In my desperate search for things to write this note and neatly wrap up the new year, I realized I have forsaken 20 years of my Buddhist practice and all of my struggles with depression and anxiety. I wish I could always reflect on things and neatly wrap them up with a bow, but alas, life is not made that way.
I look at my wall of goals – one I haven’t visited in months. With the pandemic, and lockdown, and challenges in our personal lives, some goals are no longer an option (travels, anyone?). Yet, I stumbled upon some other goals. I gained something I didn’t think was possible this year. Some delays with the obvious, but some fresh starts in the unplanned.
In every joy we felt, there is also sadness. In every sad moment we had, there is also joy. Such is life.
In our wish for togetherness for the holidays, a new variant hits and rapidly spreads just before Christmas. Yet we have family time. We have access to vaccines. We have each other.
In my grief that my mother-in-law will never accept us the way I’d like to, I find a lot of comfort in the fact that my sister-in-law and her partner love us, and my brother loves them just the same.
In my endless pursuit of excellence and growth in my career, I am often feeling anxious, unprepared, and not competent enough to tackle tough challenges. In my wish to work in software, I stumbled upon the job that I have been looking for. And all those little career changes that didn’t make sense to other employers, now made sense, and even helped, to get me here.
In my stubbornness to not become a cliche married couple, I have opened us up for a lot of arguments. But with that comes honesty, open communication, respect. My partner is not perfect. But along with his (many) imperfections come boundless compassion for my anxiety and my depression, and relentless desire to try to do better. Marriage is work. In my early days on Asian’s cultural expectation of “happy endings” and “next to normal”, I thought of marriage as a destination. You grew up. You have a family. You live happily ever after. That’s not it. Marriage is about constant communication, about constant navigation of changes in each person and the unit’s life, about the discussion of goals and directions, and most of all, about the emotional labor (not the actual work done) of what is needed in a marriage.
In my grief of deciding to not have children of my own, I take a lot of comfort in the fact that I am still able to help children in Vietnam get access to education, and that I have more time and resources now to dedicate to my long term goal of a schorphanage.
In my anxiety of aging, and growing older, (and much less attractive, hah!), I realized my life experiences and my happiness have never come from youth (or being attractive, hah!). It’s the ugly crooked teeth kid that has the most joyous smile. And it’s the people who didn’t mind an ugly crooked teeth young man with long horrible hair (that has not discovered hair products) and with scrawny arms and legs are the people who became lifelong friends. In the rejections of the (basic bitch) beautiful people, that I have found confidence, comfort, and even love, in the people that said yes.
Even as I typed out this note, the little AI icon pops up and tells me how my note will read to readers. We grew up in a society that desperately enforces the need for happy endings. But good people have cancers. But hard-working people do end up poor. But intelligent people never get to go to college or work in a cool dream job. But amazing would-be-parents will be childless. But two people who love each other very very much can get divorced.
Such is life. It’s messy. It’s complicated. It requires constant adaptation and adjustment and learning and compromise.
The days will get dark. But it will get brighter. It is -25 degrees and snowing on Christmas day. But it will get warmer.
All we can do is to sit with that fact, as we have to sit with all the other facts about how messy and hard this life is for us and keep on living.
Pace Fine Arts 