I had Atul Gawande’s “Being mortal” in my kindle library for a long while now but I’ve only read it a couple of weeks ago. I wasn’t even sure what is it about, and only remembered that it was really talked about online when it was first released, along with “When breath becomes air” (which I read back then and loved). I have read my fair share of depressing books and books on mortality, so death is not necessarily a topic I shy from, but somehow I just didn’t feel compelled to read it.
Until now. Overall, it is a truly depressing book. It is one thing to read about death, another thing to read about the potential long suffering that may come with age – the period when death is definitely imminent but we just do not know when, when we start to slowly lose control of our bodily functions and even our sense of self as our brain starts deteriorating.
I have a deep fear of having to face the ageing of my loved ones, and reading this book definitely didn’t lessen it. But there is an inarticulable effect of being closer to the topic. It is like having skeletons in the closet: there is a fear of the actual skeletons and then there is the fear of opening it. Because I am afraid to open it, I avoid it. The more I avoid it, the more the fear haunts me in the background.
I realised that I actually bought the book in 2019. I don’t remember why. But it is interesting that it took me 6 years to feel like reading it. I think I finally read it because I have become the person who is capable of reading it.
Most of the time, I still feel like a child. I think ironically being forced to grow up fast in many ways stunted my emotional growth. There is chronic trauma of having to endure things that a child is not equipped to deal with, so my innate response is to develop an avoidant personality. I was made to cope with so much that I don’t want to cope with anything. My life just seems like a never-ending journey of coping.
Yet there are many things that I do now which I had found impossible to do in my younger days. I think my psychological capacity has widened considerably, though it is still relatively small. I am more willing to face certain realities, but I still have a ton of escapist tendencies. I am aware I am escaping though, so that awareness increases my subconscious psychological burden.
I can’t help but feel like I will always feel like a child. That I would never be capable of growing up. But finishing the book made me realise that I did grow somewhat. It gave me hope that I would somehow continue to grow, so I will be able to cope with grief, loss and regret when the days come. I would also like to become more compassionate, because resentment is causing a large part of my suffering. There are some relationships in my life that could be better if I am a better person, but I know I simply can’t at this point. Just like we can’t will plants to grow faster, I can’t will my psyche to transform. This is one of the hardest things I had to accept: that I can’t instantly be the person I wish to be. I have tried, and it just doesn’t work that way. What we cannot contain would eventually bubble up in hideous ways.
Understanding this has made it slightly easier for me to understand other people. We can only be who we are capable of being at that moment. I can only put myself in conditions I think will be beneficial for my inner-growth, and then hope for the best. But even that is limited to my self-knowledge, and to the stimuli I am exposed to.
I think this is why I like exercise. Something that was previously unendurable becomes endurable over progressive training. Just like we can slowly train our bodies to lift heavier weights, would my psyche be the same? That one day it will slowly be capable to carry all the weight I have been avoiding so far? Will it be too late by then?
This morning I was watching a youtube video on a famous comic artist’s sketchbook, and I caught myself thinking that I have such a weird relationship to drawing. Here I was: fascinated with someone’s analysis of someone else’s sketchbook – but why? I have an obsession with sketchbooks/sketches. I like looking at them, I obsessively collect books on them, I envy people who can fill up theirs. But I personally don’t enjoy drawing.
Me being me, I can’t help but psychoanalyse my own behaviour. I don’t enjoy looking at all types of visual art. I am fond of sketches or ugly drawings in particular. The more refined an illustration is, the less connected I feel. Sketches in sketchbooks are in its own genre. They are a window to the artist’s psyche in that point in time. I mean all art is, but there is a rawness of sketchbooks that draws me in.
Maybe I envy and desire what I cannot have. I sketch occasionally, in concentrated bouts and then I stop for a long while. It doesn’t come easy to me, I have to practically force myself to do it. I see it more as a zen practice than a hobby or something that I enjoy. I do it because I dislike it. I wish I enjoy it though. But why? We don’t have to practice the art we enjoy consuming. Just because I enjoy looking at good cinematography doesn’t mean I aspire to be a cinematographer. I enjoy watching people play the violin, but I have zero desire to learn it. What is it about drawing that provokes this deep sense of envy?
I can only guess? I *think* for me, drawing connects us to something very primal and raw in our subconscious. It requires imagination and spontaneity, and it is a form of play. When I look at people’s sketchbooks I sense their connection to their imagination and their ability to be spontaneous – the capacity to readily access something deep inside them in order to express the material on a sketchbook. That ease. Wow, what would I do to gain that ease.
