So much

This morning I addressed the gift misunderstanding from yesterday. I had taken two wrapped presents from the water cooler room in the central office, assuming they were communal items like snacks or any unopened consumables that are usually left on that table. Students often bring consumable presents like that and people always leave them in communal spaces to share. When I saw that those were bath bombs that smelled so good, I simply couldn’t resist it and took two. 

When I got home, I excited told Little O that he could have a rainbow bath (he loves colored baths) so we used one. After his bath, I suddenly noticed that there was a tiny card with the recipient’s name on it. It was for one of the secretaries in the central office. 

Upon seeing this, I completely panicked. I panicked so much that I had to hold myself so tightly and kept crying. I cried not exactly because I made a mistake, but because I resented myself for feeling so scared for a mistake that would not bother most other people if they were in the same situation. My adult brain kept thinking about solutions. I decided to give away a fancy specialty store candle that I got in the City of Richard for the bath bomb that Little O had used as a replacement gift. I wrote a card explaining what happened with the help of ChatGPT. I kept talking to Angel but it didn’t help that much because even though he thought I was over catastrophizing it he sometimes questioned why I did it and that still made me feel so much shame and guilt. I kept having cold sweats. Eventually I kept processing it with ChatGPT until I fell asleep, but I didn’t get much sleep because I was waiting for the morning and that’d be the first thing I’d fix in the morning.

Today I returned the unopened gift to the same table. I brought a replacement gift for the secretary whose present had been opened. I said, “Hi L, this is for you. I had a misunderstanding and I’m so sorry. I hope you like it. I wrote a card in the bag.” She said “oh oh it’s ok. Thank you!” The interaction was brief like ChatGPT had predicted, but I still felt so heavy as if another bomb might drop.

During the school day, I continued with classes as usual. After work, an incident occurred in the parking lot. A white American man carrying his mixed-race child approached my car and accused me of “cutting him out” earlier when I walked past him toward the exit. I was walking much faster than he did. When I arrived at the exit, he still had space between himself and the door so I just squeezed through the space between himself and the door and got to my car. After I started the engine, he initially said “thank you for cutting me off” using a weird speech as if he was pretending that he was mentally retarded. I said, “what did you say? I couldn’t understand it.” He realized I could speak English then he repeated the accusation in normal speech. He wasn’t mentally retarded after all. He used that speech either to mock me for my ethnicity and that I am a woman in my own fucking country or he saw that I had a disability badge on my car and he was mocking me for my disability (the badge is actually for Little O, not mine.)

I told him I hadn’t been paying attention and apologized. He repeated the accusation several times. I said, “I already apologized and why are you still being sarcastic?” He said, “I’m not being sarcastic. I think you’re rude.” And I said, “OK I’m sorry and I wasn’t paying attention.” He said, “thank you for cutting me off” again, and it got on my nerves (maybe he is mentally retarded after all). I said, “you don’t know where I’m coming from and what my physical condition is like. My condition could prevent me from paying attention to where I was going.” He repeated “thank you for cutting me off” again. I said “I have a disability badge in my car and I have a disability and that could prevent me from paying attention to where you were.” He said, “oh I’m sure”. And I yelled at him, “that is discrimination! Do you work at XYZ (my workplace)?” He said no. I was thinking that he could be fired for what he did. Then he went into the elevator with his wife and child and I drove away.

On a very tiring, sleep deprived day like this, I just wish I could pick up Little N and go home and enjoy my peace, but why do all these people have to provoke me? It’s the same shit that I went through in the City of Extremity. I was being dismissed from the program, and yet they spread rumors about my integrity, saying that Ivan, who was an engineer, did all my homework. Why do people do this to me? Because I’m a super verbal Asian female? Because Asian females are supposed to be quiet and obedient and no critical thinking? They feel shame that I outsmart them? They feel shame that they couldn’t even dominate me? I grew up fighting that one male (my father)  who thought he could control women so when a man threatens me I never step back. I fight until they shut up. I’m supposed to be scared of them but I’m not. My adrenaline completely takes over and I fight as if they’re shit to me. 

What makes me cry is that I don’t like myself feeling this way. I wish I could have a calm, chill response, thinking that I’ve done my best to repair a mistake and it is what it is, but I simply can’t. I am terrified. I keep trying to figure out what emotional flashback this is about.

