely knew himself. Things were all very new to me (which isn’t to say this is a vastly different story from that of any other college student), but a lot of cogs and gears were turning, and set in motion at the same time. I had to deal with my anxieties, my depression, my insecurities, all while trying to be more outgoing than usual. I was in a completely new environment, in a completely different state. I didn’t know anybody, so I had no choice but to put myself out there, or risk being lonely in a foreign place. Eventually I made a few friends who shared a similar taste in music, and I found myself attending concerts with them. Life was good. I was comfortable. I had things under control. But doubt started to creep in. There were issues that I needed to stop running from. Issues that I needed to address once and for all.

I was in a relationship that was unhealthy for the both of us. There was a lot of arguing, a lot of guilt tripping, hurt feelings, and harsh words. That was one thing I had to deal with. Another was feeling the need and the pressure to find an internship to help me prepare for life after college. A third was me starting to question my faith; my thought process became very nihilistic when asking questions of why or what for. It’s not always clear or evident, but questioning is good for your faith. ALWAYS. Some churches don’t like to say it, some churches don’t like to stress it, but this is an infallible truth. Questioning is always beneficial. It promotes growth. It helps you to tear down your previous mentality, put together the pieces, and come to your own conclusions. It pushes you to step out of your parent’s faith, and into your own. I didn’t know this growing up. I didn’t know this after I had grown up. It took me years to discover this. It’s not something I really fully comprehended until a year or two ago. But nevertheless, none of this was anything I knew about at this point in my life.

Drawing my own conclusions was easy. I formulated my opinions based on what I heard in class, based on what I saw with my own eyes, and based on logic. Things started to come together, things started to make sense. My questions were being answered. But certain answers brought about new questions, and I wasn’t ready for that. I didn’t anticipate it. The questions were hard, so hard. I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve had anger issues in the past, which still flare up every now and then. But on top of that, there was always the nagging feelings of melancholy and fear. Those two guys were always brooding there in the corner, in the back of my mind. I hadn’t addressed the depression directly, I hadn’t found a way to control my anger. And the people I was with didn’t make it easy. My ex and my mom were always able to find the words to say that would irk and annoy me, and vice versa. Don’t get it twisted, I’m not trying to shift the blame here, as I’m equally culpable; the dynamics of those relationships were not good for any of the parties involved. Suffice it to say, the relationship went downhill after the first year. One thing led to another, and I found myself in counseling. But like I said previously, it was inconsistent, mostly due to the various days off and end of semester breaks. The relationship wasn’t salvageable at this point, and it fizzled out. “Friends, lovers, or nothing.”

I came back for my senior year, broken. I no longer had a girlfriend, and I wasn’t going to church. I continued seeing the therapist for a little bit longer, but I stopped after a month or so. I wasn’t seeing any noticeable changes, and in so doing, unwittingly pushed off my healing for another half decade. I numbed my emotions with cigarettes, alcohol, and weed. As if my emotions weren’t hard enough to deal with before the breakup, they were now infinitely worse. But continuing with the theme of my life up til that point, I once again ignored my emotions and kept them locked up in the “DO NOT TOUCH” box in my subconsciousness. At this point, coincidentally, I had stopped listening to heavy music. I never made an open declaration, but I guess I had the feeling that I had outgrown this type of music. I returned to my first love: hip hop.

I found strength in anthems such as Poetic Justice, Fuckin’ Problems, and New Slaves. I was rediscovering my roots. I was looking past the anger and the hatred and finding myself again. It was a good feeling, reclaiming an old passion of mine. And this brought about a noticeable shift in my everyday mood. I was not as depressed as I had been, can I daresay that I was content? I was going out more, hanging out with friends, making new acquaintances. Outwardly, things were looking up. I was accomplishing tasks that I had set out to do in the current day and in years past. But a dark cloud still loomed overhead. When I was alone, I was left with my dark brooding thoughts. The weed certainly didn’t help. You know how it is. When you’re high, your mind sometimes brings up strange and obscure thoughts that push you down a rabbit hole. My rabbit hole, of course, was dreary and morbid; full of negativity, fear and shame. I hadn’t properly addressed my conflicting emotions after all. When you defer addressing serious issues in your life, it just gives them room to fester and grow. Naively or not, I foolishly decided it was not in my best interest to tackle this once and for all. My depression and my anxiety, as you all know, would linger and be underlying issues that would remain with me for years, until I decided to tear them free. You can only change if you want to change. You can only get better if you want to get better. So outwardly things were different, but inwardly things remained the same.

The year after I graduated was a strange year (2015). I was living in an off-campus house with three other people. One of my good friends had moved out the semester before. So the makeup of the house that summer was a friend that I had grown distant from, a female acquaintance of ours, and a stranger that we found through Facebook. My friend had a new girlfriend who he was spending most of his time with on campus. The female acquaintance was in a sorority so she was always out. The stranger invited me out every so often, but I never felt all that close to him. It was a strange dynamic to say the least; I had never felt more alone in my life. As luck would have it, the friend who moved out invited me to attend a music festival with him and several others in Philly. Of course I jumped at the opportunity. I was there for the hip hop: Meek Mill, J. Cole, Big Sean, Future. But like the majority of festivals these days there was EDM present there as well. At that point in time, I liked to tell myself (and others) that I was allergic to EDM, but eventually it started to grow on me. In an unforeseen turn of events it even became my go-to for a while. I was going to music festivals and raves year after year. And I found that listening to upbeat, positive music made me feel something for the first time in many years. Of course, maybe it was just the drugs talking, but I felt alive!