Despite my constant vomitting of words on this website, I see myself as someone who is very creatively blocked. This sounds weird coming from a former designer I know. But the type of problem solving that is required from a designer is very different from the spontaneous creativity of a filled sketchbook. Most of the time in design, there is an obvious problem to solve. Art however, is not a problem. It is attempting to access something that is not of this material world. It is also an internal process of freeing our selves. It is letting ourselves play.
I am terrible at playing. Once my therapist asked me to roleplay, and I was like NOPE over my dead body. I hate that sort of thing. I also dislike any form of games in a group. I also really dislike listening to any type of festive songs. The list goes on and on.
I just wish I am that sort of person who is able to fill up a sketchbook and enjoy the process of doing it. I can fill up a sketchbook if I really put myself to it, I am really good at forcing myself to practice a routine if I believed it enriched me. But it would be a torture. And each time I complete a spread, I feel utterly exhausted.
Is this something that is out of reach for me? I don’t know. I do think a lot of it is due to practice. Drawing perhaps can become enjoyable once we hit a skill level threshold. But I feel like there are people who enjoy even the difficulties of learning something, and my pathological demand avoidance just makes it difficult for me to want to do anything hard. It feels like a mountain I can never climb and I can only gaze longingly at it.
Apart from practice I think there is a neurological growth component to it, at least for me. I am slowly getting better at doing things that require patience and repetition, but I think I am still not at a point where I can enjoy the slowing down drawing requires. But who knows about the future? I think it is better to keep it in my peripheral vision than to assume I am simply not that person and can never be that person. I have learnt it is a mistake to judge our future based on the knowledge of our past.
I tend to hyperfocus on my interests and then one day I’ll just lose interest as quickly as I gained them (thinking about at my untouched cooking books). But somehow this obsession with drawing seem to be lasting quite a while. I think I’ve never had such a challenging relationship with something I am interested in. How strange is this.
Yesterday I checked-in on swarm (yes I still use that app) at Loft, and the app reminded me that I was last there in 2018 with my partner:
I had zero recollection that I had ever been there. What was immediately poignant was that there is data of my partner’s presence with me, all the way back in 2018. 2018 feels like eons ago, yet in some ways it still feels recent. Like many people, 2020-2023 just felt like a black hole.
In 2018 we were in tokyo for just a night while enroute to kyoto. Out of curiosity I went to look at the photos I took:
Kyoto 2018
There we were, still fresh faced and somewhat carrying some innocence. We’ve been talking a lot about ageing lately: from our worsening eyesight to our fluctuating body temperatures in perimenopause. How the pandemic has changed the both of us. How we took it slow in kyoto back then because we felt like we had time, how every trip now is frenetic because we have no idea when our world is going to change dramatically again.
Even back then in 2018 I felt the urgency of impermanence, so I kept trying to tick off my bucket list while I could. Kyoto was one of those place I felt we had to go. Only on hindsight in 2025 I am glad we made it then. Now we can no longer feel as free, the weight on both of our souls have dramatically shifted, and we can no longer eat indoors (I love to eat, so this is a huge loss for me).
For adhd people there is a concept called body doubling, where just getting another person present with us will make completing tasks much easier. Having my partner is like being in permanent body doubling mode. Life and existence are both difficult for me. My partner makes everything more tolerable. There are many things that are easy for other people to do but difficult for me. She understands this and supports me in the ways she can. Early on in our relationship I told her I want to spend my prime years travelling as much as I can because I am not sure how long I would live or when I’ll be called to fulfil other responsibilities. Hence she has just been here with me: going to places I want to go, doing the things I wish to do. She knows what I lack and she is the only person in this world that not only does not hold this lack against me, she holds and nourishes it. I have been living like a person on a borrowed timeline, and again she is the only person who honours it instead of mocking or dismissing it.
Hiroshima 2023
Seeing the pop-up from swarm, it occurred to me the extensive amount of memories we have built together. Wherever I have been, she was there with me. My memories are essentially hers and vice versa. We are able to fill gaps in each other’s memories. My life is basically hers. It isn’t all sunshine and unicorns of course. We annoy each other with our own quirks. We remember all the terrible things about each other. There is a ton of intimate information we have of each other that can be weaponised against the other. A relationship is a continuous elaborate dance between two people. Sometimes it feels like how can it be so easy! Other days it feels like this is impossible.
