That Funny Feeling

On pain as praxis and soft tofu with sesame dressing

I’ve been wanting to send a new letter out for a while to try and make sense of these last few months. To make them mean something more than what they were, more than just a collection of days spent in a sort of quiet despair.

It felt like everything had come to a head in July. Vietnam was dealing with a huge surge in cases in the south that threatened to undo all of the previous year’s success. The outlook was incredibly grim. I managed to celebrate my 37th birthday at home with a small group of friends the day before Hanoi was placed under what would turn out to be its longest and strictest lockdown. 

In some ways it felt worse that we were able to get through most of the last year and a half relatively unscathed only to have it all fall apart, like a cruel joke, just as we were watching other countries reopen. 

In August, I deleted all social media from my phone as a last-ditch effort to reclaim what few shreds of sanity I had left. It helped me quell the near-constant stream of negative thoughts running through my head brought undoubtedly by too much scrolling, too many hours spent comparing people’s outsides to my insides. For days after I felt almost euphoric, operating with a clarity that seemed foreign to me, like I’d finally allowed my brain to breathe, a welcome respite from the constant overstimulation it had gotten used to.

It was the first ounce of relief I’d felt after weeks of living in the pit of a depression so relentless I treated any slight lift in my mood with suspicion. 

After the initial euphoria wore off, though, I started second-guessing my decision to leave social media. I worried that I was only further isolating an already incredibly isolated person, at the start of a lockdown that didn’t have a definitive end in sight. For a while I genuinely couldn’t tell if I was getting better or worse. 

The rituals and routines that once gave me comfort felt tedious, the repetition suffocating. I hated how easily I folded under the weight of a new lockdown when other people had endured, were enduring, much worse. I felt like my depression was unwarranted, like I had no business being so sad.

reenactment

The only thing that seemed to make me feel better was the guitar. I first learned to play in my early twenties but stopped after a year or so, frustrated at my struggle to master bar chords. Then, a year after we moved to Hanoi, in 2017, I bought a cheap steel-string guitar off a friend who was moving away. I must’ve used it a handful of times before eventually leaving it to collect dust in a corner of our apartment, where it mostly stayed for the last four years, until July when I was hit with the inexplicable urge to learn to play Bo Burnham’s That Funny Feeling. I’d seen his special in June and became obsessed with the song. I felt like it perfectly captured my state at the time. I referred to it, privately, as my depression song, and being able to play it on the guitar, albeit badly, felt cathartic.

Being able to regard something so painful with a kind of sarcastic finger-wagging, somehow made it more bearable. “There it is again, that funny feeling.” 

Then there was the pain that came with trying to play again. Pressing my fingers into the guitar’s rusty steel strings created deep indentations in my fingertips that would throb for hours afterward. I had to stop playing every so often, letting out little yelps after particularly painful chord progressions. But I pushed through it, determined to keep playing until my fingertips were numb, until callouses formed.

Part of me liked the pain because it had a purpose. Unlike the constant gnawing inside me that just felt useless. In a sense it allowed me to bring some of it up to the surface, where I could deal with it better, track its progress, watch it heal. I thought about how I used to cut myself as a depressed teenager with shitty coping skills, and how playing the guitar again was now serving that same purpose, providing what I can only describe as a pressure release.

Every day, I’d take stock of the state of my fingertips, how swollen they’d be at the end of the day. The different shades of red. I’d run my thumb over each one while in bed at night, noting the slight changes in texture, how smooth one day and noticeably rough the next, marveling at how the body marks time. There’s also something deeply satisfying about getting better at something when the rest of you feels like it’s falling apart. A chance to regain control at a time where I felt increasingly untethered.

I think back to how, just a month prior, I’d been looking for a new home for my guitar, asking friends if they wanted it when we moved. At that point, it had still been collecting dust and I felt ready to give it up.

I’m not sure now what I would’ve done if I didn’t have it to anchor me through this particular slump. It’s strange how some objects can mean nothing to you one day and everything the next, kind of like people.

A bit of a change: I no longer have time to develop full recipes anymore so this section will just feature what I’ve been eating/loving lately.

soft tofu with sesame dressing

Joff and I grabbed lunch at an old favorite restaurant of ours the other week and spotted this dish on the menu. It ended up being our favorite part of the meal and, more importantly, extremely easy to recreate at home, which we did a few nights later.

All you need is a block of soft tofu, sesame dressing, a spoonful of the oil from a jar of Lao Gan Ma, and a handful of chopped scallions scattered on top. A perfect dish when you can’t be bothered to cook.