I cope. I'm good at it. My automatic defense mechanism is repression. I like to make sure I'm so busy that I don't have time to deal with personal, emotional things. It's one of the reasons I have a tendency to overcommit.

The problem with repression is that there's always a tipping point. The problem with my brand of repression is that I don't know where that tipping point is, despite having surpassed that point at least once every semester since starting at MIT.

I've literally repressed my ability to gauge my mental health so much that the only reason I know I am stressed right now is because I have had about 3 weeks of continuous canker sores within my mouth, because I'm spotting, and because I have been tired for the past two weeks despite my attempts to get decent amounts of sleep.

So, my tipping point.

No, it wasn't the chain suicides MIT has had in the past two weeks.

It was the conversation my French professor had with our class in response to the suicides. She told us about her taking medical leave last year because she had been diagnosed with cancer, and the subsequent chemotherapy afterwards. She told us about how she got through the worst of chemo because of the people around her. She wanted to remind us that we weren't alone.

It was a good conversation.

Unfortunately, cancer is one of the few things that I cannot talk about without getting ridiculously upset.

My grandmother passed away from breast cancer my sophomore year of high school, on January 15th, 2010. She had been diagnosed earlier that year - the story I was fed at the time was that she had been watching a drama where the protagonist had been diagnosed with cancer, which inspired her to get a check-up specifically to look for cancer signs, when in actuality she had been a victim of horrific trauma which caused her systems to shut down. She underwent surgery despite her own protestations because my aunt, panicked, signed for it. She then underwent chemotherapy.

As a 13 year old child, I didn't really understand what was happening. What I did understand was that grandma was sick. I knew that the chemo was making her absolutely miserable even though I was only home a few weeks a year because I was at boarding school and even though she tried to hide it from me.

I will never forget the shock I felt when I went into her room and saw her wig that she used to hide her hair loss. I hadn't known prior to the discovery that chemotherapy made you lose your hair.

Honestly, I don't remember much from when I was 13. I remember my grandma always being happy and strong and learning English to communicate with me. I remember her making the best pickled radish I have ever had. I remember learning about her getting sick and how she didn't seem any different. I remember my grandma fighting with my mom and at one point hearing her say she had given up. I remember my grandma trying to survive for her grandchildren.

I remember the last time I ever saw her, lying frail and thin and weak in a hospital bed, attached to what seemed like hundreds of different tubes, unable to even breathe.

I remember the doctors telling us she was doing better.

She didn't do better.

I remember on January 11th, 2010, I drew a picture of death in my sketchbook. I remember writing down how I felt about the whole ordeal. I distinctly remember wondering what would happen if she passed away on my sister's birthday.

She passed away the day my sister turned 1.

I remember on that day I went back to that drawing and wrote that I had cursed my grandma into dying that day.

I remember being told my grandma passed away and that I wouldn't be able to return to China to say goodbye, because my parents wanted me to focus on my studies.

As if I could focus on something as trivial as The Canterbury Tales or Pre-Calculus when my grandmother had just been taken from me.

So I repressed the memory. I don't think about these moments. I think about my grandma when she was in her prime, caring for me and my parents and my aunt's family. I think about her quirks, like how she liked to put her soup dumplings in milk in a bowl and heat them up and how she thought that was tasty. I think about her obsession with Chinese herbal medicines and how she used to stink up the house.

I don't think about the memories associated with her being diagnosed with cancer.

I have a terrible case of survivor's guilt, one that has continuously been repressed since I was 13. It's been 6 years. Sometimes I still think about how it must be my fault that she passed away so coincidentally on Hera's birthday. Sometimes I still think about how if I had somehow had shown that I cared more, she wouldn't have given up.

The conversation we had today with my French professor drenched up all of these memories that I had repressed, and coupled with the amount of stress that I am apparently dealing with even though I don't seem to feel or recognize it - I ended up breaking down in class.