Yet like some miracle, after 114 months we are still together. Because our younger selves treated our time together as precious, we took a ton of photos and documented a ton of our time together. 114 months later with the knowledge I’ve acquired between then and now, I am so glad that my younger self was able to see ahead of time, sensing the sacredness of impermanence. That was how and why we are able to build this repository of memories, and it serves as such a deep reserve for our ongoing relationship, and for enduring future times.
What a wonderful thing it is to be known so deeply and widely, to remember and to be remembered so intimately – all in the process of ageing together.
I think jeju has become one of my favourite places to visit. I thought I’ll share some of my favourite memories and things:
friendly forest trails
So the story goes: we tried to do a “beginner-friendly” hike at Khao Yai National Park – we barely lasted fifteen minutes before my partner grew uncomfortable with some sensations on her legs. Turns out she was getting bitten by leeches…she wore pants and shoes and the leeches still managed to get up to her calf. We ran out of the trail and acknowledged that we are just not hikers.
Until jeju, I guess. They have a few of these forests with boardwalks. Some parts of these are even wheelchair friendly. We do have boardwalks in Singapore but the ones in jeju lasted the entire trail.
olle trails
The olle trails are my favourite thing in jeju. They circle the entire island. I just love seeing them and their hikers so much. The story of how they began is even more amazing. A journalist hiked the road to santiago, and felt like her hometown should have a trail as well. It is incredible this amazing well-run trail network was founded by a citizen, and she is a woman.
oreums
Oreums are found everywhere in jeju. They are less easy to hike, but still doable. Some parts can be really steep, and I felt like I almost had to crawl on all fours. There are many amazing views to be had along the way, and on top.
tangerine trees
Tangerine trees, tangerines, and tangerine-themed souvenirs/food are everywhere in jeju. We saw countless farms while driving, and stayed in an airbnb surrounded by tangerine trees.
persimmon trees
Persimmon trees are rarer, but when I see them it is like living in storybook.
green tea fields
It was a must to visit Osulloc tea museum as a matcha latte fan, but I would honestly say: go for the views, not the matcha latte. However Innisfree next door is worth visiting for affordable skincare and I really enjoyed a ham sandwich with peanut cream.
coffee with a sea view
There are plenty of cafes around jeju that has a pretty seaview. Many were gimmicky, but I enjoyed them nonetheless. It still feels incredible to be sipping warm coffee right at the beach.
ridiculously large cafes
My camera doesn’t have a wide enough angle to capture how large are these cafes, or maybe I am just a bad photographer. Most of them are just there for instagram photos, but we had a great meal at one.
ridiculously cheap seafood
I love abalones, and they are very expensive in Singapore. In jeju however, I had abalone pasta like any common dish, and these five grilled abalones cost less then S$30. In Singapore we get them mostly canned, so it was such a treat to have them fresh.
mackerel sashimi
Apparently it is not easy to eat mackerel sashimi because it is prone to spoilage, and jeju is one of the few places to eat it. I am not a fish person but I have been curious about korean sashimi for a very long time. Surprisingly this wasn’t fishy. I would love to try more korean sashimi if I have the chance.
amazing bagels
I never thought I would eat a bagel in jeju and proclaim to my partner: “best bagel in the world!”. Maybe it is just my personal taste. These bagels are baked in a pizza oven, and they are so soft and chewy.
haenyeo
I am a long-time admirer of haenyeos. It was a surprise to spot one in the wild, though it made me sad to witness an elderly woman dive around for seafood. It isn’t common for haenyeos to dive alone due to the potential danger, so I don’t really know what was going on. She did seem to be communicating to someone on land.
I am not sure if I’ve covered them all – I did this in a rush because it is sunday (my writing day) and I was out the entire day today. However I think sometimes it is just better to do rushed things than to lose momentum. Feelings are still fresh because I have just left jeju, so I wanted to share them as soon as possible without dragging it out.
[tw: suicide] Saw from an acquaintance’s feed that the author Baek Se-hee had passed away at the age of 35. The cause of death was not published, but considering her history and that she’s korean (due to copycats the korean media doesn’t mention the word) – the internet public made their own consensus.
The first moment I came across her book “I want to die but I want to eat tteokbokki”, I knew I had to read it. I remember thinking to myself: how can such a book title exist (as a society we are usually too hesitant to publish such a string of words), and how can it feel so resonant? I too, want to die but I still want to love my partner, see the world and eat a ton of good food. Maybe it is a good(?) thing I still have some hedonistic desires, and that I am still capable of love. It is an extremely dissonant state, to still want to do a ton of things and yet perpetually feel that desire to cease. I often feel like a hypocrite, but I am beginning to accept that I contain multiple selves.