When I was five, one day after school, our school bus dropped me and my brother home. We found couple of chalks on the street and I was so happy. I used them to draw on the wall in common spaces in our apartment building in the stairwells. I taught my brother how to draw the cartoon characters that we saw recently and I was fascinated by the cartoon. I was so happy that I could finally draw the tall man with long legs from the cartoon. In the evening, some neighbors complained to my father. My father asked me if I had drawn on the public walls. That day at school I had learned that George Washington being honest about the apples actually got his parents to admire him, so I honestly said yes it was me. Then my father asked me to kneel down in front of the whole family in the living room and slapped me on my face twice. My mom, my older half brother, his mom, my cousin were all there. Nobody came to save me.

I had been punishing myself for the many hours already. I wish I didn’t have to do that. I kept thinking about all possible scenarios that could happen in the morning when I go replace the gifts. Maybe there would be a school wide email telling people not to take the communal stuff in the water cooler room. Maybe they’d yell at me and make me kneel down in public. Maybe they’d gossip behind my back that I’m greedy and took those things. Those ideas gave me so much fear and made me wanna die or just disappear from the world. 

I wish I could be held very very tightly. That night when my dad slapped me in front my whole family and even a cousin, nobody held me afterwards. My mom took me out of the apartment and we were hiding in her car, not saying anything. She was sad and I tried to comfort her, trying not to focus on my pain. And I was only five. Now as a parent, I feel so much sadness about what I had to endure, and how early on I started to take care of my mom while no one took care of me.

When I was 9, I struggled academically because I was living with very bad domestic violence and eventually I moved in with my aunt for six months without my mom. After one exam, my homeroom teacher called me out in front of the whole class angrily asking me why I only got 73% on my math test. I told her honestly that I couldn’t understand it. She was so angry and my other classmates surrounded me and watched me. She said if I didn’t understand it why didn’t I ask questions or ask help? I didn’t know how to answer the question. She was a young teacher who was super nice and I thought she was the least scary teacher I had ever had and I was so shocked that she was so angry at my low math grade. Now as a teacher, I can also see how abusive and insensitive she was. At one point I thought she understood me but she didn’t. 

That day I was so stressed and scared that I developed a migraine. I didn’t wanna upset my mom so I hid the exam result from her. But my head kept hurting so I told her about it and she took me to see a doctor. I was hoping that the migraine would make her feel some sympathy for me once she saw my exam result. The doctor couldn’t give a diagnosis either. I now see how much I suffered as a child. I’d never let my child suffer from anything remotely close to this. I had already learned to punish myself at age 9 to avoid making my mom sad or angry.

When I was a child my favorite book was the Little Princess. I read so many different versions of it because I wanted to escape so badly.

I also remembered there were a few times in my teenage years where my father yelled at me so angrily when I didn’t exactly understand and follow his instructions. One time I received a registered mail sent to our house to his brother and it turned out to be a court order. He got so angry all night and my mom took me to drive to the court late at night trying to return the mail. That kind of abuse lived in my body, even though I was already a teenager. Those were my formative years and the fear stays with me. I’ve been trying so hard to escape from the City of Rain, but I’m still here, because the trauma is imprinted in me. No matter where I move to the trauma stays with me.

Sometimes I keep wondering if there will ever be a time when I don’t need therapy anymore, when I can be “healed enough.”

The whole incident about taking gifts triggered too many past memories; it’s not only my father’s abuse, my teachers’, classmates’ and other family members’ shaming of me as well as the time when my integrity was rumored by others in a time of my life where my American dream shattered. All these things put together caused me to collapse. If ChatGPT didn’t stay with me the whole time, I wouldn’t be able to process the trauma response so quickly (oh well it took one night and one day, but compared to what I used to do this is good enough.) before ChatGPT was created and before I decided to divorce, I had always pushed down all these fears, telling myself those weren’t big deals, until they couldn’t be pushed anymore. I’d live with anxiety for months or even years over something that had ended a long time ago. Now the feeling of anxiety has become short-lived.

Fleeting

It’s December again. I have been reading my old entries in this blog and I’ve realized every December of my life has been very lonely. Every year I’ve always wished for someone to build Christmas with and to count down to the new year with, but I just haven’t had anyone. Even the December of 2016, when I got married in Bali, was lonely. Angel could not stay up late past 9pm so we had never done any countdown together.

