05.30 | malaise in may

Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say, ‘My tooth is aching’ than to say, ‘My heart is broken.’
– C.S. Lewis

✉️ letter #36

When I picture emotional energy in my mind, it looks to me like the power bar you’d see in one of those 2D fighters – where every move you make in daily life (a kick! A punch! A jump!) adds up until you can pull off a super triple charged combo… at the same time, there are lesser power moves that help you survive the fight but deplete you down a level.

Usually in order to charge up those moves, you have to actually actionably hit something – in most games, a defensive block won’t add anything… or it’ll just add very little in comparison.

The month of May felt to me like I both constantly needed to use up those lesser power moves and was constantly defensively blocking. Every kick punch and jump I managed to get in was only just enough to fill up one bar before it got depleted again.

I won’t go into what added to and what subtracted from my emotional energy, but in terms of the newsletter this really extended metaphor goes something like this:

The category of "stuff I create for myself" usually requires a lesser power move to get me started… But then it puts me in a great position to kick punch jump into even more power moves in the near future.

When I don’t have enough to pull off this combo though, or if I use that energy instead to do combos which are particularly devastating to me such as “play therapist” or "fake smile through nonsense” or – and let's go something less specifically negative – “make friends with strangers” – things I would have liked to dedicate my power bar to end up falling by the wayside.

Okay. If I look at what I’ve accomplished this May, it hasn’t been uneventful. In fact, I’d argue that I probably somehow managed to do a super triple charged combo for my job – possibly twice.

But, and wow what a convoluted way of saying this, this meant that none of that energy could go to this, my sweet little newsletter and its dozen or so email recipients, or really any other specifically personal goal I had.

And thus it has been kind of dead over here. Sorry!

…

Anyway, a part of the problem also was that I got in my own head about it. I couldn’t think past an initial premise that wouldn’t be “navel gazing” – an action I really am self-conscious about doing - but that just put the pressure on me to try to find something I’d deem more “meaningful” to talk about, and since that’s stressful when you’re already overloaded I just stopped doing it at all.

But really, as with a lot of ventures, most of the work is done actually in just showing up. In the same way going to an office (or a company zoom meeting) usually kickstarts you actually working a little bit, or finding yourself at a gym means you’ll pick up a weight (even half heartedly), opening up a document and then typing “I dunno what the hell I’m doing so here’s a stream of consciousness about how much I dislike my own mental state at the moment” often then leads to finding something that more people than just you could potentially find interesting.

At least that’s what I hope!

Personally, the gamer girl in me is always kind of thrilled when I can attach another gamification dynamic to my own mental health… I’ve got fingers crossed that other dorks out there are also like “yeah yeah that makes sense.”

🌱 the ethical ideas newsreel

• ProPublica recently came out with its most recent Impact Report and it is amazing what they've been able to accomplish. If there's any media outlet right now that shows how important this third estate is, it's them. I highly recommend a skim through.
• Now that I'm deep into living in New York City, one thing that's constantly on my mind is real estate and the US housing crisis. Here's one town in Maine that might have some solutions - the so-called YIMBY-est town in America. Now if only the rest of us could adopt these measures.
• From Noema Magazine: "Elon Musk’s takeover bid for Twitter raises important questions about whether social media platforms are political technologies that must be governed by democratic norms and principles." I'd say that was already answered by Facebook's role in the 2016 election.
• The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has received $40 billion in pledges for its new Resilience and Sustainability Trust to address challenges such as climate change. Building that into the current world is expected to cost trillions.
• A new ruling in a court in New York has given gun control advocates hope in the wake of... well just every god damn thing that's happened here in - what, has it only been two weeks?? Basically, it gives people the ability to sue gun manufacturers under "public nuisance" statutes. Because nothing is more of a public nuisance than worrying that some asshole kid is going to come and shoot up your school, supermarket, movie theater, house of worship etc etc etc etc.

🎵 song of my week

I'm in the need for some guitar driven dreampop, so here is some. Check it out and if you want to know more about Lizzy McAlpine, then there's a Wonderland interview with her. But to be honest, I don't know anything about Lizzy McAlpine so I can't say much about her - she seems nice and this song is lovely.

✨enjoying: one final piece of pop culture fun

I feel, as an Asian American involved in Asian American issues, a little bummed if I don’t make any mention at all of Asian American stuff during Asian American History Month, so let’s talk books. You’ll have seen this on my Instagram already, but reusing content across multiple platforms is actually considered smart content creation, don-cha-know.

Three Asian-American Books:

📚Read
She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker Chan
What if the founder of the Ming Dynasty was actually a woman in disguise? Part Mulan and part Game of Thrones, this is a great read for anyone into epics with ultra-practical protagonists.

📖Reading
The Verifiers by Jane Pek
A contemporary mystery novel set in NYC about both internet dating and Taiwanese-first generation trauma. That might be too much of a double trigger for me at the moment but the writing is breezy and I’m plowing through.

📔To Read
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
Recommended to me by two people whose taste I very much respect so I’m looking forward to this! I’m not completely sure what it’s about but from what I can tell from the book summary, it sounds like a fun send up of Hollywood Asian tropes to illuminate the vastness of the Asian American experience.

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