Upon seeing it, my first thought was, “I wish I’d been taught about this when I was in school.” Back when I was studying art in the ‘90s, all of the contemporary artists I was taught about were careful. They kept themselves enmeshed in the blinders-on European art historical perspective to show how very educated they were. Modern art wasn’t so modern, anymore, so what was left? Artists referenced the art that they knew curators and gallery owners loved.

Hoyes, who started in the ‘70s, referenced social inequity and his Caribbean roots. I’m not the most socially minded person in the world, but even I could see that what he was doing was subversive at the time. Looking at his work, I vowed to myself that I’d stop being so careful about my own work—my writing.

Then, I wondered, what does that even mean?

For me, “careful” has always meant cutting and pre-emptive self-censoring. I delete anything that has a potential problem associated with it. I’m always mindful of word count. Most of my writing exists in secret journals that no one ever sees.

I tell myself I’m like this because the past has shown me that whenever I take up too much space in anyone’s life, I get cut out entirely, and while I know that has been objectively true in some crucial cases, I also know that’s not the whole story.

As a card-carrying black and white thinker, when it comes to all grey areas, I try to exist on the extreme opposite end of whatever is considered the bad thing just to be safe. Such as, “It’s bad to be sedentary? I will now exercise for hours a day.”

The other thing is that I’m terrified of looking like the asshole who doesn’t get it, because, if you understand the type of autistic I am, you know that I was practically born wearing a t-shirt that says, “I’m the asshole who doesn’t get it.”

“Oh no!” you might say, “You do fine! People don’t have any problem with you!”

Yes, true, after years of careful masking, I’ve learned how to seem as though I’m getting it, and often, yes, actually getting it, because I did figure some stuff out after a while.

However, I still remember all of those years of isolation and rejection because the stuff that happened when I was a kid lives in a special room that always has hidden recesses no matter how hard I try to air it out.

Also, being tolerated for masking does nothing for my sense of acceptance and belonging. I got diagnosed in my mid-40s, which raised lots of questions about how much of my personality is the mask and how much is really me, and this is something I’m still wrestling with.

As a result, I’ve spent my entire life being extra careful about everything. It’s like trying to balance on a railroad track while constantly monitoring your own feet. The more I messed up, the worse I felt, and the worse I felt, the more anxious and careful I became, compounding into deeper and deeper isolation.

So, now, with my writing, every time I get a rejection or a ghosting from a journal or an agent, I don’t think, “huh, I guess it wasn’t a good fit,” nor do I believe them when they say, “This is exactly what we want, but we can’t publish it right now because of a timing issue with another piece.” No. Instead, I think, “I did something wrong. I must figure out what it was.” So, I revise again 10 or 20 more times. I agonize over word choice.

I spend months wrangling with a single blog/newsletter post very few people will read. I get it wrong, anyway.

When I say I want to stop being so careful with my work, I want to stop doing that, but when I tell myself to stop being so careful, I immediately start worrying about what happens when an artist isn’t careful enough.

Maybe I’m worried about further rejections, but I’m already getting lots of rejections, so it can’t be that.

Maybe I’m worried about being one of those people who stubbornly sticks to a tone-deaf plan while dismissing their audience as “not getting it,” resulting in nothing but bullet holes in my feet.

I don’t believe in making artistic decisions based on consensus, like a comic book movie does, but I don’t believe in demanding that an audience turn brain-spillage into art, like publishing my journals would, either.

I could understand the subjectivity inherent in any piece of art. Something that’s a problem for one reader is the most beautiful part for another, but that part is completely out of my control.

So, this leaves me with only my own taste and guts to help me navigate, but I feel like this puts me right back into the t-shirt that says, “I’m the asshole who doesn’t get it.”

I don’t believe my guts steer me in the right direction. I don’t trust them. Despite that, I know I’ve been following them all along, anyway. It’s just been in an anxious and truncated way, and maybe that’s what I truly want to change.

Some of my recent flash memoir on my other newsletter:

#48 Fire and Rain
#47 Heather

Also, here is my close read on Tobias Wolff’s story “Bullet in the Brain.”

I ran to the internet as soon as it was over to make sure I wasn’t crazy. This is something I do when I hold a strong but highly subjective opinion. I look for people who agree with me, and when I find them, I relax because someone out there is arguing my side. In this case, I wanted to reassure myself everyone else feels the same way about Hans’ bombastic personality.

I don’t know if Hans cheated or not. I’m far less bothered by that question than I am by his overly romanticized self-mythology that sounds so much like it was taken straight about of a video game that I’ve wondered about the number of times he’d watched No Retreat, No Surrender as a child. He always leaves me with the impression that even if he isn’t cheating at chess, he’s definitely cheating at something.

I was shocked to find that a lot of people online, especially those who only know about the scandal through the documentary, believe that Hans is lovely and Magnus is the arrogant asshole.

This made me wonder what we expect from our geniuses.

Before I go on, I should say that I’m using the word “genius” loosely here. We can debate all day about what constitutes a genius or even whether geniuses are a real thing—personally, I say no, at least, not in the popular sense of the word.

I should also say that I’m not debating who is the better chess player. Magnus Carlsen became the World Chess Champion in 2010, at age 19 and has been ranked number 1 in the world ever since. Hans was ranked 12^th at his peak in May 2026 and ranks 19^th as I write this. He is 23 years old. Whether that makes the two of them rivals in any meaningful way is up to you, but as a person who casually follows chess, again, I say no.

When I watched the documentary, I saw Hans as leaning pretty heavily onto the “mad genius” archetype—telling us that he didn’t leave his NYC apartment for 30 days straight in order to feed the great chess mind that would never relent.

Magnus, on the other hand, with his general physical fitness and pretty blond wife, comes off as disturbingly normal for a professional chess player. In the documentary, he even claims to not work as hard as “some people.” For whatever reason, his brain just “gets” chess.

In weighing this, I thought about the only professional chess player most people can name, Bobby Fischer, who also had serious mental health issues.

For awhile, I was invested in the “mad genius” narrative, myself. Growing up, I could always clearly see both sides of the coin when it came to the various aspects my brain. My social isolation also means social independence. My tendency towards hyper-fixation means I deeply understand the things that matter to me. My ability to notice and recall details and coalesce them patterns means there’s a lot of stuff floating around in my mind that I wish I could forget. The list goes on.

I can’t remember when I started identifying my differences as a good thing, but it started when I was very young. Maybe it happened I learned about Edgar Allen Poe or Van Gogh. Maybe it was when I read the play Equus—which I interpreted as about sacrificing one’s own authenticity to relieve the pain of being misunderstood. Maybe it was anytime I read a poem, saw a painting, or heard a song that mirrored my own pain.

I grew to resent the idea that “happy and normal” should be the default goal for everyone, and while I was doing that resenting, I knew there was a faction of society that valued difference as something sacred, rather of something that needed stomping out. I became an art major.

I was a much more rigid thinker back then. Rigid thinking can also act as a form of self-protection, and for me, I was protecting myself from the idea of being jus plain “mad” without the “genius.” I always tried very hard to pose as normal on the outside, but deep down, I knew it was all a farce. I knew that mad geniuses didn’t exactly fit in, but they at least had a role to fill.

As time went on, though, that sentiment started to ring hollow to me. I’d met enough people who believed that they were entitled to all sorts of selfishness, assholery, accolades, or recognition because they’d constructed a glorified idea of self based on some archetype.

By the time I was a true adult, I’d completely soured on the idea of identifying with a particular archetype in order to justify one’s own bullshit.

Now that I’ve lived a lot more life, I’ve felt the downsides of my functioning much more than the upsides. There are no practical advantages to being able to solve an episode of Monk within the first few minutes or scoring well on an aptitude test. I’ve learned that there’s no definition of self that will actually protect me from the realities of the world. I can put my whole ass in as a writer, artist, or anything that supposedly leans into my talents, and still fail because the “mad genius” was a cardboard cut-out that only pretended to offer guarantees, when there are none.

This might sound like a bleak outlook, but I don’t think it is. It’s just a more ambiguous one. All it means is that I don’t know my future and I don’t know where I fit in. This is not new, and it’s not unique to me. Now that I’m older, it feels a lot more like freedom.

Up until that point, I was pretty sure there was no place on Earth that I actually belonged. I partially knew this because I’d been on both sides of it—the US and Japan—and neither of them worked for me.

A talker is completely text-based. You can be whoever you want on a talker, and that gave people permission to be themselves.

That small group of friends who’d brought me to the computer lab that night drifted away. I made some new friends in the computer lab itself, but most of my friends existed on the talkers.

The only space held on a talker is the space between people. Everything else is blank. Most people would say that made it less real, but to me, that made it even more real.

I was in the computer lab around dawn when a girl came in and told me that the stairwell was full of smoke. I checked, and it was. She thought she should pull the fire alarm, but she was afraid of getting into trouble. I told her it would likely go off on its own. A minute later, it did.

It was dead of winter in Minnesota, and the air was so cold it burned as we piled onto the snowbanks and watched the fire trucks arrive. I’d never gone upstairs to my room that night, so I was still dressed and had my coat, but all of the other kids were in their pajamas. They were all groggy, but I was wide awake.

The firemen eventually let us back in. Someone had walked through the men’s side and had ignited everything that would burn, but the building never caught. The dorm was a converted convent that was made entirely of stone. Even the doors were all made of metal.

As we walked past the charred remains of paper decorations and school notices on the floor, I found it so odd that no one said a word about it, as if they’d already discussed it amongst themselves and had decided to keep it quiet.

I hoped the arsonist would be caught, for safety, but I also understood the impulse.

That summer, the staffer who managed that building hung himself in his attic apartment in that same building. I knew almost nothing about him. I’d seen him maybe once or twice the entire year. Who was he? Where was his family?

Again, no one ever said anything about it. Not to me, anyway.

The woman looked middle-aged but beautiful in that “no expense spared” sort of way. The man was younger than her, sporty, and the dog was clearly his. They approached a water fountain at the start of the trail and the woman stooped to the spout meant for hydrating dogs and cupped her hands under it. As the water dribbled over her fingers, she called the dog, demanding she drink from her hands. I thought that was strange, given that there were a bunch of communal dog bowls scattered around, including a bright lime green one no one could miss.

The dog circled, wrapping the leash around her legs, refusing to drink. To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t have either. Who knew what kinds of lotions or perfumes she had on those hands? The woman stepped out of the leash, tried a few more times, and then threw the water in the dog’s face. “If you’re too stupid to drink, then you don’t deserve any water!”

At that moment, we rounded a corner, and the couple left my view. I walked ahead stiffly in horrified shock.

“Is everything ok?” my husband asked.

“Yes, fine.” There was no reason to upset him about the dog, too, but I added, “There’s something about this place that suddenly looks menacing to me.” It was true, I saw it in the azure sky, the tiny distant sailboat triangles gliding across the water, and especially in the up close mansions with their pristine unoccupied pools and gardens. Too many places had started to look menacing to me.

The woman with the dog was too stark of a reminder of the brutality of the world we live in and how helpless I often feel against it, as if I have all the agency of a discarded candy wrapper.

We got to the place where the trail descended sharply down the cliff towards the ocean, from that angle, it resembled an abyss-like drop. Like usual, we turned around. It took some time, but I shook some normalcy back into my limbs without being too obvious about it.

For months afterward, the woman and the dog kept creeping back into my mind. I saw her cupped hands, heard her imperious voice, and felt the familiar paralyzing sting inside my body.

