Rollercoaster of Emotional Distress

Have you ever felt so confuse, so lost that you don't even know exactly what are you feeling? That you want to shout, cry, punch and hurt yourself all at the same time, just to see if the distress go away?

I really hope you didn't. But if you didn't, then there is no hope that you will ever understand how I am feeling these last days. It is not the first time I feel like that. I have been there before. Fortunately, not so many times, though. But usually there is a reason for feeling like that, and this time I was caught by surprise, just out of the blue. I woke up yesterday feeling like dieing. Without a clue of why. Just sad, unmotivated, tired, frustrated and most of all, very angry with myself. That was a horrible start for a day. And it scaled up.

I think that everybody have their own internal demons, their own ghosts. You know, that kind of bad memory that you do your best to forget, to not think about. That kind of thing that hurts so much that make you question why the hell do you keep going on? That would make you accept to cripple a limb with a chainsaw if that would make the painful memory go away forever? Or maybe it's just me. But the fact is that I have my demon. I really thought that it was gone forever, or better saying I didn't thought of it at all for a while and then Ididn ' t expect it to come back. But it did. It came back strong and hitting me at all the sides. Maybe it is some kind of mechanism in the sadness that wants to ensure that you will do feel really bad. And as it was, I woke up pretty bad for no known reason and after a few hours like that my demon started to hit me. Softly in the beginning, but stronger and stronger until it became unbearable. I tried the standard procedure for depression: headed for the gym, worked out for an hour, back home, shower, head to the lab, working on my research. Didn't work. I was not even being able to concentrate on my research. Every 15 minutes I had to stop and try to put myself together. Then I used the last non-chemical resource, the letter. A few years ago I had a similar problem and decide to write a letter for my demon. Saying all I wanted to say, or all I could think about saying, as if it was a person. It was a letter never meant to be send. It is a letter to me, actually. By now it is almost like a living thing. When I am fighting my demon I use to read the letter again and add or remove parts to it, so it is almost like a dialog. Sometimes the letter is so harsh, so mean and aggressive that I question if I wrote that of if it was somebody else. Sometimes it is so full of clichés and third class sentimentalism that I feel pity and disgust for the pathetic soul that wrote it. Reading and rewriting the letter helped a bit, but no so much. Helped enough to let me keep working, and surprisingly the day was even productive.

Around 21:00h I just wanted go home, 12h in the lab is enough for one day. But I knew I would not be able to sleep, so I decided to go see a movie instead. I watched ``The Golden Compass''. It was a good movie and for the duration of it I could not think about anything. But I eventually had to go back home. I really didn't want to go back to my 六畳 (rokujou) apartment, but I had no much options on that. It was not the best night of sleep, but after ½ bottle of wine I was ready to bed.


I woke up today not much better than yesterday, but I called home. I could talk to Anyssa (my oldest daughter) and to Karin (my wife). I really needed that! It was SOOOOO good to hear their voices, to talk to Karin just about everyday things, how are the studies going, how are the kids, how Samiya is learning the names of the letters, and Tatsu is starting to read hole words and Anyssa told me that she is liking the gymnastics classes, etc. I miss that so badly. I miss hugging them before they leave to school, listening they complain about each other and things like that. And I miss being with Karin. In many ways. I miss her voice, her face, her smell. I miss talking to her. She always was my friend, the one that was there for me, the one I talked to when I needed and the one that talked to me. (She always asks if she talks too much. I don't think so. I like to hear her.) And today, after I talked to her, I was feeling happy. Really. I went from dark sadness to shinning happiness, and I was very happy for a while. But my demon came to hit me again. But weaker this time. I think it was still the "Karin-effect", so to say.

So today again, I thought that going to the movies would be good just to not think about anything. Just that this time it didn't work so well as the previous one. I went to watch ``Jumper'', but the movie did not catch my attention.


After coming back from the movies I decided to write about how I was feeling in an attempt to organize my own thoughts and maybe overcome whatever started the depressive spiral I got catch in. Now, at the end of the text, I still don't know why I suddenly started to feel so bad, or why I keep thinking over and over again about things I want to forget, but I am feeling lighter. Maybe is the process of writing itself that helps, or maybe is the illusion of be talking to somebody, I don't know. But it helped.

Happy 2008!!!

Happy New Year!!!
(At least lets hope it will be a happy year.)

Another year has come and gone. 2007 is over and 2008 has just started. It has being my 3rd new year in Japan. The next one (2009) must be the last, at least for this time. (Who knows about the future?) Last year my family was here, so I could be with Karin and the kids on Christmas and new year. It was so good to be with them, to feel family at the holidays again. But this year they were not. I was with friends, but I felt alone. Don't take me wrong, I do like my friend and it was very good to be with them (don't even want to think how would I have felt if I haven't them around), but I still missed my family.

