chrispychrisalis

[chrispychrisalis]

i cried

Today, I had a mental breakdown. When I was exercising, I suddenly went on an impassioned rant about how I could never do the things I want because I am in no position of privilege to take my time to graduate nor extend the number of semesters I stay in school for.

I can’t be in that position, so why bother changing where I am right now?

I don’t like the feeling of knowing that I’m not ok.

When I was 8, it was the first time I had a suicidal thought. I remeber asking God if I died that my remaining 72 years of life would be transferred to other people. I was such a little philanthropist.I never did die, considering how I’m still here, but the deep feeling of sadness has never stopped haunting me.

When I was 17, I experienced my first panic attack on the toilet bowl. I cried, hiccuped, felt like I was unable to breathe. The reason? After my family had gotten COVID it was up to me and my sister to buy dinner for everyone. We had been doing this for days, until one day as we bought KFC my mom got mad about some drink changes and it made both of us so miserable the only way I was able to let it all out was cry on the toilet bowl. I do that a lot.

Today, after my pent up feelings of not being able to live my life as per my wishes were released, my family came home from dinner. I dont know what happened but suddenly my mom got all mad about us not minding our own businesses and how we keep trying to fix her hoarding behaviour, and suddenly our sibling chill time at the dining table ended in a few minutes. I stared at the alcohol in her hands and wondered if it was the alcohol’s fault, but as I recalled the story of Bojack, I realised that substances dont make people do things, its just a scapegoat.

My sister chose to left the table, while my brother tried to use humor to comfort her. Me? I sat under my study table and cried my little heart out until I realised I was way to loud and went to bathe so I could continue sitting on a stool and cry.

If I let my mom know I cried because of her as I did in the past, it will turn from her saying sorry to her getting angry because its not like she can do anything to fix it so how about I just stop crying? If my brother sees me crying he will call me emotional. I cant cry because I was not directly impacted. According to their logic, the spillover effects from what they do should not hurt me, but yet with every argument and every sibling gathering at home getting broken up, I feel so lonely. 

Sometimes I feel that because I dont self harm, nor do I actually attempt to kill myself, I dont have depression. But maybe I do, and I've just been avoiding that sense of emptiness and sadness that I cant just seem to shake off. I feel like im unfixable and mentally broken. Why am I only 20 and so sad all the time? If i can be this sad when Im young, where does that leave me for the rest of my future? How do I move forward? What is my future even?

Who am I?

[chrispychrisalis]

ageism and night thoughts

I realise now why I used to feel a sense of uneasiness when I first watched Bojack Horseman a few years back. I’ve finally watched more of the show than I did back then, but I always had this feeling when I watched a show with an older character who didnt seem to have their life together.

It was because I thought: “Why are they like this? They’re old, gritty, almost about to die yet they still act this way. Why are they so shitty even after their entire lives and what they’ve been through?”.

Bojack is a bad person, for sure, but why did he never ‘wake up’ from what he was doing and stared himself in the face? I felt that older people should be better, but whenever I saw these characters in their 50s, 60s, it seemed like they had so little time left to fix all their mistakes and make up to everyone in their lives. They have so little time to get back on the right track, back onto a standard career path that promises success and money. And I think I felt uneasy, because I never grew up with people like that around me. I’ve always been fed a dose of the prescribed Chinese success and pathways that seeing such flawed, seemingly unfixable characters made me feel a sense of unfamiliarity, uneasiness, and also the fear at the back of my mind where I ask myself: “Will I ever become like this? Where I hit an age where it feels like it doesn’t matter what I do anymore because I’ve had so many year behind me with mistakes piling on top of one another, so the remaining don’t actually matter in the grand scheme of things?”.