But, mostly, I worried about how that whole situation implicated me. “Why didn’t you do anything? Why no vigilante justice?” my imaginary chorus wailed. My only defense is my own sense of powerlessness. For many of us, power only comes when we are in a collective, not as individuals, and I rarely see myself as fit for any collective (as I’ve explained here and here).

I hoped the man had broken up with the woman, but I seriously doubted he did. My faith in humankind was quite low.

Several months later, my husband and I rode the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway with friends to take in the views atop of Mt. San Jacinto State Park. There was still a good amount of snow up there, even though it was spring. It also had some nice boulders to climb and the long, long views to remind us how small we are.

On the way back down, eighty people packed onto the tramway after standing in line for a half an hour. I looked at their done-in faces and thought about how the stress of striving can wear people down until we feel like our souls have become threadbare.

When the tram hit the first pulley, the whole thing bucked and swayed forcing everyone to grab onto something (often another person). Some people screamed, others laughed, other’s made that rollercoaster sound, “Woooooah!” And we dropped further into the canyon. The granite walls flew by, the sky receded above, and the city of Palm Springs, spot-lighted by the sun, hovered on the horizon.

The tramway operator put on the song “Free Fallin’” by Tom Petty, and at least half the car spontaneously broke into song at once. Everyone else joined in on the next verse. Soon enough, we were spinning and singing and the air became electric with communion.

The cold breeze at the top turned mild and then warm at the bottom of valley. I turned to the windows so no one would see me crying. I finally had the option to stop bracing against the world, even if it was just for a short time.

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In that book, Liz Gilbert describes a practice she used to pull herself out of her depression and intense loneliness. She started writing a letter to herself from somewhere unknown and told herself (or some other entity told her, depending on how you want to look at it) all of the things she needed to hear at the time.

Automatic writing wasn’t new to me. I’d already experimented with it, but it was her description of it that allowed me to get past my own skepticism and approach it as a regular practice.

I continued writing these letters off and on alone until Liz started a newsletter giving weekly prompts for this practice, and I signed up. Last week’s prompt was, “What would you have me know about celebrating my accomplishments?”

I assumed most people read it and thought, “Oh, a nice way to list out all of my accomplishments.” But, for me, it was an opportunity to look at all of the ways I have not yet met my goals.

Here is my letter:

—

My Love,

It’s ok. I saw that as soon as you read this prompt, you said, “maybe I won’t write a letter this week,” and pushed away from your desk. But you came back, even though your stomach is doing flips, so let’s call that one accomplishment.

I know you hear “accomplishment” and you immediately think that it’s about an accounting of how you measure up against other people, and the idea of that accounting is making you break out in sobs, just now.

I know that when you read The Stranger by Camus, it gave you a chill, not because of the idea that the world lacks any essential meaning, but because you related to the main character, and you saw what happened to him.

I know that when you asked Chatgpt how you can better connect to other people, it warned you not to be too open and honest, because that was off-putting to regular people, and that scared the hell out of you. You told it that you didn’t know how to perform in the ways other people performed, and it told you that maybe you just weren’t cut out for community the way it exists today.

And, you thought, that if you can’t connect, you will never accomplish anything, because you believe no one accomplishes anything alone. They do it with help and support, and you feel that’s not available to you.

It doesn’t have to be like that, though. As far as I’m concerned, just the fact that you keep walking this earth day after day is an accomplishment. You wake up every day, and you journal, and you meditate, and you dedicate yourself to your writing, and you go to the gym, and you do your stretches afterwards, and no one steps out of the woodwork to say, “good job,” and you keep doing these things every single day, anyway, and if that’s not a fucking accomplishment, I don’t know what is.

My Love, every aspect of you is an accomplishment. You are one big walking accomplishment. Your bravery floors me every single day. Don’t let preconceived ideas of what “accomplishment” means take that away from you. Don’t let comparison take that away from you. Sit in my love for you. Sit in my pride for you. Sit in your accomplishments. Breathe them in. Swallow them like nectar. Let them in.

Love, Love.

—

Several days later, Liz Gilbert commented on my letter saying she found it deeply moving. I re-read it and was deeply moved myself.

You see, I have a regular habit.

Step One: Look at external measures to see how well I’m doing (comparison)

Step Two: Find myself lacking

Step Three: Feel Bad

Inadequacy is my drug, my desire, my comfort zone. If I can find a way to go there, I will go there. External measures have nothing to do with it. It’s an impulse that has no purpose and amounts to nothing.

Before I go on, I want to stop for a moment to have some compassion for all of us. I didn’t choose this habit. It’s a programming that was foisted upon me from the outside world. I imagine it’s a programming that’s foisted on a lot of people, and if not this particular thing, then something else that’s equally demoralizing.

In that letter, my subconscious, “Love,” or whoever, pointed it out to me. “It doesn’t have to be that way,” but it took another week for it to really click.

Yet, while I recognize this fairly regularly, I also forget this just as regularly. I don’t know how I will keep reminding myself, except to keep writing letters.

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Originally posted on amyyuki.com

I can’t go into many public spaces (the beach on weekends, the entire city of LA, ever) because the risk is too great. Even when I don’t run into it, I spend the entire time terrified I will, which leads a person to ask herself, “what’s the point?” a lot. Even a place that I once knew as safe becomes off-limits after I’ve smelled it there once. I’m too scared to go back.

It’s not just the physical illness that scares me. Every time it happens, I’m thrown into the kind of despair and suicidal ideation that usually only comes with a deep depression. I don’t know if that’s a side effect of the drug or just knowing that I’m completely helpless against this thing.

We’ve been living in Southern California for two and a half years and have lived in four places. The first one was temporary, but it was too loud (traffic noise), and I was getting sick from marijuana smoke. I didn’t know it at the time. We were close to an airport, and I thought I was being poisoned by jet fuel. In the second place, the smell of marijuana was so thick and so frequent that there was no way I’d miss the connection. In the third place (where we stayed the longest), the neighbors were noisy. My nervous system never fully regulated the entire time we were there, but I figured it was better than marijuana. Earplugs and noise-cancelling headphones exist, but I had to wear them almost nonstop, and they didn’t always work. The noise was getting worse and our rent was going up, so we moved again—right next door to another marijuana smoker.

So far, the smokers, noisemakers, and landlords have largely been disinterested in my experience. I don’t know how to express how much grief and anger this has caused me, but I often get a pressure in my chest that feels like someone jamming the tip of a baseball bat into my solar plexus.

The usual suggestion is “Just don’t be here.” Even the doctor I begged for any kind of insight into why I’m getting so incredibly ill from small amounts of second-hand smoke shrugged and said, “Get a new apartment.” I’ve been moving so often and for so long that I feel like I’m constantly on the run. I’ve changed rooms, houses, states, and countries. I’ve stood in corners and walked off into distances. I’ve gone home early or didn’t go out in the first place. I’m just looking for a place to be. I’m beginning to feel like there is no ‘here’ for me.

The social model of disability says that disabled people are not disabled by our differences, but by how society rigidly caters to a specific level of ability. A blind person is disabled by his vision only because we’ve built the world for the sighted. It’s not just about having fewer or impaired abilities, either. I have more. I hear more, see more, smell more, feel more, but since no one else senses these things, I may as well be dealing with poltergeists.

When we know an injustice can be righted, it actually gives us far more agita than just accepting things the way they are, but the agitated path is often the only path to fixing things. Plus, it’s hard to unknow there’s a better option once you’ve learned about it.

Life was never like this in Japan. There, I’d gotten used to the idea that environmental stressors would be recognized and quieted before I arrived. Here, I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that, at least in California, a person’s right to drug me against my will eclipses my right to exist in peace.

So, we moved again. This time, from South Orange County to just outside of Loma Linda—the only blue zone in the United States (a “blue zone” is a geographical area where people routinely and healthily live into their 100s).

Since it’s in a blue zone, we assumed that people would be more health-conscious, and hoped, maybe naively or irrationally, there’d be fewer smokers. Then, when the guy next door lit up, the nightmare of our months in Los Angeles came back.

It wouldn’t have been so bad in LA if the property managers hadn’t kept insisting over and over that we not confront the neighbor ourselves, saying they would talk to the neighbor. They promised to enforce the lease, which stated in bright red capital letters that it was a non-smoking property.

Because the smoke was coming in nearly every day, we made follow-up calls nearly every day, but it took them months to even make contact. I can’t hear the words “the week just got away from me” without having PTSD flashbacks. The excuses got more and more ridiculous over time, until they started sounding like a junior high school girl at a dance refusing to approach a crush.

“What if he has a medical marijuana card?” they implored us.

“The only way to find out is to ask,” we said.

“But what if he’s insulted by the question?” they fretted.

I can’t remember the details because I spent most of that time alternating between my bed and sobbing in the corner of my bedroom. Five months later, they admitted they had no intention of doing anything about the smoke but did say they’d let us out of our lease. As soon as we met the same problem here, we immediately thought we’d have to move, despite having repeatedly asked about noise and smoke and emphasizing my extreme sensitivity before signing the lease.

In the meantime, in Loma Linda, the daily high went up to 100°F, and the central air conditioner was already making me sick. They sent out a repairman. When he cracked it open, it looked as if the filter inside hadn’t been changed ever. Cleaning would be expensive. In the past, an additional air scrubber had made a big difference for me, but we were feeling pretty pessimistic about the landlord shelling out for anything. We came to the conclusion that living in California was a failed experiment, and we needed to get the hell out of Dodge.

Before moving, we thought we’d at least try speaking directly to the neighbor. Since I can barely deal with people in the best of times and was sick on top of it, my husband spoke to them. The neighbor, refusing any form of compromise, argued over and over that smoking marijuana is legal. This well overused refrain is beginning to sound to me like a driver standing next to his wrecked car after having run a red light proclaiming, “But driving is legal!”

The neighbor refused to engage in the whole “This is a non-smoking building” thing. He just talked past it, as if the point were irrelevant, which isn’t surprising. People don’t bother to find out what is actually legal and what isn’t. The rules vary between towns, municipalities, and buildings, and even the most permissive of places have regulations on where and when it’s okay to smoke. It’s not really anyone’s fault. There’s been no public education and no enforcement, and everyone keeps repeating the words, “Well, it’s legal!” with a shrug, perpetuating the mythology that it’s always legal anytime, anywhere, and under any circumstances.

Within a week and a half, the landlord sent the smoking neighbor an eviction warning, which is a letter that says, “You’re in violation of the lease. Stop doing what you’re doing or move out.” To us, this is a mythical letter. We had dreamt about this letter. It’s a piece of paper that we knew, theoretically, existed, but had been wholly unattainable in our LA apartment. Through our previous landlord, we’d vicariously begged their lawyers to send this exact letter. It would not be sent. It would never be sent. It got to the point where we wondered whether our previous neighbor had mafia connections, but based on all our observations, he was just a silly, oblivious college kid.

Another HVAC guy showed up a few days after the neighbors got their letter. He cleaned the HVAC unit and installed an air scrubber. The property manager called to apologize for what had happened. She expressed concern for my health and thanked me for my patience. She then asked if we were willing to testify against the neighbors in their eviction case. This brought me up short.

Eviction seemed too far, too fast, but I agreed anyway. This most definitely happened because my brain processing is slow (or, as many autistics say, it’s complex, and complexity takes time), and during the lag, I often get pushed along by a tide of social expectation.

Of course, a person can always change her mind about something as weighty as testifying against her neighbors, but the entire discussion got cut short when our HVAC motor died exactly one day after it was cleaned. The HVAC guy warned us this could happen. Apparently, if an HVAC motor has been fighting grime and dust resistance for years and then suddenly has none, it can break.

