I consider myself autistic but I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder in 2019. I have very strong opinions about the mental health industrial complex. I’m particularly skeptical of the purported safety of drugs like antipsychotics and anticonvulsants, which partially disabled me even more than I already was. I’m also willing to bet I’m one of those Cluster A “odd” personalities. I have a mild auditory processing disorder and my audio-verbal memory is basically shot. I also had selective mutism as a kid.

My website theme is the Disability Pride Flag’s colors. I identify as multiply disabled, having struggled with recurring flare-ups of my severe/serious mental illness. Everything is on fire and nothing comes easy, especially writing, which at times feels less like the boundless terrain of my young adult experimentations, and more like the technical and subjective minefield of a crapshoot industry that I nonetheless would still like to contribute to. But my disabilities are one reason why I’m not as prolific a writer as I would like. In fact, I started working as a voice actor in July 2021 because I (almost) gave up on my writing, which was getting me nowhere and only paying me in vibes.

I have also acquired what I think is pseudo ADHD.

• I say “pseudo,” because I was never like this in my childhood or teens (I graduated valedictorian from pre-school to high school), or maybe, as they say on the interwebs, “They let you rawdog ADHD because you got good grades.”
• I blame it on the advent of short-form video around 2020, brain damage/memory loss from antipsychotics/anticonvulsants I am moving mountains to live with but have semi-recovered from through sheer spite, and the accumulated effects and habitus of anhedonia over time.

I become much more voluble and verbose when I’m manic, and I also acquire a rhyming superpower where meaning and language’s boundaries blur, and the electricity in my brain connects remote or likely non-communicating areas of my brain. But only when I’m manic. This is also known as the “excessive firing” that includes rapid pressured speech, high energy, decreased need for sleep, verbal clanging of random words that make sense because they are punny, funny, etc., and which medication supposedly treats, but at a really high cost of denaturing the psychotic/bipolar brain and dulling the mental faculties.

Someday, I’m going to finish writing a non-fiction book about how I overcame my memory problems and give people hope that antipsychotic/anticonvulsant recovery is possible (and also as a repudiation against all the lobotomy-like medications they market to fix psychosis, and whose side effects they minimize because they appear to fix (destroy) errant neurons by tranquilizing and severing those crucial connections. I’m already drafting it, but I’m in the thick of testing out if my methods and workarounds hold in the long-term.

Speaking of useless talents (tongue firmly in cheek), I entered the piano pipeline at age 9 by entering competitions like ACE’s Junior Student Convention, National Student Convention, and International Student Convention from 2008-2011.

• I can try to write about this period of my life but it’s all just a blur and all I remember is relief after each time I performed. That, and the standing ovation from an international audience. Really great way to mess up ego formation.
• But when I didn’t turn my talent into a marketable skill as an adult (and I had some technical problems that were not addressed) because I went to college for a different path, I felt like I wasted a lot of my youth being obsessed with the idea of greatness and perfection that I never really became socialized properly–all my time was eaten up by this special interest.
• So I ended my young music career in 2011 because of a lot of factors: I’d already won 2nd place at the internationals, I didn’t really feel like competing anymore, and I transferred to another high school that wasn’t under the ACE curriculum. The last time I played was in 2021 or so, when I tried to learn Clair de Lune by Debussy.

But anyway, here’s a video of me peaking in high school as a barely-masked autistic in 2011…

I pursued computer science in 2015 because I wanted to code games. From getting a failing 5.0 on my first take of CS 12, I got a perfect 1.0 the second time, my biggest achievement in that degree program: winning the Game of Codes tournament where I used Java and the A* search algorithm to code our “heroBot,” Tyrion Lannister. I unwittingly coded a bug (a feature!) where our heroBot stopped moving to recharge instantly every time it got depleted by the other heroBots, which made it nearly indestructible. Wish I could say the same about my life.

Oh yeah, I had to learn how to make pixel art too. Fun times (tedious, but fun).

I started writing in my tweens on Wattpad and r/nosleep. Twisty horror and wish-fulfillment stories (I haven’t really changed tbh).

Here are some of my favorite short stories/novellas:

• “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” by James Tiptree, Jr./Alice Sheldon
• “Division by Zero” by Ted Chiang
• “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees” by E. Lily Yu
• “In Which Caruth is Correct” by Carolyn Zhao
• “Thoughts and Prayers” by Ken Liu
• “All the Time We’ve Left to Spend” by Alyssa Wong
• “The Diary of the Rose” by Ursula K. Le Guin
• “STET” by Sarah Gailey
• There are many more I’m forgetting at the moment, but I started seriously reading speculative short fiction in 2017.

My favorite books:

• The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins
• Babel by R.F. Kuang
• Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
• What It Means To Be Malaya by Emmily Magtalas-Rhodes
• Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

My favorite games:

• Doki Doki Literature Club! by Team Salvato
• Her Story, Telling Lies, and Immortality by Sam Barlow
• Thronglets by Night School Studio

My favorite anime:

• Land of the Lustrous
• Nodame Cantabile
• Your Name
• Lost in Starlight

Weirdest thing that ever happened to me?

I went to Boracay when I was about 10 or 11, and I looked ahead to see a group of people I thought was my family, so I hurriedly followed them. It turned out it was, in fact, not them and I got lost with the strangest conviction that I was duped or that there really was an identical family to mine (when the real one was apparently several steps behind me). I was oddly calm during this ordeal for such an anxious tween.

They eventually found me in a Mang Inasal restaurant.