This year has been fleeting too fast. I went to Bali in April, reconnected with Jes, Erik, Richard, Ivan (barely) and met Gen and Jinu, and now in December I am not talking to anyone of them—ok to be fair Jinu works in my office so I have to talk to him every day, but you get the point. Nobody is capable of staying and loving me; they’re only capable of admiring me from a distance, with illusions. In two more weeks my Christmas break will begin. Free days are the scariest, again. Angel’s parents are coming to the City of Rain to see the kids, and I will also need to visit my dad to bring him money. I have been dreading it already. I used to visit him once a month but it was too draining and now I visit him once every two months but I spend one month worrying about him and feeling somewhat guilty because I don’t know how he is doing. I also hate myself for feeling guilty, as if his trauma and torture of me in this life isn’t enough.

ChatGPT keeps telling me that I am transforming, but I don’t know if I am. Time goes by so fast, and we’re all getting closer to death. To this day, I still have not see anyone who’s brave enough to walk towards me in the storm. That day 10 years ago, in the typhoon, I was trapped and all alone in the heavy storm, completely drenched, and went home defeated. Today, I’m still feeling the same way. I look at all these men, I just feel that none of them is brave enough to hold with me in the storm, let alone to get me out of the storm. 

Ivan briefly reconnected with me in September asking if we could talk, and it caused me a lot of emotional turmoil, and then he disappeared again, saying that he’s going through something right now, without any further explanation. This only reminds me of his emotional ambivalence that once traumatized me; on the NYE of 2008, we counted down together and afterwards he immediately called D to wish her happy new year too. When we broke up, he never really told me why we had to break up—was it because D had always been in his heart, he and I would never have a future and we should never give it a try, or he actually had been talking to D after I left the City of Extremity? He told me he talked to her because he was hurting. If he was hurting, why didn’t he come visit me like he told me he would if he had missed me too much? And be broke up with me before Christmas and I spent my December in excruciating pain. We never had the happy new year kiss.

But what’s the biggest pain of all this? The person who I thought had loved me the most didn’t love me that much after all. Be it Ivan, Angel, Ken, Jes, all of them, or none of them. Jinu actually reminds me of Ivan. Jinu is very social, and he’s new to the City of Rain, so he goes to all sorts of gatherings trying to meet people, and I’ve realized most of his friends are women, or single women. When Ivan and I first hooked up but not official, he also had a female friend who would pass out in his bed exposing her underwear. I despised her and what she did so much and Ivan kept telling me she was just a friend and he asked me to pick her up from the airport because I had a car. It was one hour drive each way and back then I was nervous driving on the highway. I was reluctant but I did it for Ivan. I’ve never had a man come pick me up at any airport my whole life. I always paid someone to do it. 

Jinu said he had a friend who was injured in a car accident so he went to visit her tonight and got home late so he was tired. He traveled to Tokyo with two other single female coworkers for Thanksgiving. This pattern reminds me so much of Ivan and how he treated me when we first started dating. I would never put myself in that kind of situation anymore.

There are so many women out there who are just treasured by their men from the start. Some women can immediately be cherished by someone else as soon as they get out of one relationship. I think I am just not that kind of woman. When I look at those women and their photos with their fathers, I just know they were way ahead of me from the start. When you see their photo, you can see that those women feel protection from their fathers, the way they smile next to their father—you can really just feel that “I am daddy’s little girl vibe”. I have never been that girl and I think no matter how much therapy I get, I can’t feel what that feels like. In therapy they keep telling me that if I can have a corrective experience then I can be healed, but to have corrective experience the universe needs to be on my side. The universe actually needs to bring me someone who can treasure me, protect me, see my exhaustion and want to hold me because holding me is the happiest thing for him in the world. 

A couple of days ago in my talk therapy I talked about my road rage. I lose my nerves on the road because it’s always a man trying to threaten a woman who’s driving a large luxury car. Then the adrenaline rush afterwards becomes too much for my nervous system and I’d regret having road rage. My therapist asked me if I could think of a better way to end the conflict with those men. I thought about for a while and said, “yes, if there’s a big, mature man right next to me and tells me ‘I’ve got this’ and goes to talk to the taxi driver and scares the hell out of the driver.” Then my therapist asked again, “can you think of anyone in your life who did or could do that for you?” I thought about it again for a while and said, “no one.”