When the property manager said, “The landlord wants you to know that they are behind on you on this, and they will do whatever it takes to stop the smoke from coming into your unit,” I almost started sobbing on the phone. I knew exactly how that broken HVAC motor felt.

I’m sure our neighbors never expected to leave their home under these circumstances. I can only imagine the amount of anxiety and confusion they must be feeling right now, but I also don’t have any control over how my landlord chooses to solve the problem. Neither the neighbors nor the landlord were interested in any sort of compromise. They both wanted things 100% their own way, and you know how that’s going to shake out in the end. I could not back down because I just don’t have it in me to absorb the cost of someone else’s poor choices anymore.

I think my willingness to testify against the neighbors would be perfectly valid if it were merely about my own well-being, but I see it as more than that: autistic women are almost never given the chance to advocate for our own sensory needs. I know how rare these opportunities are, so when they come, they must be taken, even if it only moves the needle a tiny bit (or not at all) for all of us.

A Swedish study of 27,000 autistic adults found that autistic women are more than 13 times more likely to die by suicide than neurotypical women and twice as likely to die by suicide than autistic men.[1]

I’m pretty sure I know why. We often feel backed into a corner by a world determined to convince us that it’s wrong for us to advocate for ourselves. Our needs are routinely dismissed as drama or a bad attitude. Intense levels of flexibility are demanded of us over and over again until we eventually break, and the conclusion we reach is a logical one: If no one is willing to make room for us, then there is no room for us.

In the end, I didn’t have to testify. The neighbors never responded to the eviction notice, so the landlords were granted a default judgment. I’ve seen no signs of them moving yet, and marijuana smoke still occasionally drifts in. I hope, for my sake and theirs, that they don’t wait to be locked out before taking it seriously.

We’re still trying to figure out what’s going on with my extreme sensitivity. I’ve also always been very sensitive to tobacco smoke, but not on this level. The tobacco smoke in Japan didn’t make me sick, and I suspect it has something to do with what is allowed to be in tobacco products in Japan. Am I only allergic to particular strains popular in California? Do I have a treatable condition? The answers might be that it’s all strains and there’s no treatment. So, even though my need to move houses isn’t quite as urgent as before, I will eventually need to leave California. The trick is figuring out where I can go.

If you believe this is an issue that deserves attention, please share this post, mention it to someone, or find a way to appropriately bring it up when it seems relevant. Smoking is not just about the smoker, but it’s also about every person within range of the smoke.

[1] Tatja Hirvikoski et al., “Premature Mortality in Autism Spectrum Disorder,” British Journal of Psychiatry, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.bp.114.16019

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I was on, my friend, Wake’s podcast, Curious & Kind Conversations. Wake is doing a series of 42 episodes (their favorite number) before the opening of their shop, Curious and Kind. You can find Wake’s Substack here.

I was on episode 19, and if you want to hear a couple of autistic people talking about stuff, you’re un luck! Here’s a link to my episode.

It’s embedded here:

Originally posted on amyyuki.com

Another covid-test: Negative. I must just have a bad cold, but how? I’ve barely left my house in weeks, and when I have, I haven’t had any meaningful contact with anyone.

I’m so itchy at night, I can’t sleep. I try to ignore it, but then the itching turns into needle-like stabbing pains. The internet says it could be dry skin, so I drink lots of water and moisturize every day. It could be hives, so I shower with cold water and take anti-histamines. I itch all over in random places and one non-random place: the outer edge of my nostrils itch every night just before I fall asleep.

Even if I manage a good night of sleep, I wake up with the kind of cottony foggy-headedness most people treat with caffeine, but I don’t. It makes my heart race, and it doesn’t help me think any clearer. I’ll still make the same mistakes. I’ll just make them faster.

Plus, I can’t risk getting into another bad cycle of insomnia. I already feel like I’m running underwater with 20 pound weights strapped to all my limbs. I’m Sisyphus, but my boulder has quadrupled in size, flattened me, and rolled off into the distance. How will I ever get it back? How will I start again? Why is everyone else so happy with their boulder?

The symptoms disappear. They don’t taper off like a cold. They just evaporate, as if they were never there. I could see another doctor, but they always say the same thing: “There doesn’t seem to anything physically wrong with you.”

In a few days, I could be hiking or lifting weights. I could be writing or coding. I’ll be low energy, but I won’t be sick. I’ll remember having been sick, though, and worried about what that means for my life. I have to be so careful with commitments.

What would I ask a doctor now, anyway? “Can you do a post-mortem on my mysterious illness that’s now gone?” That’s humiliating. I can’t take another patronizing response where I’m left wondering if I somehow exaggerated it in my mind or even made it all up. The space it occupies in my memory is a shadowy dark square. I can’t make out the details.

At the grocery store, the cashier asks if that’s a rutabaga I just put on the conveyor belt, and I answer so oddly and nervously that it sounds like it’s actually a rutabaga-disguised bomb. I walk out reprimanding myself. “I should’ve anticipated that question and rehearsed a smooth response in my head.” That’s part of my Sisyphean boulder: anticipating and rehearsing, so I seem like a normal human to all the other normal humans. I didn’t do it. That’s something I used to do so easily and automatically. Not doing it feels a little like I forgot to put on pants before I left the house. My cognitive abilities, which used to be so reliably powerful are now weak and overwhelmed. That’s a warning. The illness is nearby—just outside of my peripheral vision.

This is how I’ve spent a lot of the past year and a half, but especially this past spring and summer: hovering on the edge of autistic burnout. Sometimes, I’m just outside of it. Other times, I’m right in it, but in varying degrees.

Autistic burnout is caused and relieved by the same circumstances that cause and relieve regular burnout. However, autistics experience it differently. We’re more likely to get physically ill, and we lose the ability to do the same cognitive tasks we could before. I’ve read that, sometimes, that skill loss is permanent.

And, autistics, especially high-masking autistics, are much more susceptible to burnout than the general population.

I’m a high-masking autistic, which is what most neurotypical people would call “not autistic.” Why? For many decades, autism was seen through a purely behavioral lens. As long as a person wasn’t “acting autistic” then they weren’t autistic. It’s only after a lot of online autistic self-advocacy has the medical community made a small, very begrudging, concession that maybe not “acting autistic” doesn’t mean we aren’t experiencing autism, especially adults. Some of us are just capable of hiding it. We learned to stop being ourselves after we got rejected enough times for being ourselves. I started hiding it so long ago that I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t trying to hide it.

High-masking autistics are more prone to burnout because we know we’re capable of blending in, everyone around us knows we’re capable of blending in, and there’s little sympathy for the person who appears to be able to conform but refuses. So, a big chunk of my cognitive power has always gone towards hiding my autistic traits and creating the illusion that I have neurotypical ones.

I have sensory processing differences. Many sensory experiences that are either innocuous or merely annoying to most people are intolerable to me. Some of my responses are measurable, like fever or flu-like symptoms, some of them less so, like headaches and nausea. Smells, especially secondhand smoke and vape, give me instant headaches and nausea. If it’s marijuana, on top of the headaches and nausea, I also get dizziness, depression, and insomnia. Even when I’m perfectly healthy, a tiny whiff of weed can leave me dysfunctional for days. I live in constant fear of encountering it alone outdoors and not being able to get home.

My body responds to sharp sounds and surprises like it’s perpetually stuck on a haunted tour. My nervous system doesn’t regulate as quickly or easily as that of a non-autistic. A stressful sound can stay with me for the rest of the day, so another stressful sound hours later is not a separate incident. They compound.

I even struggle in places that are intended to be neutral, like offices. I can’t tolerate fluorescent lights, artificial fragrances, or persistent noise. I’m aware of every person there. I hear their whispered conversations. I listen to their phone calls. I put details together to form explanations for what’s happening and why. Understanding the “why” of things is one of my coping mechanisms.

My sensory experiences are an all-the-time thing, but when I’m in burnout, it’s like someone has turned up the volume all the way up. The smallest sensation feels like a bomb has gone off.

In any social situation, ten high priority things are always happening at once. The person looking me straight in the face and talking right to me doesn’t automatically become my focus. It takes extra brain power to give their words the appropriate amount of attention, while also remembering to look at them in an un-creepy way without getting distracted by their eyebrows, hairstyle, clothes, make-up, or blink rate, and not doing anything too bizarre myself. I’m still listening to all of the other conversations taking place within earshot.

I need extra processing time to communicate in an honest and meaningful way. Otherwise, I’m stuck with preset phrases that I’ve learned from listening to other people’s conversations or responses that I’ve pre-planned and memorized. First of all, these things run out pretty fast. Secondly, they’re really superficial and boring. (Maybe this is why autistics stereotypically hate small talk. I’m lucky, one of my special interests is the weather.)

If I’m going to have a real conversation, I need to do a lot of pausing and staring off into space in a quiet, comfortable place. If I don’t feel comfortable, I get really self-conscious, like there’s a giant ticking clock above my head, and that deletes everything that was in my brain. Most of the time, it doesn’t matter. The conversation usually moves on without me, even when I’m only talking to one other person.

Phone calls are stressful. Auditory language very easily devolves into abstract noise to my ears and digitized sound is already slightly distorted. If I add that to the expectation to respond immediately, a simple call suddenly becomes a high pressure situation, especially if there’s background noise or anything else going on. Most autistics struggle with the phone, but, ironically, we’re required to make calls to access disability/health services. For some reason, I always find it easier when I can see the speaker. I’ve physically travelled to places to talk to people to avoid a phone call.

I got a second autism assessment, recently, to satisfy bureaucracy, not because there was anything wrong with my previous diagnosis. I already knew something was off when the doctor (and yes, he was a psychiatric doctor) kept referring to me as “someone with Asperger’s.” (Aspergers was removed from the DSM in 2013.) He told me that my only problem is that I’m smarter than everyone else, and therefore, I’m bored and annoyed by most people, and this is the cause of all my social issues.

Let me assure you: This is NOT what’s going on in my head. Also, it’s pretty insulting to everyone I know that he thinks I went this long without seeking out other smart people. I’ll summarize his advice like this: You’re smart enough to game the system, so game it. My problem: I tried that, and it didn’t work.

He suggested that I start by reading How to Win Friends and Influence People. I read parts of that book when I was 18, after my boss told me he’d fire me if I didn’t implement it’s suggestions. I never got past the first chapter. I saved my job by smiling more and pretending to be happy when people interrupted me.

A few weeks ago, I was at the dentist. She needed to take an impression of my teeth and put a metal tray in my mouth. She told me to bite down, and when I did, the ill-fitting tray cut into my gums. I couldn’t bite down fully, but she told me to keep trying. I didn’t feel like I could stop and tell her the problem, so I bit down harder and left a big gash in my mouth.

I sat there for five minutes with my mouth filling with blood wondering how I keep ending up in these kinds of situations. I don’t have an intuitive sense of when it’s ok to draw a boundary or complain. Because I process so slowly, by the time I figure it out, it’s too late to do anything about it.

None of this leads to boredom or annoyance with others. It leads to shame and hypervigilance. When I have a social issue, I don’t automatically assume the other person is the problem. Conflict, or even just the smallest hint that I might be in conflict, completely emotionally dysregulates me. So, I’ve learned to watch and wait and hold my breath. I stay on my toes, like a goalie in a soccer match, always ready to make a big catch, or when I think I can, do something risky and impose myself on the game. I almost never do.

Even after a succession of successful social events, I do a lot of combing through past events and fearing/preparing for future ones. Growing up, I’d been blindsided too many times and ostracized too often for me to not feel like a major misstep is always possible. If I have to choose between potentially getting a social situation wrong and not socializing at all, I often choose not at all.

