Winnie Lim

My migraine has finally broken – it is like a fever, sometimes it goes on and I can only hope it’ll break soon. I still feel remnants of it, but I am well enough to feel human again, mostly.

Migraine episodes make me want to reevaluate everything in my life, because I feel so powerless that I end up resenting myself for not making better use of my time when I feel healthy and well. Some time last year I started to wonder about a future where I will always be dealing with some chronic condition, and if so, how can I still maximise my time? Yet I can’t overdo it, it has to be a fine balance, because running around like some headless chicken is also one of the surest ways to trigger a migraine again.

I asked a friend yesterday, if she would still live her life the way she’s living now if she had only six months to live. This is why I have very little friends. ;P

I thought about the question myself. Putting more of myself out there opens more doors, different doors, and me being me, I just want to walk through all of them to see what lies beyond. Then the inevitable happens, I get sick, and I am like, why do I do this to myself, again?

If I only had six months to live, I’ll still be doing mostly what I’m doing now. Trying to write as much as possible, to tell as many stories as possible, to think of as many different ways to tell these stories, to share as many ideas as I can, to connect deeply to as many people as I can.

I weigh the tradeoffs, I feel them keenly. Sometimes packing up for a long journey means not being able to bring five suitcases along. I have one backpack, and I have to keep it light. That means having to let go of some things which are dear to me. Sometimes that means recognising some things are better off in someone else’s backpack.

The hardest thing to do, is to discern which is which.

I have begun to develop this new thought, this new possible framework for myself. Someone once told me that the right things are never too much of a struggle, and there is such a thing is trying too hard. This is what the Tao Te Ching is all about (apparently it is Jack Dorsey’s most prized possession).

And so the wise
share without cutting,
square without sawing,
true without forcing.
They are the light that does not shine.

Do, and do wrong;
Hold on, and lose.
Not doing, the wise soul
doesn’t do it wrong,
and not holding on,
doesn’t lose it.

(Ursula Le Guin’s translation)

I’ve been writing more over here. I’ve also been journalling everyday for almost 100 days now. Somehow it is different, what gets expressed when I write it solely for myself, and what comes out when I know this is going to public, even for a small bunch of you.

I guess everything is always a work-in-progress, and for now, I just want to do things that bring joy to me, and sometimes…the struggles worth struggling for, often doesn’t feel like a struggle. They are hard, but it is more of a wow, running a 42km marathon sounds insane but I am going to feel such a rush after running it, versus the I am going to feel like a terrible human being if I don’t run this marathon and I really, really, dislike running so why am I doing this to myself…

They sound almost the same, but they are not. Having the wisdom to discern, makes all the difference.

I am nursing a tiny cold and a tiny migraine, and I shouldn’t be writing when I’m sick because I end up sounding like a grumpy old person. Then I realised it is my public journal, so I can sound like anything I want. I’m always conscious of trying to hide some part of myself.

I stumbled upon the Earth Hour event at Marina Bay yesterday with a good friend. They were showing videos of the Indonesian forest fires, and I found myself uncontrollably tearing up. I consider myself environmentally aware but I wouldn’t call myself an environmental activist, so I was surprised by the velocity of my tears.

There’s so much of my existence where I am like – I really have no idea why we’re doing this to ourselves. If we logically think about it, it is insane, we are insane. We destroy what was gifted to us, we dehumanise ourselves, make ourselves behave and work like industrial cogs and we all pat ourselves on our backs for being successful.

Articles like “50 ways to being a successful millionaire” makes me want to gag. It is really saddening that most of us think that hoarding power and/or lording over other people is the best way to display our humanity.

So sometimes I think the question isn’t why I am chronically depressed, but rather it should be, why am I still alive. I look at this world and I feel like I want no part of this nonsense. I feel like I am tainting my soul by just being in this for one more second.

This is what being sick makes me feel. I am not sure if I am being unusually negative because I am sick, or it is when I am sick that the delusional optimism strips away and I actually become more realistic when confronted with the powerlessness I feel as a sick person.

But I think of myself in my youth – times when I had felt truly powerless, and yet enduring it has given me some sense of agency…that if I wanted to, if I believed, I could direct my life consciously.

And sometimes, or maybe, most of the time, change is not linear. It ebbs and flows, it goes in cycles, it silently creeps up on us, and then it seems like we’ve achieved a momentous milestone overnight.

I would still like to believe, humanity is still worth protecting. We have had exceptional souls who have demonstrated to us what we could be. I have seen in our kids, how much love and wisdom they can carry even in their very young age. We have countless people working invisibly for us. Saving lives. Seeing the unseen. Elevating the underprivileged. Protecting the earth. Fighting relentlessly against stone cold walls, at the expense of their personal lives and liberties.

