An Open Letter

Who knows why I’m posting so much right now, maybe just to wipe out last night’s remnants. But I wanted to at least briefly mention why I chose :59 as the favicon for this website.

People thought flight was completely impossible, until December 17, 1903 when the wright brothers took to the air for 59 seconds. Something so violently impossible was proven wrong in less than a minute. There are two big ideas for me here:

The power 59 seconds holds: enough time to enter a new age for humanity, and to do the unthinkable. What can I do with 59 seconds? I may not be able to shape humanity every time, but I can at least angle my course a little better with that time.

And second, how many minutes pass by me. If 59 seconds was all it took to break the impossible, I sure as hell don’t want to waste that time doing something I’m not proud of. Of course I’m not going to be able to achieve greatness every time, but that isn’t a valid reason for me to not strive for it.

“No one has ever properly understood me, I have never fully understood anyone; and no one understands anyone else” ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

This wasn’t some random loner, but a social German poet who was surrounded by friends on his deathbed. If someone this established still feels this way, it’s only natural to feel this way in our own lives. I know I talked about this before, but in this post I want to talk about one solution to this.

If you think about people as vectors, it puts things in perspective for me. If one dimension represents how much they like dogs, another represents their willingness to change, etc. we end up with an incredibly high dimensional vector. Now given a new person, even though they aren’t completely random from each other, how likely is it that 70%+ of the dimensions are within some tolerance?

The point I’m getting at is it’s incredibly unrealistic to think that you can meet someone that is that much of a match to you, solely due to how little people you get the chance to meet. However, the cool thing of being in this time in society is we have access to generations of information at our fingertips. Who cares if Todd from class doesn’t share your view on an ideal life, since turns out some ancient Chinese poet has just the poem for you! Maybe friends don’t understand struggles you go through, a potential new favorite artist may have encapsulated their pain in a song that makes you feel less alone. You can think about it as either sad, or as empowering: but you aren’t alone as long as you have access to all the work of humanity. I guarantee you someone out there has felt the same things you’ve felt, and documented it in some beautiful way for a person like you to discover.

(No sad post this time! 🎊)

My music taste was heavily influenced and somewhat formed early on in high school. I was a big tennis kid, and during away matches the team would bring a speaker and take turns playing music. Of course wanting to fit in, I started listening to rap and hip-hop music; I started liking Kendrick Lamar after hearing swimming pools there and going home to search it up. Over time, I put emphasis to grow my taste to like all genres of music, all the way from slow jazz to heavy metal. I’ve picked up some very niche genres, ones that traditionally don’t have the largest fan bases. There are some songs I really like, and every person I’ve shown it to has irreparably stared at me with a look as if to say “you really listen to this?”. To me, this is something that is invaluable to experience.

Everyone knows music is subjective, and to some extent it is just a way to connect and figure out your sense of self. I think the inherent desire for conformity can easily dissuade people from branching out to music that most people don’t like. But I think that has incredible value, if you can break past the barrier once. If you can find a new song, artist, album whatever that resonates with you, and you show it to someone with a similar music taste, the best thing they can do is look at you with disgust. If you can keep your head up from that and still enjoy that song, you are free. You can go ahead and explore all these avenues of yourself through music without the fear of being coerced into a societal mold.

So to the people who don’t read this: go ahead and find some unconventional song you love, and put it out for the world to show. Some of my favorite songs have been songs not a single person I’ve shown them to enjoys, but that just makes the forbidden fruit all the sweeter.

It was during high school.

I sat in a closet crying late at night, with a bedside table, a notebook paper, and a pen.

I wrote about how much things hurt and how my parents would regret not giving me the attention and care I needed.

I wrote about how I hoped my sister was hurt by it.

I wrote about how it could have been different.

I chickened out, put the belt away and spent some time folding it into a paper plane through tears.

Opening up the window, I threw it off the balcony, for it to instantly nose-dive into the back yard.

Late at night, I crept downstairs to retrieve my failed pilot, and to give it a secondary flight into the bushes for good this time.

The next morning I saw it again from my bedroom window.

I forget how much time passed from then, but one day I looked for it and it was gone.

One memory seared in my mind was a fairly innocent thing: recently I was in a car with two close friends, and when the topic of maturity came up one said I was far from it. The thing that struck me was maturity is something I often get complimented about, especially by my therapist: the person I consider knows me the best. The weird thing was I didn’t disagree with her, at least from her point of view. With the main group of people I interact with in person, I end up joking around, being relatively emotionally volatile, and fairly immature as a whole. I haven’t really had many chances to be vulnerable, or to talk about serious things as a whole; this is something I really enjoy doing overall. I end up being kept as a one dimensional person as comedic relief.

This ended up getting to me, since the more and more I thought about it, even through all the self-work I’ve done over the years, despite being an intricate multi-dimensional person, only one side is shown to a group of people at a time. It ends up becoming an instant thing, which personality someone ends up getting to know once I meet them for the first time. This made me immeasurably sad, akin to an artist being told to paint only with one color. Yeah you can still create great things, but it feels a bit lonely in some way. I guess that analogy broke down fairly quickly.

The way I see things is everyone has different niches they need met, just like an ecosystem. Sometimes you need some people you can joke around with, and stay a child at heart. Other times you need someone you can talk about past trauma with in a safe way. Each of these are different niches that need to be satisfied for fulfillment. Sometimes people can satisfy multiple of these boxes, and often just one. The thing that stings is when barely any niches are satisfied. You end up feeling like you lose a sense of who you are, almost like an actor becoming synonymous with a character in a hit tv show. Yeah I can make my friends laugh, but past that what sides of each other do we share?

