explaining: where all my vlogging mojo went in 2022

So I finally uploaded a video? The transcript below:

I first arrived in New York City earlier this year just in time to experience a helluva snowstorm. I was low key thrilled about it at the time, having not seen snow in years, and I think it even contributed to why I had such an easy time finding an apartment. I guess I was one of the few willing to brace the winter winds and slippery sidewalks to evaluate living situations at that time of year.

I ended up at a huge rental in Sunset Park, Brooklyn - a journey I documented here on Youtube, and I ended that video with this:

I can’t wait to DIY this place up. I have been watching a lot of HGTV while I’ve been in this hotel room. I think that’s what I’m going to turn this channel into.

Obviously, I did not.

I’m Elaine, this is Elaine is XYZ and… I’m actually on my third iteration of this vlog that I’ve been trying to film since probably October.

Look. Basically 2022 was a bit of a mental health mess for me. I’ve always had ADHD and I’ve always had depression, and I was white knuckling through most of the year, hurtling from feeling very empty to feeling very anxious to feeling guilty about feeling bad and then feeling guilty about feeling guilty because you’re supposed to know better and have compassion for yourself like you keep on telling people to and why can’t you follow your own advice, you idiot, god damn it…

While you know, working on setting myself up in this city again - rebuilding a nest, keeping connected to old friends, trying to make new ones, doing my job well enough so that nobody there would be like “gee Elaine acts like she has ADHD and is chronically depressed…”

And anyway, long story short, maintaining that veneer of Being Okay in Front of Everyone Else as I continued to spiral into some dark dark places kinda made it hard to really maintain the little creative projects I do for myself - these videos, the newsletter, even completely private things like discovering new music or house decoration.

THE DECISION TO DO SOME GOOD OLD NAVEL-GAZING

Now. In October, realizing that I was making absolutely no progress in writing any kind of script about anything else, I decided I kind of had to lean into talking about my mental health more frankly. And so I wrote something that was basically an attempt to summarize everything I’d been feeling the last - 9 months at that point - and how it related to the various disabilities I’ve dealt with my whole life.

I had the semi-clever idea to structure it alongside the various criteria I’d utilized for my last big video, finding an apartment here in New York - like how the desire to kit out this two bedroom apartment had been affected by my ADHD, how the enjoyability of nearby amenities had been ruined by my anxiety, how… and this is fun and super emo, the one thing that I could say about the neighborhood that had been mentally healing was the long walks through Greenwood Cemetery.

Yes, the gigantic graveyard that I’d been pretty excited to explore due to its connection to the history of parks in the city. I did go there to touch grass… and graves a lot this year. It turns out that when you are feeling incredibly distracted, anxious, and sad, it helps to have a physical reminder that everything ends one day.

If you accomplish a lot in your life, you’re still going to be just one story amongst many billions. If you don’t accomplish a lot in your life, there’s still a chance to look pretty good after you’re dead.

So maybe just relax a little?

About 4000 words in, I realized it was way too convoluted and long and like ~I~ wouldn’t be able to get through editing it without dying of boredom. So why would I want to subject anyone else to that?

HOW DRAFT 2 CAME ABOUT

And so my tack in November was to rework sections of it into their own more contained videos. Instead of trying to tackle all my issues at once, i’d give a bit more structured time to each of them and also be able to throw in some factoids, up the usefulness, make it not just about me.

I was about 90% done - actually - with my first one, which would be about this apartment and what it says about dealing with ADHD in general… but… well…

Something really stopped me from wanting to put the finishing touches on it.

In the video, I went into how an ADHD brain felt compared to a regular brain,

How I’d struggled to get diagnosed and medicated, and how the medication I finally got wasn’t the panacea I had initially felt like it would be and how much that hurt to find out… and how I was probably going to struggle with ADHD forever. And how much anxiety that caused me, which was great because that was what I was going to go into next… And… I don’t know.

Like, yes, I did feel all those things and it is my truth and maybe it is very relatable and good to put it out there… but also, is it really all of my truth?

First off, let me remind me that: Me, like everyone else, is going through this ongoing state of crisis.

Like everyone else, my life took a steep left turn in 2019, and like everyone else, every move we’ve all collectively made since then has been trying to find our footing again, re-routing ourselves around or away from the plans we made four years ago.

Not to mention, the pandemic isn’t the only paradigm shifting problem our world is facing. You’ve got climate collapse on the one side, and this creep towards another cold war on the other side… heck, hawks threatening another hot war on the other side… and I have to pay attention to that because my job is rubbing up against those subjects on the daily.

Secondly, let me remind me that my dread wasn’t just existential. Last year actually also started off kind of weird as an Asian woman… um…

Winter of 2022 coincided with two high profile murders of Asian-Americans, both around my age. The first was Michelle Go, who was pushed into an oncoming subway car near Times Square. The second, … Christina Yuna Lee, was very brutally murdered in her apartment in Chinatown. And while my demographic was somewhat lucky in that the attacks against us didn’t get that deadly again, it’s also not like the attacks had stopped.

Also… My subway station was featured in the news in April, because some old fogey with a crazy grudge decided to shoot it up randomly. He had a Youtube manifesto hating on women. And um… I’m not going to pretend like that didn’t color the rest of my year a little bit.

