Jul. 2026: Growing up

I have been quite busy lately, in part because my mother has been in China visiting her family, so all the housework that she usually does falls upon me. I think it’s good for me, as although I do plan to continue living with my mother for some time, I do want to demonstrate my capacity for responsbility and indepedent living. I do find it interesting though that my mother decided to task me with all the housework, instead of splitting the tasks between my younger brother and me. I think it is because my family never split up most housework into chores that everyone shares. So with my mother away, I, the supposed “eldest daughter,” must take on everything. Which has been a bit fatiguing, given that I also have other work to do. I do hope however that when my mother comes back, we’ll find a way to divide chores.

I recently celebrated my birthday similarly to last year by gathering some friends to play an escape room. We didn’t escape this time, although we were close and that game was a particularly difficult one. Birthdays do make me feel a bit existential. I’m growing older day by day, but do I know what I am doing? Probably no one really does. It’s a really difficult world to be maturing into these days.

One time, another young adult was talking about how after age 21, there isn’t really a big age landmark anymore. I responded, but what about age 26? That age scares me more than age 21 did. It’s the age at which you can rent a car without surcharge. The age by which most mental illnesses begin and develop. The age by which the prefrontal cortex is assumed to be fully developed, regardless of individual variation. And most significantly to me, the age at which the U.S. forces you off your parents’ health insurance.

Actually, I’m not entirely sure how much that last one will impact me, given that I have chosen a therapist and a psychiatrist who do not work with insurance companies. It’s a costly choice, one that my family can only just bear (with me paying for the therapy and my parents paying for psychiatry), but given how complicated I am with all sorts of diagnoses and experiences that a lot of clinicians don’t really understand, it’s been really important at this developmental phase that I’m at. There is still the risk of getting hospitalized with shitty insurance, or none at all. (Not that the insurance I have through my father’s pharmaceuticals workplace is really that great. You’d think that a big drug company would offer better health insurance. I suppose they still want to profit off their employees.) Regardless of what exactly happens when I’m no longer on my parents’ insurance, it subjectively feels like age 26 is a marker for taking on more responsibility and financial burden.

But I’m not there yet. I’ve got one year to go. I feel the pressure to get everything figured out before then.

I have a bit of a strange way of talking about vocation. You can hear my words trying to escape boxes, trying not to be pinned down. I told my spiritual director that it never resonated with me when people tried to push me towards a musical career by saying it was my “passion.” If you really know me, you know passion is just who I am. She responded, “So music isn’t it. You want to do what you are led to do, not just what you like.” The idea of a spiritual leading is definitely much closer to what actually motivates me. But strangely enough, her observation made me feel strongly pulled back to music, even considering entering a prestigious piano competition (when I’ve rarely done competitions and don’t want to cultivate a competitive attitude). It really isn’t that music isn’t it, but rather that I am not an it. Do you understand? Or am I just being foolishly clever?

I have always been someone who does a lot of different things, and I wish to remain like that. I try my best to find a way to do what I want to do, but I’m not particularly picky as to what is a “career” versus what is something I do without pay, so long as two requirements are met: 1. I am able to sustain myself, and 2. I avoid ethically problematic work such as teaching AI how to do maths (my mother thought that would be excellent work and, though it would be in a way fun for the brain and it pays well, I really do not want to encourage the development of tools that students can easily abuse to fake learning).

I do, however, need to sometimes restrain my tendency towards dilettantism, as it can take away time and energy from my core goals. Sure, I can have fun with things like learning various languages (recently I spent two consecutive, almost sleepless nights gobbling up as much Toki Pona as I could), but if I have committed to something, I need to see it through. I annoyingly still have a bunch of partly-finished creative projects. Once I get done my coursework this summer, hopefully I’ll have a bit of time to turn my attention to those projects so that they can finally see the sun.

As for the other things I want to do in my life, if you know you know. The cultivation of spirit, in myself and others, is at the core of everything I do. It motivates me in the arts, in helping others, even in just a pure love of learning. Where that takes me will be determined by a mixture of my own design and the opportunities I encounter.

