@muan's posts

Flavors of Racism

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0800

Go back to your country lazy dirty chink.

This is a real text message I received when I was working in tech in London, in a tiny startup. At the time, I had a coworker who constantly made racist jokes—some general, some at my expense. He is Indian (I think). I assumed the text was from him.

After a while, when chatting at work, I mentioned the text and told him I just assumed it was from him and kept my distance. He was shocked. He said it wasn’t him, and he honestly thought all the jokes were just laughs and giggles, he would never intentionally hurt me, and that he will think twice going forward because he does not want to be considered as someone who can send this kind of texts.

There are different flavors of racism. Oddly, the text felt like a preferable form—compared to being insulted to my face, or compared to not even knowing that someone dislikes me because of my race.

I spent 5 years in the UK and 5 years on and off in the States, and I prefer the British and European form of racism in comparison to the American ones.

Many racist people in the States will never admit it. And because they don’t, it makes me question everything about myself—not just my skin color; my gender, my appearance, my competency, my language skills, and many more.

If I just knew it was my skin color that upset them, I could leave everything else about me intact.

I believed him. But it still changed something.

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You can try harder (CW)

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0800

Content warning: on depression.

No, I really can’t.

In the last few years I have learned that the way to keep myself away from suicidal ideation is through resource management.

My insomnia persists. Last night I slept in two 2-hour chunks. I woke up each time lethargic and angry at the unchanged state of my physical and mental health.

On a good day I can shower, on an excellent day where I literally did nothing, I just might be able to take out the trash. I don’t see people socially because they drain my energy, I don’t make promises because I can’t even keep promises I make to myself. I told friends who asked me to do contract work that I literally can not make any commitments on how many hours each week I would be able to give them. I don't know if this evening I might try swallowing all the pills in my procession, or if I’d wake up tomorrow wishing to die that instance. I try not to, but my best, evidently is often not enough.

I am giving it all already simply managing the state of me being alive. Anything in addition of self-sustaining, depression management, is extra. So much extra.

You saw that I wrote a blog post, designed stickers, and shipped them all over the world. You don’t see I haven’t showered for a week, live amongst trash bags and boxes, have been eating prepared meals and delivery, for months, so that I can go into overdraft to do the things that fulfill my soul, not just sustain my being.

I can’t try harder. I had days in a row in the last months wishing that each day I can get just a bit more desperate, so I would one day be courageous enough to close out this clown show.

I am not writing this so you pity me, I am writing this hoping that you would stop asking me to try harder, to do just a bit more, as if it was easy. Whatever I am able to output right now is already my absolute best. Not a single drop more. I am scraping the bottom of the barrel every single day. Sure, you can think I am weak. I am. I am positively tired of it.

I understand that professionally, this seems like I half-arsing things. Trust me I am more frustrated about this than you can possibly be. Take [whatwg/html] Toggle (show/hide) button for example, I gave up rather quickly because I already saved up for a long time to be able to offer up what I did. What you also don't see is the emotional labor under the table that pushed me into overdraft. I am personally not disappointed at myself. I think I did the best I could, and I take comfort in that I tried. People might, like I did, one day look into the history of specification and found odd things that never happened, and thought "Ah, I wish that happened, but this person tried. I wonder who they are and what they're doing now." I found many of my favorite tenured people in the spec world this way.

Would it be better if I do nothing at all? I don't know. But there is no moisturizer for the soul. I just might dry up.

My therapist suggested that I do something less challenging, less contentious, farther from my core beliefs.

I don't know what that could be yet.

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JavaScript dos and donts

Sat, 02 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0800

Do

When the core functionality of a feature cannot function with only HTML.
When the core functionality of a feature can benefit from some JavaScript. Start with only HTML, then progressively enhance it, so it can still work without JavaScript. A table can be pure HTML; a sortable table needs only a dash of JavaScript.
When HTML does not provide the user interface pattern required, then:
- Is this user interface pattern absolutely essential? Can you use a checkbox or a select element and progressively enhance them? There is sometimes very legitimate reasons why this pattern does not exist in HTML.
  Note that I used the word "legitimate" as opposed to "good", because HTML has a long legacy and some problems are so complex that it is very difficult to reach a consensus between all browser vendors, developers, assistive technology makers, and their users. Especially so since not everyone's interest aligns. I know, shocking.
  This means your custom solution also needs to consider all the reasons why this pattern isn't part of HTML. And along with that—tech debt, browser compatibility issues, and maintenance cost.
- If you are absolutely sure, still try to provide a non-JavaScript, bare bone path if possible, and then do use JavaScript, with caution.
When the HTML solution is not accessible by default, like when you need an ARIA state change, aria-expanded or the sorts. Go to town, after checking a11ysupport! Do everything WAI-ARIA tells you to. Skip nothing.
When you think there’s a cool CSS hack to achieve an interactive behavior, because 95% of the times that solution will not be accessible without JavaScript.

Don't

All the other times.

Addendum 12 Nov 2024

Since this middle of the night post that took less than five minutes to write got more eyeballs.

“Write JavaScript like it’s 2005” had been GitHub’s front-end team’s guideline since its inception, until React got pushed down from Microsoft management and most of us on the front-end team quit. If you are a user of github.com, consider how it has changed since 2020.

This is an old practice that has gotten lost in the ways with the manufacture of JavaScript industrial complex/ecosystems and frameworks. I hate to be the one to tell old tales but this is just another reminder that you can absolutely avoid dependency hell, We used to review every single dependency that goes into GitHub Dotcom and during our time the JS bytes continuously decreased as features were added. See Removing jQuery from GitHub.com front-end for how at that time we approached GitHub front-end. jQuery was only one of the many dependencies that we added with the goal to remove at some point.