Even when I get everything technically correct, I struggle to feel connected to others because my successful interactions were the result of calculation, not relaxing into myself. Without joy and connection to counterbalance the stress, burnout gets closer.

Despite years believing that I’d one day control them, I have meltdowns, panic attacks, and shutdowns, and the other various other categories of “a person has reached her breaking point.” The stress of my sensory issues plus other distresses, like grief, conflict, or undesirable changes convert into an energy inside of my body. At some point, that energy needs to come out. It can come out in a small steady stream, like fidgeting, or in big controlled ways, like intense exercise.

The stress of conversation means I prefer to talk while hiking or walking, but unfortunately, my intense need for motion often means I’m too far ahead to have a conversation, anyway. I don’t feel safe letting this energy out in socially unacceptable ways, so I keep every aspect of myself as locked down as possible when I’m around others.

Keeping this energy in is sort of like holding in a really big sneeze, except the sensation never goes away. If I don’t find ways to get it out, I will reach my breaking point, and then some serious shit is about to go down.

It’s better for everyone if I just get enough time alone, but even that’s no guarantee. If a single event is distressful enough, it can throw me straight into meltdown. A bad meltdown usually means I won’t get any sleep, and burnout loves an insomniac.

I need a lot of flexibility in my schedule (like, almost an infinite amount). Monotropism (one theory of autism) is the need to focus on one thing at a time. If I’m working on a project, that project is all I want to do until it’s done (or I reach burnout, whichever comes first). I’ll sleep little because I keep thinking and rethinking the same project-related thoughts over and over again until I can actually do something with them (write them down or implement them). This can last for hours or days. All interruptions, even necessary ones, wear on my nervous system. An ill-timed interruption can trigger a meltdown.

I need a lot of recovery time after I do just about anything, but feeling guilty about my scheduling needs causes me to be very sparing about how much rest I allow myself, even if I’ve accomplished more than a neurotypical would’ve if we added all our work and rest times together.

Masking means pretending none of the above is happening, ever, and that I’m engaging with the world in the exact same way as everyone else.

I can manage these things with enough energy and concentration. I can tamp down the anxiety that naturally comes with having been caught too often with the wrong response or no response at all. I’ve taught myself hold still after being asked WTF I’m doing with my hands enough times. I can do it, but wears me down.

I went through a period of years, when I was younger and hardier, where I masked successfully without too much trouble or I thought that’s what was happening. I didn’t think about how I had pretty painful TMJ and bruxism or how I often over-exercised to complete exhaustion, got very little sleep, and still had the energy to be anxious all day. I regularly went several days in total isolation (weeks, if I got the time off work) and looked forward to those times. All of my closest friends were online.

Because I didn’t know I was autistic, I’d adopted the view that my needs weren’t really needs, and I spent my highest masked years self-administering a form of autism conversion therapy. I was clinging to hope that I was “normal,” just not well-trained. And yes, I habitually distinguished myself from “normal” people before I knew I was autistic. I knew I was different. I just didn’t know how or why. The higher masking I got, the more often I used affirmations that contained the words “normal” and “fine.” Like, “I’m a totally normal person,” and, “I’m doing fine.”

I thought everyone had to “game the system,” and I spent an inordinate amount of time keeping track of how well I met the culturally accepted view of success and being weirded out when other people didn’t follow the rules.

I thought that the culturally accepted view of success of a person determined how they were liked, or maybe even how much a person deserved to be liked, like a stacked bar chart, the higher it went, the more people liked you. The only positive was that I thought it was working. My “culturally accepted view of success” stacked bar chart was really high.

I just wanted to belong, and it seemed to be working. Well, it was working until I burned out and couldn’t do it, anymore. I often blame myself for allowing the burnout to happen. Maybe it would’ve worked if I hadn’t felt like I needed to not just game the system, but to master it. Maybe it would’ve worked if I’d somehow held my boundaries better. Maybe I’d have made different decisions if I’d known what a delicate house of cards I was in.

I usually dismiss the explanation I consistently find online: every high-masking autistic burns out eventually. I found it impossible to hold my boundaries when neurotypical society demanded I didn’t. The world is designed by a majority class, and I’m not part of that class. Self-blame and too much responsibility is a big part of high-masking autism. We take on the job of smoothing out all of the rough edges between us and the rest of the world.

My first really big burnout started in late 2008. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but I crawled along with it until 2012, when I finally made lifestyle changes that would actually allow me to heal. Unfortunately, that meant quitting my job. I had another big burnout starting in 2016 and ended up quitting my job, again, a year and a half later.

I typically try to ignore my burnouts as long as humanly possible, so when it finally takes hold, I can’t get out of it. The really bad flu-like parts usually only last a few days because it forces me to rest, but in 2008, when I didn’t know what was wrong with me, I was getting sick like that once every couple of weeks.

There are no drugs and/or treatments for it. The only effective change is a lifestyle change, and like most people, I can’t control every aspect of my lifestyle because the business of survival often gets in the way. Which means, for those of us who need a particular lifestyle to be healthy, it’s really more of a social issue.

I’m aware that this is long and contains a lot of painful details, but there’s no really no other way to explain what’s been going on with me. I want other autistics to know they aren’t alone and unseen. I want non-autistics to see and understand.

I don’t think autistics experience anything that others wouldn’t experience when put under enough pressure for enough time. I think autistics live life closer to the bone, so we need to make a lot more room for both our humanness and humanity.

Given this, you might have the impression that I hate being autistic, but I don’t. Hating autism would be akin to hating myself, and, while I think that it’s normal for people (especially late-diagnosed autistics) to have self-worth issues, that’s not the same as hating ones own thoughts and perspectives. I think, as a species, we have a biological imperative to love our own thoughts and perspectives. It’s about staying alive.

My extra sensitivity means that I often appreciate things that many other people barely even notice. My cataloging of details means that I see patterns other people don’t. My extra focus means I’m never bored. There are times when I find just breathing, and doing nothing else, fun. When there are no obstacles to me just being, I get so much pleasure out of just being alive. Because, when I notice everything, I see that it’s all pretty amazing.

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Want to understand a little more about masking? Here’s a youtube short (about 1 min).

Want to laugh? Here’s an autistic comedian doing a set (about 6 min).

Want to be part of the solution? Here’s a video explaining why many autistics distrust autism research and how the current narrative around autism hurts us (about 16 min).

Originally posted on amyyuki.com

Then, Dylan died in December, and right before it happened, I had the thought or the feeling that I’d survive his death. It was one of those situations where I didn’t know it was coming, but I also knew it was coming. He’d had chronic illnesses for years, and losing him had always been an unthinkable prospect for me, but, one day, when nothing particularly scary or bad was happening, it became thinkable. I thought he had at least a few more months ahead of him, but it suddenly occurred to me that when the time came, I’d manage it. A week later he was gone (after about two hours of warning).

That happened with leaving Japan, too. For years, it’d felt unthinkable to move for various reasons. One reason was that I was afraid of how the move would impact Dylan’s health. Then, one day, my mind shifted, and I started to accept the potential risks of moving, and, within two weeks, the opportunity to move came.

I’ve had a lot of similar experiences throughout my life, and I’ve taken it to mean that the universe follows some sort of order. I’m not going to pretend to know what that order is or that it’s even a fair one, but I’ve always found the idea of order alone to be a little reassuring. It suggests that things happen for a reason. A random universe is completely out of control. It’s senseless.

Lately, though, I’ve been craving a random universe. In the past year and half, my husband and I have had “a lot of bad luck.” Well, that’s his summary, anyway. Mine isn’t so simple.

I went for a hike the other day and saw a snake stretched out across the trail. I stopped. I was afraid to move. I was not afraid of the snake. I was afraid for him. He seemed so vulnerable there with that long thin body and all that exposed skin on a trail with mountain bikers on it. I thought about using a stick to scare him back into the brush, but there were no sticks around, and I’m always afraid that interfering with a wild animal will cause more harm than good, so I moved on.

I felt so much like that snake; in dire need of some tall bushes. The months leading up to Dylan’s death were so harrowing that there was no way for me to adequately communicate how much distress I was in, and I haven’t been able to adequately express how I’ve been since his death, either. Even before this past year and a half, I could’ve pointed to a lot of extremely hard times in my life.

In other words, fate has not been my friend, and I actually grew to expect to be in crisis mode for the rest of my life because of one unforeseeable bad event after another. I stopped worrying about bad luck and started worrying about bad design.

I could’ve shifted my perspective in a reasonable way, like recounting all the ways I’ve been extraordinarily lucky, but instead, I’ve been obsessing over the question of whether the universe is ordered in a way that I just don’t understand or if it’s truly random.

(When I say “ordered,” I don’t mean in the Newtonian sense that the physical world follows particular system of rules. We know that. I mean it colloquially. Do things happen for a reason? If so, what is it?)

I’ve been circling around this question like a spider around a drain for the past couple of months. I use that clunky metaphor because that’s what it feels like: I was minding my own business in my web, completely unaware that I’d built my home in the corner of someone’s shower, and then WHAM! (HOT WATER EVERY WHERE! AAAAH!)

I believe it’s both random and ordered. I’ll just say that now to get it out of the way. I won’t go into depth because it’s all very abstract and unformed, and you’re just trying to read your email and have a cup of coffee or whatever.

I’ve been wanting to write about this for weeks, but I didn’t feel like I could until universe and I had come to some sort of understanding. Maybe it’s the way my mind works—I can’t make sense of the middle until I know the end. Maybe it’s simpler than that—I couldn’t think of anything new to say. It’s not exactly breaking news that the world is an unpredictable place.

None of that matters, though. It’s not actually my job to understand the nature of the universe, nor would understanding it give me any greater control over what happens next. All the universe has ever asked of me was one thing: live here.

It never said I had to understand it, be happy with it, or comfortable in it. It never told me I had to be productive or significant. I got those expectations from other people. The universe just gave me a body and said, “Life is through there. Have at it.” It made no promises about what I might encounter out here.

I don’t know if my tarot cards foretold a new karmic cycle or not. If I actually sat down and counted all the bad things that have happened to me in recent years, I have a feeling it’d look suspiciously normal, especially for someone who just moved halfway around the world.

The major lesson I took from that reading is that human beings are cyclical. We constantly churn through layers and layers of cycles. Something is always beginning. Something is always ending. Something is always in the thick of it.

Sometimes, I feel like a spider circling a drain or an oblivious snake on a trail. I’m really sensitive. Life gets really uncomfortable for me, sometimes, but that’s ok. Sometimes, it goes pretty well, too. The wheel keeps turning. The cycles keep happening.

As I move through it, I try to keep in mind what the Buddha said about suffering and impermanence and what the great sage, Ferris Bueller, once said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it.”

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Marginally related links:

Dan Levy on Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso. I’ve admired his writing ever since Schitt’s Creek, and his movie Good Grief was one of the best written movies I’ve seen in a long time. He talks about all sorts of things, but there’s a lot about his process and dealing with his feelings of insecurity as an artist.

Here’s an episode of Cracked about why Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was actually terrifying.

You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)

Originally posted on amyyuki.com

I have some content for you. It doesn’t come in the form you’d usually expect in a newsletter, but I think you’ll like it. Well, some people have said they like it.

I was a guest on the Write, Publish, and Shine podcast talking about the challenges of being an autistic writer.

I was extremely tired and drained during the recording because, the night before, I had a meltdown and got very little sleep. It was brought on by the fear of having meltdown and not getting any sleep before going on a podcast. I’d already rescheduled twice. I wasn’t going to reschedule, again.

