Life as a human can be filtered in so many ways.

The hands are one. I’m a left handed person, who was switched to right, in the name of being able to use standard scissors – supposedly to make life easier for me.

I never knew it possibly caused problems, I guess I still don’t, but I think it did.

I read an article saying that your dominant hand and dominant brain get a bit muddled when you are switched from your natural inborn side to the opposite. It was a bit depressing to think that I may have struggled with math because of the switch. I really struggled with math, I took everything three times, in grade school with the class, in grade school behind the class, in college again after failing to score passing on the courses already completed. I got through three calculus classes and struggled to try to pass the fourth, twice, which I never did. It still hangs over my head that I couldn’t grasp the material fast enough to pass. I think I could have done it given more time, for some reason I always needed more time to understand math as it was presented to me, even though my mind isn’t handicapped in capabilities in any way that I’m aware, I just needed more time than average for math.

26% of US students are able to understand 5th grade math leaving high school, that’s crazy.

It makes me feel a bit better.

For whatever reason I am the way I am, others are also that way.

The pain of struggling is more painful when it feels like we struggle alone.

I’m teaching math, multiplication in particular, right now. I wanted to make it fun, yet my daughter is struggling. I watched a few TED talks about math, one man (Eddie Woo) had glasses, he said seeing had always been a struggle in his life, yet he would never say “I’m not a seeing person,” that’s a great attitude.

I, like so many people, said I’m not good at math. Sure it was true, but I had this idea that I could never be. I’m also not good at sit ups or cooking, but I have the idea, I could do sits ups for a month and be fine, or take a cooking class and practice a few years and be good, and I have the idea with math, that I will never be good at it, no matter what happens.

Math Inspirations:

It’s kind of silly, at my age, done with my degree, but I want to go back and get better at multiplication now. I know I don’t have to be good at it, I know there are calculators, yet, I want to take something I believed I could never overcome and overcome it.

I want to prove myself wrong.

I’m at a low point right now, typically I hate myself for being at a low point. But today I don’t.

I remember my mother telling me a lot, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

I thought I didn’t care what she said, or listen to it, yet that’s something I’ve always followed.

So, when I’m starting to need help, I am quiet, when I’m tolerably mad or exhausted I’m silent, until I blow up eventually.

I’ve never noticed that side of myself before, it doesn’t surface a lot, a few times or one time a year my optimism goes on vacation. It’s very seldom compared to my sister with chronic depression, so I tend to think I can’t mention it.

There are many times I don’t write, when I’m particularly busy with the kids sick or teething, if I don’t have anything to say, if I’ve read so much I’m mentally “stuffed,” but another time is when I’m melancholy.

I read the book “Permission to Feel” this year, it was crazy that it was my permission to feel, but it was. So I’ve been having intense feelings, good and bad, surfacing, which I’m sure built up over a life time.

I don’t have “a reason” for being melancholy right now, I had a loss in the family, grieved it, came through it, and now, for no obvious reason I’m a low point. But for the first time ever, it’s okay with me, I’m not ashamed to be at a low point. I don’t love it, the tiredness, the lack of mental clarity, yet I’m not ashamed to be a human being who gets sad sometimes, for the first time ever.

I recently saw “Mulberry’s Child” a movie where a Chinese mom tries to explain her upbringing to her American daughter, that’s very much my family as well.

We didn’t abuse our kids, so they wouldn’t be like us, yet they will never deeply understand our upbringing, and us theirs, so that it’s a huge divide between us. Like a river of gold. It’s wonderful that they don’t understand, yet distancing.

Am I a sine or a cosine? I don’t know, even hypothetically, I don’t know. One starts from nothing, improves, fails back to nothing, turns negative, hits rock bottom, turns around, improves again and repeats. The other (cosine) starts from the top, fails, turns around, succeeds, fails again ext. I don’t know which one I am, but it feels very much like my husband and daughter are on one curve and I’m on another.

It’s an ugly time in my life, as an individual I’m a bit lost if I should turn to computer programming or writing for a future career, as a parent my older child just pushed the baby to the floor from behind, for me it’s deeply depressing that our reality of two kids, includes a certain amount of sibling abuse, I need more skill in discipline than what I have to fix the problem I have, thus the reality is an unwinnable moment, I didn’t want that moment to happen, yet it did and will always have become our life.

My marriage is strongly neutral, better than bad, my husband really disregards whatever I say as I say it, and fills in his opinion of me with phantom things not remotely like what I said or did, making the actual me a stranger to my husband.

We don’t argue, yet we are one of those couples who live inside two different digital worlds, his Robbinhood, Youtube, Twitter rarely crosses my WordPress, Steam, Audible world. I didn’t want to become “that couple,” but we have.

Mentally I’m optimistic, but I feel a separation between my mind and my soul. Many times I’m ill and optimistic, and I feel the separation between my body and mind, my body at a low point, my mood still at a cheery high.