I am sad to see new comers to web developments being bombarded with what you “MUST KNOW” when those things are absolutely optional for web development. One should not need to have npm installed in the first two months of your web development bootcamp, despite what the industry perpetuates. I am disappointed that our once open and low barrier entry to web development was raised so unncessarily and arbitrarily high that we don’t even know exactly what we are serving to users.

I to this day have zero front-end framework experience, but my knowledge in the web platform gets me hired, even by the framework making companies with great engineers, because they know my lack of knowledge for frameworks does not matter, what matters is that I know how the web works, I know how to trace back to the source and understand what each line of code does.

We have an enterprise of mediocre restaurants that do not know/care to know the ingredients that go into making the food we are serving.

Lastly,

If you make websites, I encourage you to exercise taking stock of your JavaScript usage.
Alex Russell made a flow chart.
Get the original Anti-JavaScript JavaScript Club stickers from Alex.
Support the Open Web Advocacy with Anti-JavaScript JavaScript Club Tees by Frances.
I also designed some 88 × 31 banners and made them into stickers.

From member of the Anti-JavaScript JavaScript Club,
Mu-An Chiou

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An experiment

Sun, 21 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0800

Berlin, postscript

The following topics are in the note I put down for this blog post about a month ago. I'll quickly explain them since I have lost most of the context.

Content warning: depression related

Psychology

I made a friend in Berlin who is studying psychology and developed a VR self-counseling app. I tried it. It was somewhat effective. I want to try and build a web app with just video recordings.

I was able to talk about psychology and philosophy with most people I met there, and the topics weren't seem as heavy subjects. Just everyday things that everyone goes through. That was quite refreshing.

Nihilism

I have had to explain this a few times. There must be a name for this since it's highly unlikely that I came up with this original thought. Please let me know–The gist is, me having feelings about things or people has nothing in conflict with my nihilistic belief. In the philosophical sense, nothing matters, but neurons, feelings, consciousness, etc., do exist. I wish there's a way to cut them off with the will of a philosophical belief. But there isn't.

Mu-An's (Jones)town

What if I can gather up all my friends who also have a death wish to all help each other out? I can make a religion out of this.

Berlin, a good time

First order of priority, I want to ease your minds by saying that despite all the things I said in Update, I prevailed. Berlin was a great time.

All my friends there have been wonderful pillars of support. I did not once feel alone or scared since the initial weeks, which was in part just an adjustment period.

In the first week, I battled with the loud street noises and the jetlag plus my insomnia. I also took my first German lesson completely in German, and it shattered my confidence.

I should have expected that things will take time. I did expect to have to lean on my friends, but not that much; which is OK. That's the whole point of experimenting, so I can find out.

My German tutor and I had very chill lessons speaking in German and English just about life, hobbies, philosophy, literature, and politics even. We met 3 times a week, and got along quite well. One of my German friends is slightly upset with how quickly I progressed in just two months. シ

I made quite a lot of friends by happenstances. I found a pottery studio nearby where I clocked in perhaps 30 hours in the last month, and made friends there too.

My local friends met up with me and introduced me to their friends. Everyone was great. Seriously. We can amicably disagree on things, dive deep but also have light-hearted conversations. It was so easy. Not saying we are all lifelong friends now and will hang out constantly in the future. But good times were shared, stimulating conversations were had. What more can one ask for?

Due to the geolocation convenience, I was also able to connect with a lot of people in tech, met with previously online tech friends, and got more involved in Web Standards once again. I have decided to not seek full-time employment to keep my options and focus flexible, and to work on things that I stubbornly want to invest my time in, which is HTML and accessibility.

At the end of the two months, Berlin friends started to ask me "so, what's the verdict?" Without thinking too much, I said "No, it was great and all. But the cost is too high. I am going back to Taiwan and adopt a cat or two." They found it puzzling, and me too; it wasn't a great answer. These two months in Berlin was an experiment, and a successful one at that. How come I ended up deciding my hypothesis was incorrect? It wasn't perfect, sure. But logically, it is a step towards the right direction..., and deserves further expertimentations, right?

Right. I think.

It's good to try things. All new experiences are good experiences. It's a process of elimination. I can afford to fail.

I have decided to pursue a part-time living arrangement in Berlin, which involves purchasing a second apartment so the adjustment period would be less debilitating. I am fully aware of how extremely lucky I am to have this privilege. I am doing this under the supervision of my born and raised east Berliner friends, and I continue to learn German as my goal is to have a long term community there.

Some friends had pointed out that this might not be the best financial decision, but at the end of the day, it's better for me to gain short term happiness than to stay in long term depression.

So... wish me luck? :)

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Update

Tue, 07 May 2024 00:00:00 +0800

Hi again.

I am sitting in an apartment in Berlin right now thinking about e-mailing my therapist. But instead of doing that, I thought I'd read back on what I have written in the past on this website.

I guess it is time for an update.

I am doing better. I guess stabler, more understanding of my own feelings ~~and more in control~~; um, scratch that. And more aware of how to priortize my responsibilities.

My insomnia somehow got worse again earlier this year, and I continue trying. I got a new job last year, somewhat out of obligation, and I have since left the position.

With my not-so-new-anymore job, I got to go to TPAC representing the Taiwanese government. I presented two proposals at WHATWG meetings, and connected with so many amazing people. It was incredibly exciting. I found a meaningful direction and had momentum. There were a ton of exciting things I could contribute to, and they would also bring me joy.

But then I dropped back down to earth and lost the drive.

I was disappointed in myself but have also learned to accept that many things are out of my control.