I just feel like I need to be upfront about that because it’s also part of being autistic, which may or may not be clear in the podcast. Well, it’s a part of me being autistic. I can’t speak for everyone.

If you want to search for it in your podcast player, the name of the episode is:

#93 Amy Vickers, An Autistic Writer on Beautiful Flaws.

Also, here’s a link to it on the web.

I usually end with a “Thanks for reading” graphic, but there isn’t much to read here. I would put in a “Thanks for listening” graphic, but I don’t have one. I hope you enjoy listening to it. If you do, please feel free to come back and let me know.

Amy

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Originally posted on amyyuki.com

He was good all week until Thursday. Adam left to spend the night in LA because of work. Dylan was perfect all day. Then, at around 11:30 or 12 at night, he started whining. He whines a lot, and it’s hard to tell what it means. I thought he was upset about Adam being gone.

Around 2AM, I gave him extra gabapentin, and he stopped until 6AM. When he started again, I kicked him out of my room. I still remember how he looked when I pushed him out the door and shut it on him. He had to scrunch up his body to accommodate me shutting the door.

He got the message, though, and I slept longer. When I got up, he was still upset. I gave him another extra gabapentin with his regular morning dose. That helped. By the time Adam got home Friday afternoon, he was sleeping soundly and seemed good.

He had a poor appetite, though. That was the thing. He seemed good otherwise, but his poor appetite continued through the weekend. We packed his extra foods and medicines into a cupboard to make room for the Christmas tree.

He stood there amongst the boxes watching us do it. Was he worried we were moving, again? In the past year, we’d moved from Tokyo to Lake Balboa to Mar Vista to Orange County. Every move put him off balance.

Was he thinking, “I can’t take another change”? Or, “I’d rather die than move again”?

Tuesday evening, the vet said to bring him in. His regular doctor was busy, but they could take him through emergency, so on Wednesday, I took him.

I didn’t think it’d be anything. I thought it was all just a precaution. A full blood panel, an ultrasound, an echocardiogram. Sure, it’ll be expensive, but sure. The more we know about Dylan’s body, the better.

“It’ll take awhile, so you may as well go home.”

Shortly after I got home, the ER doctor called. The blood test results were already back. Dylan was in acute kidney failure.

“He needs a hospital stay, and he’ll be better. We just need to make sure his heart can handle the extra fluids. They’ll throw off his electrolyte balance.”

The echocardiogram results came in. “He has heart disease, but he’s cleared to take the fluids.”

The ultrasound results come in, too. “He has a kidney stone, but it’s in his good kidney.”

We saw on a ultrasound about five months ago that one of his kidney’s was small and shriveled, but he still had one good kidney. The stone was in his good kidney. The only way out is surgery, plus multiple blood transfusions and a feeding tube. We could try to flush it with fluids, but it’d be a long and painful process, also including blood transfusions and a feeding tube, and not likely to work.

Every option is dangerous for an underweight 17-year-old cat with pancreatitis, GI disease, diabetes, anemia, epilepsy, heart disease, and no working kidneys. He could die on the operating table. He could die in the hospital.

My biggest fear has always been waiting too long. I didn’t want to make him go through what Basil went through; weakness, pain, complete dependence. I’d been afraid of feeling guilty for robbing Basil of whatever life he had left, but then ended up feeling guilty for putting him through avoidable suffering.

So, we made that decision. They call it a decision, but it’s not really. When you’re in that situation, it’s not really a decision. It’s just room to feel guilty and second guess yourself.

In the end, he was on opiates to help with the kidney pain. In the end, he died so peacefully. He seemed to know. He seemed to expect it.

The whole time, I was experiencing a gap between what my mind told me I should be doing and what my body told me I should be doing.

It was like the time I went skydiving. I knew I was going to jump out of the airplane and that it was pretty safe. I’d paid money, took a six hour lesson, and was committed to jumping, so I was going to jump, but I looked out at the empty sky and I experienced a full bodied “NO,” like I’d never experienced before.

Every part of my insides told me to turn around and not get out of that airplane, but it was a three second thing because I got out of the airplane, and it was transcendent.

This time, I was stuck in that place where my brain kept saying, “this is what you’re doing,” and my body kept saying, “NO,” for much longer.

It took hours. We decided to end his life, and then drove to the vet hospital, and then said goodbye, and then did it, and then drove home.

On the drive home, I got the kind of headache and nausea I don’t remember having, ever, at least not simultaneously. Probably because the human body isn’t meant to maintain that level of dissonance for so long.

I’d eaten very little all day, so I was dizzy, too. I was in some sort of altered state. I got really scared that the altered state wouldn’t ever go away, and that life without Dylan was even more hellish than I’d ever imagined it would be.

I woke up a few times that night because I heard him meow. Just as I lifted my head, I remembered, and I was overcome with a feeling of peace, almost like it was being injected into me. He was finally safe and pain free.

Communications from the other side sometimes come to me that way—auditory; words, meows. It’s not in my head. I can tell the difference. A communication is just like I’m actually hearing something audible; not like I’m creating it.

(Much of my graduate school work was the study of mystical experiences. It was important to me to get answers back then. In the end, I concluded that it was real.)

He was telling me that he was ok. He was on the other side and happy. The other cats; Milo, Zophia, and Basil had welcomed him, and he was relieved to see them again.

He’d always been the social cat. He’d wanted get everyone to get along despite all their tension over hierarchy. He was always the first to initiate play or sleeping butt-to-butt. Losing them had been hard on him.

I felt a little bit better on Thursday because I was sure he’d told me he was ok the night before.

Thursday night, I got another auditory communication. I heard a song. It was just a few seconds, like on Name that Tune.

It took me awhile to figure out it was Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke. What a bizarre thing. What could possibly be in that song that he wanted me to know?

I went online and played it. A memory of the two of us dancing together. Well, I would dance, and he would “dance” by hopping around the room jumping on things and pretend-attacking my legs with fake bites. We’d get so happy dancing together.

He loved anything bouncy with higher pitched sounds, which is that song, exactly.

This past year, I couldn’t play music for him, anymore, because of his hearing loss. Instead of making him happy, it agitated him. Certain sounds triggered his epilepsy.

Friday night, I got another auditory message. It was another song, but I couldn’t figure it out. I stayed up until 2:30 in the morning searching the web, trying song recognition apps, and asking ChatGPT. I never figured it out.

I felt awful all day Saturday, because I’d failed him all over again, because, let’s face it. In the end, I still made that decision, and there’s always a chance it was the wrong decision. I probably failed him a bunch of other times throughout his life, too, without realizing it.

Thoughts like these are white hot flames in my brain. I don’t want to touch them, but I must. Otherwise, they’ll haunt me for the rest of my life.

As time goes on, I’m less pained by the fact of his death and more pained by the way time keeps moving forward. Every minute increases the distance between me and the last time I saw him. I’m exhausted from missing him. I wake up every morning to find part of my heart is missing.

I studied and practiced Buddhism for years, and I’ve learned that when we surrender to pain, we get on a path towards an open heart, and sometimes, I think there might be a slight shadow—a faint glimmer—as my heart prepares to take a new shape.

I’m grateful for the privilege of having served him. I’m grateful on a practical level (I had the means and opportunity), and I’m grateful on a metaphysical level; I got to love in this way. If I could have another 17 years exactly like the ones I had with him, I would.

Gratitude is a powerful tool, but it doesn’t alleviate grief. I don’t want my grief to be alleviated, anyway. He merits the grief. If it were up to me, he’d have his own holiday.

On it, we’d honor all of the loving animals that have passed.

Some people bond with a pet in a way that expands beyond human bonds. It stretches to before birth and after death. We recognize them, and they recognize us as soon as we meet. It’s an instant, ever lasting, true love.

I know it sounds impossible. We’re not even the same species, but it is. It just is. It’s hard to understand unless you’ve experienced it yourself. I know, because I didn’t know before, and it was hard for me to understand then, but now I do.

Note: This post is dedicated to all those people who’ve been devasted by the loss of a pet and didn’t know what to say or how to say it.

Another Note: It’s so hard to post this because putting it out in the world is acknowledging that this is really real.

Originally posted on amyyuki.com

I lived in an off-campus dorm at a university in Minnesota. Our dorm computers didn’t have browsers, nor OS’s to install them on (it was 1994), so I wrote it down and took the shuttle to main campus. The sun was on its way down. The air was so cold it stung. The snowbanks on the sidewalks were taller than me.

I don’t remember what that first website was about, but as soon as I learned about a thing called a “homepage,” I wanted one. I loved the idea of people finding a little piece of me in my absence. It’d be like leaving a note in the woods or a message in a bottle.

One of my favorites was made by a brother and sister. It had step-by-step instructions on how to use Manic Panic hair dye, and I couldn’t get enough of it.

I convinced a friend to give me a little corner on his webserver, and I copied code, asked questions, and trialed and errored.

My first background image was a scan of a very dense drawing I’d made with a blue ball point pen and a pink highlighter. It took ages to load over 14.4 kbps, and people couldn’t read the bright yellow text until the dark background appeared. Every time someone complained about it, I sprawled in my chair and cackled.

I added a journal-like section. It existed before the term “blog” existed, so I called it an online journal. I mostly wrote about the granular details of my life. I never said anything consequential, but I thought it was possible for someone to read the details and follow them like breadcrumbs to the real me.

Every time I updated, I deleted the previous entry because it never occurred to me to leave stuff up indefinitely. I didn’t want to take up too much space (on the server, on the internet, in the world). Besides, my old entry didn’t accurately represent me, anymore. I’d moved on, and I figured the internet should, too.

After college, I worked as an HTML programmer for a dot-com for about a year. I stopped when the first internet bubble burst around 2001-ish.

I saw myself as too outside of the box to be a post dot-com programmer. I was a young woman. I’d studied art in college. I wasn’t good at math. I relied heavily on signals from other people, and I wasn’t getting any that told me to continue.

So, I did other things, but I always felt the need to keep a website of some kind, often several, even if that meant I’d neglect them for long periods of time. Some of my websites were obscure art projects, some were dedicated to pets (each pet with a separate website), some were galleries for my art or vacation photos, and some were for book reviews.

Web design was a natural extension of my art, but free of the unpredictability of the physical world. For better or worse, code always does what you tell it to do. It’s one of the few places where I can efficiently scratch my itch for accuracy.

That doesn’t mean I always get it right. I get stuck a lot, but I find my way out a lot, too.

Special interests wax and wane (well, mine do, anyway), and they all have their own rhythm. With web development, I can ignore it for months, or even years, and then, there’s some kind of trigger. Someone I know needs a website or I want to redesign my own.

Then, I’ll realize that I haven’t left my keyboard for six hours. Eating is an annoying waste of time. Showers only exist to give me time to think over my next coding issue. Sleep only happens when the website is presentable—no pixels out of place.

I’m not in a normal state of operation. I don’t exist, anymore. The website is the universe, and I’m it’s gardener.

In general, that’s true of all my special interests. They offer me transcendence from the pains associated with being human. They’re lucid dreams with real world outcomes, but they can’t last forever.

Eventually, I get used up. Loss of skill is a symptom of autistic burnout, and I don’t just lose my complex skills. I experience a system-wide shutdown. The only things running are the emergency lights and life-support.

I usually see it coming, but I like to keep the pedal to the floor until the tank empties. In some ways, it’s kind of cathartic.

Under most circumstances, I resent myself for being autistic, but sometimes, I look at my pages of code, my piles of notebooks (filled with writing), or at the stacks of my art and think, “Maybe being me is worth the trouble.”

I think that because I believe the things I make have value.