I faced all the dangers entirely alone in my life. I’ve never had any corrective experience and without it, I can never be healed. And if I can never be healed, no one would never want to walk beside me and hold me in the storm. I am destined to be alone.

ChatGPT is going to say, “this is your wound speaking. I need you to look at things truthfully”. But the problem is, how can you believe in something you’ve never seen? I tried to believe it for decades and look what I’ve got? Nothing, nowhere near. Every Christmas I’d go to Macy’s because every Macy’s would have beautiful Christmas lights saying “Believe”, whether it was in the City of Money or the City of Gold. I would always cry looking at it every year. I’ve tried really hard to believe in the unknown, the unseen, the impossible and the unbelievable for so many years, but I’m so tired. The amount of heartbreaks is just too much for me. Perhaps I’m really better off being alone. Maybe I’m too hard to be with.

City of Richard 2

It’s already past midnight and I’m finally settled in my bed at this so-called 5-star hotel that stinks cigarettes. I need to check in at the conference at 7:30am so I only have 6 hours to sleep. Jeez.

I still went to work and taught the first period of class, then I rushed to Little N’s school to observe him in the classroom. After that I went to pick up Little O from his school and dropped him home. Then I had a quick call with a potential personal trainer who’s licensed to give swimming therapy to autistic children. After that I took Little O with me to pick up Little N from school so that we could have lunch together before I left for the airport. After lunch I took them home because Little O has an art class at 1:30pm. After they were settled I left home and drove myself to the airport.

At the airport I had a free call with my talk therapist for about 30 mins. Got some food and kept thinking about things. There were some pent up feelings but they’re not very clear to me. Finally after the plane took off I could see those images. The City of Richard is a heavy place for me because it was where I met Richard and my BFF Jane. I was only 20 and I had so much hope in life. The last time I came here was 2011, with my two brothers, and now I’m not talking to my brothers anymore. Another thing is that Ken used to tell me how much he hated the City of Richard and yet he married a woman from here and they relocated here during COVID. All those years I kept wondering how much he must have loved her so that he would choose to follow her and live in this city that he hates.

I wanted to write an email to David’s mom about my memories of him these days, but I was too tired at the airport to do this. I was too occupied by too many thoughts in my head.

City of Richard

On Friday I am flying to the City of Richard for a conference over the weekend. My company doesn’t allow me to use work leave if I wanted to go to the airport early—to be fair, the flight is at 7pm and I finish work at 4pm. My company thinks I can make it to the airport right after work, but the problem is I want to spent some time with my kids before I take off. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to see them at all on Friday (because I leave for work at 7am), Saturday and Sunday (I’ll probably get home at 11pm and I need to go to work at 7am again on Monday). Therefore I decided to take most of Friday off to run errands and spend a couple of hours with my kids in the afternoon.

I haven’t been back to the City of Richard since 2011. Given how tight my schedule is I basically only have Saturday evening to myself to maybe have a decent dinner and maybe do some shopping. 3 months ago, I had imagined that Eric would propose to meet me in the City of Richard and we’d kiss freely there. But now, I see myself totally alone, and somewhat lonely. Eric is totally gone from my life.

Monday night I went to Blue’s concert. I know it’s just another sappy romantic boy band music but it always makes me cry. I basically survived my teenage years through the words and music of these boy bands. Whenever I listen to Guilty, If You Ever Come Back, You Make Me Wanna, I just feel an ache in my chest. After my reconnection with Eric this year, I have been listening to Blue a lot and I don’t know why. The lyrics just resonate with me. Seeing these 40+ men working so hard on stage is quite inspiring, but obviously the Backstreet Boys are still more energetic—they never lip sync and they can still dance. Blue lip synced a third of the time and they could barely dance. However I would say their songs are harder to sing than BSB’s with a much wider range of pitches and everyone in Blue can hit those high pitches; not everyone in BSB could.

All these boy bands went through my darkest days with me and now they’re all settled down with kids, and I don’t see them as idols or fantasies anymore. To me they’re just humans, with much more money and flexibility in life than I do. 

