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jjkfire · 5 years

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update 4/27/21:

I'm working at a startup so it's extremely busy. but I love my job! i am trying to find the time to fit writing in my schedule tho. gonna figure it out someday lol. my stories are not abandoned, don't worry. all the endings and plot points have been planned. i'm just struggling to find the time to write atm. still very grateful for all the kind words and support you guys have given me over the years. hope all of you are out there living your best lives, exploring, learning, and finding joy in all the little things 😊 join my tag list (read the instructions pls) to get notified when I update my fics!

previous big update:

hello! i know i’ve been sort of mia but… it’s been an absolutely chaotic time for me.

the (long) story goes a little something like this:

earlier this year during spring break, i had friends who convinced me to give america a shot and apply for jobs after grad. i really didn’t want to because the visa process is a pain and it costs a lot. also, not a lot of companies want to hire internationals so it’s very demoralizing to receive a million rejections… but my friends are very persuasive people lol.

so it was super hectic during the last few months I had in the country as i tried to get through the visa process, study, work, beef up my resume, apply for jobs and graduate at the same time. (i understand that a ton of people have to do this too… but it’s hard y’all). anyway, one Medium article, one cold email, and a number of grueling interviews later, i found out i got a job!

now i just had to convince my parents… this was actually in all honesty, the most stressful part. i love them to death but my father really made it feel like i was choosing between my family and a job and ngl i cried myself to sleep on the regular. in the end, he finally gave me the okay to take the job but i know he’s still very upset. that’s honest to god the worst part. (my mum’s been super supportive tho so i guess that’s the silver lining in all of this!)

prior to getting the job though, I was really in limbo. I had returned to my home country because I and by extension, my parents, were not confident that i was going to be able to land a job in the US. I was very confused because I was neither here nor there. I was interviewing with the american company from my home country, trying my best to make sure they’d still be interested in me as a candidate no matter how many hurdles there were. then, to ensure that I had a safety net, I was also doing interviews locally and sending out resumes whenever I could. I was exhausted. and I know everyone goes through the job hunt so it’s equally as exhausting for everyone but yeah it was not a fun time.

anyway so now that I took that job in america i gotta move halfway across the world again, but this time without financial support and i don’t know… maybe this is the first time i’ll be truly independent and ya im seconds away from shittin myself. really gotta put on my big girl pants and try to not be broke yeet yeet.

but uhh that’s the low down on why i haven’t been able to write much at all…….. and yeah! working on it tho… haha always working on it.

to end all of this, I just want to say that I’m super lucky to have all of you. I basically got the job because of that article I wrote. I know I sound like a broken record talking about my article over and over but I dunno I guess all of this is just a little wild to me ahah.

I owe a lot of my confidence in my writing to all of you. I personally think my writing improved bc of this blog and the support you guys give me is… unreal (“: I know it may seem insignificant to some of you to reblog/like and comment on a fic but it really spurs me creatively and makes me feel sort of confident about my writing. all of that is probably why I didn’t think twice about hitting that post button on my article. although it’s a very different type of writing… I don’t know it’s just knowing that my writing is worth something… knowing that my writing is worth taking 5 minutes out of your day to read, is pretty cool and you guys kind of gave me that! (i am in no way saying that my writing is the best thing on earth. far from it. but i think you guys understand what i’m trying to say!)

so in some way, you guys helped me get a job! nice work team hahahah. also, also i just want to say, never give up. I decided I wanted to try my luck at the American job market maybe around the end of March and graduation was in early May. so I had about more or less a month to do something. I knew I needed a way to set myself apart from everyone else because my gpa wasn’t stellar and I hadn’t had any internships in America. not to mention the fact that I was an international student hence it was even harder to get hired. so basically, why would a company pick me over the next person? I thought perhaps knowing how to code was the way to give myself an edge so I learned some basic python and sql but then I realized there wasn’t really an impressive project I could attempt within that short time frame and I also knew far too little to do anything anyway. this meant that I was back at square one.

