13:59

today is shaping up to be a really strange day. my insomnia was a force to be reckoned with and so my sleep schedule consisted of going to sleep at 12, waking up at 3, waking up again at 5, then finally waking up at 8. sometimes when my insomnia acts up like this, i don't really feel the effects of it until later in the evening. today is one of those days where i feel really out of it as a result, and consequently it affects my ability to do things. i've been having this urge to do at least something, but my brain can't decide what it wants to stick to doing and so i'm just trapped with this feeling of restlessness.

my dad texted me about college again. i left him on read last time because i was just so sick and tired of the conversation, but today he cornered me after asking how i was doing and demanded me to answer him. i hate being cornered so out of frustration i cried a little. i think he's off my case for now though. whenever he talks to me extensively about college, i just get so frustrated and irritated that i almost want to yell at him and ask "why do you care so much about my education and not about the rest of my life and me? what do you really love about me?". i'm so tired of everything; i'm trying so hard to believe that things will get better, that i can find the help i need, that i can make friends that care about me beyond one or two aspects of my life, that i deserve to be treated kindly.

21:40

today i went to a birthday party and it was very stressful. there were a lot of people i didn't know and so i just stayed away from everyone else for the most part. i think i dissociated because i caught myself spacing out a lot and speaking quieter than i usually do. when i left the party and came home i think the stress of being there caught up to me and i nearly cried. i did not cry but i feel really numb and out of it.

23:06

scattered thoughts again...

today i daydreamed about having an older phone model or an mp3 player and briefly looked at listings for mp3 players.

aunt t finally got discharged from the hospital today, but she has to stay in the city of that hospital for a few more months so she can recover more. my mom and i will be visiting her again sometime in august.

sometimes when i think i'm over feeling alienated because of my preference for androgyny, my friends' preferences will really make me feel a little unsettled and wrong, if i had some way to put it. i remember my cousin and i had a conversation about this exact topic and we confided in each other about how being wlw but not cis can be so alienating when it comes to interacting with cis wlw and sometimes even other gnc wlw. like it's so alienating to see other wlw be attracted to women that exude a cisgendered sort of softness... is that the right description? but yeah. i dunno. it's a bit of a sensitive subject for me so i don't like talking about it in detail with other people.

i've been wanting to keep working on this website lately but i think i'm going through a mental slump honestly. well it should have been obvious to me from my entries as of late, but it's only now hitting me that i may not be as emotionally stable as i'd like to be. i wish i could see a therapist or a psychiatrist or someone now.

21:52

babysat again today and tuesday. took aunt p's kids to a trampoline park this afternoon. i've never been to a trampoline park before but i don't know if i ever want to be in one again, haha. something weird happened today there though; some of the kids (one of them being aunt p's oldest kid) took drinks into the play area, which apparently isn't allowed according to the place's rules. i don't think the kids knew they weren't allowed to do that. an older woman who was apparently the parent of two of the kids got really angry at them and i think they were scared. the woman then bought me a drink from the concessions area and i was thinking "i dunno why you did this but you really did not need to". aunt p's oldest kid was sad during the car ride home and she was still sad when we came back to aunt p's. i didn't get a chance to talk to her properly until after the two younger kids took a bath and started eating dinner. she stayed in her parents' room until i came in and talked to her and asked her why she was sad. because she's only a toddler she just rambled on about a lot of things. actually, one of the first things she talked to me about was how she hated being the oldest sibling. she told me about how aunt p and her husband keep making her take care of her younger siblings and how she wishes she could have alone time but barely gets it and how she wished she was the only child. i just felt really sad for her so embarrassingly i started crying too HAHA, though i don't even know if she knew i was crying with her hahaha. she also told me that even though she wants to be alone, she feels lonely when her siblings are away. i told her that her feelings were valid and just empathized with her as she talked and i ended up hugging her. i just felt so sad that she was already feeling the pain that comes with being an eldest sibling at such an incredibly young age. for a brief moment i wanted to wrap her in a big comfortable cocoon where she wouldn't have to feel that pain and sadness. i felt warmed that she felt comfortable enough to talk to me about the things that trouble her. i hope she continues see me as a trustworthy figure in her life as she grows older.

