Breathe: It's okay to be not okay

Trigger Warning: This post talks about negative emotions and self-harming behaviour of human briefly.
If you have difficulty regulating negative emotions, you can stop reading here.

We, especially us neurodivergent people, often feel under a lot of pressure being a literal part in this capitalist society. Ever since the information age, most of us are feeling like everyone else is going faster than yourself. The infamous psychological phenomenon of impostor syndrome always hits you hard when you look around. For neurodivergent people, it is even worse because all the neurotypical people in the world seems like they automatically know what they should do in the society when we need to think every step of it (aka masking).

In December 2017, my then all-time-favourite K-Pop band SHINee’s member Jonghyun took his own life. Along with a few similar cases in the K-Pop world, it raised a huge concern about suicide in Korean society. And yet, his friend and colleague singer Lee Hi, who got a song titled Breathe from Jonghyun himself, had to sing the song for the stage mourning for his passing away only a few days later. Although I think she wasn’t forced to do that, she couldn’t continue singing in the middle of the song because she was bursting out of cry. And then, a lot of audiences continued to sing her song instead of her, almost like they were saying “It is okay. We can take it from here.” The above youtube video of the stage always makes me cry, not only because it is a stage remembering the passed away K-Pop star, but also because it represents something like the message I got.

Although I am not sure about the neurodivergent conditions of any of the people I do not know personally, but as a neurodivergent person myself, I am almost always in a long-term burnout. And I have especially hard times once in a while, when the acute burnout from vocational stress or interpersonal relation stress hits me over the already-burnt-out self.

I had to go through one of the hard times recently, because there was an uncontrollable but not optimal situation at work and my friendships were not working out well. Whenever I am in that deep valley of sorrow, I always feel like I just want to cry out loud for the rest of my life, doing nothing else; but now I know the time will pass and there will be only one of the two consequences: I will survive, or not.

Recently, my now all-time-favourite K-Pop group Dreamcatcher made a comeback after a concert tour and break, with the second album in thier new parallel world universe. However, one of the seven girls in the group, the main vocalist Siyeon, announced that she wouldn’t be participating in the promotion of the song for this comeback because she has a bit of health concerns and advised to take a rest from the doctor.

While I do not know what would her condition be, one thing is clear: we have seen too much damage done in the artist themselves and the whole culture of the country from people needing rest not being able to take it. Hence I am all for her decision – that is also I have always been saying in the fan letters I sent to Dreamcatcher time to time.

I remember handing a fan letter over to Gahyun, the youngest member in the group, wishing although my twenties were not something I want it back, and although it will not always be happy and fun, her twenties may be something she can look retrospectively someday in the future and have very little regrets, on her twentieth birthday. It has been more than a half decade of time passed after that, but I genuinely wish it for everyone I care about.

Actually, the world is not that as fastly moving as you think. We often say “everyone struggles at least a little bit”, sometimes in a wrong context, but actually that is true in a sense that no one is perfect (although some people do have differnt start points in terms of privilege they have). It’s all special relativity, you know (no it’s not).

Moreover, a lot of neurotypical people does everything in heuristic and rough sense, in fact. We neurodivergent people are often accused of being clumsy and forgetful, but in fact it is the opposite of it. We simply have too many things to care about in the world, and we thoroughly care about all of them. I am not saying which side is better than the other; I am just saying about the difference, though (but we should point out that on the social model of disability, it is still our disability since the neurotypical-centric society is not ready to accommodate us).

So it is okay to be not okay. I know it does not take your pain away from my own experience. But remember the time, or at least the perception of time from our ontological self, passes over, well, time. We only exist in the present because at least the time axis of our multidimensional being is not in our control and in our relative position, the time always flows forward. I do know it does not entail the pain will end without the cease of the existence of oneself.

But the show must go on; there is no one single purpose in anyone’s life, in my humble opinion. We just live because something called our concept of self emerged from the combination of the chemical data storage of our DNA and the wiring pattern of our neurons. And I believe the readers of my blog (if they are not my imaginary concept) would agree that the data must be kept and preserved as much as they can. We might all be a set of data, in the end. And it might be the whole meaning of the life everyone was seeking for. For human beings are self-healing data storage – it is okay to be not okay.