Month: March 2017

Depression as a Friend, Not an Enemy

Posted on by Kai Raine

I find that I benefit from conceptualizing depression as a friend that is a part of me. We are usually at odds in some ways, but it is a part of me that I can’t ignore or belittle. It needs to breathe just as much as the rest of me. I don’t always succeed at holding on to this conceptualization, but when I catch myself talking too frequently about “fighting” depression, I can take a moment to remind myself that my mental framework might be slipping.

I hear a lot about fighting depression. I know I’ve used the phrase quite a lot in this series. I’m not against the use of it, because friend or not, depression and I do fight in many ways. But I try not say it too much, because that turn of phrase would make an enemy of depression. I can’t view depression as my enemy, because then I have to actively try not to fear it, adding another layer of effort. I have found that fear of depression is not much better than depression itself.

I had a moderate to severe depressive episode in my second semester of university. I didn’t know what was happening at the time. My roommate moved out, and I stopped going to class or work and spent my days under my bed—no, seriously, under my bed—with my computer. The thought of doing anything sent me into an anxiety attack.

After I recovered from that episode, I swore to myself that I wouldn’t let it happen again. I tried to hold myself afloat by remembering how awful it was to be so useless. I was trying to hold the depression at bay using fear. To put it more clearly, I was trying to hold anxiety at bay using anxiety.

Certainly, I was continuously a functioning member of society. But I didn’t like myself. I hated myself every morning that I just couldn’t do the things that I told myself I was supposed to be able to be doing. The only thing I had in abundance was self-loathing for my weakness and lack of control; I barely ever had enough energy to get through the day doing the bare necessities. I continuously wanted to get away from people: socialization was draining and made me irritable. When it got particularly bad, I would tell myself it was because of the environment, the culture, the anything that allowed me to place the blame on someone or something other than myself. That was the only way that I could forgive myself. Amidst all of this, I only occasionally missed work or class, and never anything essential. I kept my grades up and even made time for arts and crafts, writing and reading.

Functional though I was, I don’t think any part of this was particularly healthy. I was trying to force myself to be what I thought I should be. I was constantly at war with myself, unconsciously making my own life that much harder from one day to the next. I frequently had insomnia or hypersomnia. During bouts of insomnia, I would have waking sleep tremors that terrified me: initially because I thought they were seizures, and later because they would occur just as I was drifting off and I would mistake the shaking for an earthquake. I was usually either under-eating over overeating.

Nowadays, though I am generally happy, I frequently catch myself at quiet moments succumbing to morose, sad thoughts.

I catch myself, but I don’t hold the thoughts back. I let the sadness or despair wash over me. Maybe I take a walk. Maybe I try to channel the emotion into a story. Maybe I just sit there and curl up with my computer and a YouTube video. Maybe I text a friend about how sad I am right now. Maybe I blog about it. The point is this: I don’t push it away. I embrace it.

It’s difficult and it can be frightening. In these moments, I can feel depression beside me, sapping me of energy. I said I might walk or channel the emotion into a story, but that tends to be far more easily said than done. For the most part, I don’t have the desire or the will to do anything at these times.

Sometimes this strikes while I’m in the middle of something that I can’t get out of. The dark mood takes over but I’m still in action. I become less talkative and more pensive. But I can still do what needs to be done. If I feel the need, I might excuse myself to the bathroom or something to create alone time.

It is a balancing act of sorts, trying to give the darker corners of my mind the breathing room they need without completely sapping me of willpower. I feel sure that at some point my careful balance will not be enough. But I have found that since I’ve been making an effort towards greater introspection and acceptance of my own depression and limitations, I’ve been happier in my happy moments. Even the sharp, senseless irritability that used to take over from time to time has lost its hold on me. But even for that irritation, when I feel its claws settling in, I don’t fight it. I ask myself, instead, “Why am I so irritated right now?” There usually is a reason: because I want to be somewhere else, because I’m tired, because I had expectations that aren’t being met, or even because someone is expressing an opinion of me that conflicts with my own.

I try to identify a problem, if there is one, and solve it; or if my psyche just wants to be sad for awhile, I don’t stop it. This is my attempt to bring sustainability into what I suspect will be a tumultuous lifelong relationship.

Language Acquisition, or Lying Like a Rug

Posted on by Kai Raine

At some point, if I didn’t understand a question, I took to giving random answers. Somehow, I deemed this preferable to revealing that I didn’t understand the question at all. If there was only one word that I didn’t understand, as in, “Do you like poetry with onomatopoeia?” I could ask, “What’s onomatopoeia?” But frequently, I would think I understood all the words in the question, but it didn’t make sense.

For instance, while I was still in preschool, a girl in our apartment building once decided that I just had to see her stuffed rabbit. She raced into her apartment and came out with it.