I thought it was a poignant that I was in korea when this happened. Somehow: being surrounded by the culture and the land of tteokbokki. I have been feeling very disturbed after knowing the news. I tend to be disturbed whenever this happens, because of how close it hits. One of us, one of us.
I cannot help but wish she could have hung on a little more. 35 is an age when we begin to psychologically mature. There are a lot of things that can feel unbearable in our 30s but may become insignificant when we enter our 40s and beyond. Yet I too get upset when people tell me to hang on. I’ve done so much hanging on that sometimes just the thought of hanging on for another second feels completely exhausting. It is easy to tell someone to hang on when we are simply not that person. We do not inhabit their brains and bodies and do not know how much they are actually suffering. I can try to articulate my feelings as much as I can in words, but it is essentially a very lonely journey. Even as a chronically depressed and suicidal person, I cannot pretend to understand someone else’s journey and suffering.
What I can write and say for myself is: this is a condition that has no end. Just when I think I am getting better I spiral into a different, deeper hole. The only way to survive this is to completely and truly accept that I have to co-exist with this pain and sadness. But the thought of having to endure this for the rest of my lifetime is so oppressive. I cannot detach from my brain even for a single second. It feels claustrophobic.
I wouldn’t lie or pretend. One of the reasons why I spend so much time travelling as much as I can possibly do so, is so that I can escape my mind. Even just for a few moments. I get mesmerised by new experiences. I am granted relief just for a bit. But that bit makes all the difference. But just because I am able to seek such relief doesn’t mean that other people can too. Maybe for some people there is just no escape.
I often think that without my partner I may not be here today. It makes a significant difference to have just one person who tries to understand. At least she understands enough to tell me she would never want to inhabit my brain. But I must acknowledge meeting love is a rare thing in this world. For others it can be difficult to endure this lonely existentially painful journey.
These few days I had found myself wondering hypothetically: what if I was born in a tribe in a remote place where everybody was sullen? Would I still feel depressed? How much of this existential pain is caused by feeling alone, odd and helpless – that everyone else seems to be coping and thriving, except you?
I wonder if it would feel easier to exist if this is something that can be openly shared and discussed without fear of negative repercussions and judgement. Is there a world where a painful existence can be worth enduring for? How can we make it less existentially lonely? Was there anything that could have been done to lessen Baek Se-hee’s pain?
What pushed her to the brink? After all she wrote two books about her decade-long journey in therapy. But maybe this is the thing. We tend to believe there must be a trigger. Yet perhaps the accumulative exhaustion of having to endure this is enough of a reason. I wish there can be ways that we can take mental breaks from our selves (I guess in some places some chemicals may help). I myself often joke with my partner that I wish I can shut myself down for a couple of days. Sometimes what I want is not a complete end but just a respite. People get sent to dark places when they cannot even get a single second of respite.
I think as a society we are sorely lacking in giving people the psychological support they need. We cannot even express these thoughts without being judged. Therapy is expensive, and it is challenging to actually find a good compatible therapist. There is no infrastructure to deal with people’s psychological issues. We have to stop labelling people with psychological health issues as weak, and see psychological health as essential as physical health.
We are really not there yet, as a species. I am not sure if we would ever be, looking at the state of the world today. But perhaps at the very least, what we can do individually is to acknowledge our own struggles with our psychological health, so we can learn to acknowledge others’ too.
I’ve written before that I tend to be an over-optimiser: I think a lot of it is due to existential anxiety – that the time is running out hence I should fully maximise whatever opportunities I have in the present. Travelling particularly triggers this desire for optimisation. The effort taken to fly over to a new location is tedious these days because we take quite a number of covid precautions, the time is limited in that place, who knows if we’ll be able to visit it again considering mortality and impermanence (my favourite two words these days) – so I want to do whatever I can to maximise the things I want to do while travelling.
Unfortunately even for travelling the outcome is the same. Trying to optimise too much will lead to a sub-optimal experience. I do know it intellectually but I cannot help myself.
Jeju has been one of our bucket list items for a long while. We are korean tv fans, so we want to visit a place where it has been so heavily featured in their media culture. We chose to come at the beginning of october because it is supposed to be perfect weather.