Another character I’ve thought about regarding this ‘getting old’ issue is Kiryu from Yakuza. I was so caught up in his age and the idea that he only got out of prison at 39 because I thought that he woukd have nothing else to live for in front of him. That he was now one old man with limited physical strength and everything he ever worked for is now gone, and he’s also broke. I didn’t like seeing such a likable character that way, and I think it also stems from an innate belief that getting older until a certain point equates to the inability to do anything substantial with your life. And I think that’s what also paralyses me to stay in a rational, practical course because if not now, then when? When will I be able to be in a position where the future seems so bright and the modules I study are so useful? I should just stick with status quo because its so promising, yet I don’t think about the boundless opportunities out there and other paths I can take if my passion can’t fuel me.

Yet I have also thought about alternative paths but I’ve never thought about them seriously. Because if I really want to switch my major now, I need to think about the backups I could possibly have in order to move forward if my degree can’t cut it. I never thought seriously about alternative paths because these thoughts only served as a comfort, like “if I end up doing real badly for this module and course then there’s other things I could do like being an influencer and I could also make big bucks in other ways”. It sort of serves as an escapism and also an attempt in taking the enormous weight of the impending doom of not doing well in my studies when all I pride myself in is being good at studying.

Then that begs the question, am I tying all my self-worth in my ability to do something that literally anyone with an ounce of diligence and or innate genius could do so easily? Why are my grades equal to me? But at the same time I just feel that I need to get good grades, because I need to stand out because I have nothing else going for me because who really cares about some 20 year old undergraduate who has shitty langauge skills and the hobby of crocheting and playing games? What worth do I have to the corporate out there other than me summarised in a piece of paper? What good am I out there?

Where do I really stand? 

This grade thing won’t change even if I switch majors. I know that I am just trying to escape the plight I put myself in, but even the major that I feel a semblance of passion in is considered useless because its not vocational.

Its important to think about the career paths out there but what if I dont know what career I want topursure and I just know Im interested in the topic and the research that goes into it?

Is it really wrong of me to want to spend my early 20s on something I like, rather than placing emphasis on the career pathways I will embark in in my late 20s? Career changes happen all the time and interests change, but my 4 years of studying and health are now. I’m just really stressed. 

To be honest, I just wish that I could be somebody that people can rely on and talk to about their feelings. Maybe I want to be a counsellor, but I haven’t even solved my own issues. But maybe this may lead me to a job I’m interested in. I hope so. Perhaps all I want is some sort of legacy and to be remembered. I want to put good out into the world rather than being some corporate slave doing international trading.

Welp good night.

[chrispychrisalis]

landlocked

As I go through a stressful period of my university life, deciding whether to change my major or just stick through it, keeping status quo, I decided to start reading The Defining Decade. I turn 20 in April, and when I see my parents, or older folks like the stereotypical “boomers”, I tend to always have this question pop up in my mind: “Why do they still act this way when they are already 50 years old?”.

Throughout my teenagehood, I had believed that when I grew older, I would naturally have things figured out. That at a certain age, things would magically fall into place. But when I see my parents, especially when they have childish outbursts, or act in certain ways, I realised that that isn’t the case. Just because you’re older, doesn’t mean you know what you want to do with your life. It doesn’t mean that things will work out.

When I see my mother, who has been a housewife for nearly half her life, I know I don’t want to be like her. She also has gripes with how things worked out, giving up her career to spend more time with her children. There were external pressures for her to do so too, but at the age of 54, she feels like she has done nothing with her life. No career, no real friends, no true independence from my dad, and her whole live revolves around her children. Her children are now in their 20s, and I can foresee the rest of her life being an empty nester, and it hits me that even at my mother’s age, she still has a long life to live, but nothing has been built up from her younger days. 

I hate to say it, but I don’t like how she lives.

At this stage, I find myself in a hard position. The word is trapped. I feel like I’m in a softlock, unable to move forward, sideways or back. I’m in one tall vertical box with slippery walls that prevents you from climbing out. There’s no one pushing me into the box, but it’s not like I can get out either.