“Hoshii?” she asked me. I blinked and said “Huh?” She repeated the question. We repeated this exchange twice or thrice, but she simply continued repeating the question.

Here was the thing. I knew the word hoshi, which meant star. But it made no sense to me that she would be asking me, “Star?” with regards to her stuffed bunny, which had nothing in common with a star. Finally, I concluded that she must be asking if I thought it was pretty like a star. I said yes.

“You can’t have it!” she told me gleefully, clutching the bunny to her chest.

That was how I learned that hoshii meant to want. She had been asking me if I wanted it. (I was grateful that she hadn’t been serious, since I didn’t particularly want the worn stuffed animal.) This was a pattern that became a habit.

There was a girl with whom I became instant friends in preschool. Let’s call her Snowy. Our friendship, I believe, was based less on mutual liking and more on the fact that no one else seemed to want to spend any time with either of us. Snowy was loud, outspoken and disruptive. She taught me the word “benjo,” a rude word for toilet, by leading me through the preschool bathrooms, opening every stall, screaming, “Benjo!” and slamming the door regardless of whether or not their was an occupant. (The children’s stalls didn’t have locks; there was only one stall for the teachers that did have a lock.) Then she took me to the urinals and taught me the word “chin-chin” (penis) by harassing a male teacher in the process of relieving himself. He valiantly tried to explain why what she was doing was wrong over Snowy’s very loud squeals and exclamations while simultaneously fending her off.

Snowy was not conventional by any stretch of the imagination. Later, when we attended the same elementary school with nearly 600 students, everyone knew who I was because I was foreign; but everyone knew who Snowy was because of who she was. We fell in and out of friendship during the five years that we attended the same schools. She had been born in the US, and was happy to watch Disney movies in English with me. I never knew the rules of interaction with Snowy, so maybe that’s why I can’t remember a time when I ever thought of her as a best friend; but she was certainly a constant.

In elementary school, Snowy and I were placed in separate classes. It was convention that children walked to and from school alone, though we were told never to stray from our assigned routes. Drop-offs by car or bicycle were not permitted. So during the first two weeks, we went home in groups, led by a teacher. Snowy and my houses were in the same direction, but her assigned route broke off of the main group very early on.

“You’re this way, right?” Snowy asked me on the first day. I didn’t understand the question, so I nodded (it seemed the right thing to do; defaulting to nodding seemed in generally better than defaulting to shaking my head). Moments later, she was pulling me down the side street with her, and understanding flooded me just a little too late. I also didn’t have the courage to correct her, but the teacher didn’t call out to stop me. I ended up walking home through the side streets, past Snowy’s house.

Mistake though it may have been, I enjoyed getting that time with Snowy, so the next day I was happy to do it again. Only this time, the teacher (who had a list of which children were supposed to turn off where, and no doubt noticed when I wasn’t there at my turn-off on the previous day) noticed.

“You’re not that way,” she laughed, and ushered me back to the group. I shuffled along, my face burning. I glanced back and saw Snowy looking at me, her jaw slack. She clenched her teeth and spun on her heel. The rush of shame and guilt was already a familiar companion. It didn’t make it any less unpleasant.

The next day at school, Snowy turned her nose up at me and told me she wanted nothing to do with liars like myself. I was too tired or too guilty to contradict her. I didn’t know how to explain.

“You always lie,” Snowy said to me. This hurt more than Snowy’s frostiness.

My mother talked of her own childhood like she was a paragon of honesty and integrity. She never lied, she told me. When her teacher, who checked that everyone had their handkerchiefs every morning, forgot to check on the same day that my mother had forgotten her handkerchief, she had gone to the teacher of her own volition and admitted to not having it. She had been good and honest. I was trying, but still I was bad and a liar. I didn’t know what to do about any of this, but certainly explaining this situation to any adults was out of the question. I couldn’t bear the shame of letting them know exactly what I’d become.

So I lied to my parents on purpose to hide the shame of the lies I was telling left and right at school without meaning to.

I was six years old.

My Move to India, or How I Got Conned

Posted on by Kai Raine

In Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones, there’s a paragraph where the main character remembers on the stupid decisions made by herself and her friend at the age of fifteen. She reflects that people should be locked up for a year at that age in a paragraph that seemed puzzling as a teenager, and then grew funnier and funnier as I distanced myself from my teenage self and headed into my twenties.

Here’s a piece of my own fifteen-year-old idiocy.

I flew to Hyderabad, India from Buffalo, New York to rejoin my parents and sisters. I had begun the trip as an unaccompanied minor, under the care of flight attendants, but as you may have read last week, in Doha it was forgotten that I was an unaccompanied minor and I ended the trip on my own. For the most part, I was happy about it. But naive as I was, it did leave me open to getting conned.

