LYD Classic: Editor’s Note, 2026 —
This one’s from late 2018, when I was 42 and apparently had Feelings about it. The original subtitle — “Improv classes! A trip to Mexico! Crippling depression!” — does most of the heavy lifting as far as summaries go, though the actual essay is less zany-fun-year and more about aging parents, a city I’d lived in for five years without ever quite landing, and the specific weight of a depression that felt hard to claim out loud. I’m reposting it now at 49 mostly intact, which required reading it in full, which was a thing. I’m doing okay, for the record — not “everything is perfect and I’ve learned so much” okay, but okay enough to dust this off and put it back out there. Anyway. Here’s 42.
It’s been a rough year for me. Even though there have been some bright spots, I’ll remember 2018 as the year depression kicked my ass.
Okay, may not past tense. Maybe present tense, too.
This is the year depression is kicking my ass.
I don’t talk about my depression publicly. I don’t do that for several reasons — one, you don’t really bring it up in regular conversation. A friend of a friend or someone you have to call for work makes small talk and asks, “how was your weekend?” You’re not supposed to answer that with, “I woke up stupid early due crippling anxiety, go to sleep feeling resigned to the world around me, and spend the time in-between wanting to feed my emotions because it brings me brief but fleeting moments of satiation.” Instead, you reply with a polite, “it was fine. And yours?” And life goes on.
Two — if you know anything about me or read anything I’ve written at all over the past (checks calendar) sixteen years, you know that I have a very severely mentally ill sister, cognitively slow and unable to interact with another human socially on the good days, profanity-laced and physically assaulty on the bad ones. As this has happened since I was four — in an immigrant family on top of that — anything I feel would be deemed null and void, compared to what my sister goes through. “Aww, you’re depressed, Ernie?” I imagine my sister’s schizophrenia would say if it were an actual person. “Hold my beer.” And then poof, there goes Angela having a screaming fit in the middle of a suburban McDonalds, while we all shift our seats uncomfortably in the plastic booths.
I’m not 100% sure what the trigger has been.
It may be my parents. They’re getting older, dad has gotten senile, and it’s clear some sort of intervention will be needed. The TL;DR version: my parents are divorced, but it would make financial sense for them to get back together, as they have to see each other on a regular basis because of my sister, and my mom can no longer pay the bills to their house. Her central heating has broke, and it’s too expensive to fix, so she’s wrapped herself in electric blankets and bought an army of space heaters. So they start to reconcile until they have a bitter argument and swear never to be in the same room again or my dad’s short-term memory loss kicks in, and he’s forgotten the whole part about reconciling. Repeat this two or three times.
My therapist says I don’t have any obligation to tend to my parents whatsoever; that we don’t live in a time where it’s expected for unmarried Asian children to drop everything, fly home, take care of their elders. My brain knows this.
It may be that after five years of living in Miami, I’ve inadvertently decided that the best way to cope with things around me is to isolate myself. I don’t have close friends here, tried to find a tribe, ended up in evenings where it’s easier to just lie on the couch watching YouTube videos of cats rather than the spent energy.
My partner has been supportive overall but is a staunch defender of where we live. “What’s to say you wouldn’t feel that if you moved somewhere else?” And a part of me passive-aggressively send definitions of “gaslighting” over Facebook messenger, but another part of me knows he’s probably right, the asshole.
So, I’ve poured it all into work. Ahhh, work. See, putting your anxieties into your job is fantastic, because it gives you a distraction from yourself, but then it just opens more opportunities to create more stress that you’re unable to cope with. But you don’t know what else to do, or what other creative or social outlets you have any more, so you spend that all on work! It really is the gift that keeps on giving. Maybe karoshi — that whole death by Japanese salaryman overwork thing — will kick in for me, and I imagine having a heart attack in the middle of the office, grabbing my chest before I dramatically slump over a keyboard. Until I do some internet research and most of them work a hundred hour weeks, and I would be too lazy to commit suicide by working too much.
I went to Mexico City with Kareem and some friends. That was nice, and the break was good, although I ate this chicken and rice dish at some themed restaurant where the waitresses are dressed as nuns and caught food poisoning for forty hours. So I missed the Day of the Dead and would just have to settle for celebrating the Day after the Day of the Dead.
So that’s where I am right now. Next month I’ll fly back to California again for an unspecific amount of time. My goal is to convince mom to sell her house, and at the very least consider moving into the condo I own. A part of me thinks I’ll be staying a while, even though I know my parents, separately or together, will drive me over the edge. But it’ll be something different, and something different is definitely need right now.