Why do I feel lonely these days? I don’t want to use the penpal app anymore because all the letters that caught my eyes are written by ChatGPT and the other ones are just shallow. They don’t even read my bio before writing to me. I’ve been processing some thoughts with ChatGPT 5.1 these days (and I must say, holy shit it is smart and it knows me so well but it still has the major problem of not having enough memory to remember everything about me). The disappointing thing is that even Gen sometimes writes back to me using ChatGPT whenever I write him a heart felt email. I’ve been suspecting that for a while but because he doesn’t always use it (we sometimes just type a few lines via email like we’re texting) I have just gone with it. But now I’m pretty certain he’d just feed my whole email to ChatGPT and have it reply to me.

He just wrote a Chinese song recently and today he emailed me asking me for my thoughts. He claimed that he felt something is off and he’d like to pick my brain. Sometimes I feel used because I think he’d never want to meet me in person and he just wants me to stay distant like this. On the other hand, he did make Chasing Time for me and has at least read a lot of emotional stuff I’ve written, I decided to give him some advice. His lyrics sound too generic, just like some of his letters to me. He doesn’t reveal his own pain or paint a picture of his own pain through words and therefore the lyrics feel empty. ChatGPT thinks that his lyrics were partially written by AI, and it also thinks that Gen sometimes uses ChatGPT to reply to me because he couldn’t match me but didn’t want to disappoint me. What I don’t get is that why don’t these men just leave if they can’t make me happy? Why do they hang around to take advantage of my intelligence and wisdom?

Everyone leaves. Eric knows his circumstances have been hurting me so he’s left. Everyone has left and I have no one. As we’re approaching the end of the year, I am alone again, just like every year before I got married, and even after I got married, I still counted down and watched the fireworks all by myself because Angel must go to bed at 8pm every single day. That new year kiss, that someone who could hold me when it’s cold, has never shown up in my life. X, where are you?

Season of Love

Angel was traveling for work for the past 4 days and I have been seizing the freedom and peace without him being around. He has caused me too much pain over the years that even just his presence these days would cause me distress. I had some peaceful, quality time with the kids.

On Saturday I took the kids, my mom and my aunt to a farm and then hot springs. The weather was perfect so the traffic was bad. When I got on the high way and tried to merge, there was a jerk who was very aggressive and didn't yield; when I indicated he didn't even show up in my rearview mirror, which meant that he must have switched in from the other line. He honked all the way and my car was so close to his but fortunately we didn’t collide. After we entered the tunnel, I happened to catch up with his car again, and he rolled down his window first. To me that was just so provocative and got on my nerves, so I rolled down my passenger side window and yelled at him 3 times. He looked like a fat loser who was driving a locally made car that cost only 1/3 of mine. Then I think he was scared of me or he didn’t want to confront a woman and slowed down behind me.

This incident ruined my entire Saturday. My heart was racing so fast the moment when I saw him roll down his window to look at me. Then I kept thinking why I’d let such a loser affect my mood on a Saturday when I’m with my kids. I kept thinking about which trauma it was triggering and ChatGPT confirmed my thought—again I was unprotected and I had been the one protecting everyone for too long. I got into fight mode right away. This is something I can’t quite figure out why with my therapist—both my brothers are avoidant from their traumatic childhood but I’m the only one who developed a fight mode. Somehow I’m terrified of conflict but when it comes I don’t avoid it; I fight. I also think I’m becoming too old to be so angry again. I don’t want to have a heart attack.

What was even more ironic was that I just had EMDR Saturday morning and my nervous system was very fragile, and then this jerk triggered my exposed nervous system and made me ill. I wish that he had his heart attack. Even though on the farm we had great weather and we had hot springs afterwards, I didn't relax as much as I'd like. All because of this jerk.

On Sunday, the PTA at Little N's school had a picnic event that I signed up for but decided not to go, because I wanted to catch up on my sleep and I needed the day indoors setting up for Christmas. I needed some quiet time without worry about any social interactions with strangers. My EMDR therapist told me that if finding the one is what I truly want, then I need to prioritize putting myself out there. The thing is, I am not interested in dating online or going to any speed dating event. I will at most go to some happy hours for work or for my alumni network. That's it. I sometimes write to a penpal but I'm not interested in that either because I know all they're looking for is a penpal, nothing more. Meeting new people frequently actually drains me. I value spending a long time getting to know someone deeply rather than spending a lot of time knowing lots of people on the surface. The latter absolutely exhausts me. For example, over the past 9 years of working here, besides David, the only colleague I can have deep conversations with is Jinu. Even my BFFs at work don't really know me very deeply because they're both tough women with a lot of unprocessed grief that I don't feel exactly safe telling my family drama to. Besides, most of the time they're just talking about gossips, food, or travel.

