Back on Track, from Depressionland

Every time I think of Depression—how to handle it, how to get ahead of it, how to be stronger, more productive, less lethargic, more grounded, less apathetic—the word insidious comes to mind. When you’ve gone through one too many funks, you learn to recognize the signs, and by that I mean to say, you learn that there are NO signs. Nada. Zippo. Zilch.

It sneaks under your guard like poisonous gas and you don’t know it until you’re trapped in a sinkhole and you’re blind in the dark and there’s no way to crawl out. Holding on to your sanity, trying to find reasons why to even care about anything at all—becomes a constant battle. A never-ending battle against faceless monsters without any weapons at all.

I’ve been struggling for a while now to get back to reading, to blogging, to posting about books on Instagram, to origami—to get back to all the things I used to actually like to do and I keep falling down, unable to find my way back to being Me again. I stopped journaling even, the one thing other than reading that could always help me.

So during my funk, all I could do was get through day by day. Just endure and survive. The only way out is through, right? The one thing that helped me escape the nothingness, the apathy was re-reading my favorite books, the In Death series by J.D. Robb. Eve Dallas and Roarke can always give me the strength to keep getting back up and going on.

I’m trying again, fingers crossed that it sticks this time.

To everyone struggling out there, don’t give up. Hang in there.

Stay tuned.

∼Lyn

Am I DELUDED?

Hey guys, how’s it going? June ended up being a shitty month. You know how you let yourself go a day or two or three and suddenly the month’s just gone and you’re left bewildered over how you let that happen. If you’re wondering, that’s me right now. I hope ya’ all are faring better.

I’ve been thinking about something for awhile now. I don’t know if it’s the depression talking or if it’s just the regular-weird-old-me. Every time I’ve felt down, or someone made me feel inferior or I’ve been mowed down by adversity or bad stuff in my life, I’ve turned to inspirational quotes I’ve saved, or words of wisdom by people who experienced difficult traumatic experiences and came out of it stronger. It’s always boosted me and helped me stand up again.

But what if all this time I’ve just been deluding myself? What if the encouragement, the inspiration from the sayings and quotes wasn’t real? What if I was only trying to feel better about myself when in reality I’m just seeing things as I want them to be and not AS THEY ARE?

Just to give a few examples:
1 – It’s just a bad day, not a bad life. (But what if it is a bad life?)
2 – Believe in yourself and you’ll be unstoppable. (Yeah, right, give me a break.)
3 – There’s magic in you. (Nope, I’m just an empty shell.)

I can go on and on, and debug every inspirational quote especially the ones about staying positive, even in the midst of the most depressing moments in life.

The one quote I’ve always found, without any shred of doubt, to be absolutely true is something that Sherrilyn Kenyon always says, “There are three sides to every story. Yours. Theirs. And the truth that isn’t clouded by human emotions that filter everything.”

So I’m always going to be biased because I’m only seeing my side of the truth and not the unvarnished truth, the reality of my life. And my mind can’t accept that. My mind wants clarity and keeps questioning everything over and over again.

Why am I like this? Why do I do these things? Why am I so slow in everything? Why, why, why? Who am I really? Every time I think I know, something derails me and throws me in for a loop.

Have I sent you spiralling into an existential crisis yet? If you hang around, I’ll get to you sooner or later.

~ Lyn

Depression à la Reading Slump

Mental health is such a vital thing. The majority of people still don’t realize its importance. With the forced confinement brought on by COVID, maybe some people have become aware of this though I’m not holding out hope that mental health won’t go back to being a taboo once life goes back to normal.

Depression is like an insidious snake, it often creeps up on you unaware and you don’t know it until you’re mired in muck so deep, you can’t pull yourself out of it. For those of us who have it, you know how the littlest things can set it off—a bad day, lack of rest, fatigue, an argument, things not going your way (especially no matter how hard you try or how you do everything right and it’s still not enough), a book hangover, the disappointment of two highly-anticipated books that fell way below your expectations.

As a norm, my mind has two modes (Nope, not an on/off switch, sorry). A) I’m either too high or so low I could sink beneath the earth or B) I don’t feel anything a.k.a apathy i.e. an absence of emotion. When I’m high, it feels like I have champagne bubbles in my veins. I could be the happiest person in the world but the emotion is not real and the fake happiness doesn’t last. Of course, at one point, you gotta come down from that high.

And when the low comes—oh, boy, you tank so bad that staying in bed and crying for all the bad things that happened to you, because your mind is a masochist and replays all your mistakes over and over again just to show you how worthless you are, are the only things you can do.

