moving forward

Finally feel like I'm rolling again.

My dad's been terribly sick with some kind of virus for the past four days, so today I chatted with my sister to check up on him and see how everyone's doing. We wound up talking a bit about stress and how my dad isn't handling things too well because he's not used to being bedridden and too weak to work. I shared my own experiences with stress, and how I've developed my own way to deal with it over the years. I also talked a bit about how my relationship with my boss has evolved. It's kind of funny but I've sort of turned my work life here into a pseudo family, since I'm so far away from home. Even though personality-wise they're worlds apart, my boss does a lot of things similar to my dad. When I first came up here I was so lost, and I sort of felt like he was filling in the space where my dad had been. I still remember the first drives I took with him, downtown and going to Koffler, and asking him to tell me stories about his experiences like I used to ask my dad when I was little. Now that I've had a lot more interactions with him I can see why first-year me got the impression. He also reacts to stress in a similar way to my dad.

Gosh I was so young then. Everyone kept saying it but now I really feel it myself. Haha I'm getting old.

Anyway mostly I told my sister about the communications issues and frictions that we've sometimes had over the years. All of us in the lab have exploded at one point or another over different things, but the common undercurrent is stress. We've all had so much to deal with in our own individual lives, and sometimes it's hard for us to see past the crazy shit we're dealing with. And sometimes that results in us making bad decisions when it comes to communicating. I'm horribly guilty of this, I have been all my life. I chalk up half of it to depressive episodes and introversion but when it comes down to it I'm just making excuses for not having enough awareness and consciousness of other people. Being too busy to care isn't an excuse. It's never an excuse.

I wrote an email to A today. The last day she left the lab she had wanted to say goodbye, and I kind of registered it but I was stressing over work and was also fighting off some darkness at the time. That whole week had been very rough for all of us and I was playing angry music very loudly to try to stay sane. In her quiet voice, she stopped on her way out and asked me if I'd be in the next day and I replied yes, why? and she said that it was her last day and she just wanted to say bye. And then I guess she got embarrassed because I looked at her blankly and said oh. That's the last thing I said to her. "Oh." And then she slipped out and she didn't come back the next day and I felt like a giant chump. And then work and depression and other preoccupations swamped me again and I didn't remember until today how stupid I was. Luckily today I am in an upswing and the usual paranoia about people thinking I'm an idiot has subsided for now.

Basically most of the time I am paranoid about being an idiot to the point where it actually turns me into an idiot.

Something my mom said to me during our talk yesterday: there's this Chinese concept called "yuan fen". It's kind of like fate, chance, luck, wrapped into one. The consciousness of the immense improbability of being in the same place and time with the people you meet at any point in your life. My mom says everyone meets the people they do and experiences the things they do for a reason. I don't really buy into that predestined stuff about meeting other people but I do appreciate how utterly improbable my life has been so far, and how beautiful it is, when I remember to look up and look outside. And now I'm learning to cherish the brief moments I share with the other people on this planet too.