Week 6 - Notes
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Preface
It seems I've gone a while without updating the weekly. I just suddenly wanted to write, then suddenly wanted to do it. Something set it off, and I need to let this urge out. Like a basic human impulse: I can't overcome it, and I don't need to.
If a weekly journal is a record, the content and form don't matter. Writing it down is enough. I need that objective perspective to look at “me” as something that exists, to observe what “I” have been through, to read myself as a character in a chapter of a novel.
I need to do as I please.
Finals Week
I've noticed that the more urgent something is, the more anxious I get; the more anxious I get, the more my brain tends to shut down.
So during finals week, I simply can't revise normally like everyone else, or use deadlines to push myself into it. I talked with AI and called this behavior “rotting.” The AI stopped me from using that description. I felt a little loss of control, stopped talking to that particular conversation partner, and found myself wanting to explain myself.
I noticed I'd entered a loop.
I need something to wake me out of bed at two in the afternoon. Maybe hunger, or maybe the thought that I'm starting to smell, like a rotting corpse, suddenly realizing my odor could affect someone else. I can't interfere with normal people's lives. Hating myself is one thing; being hated by others is more trouble.
Then I noticed something interesting: often, I only have the strength to climb down from the top bunk once all my roommates have gone out to study. Otherwise, I hide under the covers, blankly scrolling through mindless short videos. Getting up at one in the afternoon counts as early for me. By then, my roommates are usually starting their afternoon naps, their second sleep. What wakes me is the alarm I used to set for getting up from a nap during term time.
My sleep is healthy. I get eight hours every day. No foggy-headedness. That's lovely.
When I wake to an empty dorm, loneliness swallows me again. Objectively, loneliness does more damage to my mental health, but at least it often comes with freedom. That's not bad.
I get to enjoy having the dorm to myself, and my rotting doesn't affect anyone. Even if there's an exam the next day, I generally only rally for a few hours. Fortunately, the results haven't been too disastrous.
Every day goes like this.
Something to Hold On To
I've noticed that I need something I can grasp, some opening, and then I can feel a little of something.
So what I do most often during finals week is go to the nearest patch of nature and stare into space. Usually, I only head out at four or five in the afternoon, when the sun won't cook me to death. I've been lucky enough to photograph a few beautiful skies. These are moments that keep me alive.
I remind myself not to be anxious about exams anymore, and end up taking all of them without preparing. ...Funny, yes, but it's an opening, a way to slow the rot for a while.
The things I've succeeded at in the past don't leave me with any pride even a second later. I don't feel like recording them.
So I wrap myself in things I can feel: insect bites, the breeze, ripples on the water, the sunset and sky, noisy people.
I wander around Houhu, waiting for NPCs to trigger random events. At least I happened upon two little ducklings being saved from abandonment and felt life again, for the first time in ages. I crouched beside the lake with children, watching them scoop up tiny fish almost too small to see. I watched a group of graduates filming their graduation video at Houhu and had the honor of becoming part of the backdrop.
It's lovely. I feel I need to step out of the mainstream of student life. More and more, these ordinary moments feel like the life I need, rather than sitting in a library seat or classroom revising for finals...
...I notice that I haven't felt these lovely things since starting secondary school. Their return now seems to be pointing to some opening. Maybe I still need to wait.
MBTI / Jung's Eight Cognitive Functions
I never understood how MBTI's binary divisions could classify people. Grouping someone with 51% of a trait together with someone at 99% has always seemed absurd to me, so I've never been especially impressed with MBTI tests.
But one night, I suddenly wanted to take one again and see whether I'd still get the type I used to get. I threw the I/E, S/N, T/F, and P/J percentages at AI. It didn't make much of my nearly fifty-fifty results either.
Then I remembered Jung's eight cognitive functions, which could give a more detailed set of measurements, and threw those results at AI too.
In the end, I got the label INTJ. Not bad. At least, skimming the reasoning of an AI that knew nothing about me, I found that its description resembled my daily life.
Further analysis produced an interpretation that I was experiencing grip stress. Interestingly, once I had those interpretations, I felt calm again. Suddenly, I had the strength to do a few things. Perhaps it was simply that some of what I was going through had been given a logical explanation, with something I could trace it back to. I could quantify my mental state, retrace and review it, and even get predictions about myself. That gave me a little reassurance.
Maybe I've always treated myself as something controllable and predictable. When “I” fall outside my own control, I get anxious. When I find a way to locate myself again, I calm down. Perhaps that isn't quite normal. But it's nice.
Fading
Something else I need to record: everything about me is fading. First my appetite, then physical strength, then energy, then ambition, and after that, curiosity...
I joke that university has ruined me... Turned me into a maggot that only wants to lie paralyzed in bed, or something. Nobody argues. I lose myself in jokes at my own expense.
There are upsides. At least I seem to be more sensitive now. I can tell when the milk tea I ordered at 30% sweetness is made with full sugar. Little knocks and bumps hurt again. And now I can fail to run 800 meters like a little girl...
My weakening memory plus my weakening body earned me a low mark in the martial-arts PE final. I simply couldn't remember the movements and had no energy to practice in the sun... I get heatstroke easily too. Stay outside too long in Changsha's 30°C-plus weather and I get dizzy. I don't know whether I have low blood sugar. My stomach's useless anyway: whatever I eat makes me want to throw up. The only energy that keeps me going comes from sweet drinks.
I haven't looked into what's wrong. I just feel most comfortable in bed. We've all happily agreed on that.
As I said, everything about me is fading, including the energy to write these observations.
I'll leave it here. I don't know what I'll do the next second, either.
Anyway, this was just an impulsive record. Once the impulse fades, I'll return to the loop.