Moreover, their existence is proof that I got to make them. Like many autistics, I fall into emotional dysregulation easily. In dysregulation, there’s no coding, no writing, no art, and no other special interests.

I grieve the loss when I’m in these fallow times, and the evidence of my productivity reminds me that productive times will probably come around again. I just need a certain amount of care and stability to heal.

Anyway, this is why I haven’t posted here in a while. I’ve redesigned my website, and then I had to recover from redesigning my website.

I’ve also been writing and revising a lot and submitting to places that keep turning me down.

So, here I am, feeling a little ashamed at how badly I’ve treated my newsletter but still doing my best.

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A friend of mine wrote a book called The Butterfly Cafe. It came out a few months ago, and I can’t describe it any better than I did in my review:

This is a beloved comfort read that I'll return to over and over again.

Listen, I know the author. I provided feedback on the earliest scenes and her first completed draft. I'm NAMED in the acknowledgments. I have every reason to tell you I love this book, but that's not why I'm telling you I love this book.

I knew how it was going to end, and I still couldn't put it down. The main character is an actual real person. The narrative voice is straight forward and often really funny. The setting (which is Tokyo, Japan) is spot on, but it doesn't overwhelm the story. It's not a "foreigner in Japan" story. It's a story about a woman making her bones.

If you love contemporary women's fiction, you will not be disappointed.

So, go check it out.

Originally posted on amyyuki.com

It was so vegan unfriendly. A bunch of vegan restaurants went under during the pandemic, and the few other vegan offerings dwindled. In Tokyo, vegan businesses are heavily dependent on the massive tourist industry. The only surviving vegan-friendly restaurant near my old apartment was run by a religious cult. I wish I was joking about that.

I didn’t want to be an outsider, anymore. I was sick of all the awkward encounters because I can’t speak Japanese that well. I was tired of feeling so isolated and alone.

That’s the problem when you move to a new country. There’s always something that makes you feel like you don’t quite fit in. Of course, I haven’t felt like I fit in since… I’ve never felt like I fit in, anywhere.

Regardless of that, I aimed for “home.” When I’m in the US, I don’t know where my home is because I’ve lived in so many parts of it, but when I’m outside of the US, it’s pretty easy to figure out. I’m American.

Our flight from Tokyo to LA took only 8 hours.

I liked pretending the Airbnb was haunted. I’d had a bad feeling about it when we’d booked it, and that was how I explained how unsettling it felt to be there. There was some evidence, too. The thermostat kept malfunctioning. The air conditioner would drop down to 65F or the heat would crank up to 85F at random intervals. For about a week, one of the bathrooms smelled strongly of fresh paint, but the landlords insisted that no one in the building had painted recently.

It was on a high-traffic corner near the Van Nuys Airport. A jet flew over every five minutes. It had over-stuffed white leather furniture, a gold metal Art Deco coffee table, and floor to ceiling mirrors in every room.

I rolled with it. I thought it was worth the trouble. I wanted a new life. I’d spent most of my time in Japan working hard on my writing. I read countless books on craft, listened to thousands of hours of podcasts, and analyzed the voice and structure of every book that I thought was good, but I still couldn’t put the pieces together. I needed a new phase, and I was willing to accept any amount of risk and discomfort to enter that new phase.

Well, I was willing until my cat, Dylan—the most resilient person I know—meowed at me and then fell over. He seemed to lose control of his limbs for about ten seconds. He got right back up and went about his business, but everything had changed. None of this was worth it, anymore.

Life ends. For years, that was my last thought before I went to sleep and the first thought I had when I woke up every morning. If I continued that line of thinking, it’d go: I’m going to die. Everyone I know is going to die. In what order will we die? Can I go first? Do I want that?

While I was in Japan, I lost two cats and a parent.

With me and Dylan, I’m not sure who I’d rather go first. He was 16 years old when he fell over at the Airbnb, but before that, he tore around our old apartment like he was 6. At the vet for check-ups, other pet owners envied his health and vitality. They’d ask, “Are you sure he’s 16? What’s your secret? What does he eat? Have you found the pet-fountain of youth?”

I thought it was safe to move him across the ocean, but that changed on the day he fell over.

I didn’t know how my life would have any meaning after he died. I know that sounds like catastrophic thinking, but that’s the best explanation of how I felt at the time. It turns out there is one place where I feel like I fit in, and that’s with Dylan.

There were a bunch of vet appointments. He fell over two more times over a period of a couple of weeks. The various specialists found nothing. The falling over went away, but as soon as it’d happened, I knew where I was. I was in that space when a tornado hits, and everything has been set on a random trajectory. I was in chaos.

No one gets to opt out of the chaos of the universe. It comes for everyone at some point, but I still felt like it was my fault.

I’d wanted a new life and found that it might cost me his. I’d failed to predict this might happen and prevent it before it did. It’d happened two weeks after we’d moved, so I thought it had something to do with the Airbnb. I’d had that bad feeling about it that I hadn’t heeded, and I couldn’t stop chastising myself for that. I hadn’t been careful or clairvoyant enough. I’d opened the door to change and chaos had come in with it.

Months later, we learned that he has developed a type of epilepsy that is specific to aging cats of his breed (Birman). The falling over most likely never had anything to do with the Airbnb.

Since then, too much has happened with his health to unpack all my feelings in one newsletter, but that small thing changed everything.

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Honestly, the main thing I’ve been doing lately is binging Ugly Betty on Netflix. Does anyone else love that show? Why are there only four seasons?!

Originally posted on amyyuki.com

I’m learning about things like perspective, hindsight, mythology, memory, interpretation, and how we respond when we don’t understand something.

I was seven when he made his MTV debut. Soon after, half the kids at school had the red jacket he wore in his Thriller video, and I wanted to know why. I asked my dad how Michael Jackson got famous, and he told me that it was because he was in The Jackson 5. I asked him how The Jackson 5 got famous, and I don’t remember what he said, but I do remember walking away dissatisfied. Ever since then, learning the origins of The Jackson 5 has been an unmet desire of mine. Historical accounts never gave me enough intimacy with the story I craved, but I’m getting it from this podcast.

Of course, these days, I’m not only curious about Michael Jackson’s legacy, I’m also confused by it. I feel uncomfortable mentioning him, at all, but that’s less because of him and more because of me. When I don’t fully understand something, I’m sure I’m going to make some massive faux pas about it, so I usually default to saying nothing. I’m trying to get over that, though, so here we are.

On the podcast, I’m still learning about his early years. Even as a little kid, he was a mystery. No one could make sense of his mature and magnetic stage performances, nor could they make sense of how he rarely said a word off-stage, and when he did speak, it was usually too soft for anyone to hear. The most striking thing is that no one seemed to care, as long as they could cash in.

The numerous interpretations of how his difficult childhood shaped his bizarre adulthood are so varied that it makes me wonder if anyone knew him, at all.

I was also painfully as shy child and struggled to speak or connect with others, so I’d also like to believe I understand the depth of pain he was experiencing at the time, but, like everyone else, my theories are mostly projections formed from my own biases.

It’s made me wonder about how this happens in our own lives. We might interpret an event one way, and then years later, even months later, see it completely differently. Our family members take on their own mythology. We have our own origin stories.

I’m not saying that our stories aren’t built on real events. They are, but it’s interesting how many filters we have before we settle on something that feels true.

I’ve been confused about all of that. I was going to say, “I’ve been confused about all of that, lately,” but it’s not a late development. I think I’ve always been confused about these things.

I question myself a lot—my own interpretations, my own memory. I don’t have a very high opinion of my opinion. That’s why I write. It helps me to get things down to try to make sense of everything. I delete a lot of what I write, too, or just forget it and move on. Sometimes, the most honest thing I can offer is a blank space.

I wrote a memoir that had a lot in it about perspective, but it never went anywhere, and it never went anywhere because I didn’t feel like it was ready. I wasn’t confident in my writing.

I’m coming up on a year in California, but I feel like I’m finally just now completing my move because so much has happened.

If someone were to make a podcast about my life this past year, it’d go like this:

1.     Crazy Airbnb experience (but not nearly as crazy as it could’ve been).

2.     Mysterious cat illness.

3.     Crazy first apartment experience.

4.     Autism diagnosis.

5.     More cat illness.

6.     Moving from Los Angeles to Orange County because of number 3.

7.     Things in the new place not working right.

• Broken stove

• Broken air conditioner in July

8.     More cat stuff.

9.     Fear that more bad things are on the way.

I’m trying to make sense of some of these events now that they’re behind me (at least, I hope they’re behind me). It’s been a rough year, but not the worst year I’ve had. It sits among several years sprinkled throughout my life where my life was crap. I think it’s probably been the unluckiest year I’ve had.

I hope to write about this year in more detail, but like I said, sometime the most honest thing I can offer is a blank space. Wish me luck.

Links:

The podcast is called Think Twice, and I listened to it here.

Here’s an NPR article about the Michael Jackson Podcast, Think Twice.

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Originally posted on amyyuki.com

Based on my very limited research, one of the signs of autistic burnout is a complete intolerance for things you don’t like but can usually tolerate. Suddenly, those screaming kids or that car with the loud bass aren’t minor irritations. They feel like someone stabbing you in the brain. And so, for hours afterward you’re preoccupied with questions like, “How is it ok for people to go around stabbing other people in the brain?” And, “Why doesn’t anyone say anything about this?”

Another sign of autistic (or maybe regular) burnout is still wanting to do things but feeling like you can’t. When I heard this, I actually started to cry a little bit. For the first time, I felt a little like I wasn’t completely alone with this. If it’s is unfamiliar to you, I can only describe it as something like this: There’s a brick wall inside my rib cage. It’s not going anywhere, and because it’s inside me, I’m not going anywhere, either.

Lucky for me, or maybe unlucky for me, I have a lot of experience with fighting my way out of this state. The trouble is that it’s all paradoxes.

To calm down my anxiety, I must strive to accept of my anxiety, rather than strive for calm. Calm looks like an oasis on the fucking horizon, but I have to say, “Nope, that’s just a mirage. We have to keep walking the desert… forever.”

I have to accept the knots in my stomach aren’t going anywhere. I have to accept the painful electric current that hums through my nervous system. I have to accept that the massive brick wall in my ribcage is going to sit there, for now, and that when it comes out, it’ll going to tear itself out of my sternum, because that’s actually how it works. The details of this are deeply off-topic, so we’ll talk about it another time.

To move forward, I have to completely divest myself of all responsibility and desire to move forward. I have to actually stop wanting it. I must extinguish the constant thrum in my brain that tells me that I haven’t proven my worth yet, today. The sheer amount of labor this prove-your-worth voice asks me to do is unreasonable. If I do what it asks, I’ll feel like I’ve won the day, but I will absolutely be ready for a total meltdown by the end of it. When I get it to stop, it’s a lot like turning off a firehose that’s been aimed directly at my face. Recovery ensues.

I almost apologized for my burnout, but then I started wondering, why, even now, when we know so much about human limitations, do we still feel the need to apologize when we don’t act like machines? Where did we get the idea that we need to be like machines in the first place?

When we make something, why do we think we need to produce an exact replica of the one perfect thing we accidentally made that one time? If we were a genius once, we think that every other time when we’re not a genius, we’ve failed. It must mean we need recalibration. Stat.

Of course, pausing—stopping work—well, that’s an abomination.

Did machines teach us to expect this from ourselves or did we start asking more from ourselves because machines became more reliable?