12:38

scattered thoughts cause i don't feel like making this entry flow cohesively

sometimes i forget just how freeing it is to be away from my family. being home alone for 3 days was so peaceful that when my mom finally came back home yesterday i only realized how peaceful it was.

aunt t's surgery went well. apparently after she woke up from the operation she was talking energetically. i hope her recovery goes well.

every time i have a conversation with my dad i always come out feeling tired and irritated. he will ask me innocuous questions ("how are you?" "what did you eat for dinner?") and then he will start asking me about college because it's the only thing he really wants to know about me. today he asked me about my class credits and was saying things like "if you push all those credits into your next few semesters you could graduate early" and i had to tell him that it's literally too much work to deal with. i dunno. sometimes i feel like i should be in touch with my dad more but then he starts asking me about college and i remember why i distance myself from him. but i feel bad because he gets himself into all these situations and he doesn't have a lot of people he can rely on to help him. i dunno. it's just tiring.

feeling really lonely today.

22:41

babysat for aunt p again today. she and my mom won't be coming back until... the 21st or 22nd. they're not sure of the date yet but i wouldn't mind if they came back later hahaha.

today was veryyyy tiring! i ended up staying to babysit until an hour ago and i showered and ate dinner as soon as i got home haha. my legs and feet are killing meee... aunt p's husband said i won't need to come over because his mom is coming to visit tomorrow, but i offered to help again if they really need an extra hand. as tiring as babysitting can be, it's an experience i'm grateful to have. not a lot of my peers have the experience of looking after children, and babysitting honestly helps you learn a thing or two about dealing with adults too, so i think it's good experience to have.

11:11

sometimes it's hard to look back on moments i share with people and not cringe. my friend was showing me a video of him playing a game and me watching him over call and i just kept cringing and feeling embarrassed at how i acted. the video was around 1-2 years old i think? but i just kept thinking to myself "why did i say that? why does my voice sound so annoying? why was i acting so annoying?" and it was hard to enjoy the video because i feel like my presence back then just ruined it for me. i wonder if that's a self-esteem thing. i think hearing my words in my voice is what makes me feel the most embarrassed honestly. i always wish i had a different voice because mine just sounds weird and strange to my ears. it's not even a gender dysphoria thing, i just hate how weird my voice sounds. i wish i had a nicer sounding voice like all my friends do honestly. it's weird because sometimes i do like how my voice sounds, but i guess i don't like when i just naturally let it out in front of others and hear it played back to me. i wonder why.

17:15

okay so officially the liver transplant surgery is happening tomorrow, and my mom and aunt p will be driving out tomorrow to be there with bà ngoại and i'll be home alone tomorrow just in case aunt p needs me to babysit her kids. i hope everything turns out okay.

19:19

i wish my mom had more faith in me. during dinner i wondered if i should have stayed with my dad when they were deciding on custody. but considering how much grief he put me through the years after, i think i would have come out a worse person than i am today had i lived with him. haha... now that i think about it, i experienced a lot of grief because of both of my parents.

19:29

just came back from visiting aunt t. apparently right after my mom and i left the hospital, they received news that there was a suitable donor and that the liver transplant will be happening tomorrow. i hope that things go well from here on out.

20:44

the clip of a pen one of my friends gifted me broke off today. :(

i feel so separate from my family. i sat in a corner of the hospital room while my mom and bà ngoại sat close to aunt t because i didn't feel like i was worthy of being so physically close to them. it is a suffocating feeling that makes me feel like i could cry and cry and cry if i allowed myself to. i've been fighting that feeling the last few times i came to the hospital. i am feeling less and less worthy of being part of this family. my mom told me to hug aunt t before we left but i didn't feel worthy enough to hug her.

