Esmé Weijun Wang

(Yes, there is a ghost face of my face in the above photograph.)

The new site is up. I turned 30 last weekend. I am still mired in dissociation, remnants of delusion, confusion. Dreams and reality seep into one another. Nightmares. The new medication makes me collapse out of bed — rather, I have to spend the first ten minutes or so unable to stand upright, but must be hunched over, and when I speak my tongue is a heavy and useless muscle. I take my morning pills. While I wait for them to work, my mouth fills with saliva. Drooling is a common side effect in the first few weeks. I wake up and the shoulder of whatever I’m wearing is positively sopping. Glamorous, I know. The first hour of  my day is useless. Clozaril requires bloodwork every week for the first six months. There is only one pharmacy in San Francisco that is certified to dispense Clozaril, and only a week’s worth at a time. It has not been easy, this month or more of feeling lost and confused, but I am grateful for the friends who were able to come visit me for my birthday, which was a beautiful experience. If only the fatigue and grogginess could slip away and leave me alert and whole. Still, I have hope. Hope, the thing with wings.

A huge thank you to the talented Jo Klima of The Darling Tree, who helped me with this renovation. I was concerned that the time difference between us would cause the transition to take up far too much time, but the site was really only on Maintenance Mode for a day or two. I think it looks beautiful. Let’s all give Jo a hand, shall we?

I know that there is so much more that I want to say, but I am tired, too tired to explain or say those things, and so I will leave it for now, and thank you for your patience. There is a giveaway coming up. Oh, and there is a possibility that my RSS feed needs to be re-subscribed to, so check to make sure you’re up to speed with the new site.

All my love. All, all my love.

My mother is an artist, a warrior, a highly sensitive person, and the reason I am alive — in more ways than the most basic.

I’ve been working on a project for her Mother’s Day present for the last couple of weeks, and doing so has brought me to tears on some occasions. Always, a sense of deep gratitude. Always, a sense of wonderment that this human being helped to produce me and is yet separate from me, has so many stories locked away, keeps sadnesses that I will probably never know. A sense of the ticking clock that tells me to value every moment, even if she is on the other side of the world, to Skype with her often, to take photographs of her, to tell her that she is beautiful, to share with her more of myself, now that I am grown.

Daphne is fantastically enthused in the mornings. As soon as C and I begin to rustle — we alternate doing this, it isn’t consistently one early bird or another — Daph leaps into bed, her tail wagging frantically. It’s morning! It’s morning! I’m ALIVE! WE’RE ALIVE! is how I think of it as she first laps at one of our faces, and then the other for fairness’s sake. She then settles in between us, waiting for us to rouse ourselves, and I am always reminded for even just a moment to try to be just as glad for my mornings, to be out of my mind with glee at the prospect of a new day, to be happy to be, just be.

I had a boyfriend late in high school. He was thin, an insomniac, a boy with a beautiful name that included the name of a country. I knew from the beginning that whatever we had wouldn’t last long, but I liked being liked. I liked learning about life. I told him shaming secrets about myself and he absorbed them as though he had lived a million years and was therefore unflappable.

He had another girlfriend at the same time who didn’t know about me, in the beginning. Later she would, and threatened to fight me if we ever saw one another again, which I understood, having violated a Girl Code of Conduct. But before she knew about us, I knew about her. He told me that she had an eating disorder. She was addicted to Ecstasy, and he was so tired of dealing with her crying all of the time — but most of the time, I never thought about her when he and I were together. She was as absent from my mind as living to my 30s, or getting married, or being anything other than reckless.  The only time her existence really struck me was in his bedroom, when I first saw bobby pins on his nightstand. Such innocent things, bobby pins, bought for almost nothing at Walgreens or Rite-Aid, and easily discarded. Are those hers, I asked, using her name, and he said, Yes. And then in that moment, I felt her completely.

There was a time in my life when a very dear friend lived in San Francisco with me. On one of our outings to Thrift Town, I found a Dean and Deluca mug in the dish ware area that I fell in love with — it was cream-colored, with Dean and Deluca written on the side, and the perfect weight, with the heftiness of a well-made diner mug and the price of a crisp one-dollar bill.

That mug became, in my apartment, My Mug. Never mind that we had other mugs to use; this mug, the one that had cost so little, yet reminded me of so much. I cradled it in my hands every morning, sipping coffee with its sturdy build between my palms. My friend eventually moved to New York. Sometime around then, My Mug disappeared.

I had no idea where it had gone. Our apartment was on the small side, and there weren’t many places it could have disappeared to. When we moved to this flat, the old apartment was emptied out, with no sign of my Dean and Deluca mug. To try and replace it, I ordered from Etsy a set of vintage diner mugs that had come from a real-life diner that had shut down. But I missed My Mug. I eventually bought a Le Creuset red mug, which I enjoyed with the wistfulness of taking a new lover to bed after the old one’s left you in the dust.

Yesterday, something strange happened. I picked up a random mug off of our kitchen shelves, filled it with cold brew coffee, and sat at our farm table. I looked at the mug. I ran my fingers over it. I turned it around and around — it was blank on all sides. But it was my mug. It was the Dean and Deluca mug that I’d been missing for so long, though the letters had been worn off, or rubbed down. I’d probably had coffee out of that mug plenty of times without realizing that it was the dear thing I thought I’d lost.

I laughed. Well, then! I thought to myself. How things change. How they stay the same. How you love them all over again, once you recognize what they are.

POSTSCRIPT: Yes, I did add a bird sticker to it, just so C and other folk can recognize it.