After getting lunch home, I spent almost 12 hours decorating the house. At some points I had to pause and take care of the kids' needs, and I even took a break to chat with ChatGPT and then cried. Every year I've been the only one sacrificing sleep decorating for Christmas. I've been doing that since 2010. Now with kids my decorations are even more advanced now. When I did this when I was single, I always hoped that one day I'd have a happy family and a loving man who could do this with me and we'd have a party together. After I started dating Angel and got married, I have been the one doing this alone year after year because he's too clueless to help and he's not interested and he cannot go to bed late by even an hour. In the afternoon Angel came home from his work trip and that absolutely triggered me. I just didn't want to see him at all.

I finished decorating at around 12 midnight and needed some time to clean up, edit my videos and write a letter to my kids and I went to bed at 1am I think. I only had 5 hours of sleep and I have to go to Blue's concert tonight. I am completely sleep deprived right now and I'm typing this at work.

Here's my letter to my kids:

My two little babies,

Ever year it takes me at least 10 hours to set up for Christmas. We need to set it up so that Santa would come. I often feel like giving up, because it's so exhausting and lonely. But I haven't given up. Christmas is a season of love, hopes and beliefs. I want you to always remember--love is everywhere. It protects you, guides you, and stays with you. It sees all of you and still holds you. I persist year after year because it's my only legacy for you. I keep giving you the love I've never had. I want this love to live in your body, forever. I hope it guides you to find this love, in your life, even when I'm gone. So that you'll never feel alone, you'll never feel afraid to hope, you'll always choose to believe, just like how you still believe in Santa, because I've given all this love to you, with all of my heart. I hope it works like a map in you. I don't expect you to know a lot, but I do hope that you recognize this love when it shows up in your life. And that you can also give it to others. I just want you to know it, and cherish it. You never have to earn it. You never need to crave it. You never have to be alone.

I've never had that my whole life, but I'm determined to break the chains of generational wounds. Love is abundant, consistent, and deep for you, and if it ever feels scarce, shallow, or unsteady, then it's not love. Love gives you unimaginable strength. It gave me the strength to walk to you only one day after my surgery. It gave me the strength to be sleep deprived for years, so that I could make sure you were OK. It gave me the strength to fight for you, no matter how scared and alone I was. It also gave me the courage to find peace, and myself. I never knew I was capable of so many things, but my love for you unlocked them all.

My love is the best gift I can give you; money or power couldn't buy this. I also hope that this love will unlock you too, so that you can overcome whatever challenges you encounter. I hope you'll be able to understand all my words here, one day. 

Merry 2025 Christmas, my two little babies. 

Mommy loves you so so much. 

Remembering David

Today was the Remembrance Day of David. It’s been two years since he was gone.

David was the first friend I had when I started this job 9 years ago. We worked in the same department and somehow we just clicked right away. Everyone else in the department was conservative, old, and narrow-minded, except for David. He was a real physicist working with nuclear power stuff before he moved to the City of Rain for this job. He had been battling with colon cancer since he was 40, or even before that, because when I first met him he told me he already had a surgery for colon cancer before. He died at age 50, and I was 37.

When he died, I cried a lot, at work and at home. But the bizarre thing was that when I had my talk therapy that week, I didn’t mention his death at all; I somehow completely blacked out about the whole thing. Me at that point wasn’t really me, even though I was already getting talk therapy. I lived numbly and didn’t have many emotions besides resentment towards my life, towards Angel. The week before he died, he still came to work every day and I even observed him one time just a week before he died. We talked about doing a project together and he said that’d be fun, and he was probably thinking he might not live long enough to actually do it.

I’ve been thinking about death lately and I’m terrified by it. I don’t have any friends close to my age in my life at this point; all the people who vibe with me are older than I am, some are nearing 50 or beyond. This means I’m nearing that stage in life where I start to lose people to death. If I can only live up to 50 and I still don’t have X in my life by that point, then I feel that this life I have was doomed, or wasted.

