Author: Kai Raine

The Necessity for Internal Strength

Posted on by Kai Raine

The sad reality is that no matter how much I try to stay afloat and happy, there are times when circumstances align and create really sucky days. But sometimes, it just takes one or two wrong comments at the wrong time, and I’m locked in a dungeon in gloomsville for a week.

For me, the worst of these are unexpected left turns in social situations. An unexpectedly negative comment about something I’m excited about, from someone I thought would be excited for me. A sudden outburst directed at me that seems strangely disproportionate to what started it.

Events like these can take my day from somewhere between OK and mostly happy straight to the land of gloom and I-can’t-write. These generally take place in the morning or evening. Similarly to the reason why I can’t exercise in a depressive episode (the exercise creates a racing pulse and heavy breathing reminiscent of an anxiety attack, which triggers an actual anxiety attack), I already have low energy, and with the onslaught of distressed and/or sad emotions, my body can misinterpret this as depression, which becomes an actual depressive phase that I struggle to shrug off.

So what do I do about it?

Well, it depends. The most direct approach is a conversation with the person. I can confront them about why their words are upsetting. But this, I’ve found, only works with certain people. Some people get angry, and not having the energy to fight back, I get pushed further into the ditch. Other people get overly apologetic, compelling me to comfort them, which again drains me and pushes me further into the ditch.

I could make the argument that in the long run, it’s worth having this discussion anyway, even if it is potentially distressing. But in this context, I’m talking about a scenario where I would have to sacrifice my mental well-being for awhile in order to sustain that discussion. That is never a choice I would consciously make. My policy is always do what’s best for me first and foremost. Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to end up spending the day in a daze, just trying to make the unhappy feelings go away.

What I need is internal resilience. That’s far easier said than done.

I find that it helps to remind myself that the other person’s words and/or actions were very likely not just about me, but largely about them. I find it helps even more to ask myself, “Why did this phrase bother me so much?” And then to follow through on that train of thoughts. Very frequently it will lead me to a self-revelation of an insecurity or a fear, and with that brought to the forefront, I can begin to confront it directly and try to work through it.

Sometimes it helps to talk it through, though I’m increasingly finding that this puts the train of thoughts in the hands of someone else, which can make any useful self-revelations take longer than they would if I worked through it by myself. That said, there are times when solitude only makes it harder to see clearly, and a second pair of eyes truly helps.

Reading and My Mother

Posted on by Kai Raine

If there is a reader in my life who taught me to relish the written word and my time immersed inside a book, that person is my mother.

An avid reader herself, my mother spent a large part of my childhood reading books that she would then set in front of me so that I could love them, too. Somehow, my mother always had an uncanny knack for figuring out what sorts of books I liked and procuring more of them.

This was especially pronounced in my early childhood, when my mother and father would both pick out books for me at the library, and I found that I often gravitated more towards those chosen by my mother.

I learned to read using a kit called Hooked-on-Phonix that my parents gave me the summer we spent at my grandparents’ house before we moved to Japan. That Christmas, right before we moved, my mother gave me Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie. With my father busy in his new job and my mother was busy looking after my new sisters, being read to became a luxury. So I learned to read to myself, and I learned quickly.

At first, being in Japan meant that access to new English books was rare. It was years before we borrowed the subsequent books in the Little House series from someone and I could finish reading them. By that time, I had somewhat passed the target age group and was finding myself less drawn into the stories.

Eventually, we discovered that the American School, which was in reasonable biking distance, had elementary school, middle school and high school libraries that we could access. For the eight years that we lived in Japan, the American elementary school library became my primary source of books.

I began frequenting this library on my own when I became addicted to the Nancy Drew series though we only had three volumes at home (courtesy of my mother, of course). I then discovered that many of the books were available at the American School. The librarian used to call me the Nancy Drew Girl, long after I’d read all volumes by the original author and determined that I didn’t enjoy those parts of the series written by (an)other author(s), and therefore was no longer reading Nancy Drew.

My mother also introduced me to Harry Potter when I was perhaps five or six years old. She was waxing poetic, so I read the first chapter and a half or so. I was unimpressed and didn’t pick it up again until I was nearly or had just turned seven. At that point I devoured it with an obsessive enthusiasm, joining the ranks of children who secretly waited in vain for their Hogwarts letter all through their eleventh summer.