Well, except for printers. A printer is the only machine that fails so regularly that we expect it to fail. It’s also a machine that acts as a liaison between the digital and physical worlds. Like printers, we also have to straddle both worlds, but we don’t give ourselves the same grace that we give printers. Or, maybe we don’t give printers much grace. I’ve thrown out many.

Maybe regular failure is just a consequence of straddling these two worlds, which, as humans with physical bodies, is something we’ll always have to do.

Consistent output is only possible in the digital realm because the digital world isn’t real. It’s just ones and zeros, and physical reality doesn’t interfere with its functioning. Well, rarely.

In the days of the early internet, I’d access it in a computer lab. It would fail regularly, then. When it did, we’d all look up from our terminals and spend a few minutes adjusting our eyes to looking at actual people. The physical world would slide back into place. Back then, there was still a sliver of daylight between us and the machines.

Before the average person needed to work like a machine (before the industrial revolution?), did people still suffer from burnout? Is this all tied to the belief that we have to align our own behavior with something inherently inhuman?

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Mom on the Spectrum made a video about how to differentiate between depression and autistic burnout. It was very timely and helpful to me.

Originally posted on amyyuki.com

I couldn’t be diagnosed when I was young because, back then, people had a very narrow view of what it meant to be autistic, and it didn’t include girls or the types of traits autistic girls usually manifest. On top of that, no one was paying any attention to me, even though I very clearly had something going on.

Ever since I realized I was probably autistic, I’ve been wrestling with this question: Do I tell people about it?

But, let’s face it. With me, the answer is always yes. You might call it inappropriate oversharing. I call it living authentically.

At first, I was really eager to announce it to the world. I finally had an explanation for my weirdness! People might finally forgive me for my past social faux pas!

I never really knew how to behave in social situations, so I copied other people. I didn’t know that it wasn’t normal to do that, but it’s why I went undiagnosed for so long.

With a lot of effort, I’m capable of passing as neurotypical. In fact, I was so capable, I’d fooled myself. I even modeled “normal” to myself when I was alone because I wanted so much to fit in.

After several years of trial and error, I mostly did ok. Sometimes, I copied the wrong person (like, they were an asshole or something), applied a copied phrase or behavior inappropriately, or let my autistic point of view out when it should’ve stayed in.

It’s just not possible to get everything right every time, and it was always devastating when I knew I’d messed up.

I also have sensory processing differences. Certain sounds, smells, bright lights, and textures trigger something in my brain that makes them completely unbearable.

(There are also certain sounds, smells, etc. that I find exceptionally pleasant and soothing, but I’m not complaining about those.)

Neurotypical people have preferences, but for me, this isn’t about preference, it’s about survival. It’s highly contextual, but there are times when I can’t function on a basic level because my environment is making me physically ill.

Eventually, I melt down, shut down, or have a panic attack. Usually, something small puts me over the edge because I was barely hanging on in the first place.

Most of the time, I merely function poorly, and then get burnt out and exhausted fast.

In favorable situations, I become hyper functional. I’m creative, skilled, and insightful. I have a Sherlock Holmsian awareness of my environment. Elegant solutions pile up around me and amaze neurotypicals.

So, that’s why I’m telling people. I need accommodation, consideration, and recognition that there’s a good side to all of this. People can’t extend any of that to me if they don’t know.

I’ve also considered not telling anyone, at all, because I’ve been afraid. There are a lot of negative stereotypes out there about people with autism.

To me, the worst one is that we lack theory of mind—the ability to imagine the thoughts and feelings of others. Nothing scares me more than the idea that other people might think I don’t have empathy or that I don’t think about what life is like in their shoes.

As a person who has been striving to be “normal” for several decades, all I do is imagine what life is like in other people’s heads. Well, not all. Sometimes, I do other things, but still, I spend a lot of time on it.

It’s become a habitual preoccupation of mine. That’s why I write fiction. I’ve got to do something with all these imaginings of what goes on inside other people’s heads.

The vast majority of the time, I don’t think people are being evil or selfish. Most of the time, I feel I understand how fear and desire (or craving and aversion) coalesce and result in whatever a person is doing at any given moment, and I sympathize with them.

I also empathize to a detrimental degree, but I believe that’s a separate issue. I feel other people’s feelings automatically and overwhelmingly, and from what I’ve heard in the autism community so far, it’s very common for autistic people to be more empathetic than neurotypicals, not less.

However, I can’t speak for every autistic person, nor do I want to. This has long been a problem for every person in a minority group who wants to speak about their own experience. How do you speak your own truth without your audience immediately thinking they can superimpose that truth upon every other person in your group? Maybe you can’t without always adding the disclaimer, “hey, we’re all individuals,” which should be obvious, but somehow, it isn’t.

I like the way Katherine May (an autistic writer) puts it in her book, The Electricity of Every Living Thing:

There is no single, defining version of autism, but instead an overlapping multiplicity of minds. The term ‘spectrum’ is a poor way of capturing the sheer diversity of our experience - it’s too linear, too fixed. When I imagine us, I think of a constellation instead, or perhaps a galaxy: millions of different stars shining, each expressing their fire in a different way. I am just one way of living that experience.

I don’t know how much I’m going to write about this going forward. I don’t plan on it, but at the same time, I’ll always be speaking from an autistic perspective.

I have sensory issues. My social instincts land far outside the norm of neurotypical standards. I won’t remember your name unless I see it written (or imagine it that way), and I’ll struggle to remember your face (I memorize physical features like a kid studies for a vocabulary test). For the love of god, if you’re going to change your hair, wear something I’ve seen you wearing before. I have no clue what your facial expression is telling me about your mood, but I feel your emotions (and sometimes physical pains) like they’re my own.

Those are just a few of my experiences. I could go through the DSM definition of autistic traits and tell you multiple stories about how each of them has shown up in my life, but I think that’s it for now.

Thank you for understanding.

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Here’s a clip of comedian Hannah Gadsby talking about one of the ways her autism manifests in a funny way.

Here’s another brilliant video by Khadija Mbowe, where she discusses how leftist spaces can improve their approach to challenging the right.

Originally posted on amyyuki.com

It made me feel a little envious because some of the people in that picture didn’t end up living long enough to see these times. I don’t mean that in a morbid way, but I imagine they got to live full and complete lives before the internet came along.

Before the internet, if you wanted to be exposed to interesting things like art, music, poetry, mind-expanding ideas, and exciting opportunities, you had to go to a city like New York. Once you got there, your survival depended on your ability to connect with the people there, and everyone was from a different walk of life. You had to see how they dressed, fed themselves, and made their money. It created the opportunity to acknowledge their humanness and accept how they chose to human.

Once the internet came along, it became possible to get stuff without interacting with anyone face-to-face. And now, we trade our art and ideas in a vacuum, where our thoughts are presented as separate from who we are.

Our lives don’t resemble the lives that came before ours. And, yeah, there are a lot of reasons that’s a good thing, but I think we can all acknowledge that it has also made life pretty chaotic, at least for the time being.

That’s not my point, though, my point: I take a lot of comfort in seeing my life echoed in the lives of other people, and the more the future marches on, the further away I feel from the humans who were human-ing before the internet.

I want to feel normal, but I mostly feel disconnected. For me, this isn’t an internet-specific condition. Back in the 1990s, just like in the 1970s, I had to go somewhere new to get my needs met. I went to those new places, and I met new people, but I was too shy to connect with the people in those new places. I didn’t start finding connection until I started going online, then I was online almost nonstop from 1994 onward. (“Shy” isn’t a strong enough word, but I won’t get into it now, just know I had serious trouble communicating face-to-face. Online communication wasn’t easy for me, it was just possible.)

So, maybe I’m not so envious of those who lived and died before the internet. I’m not sure what kind of life I’d have had without it. Maybe I would’ve eventually come out of my shell and learned to be a normal person by interacting with normal people, but I just don’t know.

I drove to the store today, and I made one of those left turns where you have to wait for the light to turn red because there’s no break in the oncoming traffic. On the street corner, there was a woman in an orange safety vest wearing chunky gold hoop earrings, working some job, and dancing like no one could see her. Prince was on the radio, and I wondered if she was listening to the same song as me. If she was, I couldn’t blame her for dancing. If I wasn’t driving, I’d have probably done the same thing, well, maybe not quite, but I probably would’ve at least tapped my foot. A little further along, a man had just parked his car and was walking purposefully toward some destination. There was a a little pop-up restaurant on the sidewalk with a line of people leading up to it.

I made my turn and thought about that NYC street corner in the 1970s. I don’t live in New York, I live in Los Angeles, and whenever I’ve had the option, I’ve always chosen city life because of the things I mentioned above.

I could barely interact with people, but all the trouble was still worth it for me, just to be around them—to see them. There’s something so beautiful about seeing people living closely together; their lives completely different, but also echoing each other. It shows me what we have common, and tells me that, most of the time, we get along with each other just fine.

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Originally posted on amyyuki.com

One time, someone didn’t bother with the alarm. Instead, he set the building on fire, but it didn’t burn because our dorm had previously been a convent, so it was a really old stone building built without a stick of wood. Even the doors were made of metal.

Back then, I thought everything was ahead of me, and my future could be anything. I thought I’d escaped my wretched past, and in a lot of ways I had, but it was still working on me in other ways that I hadn’t yet learned to appreciate. I’ve learned to appreciate it since then. I’ve carefully sifted through all my pain for it. I’m still learning how to appreciate the things that make me grateful.

The other day, my dad mentioned Sheryl Crow, and every time I hear her name, I think about my first week as a college freshman. For the first time in my life, I had my own clique. I wasn’t just some hanger on (that came later, when they realized what a weirdo I was), but for that first week, I was indistinguishable from the rest of them.

We all piled into a car and went for a drive. Sheryl Crow came on the radio, and we all spontaneously started singing along to her song. We were in a breathtaking part of Minnesota where the Mississippi river is surrounded by tall bluffs. The sun was setting over the river, and the sweet fresh air rushed into our open windows. The interior of the car was a faded blue-gray cloth. The girl sitting in front of me had her caramel blond hair up in a pink velvet scrunchy. I’d taken my own scrunchy out of my long dark hair to let the wind whip it around.

The whole car buzzed with the feeling of possibility. I thought that maybe it was just me. I could’ve driven around for hours singing along to Sheryl Crow, if only that little stretch of road would go on forever, and the sun would never stop setting, but the song ended and conversation resumed like normal.

Years later, I was with that group of women. We’d all moved on, got other friends, and went in different directions. It seemed we barely had anything in common, anymore.

Then someone asked, “Remember that time we were riding along the river in Kayla’s car and the sun was setting and Sheryl Crow came on the radio?”

“Yes!” several of us said.

We reminisced about the details and the singing, and then someone else said, “That was one of the happiest moments of my life. I’ll never forget it. It was magical.”

We all looked a little dumb struck because we’d all individually felt that way, but thought it was just ourselves.

The five of us were bound by an event. So often, people are bound by tragedy. We remember all the details of the day someone died or the day someone wrecked the car and could’ve died. We don’t often get happy moments that are so rich in feeling that it still carries that same weight, but because it was so fulfilling.

Note: This is from a writing assignment from a class that I’m taking now. The class seemed to really like it, so I’m sharing it with all of you.

Love to you all,

Amy

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Originally posted on amyyuki.com

Phase 1: PANIC!

Adrenaline and cortisol have taken over my brain. Anytime I’m not working on the move, I feel like I’m about to wake up and find that it’s the day before my flight and nothing has been done.

Is this because I’m a perfectionist? I don’t just see myself as morally obligated to solve all my problems, but to pre-solve them before they happen. If I allow a problem to emerge, then I’ve been irresponsible.

