Sunday, June 24, 2018

Death, Consequence, and The Hill of Thoughts

Death PT I
Totalbiscuit died recently. While it's unfortunate he told somebody he hoped he got cancer and die and died to cancer himself, it by no means he deserved it. It's not eye for an eye at all, and even that makes the whole world blind. It's not the same to make an angry comment in the heat of the moment as it is to sincerely wish somebody has their life ended. It's one thing to know it's difficult to be on the receiving end of countless criticisms every day, and it's another to experience it. Our minds were evolved to handle input from our tribe, but while technology has given a voice to those who could not speak, it has allowed us to peer into a window into a never-ending cacophony of angry noises. Geography stops mattering in a way that must feel evolutionarily bizarre.

People see a sliver of somebody's life and personality and assume they know them. For sure he has changed his opinions as he came down with the illness, but on the internet people assume others never grow. This is literally death, and a painful one at that. It's years of painful fighting, knowing the whole time it could very well end all too soon. There's the dealing with the medical staff, but most of all there's his wife and disabled son that he left behind. To lose somebody that means the world to you is something nobody should have to go through. I don't know what I would do. Imagine watching people wither away, cachexia and all, hair lone gone. Totalbiscuit was an interesting video game critic/personality. The world is a little colder without him.

Death PT II
I've never seen him act this way. I thought he was the type that slept with different girls but never got attached to any of them. Turns out there was a girl he kind of liked. He told me how she was kind to people and gave to the homeless even when she had none for herself. But life was hard on her, and she had a drinking problem. When caught driving drunk, she couldn't drink anymore, so she turned to harder drugs: Cocaine. She admitted this when she came and visited him. 'Do you think what I'm doing is wrong?', she asked him. Being a counter-culture guy, he said no. Days later she died of an overdose.

'It's like nothing changed!', he remembered her saying. Her attention to detail impressed him. She remembers the way the house was, and the pets. It felt like she came back to him, and the world took her away. He feels guilty. He thought he should've put anti-overdose drugs in her purse, and told her not to take cocaine. I tried telling him that with things like this, it's usually very hard to stop or control. Other people in her life couldn't get through to her either, so his part was just one of many things that could have gone differently. We'll never know if anything he could've done would've made a difference... but he felt it was important for him to have at least tried.

Somebody once told me a story about my father decades ago, before I was born. He liked to ride his motorcycle, and it was legal to ride without a helmet. My aunt was annoyed that he didn't wear a helmet, and after many attempts at convincing him to get one, decided to buy one and gave it to him. He started wearing it since he got it for free without hassle. Later that week he got into an accident and got pushed off the motorcycle. He suffered a scar but came out okay. But if he landed poorly without a helmet that could've been it. It was a story told to say that sometimes one person can make all of the difference.

And that's life. Sometimes you never know. Sometimes bad things we can't predict happen and there's nothing we can do. Lack of control is scary, maybe even worse than guilt or what-ifs.
A pill to make you numb 
A pill to make you dumb 
A pill to make you anybody else 
But all the drugs in this world 
Won't save her from herself

Death PT III
Over time I've had different people confide in me their various life problems. If you have existential problems, you are not alone. Most people care a lot about what other people think of them, so they might bury their problems, thinking other people would think lesser of them if they ever come to light. Unless you really know a person you might not know how many skeletons are in their closet. This means most people can empathize with you on some level because they've got shit to deal with too.

You're not a loser because you have problems. Maybe the people you least expect are contemplating suicide right now. Life can be really hard sometimes with no easy way out. Sometimes it's flat out unfair. But whoever you are reading this, I hope you pull through. Even if I don't like you, stay safe.

Strong people show weakness and survive.

Weak people act tough yet perish anyways.

Death PT IV
The following is loosely adapted from Time magazine.

With the recent death of Bourdain and Spade, we are reminded of the uselessness of envy. It is a miscalculation in the relative worth of things. We don't have our own TV show or fashion line, and that makes us think we aren't as hardworking or intelligent as they are. They must be better people than us. But this comparison is made with flawed data. People's lives are not as they appear. Bourdain's line is the epitome of this: 'What do you do after your dreams come true?'

Life PT I
Transitioning has been unexpectedly difficult for me. Due to both hormones and life experience changing how I think, I've had to adjust to fluctuating emotions. It's not all bad. I don't take for granted showing who I really am instead of hiding, or not thinking testosterone ruined my body. Yet having a gender that aligns with sex is something over 99% of the population take for granted. It's like a diabetic. They don't take eating for granted because one careless day and it could be their last. So yes, it gives me joy sometimes when I feel feminine. Sometimes when I find something funny I laugh until there are literally tears in my eyes. Emotion flows more easily and I feel less pressured to act a certain way.

But sometimes things aren't so good. The realization that one is transgender is an opened Pandora's Box. Things will never be the same again no matter what you do. Sometimes I feel like nothing I do is ever enough. I will always be a fake, trying, wishing, to be female. Even with sex reassignment surgery, which itself comes with a whole host of potential problems, I would still be a shade of a natal female. There are things I can never take back because of when I started hormones. There are times when I see a normal female and get jealous. The flip side to unabashed joy is neuroticism and depression. At first I was surprised at how upset I was at various events, until it happened again, and again, and I realized how I processed emotions changed. Maybe it's a second puberty and it brings along with it some of the teenage angst, except when present as an adult others are less understanding.

