Andrew Yuen's Blog

Artificial Heart

Lately I have been having dreams that have left me feeling vulnerable. Much of it has to less to do with the content of the dreams themselves. Like my dreams, I have less and less that I wish to say these days, about anything. I find that the anxieties of life are things that manifest deeply upon awakening. The heart, beating during exercise, is an enjoyable, life affirming thing, but at rest, in bed, waking with a racing heart is often a terrifying, unnatural feeling. I find it difficult to manifest or even want to articulate these thoughts, what I find life affirming instead are articles like the one below, from the late Mark Fisher, whose disheartening death seems to be a grand indictment on the state of our times, the nature of capital. Much ink has been spilled in this area by people far wiser than me, and Mark Fisher was one of them. I find it difficult to recommend other, technical literature on Mental Health, books like Experiences of Depression by Matthew Ratcliffe, while helpful in categorical ways, was not something that I found personally insightful. Mark Fisher’s article below was much more helpful in helping me understand that I was not alone, not just in the way I felt but the way I am, as I grow older.

Writing for personal expression can be lonely work, and reading can be lonely work as well. I wish for all of us to connect not just in these times, but through time and space. We grapple with the certain facts of life and its transience, and what we say, as a record, is a way to buffer against that. The artist, On Kawara, had a project that had the simple and direct message of stating ” I am still alive “, in a series of telegrams, often, in times of great confusion, a simple message is the best. In these times, I hope you have been well.

Good For Nothing

Resource recommendations

The Oriental Darter shakes water off its wings.

Every December, an Oriental Darter finds its way to the same series of branches in Hindhede quarry. It’s how I keep my sense of time, a reminder that nature itself is, generally speaking, indifferent to the troubles of our times.

It’s only sunk in recently for me that we are two years in this pandemic, and I celebrated my 2nd pandemic birthday with a curiosity that my sense of time has stopped. It seems like I’ve magically grown older, without the following sense of having travelled somewhere, and I’m sure it’s the same for many people too- we all feel that we are stuck in place, which we kind of are.

I do experience a fair bit of anxiety that stems from not knowing, and the reading that I try to do on new variants, that I try and use to give myself a sense of control, often confounds me. There is too much to sift through and be uncertain about, that I attribute to the conflicting stories that arise from developing information and conflicting public health communication.

The two sources that I’d like to share with you today that I use.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-osterholm-update-covid-19/id1504360345

https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/

I hope these resources are useful. I find Dr.Osterholm’s podcast a soothing voice to fall asleep too, with his even tone and calm, humble rationality.

I wish you well. Thanks for reading!

A New York Minute

On the way to pick R- there were things that I enjoyed in a New York Minute. I watched the tree trimmer, gliding upwards in his little box. I was waiting at the stoplight. There is something very beautiful about watching the world in my little chair, where the world moves and I am stationary, and the rolled up windows give a muted, silent movie.

I thought about a person a thousand years from now, watching my world from a screen, thinking about what it must have been like to experience this. I wonder if it will be beautiful to this person, if he thinks about how simple or quaint our lives were.

It is difficult to find a moment of beauty, because we have so much trouble experiencing it, without wanting to capture it through a screen. There will be a time again, where I have the courage to go somewhere without a phone or a camera, and see a beautiful sunset, absent from the feeling of wanting to take a picture.

I didn’t take any pictures of what I saw today, but I did tell R- about how it made me feel, to think about what it would be like for a person, a thousand years from now, to have watched it. What does he think? What do I think?

Next to us, there were two men, both who looked very different in appearance and yet were sage-like in their own way. The both of us eavesdropped for a while, and then I told R- about the drive her, that it brought to me a feeling of being very glad to be alive, in this place and time.

This is what enlightenment is, she said.

Birds

The birds, on some level, must have known that something was up. You could hear them in the mornings, for miles, singing in the traffic free air.

I admired their consistency, admired them in the way people who are deeply alone can pay attention, free from the call and response of a human conversation. They were my solace- the idea of entertainment in a crisis felt peverse, I never liked it.

The human face, half obscured. We ourselves were the thread that connected us to our invisible enemy.

I thought about human selfishness, and how we contended with that in solidarity. The tenuous web of human relationships- how fragile it was. Don’t hoard, wear a mask. Or even in the early days, where waring a mask was seen as a sign of…what exactly? A skepticism for the public narrative? Of a mistrust for authority?

I wished for a time to be deeply, and personally, alone. I wished for deeper solitude.

So I went to look at the birds. They flew in the direction of fading light, at sunset. I walked towards the street where they dipped low, between the houses, and went back up again. They flew across the sky in intermittent bursts, and around me, people were turning their lights on in their houses, gathering at the dinner table.

I waited, then I heard a voice from a balcony above. “Are you watching the birds?” he said. I looked up. He was leaning against the balcony, looking down, a middle aged man, balding, in a singlet. I looked at him. I could barely make out his face, in the evening light, the first face of a stranger I’d seen in months.

“ I am”, I said.