There are people, among us, who are willing to sit in a jail for decades of their lives in order to do what it right.

And then, at the other end, there are people who will not hesitate to kill us (and themselves, stupidly) indirectly with their short-sighted decisions over our natural resources. I’m not only upset over the forest fires, because at the very least that is visible damage…it is the chronic damage we’re doing to ourselves that is more upsetting for me.

Our kids are our future. What are we doing to them by slowly squeezing the joy and life out of them?

I was at Gardens by the Bay yesterday, and I was telling my friend in jest while pointing at an air-conditioned dome. That is our future, I said. Living in these domes. Because the sun will get too hot, the air too polluted. We’re looking at a future – assuming we get lucky by not drowning to our deaths in floods – where we will no longer enjoy the natural life-giving warmth of sunlight, the life-sustaining freshness of air, all of which we take so much for granted today.

The next time you walk out in the sun, bask in it. Take a breath of oxygen and remember what it feels like.

That’s what we will miss, when we become successful millionaires and our kids have deep-learned themselves to become straight-A students.

You know how sometimes it is really uncanny how everything seems to colliding?

I have been watching Grey’s Anatomy after reading Shonda Rhime’s Year of yes – particularly the number of times she referenced Cristina Yang:

“She stands face-to-face with the man she almost destroyed herself loving. She’d once lost herself in his orbit, revolving around him, desperately in need of his sun. She’d made herself smaller to accommodate his greatness. Now she has surpassed him. And he is paying his respects…I realize why Cristina’s journey can end. I realize why it is time to let this character go and be happy for her. Cristina has learned what she needs to know. Her toolbox is full. She has learned to not let go of the pieces of herself that she needs in order to be what someone else wants. She’s learned not to compromise. She’s learned not to settle. She’s learned, as difficult as it is, how to be her own sun.”

“During my darkest hours, my quietest saddest moments, my loneliest times, writing Cristina Yang fortified me.”

“Cristina Yang. I gave her my ambivalence about marriage. I gave her my passion for work. I gave her my love for something greater than any romance, something that draws her focus more than any guy—a creative genius floating forever out of reach that she will never stop trying to capture.”

“Cristina Yang made me brave. I thank her for appearing out of the ether.”

I mean, how can a writer be fortified by an imaginary character she herself has created? It turns out even I, as a viewer can be fortified by an imaginary character someone else has created.

Today, I caught an episode where Cristina Yang’s husband was trying to tell her why they should sign their divorce papers:

“We should never have gotten married in the first place. When we did, we took something beautiful and we put it in this box. For the last two years, all we have done is beaten against those walls and teared each other apart.”

I laughed. A seemingly random episode that occurs after watching something straight for nine seasons, serves to reaffirm a string of thoughts which have been the most salient in my head.

It is not about marriage, love, or anything. For me it is everything. To have been putting myself and other people in boxes. To fit myself into people’s boxes. To make people fit in mine. To stay in boxes out of love, loyalty, obligation. It reduces me, it reduces other people, it reduces the world.

All I am now, all I seek to do, in the increasingly blurred lines across my work and myself, is to try to get myself and other people out of boxes.

If I didn’t watch Grey’s Anatomy I would have appreciated “When breath becomes air” a lot less. I have found myself unexpectedly familiar with his depiction of his surgical resident days and his neurosurgeries:

“The pain of failure had led me to understand that technical excellence was a moral requirement. Good intentions were not enough, not when so much depended on my skills, when the difference between tragedy and triumph was defined by one or two millimeters.”

When faced with his diagnosis:

“We would carry on living, instead of dying.”

On moral duty:

“Moral duty has weight, things that have weight have gravity, and so the duty to bear mortal responsibility pulled me back into the operating room.”

On his respect and gratitude towards his doctor, Emma – why it is important to be a human being above your job:

“She had always kept this part of my identity in mind, even when I couldn’t. She had done what I had challenged myself to do as a doctor years earlier: accepted mortal responsibility for my soul and returned me to a point where I could return to myself…Emma hadn’t given me back my old identity. She’d protected my ability to forge a new one.”

Why he wrote the book:

“When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.”

His wife, on their love and marriage:

“I expected to feel only empty and heartbroken after Paul died. It never occurred to me that you could love someone the same way after he was gone, that I would continue to feel such love and gratitude alongside the terrible sorrow, the grief so heavy that at times I shiver and moan under the weight of it. Paul is gone, and I miss him acutely nearly every moment, but I somehow feel I’m still taking part in the life we created together.”