This is the first time I’ve ever noticed feeling “blue” while having a hopeful “mind”.

I’ve been wondering about the mind and soul for sometime. I heard, mind, body and soul, many times as a complementary and alternative health major, yet I never had any grip on the slippery soul.

I’m beginning to feel my soul, weeping. But gratitude is keeping my mind very happy. My body is somewhere between, recovering from illness, not sleeping much lately.

Perhaps my mind and soul are usually low together, or high together, so feeling them at odds with each other is very, jarring, yet helpful at getting a sense of my own soul.

It may be cliche, but playing music has been the only way I really get in touch with my soul ever. I haven’t made it a good habit yet.

It feels like my life has fallen apart lately, but I don’t have evidence that it has. I’ve been getting the laundry done, the folding done, the dishes done, the kids fed, as much cleaning as I ever do, a bit of organizing, spending responsibly, things that were hard for me in the past, yet it feels completely hollow. I feel like a ceramic rabbit impersonating a real rabbit.

So many things are great, my kids are doing well, I hope, they laugh on a daily basis, they sing sometimes, they dance and spin, I think that means they are well. My husband kept his job, he started investing in stocks, we are doing as well financially as we have ever done, with the signs of being done with our overspending and fiscally irresponsible youth. I’m very much alive, physically I’m so lucky to have so little pain or lack of freedom in that way. But I feel very alone, profoundly alone.

I feel like I have a huge internal wilderness, with a large forked river, and I don’t know which way to turn. I don’t know where I’m going, or even where I want to go.

Perhaps it stems to my marriage being a place of uncertainty, I don’t know if I want it to get better, or be over, or even be the same. I’m deeply lost.

Because it feels like everything is out of my hands. And if it’s all out of my hands, I don’t know that I want to exert the effort of forming an opinion if my opinion isn’t going to impact reality.

I don’t know if I want to keep trying to discipline my daughter to be non-violent or just separate the kids physically.

I don’t know if I want to keep mentioning my life to my husband, who seems to forget my words before they are even spoken.

I don’t know what matters to me right now.

I’ve been thinking about the quote “the key to enjoying life is realizing we are never really in control.” Perhaps too much, it feels like I’m drowning in serenity. I don’t know if I’m going to spin aimless circles or come through an underwater cave into another source of air.

I have lost myself, but without being a mess, I’m showering, everything is somewhat tidy, nothing is outwardly out of place, but inwardly everything is out of place.

I think I’ve the bottom of my personal sine curve for the second time in my life, I remember being a Jr High student walking home 6.7 miles, completely lost. Like not actually lost, it was a very easy route of pretty much one road and then a right turn, yet completely mentally lost.

This is the second time in my life I’ve been lost. And nothing horrible happened, my biggest loss in life was in between the times I’ve been lost in 2006, when I lost my grandmother, the only person who ever loved me in a way that felt like real love.

There are times it felt like everything I did mattered, and other times, it felt like nothing I did mattered. But right now, I think “mattering,” “impact,” “success,” “connection,” “relevance” is like the intersection of sine and cosine at ~.8, I think the horrible mistakes and the wonderful attempts both fail to intersect another person or even yourself most the time, that the window for success and connection is always small, that failure is all the points where the two cures don’t meet, and success is very brief. I think getting comfortable with failure may have been the best thing I’ve ever done for myself, perhaps it’s the best thing I’ve ever taught my children.

“If you don’t have something nice to say, it’s fine to try to speak your truth still, it’s fine to tell your story still, it’s fine to say hi to me still, it’s normal to not be perfect and polished at all times, it’s natural, it’s inevitable (beautiful? I’m not there yet).”

I’m not sure how much using the wrong hand affected me throughout my life, but I’m sure using the wrong attitude has affected me the most.

Specifically intolerant perfectionism. Sometimes I’ve been negative, greedy, hateful, bitter, ungrateful, or entitled, but not nearly to the extent I’ve hated myself for being imperfect or parlayed myself by seeking a guarantee of perfection before starting something (which obviously never comes).

Often I see my good ideas turned into reality by someone else, and it’s beautiful, it makes me feel like I didn’t let humanity down, because someone else picked up the banner… but when I wonder why it wasn’t me, I know it’s not because I was lazy, but because I was too perfectionistic to allow myself to try.

So I am at a low point, a hopeful low point, and I’m noticing some of the brightness of this dark landscape is gratitude at what others do to solve the world’s problems, some is knowing that life is so changing, my life will surely change again, seeing some of my “friends” (I don’t how to call the people who barely know you, but inspire you so much) succeed lets me know that success is possible, there is a solution to the problem, even if I haven’t found it yet…

It’s been interesting being melancholic, without putting myself down for being melancholy for the first time in my life, and it’s the first time I’ve ever written from this place that I have so seldom been in, but that I was raised to believe is a place of mandatory and absolute silence.