This draws me to my current conclusion of how we ultimately want to be seen. It feels like a basic universal desire to be acknowledged, having someone see all these different parts of you: the good, the bad, the ugly, and in doing so validate your individuality as a person. I hope that I don’t need validation forever, but having someone see a previously thought extinct creature is a thousand times better then promising it’s still out there somewhere. It’s hard to change solidified social relationships, after all how are you supposed to go from asking someone to work on a project to talking about childhood trauma? Thank god for therapists at least. At the end of the day, I think if you find someone who sees all these different parts of you, likes you, and is someone you’re attracted to, go ahead and ask them out. That being said this might just be my sold-dream of a relationship, and hopefully you don’t need some miracle person to satisfy these niches for you. Actually the more I think about it, maybe being in a relationship is bad if you don’t already have your niche’s somewhat covered. Normally I try to edit these posts to refine my thoughts, but I think it’s better to leave this whole derailed train of thoughts out in the open. It’s a testament to the fact I learn from my mistakes; I guess I have to blindly believe that these things have inherent value, because otherwise I think I couldn’t handle it.

So first of all, round of applause for me making it 3 posts before talking about sad stuff. 🎊

I got up from bed to write this because I wanted to get these thoughts out of my head, or at least try to resolve them a bit. I started watching “Bocchi the Rock!”, an anime about a girl with severe social anxiety finding her community, specifically through a band and guitar. There’s a lot that I’m thinking about it, but I guess I’ll just talk about one specific aspect here: the desire to feel sad.

If it isn’t obvious by my incessant badge-toting, I have MDD (Major Depressive Disorder) and anxiety, but thankfully much less nowadays thanks to treatment and years of therapy. However, I haven’t had severe social anxiety like the main character in the show does; I’ve been able to make eye contact with people, and even talk to strangers (wow!) without breaking down, so I’m far ways ahead of the show’s main character. However, watching her go through these struggles leaves me with a remnant pang of a strange thing; I want to be depressed.

I ultimately know that the thoughts I have aren’t rational, and I can justify it many times over on why I feel this way, but my brain keeps going back to the state of WANTING to be depressed. Isn’t that a silly thing to do. Something that causes me so much anguish and despair is something that I push myself towards.

I remember watching some psychotherapy video about it, speaking about how this is what I’m used to, and this is my tried-and-true method of handling issues in life. The same way the child prefers the abusive parent compared to the unknown, my default comfort state is depression. And all of this gets weirder because of how depression is (at least for me).

A while ago I learned of some theory of depression that reframed it for me: for almost everyone, people go through bouts of depression. Whether it’s losing a loved one, losing a job, a breakup, or any of the other valid reasons to be depressed, the neurotypical person will at least know why they are depressed. For a person with chronic depression, it’s like you don’t even know what’s wrong. It’s almost like a fog slowly creeps in and starts to shadow out everything else in life, and you have no clue what or why it’s surrounding you. The theory proposed that depression is your brain going “oh dang this sucks, I don’t think the human can handle this. Better make sure they can’t see the problem!”. Almost like a perfect form of escapism, the brain suppresses the problem, to the point the human has no clue what went wrong. While I’m a big fan of escapism as a concept, this ends up backfiring horribly. Imagine trying to walk to a store, all while in incredible pain without knowing your femur is shattered. That doesn’t sound too healthy does it? At least for me that’s how depressions been.

As a result, a big way I fought my depression was constantly searching for what a potential problem would be. It’s had its pros and cons, as I end up having a hyperactive self-awareness, but as a consequence I ends up a chronic overthinker. Now here’s where this tangent ties back in; when I’m having a low serotonin day, I’m depressed but not due to anything specific. But since I’m so afraid of falling into another depression, my mind violently races to try to find out what the REAL cause is. Yeah I know that the last 10 times it’s been due to the come down, but who knows if this time is different? Better to frantically go over anything and everything to find a potential issue. I end up just running in circles looking at whatever has happened and trying that on as a potential trigger. The worst is when I’ve had a day I’m proud of. Today I pushed myself far out of my comfort zone, did things that terrify me, and I was completely glad about it. But now, I’m faced between either risking falling into a depression, or picking apart every good activity to frame it as the villain. Kind of a cruel predicament if you ask me.

Honestly, these nights are some of the hardest. It’s scary to be left alone with your thoughts with your brain as the enemy. I’m glad I have these conditions, as they have made me stronger and better at things, but it doesn’t make it any nicer to go through these low points. Sometimes I wonder if I would trade my successes and my skills to be a normal person. But this is all I know, so what credibility do I have in any assessment of that anyways.

First posts are always awkward, it's like setting a precedent and without more to back it up it just feels like a skeleton of a neglected project, but here my attempt is.

I've decided to start writing a “blog” more as a way to put down my thoughts into writing, almost as a public journal. I think of it more as an extended discord status to be honest. I hope I don't sound too pretentious, as writing has never really been my strong suit and I don't know if I'm able to emulate the way English majors talk, so here I am.

God forbid someone expect something out of this, but hopefully this is a cathartic process for me.

Regarding the name of the blog, I chose “An Open Letter”, as I feel like that is what I hope this to be. More or less an ongoing one-sided conversation to the digital void, and while part of me hopes no one I know reads this, this is my little act of change.

I hope to be for lack of a better word pretty damn cringe, because if I can do that I don't doubt that I will be an unadulterated version of myself, and I'd like to be as authentic as I can. I plan on writing more about what I mean by this later.

Either way, as cliché as this is, (look how fancy I am copy pasting the é) this is my Hello World to this project!