21:59

one of my favorite moments as someone who wants to be a nurturing figure to children is when they become comfortable with you; when they feel comfortable eating around you and letting you feed them, when they feel comfortable enough to tug at your shirt, when they feel comfortable enough to talk and sing around you, etc. i almost cry thinking about those moments because it warms my heart to be trusted so much.

17:32

ahhh babysat for aunt p again today... kinda wiped out! babysitting makes me reflect on how much responsibility it takes to raise children, especially when you're raising more than one. it makes me wonder how so many parents-to-be can think they're adequately prepared for raising a baby when you still constantly have to learn as you go. every child is different and you have to adjust to accommodate them. that's why i'm perfectly content with helping raise other people's children but not raising one of my own.

19:58

i have been so sad and withdrawn on and off since last night. i have to babysit for aunt p again tomorrow and i'll have to go out for dinner with my dad afterwards. my mom and i will be visiting aunt t on saturday and come back the day after. i just realized that it's only wednesday.

21:44

apparently aunt t's condition is getting worse and we'll have to visit her again this weekend. i just want her to come out of this okay.

09:58

hmm my mom told me that aunt t won't be discharged this weekend. apparently there are still procedures they have to do and so she'll probably end up getting discharged sometime next week. no one in the extended family knows about the situation with aunt t. the immediate family has been trying to keep it quiet because this family is prone to gossip. it's tiring to be around my family because they're so overly concerned with their status and being hypervigilant about how they present themselves to others. i dunno. i don't have much reason to care since no one cares about me past my education (no one ever asks me about anything other than college. telling!). i still remember my mom told me she wished i was going into computer science instead of graphic design... when i was getting my credit card set up. in front of the person helping me with the process. i still don't know why she did that? what was even the point. i know that guy was feeling so awkward because he paused for a few seconds. but whatever, i'm not even interested in computer science anyway.

since i'm talking about majors anyway, to be honest i never felt like there was a major i really wanted to get into. i only chose graphic design because i didn't want to go into the general liberal arts. but sometimes i wonder if i should change my major to something else... but there also isn't any other major that i could see myself getting into. graphic design is a stressful major and you always have to be on your toes, and i get so busy to the point i go periods of time without talking to my friends or watching or playing anything new. but i dunno. anything is better than being with my family at this point. i like the people in my cohort though, most of them are really nice people. i'd like to be closer friends with some of them honestly. i have two irls in my major, but one of them is in a different cohort and the other is changing her major to liberal arts. she was my closest friend in my major too because we got along so well and were always talking to each other, so it'll be weird to go through the rest of the program without her. we do still talk though, and we share that discord server with my other graphic design friend, so we'll still be in touch i think.

23:28

i think it's incredible how you can associate things with a moment or period in your life. recently i rediscovered tvxq's song catch me and suddenly i remembered how not only was it one of the first kpop songs i ever heard, but that i listened to it during the first few years of my parents' divorce. even though it's already such a melancholic but energetic song, i can't help but feel even more melancholic when i listen to it because of how much i struggled during that time. that made me remember that there are a lot of songs i associate with that time of my life... arcade of fire's joan of arc, samefree's lily lily burning night... actually now that i think about it, my vocaloid phase started right before that time in my life and i ended up listening to a lot of the classic vocaloid songs during that period. i actually also remember watching the free! anime over there too... wish i didn't though LOL. actually i don't even think i really understood what was happening in that anime anyway because i barely remember it hahaha. but anyway... listening to these songs makes me feel like i'm back in my dad's small apartment, the second one he lived in. i can still remember what the entire apartment looked like and how i would stay up into the early morning because i didn't know what to do with myself back then. it's sad now that i think about it; i was barely a teenager and i was already feeling so lost. listening to these songs makes me feel like i'm in middle school again, feeling lost and not knowing what to do with myself, starting to dive deep into an ugly cloud of hatred; hatred at myself, hatred at my parents, hatred at the world. i remember i lost my friendships when i started high school too. it was a really sad time and no one knew what to do with me, not even myself.