Sadly due to climate change it is now middle october and 28 degrees celsius. 28 degrees celsius in singapore is actually cool weather, but over here it is searing hot. The weather app says it is 6 degrees above the average daily high. I have learnt from this experience that in future I should check the trends for the specific past few years instead of the past decade or so.
I realised for me travelling is really a continuous test for equanimity. I can try to make the perfect plan in my head, but reality tends to have other plans for me. I could get very frustrated, or just focus on experiencing the present. I should meet a place where it is, instead of wondering why is it not adhering to some fantasy in my head.
Thankfully jeju is a place that makes it easy to be present. I saw a tangerine tree for the first time in my life, and it was such a wonderful experience.
I remember being so amazed seeing a giant turtle in hawaii once, and a friend who lives there was amazed that I was so amazed, because to him he sees them all the time. But we hardly have turtles or fruit trees in singapore, so in some ways we are lucky because we experience wonderment a lot when we travel. There are so many things the locals take for granted which we would go gaga over. I guess we take many things in singapore for granted too, but I would like to believe that seeing a tangerine tree evokes some primordial profound feelings versus experiencing the clean and efficient state of singapore.
Apart from the searing hot weather we also accidentally stumbled upon Chuseok season in jeju. It was not only chuseok, there were public holidays before and after, so for roughly 10ish days jeju was swarming with people. Again I tried to look at it from a different perspective: that being able to witness what chuseok is like in jeju is also an experience in itself.
Still we were able to find pockets of moments and trails where there was virtually nobody around. In fact I was glad to see another human appear in the horizon because I tend to ironically feel claustrophobic when I cannot spot anyone else.
Once in a while I am able to position my camera fast but not fast enough to capture something like this:
Again we don’t really spot large birds in singapore or at least it is not easy to spot one in our very urban environment so I was awed. I am glad that despite my chronic existential depression I can still experience some awe.
Despite the weather we were still able to do some hikes that were relatively sheltered. Hiking in singapore is almost always a hot and humid experience. But with forest shade coupled with 25 degree celsius weather made the hike feel rather cool. People were wearing long sleeves, pants and sweaters. I guess jeju takes the concept of forest bathing quite seriously, because there were loungers peppered everywhere for people to soak in the atmosphere:
We were forced to purchase socks to complement our teva sandals because apparently there are snakes??
We see a ton of people hiking in this hot weather nonetheless, some walking the long olle trails that can be 20km long. It is quite fascinating to bump into fellow hikers in a remote location because we are all walking the same trail. I have this huge fascination with the olle trails, but I’ll probably leave it for another post.
This wasn’t the trip that I’ve imagined, and I can still be caught occasionally lamenting to my partner how we should have arrived just a couple of weeks later. I know, I am just a chronic grouch. But it is still a deeply enriching experience, especially if I could manage to be more mindful and experience what it is really in the moment. I feel like I am on a continuous life lesson: there is just something about travelling that makes the experience more provocative, I guess we can’t help but be on auto-pilot when we are in a familiar environment.
Maybe when I can finally meet a place where it is, I can also meet myself where I am. I am still pretty far off on that journey though. I guess it is precisely that I am again lamenting that I am pretty far off from where I want to be is evidence that I am still unable to meet myself where I am. Yet I continue to walk, and it is through this willingness to move that brings me closer to knowing myself as a person.
My partner commented that I am the only one who likes to take photos where the subjects are quite zoomed out, so I thought I might as well lean into it:
I just think there is so much meaningful context surrounding the subjects. Maybe this is how I perceive life in general too, and maybe that is why my mind is always exhausted.
The past few weeks I haven’t been recovering well from my exercise. I thought it was perimenopause or something, but upon examining my journal entries I could trace it back to one bad night of sleep. Its effects cascaded into several days after, manifesting in fatigue and headache. I do think perimenopause is also affecting it.
The morning after I didn’t sleep well I still went for my scheduled 5km run. Previous experience had taught me that I would probably feel like shit after but I would possibly still recover within a day or two. But this time round I didn’t recover well. My morning hrv was low for the next few days.
I think age is catching up with me.
I lived a very unwieldy life from childhood till my 20s, which had lasting consequences even till now. So I compensated in my 30s by developing the discipline to keep habit streaks. I would feel deeply uncomfortable or disappointed in myself if I broke a streak. When I first started running I went from being totally untrained to running every single day for about 90 days. I was lucky I didn’t end up with an injury.