Immigration went without a hitch, but at customs, I got pulled aside. I was traveling with one or two large suitcases. A suitcase was marked with chalk, and I was told that because of those markings, I had to go talk to the customs officer at the desk. I went over to the desk.

The man behind the desk asked me if I was traveling with electronics.

“Not many,” I said. Just some cords and a phone. (Why I was carrying a phone in my suitcase I don’t really remember.)

“You have to pay a tax for electronics,” the man told me.

My heart skipped a beat and then started to pound. I envisioned losing everything in my suitcase. “I didn’t know that.”

The man named a sum of money that I was supposed to pay. Terrified that I would have to give up my entire suitcase, I went through the contents of my wallet. I don’t remember how much I had, but I think it was more or less $50. Whatever it was, it was less than he had told me to pay, even if I converted it into rupees.

“I don’t have that,” I told him. “But my parents will have come to pick me up. I could ask them for the money. Can I just leave and get the money and come back?”

“You can’t come back if you leave the secure area,” he told me, “and you can’t take this suitcase without paying the tax.”

“But I can’t pay,” I confessed. “I only have US dollars.”

“That’s no problem. How much do you have?” he asked me.

“Only fifty dollars,” I admitted.

“Well, I’ll let you off this time,” he said magnanimously with a smile. “But you know next time, you should carry more cash.”

“Thank you,” I said, feeling terribly relieved. I handed him what money I had.

“So your parents are picking you up, then?” he asked.

“Oh, yes!” I told him, now talkative with relief.

“Your parents are American?”

“Well, yes, but my father is from India,” I told him, and happily explained how we had moved around and ended up moving to Hyderabad purely by coincidence. The customs officer nodded and smiled as he listened, and I felt reassured. Eventually, I finished my story and confirmed that it was okay that I now leave.

As soon as I got out of the secure area, I met my father. I told him about the nice customs officer who had let me pay a reduced tax on the electronics because I hadn’t had the money.

My father frowned.

“Did you ask for a receipt?” he said.

I blinked and said I hadn’t.

“You were conned,” he said bluntly. “There is no tax. Think about it: have you ever heard of a tax like that? And if it had been a tax, why would they let you go without paying in full? This sort of thing is common in India: people will try to trick you into giving them money. You’re going to have to learn to be more street smart. You should always ask for a receipt.”

Oh, how foolish I felt.

You Are What You Read

Posted on by Kai Raine

I’ve always been in love with books. When I was a teen, this love turned all-consuming and obsessive. It got to the point where I would go to work with my mother because her office was next to a bookstore. There I would sit all day, devouring books like my life depended on it. At the time, my mother told me, “Be selective in the books you read, because you are what you read.”

She told me that she had the experience of reading too many wartime German books that had made her depressed. Eventually, she had realized that the books were the cause, and stopped reading those books. When she described the experience, I had an inkling what she meant. I had read Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon when I was fourteen. It had pulled me in and drowned me, making me live from childhood through adulthood into old age, despairing at the futility of attempting to preserve a way of life. Even as the characters made peace with the changing times in the end, I could not. I remained broken and devastated and utterly listless for a month. This was my first experience of a mild depressive episode that I can positively identify in retrospect.

So what was the lesson, then? Stay away from books if I find them upsetting? Of course not. I don’t regret reading that book, nor the effect that it had on me. It had that effect because of the crisis I’d been going through, being (I felt) forced to adapt to suit Buffalo in ways that were not exactly comfortable to me.

I don’t feel that there’s anything I should have or could have done differently at the time. That book and the effect it had on me were profound. I am inclined to say that a part of it lives and breathes within me, nearly as much a part of me as a memory of my own life. It has guided me and continues to do so. I instinctively steered clear of heavy-seeming books for months afterwards.

Yet no light-hearted book could measure up to the force with which that book had pulled me in. Having sunk so deeply into a book so recently, the books I read afterwards were still entertaining, but also underwhelming. A part of me still craved that pull, that sense of complete immersion.

So I don’t believe it’s important to stay away from depressing books to keep from being depressed. I try to balance the books I read with the effect they have on my mind, and the effect that has on my real life. There is an effect, there’s no doubt about that. I try to take note of the ways books I read recently are affecting my thoughts and my actions. So far, I’ve not found any cause to steer clear of any type of book altogether.

Language Acquisition, or Making Little Girls Cry

Posted on by Kai Raine

When I tell a story of my childhood, I sometimes preface the story with, “Look, I was an especially slow child.” Truth be told, I don’t think that was quite true. I think I was an especially confused child with a tendency to overthink everything without even knowing, confusing myself even further. I emphasize this because a lot of trouble could have been avoided if I’d simply asked questions or admitted to not understanding more often.