Earlier this year I reached the conclusion that I need to have a constant source of relational intimacy. My family and I were never close. In fact, I am as far as can be from them now mentally. I have no close (geographically & psychologically) friends at all due to moving around and working remotely all my adult life. I figured now, my three options are:

Continue to try to find something in Taipei
Find an oversea satellite hub where I can meet a bunch of my favorite people semi-frequently
Adopt a cat or two

I have been trying 1 for a hot minute and it has been looking grim. Perhaps I am just too peculier and picky. My high school best friend said I am a weirdo trying to find other weirdos, of course that is going to be hard. Him and I are still close, but our lives have diverged too far to cross again.

2 was deemed promising because I am always happier when I meet my oversea friends, which is also always noticeable by people around me as well as myself.

I was pretty sure 3 wasn't going to work, as I am someone who would not like to be relied upon; however in this scenario, I'd be relying on them too, so it would be a mutual dependency. Transactional. Not owing anyone any favors is logically preferable. And my cat friends always seem less lonely than I am.

I met more people, went to a few cat shelters, and visited a few different countries. 2024 is my year of fucking around and finding out. So that brought me to Berlin.

Berlin was my first stop after I started my "digital nomad" phase soon after joining GitHub in 2013, because a U.S. work visa was impossible to get.

Berlin has always been one of my favorite cities. The GitHub coworking space here used to have a collection of international, weird, smart, but also very kind people. And my subsequent visits back to the city were all for JSConf EU, where my favorite kind of nerds get together.

The decision to try out Berlin wasn't a hard one. I know so many people here, and baking Pretzels, like my obsession with Pacific Saury (秋刀魚 / サンマ), is one of my personality triats now.

I figure if I want a hub here, I ought to learn the language. And I grew up wanting to be a polygot, so why not use this chance to get serious about things?

I found a German tutor, a very cool nonchalant Taiwanese German woman who is also kind of weird like I am. Her German mom loved my pretzels, and our classes went very well.

Months passed by I arranged to attend a language school in Berlin and my friends helped me find an apartment. My doctor signed off on my travels and agreed that changes of sceneries are always good. Everything fell into places. And I fell into this foreign city.

How hard can it be? I moved to Birmingham when I was 19 to study, I moved to New York when I was 29 for work. Now I am simply pretending to live in Berlin for a mere 2 months. Easy-peasy... No?

Little did I know this challenge would push me off a cliff like I was free-falling.

I got the warmest welcome. Lots of friends hit me up wanting to meet. There are no external problems that can't be solved. Except all my problems are internal. Deep feelings of anxiety and fear. I immediately want to crawl into a ball and ship myself back home, where things are familiar.

"This is a mistake," I said to myself. Perhaps I moved too fast, too far, too hastely. "Nothing is grounding me here," I said to a friend. All these loosy goosy reasons for me to be here are not enough of an anchor to weight my anxiety down. I am floating in space and surrounded by... what the fuck is that?

I gotta relax.

I'll check back in with y'all in two months.

Trust the process. It will be fine. Everything will be in its right place.

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:tada:, on emoji code and more

Wed, 04 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0800

🎉, what do you call this emoji? To many of us it is memorized as :tada:, or :hooray:. However, if you put that into macOS/iOS emoji searcher, neither tada nor hooray would yield any results.

This is not a post about emoji naming, but about what we all now refer to as the :emoji_code:. Emoji naming is a can of worms that I would rather not open.

For a bit of context, I am a bit of an emoji enthusiast, and also kind of a fundamentalist. I maintain several emoji related projects. My friendship with many people in tech started through our shared interest in emoji, which is why I have been thinking about writing this post for a while.

To all the lovelies at Slack, I don't mean to pick on you all. You just got too popular and people start to attribute things to you. So I aim to set some records straight.

What is Emoji?
Slack custom "emoji" are not Emoji.
Slack did not invent :emoji_code:.

What is Emoji?

You can find the origin story of Emoji (絵文字(えもじ) ) in Mariko's Evolution of Emoji 🖼🔤✨ or Monica's Emoji: how do you get from U+1F355 to 🍕?. They have done a fantastic job telling you all its glory that there's nothing I can add.

My very brief version of the introduction is: Emoji is a character or a sequence of characters in the emoji category, as defined and maintained by the Unicode Consortium. Emoji are characters, similarly 龜 is a character that means turtle, and 🐢 is a character that means turtle.

The Unicode Consortium does a lot of other things, like preserving near-extinct languages, like figuring out how to design spaces for multiple versions of the same origin character that are different in cultures as they continue to change over time.

Slack custom "emoji"

Slack custom emoji on the other hand, are images that rendered in character sized to mimic the graphical yet character-like nature of Emoji. They are usually assigned a shortcode, but has no definition nor does it occupy a space in the Unicode Character Code Charts.

As an Emoji fundamentalist, I hope you can see why I have a problem with people calling them emoji. The "文字"（words/characters) part is kind of important. These are tiny stickers. I am not saying it's bad; they are just not emoji.

Who invented `:emoji_code:`?

It's hard to say, but shortcodes like these that represents text-sized imagery have existed since the dawn of the world wide web, and particularly around the time internet forum blossomed. In this case I want to talk about specifically using shortcodes for emoji, so it's going to be between the standardization of emoji (read the linked posts if you didn't in the previous paragraphs) and the birth of Campfire. Here I will let Jeremy Daer who introduced the first 10 :emoji_code: to Campfire do the talking:

Nice to meet you, Mu-An.

:sunny: ☀️ and :leaves: 🍃 were the first two. They're still favorites. 😊

This was a quick hack to have fun with an easter egg in Campfire since native emoji were broadly unsupported at the time (fall 2010). The colon style mimicked *other* /forms/ of ~emphasis~ common in message boards and IRC using :noun-like: punctuation that seemed otherwise unclaimed.

Names were assigned to feel right in chat rather than mirroring the long Unicode descriptors, like :+1: for 👍🏼 rather than :thumbs_up_sign: and :zzz: for 💤 rather than :sleeping_symbol:.

