Out of Africa

so i have been even less happy with life when i was told by boss last week that i needed to do a big presentation next month in front of all the bosses in a service completely strange to me. :$$$$ I am no good at presentations even on familiar grounds (and even when the audience is only 2-3 people) and just thinking about what's going to happen in that packed room with unfamiliar bosses was enough to make me hyperventilate.

not to say a big part of the presentation is going to be on the controversy of Exit international. :$$$$$ i must confess i don't really have a strong sense of social justice... i feel very honoured and happy when smart friends invite me to join their vigorous intellectual ethical debates... but my own views often go no more than the universal basic understanding that the more you ban people from doing something the more people would want it so what is the point...
anyways i am having a week off and tried to look up stuff on Exit International and felt very poisoned in many ways...
maybe i just need to chill and have some valium. :(

hence the procrastination and denial start and I went back to read old mangas. I first read Tokyo Love Story when I was 15 and then watched the more famous TV adaption some years later and over time the two somewhat different storylines merged a bit, until recently via someone else's reviews I suddenly realised what was really going on...

Rika Akana... the altruistic gregarious smiling goddess loved by everyone in the series, was actually a fulminant borderline in the manga.
reading back i managed to spot even the parasuicidal gestures...lol  there was this bit when she had an argument with Kanji and ran out in a thunderstorm and purposefully clipped her hair with a metal clip showing everyone she wanted lightening to strike her because Kanji was not being nice... -_-|||| (this is textbook stuff!!!)
...and the reason why Kanji went out with her in the first place, and why she was somewhat accepted into their little friendship circle since high school, had a lot to do with their high school borderline friend who suicided at the age of 17.
when I first read it I completely failed to see the relevance of the dead friend and mentally skipped chunks of people's flashbacks about events from high school (probably found it really boring too)...
and now they finally make sense... *sniff*

Fumi Saimon is a brilliant storyteller and has a philosophy degree but probably hadn't studied much psychology by the time she came up with borderline Rika:
and because of that she never had a condemning tone about Rika and her impulsive unjustified actions. she attributed her BPD to her desire for authenticity and freedom, 2ndary to her early upbringing in the primitive carefree vibrant environment of Africa.
Now moving on to the TV series, instead of primitive Africa, Rika came from America.
So borderlines are from Africa and goddesses are from America.
...
....
......this is so racist even racist me cringed.

so, back to the manga, i ended up crying almost non-stop when I got to the last volume.
playboy Mikami:
Overall my life is a success: I became a doctor, I am popular with girls, and now I have a beautiful fiancee, but only one thing lacking...
I have had no happy childhood.
successful people often want perfect success, but there is no way to change past misfortunes.
I want to give my son perfect happiness, only in this way my success will be complete.
He can play by the river until the sun goes down. and when he is hungry, he comes home, his parents would have made him a warm dinner, smiling as they welcome him back...
哭成狗……

Satomi as a teenager arguing with the rest of the class after the borderline girl committed suicide and left a note on the class blackboard saying "I hate all of you."
-What she told us by her death, i think, is just that we cannot buckle under such unjustified violence.
-Is suicide a form of violence against those who are left behind?
-I think it is, and such an angry suicide note is an act of cowardice.
-How can you say such terrible things about a friend who passed away?
at which point the majority of the class became indignant about Satomi's attitude and left the room but only Satomi, Mikami and Kanji stayed. Each of them were affected by the borderline suicide more than anyone else:
Mikami had a one night stand with the borderline girl not long ago-
Borderline girl tried to ask Kanji out just days before she died and got turned down by Kanji who said he liked Satomi--
Satomi's family ran a love hotel and she saw the borderline girl walking out with a man a week before she died and the girl accused her of reporting it to the teachers while she didn't-
Mikami tried to console Satomi:
-These people are just indulging in their sentimentality - "the noble me who is really considerate about my friend". Everybody used to hate her, didn't they?
I really don't think we can take dead people's last words too seriously. In crime shows we often hear the criminals saying before they die "i did it"... but if I am the criminal I will definitely say "I didn't do it".
Humans are all fallen. Who knows how true people's words are before they die?
and Satomi continued... crying:
-I thought she died hating me, but I am not going to admit defeat.
With people who really dislike me, who dislike me to the point that they wanted to go and die...
I am not going to run away. I am going to accept it.
继续哭成狗……

and Rika Akana meeting Kanji for one last time in Ehime, when Kanji told her about their high school borderline classmate who died and how much she reminded him of her:
What a joke. I am just Rika Akana. I am not going to be like anyone else.
and I am not dead yet. I want to live and live and live well.
I want to live and definitely not waste my life.
这次哭成polar bear没救了……