(Side note: I still don’t like the formula used in the first chapter of a few Harry Potter books, including the first. Namely, the formula where the first chapter is full of characters which the reader either never really knows or will come to know later, only there to set a scene and atmosphere. Reading such chapters, there is generally a certain lack of engagement that I feel, woven into the writing because the author is implicitly letting you know that this is not your main character. Now that I know and can usually identify this formula very quickly, I breeze through these chapters, entirely disengaged, just waiting for the next chapter to begin. While I understand the appeal of this formula and even use it on occasion in my own work, I find that for me, it’s a formula that’s a lot more fun to write than it is to read. Which is why, to date, I’ve ended up cutting every use of it out of my own work after writing it.)

The only time that my mother and I had a serious disagreement about a book was over Bleakhouse by Charles Dickens. I was eleven or twelve years old, and my mother decided that it was time for me to graduate from the fantasy novels I was devouring and turn to more serious books. Some of the books she gave me at this time were well worth reading (Bridge to Terabithia and The Giver, for example). But one that I didn’t understand―and still don’t understand, in the context of my age at the time―was Bleakhouse.

I suffered through the entire first chapter (which, fifteen years later, I still summarize as “it was stormy and windy”). When we reached the second chapter and the prose was still meandering on the subject of a senseless family feud and how very senseless it is, I put my foot down.

“What’s the point of any of this?” I demanded. “Is there even a story?”

The answer was yes, but the book took so long to get to it that by that point I was utterly disinterested in it. My mother gave up and never suggested another Charles Dickens book to me―in fact, that became the last book she ever told me to read. After that, her recommendations were conveyed to me as recommendations rather than as orders.

My Longest Flight and Longest Night

Posted on by Kai Raine

When my family was living in India and I was attending university in Alaska, I usually had to take a minimum of five flights to get from the start of the trip to the end. After my first semester, when we booked my flights around the semester and then had to pay booking change fees when we knew my exam schedules, my mother decided to send me back to Alaska on a one-way ticket so that we could book the next round trips around my vacations rather than around my semesters. That one-way trip was the only time when I had only four flights, and it was a terrible experience.

My route went as follows: a domestic flight from Hyderabad to Delhi, followed by an excruciatingly long flight from Delhi to LA (via London, where it stopped for fuel). From there I was to fly to Fairbanks via Seattle.

Since I was a child, I had loved long flights. I loved the chance to watch movie after movie or immerse myself in a book, and later, once I had my own computer, to do whatever I liked for a hours at a time with no distraction except flight attendants bringing drinks and food.

This flight was long enough to put a dent in my enjoyment. For one thing, there was no personal entertainment system. Normally, this was endurable; this flight, however, was nearly 24 hours in duration.

It was, unfortunately, made even longer by the fact that we were delayed several hours.

Worse still, after we landed in LA, it took me a solid two more hours to make my way through the slow-moving, pushy line of immigration (just the memory is enough to inspire gratitude for those automatic terminals that they’ve been using for the last few years).

Naturally, by the time that I made it through immigration, it was four or five hours after I was supposed to have landed, and my connecting flight had gone. There was a line of people being rebooked before they went out of customs, so I joined the line and waited another hour.

Of course, once I reached the front of the line, I was informed that because Air India had nothing to do with Alaska Airlines and my tickets had been booked separately, I had to go talk to Alaska Airlines instead.

Air India and Alaska Airlines were two terminals apart, and the terminal in the middle was under construction, and therefore deserted and dark as I rushed through it, ignoring the shadows in my imagination.

Naturally, Alaska Airlines informed me that because they were not affiliated with Air India, they were not responsible for my delay and I would have to rebook. After running back and forth through the deserted terminal and even (out of sheer desperation) trying tearing up and declaring, “But I’m only seventeen, I’m a Minor!” I could elicit no sympathy. At last I conceded and rebooked—for the next morning.

I contacted my mother and let her know, as a friend of hers was supposed to meet me in Seattle. She asked me if I wanted her to contact a friend of hers who lived in LA, who was my sister’s godmother. I told her that it was only eight hours or so, hoping that she would insist. She didn’t, and merely wished me a good night. I said goodbye and hung up so that she wouldn’t hear how my throat was closing and my eyes were filling with tears.

