the truth
The Truth- no matter how much analysis is done, how many post-mortems are held, or how many numbers you look at until your head spins- is that people are fundamentally illogical. It’s all too easy to look at the other side and think to yourself, how could they ever feel that way? Why would you do that? And it’s all too easy for them to do the same to you. If we could predicted down to a science, if all these decisions could be boiled down to an equation, the truth is that we would not be human.
The Truth is also that, fundamentally, humans - as a species, not as individuals, adapt and survive. Humanity has been guilty of some of the worst crimes against itself, and yet we continue to be, to grow, and to find joy. The challenge is to find that within yourself as an individual and fundamentally, to have faith that there is a version of you on the other side that is worth getting to know.
The Truth is, no matter how unbelievable it sounds, is that everyone, at any point in time, is doing their best. That’s not to say that there weren’t missed opportunities, mistakes, or perhaps poor moral choices involved- but that even with those things, that is the best that person could offer up at that time. Use this to give yourself and others grace, but not to excuse lack of action and growth- even the slowest growing plants make a bit of progress every day and through every setback.
The Truth is that when I woke up this morning and went through my day, I didn’t do anything differently. The Truth is that when I look back 4-8 years ago, I remember far more about the good times and everything else is a dull backdrop, and that is something I feel very privileged and lucky to hold on to. The Truth is that time will continue to pass, and 4 years will pass before it seems like it should have.
Resilience
When I picture resilience, in some abstract sense I picture something large, unmovable, unbreakable, unyielding. A large boulder that feels strong, steady, and stable.
Or if I back away a bit, I might picture fields of grass- bending with the wind but never snapping. Always returning to how they were when the storm has passed.
Neither of those feel like me.
When I fall, I fall hard, and fast, and there are weeks where it feels like I can’t breathe. I don’t bounce back, I don’t remain whole, I’ve shattered into pieces. For a long time I chased when I would feel “whole” again- rushing to pick up all the pieces and getting them all mixed up in the process.
I am not resilient in the way that I never break. I am resilient in the way that I have shattered many times, to the point that the new cracks are indistinguishable from the old, in that being put together once again, I have new mends blending in with the rest.
I’m Not Waiting for the Next Part
When I ride roller coasters, I am so tense and holding on so tightly that I can’t even scream. I’m holding my breath until the drop is over, and hating every second until that happens.
So when I run into a problem, I’m desperately looking for a way off of the rollercoaster so I can breathe again. Pro- I’m great at finding and executing the escape route. Con- Sometimes you truly cannot get off the rollercoaster.
So it would be wise to remind myself that not everything is a prequel to the next step. I’ve become really good at doing the introspection and reflection and chewing on things and then sleeping on them and coming back to them on long walks. It’s a great way to get at the root of a problem, but sometimes you do all of that digging, see exactly what is happening right in front of you, and you can’t do anything about it. And it becomes too easy to turn that internally, to think that something must be wrong with me, that I can’t find a solution or a way out even when I know exactly what I’m staring at. But sometimes there just isn’t a right answer.
If I’m going back and forth on something, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m indecisive- I may genuinely be right up against the line, and natural changes can make it feel like I keep hopping the fence. When I’m ready, I’ll be ready, even if the months leading up to that moment are absolutely maddening and have me holding my breath until the drop is over.
Elsewhere: Death of a Dream
At some point, you realize it’s useless to wish for things to go back to “the before”. Maybe you go through the seven stages of grief, maybe you just go through one long stage of depression, but at some point, you’ll get bored and have to figure out what this brave new world's deal is. You’ll never see them again. That was the last time you’ll ever be there and you didn't even know it. You keep walking through doors until you run out of them, and even when you think you’ve turned back, you haven’t. It just looks the same. It’s not the same.
Time is a ruthless playwright, change is its favorite trope.
So how do you savor the present without the fear of losing it later?
Scrambled
A post on January 1 feels laden with expectation.
But I don’t have anything inspiring or special to say today.
Just that it’s been a while since I’ve written, and whether that’s the chicken or the egg, I’m pretty sure I know the other side of the equation.
The only thing that is my job is to take care of myself. Everything else is extra.
Lessons Learned from Kintsugi
An object is made more beautiful for its flaws- in a way that no one else can replicate or recreate.
But it would be ignorant to pretend it is not weaker along those flaws, and you must take care to not stress the fault lines. (Or, at the very least, you should, if you’re working with a silicone moldable glue that is definitely not as strong as the original ceramic.)