So I want to thank everyone that had to deal with me bawling my face off all day today, whether it be my French II classmates who tactfully didn't say anything, or my French II architecture grad student buddy who walked me to studio, to the people I ended up crying to in studio. I'm not in a good place. Again.

My roommate thinks that I should go to Mental Health, but thats a whole other blog post in which I get to talk about the stigma around mental health and how much of a non-issue my culture believes it to be. I'm definitely considering it, though. Again.

Maybe this time I'll actually seek help.

So approximately a quarter of the semester has already gone by. It simultaneously doesn't really feel like we've been in school for long, because of the snow days we ended up getting, and feels like we've been in school forever. I can't wait for a real break - just three more weeks to go!

Confession time: I did a dumb thing and overcommitted, again. Silly me thought, oh I'm only taking 3 classes this semester, I can fill all the extra free time I'll have with fun things like dancing all the guest performances.....and jobs. Except I didn't think about the fact that my biggest time crunch is and always will be studio, and I am still taking a studio.

And by the time I realized, I was already committed and I'm now technically working 4 jobs. 2 UROPs (Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program), one with John Ochsendorf, who's a professor in Civil Engineering (course 1) and Architecture (course 4), and who's possibly the coolest person on the planet (shh don't tell him I said that), and the other a continuation of the UROP I've been doing with Meejin Yoon. Which, by the way, is super awesome because that project I worked on kind of over the summer? Yeah, the Collier Memorial? Its being built and I get to see it happen.

I'm also babysitting a 15 month old boy 3 times a week for an hour each, and tutoring about once every two or three weeks.

Just so you know, no one should ever do this.

Just no.

Don't do it.

All of it is pretty fun, some more fun than others, and I get to make bank, but I don't have any time, at all. I wake up at 8 every morning and sleep at 1 or 2 every night, which seems like a fair amount (6-7 hours? College students can survive on that, right?) but the lack of sleep adds up. Just Sunday, my friend took one look at me and asked me if I had lost weight.

The last time she saw me was the Sunday prior.

Oops.

On the other hand, my classes have been going fairly well:

French II is surprisingly more difficult than I thought it was going to be. French I was a breeze, and I kind of assumed the second course would also be fairly simple. Wrong. Grammar is hard, and the fact that the only two languages I speak, English and Chinese, have approximately zero grammar at all doesn't help.

Also sometimes I get French confused with weird Japanese phrases that I know, which is probably the strangest experience ever. The languages are not similar at all.

Psychology of Gender and Race is super awesome, just as I thought it would be! I'm taking it with one of my roommates, so it gives us something to talk and laugh about as we trudge through the snow on our way home every Thursday night at 10 pm. Also, people are really uncomfortable talking about intimate things - not meaning intimate stories about themselves, but intimate things such as clitorises and penises and piggy-piling - in the class, which makes it infinitely more entertaining.

Last but not least, studio. My biggest nightmare. We've been working for the past month on a mapping exercise, where we study a certain aspect of our site in depth and quite literally map it out. Our review was last Friday, and my professor decided that I should redo the entire thing over the weekend to reflect the critiques given, which was good in that now I have a stellar map that shows what I want it to show and conveys multiple layers of information, and bad in that the review was over and I really didn't want to draw more lines.

To quickly walk you through the board, this is the same area of the Back Bay / South End area of Boston (the red-outlined and shaded section is our site) shown in two axonometric views and in a top view. The line type corresponds to the type of infrastructure it depicts (city fabric, turnpike, orange line, and commuter rail), the thickness corresponds to the amount of traffic frequency the infrastructure averagely receives (the thicker the line the more congestion, basically), and the lengths of the line corresponds to the width of the roads.

I also have two sections - one with buildings and one without - next to the axons to depict the two layers of infrastructure that goes on around the site.

I guess that's what I've been up to lately, busying myself with a bunch of stuff and getting not enough sleep to make me sufficiently happy! How have you guys been lately? Comment below and let me know!