so, I switched gears instead. I sat down and really thought about what I could do. I concluded that at the very least, I could write. I knew I could write so I needed something that I could use along with my writing and I was like… it’s gotta be data! knowing that, I picked up the basics on how to use Tableau and I also picked up VBA macros in excel (if you don’t know what this is… I think you should Google it. it will literally blow your mind. excel can do a lot more than you can imagine). Then, I picked what I wanted to write my article on, got the data I needed from google trends, used vba macros to make the calculations faster, used tableau to make charts based on the data and photoshop to spice up the charts and etc. I did my research in the meantime as well and had a rough plan on what I was going to write about. after this, it was all systems go and it went a little like this:

wrote the article. attached my charts. linked the links. hit that post button. applied to all the jobs & companies that I thought would see value in what I did and can do. got rejected many times. felt discouraged. did more searching on companies that were willing to hire internationals. decided to send a cold email to a company. ACTUALLY HEARD BACK. went through multiple interviews. ACTUALLY GOT THE JOB.

so guys, never give up. recognize your strengths and build around that. if you think you don’t have any strengths, look harder. if you still feel you don’t have any, make the effort to learn something. it’s never too late for anything. I did all of that in one month and 10 days (the learning stuff and writing the article thing I mean). always be open to learning. I say this so much irl that my friends are sick of it but in this day and age with the internet, you can literally learn anything. so please, learn. learn for fun, learn for whatever reason. learn anything. you’ll never know when it’ll come in handy. like my basic Photoshop that I learned just so I could make a header for my blog… literally used that skill for the graphics in my article lol.

anyway, you can achieve a lot more than you think you can. you just gotta throw caution to the wind and do your own thing. be determined, be proactive. if things aren’t going the way you think it should be, do something to change that. you are all amazing and capable of great things! I hope you all know that. my mum always said if you never try, you’ll never know. don’t be afraid, don’t stop to think about what other people will think of you. keep doing you. people doubt you enough so don’t add to that. keep your head held high and keep moving forward.

once again I want to thank you guys for being sort of a support system for me! every comment, nice ask and sweet message has brought me this far. i really mean it (’: always be nice and supportive my sweet dumplings. your words truly have impact!

#very long essay...#it's a very long ramble i know ): but it feels so good to vent here #ramblin

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wayoutofwonderland · 6 years

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I figured before I start blogging I should probably do an about post just on the off chance I do get any followers, although I’m only really doing this for myself if my posts help someone else later on then that’s cool too.

I dunno if I want to put my name to this yet but I’m 29 and a mother to three gorgeous kids. I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) probably something like four years ago now after first being wrongly diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder. I did a bit of therapy and DBT and trialled some medication but none of it changed my life. I’ve been unmedicated since I found out I was pregnant with my youngest, who has recently turned three. I can mostly hold it together, in public anyway. But at home I am overwhelmed and irritable ALL the time and my brain feels like someone has scrambled it, but this isn’t new. It has always been a struggle for me to think clearly, organise my thoughts, and remember anything. Most of my life is a big blank space, I remember very little about my own childhood, or my children being babies, or any other part of my life. If it’s not happening right now, it’s practically gone.

I’ve always said if I could just throw the contents of my mind onto a wall to see and arrange my thoughts neatly it would be so much easier, but I can’t file what’s in there. I’ve got stacks of papers shoved into boxes and stacked on top of other boxes and someone keeps shredding and incinerating stuff without my permission. Trying to think a situation out or follow a train of thought is like trying to hold onto water in my hands.

A lot of things about me are explained by my BPD diagnosis. It’s a diagnosis I fought for, after being diagnosed with Bipolar I spent hours upon hours researching and I just couldn’t relate. I did, in my researching, stumble upon info for BPD and the more I researched the more I realised that it fit me. I could not convince my doctor. One day she snapped at me, ‘well, we can’t meditate for that!’ as if that’s what I was after.

Shortly after, I got a new doctor. My first meeting with him, I took all my research, my old journals, my numerous ‘could you have BPD?’ quizzes, and screenshots of the criteria in the DSM that I fit perfectly at the time. I walked in prepared for a fight and I pitched to him that I did not have Bipolar but in fact Borderline Personality Disorder and after presenting my case I was not quite prepared for what he said: ‘I believe you’. To this day it’s probably the most validating thing anyone has ever said to me. So I started on the meds and the therapy and got referred to a short DBT course and then finished other sections with my therapist. I stopped seeing her because she was leaving, and I thought I could handle things by then.