It is futile to pretend that the pieces will fit back together perfectly, that you’ll be left with a perfect recreation with new gold on top. There will be holes where pieces turned to dust, and compromises will have to be made between which lines can match up perfectly and which ones will have to be held askew and smoothed over, gaps filled.
You will have to choose if you’re okay with the holes, or if you’ll try to fill them and gild them. Are the holes to let the light shine through? Or are they a symbol of incompleteness? How small of a piece are you willing to carefully place? Can you even see where it originally went?
There is an order to these things, so you’ll have to plan which pieces have to go together first, and then realize doing that makes the new, larger piece not fit anymore. So you’ll have to go back and undo what you did, break it in two again, and put them back together in the context of the whole.
You may drop a piece in this process, shattering it further, and you may silently curse yourself and the extra work you’ve created, while you externally wax poetic about how it’s just all part of the story, part of the journey, that led you to the finished piece.
Ikea will replace your broken object, but you will have to bring it with you and give it back. So you may as well pretend the enjoyment you got out of putting it back together was worth what you paid for the original that you expected to stay whole, and just keep it instead. You may as well pretend this was even better than what you planned for.
An human is made more beautiful for its flaws- in a way that no one else can replicate or recreate.
A Decade
I definitely don’t have aphantasia. Whenever I read or hear a story, I’m almost certainly picturing it in my head, laying it over the places and scenes from my life. They’re not photo realistic, but I certainly could at least draw out the rough layout of many of the important places in my life.
So if something takes place in a school, I’ll probably either picture my 3rd or 5th grade elementary school classrooms- how the desks are arranged in clusters, where the teacher stands in front of the blackboard, the combination of fluorescent light from the ceiling and natural light from the skinny window in the corner.
For almost any house it’ll be some mixture of the first apartment I remember, and the house I grew up in, depending on what the descriptions call for. Start with the living room leading to the kitchen and the backyard, maybe move the stairs to a different side and bring a bedroom downstairs. The couches are always green and match the walls though.
For funerals and wakes, I’ll probably be thinking about the Chinese funeral home in Brooklyn I visited 10 years ago. There’s a coffin in the front, a fireplace to the left, and though I can’t really remember if anyone spoke that day, the stories I read usually do have someone saying a few nice words, so there’s a podium to the right. I’ll probably see the whole thing from just right of center, a few rows back, where I sat that day as I folded paper money to throw into the fire.
I can still remember the two-story white paper house burning, cackling, askew in the fireplace, hoping to give her peace in the next life.
I don’t remember her being religious, but I’m pretty sure the service was Buddhist, because I guess that was the closest thing that had the right customs, and you must have to pick something when you suddenly find yourself planning a funeral.
I remember walking past her with a friend, twice, and thinking that it didn’t look like her lying there. Her face was swollen, she didn’t have her glasses, it didn’t look like her lying there.
I remember the long trip to New Jersey, that year and several times in the years after, because I guess you must have to pick wherever there’s space when you suddenly find yourself planning a funeral.
It’s always sunny when we go, because we know we’ll be outside for a while. We get off the train and start walking, passing by a convenience store to pick up drinks and snacks for the afternoon. When we get to the graveyard, we find the cottage-like main building and walk past it, to the left of a grove of trees (lush and green, because it’s summer), looking for the black stone with engraved roses tucked away in a corner. Sometimes there are already offerings there, sometimes we wipe off the dust and dirt from the top of the stone. We settle in a semi-circle, not talking about anything in particular, but we brought flowers and snacks, so we’ll just sit and reconnect for a bit. We always leave something before we go- a small sketch one year, a tassel from a graduation she never got to attend one the next, an electronics breadboard some other time (the one time it started raining- a tall and lanky form crouched on the grass connecting wires while the rest of us stood with umbrellas around him). On our way back, we’ll stop by that one Chinese restaurant next to the convenience store and order a Happy Family, whatever that is. We eat ice cream on the roof of the parking structure while we wait for the next train home. We hope that we can make it back the next year, but as time passes other things get in the way- internships, graduation trips, work, moving to the other side of the country. Is tradition defined by the series of actions you go through each time? Or is it the meaning behind them?
A decade is a long time. At every milestone, I wonder where she would be. What college would she go to? What would her college graduation look like? Would she go on to grad school? Med school? It takes a few years but before you know it, it’s not just the gap of “she should have been here” at prom, at high school graduation. It’s looking back and seeing her frozen in place while everyone else has gone on and grown up. Growing up is overrated, but what a gift it is as well.