So the world is on fire. Why should I bother feeling ashamed of struggling with my neurodivergence when even neurotypical people are struggling.

But then, especially while going through the footage that I did film, it hit me.

WHAT IS ADHD IN THE CONTEXT OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION?

The way I was talking about it made me actually kind of take a step back and ask myself, has the last year really just been me struggling against my own brain? Is everything I consider part of an ADHD diagnoses actually really that awful?

Yes, I’m not neurotypical, but saying I’m neurodivergent leans so hard into the disability of it when, I realized, I’m not even always convinced it’s a disability.

Let me explain.

So in the vein that it takes all types to form a society. There’s a lot of science to point to both ADHD and at least the propensity towards depression as being… kind of useful for the species on the whole.

There’s this fun term that I’ve seen a lot of recent therapist content creators use for people who don’t fit the characteristics of typical neurological development… it’s a little cheesy, but I kind of like it a lot:

Neurospicy

And the reason I like it is it reframes how I should be feeling about these two mental loads that I’ve carried around with me all my life.

Maybe if “neurotypicality” is the carby staple of day-to-day civilization, not having a brain that works in the same way is the salt, the sour, the heat that makes everything less bland, more actually palatable.

ADHD brains tend to want to explore, try new things, be creative - especially in high stakes, high adrenaline situations - which is probably why so many famous athletes, artists, actors, and musicians have now come out of the woodwork to talk about their own struggles with their ADHD diagnoses.

And as for depression, well… people tend to only use the word “depression” when someone has gotten to that fully debilitating state - the one where you can barely get out of bed for days on end… and yes, that has happened to me too.

But just like ADHD Overwhelm, where you’re thinking so many thoughts at once that you literally feel paralyzed, is near the bottom of a spiral that, yes, your brain is constantly walking the edge of… There’s a lot of stages of sadness you go through before you get to full blown screw it all depression. For me, as a relatively high functioning depressed person, I think I more operate in a stage I’d call a        tendency towards melancholia.

There’s this scholar and author of the book “Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy” so you probably can think of where he falls on the thinking about this. I really liked his definition. Eric Wilson described melancholia as “a turbulence of heart that results in an active questioning of the status quo, a perpetual longing to create new ways of being and seeing.”

And maybe this is slightly anecdotal, but I do feel like, in the history of our society and arts and culture, people with that tendency towards melancholia have tended to uncover more beautiful insights on the human condition.

I think there’s a lot behind the James Baldwin quote: “The things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

I think it’d be really hard to be an activist, to advocate for other people, if you weren’t at least somewhat colored by sadness yourself.

And speaking of creativity again, you know that whole trope of the tortured artist? I mean, scientifically, it seems like there’s some evidence it could be true.

One famous metadata study from 2017 of the composers Lizst, Beethoven and Mozart looked at the letters they’d written to their friends throughout their years, determining their emotional state by analyzing the types of words associated with depression and sadness… and it turns out that the times when they expressed how sad they were the most was also when they were delivering their best works.

In general, it seems, people who are drawn to the arts may have different brains. A 1993 study found that people who work in creative fields tend to be 8-10 times more prone to quote-unquote mood disorders than people in other fields.

And when I thought about it, I found this with the people I’ve been closest to in my life, who’ve I’ve found an immediate connection to and who I’ve really probably, admired the most. Most of them act like me and tend to also have various levels of ADHD and/or depression. And these close friends are genuinely, objectively, caring, kind, good people… who tend to be very creative and work on really cool, fascinating things.. I love that. I want more of that, I want more of that in my life.

TRIALING A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON MY OWN BRAIN

All of which brings me back to why I like the term neurospicy.

It’s a lot more empowering to think of the way you are wired as the tang that offers depth to a key lime pie, the kick to a pasta arrabiatta, the complex curry that makes rice impossible to stop eating.

What if, instead of my brain as a bad thing I need to get control over, I thought of it as a different, powerful-in-its-own-right thing that I wanted to actively work with. Find ways to encourage the parts that are actually pretty wonderful to me, while mitigating some of the parts that make living in this society kind of annoying.

And even when that does bleed into becoming ADHD paralysis or full blown depression… well, maybe the issue is the system at large.

More people feeling constantly distracted is deeply tied to our world becoming constantly more distracting. Similarly with depression, the full blown kind. The journalist Johann Hari wrote a book called Lost Connections, in which he went deep into a variety of factors other than your own brain chemistry that could cause clinical depression, and those included things that are still now being actively encouraged by a capitalist society - Lost connections to family, friends, and community; lost connections to a sense of hope for the future; and lost intrinsic values such as love.

Now, I don’t really know how much of my depression, and especially the dip it took this year, is simple brain chemistry versus everything else that was going on.

In any case, if there’s one thing I want anyone to take from this video it’s this: I’m actually okay, i think. I have a weird brain, but I’ve always liked being a little weird. And since trying to force my brain into being unweird has only been painful and rude to me, I’m going to try, this year, to be more chill about it. To work with it rather than against it. And maybe in that process, I’ll come up with some better video ideas. We’ll see. No promises.

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