It was entirely situational. In many cases, I could openly ask questions, or just flat out say, “I don’t understand.” But those were cases where I could see that it was permitted, or even accepted. The moment that a person started talking with the assumption that I of course knew what they were talking about, I would not ask.

I don’t remember my early days in Japan well enough to say whether or not I tried asking or admitting to not knowing. In many cases, it was obvious that I didn’t understand. But children are not naturally granted the ability to explain. In most cases, if I’d be confused, the other children would repeat the same words, only more slowly and loudly.

My parents couldn’t afford an international school, and I was young enough that I was just plonked straight into preschool. I’ve been told that my parents wanted to wait awhile to put me in school, but I was insistent. I wanted to go to school immediately.

They found a nearby preschool and took me there to see it. I didn’t care about anything except that I’d get to be in school again. I said I wanted to go there. My parents folded.

Somehow, it hadn’t occurred to me before I started that this would mean that I would have to speak Japanese all day, everyday. On my first day, a girl came up to me while I was playing in the sandbox and said, “Okatazuke!” I stared blankly at her. She repeated, “O-ka-ta-zu-ke!” Bored of the repeated syllables, I turned away and back to the sandbox. She went away. Momentarily, the teacher came to me.

“Clean up,” the teacher explained to me through her heavy accent, pointing to the words scribbled on a sheet of paper. At last I understood, and I obeyed. The next day, when a child went around calling, “Okatazuke!” I knew what to do. (I feel that it is important to explain that she didn’t actually speak English. She had minimal knowledge of English and abundant knowledge of children, and somehow this was enough to tide us over for the week or two when I entirely could not understand Japanese.)

I gained Japanese vocabulary rapidly, motivated by the fact that no one understood me. But there were also no rules or lessons to guide me. As my Japanese improved, other children came to expect responses from me. I would still stare at the speaker in incomprehension, but now the question would be repeated more times, with rising irritation. There was no such nuance as I-can-follow-most-conversations-but-this-question-has-a-word-in-it-that-I-don’t-know. I was expected to understand, and so I expected to understand…and felt ashamed when I didn’t.

There was a ritual that all the children engaged in when playing as a group. A child who wanted to join the group would chant, in a sing-song voice, “I-re-te!” (let me in) and the children in the group would chant in response, “I-i-yo!” (yes you can). It was like clockwork. No group ever said anything else. So one day, I decided to try. There was a sort of spinning jungle gym that we all loved: a spherical climbing frame with a hollow center, set up on a platform that rotated. We would take turns sitting on the frame and standing on the outside, running in a circle and pulling the bars with us to make it rotate.

On this occasion, after days or weeks of wishing, I had managed to seize the much-coveted spot at the very top. I was lying there looking up at the sky and enjoying spinning, tactfully silent so that when it was time to swap places, no one would notice that I hadn’t moved. My plan worked, and I basked in my success.

That was when a girl came and sang, “I-re-te!” Elated by my cleverness, I decided to try breaking the pattern. “Da~me!” (No) I said amidst the choir of “Iiyo”s.

The girl wilted before my eyes, all the excitement leaving her in a rush. Her head fell and she began to sniffle. This startled me. At no point had I expected crying. As the other children rushed to comfort her, telling her that no, of course she could play with us, I sat up from my perch. Suddenly I felt small and foolish and wished I’d been somewhere less conspicuous than the very top.

“No, don’t cry! You can play with us!” the children said to the crying girl.

“No, I can’t. Someone said I can’t.”

“Who? Who said that?”

She pointed straight at me. Another girl looked up at me. There was no accusation in her look, just confusion. It made me feel like scum.

“When someone wants to play with you, you say yes,” she explained to me. I nodded. She turned back to the crying girl. “See? She understands now.”

“Come on, play with us!” the other children were saying. I was tongue-tied with guilt. The girl didn’t move and continued to sniffle.

“Play with us,” I managed at last. “You can play with us.”

At last, she climbed into the sphere. Her eyes were still watery.

The other children were a lot less concerned with the girl’s hurt feelings than they were when they realized that I’d been skipping turns when I was supposed to be on the outside, rotating the sphere. I obediently climbed down and took to running on the outer side. The other children let the crying girl have the place at the top that I’d vacated.

She and I were never in the same class. I don’t think she went to the same school as I did after preschool. I don’t believe I ever even knew her name. But for the remaining 7 years of our time in Tokyo, I would see her near our apartment from time to time, usually with her grandmother. Even seven years later, the sight of her made me feel guilty and ashamed. I would duck my head and rush past, hoping that she didn’t remember me.