We gradually added more shortcodes as we used them, including in Campfire /play sounds.

Soon after, emoji-cheat-sheet.com popped up, thanks to Arvid Andersson.

GitHub used Campfire at the time and they caught on to the hidden feature right away. They requested more and started to use them internally, so in winter 2011 we extracted a gem that became gemoji.

Arvid probably has a keener sense of history from here: tons of others either adopted those shortcodes as-is or introduced their own sets and he compiled their usage on emoji-cheat-sheet. (Note, it appears he sold the site, but the original is still in archive.org and the GitHub repo still has full history.)

Thanks for the email! Fun to look back at this. I had no idea it had spread so widely. (We dropped support for shortcodes in Basecamp 3 since nearly all browsers had native emoji support by then.)

Best,
Jeremy

That's it! Many thanks to Jeremy Daer for providing these context.

To this day the naming of :emoji_code: is still non-standardized, and I don't know what it'd take for it to be. There are emoji projects that attempts to consolidate all the codes used in different chat platforms, but because there isn't a consistent source of truth, these libraries will always be playing catch.

How to use Emoji?

Lastly, let me rant on for a little bit more.

Since Emoji are characters by definition, they should not be used as not iconography, especially when used for the imagery implied meanings. This is especially important when it comes to localization and assistive technologies. The operating systems knows how to read Emoji as they have definition, however this is not universal nor localized.

For example, 🧵 is defined as "thread", which is commonly known in the English speaking internet as "a thread of discussions on a topic", however this definition is not localized to Chinese. To use 🧵 as a stand-in for "thread" it means you risk meaning getting lost in language barriers and cultural differences.

For a microblog like "🚨🚨🚨🚨 Attention 🚨🚨🚨🚨 Wild fire alert in the following regions: ...., calling for immediate evacuation for all local residents," what assistive technology reads out is "police car's light police car's light police car's light police car's light attention police car's light police car's light police car's light police car's light wid fire alert in the following regions:..." Surely that is not considered an optimal experience nor messaging.

Or for a less hyperbole example: "Today is international 🥞 pancake 🥞 day!" reads "Today is international pancakes pancake pancakes day!"

We can argue how assistive technology, operating systems, or browser engines, should and may be able to fix this issues through automatic de-duplication. but in the case of user-generated content I personally do not think it's an easy problem to tackle. VoiceOver on macOS now reads it by count of emoji, NVDA de-duplicates where possible; however, these fixes only apply when emoji are used as plain text, and aren't being replaced by images with alt text for flavors or cross operating system support, like they do in Slack, Discord, Twitter, and may other platforms.

I don't expect everyone with an emoji keyboard to know this, but I think these guidelines should be baseline knowledge for all the content writers.

As much as I love emoji, the Unicode Consortium undoubtedly does a lot of work that is way more important than maintaining and adding Emoji each year in my opinion (see: Mariko's hot take). However, if the attention they got through the worldwide adoption of Emoji helps fund their work, I guess that is a good thing. You can adopt an emoji to help fund their work.

I adopted 😬 a while ago; I used to make this face in photos because I don't like my smile, and to me it also is akin to 🤷🏻‍♀️, but there's really no way for people to know that I didn't mean to be :grimacing:.

Now, go forth and enjoy Emoji responsibly. 👋🏼

Many thanks to Javan, Trevor, Josh, and Jeremy for the background information on the creation of shortcode.
Many thanks to Monica for reviewing this blog post.
Many thanks to Julia for her wonderful emoji presentation in GitHub circa 2012 (find it and watch it, current hubbers!).

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Why not today? (CW)

Thu, 06 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0800

CONTENT WARNING: depression, suicide.

"Why not today?" I asked myself.

A year has passed by since I started to have strong suicidal thoughts daily. Ever since I started taking SSRI, anti-anxiety meds, and sleeping pills, things have gotten a lot better.

"A lot," huh.

Instead of thinking about death 100% of the days, I now have perhaps 40% of those days on average. And I have gotten more accustomed to them, and know how to deal with them to the best of my ability and available resources.

Whenever the mood strikes, I bake if I can. I take sleeping pills if it's time. I try to not be alone as much as possible. Some days these aren't options, some days I am weaker and I just drink till I am numb (a new thing I started to do this year); on one particular day, I went out and bought charcoal, along with some barbecue ingredients.

"So are you just chugging along with life/work mostly normally but having thoughts about death increase?" a friend asked.

I wouldn’t say normally. I have to try pretty hard to not think about how nice it’d be to die right this second. I think about it while in a meeting, while wiping down my countertop, while watering plants, while buying groceries, while hanging out with or talking to friends, while taking a bath, while having lunch with my coworkers, whenever I cross a street or walk past a bridge. And then I just would have to pull myself back and concentrate on the people or things in front of me.

You would catch me saying, "sorry, would you say that again?" cause I wasn't there.

I have a bag of charcoal in my apartment. So now this question comes to mind on the bad days. "Why not today?"

As previously discussed, I seem to be incapable of physically killing myself; nevertheless, the bad days have been pushing me to take tiny steps, ones that are easy and far removed enough that don't trigger my survival instinct. Now that I have taken a step, a physical step, both my therapist and psychiatrist upped the frequency of our appointments and my psychiatrist increased the the dosage of the SSRI.

I think about how I don't have things in order yet. For example, no one has access to one of the accounts that is about to be merged with another company, and if I don't stay alive till then to deal with their merger (inconvenienced by Wall Street, lol), a lot of money goes to waste when it otherwise would have make some people I care about right now very happy. But does it matter if I was dead? Who is left to care?