So... Tokyo Love Story is actually Tokyo Borderline Fairytale, good antidote for people, shrinks or not, who are troubled by the fact that others had in some ways, wanted to make them responsible for their own demise. There is a very borderline girl in the story who upsetted many people along the way with her borderliney actions, but in the end with an amazing twist of fate, graciously turned around, took responsibility for her own actions, left things as they were, and salvaged a few people haunted by the memories of a past borderline suicide, by their more positive experiences with her.

and I feel salvaged too by you, lovely Rika Akana.
and you really didn't have to look as good as this. *hearts*

The runaway job

i am two weeks into my new job and already not liking what i am seeing. I still like the work itself more than any other subspecialities of this field... but this is a mere 20-30% of my week, and i really don't know if that's really enough to sustain me.

apart from a big boss who doesn't really seem to trust his colleague of at least two decades and gets me involved in uncomfortable (and very unnecessary) conversations, i look at the psychology team and feel very speechless almost every single day. one prominent member has already made multiple strange personal/professional comments and the other day she dropped another bomb as she was telling me about a pt: i think pall care is just slow euthanasia.
?!@_@...
?!@_@...x10
i kept quiet and moved the conversation on from her passionate stance for unknown reason. it was however enough for the fleeting acronym of "aphra" to flash across my head.
这算是鬼话还是人话？你这个样子还要teach人家psychology????
but maybe my professional suspicions are also just be projections of my own discomfort with people who fail to even put up a temporary facade professionally and instead make their personal views and feelings spilling everywhere even in front of strangers.

end of the day i am not void of empathy for my new boss or psychology colleagues. To be good at this work we cannot simply shut things out and be blunted, and the level of sensitivity we need to maintain makes us vunlerable to all kinds of poisons in life. 生老病死 happen around everyone and hit everyone hard and affect us in all sorts of ways. and if we are finding our own lives and related poisonous thoughts and feelings difficult to manage, what do we do? we go on to poison ourselves? or others? or both?

I am not privy into my boss's personal life but i have heard gossips of tragedy and sadness. i can still take pride in myself these days for keeping a psychotic borderline at chronic high suicide risk on cto seeking admission out of hospital for community mx despite my past bad experiences (and then go home and worry and not have an appetite for days) but where will i be when i get to boss's age?

i will probably be far worse off in clinical practice and personal life. i may already be dead from consequences of all this chronic sugar and carbonated drink craving and erratic binge eating and non-eating.

so i am kind of relieved to think i did all the background work so i can go back to my old workplace and 95% certain i will want to go back after 6 months. what really bothers me however is the fact that everyday I still drive past my home away from home for the past 9 years...
...and despite my dislike of the new, i don't feel homesick about the old or miss it very much at all.  囧

Maybe I just need a runaway job, like people who have runaway accounts and can take off at any time, so that when I am unwell and unfit for work i can admit i am unwell and unfit for work and get away and do something else.  For now i am starting to think at least having a space away from every psychological mindedness related stuff is probably what I need at this point in time. chinese ppl overall are not very psychologically minded. when there is a good traditional chinese story that is not psychologically minded but still decent and makes sense it is worth gold. (the Bible on the other hand is very psychologically minded... i remember reading stories of certain biblical heros when i was younger and always thought these people get a bit funny at times, and nowadays a lot of the funniness have very reasonable psychological explanations and make perfect sense... )
but I will leave the Bible alone for once.lol



i finished watching a romantic period drama this week (with no significant biopsychosocial stressors to decompensate me and make me turn to more violent bloodthirsty alternatives... XD) and really liked it. It has its brainless bits, and is not psychologically minded at all (kept on asking to myself how can person A interact with person B with such ease and not project feelings of past issues with person C onto person B etc etc etc... 囧）

but it was a sweet good story with good looking people that after watching once i want to watch it again. *giggle* both male and female leads were older than me and still looked stunning (yes I am at the age now that i do mind these things -_-|||) Wallace Huo has been around for a while but I was never really into him. think i found him too good looking and not really my type... lol there were also gossips around re: him into activities that were a little more tangible and transactional than watching little movies (if you get what i am getting at... XD)

but i find him so professional in his work it's almost touching. he's such a convincing romantic lead and so stable in his performances in almost every drama with different actresses there are hardly ever any half-hearted sloppy scenes. (remembering masha and his facial spasms when he just needed to look a bit "interested" in a female lead who has a more commanding air than him...-_-|||)

so when professionalism is a little short in supply in real life at the moment, this realisation is somewhat inspirational. and as politically incorrect as i have always been, if stars have enough likeable attributes, i don't find transactional lifestyles in the privacy of ones' own homes very bothering at all.