22:34

got back from visiting aunt t a few days ago and honestly a lot happened and i'm really tired and annoyed tonight so i have a lot to talk about!

hmm where do i begin. well i should talk about aunt t first. she seems to be getting better... there were complications with the transplant approval process though the last time we visited her. but i think things are getting sorted out and they said she may be able to be discharged over the weekend. it's a little weird; they were able to transport her to the other hospital themselves but they don't provide transportation for her to go back, so my mom has to be the one to pick her up. uhh i don't remember the exact reason they provided but it didn't make any sense to me either way.

ugh but enough about that. my mom took me to her white boyfriend's place because he wanted to make us dinner. i almost had a mind to tell her i didn't want to go but then she'd have to go to the trouble of getting dinner for me and i know she's the type to take advantage of these kinds of situations, so i just kept my mouth shut. the food tasted as white and horrible as one can imagine LMAO! he made us fried fish and it was very bad and overly salty (even though i'm already sensitive to salt amount!). it was also one of the whitest dinners i'd ever had in my life: unseasoned potatoes, unseasoned corn, cornbread. it was really gross and bad! when we were driving me home my mom was telling me that she at least appreciated that he cooked for us. i could not find it in myself to be appreciative of the trash that i ate today. haha. we also watched that megan movie after we ate and honestly... i'm not at all sure what i expected from the movie. it's literally just another "ahh a robot that's too advanced that it starts killing people ahh scary" movie. white guy over here was telling me he thinks that's where technology will be in 30 years or so and i was just like... no dude. my cousins and i literally talked about this a while ago: AI and technology in general just... does what you tell it to do. the extent of its knowledge comes from what we feed it. i know nothing about computer science and all of that so i'm not the right person to talk to about this kind of stuff, but it's easy for even me to see that AI is not harmful in that it itself will hurt us... it's what people with malicious intent will use it for that we should be worried about. but of course white guy is very intent on believing that technology will take over, and then he brought up how the internet is full of all kinds of information and i was just thinking... who do you even think put all this information out on the internet? you think technology just went "abracadabra!" and the internet as we know it was created? good lord oh my lord. anyway it was very tiring and i've had my fill of white people for years to come. but unfortunately i have to go back to college so... ahhh white people jumpscare!

ah but yeah, i just wanted to get the irritating stuff out of the way cause i don't like being negative for so long. as for nice things that happened, recently one of my irls said something really touching to me. i was telling him and another irl about how i was going to visit aunt t and he told me that even when they're busy, they still care about what's going on with me. i was really touched by that. it seems like something obvious in a friendship, but i'm someone who needs reassurance that people, you know, actually care about me (gesturing to two paragraphs ago). so that was really nice of him to do. it's really crazy what moving to a different environment that's kinder to you does to you!

what else happened... that's really the only major positive thing that happened. oh well but i've been finding new wonderful music, though that's something that happens to me somewhat often it's always nice to find good music. just earlier today i found this album called "color vs the light" by the artist nevarakka. i'm a sucker for trance music, so it's always nice to find more wonderful trance songs. also i finally started watching the yugioh anime today! that probably seems weird, but aside from a few clips of the duel monsters anime and a few episodes of season 0, the only yugioh media i've completed in full is the original manga. before i started with the manga i really debated on whether to start with the manga or the anime first, because i was aware of all the changes they made to the anime (filler arcs, and more importantly just a lotttt of changes to the existing story for better or worse). since i'm the kind of person that usually likes to interact with whatever came first in the franchise, i picked up the manga first... which took me two uni semesters to finish. but i finished it! and now i'm finally starting on the anime. i was originally going to stay with duel monsters and not continue onto the other series, but i'm a bit endeared to yusei from 5ds so i'll be picking up gx and 5ds too. i'm not too big a fan of the later series because they really go in on the card game which i'm not super into, but if i find it a slog i'll probably drop them.

but yeah, that's what's been happening lately. this entry took me an hour to write up! i do want to watch utena at some point... i even said i'd watch it over the summer. but that hasn't happened yet. hopefully i'll get to it soon!