I had a large backpack, a computer bag and a large suitcase. I felt a marrow-deep exhaustion that I’d never experienced before, much less from a plane trip. I saw people sleeping in seats, huddled around their bags to keep them from being stolen in their sleep. The terminal was deadly silent, except for the occasional snort or snore. Occasionally, I would see someone laying on their side with their eyes open, following me as I walked, and I felt terrified. I tried to arrange myself and my bags in a seat to sleep, but my suitcase and backpack were too large for me to keep a hold on them. I could do one or the other, but not both.

The fear mounted with my exhaustion, so I went to the bathroom. I locked myself in the handicapped stall, left my suitcase and backpack against the wall and hung my laptop bag on the hook, and sat on the toilet and tried to sleep. It was by far more comfortable than any location I’d tried before, but every sound of a person entering the bathroom startled me into waking and I wasn’t resting at all.

After half an hour that felt like a day, I gave up and wandered around with my bags until at last, I found an outlet in a hallway with no seats at all. Perching myself on top of the heating vent, I called my mother’s friend in Seattle.

She talked with me for perhaps half an hour or an hour, until my phone was running low on battery (I couldn’t charge it and talk at the same time). I felt safe while I was on the phone, and was terrified to hang up, lest the exhaustion and the terror come rushing back. Fortunately, it didn’t. I plugged in my laptop and wrote stories until the dawn finally arrived and the terminal started groggily coming back to life.

I had a croissant and slept on my flight to Seattle, where I ran into a friend from university and my mother’s friend came to meet me for a scant half hour or so before I had to go back through security to my next flight. I was (somehow) perfectly chipper and energetic by then.

(But on occasion, the thought of flying into LA still fills me with a sort of remembered sense of horror.)

Exercise: Breaking Out of a Lifelong Rut

Posted on by Kai Raine

Ever since childhood, I haven’t been very athletic. I always preferred to curl up with a book or a puzzle over any outdoor activities. Even when sports were required at school, I was always among the slowest runners in my class, or even my grade. I was on a swim team for awhile as a teen, but I was always the slowest or second slowest swimmer on the team. The only “exercise” I could do with any confidence in my own ability were table tennis and skiing. I also enjoyed swimming and dancing, but all four of those activities were difficult to access with any sort of regularity.

At some point, I realized that exercise had become something that I associated with general unpleasantness: pushing my body into exertion knowing that I would only get sweaty and uncomfortable (and probably look ridiculous doing it), knowing that I would be terrible at it. I knew that if anyone was around, surely they would scoff and mock me for my sheer inability to run fast enough or long enough, or the way I’d keel over after what to anyone else wasn’t very much exertion. (Unfortunately, the mockery I’d experienced throughout my childhood and teenage years had created certain expectations in me.)

In short, I had come to dread the prospect of any sort of exercise. As I’ve mentioned before, I also was unaware for a long time that I had anxiety, and couldn’t explain why the prospect of doing anything that got my heart rate up was sometimes an extremely psychologically tumultuous experience. But even after identifying this problem, while it did give me a defense at long last, I couldn’t find a way to effectively exercise. I also couldn’t find the will to try very hard to learn to like something that I knew I hated and could never remember enjoying to begin with.

The change began with my sister’s invitation to do a 30 days of yoga challenge on YouTube with her. We lived an ocean away from each other, but she suggested we do one video a day “together.” It was exactly what I needed. The idea that it was for my mind rather than my body got me over my dread of exercise. The instructor Adriene was soothing and offered enough alternatives for people with varying degrees of flexibility, which helped me by letting me simply enjoy the movements and the poses and the breathing without getting caught up in my lack of flexibility or weak muscles. The prospect of doing this “with” my sister kept me going even on days when I didn’t necessarily have that much will to exercise.

At first, I only did yoga in little bouts of a week or two, only to forget or lack the time for another week or two before resuming the habit again. But little by little, I grew more comfortable moving in my own body, and I grew more comfortable with its abilities and limitations. I came to enjoy exerting myself through yoga. Before I knew it, the sheer dread I had once felt at the prospect of exercise had faded away into a light pulse of nervousness.