So here it is for me. Life and love is not about escaping boxes, but getting out of the ones that reduce us in order to be in the ones that fortify us. What used to fortify us may start to stifle us when we grow out of them, and that is time to let them go.

When we watch something become, when we watch ourselves become, that becoming requires a great deal of loss in order for a new form to take shape.

With every end it brings new beginnings; with great loss, I am made aware of great love.

One would think that zen masters can stop meditating on life since they have already achieved zenness, but there is this parable somewhere which I can’t remember – that the more zen one becomes, the more one has to meditate.

I wrote this in my journal recently:

I take it all that comes to me, I appreciate everything for what they are, and I let go, in order to embrace the next moment.

In that moment it was clear and loud, I have felt a sense of peace, for that string of moments. The chaos returned, eventually. I guess this is what meditation is about – to remember it is all in the now, that each and every moment has to be evaluated on its own, to be parsed accordingly.

Epiphanies, lessons, life, love – they all have to be recommitted to, on a moment to moment basis. That is one of the greatest lessons I have learned recently. Neurological research has proven the same, that our brains are extremely malleable and yet set in its ways. We’re walking contradictions and paradoxes. Yet if we become aware of our chronic patterns, we may have a chance at evolving our own unconscious behaviour, but that takes a concrete belief that our brains are malleable. We can literally rewire the connections to our brains, if we are conscious of them. But how many of us are capable of being that conscious, that deliberate, that anticipatory of ourselves?

I just finished “A General Theory of Love” recommended by my dear friend Vanessa, because I tweeted about my fear of abandonment. See, this is why I love tweeting about my fears, because I get stories, support and recommendations back in return. The book just hit so many parts of me, that I am having a hard time selecting quotes to represent it (I would cite the whole book here if I could):

It is limbic resonance that makes looking into the face of another emotionally responsive creature a multilayered experience. Instead of seeing a pair of eyes as two bespeckled buttons, when we look into the ocular portals to a limbic brain our vision goes deep: the sensations multiply, just as two mirrors placed in opposition create a shimmering ricochet of reflections whose depths recede into infinity. Eye contact, although it occurs over a gap of yards, is not a metaphor. When we meet the gaze of another, two nervous systems achieve a palpable and intimate apposition.

A second person transmits regulatory information that can alter hormone levels, cardiovascular function, sleep rhythms, immune function, and more—inside the body of the first. The reciprocal process occurs simultaneously: the first person regulates the physiology of the second, even as he himself is regulated. Neither is a functioning whole on his own; each has open loops that only somebody else can complete. Together they create a stable, properly balanced pair of organisms.

Attachment security continues to be a powerful predictor of life success. The securely attached children have a considerable edge in self-esteem and popularity as high school students, while the insecurely attached are proving excessively susceptible to the sad ensnarements of adolescence—delinquency, drugs, pregnancy, AIDS. Almost two decades after birth, a host of academic, social, and personal variables correlate with the kind of mother who gazed down at her child in the cradle.

A relationship that strays from one’s prototype is limbically equivalent to isolation. Loneliness outweighs most pain. These two facts collude to produce one of love’s common and initially baffling quirks: most people will choose misery with a partner their limbic brain recognizes over the stagnant pleasure of a “nice” relationship with someone their attachment mechanisms cannot detect. Consider the young man described in the last chapter wrestling with the present-day reenactment of the long-ago love with his fiery, critical mother. As an adult, he faces a binary universe. If he connects with a woman, she turns out to be his mother’s younger clone. But a supportive woman leaves him exasperatingly empty of feeling—no spark, no chemistry, no fireworks.

You can’t tell someone with faulty Attractors to go out and find a loving partner—from his point of view, there are none. Those who could love him well are invisible. Even if the clouds parted and a perfectly compassionate and understanding lover descended from heaven on a sunbeam to land at his feet, his mind would still be tuned to another sort of relationship; he still wouldn’t know what to do.

The brains of insecurely attached children react to provocative events with an exaggerated outpouring of stress hormones and neurotransmitters. The reactivity persists into adulthood. A minor stressor sweeps such a person toward pathologic anxiety, and a larger or longer one plunges him into depression’s black hole.

The gist is, we are all regulators of each other and good luck if one has questionable regulators when one is young because that is all one knows. What we think is regular can actually be erm, totally screwed up.

A couple of weeks back I started writing an essay about my fear of abandonment, and I stopped. Part of all the change I have endured in my life, is that people drop out of my life like flies. People whom I thought would go on to be my lifelong people, are now gone.