I told my therapist last night, I have slipped into a deep place where I am feeling increasing amounts of a need for control. My handwriting gets tighter, neater. I make lists and more lists. I tidy. I tidy again. I make plans. I schedule. I pressure myself with existential questions, perhaps to justify my life. Rituals. Rules. Foods to eat and not eat. Control, control, control.

Chris took this photo.

We had never used the fireplace before. It was one of the things that I liked about the flat before we bought it – the fact that maybe, someday, we would be able to light a fire, and sit in front of it and do all kinds of things that are better when in the atmosphere of a room with a “crackling fire” in the fireplace, things such as reading books about love and death, or watching episodes of “Downton Abbey” while curled up with a dog. Certainly not a place for the television (in the basement). The only thing stopping us, really, was the fact that we were lacking a fireplace screen. One would think that this would not be so insurmountable. Yet we only had our first fire this week, a little over a year since we officially became homeowners. The tiny Meyer lemon tree Chris planted in the backyard now has its first yellowing lemon.

Lately I’ve been obsessed with the idea of homemaking. Of making this place home. I want nothing to be sterile, I want to feel cozy, I’ve begun to invite people over for dinner – the idea not to cook something extraordinary, but to have people eating at our table, the table that I love, and which currently has dead flowers in a vase, the dead flowers looking better than they did when they were alive. The front room is where I spend most of my time. It is the most lived-in. In the bookshelves you can find silver packets filled with Polaroid pictures tucked among speakers, a small box filled with free bookmarks accumulated from bookstores, the skeleton of a frog mounted on wood (the frog’s name is Franklin Toad). The mantle, which deserves its own post, is a strange and shifting thing, with a fair amount of room that allows for accumulation. Discard and add at whim.

A heartfelt thanks to all of you who got in contact with me about my recent ailments. I am starting to feel better. You are all wonderful.

Fireworks in the front yard of my uncle’s home in the rural outskirts of Pingtung, Taiwan. It was an extraordinary New Year’s Eve — I was fighting a lack of appetite, but the delight of everyone around me was fantastic. And it sure drowned out the shrieking of the pig farm next door.

I realize that Part 3 of my three-part series didn’t go up as planned. That’s because I haven’t written it yet. If you’ve been waiting on pins and needles, I appreciate your patience. I’ve had a lot on my mind lately.

On Monday I saw my therapist, and she stated something that possibly changed everything  —  akin to my struggling for years to articulate something through a self-made pidgin sign language marked by confusion, and then a Helen Keller-esque understanding of what WATER is. Oh! It’s that simple! And yet not simple at all. It’s so new to me that I feel I must keep it private. I’m sort of embarrassed by it, even though it explains almost everything that I’ve done since I was barely a preteen. I apologize for being oblique.

And I saw my psychiatrist yesterday, whom I adore, and she is always very straightforward with me. We talked about my medications  —  mostly, how we can work to decrease the amount of medication that I take. (At least eight medications a day. I take 10 pills for one of those medications!) We also talked about how my diagnosis, which continues to fluctuate after 13 years of treatment, is most likely either Bipolar I Disorder with Cluster B features or Schizoaffective Disorder. The latter, she explained, has a poorer prognosis. She is concerned about my frequent “oscillations” in illness, and would like to get me to a place where I have at least six months of pure euthymia. I tried very hard to remember the last time I had six months of pure, symptom-less living, and found that I couldn’t. Every time you experience another episode of psychosis, she said, it damages your brain a little more  —  so we’d like to limit those episodes as much as possible. Either way, we treat the symptoms with the same medications, but I left her office feeling melancholy.

This week I also received some mail from a long-time friend who is not doing well. In the letter, she essentially asked what she should do. How do you do this with such grace? she asked. How do you keep going when drugs and therapy and time don’t work? How have you handled your trauma? What should I do?

I put the letter next to my bed, on my nightstand. I have no idea what to say. I just had a dream about my abusive rapist sex offender ex last night, even though I cut off contact with him in 2003. I had some “oscillations” less than a month ago. I go to work and I do my job and sometimes I have to take leaves of absence, because I am fortunate enough to work at a place where I can take short-term disability and not lose my job. When I am doing badly, I feel like I am handling life with anything but grace. I worry that there are giant holes or spiders in my brain, and that I will never be okay. I don’t feel this way all the time. It comes and it goes, like so many things do, including love. And, maybe, including grace.

This is my extended family on my mother’s side. With the exception of my brother, who’s the handsome fellow in the lower left corner of this photo, these people, although they comprise some of the most beloved people in the world to me, all live in Taiwan, including my mother, and my grandmother who just survived breast cancer, and my cousin Danya, who is one of the sweetest and smartest young women I know and loves IHOP, and my cousin Jackson, who used to play with me when I was still in the crib and is now a doctor and takes some of the most amazing, joyous, heartbreaking photographs that I know of, and my uncle who lived with us in America for five years, and so on. I love this image because of how ridiculously happy everyone looks. I feel sad when I see this image because I am always, on some level, fundamentally divorced from them, if only from the vantage point of distance. I go to see my Taiwanese relatives once every three to five years. But this will be one of those years, and every time, I see my faraway family and faraway country with different eyes.

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I am thankful for the restoration of my mental health (as much as such a thing exists), but the community I have that should allow this to happen, including my family, friends, doctors, hospitals, Daphne, blog readers, co-workers, etc. — all of you are what truly save me, year after year — and I do not exclude myself from this community; I am, in fact, fiercely proud to be a part of it.

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Whatever you do today, whoever you are, I hope you find a moment of rest.