Belonging: A Reflection
I don’t know how to put into words the lump in my throat knowing I had to ask my mom if she still did her shopping in Flushing. I don’t know how to describe the strange combination of relief and sadness when she quickly replied she doesn’t go to Chinese grocery stores anymore.
But this isn’t about that.
This is about growing up in the South and the one Chinese grocery store in town that we always went to. I looked it up and it’s still in the same spot, the shelves looking exactly like I remembered. Rice stacked in the back, a bakery with egg tarts in one corner and various home goods and furniture in another. At some point I thought that its name was how you said “grocery store” in Chinese, because the two were equivalent for me.
This is about the main Chinese restaurant in town, which either moved or is gone (many more seem to have taken its place). I have so many memories of going there after every piano recital, every occasion to be celebrated with family friends. I remember the owners’ kids, the dragon and phoenix on the back wall, the buddha statue in the front, the DumDum lollipops at the counter, and running around empty buffet serving tables with my friends. I remember sitting in a corner with my book while my mom worked, and now realize that the book was probably a picture-vocab book my parents used to study English.
This is about being the only Asian kid in school for 2 years, and then seeing that completely shift when we moved to the suburbs. In fact, I was probably the only Asian kid the school had seen in a decade or so. Those two years, I probably stood out like a sore thumb- but I just remember teachers helping me reach water fountains, girls in class doting on me because I was a year younger (and tiny), and always standing in the front of the line.
This is about knowing almost every Chinese family in the county, or at least, feeling like you did, because you probably went to Chinese school together or your parents worked together and got together for a potluck at some point. There was a feeling of connectedness, of holding on a little tighter to your culture when you knew it was difficult to find around you.
I don’t have some big story about suddenly feeling like I belonged when I moved somewhere that had multiple Asian grocery stores in a 10 minute driving radius, or going to a high school where 3/4 of the students looked like me. I just have some memories of growing up somewhere where you weren’t the norm, but you weren’t alone either.
Genuine Enjoyment of Truth Tables
When I come across a tricky bit of logic, it brings me a certain delight to simplify it by manually drawing out truth tables. There’s a kind of elegance and satisfaction to both be able to find a simpler way to express something, and to be able to definitively prove that it’s equivalent to what you originally intended.
If only words worked the same way!
I find myself to be someone who usually knows what I mean in my own head, but also tends to think faster than I can speak. It leads to a lot of doubling back and even cutting myself off halfway, because I’ve already challenged myself and changed my mind. My written form is even more guilty of this- I am a generally fast reader, but can be a very very slow writer. There’s not only the first layer of what to say in the first place, but near unlimited opportunity to revise what you can’t in a stream of speech.
Human language is heavy with the context of the speaker’s life. There are enough shared fundamentals that we get by, but enough unique experiences that many misunderstandings, some slight and some not, slip by unattended. Truth tables have their own language, with a grammar and a vocabulary you use to put it together. It has its own assumptions (like something can only be purely true or purely false), but no one’s truth table is going to look different than yours because of your differing life experiences. You may be expressing the same thing in different ways, but you can easily show each other that you really mean the same thing.
Though if you always understood exactly what someone meant to say, life probably wouldn’t be as interesting. :)
On Failure
I would be remiss to write this post and not mention that a number of the ideas were heavily influenced by or learned from The School of Life’s How to Fail class. Hopefully I’m able to provide my own lens on the subject, but I highly recommend exploring The School of Life if this interests you!
If you’ve seen Randy Paush’s Last Lecture, you may be familiar with:
The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.
On one hand, I think this has a lovely sentiment- just because you run into a brick wall does not mean you should stop, and everything, even brick walls, has its own purpose.
On the other hand, I’ve had periods in my life where I thought back to this quote and thought: They told me about the brick walls but didn’t tell me it would feel like the walls were collapsing on top of me.
Looking back, I had a few misconceptions. I don’t think failure is bricks pinning you down and preventing you from moving forward. It’s more like coming across a really deep, muddy patch- it’ll certainly be harder to walk through and you’ll move slowly, but there’s always something on the other side, even if it takes some time. Another was that once I had failed, I had learned my lesson and wouldn’t fail that way again. But it is never a matter of “what if I fail” or “what if I fail again”. There are no ifs about it- you will fail. What you have control over is how you fail and how you move through it.
