#4 - Irrationality: A Fine Line
I bent over backwards to attend a K-Pop fanmeeting, but this is really a story about anxiety issues and mental illness.
Hello,
How have you been this week? I’ve been trying out a new meal plan. I tried the low-carb diet (not strict enough to be considered keto though) and for a while I was happy cooking everything in butter. But yesterday my face was painfully dry and my itchy rash returned. I’ve decided this low-carb thing is not for me. So I cooked myself some rice today and sugar crashed for hours. Thus, an evening newsletter. Maybe you can read this as a bedtime story. 😆
Heads up, I’m taking a short break next week. You will still get a newsletter, but it will be a short one. I will recommend you some stuff to get you through the week.
Stay healthy everyone! 💛
It's a scary thing, to live your life without knowing you can trust your own senses. I thought I was a rational person; that every decision I made was deliberately thought through. But when does thorough thinking become over-thinking? As someone with a mental illness, I couldn't really see the line.
I was minding my own business, scrolling Twitter's timeline when My Music Taste announced they were organizing an international online fanmeeting for my favorite K-Pop group, B of You. I was shocked through my system because K-Pop fanmeetings were almost always exclusively organized for the Korean or Japanese market. But the pandemic has changed how people do things. K-Pop is finally forced to find international revenue online.
K-Pop fanmeetings are how idols promote their albums. It's the ultimate fans lottery. Buying an album will get you one random chance to meet your idol while they sign your CD. The more albums you buy, the bigger your chances to win the fanmeeting. It's common for fans of popular groups to buy up to hundred(s) of albums for those brief seconds of meeting. Usually, they would sell those albums later at a price point cheaper than the market price.
Due to the pandemic, the fanmeetings are now online, which means international fans can participate as well, as long as they have the means to pay for and ship the imported albums. And it was my chance to actually talk to B of You.
They're Kim Kookheon and Song Yuvin, a duo group that debuted in early 2020. They're young, but they started their idol careers many years ago. They didn't manage to gain the critical mass needed for popularity and stardom, so they re-debuted as B of You. Even under a new name, they were still struggling a lot. I was the only B of You fan (called Meet You) on my timeline, I had to find my own, new Meet You friends to support them together.
They’re being unpopular may sound a bit sad, but it also means that I had really good chances to win their fanmeeting. With huge FOMO crashing over me, my brain immediately went to a number: 10. Buy ten albums and I'd have a good chance to get in. I opened my spreadsheet and quickly calculated the cost for albums, shipping, and taxes; the number went to almost Rp3,000,000. A new anxiety immediately spiked through me. What if I didn't win and lost all that money? What am I going to do with the albums? Nobody's gonna buy them (unfortunately, they were that unpopular).
I thought to myself, I should just buy five albums. But I had the money to buy ten albums though, even though I needed to take the money out of my budget somewhere. What if I didn't win it and regret buying five albums, knowing that I could have bought more? My heart was beating fast; my hands were shaking; my mouth was dry. I needed to make a decision quickly; buy the albums before the near deadline. Paying so much money for a K-Pop merchandise made me feel like I was gonna be bankrupt the next day, but I also really wanted to talk to Kookheon and Yuvin. I was thinking this big purchase through, but I honestly didn't know how rational I was being. Ten or five?
So I asked my therapist what should I do about this problem. He turned it into a homework instead (of course he did). Usually he would promptly answer my questions, but this time he wanted to see how I’d find my own solution. I admired him for his improvisation and skills, but at the time I just really wanted to get this over with. Anxiety made me feel like I was going to die. It interfered with my daily life.
So I went back to my spreadsheet. I recalculated all the numbers every way I could. I still didn't know how many albums I should buy. I didn't know what those numbers meant to me.
I stopped and took a deep breath. Uti, they're just numbers. Surely there must be a way to correctly count them. And the most brilliant thing occurred to me: I called my mathematician friend.
Kendra* studied math and does numbers for a living. I begged him to help me with this problem. As soon as he heard about how the fanmeeting works, he quickly summed up that this was a game of chance and that I should really calculate my risk tolerance. So he walked me through a simple exercise.
How much money am I willing to pay if I have a 100% chance of meeting Kookheon? One million? Two? My answer was three million. I'll gladly pay it for a guaranteed meeting with my good boy, Kookheon.
Now let's take it down by half. Am I willing to pay Rp1,500,000 for a 50% chance to meet Kookheon? I stopped. I'd never really thought about my purchases this way. Nobody had ever challenged me like this before. I thought about it, and I decided that yes, I'm willing to take that chance.
Now let's take it down again. Am I willing to pay Rp750,000 for a 25% chance to meet him? That's a one in four chance. If I lost, I wouldn't get the money back. I thought that was a lot of money. I didn't want to lose it for nothing. And suddenly, I knew where my line was.
I'd always known that I'm risk-averse as a person, but I never know exactly how much risk I could tolerate. That night, this exercise had unexpectedly taught me something new about myself. It was such a lightning strike, I almost cried.