I don’t buy into the capitalist definition of success, but I still feel shame when I can’t make things work from that standpoint.

Phase 2: Boxes

I need boxes to ship stuff and organize stuff. In the past, when a delivery truck rolled by, I’d wonder what people had ordered. Now, I only covet all the delicious, beautiful boxes inside.

I’ve made a lot of big moves in my life and have lost stuff with every move. I hardly own anything that links me to my past. I used to think that was a good thing. I didn’t want any reminders, but now I miss those things. I’m afraid of losing more.

Phase 3: Codependence

As Mary Karr writes in The Art of Memoir, “Am I healthily less codependent or a bigger bitch? You could argue either way.”

I have a codependent relationship with my cat. It isn’t his fault.

Codependency is a lot like an eating disorder. We all need relationships, just like we all need food, but there’s a difference between having a cupcake and going to a bakery and eating everything in the store. Just like there’s a difference between having a relationship and letting it consume your entire life.

Dylan loves our arrangement: He meows, and I give him whatever he wants. I don’t regret it. Love and care are the magical parts of being human.

Phase 4: Shedding

I find it so enjoyable to get rid of stuff that I’m thinking about buying new stuff just for the pleasure of giving it away.

Never mind. People are fickle. They change their minds a lot. They message you nonstop for hours about how their life will suck forever because you gave your well-used $10 yoga mat to someone else. This, even though you didn’t hear back from them for a week, and you don’t have time to make sure everyone gets a fair shot at every item because you only have one more week to empty your entire apartment.

Phase 5:

We spent two days in the countryside in Chiba, so we could be near the airport and take a breather before our flight. I got to see/smell kinmokusei blossoms (sweet olive) before I left. They appear just as typhoon season ends. Not only are they lovely, but they’re a signal that summer humidity is over and fall colors are on the way. Of course, I won’t see any of that this year.

Done:

I’ve been in Los Angeles for two weeks now.

I was worried that I was moving to a hostile culture because I used to live in Philadelphia, where a Granny might shove you to the ground for taking too long at the ATM. Also, everyone keeps talking about how toxic American culture has gotten these days. So far, everyone in LA seems to have pledged to disseminate kindness on the very day I happened to run into them. It has been lovelier than kinmokusei blossoms.

As I set up my life, I keep wondering, “What’s the catch? You’re speaking to me in English, but these forms surely must be completed in half-width katakana, right? What? I don’t need a form? Are you sure? I brought my hanko.”

Not As Done As I Thought:

Life has gotten complicated, but I’ve crossed my fingers that it’ll uncomplicate soon. I hope to post more often going forward.

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Originally posted on amyyuki.com

I wanted to ask him why I haven’t seen any evidence of how shocked and aggrieved the Japanese people are considering how the media was going on and on about it.

I watched an interview with four Japanese people about Abe’s assassination. In it, one woman says:

In people’s everyday lives, it was not discussed as much, and many people went out that night without a second thought. The fact that our daily lives remain the same despite such a major incident is a sign of peace, and an indication that we take peace for granted.

I thought she meant that it was a good thing—no one panicked because everyone takes peace for granted—but later on, she adds:

We’ve been seeing more crimes committed by people dissatisfied with society, using murder as a means to raise their voice. I think this might be our wake-up call to stop taking peace for granted.

Despite her last sentence, it’s not clear to me whether she thinks taking peace for granted is a good or bad thing.

Is the Japanese non-response a healthy distancing or an unhealthy disconnect? What’s the difference?

I recently read Heart of Darkness, and it led me to think more about this.

The main character is an Englishman named Marlow. Sometime in the 1890s, he takes a job captaining a steamboat up the Congo River.

At one point, he compares the African man who maintains the vertical boiler of his steamboat (a somewhat technical seeming job) to a dog in breeches.

He also witnesses the Europeans commit several horrific atrocities against the Congolese people, and it makes him feel kind of bad. He starts to wonder if his own people are as civilized as he thought.

Marlow is no prodigy of social justice. He never rethinks the status of the Congolese people, but he abhors the cruelty he sees inflicted upon them because he’s a human being. He recognizes pain, torture, and senseless death when he sees it.

From the beginning, Marlow knew he was the beneficiary of a system that exploited the land, animals, and people of Africa, and he was comfortable with that arrangement until he had to witness the consequences of it close up.

Why the difference?

An fMRI study examines this phenomenon by comparing the trolley and footbridge dilemmas. In the trolley dilemma, a runway trolley is headed for five people. The only way to save them is to hit a switch that will change the trolley onto a track that will kill one person instead of five. Do you do it? Most people say yes.

In the footbridge dilemma, it’s the same situation, but this time, you’re on a footbridge with a stranger, and the only way to save the five people is to push that stranger off the bridge onto the tracks to stop the train. Do you do it? Most people say no.

The study says:

The thought of pushing someone to his death is, we propose, more emotionally salient than the thought of hitting a switch that will cause a trolley to produce similar consequences, and it is this emotional response that accounts for people’s tendency to treat these cases differently.

This is why I think Heart of Darkness is one of the most studied and referenced books in Western canon. It’s not because it’s so well-written, it’s because those of us who live in a wealthy countries recognize Marlow’s shift in emotional salience, and we see it in ourselves.

We know that animal products come from factory farming, plastics and fossil fuels are pollutants, cheap garments are assembled by child labor (or adults in inhumane working conditions), and the list goes on.

We’re aware that we are the beneficiaries of a system that exploits others, and as long as we can distance ourselves from it, we can live with it.

I’m not saying this to make you feel shitty. I’m saying it to acknowledge the truth of our experience. Most of us don’t want to be in a system that causes unnecessary suffering, but, like Marlow, we’re not really sure what to do about it, either.

Before things get too dire-sounding here, I’d like to point out this New York Times article, which says that things are better for humans now than they’ve ever been before. There is no mention of the environment or animals.

The human experience is better than ever, but Americans feel worse about it than ever before.

The emotional saliency of our situation has changed. We now experience climate change ourselves. Many of us personally suffer from the consequences of a system that was designed to take care of the people on top and no one else. But, mostly, social media and the 24-hour news cycle demand that everything be emotionally salient all the time, but everything can’t be emotionally salient all the time. That’s not a sustainable way to live.

So, what do we do with this?

First, I suggest reading this opinion piece in The Washington Post about how most of today’s news isn’t fit for human consumption and what to do about it.

I’m not advocating for keeping our heads stuck in the sand, but to be mindful of what we allow into our bubble of emotional salience.

We can argue all day about which issues are the most important, but each of us is capable of sitting down and figuring out our own bandwidth for emotional salience, and which issues are closest to our own hearts.

Then, we can choose not to be like Marlow and do something tangible about our chosen issue (posting on social media doesn’t count). I think that’s a far better practice than spending most of our time locked in conflict and overwhelmed into inaction.

The assassination of Abe seems to not have much emotional salience for the Japanese people. I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing. Maybe the important thing is that they aren’t panicking over an event that probably isn’t a sign of anything worse yet to come.

If I were to speculate, I’d say this: In general, Japanese culture promotes far more civic-mindedness than American culture. They tend to quietly focus on good daily practices, rather than loudly bemoan things outside of their control. They trust their system (for better and for worse), and they trust each other. All of that leads to a lot of calm and very little social volatility, which is something it seems like the US could use, right now.'

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Links and Things

I’m sorry, but if you don’t watch this video, there’s something seriously wrong with you.

I really enjoyed the documentary Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir.

Refind is a newsletter that sends seven links curated to your tastes per day. For every unique click I send to them, they send me an appropriate click back, so taking a quick gander at what they have to offer is a great way to support my newsletter.

Originally posted on amyyuki.com

Maybe it’s a little weird that I put my college degrees in the same category as, say, reading The Power of Habit, but I find there’s a lot of grey area between the two. Nowadays, there are independent certifications for everything from leadership to tarot reading, and some college classes don’t give you any better information than what you could research on your own.

In her 2018 article, “Improving Ourselves to Death,” Alexandra Schwartz writes:

Self-help gurus need not be charlatans peddling snake oil. Many are psychologists with impressive academic pedigrees and a commitment to scientific methodologies, or tech entrepreneurs with enviable records of success in life and business.

So, the distinction isn’t obvious to me. It’s all in pursuit of a better self.

I’ve always believed in the adage, “you get out what you put in,” and have pursued things with an intensity that would make Bruce Wayne say, “Woah, lighten up, take a chill pill.”

I didn’t just want to improve, I felt I needed it, and I thought my intense need to be a better person was unique. But, the self-help market is expected to grow to $13.2 billion in 2022. I’m sure college tuition is not included in that $13.2 billion estimate, otherwise that number would be much higher.

Why are we so compelled to get so much help?

Alexandra Schwartz wonders about this, too, and concludes that it’s the pressure to measure up in a highly competitive economy. She writes, “If the ideal of the optimized self isn’t simply a fad, or even a preference, but an economic necessity, how can any of us choose to live otherwise?”

She’s right about me, I have sometimes been motivated by the desire to stay employable in a highly competitive economy, but if that’s the only benefit, then self-help has proven to be more of a hinderance than a help, for me.

I don’t blame my teachers. Whenever I was motivated by competitiveness, I already had the skills I needed. I was really seeking a band-aid for imposter syndrome or my fears of inadequacy. Afterwards, those psychological roadblocks were still in place, and I’d only managed to put off facing them for a little longer.

I’ve never pursued a degree or certification with a guaranteed income attached, like dentistry, for example, and I’ve only monetized one skill acquired in a classroom (reiki). Ironically, my hard skills (I’ve worked as a web developer and a data analyst) were things I taught myself or learned on the job.

William Gonch takes a more philosophical approach. In his article, “Cognitive Behavioral Soulcraft,” he tells us that self-help is about pursuing goals that give our lives meaning.

He writes:

I must evaluate my passions to determine the life I want to live and the goals I want to achieve. Then—and this is the hard part—I must continue to see those goals as meaningful, and interpret daily actions as steps toward them… In its attempt to give us control over our own stories, [self-help] impoverishes the stories we share and the meanings we make together.

According to Gonch, building a better self is how we replace the lost meaning we once got through family and community. Because a regular sense of connection is no longer available, we focus on ourselves.

In Gonch’s narrative, we lack the connections that once provided us meaning because we’ve left our hometowns to build exciting careers elsewhere. I know many people who’ve left their hometowns, but not to build exciting careers. They left because they felt no sense of belonging in their community of origin, including myself.

I’m willing to bet that, historically, lots of people have lacked a sense of belonging in their places of origin, but they also lacked alternative options. Now we have them.

I’ve also noticed that a lot of classes, workshops, and retreats are designed to instill a sense of connection among the participants, so we leave grateful for the experience and, ideally, with a few more friends. If what Gonch says is true, that’s one way to guarantee that a participants’ needs are met even if we go in not knowing exactly what we lack.

For me, a quest for more meaning is at the heart of all my actions, but that’s not the entirety of my self-help story.

My motivations to help myself have progressed along with my psychological states at various points in my life. At first, I thought it would validate me as a human being, but since, I’ve been motivated by illness, depression, anxiety, skill development, joy, and inspiration.

I don’t regret any of the self-improvement I’ve done, nor any of the self-help books I’ve read (well, maybe a few, there are some pretty bad ones out there), but I also believe in another adage: “nothing is wasted.” We find ways to use everything we’ve learned, even if not in ways we never expected.

What about you? What’s your relationship with self-help?

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If you don’t know about Johnny Harris’ reporting, then you’re missing out, and you should start with his video about why McDonald’s ice cream machines are always broken.

Originally posted on amyyuki.com