A lot of motivational posters, books, or speeches seem to try to empower people with a “You can do anything you put your mind to!” attitude, and thus focus on how “you can have it all” no matter what the limitations are in your life. This is also incorrect. A more accurate representation of life is “You can do anything… but not everything.” The honest truth is that everything comes at the cost of something. Having a strong career may mean more time away from your family. Maybe taking a ton of risks means your work isn’t consistent. Building a strong network means less time on building your own projects. At the end of the day, you are a human with a certain number of hours in the day and a certain amount of energy. There is a finite amount you can achieve with that no matter how superhuman you seem.
Besides the costs of things relative to each other and the choices you make- the math is against you too. Many people’s far flung dreams are probabilistically speaking, impossible. How many musicians never “make it” compared to the few we always see on the charts? How many authors are able to fully sustain themselves from that work compared to the number of drafts publishers go through every year? We see tons of zero to hero stories, because that’s what society likes to put on a pedestal. But it gives us a false model of what success or failure looks like in the real world.
(On the other hand- your probabilities could vary drastically from the norm. Your safety school or job could be someone’s improbable dream.)
One effect of unrealistic expectations is on one’s self esteem. If you consider self esteem to be the proportion of one’s success to one’s expectations, you can see how this unbalanced view of the world will inevitably lead to a low self esteem. What can you do about this? Well, you can either raise your success- which is extremely difficult- or you can lower your expectations- which is still difficult… but relatively easier.
"Our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do. It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities"
— William James
For example, a lot of people feel pressure to be successful in all areas of their life- their career, their family, their friendships, their hobbies. This is compounded by the fact that we tend to speak in over-sweeping generalities- largely referring to successes or failures, not “success in this area” or “failure in that area”. Being able to see and discuss shades of grey instead of the black and white of success and failure will help us have more realistic views of others, and more realistic goals for ourselves. Actively knowing that your success in one area means you’re choosing failure sounds defeatist, but in reality it gives you more control to say “I’m choosing to fail in this area” vs thinking you should succeed and failing to live up to your own expectations.
There’s a further nuance to failure- there’s bitter failure vs honest failure. Regardless of if it is failure in a way you choose or expect, it can still plague you if it’s framed as a bitter failure. Just think about how “The publishing industry is a scam and full of sellouts” vs “The publishing industry is biased and difficult to break into” affect you differently.
———
What I have learned is, it’s okay to fail, not only because of what you learn from it, but because sometimes it’s exactly what you need. Success does not make you immune to failure again- and failure does not mean you’ll never succeed again.
A parting exercise for the reader: a year from now, you have neither wildly succeeded nor wildly failed in your career, relationships, or finances. What does your life look like?
Focus.
As I’m writing this, we’re at almost 8 months working-from-home and counting.
I’m not good at it.
Yes, growth mindset and all that- I don’t think I’m doomed, but I do think very few aspects of working from home fit my personal inclinations. For me, it’s been a long series of trying to trick myself in various ways into summoning something vaguely resembling the focus I had in the office, which was already not very robust. I’m a chronic procrastinator who is perfectly content to be not-doing-anything-in-particular, stays up too late, sleeps in too much, and loses track of time too easily. But I also take pride in doing whatever I do well, so constantly falling short of my own expectations is also really draining.
I could turn this into a “20 productivity tips that kinda sorta worked for me” post, but I think reflecting on why this may be the case is more interesting. I’m sure there are countless factors for why I work and focus the way I do, but here are a few I’ve thought about:
Structure (time, part i)
It’s probably not uncommon to benefit from some amount of structure, but it is interesting to consider the different types of structure. Specifically, I’ve come to the conclusion that structured time means very little to me. It’s a blobby squishy thing that I always feel is more flexible than it is. That being said, as a whole I don’t tend to be late to things either- but I would argue that’s usually because of some external pressure, not the inherent structure of time. When I’m setting a schedule just for myself or just for the sake of having one, it’s very rare that it’s effective for me. So the loss here has been in losing the structure of my routine- normally, I have to be in the office by a certain time, so I have to catch either this train or that one, so I have to be awake at latest by this time. Without any of that, and only having times I set for myself, I struggle to follow a set structure, especially getting started every day with my morning brain. (Side note, I’ve wondered if car commuting would be similarly poor for me, because it gives me too much flexibility + adds variability in my commute.)