Storytelling and My Father

Posted on by Kai Raine

If there is a storyteller in my life who taught me to love every part of creating stories, that person is my father.

My father would make up stories for me all the time, and would frequently pull me in to help him create the story (though I would have been perfectly happy listening to him simply tell me a story). He would make up stories based on things we had seen or talked about. Eventually, I started craving repetition: not the same premise told a dozen different ways, but one story, told in a certain way.

I had two favorites. One was a story about a baby bird who falls out of his nest while his mother is out finding worms to eat, who then sets out looking to find his way back to his tree. The other was a story about a raccoon in the US and a Koala in Australia who become pen pals through messages in bottles thrown into the ocean.

My favorite game was also a game we called Friends, which was essentially a game of pretend. We would pretend to be somewhere else, and pretend to explore that place or play there. I have one particular memory of playing Friends at the Beach when we were at the top of a mountain. Another parent may have said, Why don’t we play Friends on the Mountain, so that we can enjoy being here? But not my father.

In fact, my father was frequently attempting to engage my imagination in ways that sometimes seemed to distress others. For instance, when someone would read me a fairy tale or show me a Disney movie, and they would tell me at the end that “They all lived happily ever after,” my father would point out, “No they didn’t. What about the stepmother?”

I don’t recall whether he did this with me as well, but when my sisters were young, he frequently told them variations on fairy tales, perhaps becoming the catalyst that kicked off my love of adaptations of fairy tales and folklore. I have a particular memory of his version of Cinderella, in which the stepsisters and stepmother are kindhearted and Cinderella is the antagonist. This is perhaps one of the reasons why I so enjoyed Alex Flinn’s Bewitched, which told that same story, but making the stepsister far less altruistic and more human, crumbling under her step-sister’s self-victimization and manipulations.

I didn’t recognize my father’s skill in storytelling until, one day when my father was gone on a business trip, my mother offered to read me a book and I asked her to make up a story instead. I awaited her story with bated breath―and was underwhelmed when she told me about an episode where a girl watches a baby’s diaper being changed. The twist―“That girl was me!,” ended my mother―did nothing to improve my opinion of the story. I asked her to tell me stories two or three more times afterwards, but it was always the same: an episode out of her own childhood with no arc, and neither a beginning nor an end. (Essentially, things happened, but there was no story there. Funnily, my mother was capable of telling engaging stories out of her childhood, but only if it happened naturally over the course of a conversation and she couldn’t seem to call up these stories simply in the name of a story.) I learned to ask my mother to read to me and to ask my father for the made up stories.

Eventually, there came a time when I tired of the same repeated stories and asked for new ones. My father would tell me that he would tell part of a story if I would continue it for a time, then he would pick it up again. I remember a story we were making up this way, night after night, until one night I was making up a scene about a few of the characters (various animals) running up a downwards escalator in a mall at Christmastime when I realized that I could no longer remember how the story had begun. I also realized that I had no sense of the story trajectory any longer. Immediately, the whole venture seemed pointless. The following night, I asked my father for the story about the raccoon and the koala. I began to resist attempts by my father to draw me into storytelling: I would think of the animals running up the downwards escalator and think of the pointlessness of it all, and didn’t want to repeat that experience.

After my sisters were born, storytelling between my father and myself became a rarity. As I grew older and learned to read, I discovered a whole world of stories, and the father-daughter tradition of storytelling died out altogether.

No One Needs to Know Who I Am

Posted on by Kai Raine

When I was in university, I went through a phase that lasted about half a decade where I was extremely cynical of strangers wanting to know who I was or about my life.

This was in the late 2000s; I had finally acquired a Facebook account and learned that anyone could Google me and acquire more information about me than I necessarily wanted to provide. I’d always been somewhat talkative with random people I met on public transportation, beginning with a nice man who sat next to me when I was 6 and flying alone for the first time. Now I was growing more wary of offering any identifying information about myself to strangers. My name in particular is so unique and identifiable that I decided it was best not to give it to strangers. Sometimes I offered alternative pronunciations of my name; sometimes I used fake names.

It quickly turned into a game of playing pretend. I wouldn’t contradict any assumption made about me. I also didn’t want to explain my whole life story to random people, so I would pick a country and find ways to make it sound as though I was only from that place without actively lying.