So, all in all, you can see why I rather prefer the apathy. I used to hate it, the lack of emotion, and I’d do anything to feel something. Now, it’s my lifeline. When you don’t feel anything, you can’t spiral into despair. But the downside to it is that you don’t give a damn about anything. Nothing matters in this state. So, I have a coping mechanism for that—my principles & BOOKS. For as long as I can remember, books have been my escape and my solace. A good book allows me to feel emotions without the high/low factor.

However, being a book dragon with depressive tendencies isn’t without its own set of problems, especially when you’re stuck with a book hangover or the dreaded reading slump, which can bring on the D word and let me tell you—it sucks. It sucks when you’re depressed and you can’t even read your way out of it.

Reading-wise, August was a good month and I was up to such a good start getting through my NetGalley and Edelweiss books. One of the books I read, Fable, was an amazing read. Then September started. I was lucky to get two new highly-anticipated releases I badly wanted. But rotten luck prevailed since both books turned out to be disappointments. Book hangover from Fable, followed by two disappointing reads one after the other at the very start of this bloody month, all equaled to…*drumrolls*… yes! Reading Slump! (note the sarcasm.)

September used to be my favorite month, but this year since it’s started, I’ve been miserable. My usual solutions for dealing with reading slumps haven’t been working—reading old favorites, changing genres, reading newer books—nothing’s working. So anal obsessive soul that I am, I sorted my obsessive-compulsive TBR list by number of pages, which entailed searching on Amazon for each title from my TBR list (which had 3,000 titles & change) and checking the total number of pages in the description section because I wanted to read books with less than 200 pages to get rid of my reading slump. What can I say, it kept my mind occupied.

Did it work, you might ask. Did it get rid of my reading slump? And the answer to that—a big fat no. I’m all out of options, unless jumping off a bridge is still valid. On second thought, the water’s freaking cold. So I’m writing instead, venting I guess, or spiraling again? Fellow book dragons, mind sharing your coping mechanisms for reading slumps?

I hope ya’all are having a better month than me. Mazel Tov.

∼Lyn

Colored, Black and Brown and Blue

I am a person of color. My skin isn’t pure black, alas, I’m not lucky like that. Instead, my skin is brown. On top of that, I am Asian. For some, that’s a big black mark against me.

I am a person of color and I am proud of it. I ask myself, why should I have to state the fact that I’m proud of it, as if it’s something to be ashamed of? Why do I have to feel inferior and less because of my skin color?

Life Update, Blog Update

Life Update

Hiya everyone! I know I haven’t been around for a while now. I don’t know if it was the depression, burnout or just life in general getting me down but I lost interest in both blogging and Instagram. I was kind of at a loss for inspiration and motivation and I kept asking myself, why bother? What’s the point of it all?

And the answer? I chose this. I chose to blog and to post on Instagram. Maybe there’s no point but it was my choice. It still is. That was a relief for me, because if I am not doing all these things what else would I be doing with myself? I’m going to try a different perspective to it all – to my life, to doing the things I want to do, to try to stay interested in things that bring me pleasure.

Book Review: Six Goodbyes We Never Said – Candace Ganger

Hello, everyone, I’m participating in my second blog tour. Happy release day to Six Goodbyes We Never Said by Candace Ganger. Here’s my stop in the blog tour and my review.

Rating: 4/5 🌟🌟🌟🌟

Genre: Young Adult Contemporary

Review:

Mental health, what does it mean? Is it a big issue, a small one? Is it real or tall tales? Even in this present enlightened day, despite awareness efforts and campaigns, a large majority still don’t place as much importance to it as they should. In small countries, mental disorders aren’t viewed as genuine or real or worse—they are viewed as a bid for attention. The people with these disorders are seen as being difficult. What so-called “normal people” don’t understand is those with disorders are actually having a difficult time.

Who Am I? (I sound like the Jackie Chan movie)

Do you ever feel like you get all these opportunities for free time so often and instead of utilizing that time wisely, doing all the productive things you want to do, you miss those opportunities by being a total sloth and lazing around and just wasting all that time away? Yeah, that’s who I’ve become, a total sloth. Sometimes I don’t even know who I am anymore.

I guess it’s pretty obvious I’m having a crappy Monday and a lousy start to this month.

I don’t understand anymore why I keep making the same mistakes over and over again. I know better, and yet, it’s like there’s a disconnect between my mind and my body. I can’t seem to reconnect, to push my body to do what my mind wants to.