Multitasking
Thinking of multitasking as a magical do-all skill seems less common than it used to be. People have accepted that for most people in most scenarios, multitasking is not effective. I think I’m exceptionally poor at it, especially because one of my strengths is jumping from one connection to the next within a topic, diving deeper into rabbit holes. If you’re asking me to hold on to multiple threads, I can’t explore each one as much as I normally would. Also, I would categorize myself as someone that has high inertia- so both activation energy and context switching are pretty expensive for me, which has certainly increased now that I have to coordinate a lot more logistics of working from home than I did when working from an office.
Screen On Time
Pretty self explanatory. I deeply love and appreciate the ability of technology to bring people together and maintain important connections, but at this level, too many of my relationships feel parasocial; lacking physical human presence is weak at generating genuine connection. If anything I feel a wider gap between in person interactions vs virtual interactions than I did previously. Meetings have actually been beneficial in that they’ve provided some much needed structure (I know I have to show up to them and show up on time), but I usually end them feeling tired, tense and noticing I have an exaggerated smile. Increased screen on time has meant increased time that I feel I have to be “on” as well.
Novelty (time, part ii)
I don’t consider myself an adventurous person or someone who is always looking for a new shiny thing. But I’ve definitely wished for something to break the monotony, something to look forward to. I’ve lost any frames of reference I had for the passage of time- we’re squarely in the fall and I could wake up and feel like it’s spring. (The constant temperate weather in the Bay doesn’t help either). None of the things I associate with summer or was looking forward to this year happened. I can’t look back on my camera roll and relive memories- all I have are screenshots of the news, memes, and occasional selfies that try to hide as much of my messy room as possible.
Resource Management (time, part iii)
I read something recently that presented the idea of “energy management” instead of “time management”, which resonated with me for reasons mentioned a couple of paragraphs up- I can’t manage time when I stretch minutes to hours and tend not to notice when it’s already gone.
Energy management isn’t terribly concrete either, but at least it’s clear how it happens- some things drain you, some refuel you. Even figuring out how to make that work in these times has almost been draining in and of itself. For one, some amount of my mental resources are always locked up by anxieties and worries about everything happening in the world- this happens to some extent normally, but not to the same degree and usually with more control over “unlocking” those parts of my brain. So relatively speaking, both draining and refueling things cost more, which makes the return on investment for usually refueling activities pretty poor. Not to mention the library of refueling activities is very physically limited (rightfully so, to be clear).
You would think this year would be a fantastic time to read even more than I did last year. The truth is I usually haven’t found myself with enough activation energy to read nearly as much, especially without the structures I used to use for reading like my commute. Honestly I don’t love to admit it, but I think in total I’ve probably thrown a lot of my available resources at my job- it’s the place that has the most external pressures/dependencies, and there’s always more to do.
Why Am I Here
The short answer is, I’m here to practice.
Last year, I dove back into reading, and I was reminded of how powerful words can be. And in particular, how unique and impactful individual voices are. There were also a couple of points (mostly at work) where I got a lot of satisfaction and fulfillment in being able to put something in words that people resonated with or could more easily understand. I secretly (and not-so-secretly) relish the skills I think I’m good at, so that validation evolved into thinking about how I could develop my voice further. I’ve realized that the way to do that is not to wait until I’ve collected all these novel thoughts and experiences to then try to pull them together, but to just start writing now.
There are a lot of times I’ve attempted to start something (a few have been blogs or writing), and dreamed of it growing into fantastic things, only for it to putter out after a few attempts. I think for a long time I saw this as a flaw- that I couldn’t follow through, commit, or learn deeply about something. I’m hoping that here, I’m intentionally giving myself space for this to be whatever it is. Whether I keep this up for years or months, it will have served a purpose and contributed to my skills and growth, and that’s all it needs to be.
With writing in particular, I think in previous attempts, I often ended up imitating someone else’s voice instead of my own. Not just particular people I admired, but even just a version of myself I wished or thought I could be. Someone more wise, more eloquent, and frankly more put together than I am. I’m sure that’ll continue to some degree here, but if the whole point of this project is to find and refine my voice, I hope that I can shout into the void without trepidation and worry more about how it feels to shout than what it sounds like to others.
I don’t know exactly what kind of writing I’ll do here or what this will become. Maybe this will become a space for book reviews, commentary on current events, life updates, all of the above, or none of the above. But in any case, words don’t have power when they’re spoken, they have power when they are heard. So if you’re here, thank you.