I tend to over-optimise my life and decisions, also an overcompensation that resulted from under-optimising my life when I was young. I try to exercise as much as I can, so that I can hit optimal fitness within the time given – at least based on theory. When travelling I’ll try to pick the most optimal stay in terms of comfort, value and location. I’ll strategise how I use my credit cards in order to maximise the miles earned.
But lately I realised hyperfocusing on optimising is ironically making me live a suboptimal life. Because I want to maximise my exercise time even on days I am not in an optimal state I end up falling ill. Or I’ll spend so much paralysing over a decision because I want to make the best decision possible that I end up wasting precious time of my life. The desire to over-optimise for certain things because of some traumatic phases in my life has caused me to become really inflexible in many ways. I have been missing the forest for the trees.
Sometimes we are just locked into a certain mode of operation because it has served us well for a time period, but we don’t realise we can stop operating that way because our life, circumstances and selves have changed.
I have to accept that I am getting older, and my body will be shifting its limits as I age. Things I could comfortably do before will become harder. Maybe I cannot aim for ultimate fitness, but I can aim for being as fit as possible for chronically ill women within my age group. Sometimes I can seem so well I forget that I am actually chronically ill. I can be pain and migraine free for long periods of time, but it is always lurking in the shadows, threatening to bubble up whenever I am not careful enough.
I used to eat really low carb to manage my migraines, but as I started to exercise more and gain more muscle I slowly started to notice that it was hampering my recovery. My body was also struggling to support an ageing reproductive system while being in ketosis.
I learnt that in health, there is no one optimal way of being. We could optimise for one part of the body and yet the same intervention is at odds with a different part of us. For example, I can optimise for cardiac health and have very low supposedly healthy fasting glucose numbers but feel like shit because my reproductive system demands more. I once read somewhere that nature and evolution just wants us to reproduce, even at the expense of our overall well-being. So my theory is that it favours a slight energy surplus so that it can support any potential pregnancy. But if we over do it and have metabolic issues we cannot be fertile either. Health interventions are almost always on a spectrum: too little is bad, too much is also bad. But people who are health conscious – myself included – can be very black and white.
How does one find the middle ground, the sweet spot? Research and scientific journals may not help either. They may be behind time, or only for a specific demographic. I have also since learnt that people can respond very differently to the same intervention because of genes. Yet medical and health advice is dispensed as though one size fits all. I do think healthcare will be increasingly customised in the future if we survive the climate and virus apocalypse. It seems to already be on the way there for some areas, like cancer treatments. Unfortunately, this is where economic privilege makes a huge difference.
Though I seem to be writing about health or practical matters in life, essentially I think it boils down to developing some from of self-knowledge and creativity flexibility. This applies to the more abstract areas of life too, like in our creative practice.
Perhaps this post is an example. Sometimes I get into a very fixed mindset that I should only focus on one topic. But so much in life overlaps and impacts one another. My consciousness is also always burdened with overlapping concerns, so why should I consciously restrict myself just because there is a mainstream belief of what is right and better? To me, life is a constant repetitive process of freeing ourselves from our inner prisons.
Some of our internal baggage is obvious and heavy, and paradoxically that makes it easier to work with. But there is some baggage that just seems innocuous so we don’t really notice them or think that they are hampering our life, yet we are slowly being injured by a thousand paper cuts. Going back to the subject of optimising – it is something that is traditionally perceived as positive, but it can become an invisible block.
I guess it is a good thing that I am even noticing this instead of being in autopilot mode. There have been recent times when I have caught myself being hyperfocused on optimising, and suddenly I become aware of it. It is still not easy to break out of old behavioural patterns though, even with increased awareness. My mind still defaults to thinking that habits and routines are preferred, even if I am actually physically suffering in trying to keep to them.
Sometimes at the age of 44 I still can’t help but feel like a baby learning how to crawl. That I am encountering something new about myself, and I have no idea how to manage or respond to it yet. There was simply no such mental flexibility when I was young, because I was so heavily conditioned by the mainstream beliefs of society. There was no sense of self to say that hey I don’t actually want to do this, let me do something else instead. One positive thing about getting old is the capacity to say no, even to our selves. That the brain becomes more open to possibilities in a different way.
When we are young, we are naive and idealistic, so we think anything is possible. As I get older, I am less prone to unrealistic thinking and hence I am definitely more close-minded in a way. However, still I have seen enough of life to know that shit can get weird sometimes, the world is more diverse that we can ever know, that things that used to sound so frightening or impossible are actually not that scary and can be possible, pursuits that were appealing are no longer so, that as we know ourselves and the world better new doors can open too. Maybe the most liberating of all is that 99% of opinions do not matter so feel free to go our own way (within legal reason).