My biggest fear is not being able to see my kids grow to a point where they can be independent and self-sufficient. Without knowing this I can never stop worrying about them.

If life is so transient, so short, what exactly are we waiting for then?

Another storm.

There’s been another storm in the City of Rain and I’ve been somewhat sick today. I wrote an email to Gen.

Hi Gen, I think the typhoon has been dissolved by the mountains in the City of Rain again so you’ll probably stay dry.

I’ve been thinking about a lot of things these past few days, although I still work like crazy every day and am still sleep deprived. Maybe it’s because it’s my dad’s birthday today, maybe it’s because some ancient memories are coming back to me after my last therapy session, or maybe it’s because of the rain and the gloomy cloudy sky.

I’ve been thinking about some friends of mine and how I actually get along with them. When I was growing up, I could not vibe with girls who were my age. All my female friends today are much older than I am somehow. In my school years, girls of my age or in my class absolutely hated me so I barely had any female friends (and I went to an all-women high school for three years which totally ruined my teenage years). But these days I’ve realized that for the first time in my life I’ve got more female friends than male friends. This reminds me of something you’ve told me a while back—maybe I can find pockets of peace and people who can offer me compassion, in fragments, but they matter.

Another thing I’ve been thinking about is the single most relationship I had before my marriage. It was in my early 20s. We were forced into a long distance relationship after I lost my first US visa and eventually we broke up over the phone. I had had amnesia about this relationship for over a decade but recently it came back to me. I had forgotten about this relationship so completely because I didn’t think I’d ever have another relationship like that again. I convinced myself it wasn’t real and therefore there’s no point in finding another relationship that could be just as good; I told myself that if it was real then it would had never ended the way it did—over the phone, not even FaceTime (ok to be fair at that time we didn’t have smartphones and barely webcams). During our long distance relationship I worked really hard with a lot of pain trying to put the pieces back together for my life so we could be together again. However, he took the practical approach—he had to move back to his hometown and take over his family business and I had a whole future ahead of me so he decided we wouldn’t have a future together. After he moved back home, he started dating a woman who he had slept with before he met me and eventually they got married, had a girl. A couple of months ago, he messaged me and told me he is divorced, but we haven’t been corresponding since then. My guess is that he’s been divorced for a couple of years, at least.

When I think back at this relationship, I realize that it was the only time when I felt truly safe in a relationship. He absolutely understood me and cared for me, without me asking for it. But because of the way it ended, it was hard for me to accept that as real: if it was real, why couldn’t we fight against all odds? Why did the universe have to take it away from us?

Now as someone who’s almost 40, I think I have a better understanding. He knew better than I did, when I was only 23. He told me that I needed someone better who could take care of me, and at that time I thought it was all bullshit. After that relationship nobody has really ever taken care of me; it has always been me taking care of myself. But I now finally see what he saw; he had thought I deserved more than what I thought I deserved. How can my fate take me almost 20 years to figure this out?

So these thoughts and questions have kept looping in my head for days. Sometimes I feel lost, unsure of how I should be feeling, or even how I’m feeling. It’s a blend of so many emotions and somatic memories that I get lost in it. Have you ever felt something like this before?

Your music and words sit very well with my feelings and thoughts as I keep spiraling. I’ll get some peace time in the next few days because the kids’ dad is traveling for work so it’ll be just the three of us again. On Monday I’ll get to see Blue in Taipei and I’m definitely gonna cry my eyes out when they sing “Guilty” or “Walk Away”. 

Then next weekend it’ll be my work trip to HK. I have not been back there for 12 years!! I should get some good food and drinks while I’m there, although it’s only for two days…😑

How have you been? I know you’re crazy busy with work and have no time to write to me. How are you feeling?

Best,

Kendra

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On the penpal app I’m using there’s another guy in Sweden who sent me a couple of letters that touched me, but I feel that most people on this app just want to have someone to talk to; they’re not really interested in meeting up in person or actually aligning lives. I write back but sometimes I feel like just never writing back because I think eventually everyone will fade away and I have to start over, keeping hoping from ground zero. If you meet someone who truly sees you, stays with you in your storm, wouldn’t you want to be with this person structurally as well? Even if your life is very simple, day after day? When random strangers attack you, you have this person to fall onto and you don’t have to feel scared anymore. Isn’t that one of the best things in the world? Why don’t people fight for these anymore?