And another part of me think about if I could be like some of my other depressed friends, where they don't have a problem with living, they suffer due to the status quo. A lot of them have tried, really fucking hard, to make things better for themselves, but life continues to suck, and some of them get into the state of learned helplessness. I don't think that applies to me, because I never really tried, by that I mean, I don't have a picture of what a life worth living looks like, what a picturesque future can be, so there's nothing to work towards. A friend wears a cryonics bracelet, and it truly puzzled me.

I don't know why today is not the day. Perhaps the step is still too big, perhaps like I said before, I don't really want to or is simply incapable of commiting suicide.

I will inevitably keep thinking about this on the bad days when I am weak, and take those tiny steps.

I smiled at you. I laughed with you. I baked you bread. I sent you memes. I mailed you postcards. I went out of my way to find gifts for you. I told you I had an amazing time. I thanked you for the company and the conversation. I embraced your children and made them like me.

And I got through a day.

One
single
day.

Addendum:

Some of you might see that this is quite a departure from my initial post. This one is, raw I guess, in comparison. It was the first draft, and I did not ask anyone to review it before publishing. As context for why this is, here's a diary entry from last year after I published the initial post:

They praised my article, but it made me sad. I have become a person with problems™.
He said that perhaps my courage to share came from my good nature of wanting to help others, as I had packaged it that way. But not really. I honeslty just want to ask for some mercy.
I want someone to know that I am trying very hard to not simply fall apart. But that someone does not exist, thankfully we have the internet to overshare to.

Would you take the initiative, lend a hand, and let me hold onto it for a bit? Can you see that I'm trying very hard but still having a hard time?

@y said he wanted to give me a big hug. But in reality, I'm just forever sitting alone here in my apartment.
As I continue to live, I must accept that I am just here on my own; I can't fall, not in any direction.

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Giving up (CW)

Mon, 01 May 2023 00:00:00 +0800

Content warning: on life.

A few days ago I woke up in a very depressive mood. I knew it was going to be a bad day in that my mind will be preoccupied with thoughts, so I posted on Instagram asking my friends if they'd tell me something nice. Anything at all. They didn't have to be compliments.

I received a lot of supportive words, a few animal pictures, some compliments, and a few strangers told me how I inspired them; it was all very nice. And I am really really glad that I have this network of support, when I badly needed it.

Nevertheless, I want to talk about the idea of "giving up".

As previously mentioned, I don't see ending one's life as giving up. Some of the messages (very nice, well-intended ones) I received walked along the lines of "life is beautiful, there are so many possibilities", "you have so much potential to make wonderful things happen", et cetera. And these specifically, really rubbed me the wrong way.

I don't deny that the universe is fascinating. I am a very curious person; as a new friend recently said, "you ask a lot of questions." I fully recognize that there are people who appreciate my work and contributions. I see that there are things, even "good" things that I can and want to do.

However, if you were inside my brain, you'd see how unbearable living can be sometimes. My continued existence takes a toll that sometimes frankly I just can't afford.

The things that drain the life out of me can not be replenished by the wonders of the world. Much like the renewable energy problem the world faces now–we can generate a ton of solar energy, but storage is limited, the mineral and spatial resource needed to create storage is also limited; so the batteries get drained quickly given how little we can store.

I am trying to fix the storage and consumption problem, but just please know that it is not that I have no where to spend my energy. I am plenty curious and find life to be full of wonders, while at the same time, given that running on fumes is my constant state, it is exhausting.

"Life isn't worth it" is a demand/supply problem. Your body might need to hydrate, but you might simply be incapable to afford clean water. This demand can be mental and/or physical.

So putting an end to this is desirable, because the status quo is surviving instead of living. It is not giving up. It is not cowardice. It is not selfish. I am not bored.

Life is optional and exhausting, and I am not indifferent to the wonders of the world or the people around me, but I am indifferent to living.

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On relationships, or lack thereof

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0800

Wanting a relational sense of happiness is totally legitimate. But we shame both its desire and its lack of achievement. We condemn women who stay single and refuse to settle, but we also condemn women who are honest about how hard it is to have 0 social support or safety nets. - @aymannadeem

A while ago I made this website, muan.single.fyi, for reasons stated at single.fyi. My own profile had been reworded significantly since its initial creation, as I continued to figure out what I am actually looking for.

Now 34, a lot of friends have gotten married or have long-term partners. It doesn't bother me really. I have been mentally preparing myself to die alone for a long time, and I am "pretty happy" alone. I keep myself really busy, be it overworking and burning out, running a company, playing video games for days on end, working out, learning stuff, going to all kinds of shows, or hanging out with friends.

There are only a hand-full of relationships around me that I look at and think "oh that might be cool." The majority of the relationships I have observed throughout my lifetime have honestly seemed like colossal waste of time and energy, let alone ones that were hugely destructive. It makes sense though—I observed relationships between people my age who didn't know what they were doing, I grew up in a unhappy family (in my opinion—please, no one send this to my mom), and I tend to make better connections with people who are from broken families or have generally a pessimistic view on life. There's simply not much evidence that suggests relationships are worthwhile endeavors in my observable universe.

If you had been following me you'd know that things haven't been so great, and, as someone who have always been wearing her hyper-independence as a badge of honor, I was devastated upon realizing that sometimes it is impossible to keep it together, through sheer willpower by myself. It was ingrained in me that showing vulnerability and asking for support are extremely shameful actions, and putting emotional burden on others is not only selfish, but also incredibly entitled. Worry not; I have been working on untying these knots.

However, while working through this, I have encountered a bunch of counters along the lines Ayman wrote about. When I talk about wishing to have someone to count on, to support me in times of need, and that relational sense of happiness, people tell me I have to be more independent and only seek happiness from within. When I say I am and have been hyper-independent, I take very good care of myself, and relationships are complementary instead of necessary, people accuse me to be non-committal and that my potential partner would not feel appreciated (read: due to me not being financially dependent on them). It has gotten to the point that talking about relationships makes me anxious and I wonder if I should simply spare myself.