Reluctant Unaccompanied Minor, Forgotten

Posted on by Kai Raine

My mother has frequently joked that I’ve looked 32 since I was 12. (When I turned 24, I joked that by my mother’s own logic I was now 64 and the oldest member of our family. One of my sisters objected that I was misunderstanding: I stagnated at 32 at the age of 12, she said, and therefore was still 32.)

At the age of 14, I lived in Buffalo with my mother’s parents and my family lived in Hyderabad, India. I naturally visited them once or twice, traveling as an unaccompanied minor. Though this was only a trip I made once as a round trip, and then once more as a one-way trip to join my family, it was never unremarkable.

The preferred route in those days between Hyderabad and Buffalo was Buffalo -> JFK in New York -> London -> Doha or Dubai -> Hyderabad. I always ended up having long layovers, and it was excruciating. The only place where I didn’t mind being stuck for awhile was JFK, where there was a play room of sorts for unaccompanied minors: there were puzzles, a TV equipped with a playstation, various games and a few books. So of course, JFK was the only airport where I never spent any particularly long amount of time waiting between flights.

In London, I once missed my flight out of Heathrow due to a delay, and they rebooked everyone for a different flight that departed the next day and put them up in hotels for the night. But much to their distress, this was not an option for me. (Apparently it’s against policy to put an unaccompanied minor into a hotel.) They eventually settled on putting me on a different flight that left several hours later out of Gatwick. After a long, traffic-heavy trip in an airline-owned car to Gatwick with a flight attendant, I was handed off to a different flight attendant. Still, I had several hours to wait for my flight. The flight attendant explained apologetically to me that policy dictated that I had to stay with her, but they had only a tiny staff kitchen where I could sit for those hours. She told me that she would trust me to go out into the airport and come back by a designated time, and let me leave the area. I wandered around the small airport until I got bored, then spent the rest of the layover in that staff kitchen reading. (And wishing they would have just let me stay in a hotel like all the other people.)

International flights to and from Doha now principally go to and from Hamad International Airport, but at the time Doha International Airport was the default airport. This was a relatively tiny airport. Like Gatwick, they did not have a room for us unaccompanied minors. Unlike Gatwick, they didn’t even have a staff room.

I and a boy a few years younger than me, obsessed with drawing dragons in his sketchbook, were sat on the floor behind a desk at a gate while the flight attendant charged with our care manned the desk. (To be clear, neither of us was taking this flight. We sat on the floor behind the gate until a flight attendant from our connecting flight came to collect one of us and take us to our gate.)

Adding to all of this, nearly every time I was handed from one flight attendant to the next, they’d eye me strangely and ask, “You’re a minor? Really?” To which I or the previous flight attendant would say that I was fourteen and be met with shock.

To put it simply, I was not happy that I had to travel as an unaccompanied minor. Since it was a service that my parents had to request, the first time when it was a round trip, I begged them not to request it on the return trip.

“I look plenty old enough,” I argued. “I’ll be fine.”

They begged to differ, and I was again an unaccompanied minor.

On the one-way trip to India, I again begged them not to request the service, and again they decided that it was necessary. As usual, flight attendants were incredulous to hear that I was an unaccompanied minor.

From London to Doha, I was flying with 3 other, much younger children as unaccompanied minors. We were put on the plane early, and then told to wait at the front of the plane without disembarking after it landed. I did as I was told. The other children disembarked one by one as their parents showed up accompanied by flight attendants.

I stood there, waiting to be led to my connecting flight. The flight attendants kept eyeing me in a way that seemed a lot like annoyance. After the last child left and I found myself still locked in a staring match with a flight attendant, I realized that they did not remember that I had been one of the unaccompanied minors handed over to them. They were waiting for me to disembark, no doubt wondering why I’d been idly standing near the children.

I didn’t say a word and disembarked.

I revelled in getting to walk around Doha airport, going where I pleased and sitting in actual chairs, wherever I wanted.

When I arrived in Hyderabad, my father was surprised when I emerged without any escort. I explained that the airline had forgotten that I was an unaccompanied minor in Doha, but everything worked out, see? This was why there was no point sending me as an unaccompanied minor.

It was a moot point by then, but they never sent me as an unaccompanied minor again.

Veganism: Knowing What You Need

Posted on by Kai Raine

Being vegan isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. A lot of my friends have told me that they simply could not be vegan because it makes them miserable to so limit foods that they enjoy so much. I can sympathize. At times when I break my vegansim (generally for convenience’s sake), I very much enjoy the taste of the non-vegan food. But if I listen to my body, that enjoyment doesn’t last. My body begins to feel heavier and more sluggish if I eat dairy or too much meat. This serves as a reminder that veganism is right for me, and if I was wavering, provides motivation for me to go on being vegan.