We went back and forth, a little volley. He told me about where they nested, in a street a few blocks away, in a tree. I couldn’t make out exactly where, but it didn’t matter.

On Tomorrow’s Conversations

When I was growing up, feelings weren’t something you talked about at the dinner table, or with your friends, and certainly not in the classroom. I had many daydreams in class, and many of them had an angry voice cutting them short- the voice interrupting the introspection that’s necessary for life, the ideas shafted in exchange for the curriculum that had no place for them.

What I really learnt, during those many classes and interrupted daydreams, were that feelings weren’t something that you brought up. Not in public, at least, but only in hushed conversations in doctors’ offices, and there, they were serious, solemn conversations.

We never did get round to talking about feelings in class, but I did see my first therapist when I was 12, following an “outburst” from an incident in school. I did think at the time that the outburst was my fault, but many years after, I know that it was a very natural reaction to my world- the frustrations of being misunderstood, by teachers, and also, the emptiness of not having the conversations I wanted to have.

It took a long time for me to put a name to those empty feelings, and in many ways, I’m still waiting for that conversation.

Certainly now, in this changing world, much has been written about the need to talk about mental health. The other question is this: what do we talk about once that conversation starts?

Part of that conversation is talking about how to navigate a shifting world in the time of a pandemic. We have to cope with the grief of our pre-pandemic world, and part of that coping is the solidarity that Social Media can offer, a feeling that someone, other than me, was having trouble.

I have wondered often if the children of the generation after me will have parents that talk openly about their mental health – if mindfulness programs will be commonplace in school alongside art crafts and PE.

This is the future I dream about, in my time of solitude with the freedom of no teacher yelling at me. And here’s to the hope that it continues.

A small good thing

Something that made me happy was when I was walking around my estate, and one of the people that worked at Toast Box said hello to me when she was walking to the bus stop from her shift. It made me realize that I’ve actually seen her around for many years already, and its nice that we both acknowledged that.

With many times in my life where I’ve felt overwhelmed by the fact that life and friendships can often change very quickly, its nice to get to be familiar with someone and maintain a very specific distance and boundary- its this particular type of interaction- the connections that we make in passing that often go unexamined- that makes me feel, well, decent.

Really good article on boundaries

Small update! Found this article helpful. Can be difficult to establish boundaries sometimes, and it feels unkind to do so even though its something that’s necessary in certain friendships, if not all. Happy reading!

https://www.psychologytoday.com/sg/blog/the-couch/201903/everybody-needs-boundaries-6-ways-make-them-work-you

What does healing look like? ( To me )

Just the other night I was wrangling with a box of butter cookies. I had opened the box the wrong way, and all the cookies came spilling out onto the table. It was one of those nights where I felt restless, where the worries tend to pile up, but I despite myself, I let out a little laugh which surprised me. It made me think about my moment to moment responses and how I would have responded to it in a darker mood, which would probably have been a disproportionate sense of anger.

That made me think of what healing looks like for me. There are many things that I’m upset by, other people, both recent and not, and after a bit of reflection, I wrote these few things down in light of those thoughts.

1) Learning to cultivate a healthy belief in the self

2) An acknowledgement that there are very tiring hours and stormy moods in a day and the acknowledgement that it will pass.

3) Learning to acknowledge that I will not be understood by everyone

These 3 things are mostly notes to myself, and there are internal explanations that I don’t really have the energy to elaborate on, mostly because they involve the often complex, ambivalent feelings regarding people that have crossed paths with me.

These few months have led to more opportunities to confront the self, and to reflect, and sometimes to ruminate. The places that these thoughts lead me are on occasion, dark places, and they do keep me up till the late hours.

I hope some of these thoughts make sense to you, but if not- I wish you a good day, and hope you can feel a sense of solidarity with me through these trying times.

Podcast

Feeling distressed because of COVID? I found this helpful:

COVID-19 Chapter 6: Mental Health

Thoughts by moonlight

[image error]

I’ve been thinking about what about my life is noteworthy to record. For example, there are many night walks I go on. It’s beautiful in the moonlight, and there’s something special about the early hours of the morning, and about the cats too- stray ones, and those with collars, and black cats- that seem to develop a curiosity of me- perhaps they see me as one of their own. I saw one- We each took a street and walked side by side for a few houses, she would disappear behind a car, or in between street lights. After a while she crossed towards my side, and when I looked behind me, she looked behind her. Some feeling of being in this together, which is a special feeling.

Of course, all this is forgotten my morning, and the only memory left is that I took a walk at night, and this is how banal my life is. I thought of other things to, like the philosophical concept of death, and I thought about different ways to journal.

So, how do I journal right now?

1. I keep an Evernote mostly of day to day thoughts like the ones above.

2. I keep another written journal on to dos, which aren’t lists but more a visualization of how I’ll view my day.

Taken as a whole, they help keep me centered, and I do recommend journal-ling as a way to keeping one centered. There’s a surprising about a self insight to be gained by flipping through the writing, and you might find an insight or too about life. Or something. The process itself is therapeutic.