When I was 17, 18, studying for the A-Levels, the only goal was to finish my schooling, to get a decent grade that would open all the doors for me. My grades ultimately opened some, but left an iron fence in front of others. At that point of receiving my grades, I had thought about how great it would have been to be able to have the choice to do medicine or law, but I knew that in my heart, I would not have even chosen those paths,

At 19, I picked course that felt the most practical or rational. Business courses. In the end, I chose to go to NTU to study Maritime Studies with a second major in Business. Take note, at that time, the second major part was very important to my self-worth. It showed that I could go to another couse other than Maritime (which is known to have a very low cut-off) but I had chosen Maritime, and I could even take up more modules. I wanted to be a big fish in a small pond after the 2 years of Junior College that had trampled on my own self-worth and have given me so many insecurities, causing me to retract back into my own comfort zone after I had been such an active student in secondary school. I blamed it all on being burnt out after doing so much in secondary school, but I just hated the idea of having more avenues of competition (such as in clubs where I knew I would not be a frontrunner for any positions). 

But in university, I learnt that no matter how much I thought that I would be a standout, I was nothing more than just another fish. A big fish, a medium fish, a small fish, nothing. I was just a fish. There was always going to be people better than me. Perhaps the reasoning behind the choice of this major was flawed, deeply corrupt, all stemming from a place of fear and incorrect motivations. 

After the first semester of studying and working hard, it was at the end of the semester that I realised that I had to work even harder in the second semester to either maintain my current grades or pull it up. But I had worked so hard already, so how was I supposed to work even harder?

At the start of the first semester I had been wanting an escape route to study in Japan. But it was sort of a joke, and it was during the period of adapting to school.

Only recently, I had realised that perhaps this course wasn’t for me. The second semester was harder than the first. I had a higher workload, more modules that I had barely any interest in. Sure they were useful, but the process of studying for that grade was tiring. I was tired all the time. I would start forgetting things in turn for chasing that grade, and I was foregoing my social life and sanity for my studies. 

I felt like I was going to die young. I realised that I had been overlooking all the red flags in my first semester. I had nosebleeds all throughout October, and was getting them again in February. My aptly titled’ nosebleed diary’ began with the line: ‘Uni is killing me’. 

My major has good career prospects. It has a good pay. But all I thought was: if studying to obtain such prospects was already taking such a toll on my health, both mentally and physically, what would happen to me in my late twenties?

What would I become at the end of it all? I had been studying as if it were routine, waking up at the same time each day, travelling, going through it all like I was on autopilot. But that snap and epiphany that occurred on that very morning during accounting class was the realisation that I had been living life like a robot. 

I had just missed a graded weekly quiz for the accounting class. It probably cost me about 1% of my grade, but I felt that fear. I had missed it because I was so caught up in studying for a midterm for another module. I told my mother and my sister about it, and they told me that it meant that I needed better time management. I had been following a standard routine, but that one shift resulted in me making what I felt like was a huge mistake. Like the sky would crash down, and the earthwould shake and I was ruined. 

The fear that I might make the same mistake haunted me, albeit for a short while, before I realised that perhaps nothing I was studying was for me. 

On Thursdays, I usually have about 3 hours to study before I go home. But on that day, I sat at the study corner, watching Bojack Horseman and attempting to find that motivation to look through my lecture slides. I started having another nosebleed, and went into the toilet cubicle to cry, before blowing my nose so hard more blood came out. 

It was the first time I had cried in university. And I had a feeling it wouldn’t be the last. At least it wouldn’t be, if I was stuck here.

So, at the age of 19 turning 20, I decided to pick up The Defining Decade. I am hoping it helps move me into a direction, breaking down the slippery walls of that stupid vertical box and being able to walk out of it on my own. At the very least, I now know that not everything falls into place at some magical number. I’m not going to turn 30 and suddenly have that ‘eureka’ that I must or need to do something. 

I’m planning to type my thoughts as I go through the book, rather than at the end so that I can capture my thoughts better in the moment. I don’t necessarily believe that the book will be the key and help me through all my worries, but I’m hoping it at least pushes me in the right direction.