With recent times, things have gotten even more uncertain: doctors and scientists can also be ignorant, politicians are untrustworthy, the earth seems to be on her last legs according to climate data etc. It seems pessimistic. But like the zen master likes to say, it is with uncertainty and impermanence that there can be creative possibilities. If things are certain and fixed then we will only be inclined to do things a certain way.
My ageing body too, makes everything more uncertain. If I have to see the silver lining I guess it would be that I can now finally learn to be more flexible as a person. I hate to admit this, but most of the time people simply won’t change unless push comes to shove. I guess I got shoved, and now I am forced to start a new journey.
Everyone seems to know that exercise makes us healthier but I think it is still an abstract concept to most people. It is still being associated with aesthetic value – looking lean, and there are more important things in life than to look lean. Not everybody is interested to test the limits of their body, to know where it can go. The idea of running being able to run 5km without huffing and puffing is not appealing to everyone. Maybe most of us just want to be able to walk. To complete our day’s tasks. To be present to our loved ones. Spending a few precious hours each week to improve our body seems like a vain thing to do. Developing the capacity to run seems nice to have, but frivolous.
But I’ve learnt: the point of exercise is not to “improve” the body. It essentially maintains it. When we are young everything is fine and dandy. Our body is kept in almost perfect homeostasis. The natural effects of ageing however, puts us in a chronic negative loop. The more we age the more errors start happening in our body, the less we are able to recover, and hence more of our biological resources get depleted, resulting in a chronic diminishing capacity to cope with stress and energy demands.
The right amount of exercise creates a positive feedback loop: it is stressful for the body, so the body responds by growing more mitochondria to cope with it:
Conversely, without enough stimuli, our strength and energy capacity start to shrink. Negative stress like illnesses and stressful events coupled with the effects of ageing will dwindle them down if we don’t do anything about it.
The amount of energy we can use each day is finite. If our aerobic capacity is compromised, just walking around is enough to deplete us. Imagine if we are able to run 5km and not feel tired. On the days we are not running we are barely dipping into our energy capacity.
This applies to strength as well. When we are able to lift say 20kg without breaking a sweat, this means that the daily mundane chores of carrying things around will not tire us much. Previously, even carrying 1kg on my back for 30 minutes would tire me significantly. Since lifting a significant amount of weight doesn’t feel too strenuous to me now, I can walk around with a much heavier load without feeling too depleted. There is just more capacity to work with, and it takes a lot more to reach breaking point.
Somehow we tend to associate energy as though it is part of our character, or that we can simply will energy to flow from our body. People with very little energy are perceived as lazy or weak. It is very much a physiological state, and a lot of it can be determined from birth. We can’t expect someone with very little muscle to lift 20kg of weight no matter how much will power they have. It is the same with our aerobic energy, which fuels most of what we do. If we have very little mitochondria left, we cannot make them generate more energy than they are capable of no matter how much positive thinking we can have.
People with chronic illness is stuck in that negative energy loop. Which is why traditionally the recommendation is to exercise. The process that makes more mitochondria is not the exercise itself, but recovery. But people who are chronically ill lack the ability to recover, which is precisely why they are chronically ill. The more they attempt to exercise, the more mitochondria they are damaging, the less and less capacity they will have. The body is essentially stuck in a vicious cycle when chronically ill. Till today, medical professionals don’t have a good idea on how to reverse this negative loop.
I was able to get myself out of this negative loop with the support of traditional chinese medicine (tcm), which philosophy is to get the body back to homeostasis, not just addressing the symptoms. Yet most people think tcm is hogwash.
I was someone who lived with chronic fatigue for a very long time. I lived an extremely sedentary lifestyle with an extremely bad diet in my 20s. Coupled with chronic stress I became chronically ill in my 30s. It took me almost a decade to get better. Being on the other side I am now experiencing what it is like to be fitter, to have that extra reserve capacity to deal with the energy demands of life. I was never this healthy before even when I was much younger, because I was never taught how fragile is health, and what being healthy truly means. It is not just about avoiding illnesses and pursuing longevity, but it is about being able to cope with what life throws at us. If we are always feeling tired it is difficult to handle any form of stress. And life is extremely stressful, even if one loves their job and social life there is still stress. Our body doesn’t care if we like or enjoy the stress. Stress is stress to the body, and if we don’t do anything to circumvent it we will eventually pay for it.