Now that we knew my tolerance, it was easier for us to find how much money I was willing to lose in this fanmeeting bet. I was fine with losing as much as Rp600,000, but not more. Since one album was about Rp150,000, and I was going to buy two albums for my personal collection anyway (there were two album versions); an additional Rp600,000 would allow me to buy four more albums. In total, I was willing, and could afford, to buy a total of six albums. And I felt like my whole world shifted.
In the beginning, I already told myself that I should just buy five albums instead of ten. But my mental illness has made me lose confidence in myself. In therapy, I learned that my emotion dysregulation could make it hard for me to think rationally. I accepted that I probably made a lot of irrational decisions in the past. But this B of You fanmeeting had made me see how exactly was my being irrational pre-therapy. For god's sake, I couldn't even tell what was rational and what wasn't. I really didn't.
There was no fireworks, but it was one of the grandest moments of my life. For the very first time, I could finally see it, the fine line between rationality and irrationality. I could feel myself grow.
I was confident with the numbers then. I went ahead and bought my six albums. A few weeks later My Music Taste emailed me. I had won the fanmeeting. Six albums and I fucking won it. I was floored.
My therapist laughed his ass off when I told him I won the fanmeeting with six albums. He frankly told me that he was expecting me to cave in and buy two albums, because that's how someone with a Borderline Personality Disorder usually sees the world. Go big or go home. Black or white. Ten albums or zero. He couldn't believe I chose six, let alone winning the lottery.
I told him the math exercise I did to get to number six. He lit up and told me how proud he was of me. I was finally learning to see the shades of gray; the middle between two extremes. And this was one of the ultimate things that would help me big time in managing my BPD symptoms; that there are more than two extreme options in life. There is always the middle choice.
Counting is one way to do it, but we can also apply a similar exercise in non-math problems. Let's say you want to eat your favorite expensive sushi; it would make you happy but you're also worried about the money. Maybe you think you should just buy some cheap jajanan gerobak not far from your kos-kosan. Maybe you'd get sad eating it, but at least it won't hurt your pocket. It seems like there are only two options, but you see, there are more choices in the middle. Maybe you can still have sushi, but go for a cheaper one. Or get your most favorite jajanan gerobak, cheap and delicious. It's not an ‘either/or’. You can get that win/win you're desperate for. Therapy has truly rewired my brain and this moment was one of them.
The fanmeeting day arrived. I supposedly shouldn't have anything else to worry about. But my hands shook from anxiety nonetheless.
A number of worst scenarios played in my head. What if the internet connection dropped and I lost my chance to talk to B of You forever? What if work called in the middle of my conversation with the boys? How do I look? Do I look presentable? Pretty? Attractive? I couldn't speak Korean, what if they didn't understand my English? What if we just stared awkwardly to each other through the screen and they laughed at me? What if they found out that I was recording the fanmeeting for digital keepsake and they banned me immediately from the event? I was nearing a panic attack, I had to drop everything I was doing so I could breathe.
I did everything in my emotion regulation arsenal. I hugged my knees and rocked like a baby, telling myself that it was okay to be scared. I also told myself that those bad scenarios were only in my head. I meditated. I did breathing exercise. I distracted myself with watching stuff. I even tried screaming. I managed to calm down for a moment. But not long after, I was anxious again. I was even anxious that I wouldn't be able to experience the fanmeeting fully because anxiety trapped me in my head. Anxiety-ception is such a nightmare.
Later, my therapist would explain it was because my brain had been conditioned to live in survival mode for a very long time. My brain grabbed onto crisis very strongly and wouldn't let it go. It was understandable that a fanmeeting could be an anxiety-inducing event, but the problem was my brain turned it into a bigger problem than it actually was. Many times, my body would start shaking from anxiety even though nothing was really happening, so my brain made up scenarios to explain why I was anxious. Those scenarios were lies. When humans were living in caves, anxiety may help you to avoid predators; but in modern times like today, my brain was just being too helpful.
So I held myself down. Despite my heart's beating so fast, I was determined to be in this 5-minute fanmeeting from start to finish. I prayed and prayed that I wouldn't freeze from being nervous. And the fanmeeting turned out to be wonderful.
Not a single one of my worst nightmares came true. The internet was doing fine. Work didn't interrupt me. There was an English translator. B of You and I talked just fine (we were really cute!). I even had the chance to tell Kookheon how he was the inspiration behind one of my characters (he told me to send him the book). And good god five minutes were really looong. The script I rehearsed couldn't make it the five whole minutes. Fortunately, Kookheon and Yuvin made an effort to keep the conversation alive. I was so grateful for them. And, I managed to record everything. Watch for yourself. 😉
They're so nice. 😭😭😭
That was more than just a fanmeeting. With that event, I felt like I had done everything I could as a K-Pop fan. I collect albums, go to concert in Seoul, and attend a fanmeeting. I made it and I'm satisfied. Even if I'd have no more fanmeeting chances in the future, I don't mind. I'm happy. I had got more than I signed up for in this one fanmeeting. I got to know myself better.
B of You is no more now. They terminated their agency contracts early this year and went their separate ways. They’re still friends and meet from time to time. They’re still trying to make it. They’re still chasing their dreams. And I will still support them.
*Not their real name