I wonder if that is the tradeoff for having a rapidly evolving identity, that I am never the same person as I was a week ago, much less a year or more ago. The deeper the attachment I have to people, the likelier they are to drop out, because we inevitably become deeply attached to some notion of each other – that horribly breaks when I decide to make some radical change in my life (which occurs arguably every quarter). The ones who stay in my life are the ones I keep at some emotional distance, in some ways that keeps us together in some form of looseness.

So what is also inevitable is that I have become very ambivalent to people, I am terrified of any signs of dependency either way. It doesn’t actually make my fear of abandonment better.

I grew walls unconsciously in order to keep myself safe and sane. But it is like keeping myself indoors in order to avoid getting sunburnt. I lose out on the sunlight.

Going back to the beginning of this post, I wonder if I could just learn to love people or things wholeheartedly, and let them go gracefully when the time comes.

The reality is that most people don’t abandon me (in some cases, I deserve it, or they have to). Stories always have an ending. That is just life. We are off to our next pages, chapters, books. Holding on is what that causes pain and expectations. That they will stay with us. But nothing ever really stays with us, not for long.

I just have to get better at living – that every moment is beautiful in its own right, that I can learn to love fully and yet let go fully at the same time.

I don’t want to miss out on sunlight, and I can learn to love other seasons too. And perhaps, I can slowly convince my brain that I can have more evolved forms of regularity and seek better sources of regulation.

I have had an intense past couple of weeks. Everything is happening so fast and in concurrence that I haven’t had the space to distill them yet.

I wrote a post last week on being chronically depressed and suicidal, and it unexpectedly took off – at current count it has more than 14k+ views and 100+ responses. I wrote it because I was tired of the stigma and the mainstream narratives surrounding mental health. I never really had the opportunity to write it, because I was either afraid to be judged, or I was worried that it may cause some negative repercussions to my employer. I mean, what would investors think of a designer who thinks about killing herself every other day?

Opening up in front of a roomful of people about my mental health gave me the impetus to write that post. I was also tired of people telling me that I don’t look suicidal. I wish I could describe what goes on in my mind every other second, but just because I have learned to present myself as functional does not mean anything. It just means I have learned to cope. Like most of us who suffer in silence. Also, one may be surprised to learn later in life that, some opposing emotions do not belong to the same spectrum. They can exist in parallel.

I am also grateful for this time in my life when I can consciously choose to be independent – at least for a while – so I can pursue efforts like this. It makes me think about how many of us are offering less to the world because our hands are tied for some reason. I am this open and transparent not only because I have the courage to, but because I don’t have to worry about putting anyone else’s life or career at stake. For now.

The liberty to pursue one’s life’s work does not come easy. I have been thinking deeply about a post I had written almost three years ago, on my life’s work. As I type this now, I feel energizingly drained by all the recent conversations I have had – both offline and online – but I have never been more certain about who I am, where I am, and what I should be doing. I am more convinced than ever that my fulfilment comes from intangible labour, and I want my work to be felt, not measured.

So I sit with this paradoxical chaos. Of wanting to be present in every moment and yet being patient enough to know some things just has its own time, of understanding the power of the individual and yet harnessing the power of the collective, that love is about staying and yet letting go, that some of the most invisible things in life are the most visceral.

I think one of the greatest gifts for me, is knowing where I want to be, liking where I am, while knowing I am not dependent on being here, or afraid to leave.

I should be writing more. I want to, but I start telling myself a thousand reasons why not, and so I don’t. But I accumulate all these thoughts in my head and by the time Sunday comes I try to sit down and write, there’s just too many of them and I don’t know where to start.

I dreamt that I had late stage cancer this time last week, and it provoked me more than usual. I think about dying all the time, don’t get me wrong, but there’s something different about wanting to end my own life vs suddenly dying in an accident vs having to accept one’s impending mortality with a sense of helplessness.

“It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.” — Umberto Eco

I started to think if there would be anything I would have done differently if that became real. It was a good exercise, because I realised there wasn’t. In a lot of ways I am having the time of my life now. I don’t have people’s deadlines to answer to except my own, I am working on things I really care about, I have time to spend with the people I love, and I have the presence to show up for people who need me. There isn’t anything that I wished I could have done, except I would take the remaining time to churn out the ideas I have sitting in my head.

I don’t actually need that dream as a reminder. I have begun to measure my pulse rate again, and it is wild and low. When I see my TCM practitioner she tells me she could hardly feel my pulse. Sometimes I feel like my heart is going to stop beating anytime. There is also the question of my eyes. They are definitely better since I got back, but the visit to specialist last week showed that they are still pretty dysfunctional. There are also my anxiety attacks which still occur once in a while. Or my migraines, when I overstrain myself.