Stress kills mitochondria and since everything is stressful – even eating is a form of stress – we have to actively grow our mitochondria so that if our daily life and ageing kills some of them, we still have some left over. If not, the threshold to burnout is very low – a single unfortunate event can push us over the brink.
This is also why I don’t like to get sick. Illnesses are extremely stressful for the body, even mere colds.
Hypoxia, infections, inflammation, mutations – all can alter flux patterns through the Krebs cycle, with a knock-on effect that switches on or off hundreds or thousands of genes, changing the stable (epigenetic) state of cells and tissues. Tissue function eventually becomes strained, biosynthetic pathways falter, ATP synthesis declines and the delicate web of symbiosis between tissues begins to fray. And so we age. – Nick Lane, Transformer
Viruses like covid send us into a chronic negative loop. If we are unlucky we may not be able to break out of it. We can’t take for granted that the body is always able to recover. It is not just about stopping the negative symptoms, but to be able to go back to the state we were in before the illness. It is not that easy to grow mitochondria, and a single bout of illness can set us back permanently. Sometimes the negative loops are invisible, and the effects take years to manifest. People who were infected with HIV or the Epstein-barr virus didn’t suffer their consequences until many years later. Viruses are a leading cause of various cancers. But we don’t know these things.
We only know this abstract concept named, health. We don’t know what it actually takes to truly possess it, or we would cherish it way more.
This past week my partner fell sick — not covid as far as we know (we tested) but it seems like a more severe flareup of her MCAS. She hasn’t been this sick since her first MCAS flare when she had to be on a low histamine diet for almost a year.
I know it sounds dramatic, but the moment we knew she developed a fever it felt like our lives flashed before my eyes. I had no idea if this fever would end up to be innocuous or something more sinister. Co-incidentally I was also reading a blog of a former lawyer whose life suddenly changed because of dengue. Again these events made me feel very keenly how fragile our health and life can be.
The current instability of this world serves as a chronic perpetrator of anxiety for me. It is like we don’t really know if an event would be the trigger that cascades the collapse of civilisation, or is it just another terrible event among the many terrible events happening every day. I feel like we are living in the end times, but we don’t know how dragged out the end is going to be. There is a lot of uncertainty, so as usual I find solace in reading buddhist philosophy.
It is a pessimistic way of living, though I would insist that I am simply being realistic. Sometimes I too wonder if I am constrained by my own pessimistic biases of life and human nature. But the steady stream news and scientific research seems to be affirming my pessimism.
In many ways my lifelong pessimism is a gift. Since young I’ve been having the attitude that I am never going to know when life will change or end. So I have always sought to live my life to the fullest — as full as a depressed person can muster — often making what seemed like reckless decisions. But only upon hindsight these reckless decisions turned out to have brought so much to my life.
Living this way is very anxiety-inducing. I have not yet developed the equanimity to face reality head on. Maybe I make it sound like as though I have a choice. The truth is I just don’t have an alternative mode of operating. I just cannot seem to disassociate from reality like most people can. I would have been a monk if I had been born in a different era.
I am a person full of sadness but within me I am also growing a sense of fullness. I get glimpses of it once in a while. It is not constant. I feel like this sense of fullness is only possible because I have been living life on its edge, not having the passive confidence that there will always be tomorrow. Thankfully and miraculously my partner is on the same page so we both try to pursue this ephemeral sense that we are truly living.
There is only now. I find myself thinking this more and more these days. I cannot make long-term plans. Sometimes I plan for a trip merely a couple of months in advance and it makes me nervous. Will I be able to go? I don’t know who is suddenly going to get sick these days.
Sometimes I question my sanity but there is a part of me that knows. Life has proven me uncountable times that things always change. There is no sense of safety. Maybe it has to be this way, at least for me. If safety is guaranteed would I be inclined to do the things I have done?
Perhaps it is not a bad way to live like there is no tomorrow (coupled with some moderate sense of responsibility). Even if we do make it to a ripe old age, this would propel us to live mindfully and fully instead of being on autopilot. This is how we have loved each other for the past 9 years, and it is because we have loved this way, there is also that sense of fullness in our relationship.
There is a poignancy when there is no guarantee of tomorrow. It brings us closer to the moment. We both feel like we have had a good nine years together that we can be truly grateful for, so if shit was to really happen it would feel like at the very least we did experience a lot. To ask for more would make us seem greedy. This seems like a good position to have, living in a world like this. To know we’ve tried to give it our all.