That's why Ayman's words ring so true to me. This desire has become too contended to admit to, while staying single as a woman in her 30s+ remains a pitiful predicament in the eyes of our society.

So I guess I will keep this to myself, and to you.

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Depression (CW)

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0800

CONTENT WARNING: suicide, and very strong opinions on the value of lives.

F2022

2022 is probably the most disorienting year of my life thus far. I spent the whole year trying to make sense of things, and failing. I was diagnosed with depression in the latter half of the year, and then very fortunately was given time off by my employer for an extended period. I am better now, at least on most days, and have gone back to work.

I want to write these experiences down because I learned a lot during this ordeal. I think the past me would have benefited from a post like this; I wish I had known to take insomnia much more seriously, and I was lucky to later learn to gauge the severity of my symptoms and when and how to escalate.

I am no expert, and the process I went through was quite a mess. I hope you read with empathy. My case is likely not going to be applicable to most, and I understand some of the words used and quoted might be triggering to some. As the content warning suggested, please stop reading now if this is a sensitive topic to you.

I have had enough good faith arguments with friends to know that many of them strongly believe that some of the principles for survival that I follow rigorously are unhealthy. I plan on continuing to have these discussions with my friends and therapist, because I do want to get to a better place, and am open to being convinced.

But past experiences shape us into who we are today. My ways of surviving are deeply ingrained; to change them, I would have to try creating new, more wholesome and less treacherous experiences.

Moving back to Taiwan

One of the first things I did after moving back to Taiwan was find a therapist, mostly for the family issues that I have been avoiding by doing all I could to stay off this island, but also for the burnout I experienced from my previous job.

I was extremely lucky to have found a therapist through a referral, someone I immediately clicked with. I’d describe our sessions as very productive. There is always an agenda, and always a debrief. I make notes during the sessions, I am very good at executing solutions, and things were getting resolved. At one point I even thought I was really the happiest I could be. Not all the problems were gone, but I could see that many things are "solvable"; much like software development, you just need enough code.

One issue existed from the get-go though—I am pretty guarded, and I was the one setting the agenda, instead of being led by my therapist. I thought I knew best. I made decisions on what problems were worthy to talk about and what weren’t. I treated the sessions like work meetings, which I'd avoid if possible, and I only book a session when absolutely necessary, with specific items to discuss.

From my therapist’s point of view, it was a matter of “when Mu-An is ready, she will tell me,” which I definitely appreciated. Earlier this year I opened up to her about new topics, which I led with "seems stupid to talk about this, but…" She paused and took some time to make sure I was aware that by delving into this new topic, it showed I have grown a lot, and that I was ready to take on more. But like many, I strive to present an outward image of being productive, hyper independent, functional, and efficient. There are definitely many things I deem unworthy of the billable hours.

Insomnia

I cofounded a company in 2011 and acted as a one-person engineering, product, design, and ops team. I always treated it as a side project, and I learned a lot by having to do everything. By 2021, it had grown to a company with 40 employees, and became the largest crowdfunding platform in Taiwan. It long grew past what I originally signed up for. I never intended to work on it full time, and it had been stressing me out ever since the business picked up significantly a couple years ago. Because friendships were involved, changing the arrangement took energy I didn’t have. Last year, with time, space, and therapy, I finally made the decision to hire a CTO to build a team and then stepped away from operations completely.

Around this time I thought I should be my most stress-free self. I intentionally stayed unemployed, I didn’t have to worry about money, didn’t have commitments, and had close to no responsibilities other than taking care of myself. But for unknown reasons, I started experiencing chronic insomnia. I wasn’t able to sleep for more than 5 hours, and never really felt rested. The insomnia was something I deemed unrelated to mental health (I couldn't be more wrong) so I did not tell my therapist, but I did talk to her about still not feeling relaxed.

I tried a lot of things. I exercised regularly, did cognitive behavior therapy for sleeping, tried getting more sun, had all sorts of supplements, took sleeping pills, tried weed (where it’s legal), and attempted to exhaust myself to the point that I would pass out on my bed. Despite all these efforts, I still would always wake up after a choppy 4 hours of sleep, wide awake, feeling unrested, exhausted, and unable to fall back to sleep.

At the end of 2021, I decided to continue on with life. I bought an apartment, and got a job. The insomnia worked well with the new job’s setting since I was up every day at 4 or 5am and could catch up with US folks some.

Soon after, I gave up trying to sleep better, and I started to do more, as how my normal self would have, after a long vacation. I operated as if I was at 100%. I worked, led projects; I exercised, squash and weight trainings; I fulfilled all my responsibilities, and then some. I was doing open source, learning Swift, studying Japanese, expanding my social circles, and taking care of my family, all with severely deficient rest.

I felt my attention span declining, and almost everyone who saw me in real life around that time commented on how I was visibly exhausted. How rude of them.

I figure at some point, life must find a way, since I couldn’t.

"It’s time to revisit the idea of suicide."

A couple months later (18 months after the insomnia started), my mind sort of just… gave up. It might be worthwhile to note that my body didn't.

I woke up one day and there was one thought on my mind, and I could not get rid of it: “I’m exhausted, I have no energy to go on. It’s time to revisit the idea of suicide. Baby Mu-An chose difficult and painful methods. Being twice her age now, surely I am smarter, wiser, more experienced, more resourceful, and can come up with something better and easier.”

I had attempted suicide twice before, but in completely different contexts; contexts that drove me to leave and try my best to stay away from Taiwan. After the second attempt I concluded suicide was something I am not competent enough to execute, therefore I simply crossed this option off the list of potential solutions. Given that I can't die, at least not on my own terms, I should try to live well, which involves a lot of rules and guidelines for survival that I regarded as completely necessary for my own protection, yet were thought by friends to be unhealthy.