Albert Einstein said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”

I tell myself I’ll do things differently but I seem stuck in the same vicious loop and I can’t break out of it. I told myself this month would be different but I already wasted the first two days of June, doing you’ll ask what? Nothing. That’s right. I did nothing. There were so many things I should have, could have done but I didn’t. Why?

I don’t know how to be different, how to get the results I want with all these dead-end roads I keep taking.

Will I be stuck like this? Always filled with regrets.

I know that there are no do-overs so all I can do is let go. Let go of the time I wasted, and instead learn from my mistakes. Stop punishing myself for what I didn’t see when I was in the moment but what is clear to me in hindsight. But the fact remains, hindsight sucks.

Here’s to hoping I don’t end this year with these regrets.

The Unpleasantness of being Blocked

I wasn’t going to talk about this. I started drafting my weekly meme post “F Is For Friday” but I found myself writing about this in it. I try to leave only good things for my Friday meme, to try to practice gratitude and I didn’t want this negativity in it. What happened is still on my mind and maybe writing about it will exorcise it. I just want to be done with it. Writing is my salvation. By jotting something down, I can exorcise it from my mind, give a well-deserved burial. So, I guess that meant I had to do a separate post.

This has been a really lousy week for me, filled with bitter disillusionment about someone I’d believed to be a real friend. You think you know people but you don’t. You never do. This was such a hard thing for me to accept. I already knew it, of course, and yet, I allowed myself to trust and care.

Some of my closest friends are people I met through Goodreads or Instagram or here, on WordPress. We’ve never met each other before and we might be oceans away or on the other side of the world from each other but in one instant, we clicked and became fast friends.

Still, I’m a very private and wary person so I don’t just open up to anyone. That’s why when I meet people I connect with that instantly, I cherish them. That kind of friendship is like finding a diamond among rocks.

I met someone like that on Goodreads and we began chatting on Instagram. We clicked at once and talked and talked and shared pics of each other and shared stories of our families and a lot of personal stuff for more than three months, during which we chatted every day. I know that’s not long to know someone but time is relative. When someone shares that much with you, you get to know that person. I valued her as a really good friend.

Then out of the blue, she says her Instagram’s not working, and that she wants to cut off from all social media. I respected her decision and try to support her in whatever she’s going through. Instead, I find out that she hasn’t cut off from social media and instead that “friend” blocked me on Goodreads and when I check my Instagram, I find I was blocked there as well.

I was confused. I couldn’t understand why she’d done that. I tried contacting her but no response. It was very unpleasant for me to try to reconcile this new version of my “friend” to the person I thought I knew.

It’s like all this time, I’d known Dr. Jekyll and now I was faced with Mr. Hyde. Like I was dealing with two different persons – the first one was my friend, thoughtful and so caring. The second one a total stranger who didn’t give a damn about me.

The worst is, I don’t even know why. She didn’t even do me the courtesy of telling me why and that was hard to figure out because she seemed like an upfront person. I don’t  know if I’d done something wrong or not to be treated in this manner. I don’t understand why people do that. Why not just tell someone you don’t want to be friends anymore? Why play games like this?

I’ve been told I can be blunt almost to a fault. I don’t play games and I tell people upfront what I think. When things are not alright, I say so. I can’t understand how someone who pledged to be upfront could be like this? Because it’s something I wouldn’t do.

So, this was a real donkey kick in the face. Because that diamond turned out to be a mud ball in disguise. It’s a shitty thing to do, cutting off completely from someone without giving them a reason. Am I supposed to spend the rest of my life wondering why? To hell with that. If that’s the kind of person my “friend” truly was all along, then I want nothing to do with her. I’m the type of person who strikes someone off their life when this kind of shit happens.

 

I did not write this post to throw mud on her or badmouth her. Thing is, she never even checks my blog. And now that I’ve been blocked like this, for no reason at all, I don’t see her checking my blog. So, no hidden agenda, people.

I’m not hurt, really, more like confused about why this happened. I hate that she preferred lying and using subterfuge than being honest.

And I’m done. I don’t care what the reason is anymore and I’m definitely not giving her another thought. She chose to do this unpleasantness. I’m done with someone like that. I don’t forgive or give second chances.

I’m grateful for my small circle of friends for being here for me, for having taken a chance on me. The silver lining from this fubarred situation is I realize how lucky I am for my circle. But I’m never taking a chance on someone else ever again.

Hell no, I am never going to open up to another person on GR on Insta again. No way, hosé. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. Lesson learned in stone.