It was a fun game.

But this also created more distance between me and the people I met. The conversations were fun, but I never stayed in touch with any of them. If anyone gave me their contact information, I threw it away. I never really remembered anything meaningful from the conversations. During, I was busy spinning my own tale and only superficially listening to the other person’s side of the conversation. Once we parted, I would forget everything: my own story and the other person’s.

I eventually stopped doing this as a rule because it began to feel tedious and burdensome. I was doing it in large part because I didn’t want to make conversation, I realized. It was all well and good as a strategy as long as it was fun, but once the fun was gone, there was no more point in continuing this, I thought. In that case, it was far easier to answer in monosyllables and communicate through non-verbals that I wasn’t interested in conversation. If I choose to make conversation with strangers, I now figure, it may as well be either sincere or enjoyable. Sometimes, it’s even both.

Veganism: Pancakes

Posted on by Kai Raine

Sometimes, I have down days and just want to not have to think about anything. Pancakes are a great way to start days that are already taking an effort.

Vegan pancakes are insanely easy to make. If you’re feeling particularly low-energy, just mix together 1 part flour and 1 part non-dairy milk and fry it up in some oil. It can be as simple as that.

But if you think it’s worth the time and effort, vegan pancakes can be extremely delicious: better, in my opinion, than their non-vegan counterparts.

This recipe from Ceara’s Kitchen is one of my favorite recipes, and the one that made me fall in love with vegan pancakes in the first place.

This recipe from One Ingredient Chef is a similar version, though slightly more work in its use of flax egg.

And this recipe at All Recipes isn’t quite as elaborate as the two above, but still delish!

Each of the recipes above can also work in waffle irons. 😉

(Is this a cop-out of a blog post, you ask? Perhaps, yes. But as we’re headed for about a month’s worth of introspective, long-ish posts, I could use some pancakes.)

Language Acquisition, or the Endless Lie

Posted on by Kai Raine

One fateful day in second grade, I was at my rambunctious friend Snowy’s house with two other girls. We sat around a table and a question was asked of me in a teasing voice. I was mostly fluent in Japanese; I drew blanks much less frequently than I had even a year before. Still, I didn’t want to admit to not understanding the question at all. I couldn’t even try to make sense of a part of it to guess at its meaning.

So I turned to my friend Shino and asked her to answer first.

Snowy and I weren’t especially close at the time, having been in separate classes for over a year and not having spoken for most of first grade after she deemed me a liar unworthy of her time. Snowy and I had always been more of fellow outcasts than close friends anyway, so I’d recovered and found myself another friend.

We used to spend hours at her house, drawing different versions of the Sailor Senshi from the comic and animated show Sailor Moon. But her father had been transferred to Indonesia at the end of first grade and she’d moved away. I’d been alone again for a time.

Making friends was particularly hard in second grade, because the teacher weirdly singled out myself and one other girl as her “favorites.” I was selected because I was foreign. The other girl Belle was in voice training and had an amazing singing voice. She sang a capella to the entire school and parents at sports day and a few other occasions: a role created especially for her because she was such a talented singer.

I went to Belle’s house to play with her a few times, but we didn’t quite have the chemistry to become close friends. She also didn’t have that much time after school, since she took classes like calligraphy and voice. I may have even resented her a little for having been singled out for her talent, where I was only singled out because my existence was a novelty. Belle shone under that teacher’s wing. She was the first to learn to recite the multiplication table. Her penmanship was exquisite (and this was very important in schools I attended in Japan). She was poised. And she could sing. I, on the other hand, was never better than average in anything.

I floated around for a few months, playing with various classmates from time to time but never really developing a connection. Then I became friends with Shino. Shino was a sweet, pretty girl who had been in the same class as me for a year and a half by then. We had never had any noteworthy interaction that I could remember. I wasn’t socially conscious enough yet to be aware that she was fairly popular among the other children in our class.

One day in the second term of second grade, the two of us had just gotten off lunch duty, returning our class’s lunch tray to the kitchen. We started playing a game in the hallway, tagging each other and running to the other end of the hallway, then trying to run back without letting the other tag us. We weren’t supposed to be running indoors, and a teacher passing by scolded us, but laughingly and indulgently. We apologized to the teacher. We stopped running and started talking.