In the following days, committing suicide became my only thought every waking minute. I was still working. I tried my best to distract myself, I exercised even more, I started baking, I met with friends whenever possible, and forced myself to say yes to all social events. Though I am an introvert through and through, I filled my time with people’s presence so my mind couldn't idle and spiral. It was exhausting pretending everything was fine, and the harder I tried to repress the thought, the more prominent it got.

My manager knew I’d been going through "some stuff" at this point, and one day I laid it out to him, and just said I don’t think I should be working now. At that stage, I was desperate enough to just quit and let my life come to a halt, but was talked down by a friend. My manager said that I should 100% prioritize my mental health, and I went on leave soon after.

Now a timely recommendation came through from a friend–a neurology clinic that was renowned for treating insomnia. I went and got diagnosed with severe anxiety even though I really didn't feel that way (#NotADoctor), and I got prescribed benzodiazepine. Getting treated for insomnia seemed reasonable to me, since my urge to end my life was due to exhaustion. I simply didn't have the energy to live anymore. Imagine a device with a drained battery, that can't shut down, but still processing at 100%, overheating.

I got loaded with benzodiazepine, 4 times a day. I did feel slightly more rested in the morning, but was still only getting a choppy 4-hours of sleep. Worse, I was barely able to function in the day time due to the side effects—dizziness, unsteadiness, not being able to concentrate. I broke a few glasses and mugs in this period. I swapped to enamel cups and got anti-slip slippers.

I told my therapist about the suicidal thoughts, which caught her off guard, since I had never mentioned anything of the sort and I seemed generally functional and capable. She demanded that we switch from the initial ad-hoc scheduling (every 2-3 months) to 2 times a week.

Around this time I started to reach out to even more friends, but my inner self thought it was utterly pathetic to need to talk to other humans on a daily basis (one of the "unhealthy" survival principles of mine). This need added fuel the fire that is the root of my suicidal thoughts—life is unbearable now because of my incompetency in resting, in being self-sufficient, in being independent, in being not a burden to others.

I went back to the neurologist every week, and the doctor’s solution to my unchanged situation was to up the dosage repeatedly. He reassured me that I would eventually get used to the pills and the side effects would subside. They didn't.

In the next few weeks, even typing on a phone became too difficult of a task for me.

Being overwhelmed by the thoughts of killing myself, I contacted a lawyer to set up a will. On a day which I deemed to be close to "the day," I called up my dad. I know he cares and might blame himself. He came to my apartment immediately.

In a traditional East Asian parent fashion, he couldn't understand why I was going to therapy to begin with; none of my family members understood it. I was the successful one, I had it all together. He commented that maybe I was just bored (mind you, around this time I was still working on open source projects that excite me a lot). He also suggested that perhaps I needed a purpose in life, needed an answer to the meaning of life, given I am the only atheist in my very Christian family.

All his responses were expected. I shrugged and let him hang out for the day since that'd ease his mind. I told him about my situation for his benefit, so that it wouldn't come as a surprise, and to give him an opportunity to "do something" to prevent what would come.

However, as it may be obvious to you by now, I later realized that I irrationally didn't really want to die, at least not that badly.

How...disappointing.

"Why won't you just jump off of a bridge?"

You see, I am a nihilist. I don't think taking one's own life is bad. I recognize the insurmountable pain is completely subjective. I think the act of suicide is brave. I regard it selfish for people to say "You should continue to suffer for my sake. I'd be sad. People'd be sad." I believe in the right to die. I believe the pain right here, right now, in my mind, is just as real and excruciating even if it may or can go away in the future. The future holds no weight for my present state of consciousness. Life has no meaning, and sure, we get to create our own meaning, but why bother? In a world that is so hostile, we should be able to just not live.

I was extremely lucky that everyone I reached out to, without fail, made time to talk to me. They offered a lot of different perspectives, and some know me so well, including my nihilistic nature, that they trusted their blunt and piercing questions would force me to re-examine my perspectives instead of push me towards the edge. I was not sad, I was not seeking consolation nor attention. I was trying to make sense.

One day, I sat in a park after squash, facetiming with a friend in New York, when he asked: "why wouldn't you just jump off of a bridge though?" ...Good point, why?

Against all my beliefs, I fought back the suicidal thoughts as soon as they got here. I instinctively push back on the thought of "how nice would it be to just stop?" every time it pops up. I could not explain it, except perhaps this is my Survival Instinct at work?

Again, "how disappointing!" I thought to myself.

Changing course

Thanks to the American pharmaceutical culture, many friends knew more about the pills I was taking than I did, and they suggested that I should at the very least get a second opinion. But contradicting someone with a medical degree when I know nothing feels odd, so I reached out to my therapist. It turned out she’d been hoping that I would ask. She did not volunteer advice because she feared contradicting another professional and how I wanted to seek help (in this case, choosing to treat insomnia instead of depression) might create further anxiety for me.

She referred me to a psychiatrist, who turned out to be a godsend. He saw the previous prescription and changed it all. He explained to me why the previous combination of pills led me to feel a certain way. Then he explained the new treatment to me: what SSRI is, what my diagnosis is (other types of non-recurring depressive episodes as opposed to major/clinical depression) and the differences, what each pill is for, what are addictive and what are optional. He agreed the chronic insomnia is likely the root cause for the suicidal thoughts, which were essentially a symptom of chemical imbalances caused by being sleep deprived for an extended period of time.

This might sound too good to be true, but as soon as I switched to the new prescription, everything got better. Granted, I was still exhausted throughout the day, but I was able to essentially sleep any time anywhere. I vividly remember how on the first day I was still filling my time with human presence, and in front of a fish market, I told my friend that I was so close to just laying on the asphalt to sleep that I needed to call a taxi home immediately.