Life was rough after the breakup. I mean, it’s a tough situation for anybody. But not properly dealing with your emotions makes it immensely more difficult. You live and you learn, but sometimes you’re too jaded to see through your ignorance and your bullish stubbornness. It’s like you become so set in your ways that you fall into bad habits. You ignore all other options, and just go with what you know. What I knew was running away, and numbing my pain. I didn’t have a constructive outlet to release pent up negativity and bad energy. I was writing song lyrics and poems on and off for a few years, but I didn’t stick with it. It wouldn’t have helped anyway; I hadn’t realize that I could channel my emotions through my creativity. In my teenage brain they were two distinct and separate concepts. There was no overlapping, there was no combining them together. So what I needed growing up was someone to talk to. A wall to bounce ideas off of. A place to release my emotions, and thoughts, and feelings without any judgment. The judgment was key. Whether it was just my perception or reality is irrelevant. Growing up I was consumed with shame and guilt stemming from my fear of judgment. This, I can point to as a key piece of my development. At some point, it became difficult for me to relate to others, to open up. I stayed within my shell, because it was safer that way.

But this approach led inevitably to having a lot of pent-up frustration, anger, and sadness. Like I said, un-dealt with, ignored, sitting in a box. Sometimes the emotion would slip out in the form of an abrupt and intense rage. Or a deep and random melancholia. Or the giddiness of feeling on top of the world. The highs were high, and the lows were low. I was far from even-keeled. There was no way to know how I would feel from one moment to the next. It was embarrassing sometimes, which furthered my argument for keeping everything bottled up inside. But when the break-up happened, the bottle exploded. The box tore at the seams. The emotions started swirling in my brain. The pain of 20 years. Going to California didn’t help it any. And I made two conscious decisions: stop going to church, and stop feeling. Novocain my heart, novocain my mind, novocain my soul. Maybe most shocking to me was that it worked! For a time…

If I haven’t made the moral of the story clear enough, let me ram it home one more time. Say it in plain English. DON’T IGNORE YOUR EMOTIONS, folks. Don’t do it. Just don’t. It’ll lead to more pain in the future. It’ll lead to years or decades of stunted growth. It’ll lead to a cycle of gloom and despair. I would know, I lived it. For a time, I had no purpose in life. Life was meaningless. Same shit, different day. I was muddling through life as only a wallower could. Highlights of my life included going out with friends, and getting tattoos. The rest of my existence was work, smoke, Netflix, eat, sleep, rinse & repeat. For a time, I was getting tattoos solely because the physical pain reminded me that I was alive. Not a great way to live. But listening to EDM, gave me some semblance of hope. Made me feel something aside from my constant state of apathy. It sparked me, and motivated me in spurts. The afterglow of a festival kicked me in gear for two or three weeks at a time. But it wasn’t enough to get me started, the engine would sputter and die. I wasn’t motivated enough to change my lifestyle. But these little sparks at least got me thinking. Eventually, after several cycles of starting & stopping, I got the sense that I could do better. I realized that I wanted more. I was no longer satisfied with the same old. The routine was getting monotonous. I started thinking deeply about my direction in life, and I rediscovered my love of writing. I now had a purpose.

We all know how the story ends. I met a girl, I started seeing a therapist, I addressed my emotions. The river started flowing abundantly. Little did I know, but God had a plan for me this whole time. Everything happens for a reason. Adversity makes you stronger. Cliche, I know. There are different stages and different seasons in your life. A time for preparation, a time for healing, a time for refocus, a time for breakthrough. In late January/early February this year, one of the last times I attended church in person, my pastor preached about something that I internalized deep in my core. He said that 2019 was our sowing season, our time of healing. 2020 would be our year. He said to prepare our minds to be blown every month this year. I took this message to heart. It’s kept me optimistic through these troubling times. I’m still claiming 2020 as my year, my period of breakthrough. I still have hope for this year. I’m still seeing blessings, even with an economic shutdown. Even without work. I have faith.

But none of this would’ve been possible without the effort and time it took me to get my mind right. It was years in the making. From the years of pain and depression, to the breakup, to my turning away from the church, to my darkest day. All this bleakness ushered in a season of change, a season of regrowth, a season of healing, a season of preparation. All of this hardship was necessary. For without it I never would’ve made it to therapy. I never would’ve reached the point in my life where I became perfectly in sync with my emotions. Now that I’ve removed my emotions from the box and started dealing with them squarely, I haven’t needed to invest so deeply in the music that I listen to. Music no longer changes my emotions, messes with my moods. Music is just music. My emotions are no longer centered around outside influences. I’m in tune with them now. And thus, the sole purpose of music for me now is entertainment value only. I’ve been listening to a mix of metal, hip-hop and EDM. The soundtracks to the three stages of my life have merged, and become one.

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.