We became fast friends. Finally, I had someone that I could honestly call a friend.

There was a duplicity in Shino that I wasn’t wise enough to see at the age of eight. She was wonderful to be around when it was only the two of us. But when others were around—especially girls—she seemed to become more plastic: she smiled and was nice, but never stood up for me. It never occurred to me that this was odd.

So that day at Snowy’s house, when I turned the question to her, Shino smiled sweetly and redirected it to Snowy instead.

Snowy shrugged and gave the name of a boy in our class.

This was a boy I’d never taken any particular note of. He was extremely good at sports and among the fastest runners. He was always cracking jokes and wore flattened, blackened slippers, since he couldn’t be bothered to take the time to put his heels into the indoor uwabaki slippers we all wore inside. I’m going to call him Kasanova, Kas for short.

So Snowy named Kas.

“Oh really?” gasped Shino. “Kas for me, too!”

“Me too,” said the third girl. “Kas.”

Now it was my turn to answer, but I still had no idea what the question had been. All I knew was that all the other girls had named Kas.

So, “Me too!” I said, widening my eyes and looking between them. “Kas!”

And then as they began to talk about him, it dawned on me what the question had been: “Whom do you like like?”

The next day at school, during a study hour in the library, Snowy announced loudly, “Kaaas!! Kai likes you!!”

Kas glanced at me (he looked a little puzzled) and I ducked my head back into my book. He turned away, apparently completely unconcerned. The rest of the class snickered while the librarian shushed Snowy.

I was seething. You like him, I wanted to say. You and the others all like him! I couldn’t admit that I had lied. I couldn’t out the others, because that would make me just as bad as Snowy. Shino was there, laughing lightly along with the others, but sending me an apologetic look. The anger left me: I couldn’t expose her in front of everyone.

So I said nothing.

Oh well. I supposed I’d best like Kas, then.

For the next two years, even after my friendship with Shino was reduced to a pile of ashes, I maintained the fiction that I liked Kas. At some points, I even convinced myself that I liked him. He was athletic. The other girls liked him. It wasn’t a bad option. I liked Kas. Over two years later, on the very day I transferred to a new school in fourth grade, my “feelings” for Kas vanished and I only felt relieved. Even after two years of faking it, there still wasn’t a single drop of genuine feeling there.

Twenty years later, reminiscing over drinks, my friends Rilla, Windy and I realized that every single one of us lied to each other about who we liked in the third and fourth grades. We laughed and commented on the idiocy of our childish mindsets.

Congratulations, You’re a Mother! Wait, What?

Posted on by Kai Raine

When I was sixteen going on seventeen, my family made one long, extensive trip to see many of our family and friends in Japan and the US. Because my parents had work and therefore less flexible schedules, they returned home to India first. But my sisters and I wanted more time on the trip, and our parents agreed that we could return a little later.

We would be flying back to Hyderabad from Chicago, with an overnight layover in Singapore. My mother had a friend in Singapore who would be meeting us there and taking us to the hotel where we’d be staying the night, then back to the airport in the morning. This was my first time flying alone without the unaccompanied minor service, though I don’t remember if this was because my parents had conceded to my argument that I was well-traveled enough to render it pointless, or because whichever airline we were using considered me too old to qualify. Either way, I was in charge with my twelve-year-old sisters in tow.

Our last stop was with my Italian godfather who lives in Chicago, who defies the combined stereotypes about Italians, godfathers and Chicago by leading a perfectly ordinary life and being a perfectly lovely person.* My godfather took us to the airport. He had intended to come through security with us, but they would not allow him through because his keys were too pointy; they also could not hold onto his keys for him, and of course he couldn’t simply abandon his keys. So we said our farewells at security and my sisters and I headed to our gate.

When we reached the gate, they were announcing that the flight was overbooked and asking everyone to come to the counter to check their bookings. I told my sisters to take a seat and took our boarding passes and passports to the counter. They asked me if we would be willing to rebook to fly to Singapore via Tokyo instead of Hong Kong.