In the following days I just slept. Day and night. I have never felt so tired yet so relieved.

On the 4th day I woke up, surprisingly, full of energy. And the suicidal thoughts were just gone. The pills work so well that I immediately started to feel a dependency on the them, which created a new anxiety for me.

I went back to the psychiatrist for my recurring appointments, and just like my approach to therapy, each time with a list of questions that he patiently answered, including the pill dependency, the withdrawal affects, and if/when the end of this would be.

"There’s not a requirement for you to live the depth of your own internal despair."

I definitely had a case of depression imposter syndrome. "Am I depressed enough to deserve people's time and attention?" "I don't want to act like a total mess, but should I act out my internal despair so it wouldn't seem like I am faking it to get out of responsibilities?"

During a one-on-one, my manager calmly reassured me that no one was questioning my needs, and I did not need to put my heart on the table to justify anything. And similarly, a friend told me that he took my call for help seriously not because of how depressed or not I seemed, but how desperately and relentlessly I was seeking help.

Between seeing my therapist more frequently and the new treatment, I slowly made peace with needing people and asking for help, some of the time. And the suicidal thoughts went away once I was sleeping better.

However, now I can feel the energy and mood difference when I don't get a good night's sleep, or when I forget to take the pills the night before. The thoughts and depression come creeping back like clockwork. And at times, I experience dissociation, which I never have before. My psychiatrist introduced the term to me after I told him about this weird out-of-body feeling.

I was told it'd take time. Something to do with neurons, receptors, et cetera. But I am indeed better now. Slowly and surely, getting back onto the orbit.

"Aren't you glad you didn't manage to commit suicide two weeks ago?"

After I got on the new prescription and stopped having suicidal thoughts constantly, a friend asked if I was glad that I didn't manage to kill myself impulsively, because they were extremely relieved to see that I was feeling better. I responded, "honestly, no." I was not, and I am still not glad. Not in particular. My view on life has not changed. I still believe the pain was very real, I still believe it would not have made a difference whether I had left you all two months ago or I stayed alive for another 50 years.

I grew up on the receiving end of suicidal words and messages, even though most of them were meant for emotional blackmailing. As someone who had tried and failed, I tend to either call their bluff or take their ideas seriously and analyse their plans with them.

My biggest takeaway from this experience is that nothing can make me feel worse than being depressed, and this has changed how I prioritize a lot of things.

I feel extremely privileged to have the resources to get all the help I needed to unstick myself, but many who are clinically depressed aren't in my position, and I can only imagine their despair. I hope they can stop suffering, whatever way that seems viable.

As for myself, I am glad I am no longer in that constant state of despair, and I now prioritize my mental health over essentially anything else; perhaps mainly my own expectation of how accomplished and capable I should be.

Morbid as it might seem, I do still believe that when one feels such levels of desparation, suicide remains totally reasonable.

"Your friends sound great."

Many, many, many thanks to my lovely, intelligent, empathetic friends. I can't name all of you, but you know who you are. Everyone who's jumped on a call with me, kept me company, picked up my calls, responded to my texts, sent me texts out of nowhere, gave me quests, invited me to hang out, randomly dropped by my apartment, set up recurring calls with me, strongly encouraged me to fly out of the country to see your lovely faces, randomly checked in on me, told me to watch a documentary about suicide, a standup comedy about depression, rudely pointed out that I didn't want to die, and even more rudely pointed out that with a lot of work I might one day find life to be preferable to death. The nerves on some of you!

I wrote this post because I learned a lot in the last couple of months, and I thought it might be helpful to share it. I have a mountain of work to do on myself, and a whole list of topics to read up on; especially given that I have found out my instincts would prevent me from taking my own life. I know it is a feature, not a bug; regardless, this feature is a nuisance more than anything.

I have to admit I was quite clueless about depression before this, aside from what's portrayed in the media, and I still am. My case of depression is definitely not a universal one, just one of the many ways it could manifest, but hopefully some of this will be useful to someone out there.

I wish you all a peaceful mind.

P.S. Many thanks to Domenic, Garen, Hidde, Jessica, Rob B, and Rob H for reading my draft and giving me feedback and the confidence to publish this post.

Addendum, January 23, 2023:

The woman who cries wolf

A month has passed by since publishing this post. Many friends who offered support have sort of... dispersed, which makes sense. I am "better" now. However I also found myself slowly creeping back into the habit of "I should not bother people with my problems", especially not with the same old ones. It is now a personal failure of mine that I am incapable of getting through the same obstacles with ease.

I still have good days and bad days, and some bad days are crippling.

I want to stress how extremely difficult it was and still is to reach out and ask for help. As someone who lives alone and work remotely, there's really little to no social contact I get unless I go out of my way to seek them, which is terrifying.

Something I left out in the original post was that I had tried to read a book a friend wrote about his journey through depression. I broke down crying at the preface, written by his loving sister also business partner who saw firsthand how he went from a happy person to a depressed mess. No one would have known what I was going through if I had not simply... told them.

So this is a message to myself as well as to whoever struggling alone too. Perhaps you've experienced this as well—sitting on the floor of your apartment holding your knees tightly together, trying to hold back tears, and wishing that you can just stop feeling, whichever way possible. Unfortunately, the only way out of this is reaching out, owning and facing the vulnerability, and seeking professional help, with whatever that's left in the tank, even if just the fumes.

I wish you strength.

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@muan's posts

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Update

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Why not today? (CW)

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F2022

Moving back to Taiwan

Insomnia

"It’s time to revisit the idea of suicide."

"Why won't you just jump off of a bridge?"

Changing course

"There’s not a requirement for you to live the depth of your own internal despair."

"Aren't you glad you didn't manage to commit suicide two weeks ago?"

"Your friends sound great."

The woman who cries wolf

Who invented `:emoji_code:`?