I am not sure if I’ll ever be back to a normal spectrum of health again, or having a dysfunctional body is an acceptance I need to have because I had probably gone too far in burning it out.

So yes, I am doing a lot of things and making decisions that most people wouldn’t, or arguably my past self wouldn’t even consider, but I have to, because I don’t know when I’ll be incapable of working, or being. The thought of being unable to work scares me more than actually dying itself.

I can’t imagine life without writing, without being able to see some of my ideas come to life. Instead of wasting my psychic energy being neurotic I am trying to be better with expressing the hidden parts of myself more, like attempting to write terrible poetry/prose and posting some of them on instagram. Who cares about the poetry being terrible if I feel cathartic writing them?

I keep asking myself now – what can I do more of, to become more of myself? How can I build the resilience to endure the alienation of being more and more myself and less and less like others?

I guess all I want to do, is to know myself before I die, or worse, lose the capacity to, while I am still alive.

It seems like a permanent condition, that no matter how much joy or fulfilment I feel, that I’ll inevitably slip into periods where I am just keenly aware of my shadow following me. When I was younger and didn’t know better, I would spiral deeper out because I would try to escape the darkness, having been conditioned to think it is bad for me.

These days, with by a ton of research and philosophy, I have learned that times like this are a signal for me to start retreating inwards so I can have the space to introspect and realign myself.

There is this persistent awareness that has been slowly growing in strength recently, that the more I wish to embrace my inner-artist, the more disconnect I will feel with the rest of the world. There is a certain resilience I have been trying to build, that I will have the courage to follow my intuition to do the work I am guided to do, no matter how much noise I have to be exposed to.

But sometimes, I am not sure if I am building resilience, or simply erecting walls.

Part of building this resilience is to architect an inner world so rich, so strengthening that I wouldn’t really need to surface into an external world. Unlike design, which requires a lot of external feedback and validation, art requires us to go more inward to seek the answers.

That sort of inward journey can feel so rewarding, to know there’s always more to explore, more to uncover, deeper to dive into. There is a risk of getting lost, and perhaps if I am not careful, I will stumble into an unhealthy darkness, the darkness that has always been there waiting for me for my entire life.

I feel like I am leaving my entire world behind, or I’ve already left the world I know behind, in order to step into a new one. I am not very sure if I am ever going to emerge out of it, if stepping into this new void will be akin to a bare garden that will grow flowers and trees eventually, or more like a blackhole I will not find a way out of.

I guess part of pursuing art is the acceptance that there will be some answers we’ll never be able to find, and that sentiment will hopefully be captured somewhere in our work, invoking questions in the soul of those who may come before it.

One of the biggest factors into my wellbeing upon my return is the joy I feel when I am able to show up for people in my life. There are people who have seen me through my worst and my best, my extraordinary moments, the mundane and the painful. They appeared in my life when I was barely growing into myself, at a time when I started to understand who I wanted to be. They knew me when I was much less of a person than I am now.

These are the people who stay in my life by virtue of a shared story: a conscious philosophy towards the future, bound by the weight of a common history.

Yesterday, I attended the wedding of one of these people:

with the beautiful bride. <3

A photo posted by Winnie Lim (@wynlim) on Jan 8, 2016 at 10:41pm PST

I have known Audrey for roughly six years – most of that time I was away. Due to our busy schedules, we hardly have time to hang out even if we were both in the same city. She’s one of the first people I’ll call upon when I am back, and she would do the same when she visited SF. It is that knowing right from the beginning, that we belong to the same life-long tribe.

Despite the lack of frequency, we have found rare long stretches of time to connect deeply, and I have somehow managed to get to know her parents, her brothers, her co-workers, and her partner, who is now her newly-minted husband, among the wide common network of friends we already share. I didn’t even realize I know and am known by such an extension of her until I was at her wedding. It was a poignant, conscious observation I had. Isn’t it such a beautiful thing to be connected to another person and exist in that overlapping web of complex, intricate, human connections?

After the wedding, I was inspired to look through my photo archive, and I was just overwhelmed by what it feels like to be part of someone’s life to be part of their major milestones, and what it feels like to have them for mine, how it feels like to witness milestones among the same tribe of people.

One of these was Min’s wedding where Audrey served as her bridesmaid, and now I feel like I must have done something right in my previous lifetimes to attend the weddings of two very dear and amazing people in my life. How much we have grown, how far we have come, how far we have to go, how blessed we are to walk some of that long, winding path, together.