10:55

when do you call someone a best friend? a while back one of my irls called me his best friend and i was surprised. when do you reach best friends status with someone? all of my friends are just "friends" to me. calling someone a best friend feels strange to me.

18:43

sooo sleepy today. aunt p had to take her two older kids their friends' birthday party today so she asked my mom and i to just be at her place so her youngest kid wouldn't be alone in the house. it was honestly easy for the most part cause we arrived right before aunt p had him nap, so we were pretty much just sitting around for 3 hours. he woke up right before aunt p came back so we just played with him and fed him. we stayed for a few more hours just because aunt p and my mom were talking about aunt t. aunt t was transferred to a hospital in another city so they could do some procedures on her. my mom and i will be heading over to visit tomorrow, and coincidentally her boyfriend is heading the same way to visit a family member so it's convenient to get a ride from him. i just do not want to be in the same place as him though hahahaha. and his son is coming with him too and i don't like him so double whammy i guess. i hate that i still have to deal with this white dude but i can't deny that he has helped my mom out a lot and made things more convenient for her. she's admitted this to me once too, that she'll just dump him if she can find better support elsewhere and that it's the only reason she's still in a relationship with him. wish she could dump him sooner though! he's so full of himself that i can't stand to be associated with him.

but anyway, it's been a tiring summer so far. when i go back to class and the professors ask me what i did over the summer i wouldn't really know what to say to them. well i guess i could say i did some babysitting and that i worked on my portfolio. OH that reminds me, i did end up finishing it earlier this week! i ended up finishing it without my friend looking at it and he apologized and said he was busy. i mean i wish he would have told me he wasn't able to do it but this solidified the fact that i really can't rely on him so much in the future. i know it's bad to have low expectations for people but... what can i do when i'm consistently being failed by people. and yet people trust that i'll do my best to be available for them but are also understanding that even i can't be there for them sometimes. is that people-pleasing? well it really isn't to that extreme because everyone knows i'll give it to them straight unless it's something really trivial and then i just stay quiet or be vague about how i feel. i've learned that i'm good at saying things kindly but also that i'm prone to being too harsh with my words. actually the more i write it out i think i really do just have too much patience and restraint for people. but i'm not really good at faking emotions... haha. unless it's over text, then i can just consider my words more carefully. oh hmm i'm writing a lot without meaning to, i think i've just had a lot to talk about over these past few days! or maybe i just think too much. i'm also really hungry.

22:01

thought dump...

recently i discovered i like the way my writing looks when it's slanted rather than straight, like how italic words look. i hate how my writing looks when it's vertically straight. i remember a kid in one of my classes in high school saw me write and he said it looked awful. we were doing some group assignment in class and we all had to write on a paper together. he was some asian kid and i didn't like him. honestly a lot of the asian kids in my school sucked and it really shocks me when i think about it but it's also not surprising. asian americans can be so annoying like why are you like that! and it's always asian americans too, barely any other asian diaspora. i went to a higher-end public school and genuinely all the easian kids, seasian kids, sasian kids... sucked! many of them were financially comfortable or rich and also had many opportunities available to them which was so different from my turbulent upbringing. i wasn't born poor but both of my parents fell into poverty and we've been struggling for a while. it was to the point my mom and i almost became homeless while i was in middle school, but we were lucky that my ông bà ngoại were compassionate enough to take us in while my mom found a stable job. whenever i think about my childhood, it makes me think about how many people are just one step away from poverty and another step away from homelessness. i often find myself thinking about when we'll lose everything again.

i realize my diary entries must be so strange to read cause how did we go from how my writing looks to worries about being homeless... my brain everyone, give a round of applause!