This too shall pass.

It's a Persian adage about the temporary nature of the human condition. If you are happy, it will fade. On the flip side if you are sad, that too, will pass. Well, life itself will pass. Change is the constant. Things don't stay the same. One could claw away and yearn for the past, but while it is a good place to visit, it's not a good place to stay.

Some very bad things happened very recently to me. Thankfully when suicidal thoughts enter my mind I know it's an empty threat. I still have much I want to do and experience. Self-transcending love. Sex. Friendship. The future of my transition. Cute outfits. The future of computer technology. The completion of my Skyrim work. Lazy day of hot chocolate and cuddling. Making lemonade. Skyrim while it rains outside. The smell of her hair.

I will pull through. I always have. This is not enough to stop me. Times like this, I rely on my close friends to lean on. These are people who I can say anything to without a filter and confide potentially life-destroying secrets without fear. People who actually care. That's rare. And when I find them, I don't want them to go.

Sometimes though, life wants to borrow them for a while. Full time job. School. Just stuff. Have you ever, in a hangout with friends, ever stop to think that this memory here, yes, this one, will be one which you look back on with fondness? Maybe it'll help people cherish what time they have. Because it will pass. It always does.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, 
But I have promises to keep,
Miles to go before I sleep.

Life PT II
The following is a quote from Sam Harris during a speech.
Most of us try our best not to think about death. But all of us knows that we're just a doctor's visit away from being starkly reminded of our own mortality. I'm sure many of you know somebody who has experienced this. You must know how uncanny it is to be thrown out of the normal course of your life, and just be given the full time job of not dying. The one thing people tend to realize at moments like this is that they wasted a lot of time when life was normal. It's not just they spent too much time working or compulsively checking email. It's that they cared about the wrong things. They regret what they cared about. Their attention was bound up by petty concerns... year after year when life was normal.

And this is a paradox of course, because we all know this epiphany is coming. Don't you know this is coming? Don't you know that you'll look back on the kinds of things that captured your attention and you'll ask, what was I thinking? You know this, and if you're like most people, you'll spend most of the time in your life, tacitly presuming you will live forever. It's like watching a bad movie for the fourth time. These things only make sense in light of eternity. There better be a heaven if we're going waste our time like this. There are ways to really live in the present moment. What is the alternative? It is always now. However much you may feel the need to plan for the future or mitigate risks, the reality of your life is now. This may sound tripe, but it's the truth. And we spend most of our life repudiating it, overlooking it. The horror is that we succeed. We manage to never really connect with the present moment and find fulfillment because we are continually hoping to become happy in the future, and the future never arrives. We're always anticipating what is coming next. We're always trying to solve a problem. It's possible to simply drop your problem, if only for a moment, and enjoy whatever is true of your life in the present.

Consequence PT I
Being transgender is confusing and many people don't immediately know what it all means. I was young, pushed to act a certain way, and didn't find good sources of information. I was a kid living in a time where LGBT support was still in the minority. It took me a long time of self-debate before I decided to call myself transgender and pursue hormone replacement therapy. So when I saw two people I thought might be transgender but did not know it, I asked them a few questions and gave a few of my thoughts. In both cases they realized they were transgender and decided to pursue or seriously consider pursuing HRT.

It is crazy how I can drastically affect of some people I talk to. Because I debated myself for so long, I knew what to say and how to think about the issue. A person recently thanked me for helping them discover themselves. I just wished somebody was there for me when I was young, because I would've started hormones earlier and hit puberty. At least I made a difference. That's special.

Would those people have found themselves without me eventually? Maybe. It's surprisingly hard to do so, even in this internet age. People harbor too many misconceptions about what it means to be transgender. And when they figure it out, they might be 40 and married with kids. Or they could figure it all out next year somehow.

Consequence PT II
A long time ago in middle school, I wore the same clothes every day and got bullied by mean-spirited people that enjoyed the suffering of others. My self esteem was at an all time low in my entire life. Then I met a girl on Maplestory. We got along really well. She once confided in me that she got along with me better than her online 'boyfriend'. I went to visit my father in Taiwan for a month and forgot to tell her. I tried to contact her on Maplestory in Taiwan, but due to the IP block, I couldn't log on. By the time I got back to America, she was gone. Sometimes people enter our lives for a relatively brief period of time and leave footprints on our heart that stay forever. She taught me that I wasn't an undesirable bag of shit nobody could ever love. She probably don't remember me anymore. But I remember her and the impact she made on me, and that is enough.

Hill of Thoughts
On the Joe Rogan podcast a guest brought up something interesting. He said to think of your mind as a hill. Your thoughts are sleds going down that hill. After a while after a lot of thoughts have gone down that hill, there will be these grooves, which get deeper and deeper... Until you can't go down the hill without slipping into those grooves. That's who we are in middle age. And what psychedelics do is flatten the snow. Lots of fresh powder. I found it a beautiful metaphor. And when people come out of a psychedelic experience and repeat these platitudes like 'love is what matters', it really is true. Platitudes are truths with all emotion sucked out of it. Sometimes we are looking so hard for novel ideas that we forget that some of the most basic ones are the most important.