Since then nothing has really got any better and my life is still a mess. I seem unable to pin down my interests or a career I can stick to and I haven’t worked full time in eight years now, I did pick up a bit of work this year but it’s very casual and I haven’t been called in a while. I can’t even get the motivation to clean my house, the idea of getting up every day and going to work where I will have to use this fried, scrambled brain of mine is utterly terrifying. Almost any interaction with my children, who I love more than anything in the world, leaves me stressed and irritable, I’m always overwhelmed. There is three of them and one of me, and the noise is too much all of the time. It’s always so loud that I can’t think.

I have been writing it off as anxiety, as I know I have terrible anxiety. It was another thing that showed up like a beacon on the tests I did at the mental health place but I told her I wanted to focus on the BPD and so I assume it’s been noted on my official diagnosis, but I really have no idea. I used to have such a hard time that I couldn’t even pay for things myself because I couldn’t interact with the cashier, and I started forcing myself to do it and now it’s okay. I still get anxiety about it, but I can do it. Same with phone calls and meeting new people.

Other things aren’t explained by the BPD diagnosis. I figured it’s just me, my head is screwed and that’s just how I am. Then the start of this year, my son was diagnosed with ADHD (combined type). It was a diagnosis that surprised no one since we all pretty much knew already. Yet I’d never really researched it. He started out on medication and we’ve done a bit of tinkering with that and his school work is really improving which is really the only thing he needs his meds for at the moment, as he was really behind in school. And I kept researching.

Someone I know posted something on Facebook that I could have written myself, about her ADHD. I said that sounds just like my whole life but I thought it was my BPD. She and another of her friends (they both have BPD and ADHD) explained that there’s a lot of overlap between the two. I know that there’s a strong genetic link with ADHD, and that parents of kids diagnosed with it often realise it sums up their own lives too. I also know that my own brother fits the criteria for ADHD perfectly and has since he was very young.

But although I knew that ADHD is not just hyperactive little boys, that’s what I was dealing with, with my son so that’s where my research had mostly been focusing. And I didn’t fit any of that. I don’t recall ever being overly hyperactive. Nowadays it’s all I can manage to get off the couch. In school I was a good student, I did my work and was quiet in class, but didn’t really understand the work. I was a voracious reader and loved writing about subjects I was interested in. I could not grasp even basic math. I had the same teacher for two years who encouraged my love for writing and reading but would not put in any time or effort to teach me math. I eventually learned to tell time and count money with a tutor, but I still can’t do math in my head without counting on my hands or imaginary dots for addition and subtraction and if it’s not a low number, forget it, I can’t do it at all. I can’t do most multiplication or division. I have no concept of weight, distance or measurement. I have no concept of time. It seems limitless until abruptly I’m about to be late for something, again.

Im always late. If I try really hard to get there on time, I’ll be too early and have to wait around. My brain doesn’t want to work. I don’t have the mental energy for anything at all.

I stumbled across something about inattentive type ADHD. Hey... that makes more sense. I can relate to that. And that, and this... the more I find, the more I refined my search to adults with ADHD, inattentive type ADHD and women with ADHD the more I saw my life, the parts of myself I can’t explain, the parts that I thought were just me being a failure.

My kid has a meds review coming up next week. I asked his doctor how I’d go about being evaluated myself. She’s going to talk to me about my next steps when I see her on Tuesday.

If I’m evaluated and it turns out that the answer to the chaos in my head is not ADHD, I’ll take this blog down. But if it is, this may well serve as some useful info for someone else down the road who might be wondering the same thing about themselves and how this stuff works and how it feels. And it’ll be good for me to have a record of this stuff. So in the meantime, I will be reblogging my BPD stuff here and also ADHD posts that I can relate to (which is a hell of a lot) or that I think will be useful in helping understand my son, and I do not mean to offend anyone by reblogging those without an official diagnosis so hopefully no one gets upset at me for that.

I also know that nobody with ADHD will read all of this, at least not in one go, and reading it back to check for typos was too boring even for me but the rambling blog posts at least explain everything I want to say and most stuff that is relevant to where I’m at right now. Maybe I’ll do a separate TL;DR post summary.

#about me

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