But life also isn’t as simple as eating what I like as a vegan. I came to realize that there are certain things that I need to watch. I need to make absolutely sure that I get enough protein. Especially if I’m visiting someone who knows that I’m vegan, the common assumption is that I live on salads. I’m actually not all that fond of the green salad, but more importantly, it doesn’t contain most of the nutrients that I need. At such times, I have to find a delicate way to supplement my diet with something more nutritious.

Furthermore, even if I have total control of my diet, there are some nutrients that are either absent or insufficient in vegan food. I use Holland & Barrett’s Vegan Multivitamin & Mineral Tablets for this. But because I am mostly vegan, I don’t take them routinely—only when I’ve been consistently vegan for a few days or more. Because I’m not consistent, sometimes I lose track.

A friend once told me that she finds it easier to combat her depression if she has vitamin C in the morning: whether by tablet or by orange juice. I was in a shallow depressive phase at the time, and this made me think. I looked back and tried to remember the last time I’d taken the multivitamin tablets. I’d been eating consistently vegan for months, but I hadn’t had taken the tablets recently.

I took to making sure that I had orange juice in the morning and that I took a tablet a day. My depressive phase was gone in a few days. (I also developed a hilarious craving for orange juice that lasted for a few months afterwards. Friends I visited on a regular basis started stocking up on orange juice if they knew I was coming over, knowing that I would be raiding their fridge for it. I took to joking that my body was worried that I’d give it scurvy.)

I never used to pay very close attention to my own eating habits, so in some ways this has been a steep learning curve. If I’m feeling off—in mind or body—I don’t automatically review my recent eating habits to see if there’s anything I might fix there.

Sometimes changing my eating habits doesn’t do anything to help me. But I have found that it helps quite a lot if I keep an eye on it.

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

Posted on by Kai Raine

For the second half of my first decade of life, I had a reputation as a liar.

I was in my teens the first time a friend (irritated to realize that I’d been nodding along with no idea what she was talking about) pointed out that I should ask when I didn’t understand something. What a novel idea! I was in my twenties before I grew comfortable asking…and even now, I wonder if I truly am always able to ask for clarification when I should.

It doesn’t take much to imagine why this might cause problems.

On some level, in my own childish way, I was always aware that this was a problem. In later years (by which I mean ages 8 through my early teens), I would blame it on language barriers, the moves and culture shock. I even relished the feel of believing this claim from time to time. Yet I know that that isn’t really the case. I have one particular, distinct memory that has never left me, and it contradicts that notion.

When I was five years old, before we moved to Japan, my newborn sisters and I lived with our mother at her parents’ place while we waited for our visas. The visa process took far longer than we expected (months: nearly half a year in all). I had one friend and a group of kids that I remember spending time with simply because they never said I couldn’t. I seized any new potential friends. On one occasion, I went to one new potential friend’s house (with my mother’s knowledge, as I hadn’t gone rogue quite yet). It must have been my first time there. His mother was Chinese*. I can’t recall her name, but I need a name for this story, so I’ll call her Fiona. Fiona began asking me questions.

I have to emphasize that I have no recollection of why I couldn’t understand the questions. Perhaps she had an accent (to this day, some accents can render me completely incapable of comprehending English that is, I am told, perfectly comprehensible to others). Perhaps I didn’t understand the way that the questions were phrased. Perhaps I was willfully refusing to listen. Or perhaps I was so confused about what was happening that I understood the words of the question but had no idea how they configured into something comprehensible within the framework of my recently uprooted life.

Fiona’s question that began my spiral of lies, for the record, was “Are you staring school in September?”

I was four years old when my father and I visited Japan for his job interview. I went with him because my mother, whose pregnancy had recently been found to be twins, had been prescribed a certain amount of bedrest and couldn’t look after me during his trip. I was sat in the corner during his interview, but it was absolutely necessary to inform him every time my crayon broke. (Nothing is more important when you don’t have the dexterity to peel the paper off the crayon to keep coloring. Ask anyone.) My father was mad at me as a result, but I didn’t understand the cause and effect, since he waited until later to scold me for my behavior. This and a fire alarm that went off in the hotel in the middle of the night were the highlights of my first trip to Japan. It was not a good first impression.

It had been explained to me that we were moving there. My parents seemed excited enough. I was excited at first. Then my school year ended at the preschool I attended. My mother and I went to see a play that we went to see every year, performed by a local Kindergarten. I had always expected to attend that Kindergarten. I asked my mother excitedly if I would now be going there next year.

“No,” she said to me in a way that I registered as absent and irritated (not an unusual state when I asked repetitive questions shortly after my sisters were born). “We’re moving to Japan.”

