4 February 2017

A few minutes ago I went on Instagram and felt a sudden wave of dread and loneliness. I started wondering if this particular girl, Rachael, actually doesn't like me. I doubt she has any real opinion of me, but I just wondered anyway. I shouldn't feel this way because I literally spent this entire day with friends. First with Shuge and Elizabeth at HeChaa. Then with Aditi and Dhanya at her house. I laughed a lot today. More than usual. Loud laughter that makes my face scrunch up into weird shapes. Instagram is filled with so many friends, but in a way I think I need to be careful. It's easy for me to start wondering who cares and who doesn't. I wonder if I'm a bother.

The downside to making my Instagram public is that I feel obliged to follow people I know back. I kind of want to tell them that I don't want them to follow me because I feel like I'd be a bother to them since I post so much random spam. It's almost (it is) holding me back from just posting what I want and my thoughts. Yet by making my account public, when they follow me, they already know what they're getting into since they can see my posts, so should I really feel bad? Just now I posted two consecutive posts about the new Fire Emblem mobile game, and I silently apologized and cringed as I did it because I imagined how it could be annoying to regular people out there. In reality I know they probably don't care, but it makes me nervous anyway.

I get nervous easily. I usually stay calm around people I know well, but I am nervous with anything involving strangers/people I'm not close with. I mean outwardly I'm calm because I'm afraid of betraying any emotion to unfamiliar people, but my heart is actually pounding like crazy. Whenever someone asks me to do anything that requires interacting with random people, I want to refuse, but I don't because then I'd feel bad. I don't want to seem like I'm afraid of everything but I am. I want to say I'm not like you but I don't. I know I need to become more comfortable with people in order to progress with my life.

I don't often feel these waves of anxiety, especially in comparison to a lot of my friends. I think I'm a generally happy, relatively stress-free person. Maybe it's because I try to put it off and escape it until it's over. Whenever there's a test, I routinely tell Dhanya that I will simply allow fate to guide me to the holy land, which in many cases is true. But for the Physics test today, I actually studied on Thursday because she had motivated me. It's also probably because I actually kind of knew how to do things. I remember last semester I had tried studying as well, but it was just so discouraging because I would stare at a problem for too many minutes not having a clue how to solve it. Not a shred of any idea. So I would give up.

Last week, when Chung Min was at my house after going to get tea, she asked me how I deal with my stress because I never seem stressed out. I paused to think, but I didn't really know the answer. After debating for a bit, I told her the time when I probably felt the most stressed. I told her about the time in middle school when my mom came into my room, slammed herself into the floor, and started crying, asking me why none of us love her. Chung Min told me that maybe nothing after that was stressful in comparison. I don't think that's true. I think I just tend to run away.

I didn't say anything and just called my dad. I remember feeling hot and my heart beating fast, but I wonder now how much I really cared. I remember coming home to weeks of my mom sitting in the dining room with the TV off and smiling a smile that wasn't really a smile. Talking in a uncomfortably high and soft voice. Randomly hugging me. Staring off into space with a strange look on her face. Constantly pacing back and forth, slapping the sides of her body with her arms. Only one light in the entire house was on. Usually the TV is never off; the house is never so silent. I remember seeing a bowl of completely over mushed 番茄炒蛋. It was like soup. I asked her what happened and she smiled and said she's been absent minded. I don't know why I felt so scared. There was nothing but that bowl of mushy egg and tomato, a dim light on, and her. I wonder what she was doing the whole day in silence while I was out. She would routinely talk about things from the past, paranoia. When asked who told her these things, she said the voices inside her head that don't stop. The voice told her to delete a bunch of photos of us from the computer. Months of this culminated to the situation in my room. My dad took her back to Taiwan for a few weeks to see a doctor and relatives. I remember walking home from Lawson. I don't remember what I was thinking at the time. Maybe I wasn't thinking of anything. I remember a conversation I had with my sister, Grace, about how I just wished everything would go back to the way it used to be when she would just yell at us about things. No weird hugs. No weird smile. No voice trying too hard to be loving and caring. Just normal.

She's definitely better now, but she is often still paranoid and stuck in the past. She and my dad fight a lot. A lot of times I feel bad for my dad, but sometimes I feel bad for my mom.

Today is just one of those days.