Anyway, I thought it would be better to go out on new years than stay alone at home. So, I went to Ageha with some friends (Adri, Lina, Kixpe e Zauder). Ageha is advertised as the biggest dance club in Asia, and the place is really big. On new years it was crowded. Really, really crowded. But it was worth. The music was good (except for the DJ at the pool site that expended more time talking that playing music -- but the other sites were OK), there was a fair amount of beautiful people, and there were special shows. On the entrance there were some 5 or 6 girls doing pole dancing, not like that we see in B movies, they was not naked, but using sexy clothes, and they was indeed giving a show, even the girls stopped to watch. 10 minutes before midnight a DJ/Drag Queen started his/her/its own show for the countdown. And it was a good show too. The guy knew how to do his/her/its show. At midnight every body hugged each other, there was balloons and colored paper falling and everybody was happy. It was a happy night.

Harumi, I, Kixpe and Lina at Kita-senju station, in our way to Ageha. Zauder joined us at Shin-kiba station.

The other remarkable event from this beginning of year is that yesterday was Kixpe's birthday. We should have joined for a small party at Robson's house, but for different reasons most of the people invited had to cancel at the last minute. So I, Kixpe, Adri, Robson and Nelia (Robson's girlfriend) went out for a dinner at TonQ.

Robson, Kixpe, Harumi and I waiting for a place at TonQ to celebrate Kixpe's birthday. Nelia is taking the picture.

Despite the new year's party at Ageha, and the atmosphere of celebration of this time of the year, I don't feel so good. Actually, after Christmas and my shodan exam, I am feeling pretty bad. I had a meeting with my adviser just before Christmas, he was very clear about the status of my research, and it is not good. I expended the last year trying to develop a new method for model checking multi-valued models. (Don't bother about what exactly is that, it's important just for me.) I finally have perfected the new method and I can handle very huge models now. I was excited about this, because I thought it would be the whole point of my Ph.D. research. My adviser thinks differently. He told me he is disappointed I have took so long to work on this method; that he suggested it just because he thought it would be good to work with it since nobody had done it before, but that this, alone, is in no way enough to justify a Ph.D. degree. That I will have to think about some new direction for my research, and it have to be something that gives solid results in the next 4 to 5 months, otherwise I will much probably not be able to graduate on March, 2009, as it is scheduled.

In less than 30 minutes of meeting I came from extreme excitement and happiness to the most complete frustration and despair. I have no idea of which new direction I can give to my research, I have no clue about where to look for inspiration, I have no idea at all of what I am gonna do.

Besides all that, I have to finish writing a paper with deadline on January 11th. The paper will be a revised version of the one I presented in November, on a workshop in Kyoto. It should be easy as a Sunday morning, but it's not. My sensei, said he doesn't like the way I organize my papers. To him they looks like a text book: much theory and fundamental concepts in the beginning and finally my conclusions. To him it's boring. There are no "catch phrases", or other exciting things to keep the attention and interest of the reader. He wants me to correct that. In the last days I have being crawling after examples of good papers, trying to identify some pattern of how to write an exciting theoretical paper about multi-valued temporal logics (for real, I almost laugh only to think about the contradiction in terms that this sentence is) . On top of that, he also wants me to provide some meaningful example that show that my method is not only applicable but also useful, in the sense that the example must be more easily or naturally solvable by my method than by the traditional one. It is probably not hard to grasp that up to now I have not being successful.

Karin, has tried to help me and looked for some references too. Two of the references she sent me gave some insights, but I don't know if these insights will be enough to finish the paper as my sensei expects. I have a meeting with him on Monday. I just wish I would die before that so I don't have to face him and tell him I failed on doing what he expected. I hate to fail! I really, really hate to fail. It hurts my self-esteem. Makes me feel unfit and unworthy. Just the thought that failure is unavoidable makes me loose control. I'm not being able to sleep well, or work well because I'm stressed.

When I was a project manager in ISH I keep track of the progress of all projects. I always was able to identify potential risks weeks before something actually happened and take measures to prevent it: renegotiate deadlines, allocate more resources, review the distribution of tasks and so on. No project I have managed ever failed. Now I have no flexibility at all. I can not allocate more resources. I can not negotiate deadlines. I may not do anything but work as hard as I can force myself to. And it's not being enough.

I don't know what to do.

P.S. I am probably being too much dramatic here, OK? I am stressed, frustrated, tired and I have not trained Aikido for a while (it's winter vacation until next week), so I could not alleviate my frustration throwing people in the floor. Don't take me too seriously. I will be better in a few weeks.