In other news, I recently had a one-week break from my vegan diet because I was considering doing a ketogenic diet to help with bipolar, and my psychiatrist said that I could try it so long as I don’t also remain a vegan. The ketogenic diet (characterized by high fat, very low carb, and medium protein), though frequently thought of as a weight-loss fad, actually had its origins as a treatment for epilepsy. Because some bipolar medications are anti-epileptics, scientists began investigating the effects of keto on bipolar, thus kickstarting the field of metabolic psychiatry. So far, early studies suggest that, for some people with bipolar, a ketogenic diet can reduce bipolar symptoms and control metabolic side effects that bipolar meds can have. I was genuinely considering the diet and began experimenting with non-vegan foods as a first step, but it was really my mother who pushed me towards it by suggesting that the diet could lead me to be able to get off of meds. Most people who do the diet don’t come off meds, however, and the shame that I felt from my mother when I expressed hesitance about doing keto really was not a good way to move forward. During the day, I would enthusiastically try new foods, in particular fish, eggs, and pork liver (I decided that pescatarian minus dairy plus offal was the most consistent with my environmentalist ethics while providing the expanded nutritional options needed for keto). During the night, I would then feel physically and emotionally sick from what I ate.

After a week of partial experimentation with keto, I decided that I just didn’t want to do it anymore. Even if I did a fully vegan keto diet and thus stuck with my environmentalist ethics, eating loads of fat did not make me feel good physically, and fatty plant foods like avocados and certain nuts aren’t necessarily that environmentally sustainable anyway. But also, food as culture and as medicine is important to me. Although it is possible to adapt Chinese food to be suitable for keto, many traditional Chinese and generally Asian foods are high in carbohydrates and would thus need to be essentially eliminated on a keto diet. Plus, there are foods that my mother makes for me that are medicinal, such as mung bean soup for detox or red bean soup/porridge for menstrual periods, that would also not be permissible on keto, despite being very healthy. And finally, I became unsure what sort of specific benefits I was looking for in a keto diet. I do not show evidence of significant metabolic side effects, and I do not have frequent mood episodes. I would say that on a day-to-day basis, autism and ADHD have a larger impact on my life than bipolar does. But of course, when bipolar stuff does happen, the impact on my life tends to be more dramatic.

Maybe there are ways that I can less drastically change my diet to support my mental health. I have a book on traditional Chinese medicine for mental health, and although it does not discuss bipolar specifically (its focus is on more common mental health maladies), the sections on anxiety or ADHD might be useful for me. It lists recipes, acupressure procedures, even musical prescriptions that benefit mental health in various ways. Although I am of course open to modern developments in medicine, I have a particular interest in traditional medicine, as they relate to my culture and have been tested with time, whereas for things like a ketogenic diet, it’s unclear what the longer-term effects are as the research is still new.

Because my mother has been visiting her mother in China, I’ve gotten to speak briefly with my grandmother through WeChat while actually seeing her face, which is nice because unless there is someone to hold the phone for my grandmother, she is clueless about how to hold it and aim the camera correctly. Knowing that my grandmother is a Christian, I gave her a statuette of an angel, which I hope soothes her soul as she seems to not like being old and to be afraid of death. Today my mother is visiting the grave of her father for the first time. She is taking a rock there that I selected for him. I wish that I could go see my grandparents, but at least they know that I’m thinking of them.

I had a photo of my mosaic, which I made in January, accepted in the call for artworks associated with the Mad in Norway Film Festival! I previously shared an image of the mosaic in this post. The artworks, which focus on the healing power of art-making during mental distress, will be displayed on screen in between films during the festival. They will also be visible as a web gallery on the film festival website. I don’t normally submit visual art to places as I try to let it be the one area of the arts where I can just fully relax and not worry about standards of excellence, but this mosaic just happened to fit the call very well.

Does what you do are doing in your life right now align with your sense of purpose, mission, vision, etc.? How could you live with more alignment?

Does purpose precede being/doing, or does being/doing create purpose?