That was the first time that I understood that moving to Japan meant that we wouldn’t be living in Acton anymore. The realizations came one-by-one: no more friends, no more room of my own, no more English. I learned to by myself that summer. I staged my own mini rebellion when my parents put me into private Japanese lessons: whenever the teacher asked a question I would take a sip of my drink. All this got me was a suspension of my mid-lesson drink privileges. (I abandoned my rebellion of my own volition when I discovered that there were hand games in the book. I pointed one out to the teacher and she smiled and taught me that instead.)

Despite my rebellion, I was still in the process of working out what it all meant. It wasn’t only the move: the addition of twin sisters only a few months prior had also utterly upended the family dynamics I’d grown used to. My sense of reality was utterly compromised.

So, was I going to school in September? Well, my mother was always gushing about school and learning. I didn’t know. Could I go to school in September? Maybe. I said yes.

Fiona followed up with the question, “Are you going to Maple West?” Maple West was the local elementary school. I didn’t know this. I heard a jumble of sounds that I didn’t understand.

Maybe I was tired from my crisis over the previous question and a long day of playing. Maybe I was so confused that anything seemed possible. Maybe I didn’t care as long as I could stop answering questions.

I said yes again.

Later, at home, I wasn’t hungry at dinner. (I’d just had an existential crisis over whether or not I’d be going to school. It’s exhausting, but not in a way that works up an appetite.) I told my mother and grandmother that I’d eaten at Fiona’s house. (I had. It was a packet of peanuts like you’d get in a plane. I didn’t mention that, but I assumed they knew by telepathy, as mothers always do.)

“Oh,” said my grandmother. “Was it Chinese?”

Was it Chinese? What was Chinese? Well, Fiona was Chinese, so maybe it was. I said yes.

There were a few follow-up questions (“Was there rice?”) during which I realized I’d made a mistake. But how did I explain something so shameful as misunderstanding a question? Besides, I realized, if I told them, they would make me eat. I didn’t want to eat. So I nodded along to all their questions until they let me leave the table.

The next day, my mother and Fiona spoke. I received a thorough scolding about how I shouldn’t go around telling lies. I was ashamed, but even more confused. How was I supposed to answer these questions? I didn’t know. I was already a liar. My mother was always telling me how smart I was: better a liar, I thought, than to let on that I really wasn’t smart at all.

And this was all before language and culture got thrown into the mix.

*I honestly don’t remember if she was Chinese. It could have been Taiwanese, or some completely different Asian country. My memory of geography from the age of five is questionable.

The Living Murphy’s Law of Transportation: Introduction

Posted on by Kai Raine

For about a decade from my early teens into my early twenties, I was the living embodiment of Murphy’s law when it came to transportation. Though I traveled a great deal in those years, I rarely had any trips that simply went as planned. It came to a point where my sisters would flat out refuse to travel with me, citing the fact that somehow my travel was always characterized by delays, cancellations and a great deal of unplanned inconvenience.

During these years, this was a routine icebreaker and dinner table conversation. The stories always made for great stories and a lot of laughter, and I had more than I could count. Many times, people told me I should write down the stories. I never did. A part of me was convinced that it was more or less a routine part of travel, and people who didn’t encounter these problems probably simply weren’t traveling enough.

Of course, my travel was frequently intercontinental. The longest stories came from journeys going home or to university before and after vacations. This was always a very convoluted trip, because the cheapest way was to fly across 3 continents in a minimum of 5 flights. Yet even when this was no longer the case, when I lived in Europe and would be visiting family only one or two countries away, odd complications continued to plague my travel for a few years.

At one point, I remember thinking that I really should write some of the stories down. I looked back on the recent trips I’d had and trying to work out which to begin telling. Then, suddenly, a thought occurred to me and I changed my mind. Instead, I started filtering through my memory for a single trip that had gone relatively smoothly—something that wasn’t any worse than a delay, I thought. I couldn’t remember any such trip recently.

People would talk about the annoyances of a one-hour delay that caused them to miss a flight, and I’d bite my tongue and wonder how they could possibly have been so confident in their flights being on time as to book a layover so tight that a one-hour delay would cause them to miss the connection. (At this point in my life, my minimum layover time was three hours.)

In the end, I didn’t write any of the stories down. I kept on coming up with new stories, and I told them so frequently that I didn’t see why I’d ever need them to be written down.

Then, three or four years ago, things suddenly settled down and I stopped having such problems. Now I book my flights with one- or two-hour layovers and hope for the best—and I haven’t missed a flight yet. (Excepting the one time that I misplaced my passport…)

But now I find myself thinking back to those stories and realizing that all the chaos and all the inconvenience really was very much out of the ordinary. The sheer frequency with which I wound up stuck in places where I had not intended to end up at all is, in retrospect, funnier than ever.

So now that I’m blogging about travel stories, I created a series focusing on these stories. I’m certain that I won’t be able to remember them all. But I’ll start telling the stories as best I can remember.

