I should really be in bed, but whatever.

Tonight I dug up a letter John sent me a few months ago after he hurt me like never before:

I’ve been reading your blog and calling you all weekend…I know you need attention and I’m sorry I’ve been so neglectful of you that it’s reminded you of the way your parents treated you. Please stop contemplating suicide as a realistic course of action in order to remedy the problem. I love you and would really miss you and at the end of the day in a selfish way I’m scared that I’d hate you if you left me here by myself feeling as guilty as I’d feel if you did it. I think you have fundamentally misordered the priorities we all come hardwired with. To rank the absence of sadness or the presence of happiness or whatever suicide would gain you as goals higher than survival is the first error and then to seek those first goals using the methodology of suicide is the second. You’re a little Chinese man who drinks fruit shakes and is definitely intended to live longer than the genetically predisposed to die in his early 50’s Caucasoid over here. Lets keep it that way shall we, I haven’t got your eulogy polished to nearly the degree you’d want it to be.

At the time, I couldn’t get past the first few sentences because the pain was too fresh. And his words too poignant. Whereas I’m very vocal with my feelings, John is the opposite, and for him to say these things made me feel like my heart would burst. I read it tonight because I wanted to be reminded that I’m important to someone, the way I need to be.

It made me realize that a little part of me still defines myself through others. But I don’t care anymore. I have someone who loves and needs me the way I love and need him. That’s what matters. That’s what makes me feel important, like my life means something.

Knowing this brings me a great deal of comfort.

And that will be enough to get me through.

(I wonder what he’ll say at my eulogy.)

Sometimes, life moves too fast for words.

I recently started a course of Isotretinoin, a strong medication used to cure severe acne by altering DNA transcription. For some reason, my acne has really flared up in my late twenties. I would get huge cysts on my face that would last for weeks, not to mention the hyper-pigmentation that would last even longer after the cyst went away. Needless to say, it was making me very anti-social when I was talking to people and felt like there was a huge distraction on my face.

I was referred to a dermatologist, who gave me a prescription for “full strength” (according to my body weight) to see if I could handle the side effects. The pharmacist asked me if she made a mistake because they don’t offer a dosage that strong, so now I take a combination of two dosages.

Due to the potency of the medication, there’s a huge list of side effects. The scariest is the mood changes. I’m supposed to stop the dose if I start experiencing:

• changes in my mood such as becoming depressed, feeling sad, or having crying spells
• losing interest in my usual activities
• changes in my normal sleep patterns
• becoming more irritable or aggressive than usual
• losing my appetite
• becoming unusually tired
• having trouble concentrating
• withdrawing from family and friends
• having thoughts about taking my own life

As a person who’s suffered from suicidal thoughts in the past, this was quite a frightening proposition. I asked my friends to be aware, just in case I don’t notice any changes in myself.

So far though, the only side effect has been extremely dry skin, especially on the face. The lips have been the worst; I can’t eat or drink anything without applying a thick layer of moisturizer on them, otherwise they peel like mad.

Prior to this, the only time I used Vaseline was as a sexual lubricant.

Now I get aroused every time I breathe in.

 

The third Emergence Exposition was the first summer show. With daylight coming through the house, and the doors and windows open, there was a different mood floating around. People also dressed lightly and in bright colours, adding to the sense of airiness.

Along with the mind-blowing visual artwork, there were performances by Con Brio, a string quartet, and Aura Giles, a modern flutist with huge lungs.

One of the most memorable parts of the night, however, was a performance of an original composition by John Alac, where he tells a story of a man about to be executed, using only his guitar. The number of different sounds he gets from plucking, tapping, scratching his strings is quite amazing, although what really blew my mind was the way he got the sound of a bell to toll at 4:06.

(You can watch this in High Definition on the Vimeo site. It looks much nicer.)

I stopped going to therapy.

Because I feel like I’m fixed.

Not completely, but I’m at the point where I can recognize my problems, bad mental habits, and work towards fixing them myself. My anxiety — the reason why I went to therapy in the first place — is under control, and I’ve been delightfully drinking black tea in the mornings¹. No more suicidal thoughts either.

I asked my psychologist whether I could hang out with him outside of the sessions because I enjoyed his company so much on a personal level. From life to art to sociology, we would always stray onto a wide variety of other topics. Perhaps I found the human mind to be as fascinating as he did.

He told me that as much as he’d like to, his ethics wouldn’t allow him to do so. I brought up the option of going to someone else for therapy, so that we could be friends, but after a bit of consideration, I didn’t like that option either, because I really enjoyed working with him. On top of that, as he explained, he would be available to me if I ever required his services in the future. I won’t lie and say that it didn’t make me very sad, but I understood and respected his reasons.

So after my last session, we shook hands, and he said “I’ll see you when I see you. Take care”.

And he meant it.

1. Caffeine, along with many other things, used to trigger anxiety attacks in me. [↑]