I’ve almost got it

Life right now has habits but no real name. Life right now has a couple nicknames. But it’s on the tip of my tongue. I anxiously wrack every inch of my brain trying to remember or know that this is. A new season is rustling in. Before I know it, that rustling will have a name, and my brain will go, “of course that’s it.”

Awe

I hope that every last one of us becomes so astounded in brief moments that our cynicism is challenged. Include me in that. May every jaded thought I’ve raised as a fortress crumble so I might be thrilled again.

Adages my grandparents left on the boats

Traditionally, parent’s greatest dream for their sons is prosperity. For their daughters, safety.

In the old country, parents feared most that their sons would fail. They feared that their daughters would be ruined.

The destiny of the sons always remained with them, but daughters, their blessings and peril always happened to them.

Bruised Design

Pain is first a demolition team, then an architect. The gutting is the first step to new shapes and heights to come.

Percussive Priority

Humans appear first as heartbeats.
They know we’ve left the same way because the heartbeat is gone.

In-between the first time we’re seen and the last time we’re alive, honor the first thing we ever were.

Healing, a Lifelong Practice

Healing isn’t a distance. It’s a practice.

The far feeling — the daunted contemplation of getting somewhere else while here is unbearable—that sensation is the anxiety of starting, restarting, not healing in a perfect way. Practice won’t make healing perfect. Rather, the practice of healing—of gathering and compiling and replacing behaviors and thoughts— brings us closer to ourselves. Up close, we can’t objectify or dissociate ourselves like we do when we numb, like our brain does when triggered. Healing is the patient and gentle practice of meeting ourselves up close. There is no tracker or comparison—just more moments of peace in your gut, your shoulders, your chest where it once felt like an avalanche inside, but it’s starting to feel a little more like home.

Selection Criteria

Do not be so proud or fearful that you become the wrong thing’s first choice,

that you tie yourself to something you don’t want because being wanted matters more now than fulfillment later.

Self-Sabotage

I pummel myself

and punish myself

So I never have to forgive anyone.
I hurt myself as a distraction from hurt someone else caused.

Limp-wrist stories

How do I experience it without it becoming my biography?

When do I get to explore without a definition, expectation?
I want to keep my name even if another label comes along with it.

I want to want you where everyone is watching and still have it be us. Still be in this peony ether without letting voyeurs make us more understandable to them.

The labels aren’t always wrong;

They’re just missing something.
They’re missing the context, idiom, timbre, color—

Colors that haven’t paired together even if they’re found in the same flag.
I want all the missing pieces to meet like we did—

Because it felt right, and it couldn’t be forced.

The last post of my twenties

I am ending a decade of existing while trying to survive other cycles. I am turning 30 as a full time student, which I didn’t plan on, but I knew it was coming. I didn’t understand that enrolling in law school at 28 would require feeding the adulthood that I built in the proceeding decade to survive these three years. Many cherished relationships did not survive. There’s no time for my beloved hobbies, and the confidence I cultivated no longer exists. This is the lowest I have been consistently since middle school. I am embarrassed to write that. I am as mortified to admit it as I am to re-read it.

This is a low point, not because I am turning 30 but because I am struggling in law school. I am struggling with how much of my life got consumed by this pursuit, how much of me got lost in it– how much of myself I can’t even locate anymore. I am indecisive, yet convicted. These convictions aren’t logical. All I know is that I must abide by my gut’s command. I keep asking it if we got it right by choosing this. It says yes, and this my only solace. It is the smallest relief from all my grief.

I am so spoiled that I get to grieve a life at all. I am privileged that I get to bemoan attending a professional program. It took a long time to even let myself feel that, to let my pain be as valid as the luck I know I have. Why does it feel most impossible to accept softness when we’re in a hard place?

Because I’ve gotta tell you, I have never had to accept so much grace from other people. It is overwhelming and humbling to be offered anything at all when I feel like nothing. I’ve spent my twenties in awe of the kindness and brutality people — often the same people– are capable of. This includes me. I’ve been disgusted and pleased by myself. I’ve left myself only to return.

There’s relief in aging. Youth is currency to an agist society, but currency rarely affords us reliable protection. Since fourteen, I’ve been on-guard. Since fourteen, I’ve seen this flash in the eyes of people (especially men) with experience or power over me. Youth is a shiny penny, not a shield. It is the thing that some people want to pick up and play with it because it makes them feel lucky, but they lose nothing in losing the penny. We, the pennies, the young people without last names or significant support systems, cannot afford to be dropped. I navigated my younger years in avoidance, with strategy. I did not get the same carefree youth some people discuss. Now, my energy is older. I am older. People who get off on manipulating young women don’t gravitate toward me like they used to, and that is a gift.

Aging is a force of nature. The alternative is death. Historic tragedies often involve man’s vain attempts to beat nature, and in one way or another, nature prevails. I do not want to fight natural processes by lamentation, illusion, or willpower. What willpower remains since I started law school can’t be squandered on lamenting a decade I already lived.

I don’t think that years belong to us. I can’t claim the time, but I want to work with it. Decision making became harder after law school. I feel like I might have screwed up my life by going, and now, every choice or option is doused in that same worry. The worry that I am bad and unworthy and stupid.

I turn 30 in an hour, and I am lonely. I turn 30 in an hour, and I’m not happy with where my life is. I don’t really like who I am in this moment or what I look like. But I don’t want to be anyone else. I don’t want to abandon myself just because that’s the pattern other people set for me. I want to greet this new decade with bare fingers and a bravery I haven’t known in a while. I want the real deal, and I want of be the real deal. And I’ll make it happen.