If you have your own crazy travel story, do post it in the comments! I love hearing other people’s travel stories even more than I enjoy telling my own!

Veganism: Why It Works for Me

Posted on by Kai Raine

Two and a half years ago, I became vegan because of the moral considerations: for the environment and for the animals. I remained mostly vegan because I realized it made me feel healthier and more energetic. If I had to pinpoint one major change that kickstarted my journey to a healthier, happier lifestyle, it was the day I turned vegan. Vegetarianism and veganism were things I’d always toyed with, but never quite committed to—until one day, when I went vegan overnight.

I want to emphasize that I’m not advocating for worldwide veganism! This is not about why veganism is great for everyone. This is about how I adopted a new eating habit and stumbled across some realizations about myself.

I turned vegan overnight because of a conversation with a very rational friend of mine, who has on many occasions functioned as my sanity barometer. In essence, I explained to him that I did not go to zoos or aquariums because I had found that I generally didn’t approve of the way that some of their animals were kept. (I have a particular problem with aquariums that keep marine mammals.) I ranted about the studies that show that animals are traumatized by the poor treatment they receive in cramped quarters.

He pointed out that that made no sense. “You would go to a zoo or aquarium maybe what, once a year?” Even less than that, I had to admit. “But you eat animal products a couple times a week, right?” Even more that that: I loved milk and yogurt, and had some virtually everyday. “Surely you see that your argument against zoos and aquariums doesn’t make any sense unless you’re also vegan.”

“Well, I’ve considered being vegan,” I told him. “But the thing is, I don’t like the idea of being that person who visits a friend’s place, or goes to a party and has all the dietary restrictions that have to be catered to.”

I don’t remember what he said at that, because even as I said the words, I heard the flaws in my own reasoning. Obviously, in that case, I could be vegan at home. I could eat whatever I was served in public while still remaining vegan in private. My reason was a ridiculous one.

My friend was insistent that I understand that he wasn’t advocating for veganism, he himself not being vegan. “I know I’d be miserable if I were vegan, and I would rather not subject myself to more difficulty than I have to,” he explained. “But I just wanted to point out that your logic isn’t consistent.”

It was true. That evening I emptied out my fridge and cupboards of all non-vegan food items. I decided I had to make a clean break, or else I might decide “Oh, but I can just get a little of this” and I would fail to uphold my new decision before I had ever really begun. I took the non-vegan food items to this friend, who was concerned.

“You know that I wasn’t trying to tell you that you had to be vegan, right?” he asked me.

“No, I know. It wasn’t you; I convinced myself.”

That evening, I made an Indian dish with lentils, rice and vegetables. I bought soy milk and tofu. That weekend, I looked up recipes for vegan pancakes and muffins and burgers, and anything else I could think of that I might start to crave.

To my own surprise, I didn’t have any cravings for non-vegan food for months. I was excited about the new recipes and I couldn’t wait to find all sorts of new ideas and new foods to cook. For about 6 months, I was strictly vegan.

During this time, I realized that I suddenly had energy like I’d never experienced before. I wanted to be active and move around and go outside. Previously, I’d very much been an indoors person. I still enjoyed my indoor time and my quiet time, but I also wanted to be doing more and going out more.

Over the months that I’ve been mostly vegan, I’ve worked out that this is mainly an effect of removing dairy from my diet. I haven’t gotten any medical tests, but I have come to realize that dairy just doesn’t agree with my body. Somehow, a little bit of dairy in my food has the effect of making me both physically and mentally slower and fatigued. There were minor stomach problems that I used to have habitually that I no longer have ever since removing dairy from my diet.

I have no doubt that at least part of this change came from simply the psychological effect of making a mindful choice to care about what and how I ate. Not having had any real medical tests, I couldn’t say if my reaction to dairy is lactose intolerance, a mild allergy, or something else entirely. I do, however, know that I am happier and more active by simply eliminating dairy from my diet, so I keep that up consistently.

With regards to meat and fish, I’m more fluid. I steer clear of red meat all the time, unless I’m in a place or situation where it’s difficult to work around that. I’m more forgiving of eggs and chicken if the chickens are what I call “happy chickens”: raised with plenty of space and good food and sunlight. Fish I frequently incorporate into my diet (this was a concession I made within the first year so that I would be able to continue to eat Japanese food), but I try to ensure that I only eat seafood that is caught in a sustainable way.

Having read this, one might think, “So you’re not vegan at all, really. You’re mostly just dairy free.”

True, I don’t stick to a strict vegan diet, and I don’t keel over with guilt at the thought of eating meat. It’s more of a guideline than a strict rule. But I do make an effort to remain vegan as much as possible. The effects of meat in my diet aren’t as pronounced as the presence/absence of dairy, but I do feel like I’m happier when I’m eating vegan.