I probably should have flatly said no, but the prospect of Japan was a lure of incomparable allure to me. Sure, we’d only been to Japan a few weeks prior. But I hadn’t been back for 3 years prior to that (it felt like an eternity at the time—how naive I was), and I didn’t know when I’d get to go back again (not for another 9 years, as it turned out). Even if we were only in the airport, even if it was only an hour or two, wouldn’t it be nice just to be able to speak Japanese a little more?

The lady behind the counter saw my hesitation and pounced. She spoke of vouchers to give us significant discounts off our next flights.

“Someone’s meeting us in Singapore,” I explained to her. “I don’t know how to contact him. We have to arrive at the time we said we would.”

“That’s not a problem,” she assured me. “The flight from Tokyo only arrives five minutes later than your current booking.”

I was still hesitant.

“I can give you seats together on the other flight,” she continued to hedge. “You would have to be seated separately otherwise.”

I folded.

I had one other reason for conceding. The flight was supposed to have the sort of layover in Hong Kong where some passengers disembarked and some new passengers embarked while the plane refueled, but everyone heading onwards to Singapore remained on the plane. My sisters were extremely susceptible to motion sickness, and a part of me thought that maybe it would be better if it was two shorter flights with a break to walk around an airport in the middle than to have one long flight with a break in which we had to remain in our seats. Whether or not I consulted my sisters’ opinions I don’t remember; but I suspect that in my teenage arrogance, I made the decision unilaterally.

She reprinted our boarding passes, gave me 3 discount vouchers and belatedly informed me that we had to hurry as the other flight was already boarding. So it was: all the way on the other side of the airport.

So I collected my sisters and we ran through the airport, back through the illuminated tunnel and reached our gate just as they were boarding the last stragglers. There we encountered a hitch: the lady who had reprinted our boarding passes had misprinted them. She had printed one of my sister’s names twice, and the other one not at all. After some brief confusion, the flight attendant realized that there were, indeed, 3 seats among us even if there were only 2 names. She let us on.

Once we reached Tokyo, I took the boarding passes to get reprinted with the correct name. We hung about in bookstores and concession stands in the airport while we waited for our connecting flight. My sisters were already not feeling well. After an objectively underwhelming, subjectively tantalizing hour or two in Tokyo, we boarded our next flight.

After we had boarded, one of my sisters informed me that she felt sick. The other one added that she did, too. I pushed the flight attendant call button. When the flight attendant arrived, I asked her if she had any sort of medication for motion sickness. There was a flurry of activity as flight attendants conferred with each other and peered with concern at my sisters, who were looking distinctly unwell. In particular one English-speaking man and one Japanese-speaking woman kept coming and asking more questions and expressing different concerns.

They had no medication, and there was talk of letting us off the plane if my sisters were too sick to fly. But my sisters decided that they could brave the trip and we took off, though the two flight attendants continued to keep an eye on us.

Now, as I have mentioned before, I looked far older than my age. (“She’s looked 32 since she was 12,” my mother used to say.) Meanwhile, my sisters did and still do look far younger than their age. They still tell me countless stories of odd looks and incredulous comments that they receive when trying to purchase alcohol, despite being over the legal age limit.

I had never specified to either flight attendant that these were my sisters, and in the stress of sitting between two ashen sisters, it didn’t occur to me to wonder at all the questions the Japanese-speaking stewardess was asking me about the difficulties of twins until she asked, “Is their father still around?”

I blinked. “Yes,” I said. At last it dawned on me that she thought I was their mother.

I continued conversing with her without missing a beat. Though I don’t recall outright lying, I never outright informed her that no, these were in fact my sisters, and she never seemed to catch on.

When we eventually landed, we were among the last to disembark, and then we all went to the bathroom. This meant that we were among the last to leave the secure area for our flight, and all passengers from the Hong Kong flight were long gone. Our mother’s friend had apparently been frantically calling our mother (who expressed a complete lack of concern and assured him that fifteen minutes was hardly cause for concern) and asking the airport personnel for information.

This adventure quickly rose to the ranks among favorite dinner table conversations in our family.

*Because this is the internet, I feel that I must make it absolutely clear that this is a joke: I don’t subscribe to any stereotypes about Italians, godfathers, Chicago or any combination thereof. My godfather, meanwhile, is in fact a perfectly lovely person.

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.