(No – I have not gone crazy. This is called Meditation – For easy to follow, I have called alternative me Mr.P)

Mr.P: “How’s Boston?”

Me: “it’s going great I think. Gorgeous weather. Sunshine. Warm. Not usual this time a year in Boston. I’m a bit too early for the spring flowers. But it’s still gorgeous”

Mr.P: “And the seafood”

Me: “Yes the seafood. I wish I had more time to plan it better. The trip was a little rushed and I didn’t have any time to plan”

Mr.P “But you are having a good time, though”

Me: “I think I am. Some 28-year-old resident at Massachusett General hospital called me sexy today. He even evoked my all-time-favorite pick-up line – Your mind is very sexy.”

Mr.P: “Aint that a good thing?”

Me: “I don’t know. Maybe 16 years ago a compliment like that would have made my heart jumps out of my chest. These days, I don’t know. I somehow feel like an imposter in my own body you know. I’m 37. Where did the years go? It’s always hard for me to classify myself as desirable”

Mr.P: “But this isn’t just about your look”

Me: “Yeah. But my brain has been feeling a little foggy lately. I don’t know if I’m doing ok at my job”

Mr.P: “Didn’t your boss say he is grateful he found you or something?”

Me: “Yeah. I guess. But the last 3 directors quit so he might just want to keep me by buttering me up”

Mr.P: “You’re not even grateful, are you?”

Me: “For what?”

Mr.P: “You’re alive. What’s little pain compared to that?”

Me: “You’re seriously NOT quoting Six Feet Under to me”

Mr.P: “It’s you who insist on quoting that pretentious show that your husband hates”

Me: “He hates a lot of things I like”

Mr.P: “Do you resent that?”

Me: “It’s like food. You can’t force someone to like what they don’t like, since they are adults. Unlike how you can force children to eat broccoli. To be honest I’m grateful for him. You know I am.”

Mr.P: “So what’s this whole deal with you?”

Me: “I think I just missed the version of us that we used to be. Not this post-pandemic couple. Not this couple who has nothing common to watch on TV – or have nothing common to do aside from watching TV. Not this couple who argue over phone usage. I miss the version of him that says smooth crazy things like Being smart looks very sexy on you. I miss this person who sneaks in 2 hours before my friend arrives at the airport so we can spend some time together. I miss this big bold person who takes risk and not ground himself to a place, to a house, to a city”

Mr.P: “You know you hang on to pain as if it means something; as if it is worth something. Let it go. Endless possibilities and all he does is whine.”

Me: “Seriously fuck right off with the Six Feet Under quote already”

Mr.P: “Seriously, remind yourself of the promise you said on your wedding day. You promised not to fuck up. You’re fucking this up”

Me: “Tell me how to unfuck it then. Oh, wise one?”

Mr.P: “Don’t you see, you hate this studio apartment. You don’t want to move to another city and not have furniture. Where are you growing your garden? Where are you putting your studio equipment? You don’t hate your life. What you have is a temper tantrum nervous breakdown because you are aging and you are terrified of losing your edge in your career, that your partner finds someone else more attractive than you, that you are abandoned and isolated because people don’t care about you. You know, like how you always fucked up your relationships and friendships in the past. You know how to fix this. You’re the wise one in this. You are me.”

Me: “And then what”

Mr.P “Be happy. Because you know deep down you are. You just need to allow yourself to be. You deserved this. Happiness is a choice. So choose. Remember, you choose this.”

Me: “Enough with the quotes already” 

Mr.P: “Well, if you think I am obnoxious with the quotes, you are not ready to learn how your friends feel about your quotes.”

Whenever I am at peak escapism, the song I listen to is Boston – Augustana. Which is funny, because I never really love Boston that much or thought about moving to Boston. I guess it is just the fantastical romance of it all

I guess 16 years is a good time to revisit a place you thought you’d never move to. I was here in 2006, a student, (a broke, foreign student), a nomad, a twenty-one-year-old who is just as clueless about life as he is driven to strive for a better one, and a deeply deeply closeted man. 16 years could be a lifetime. Kids come out at 16 now. It feels like a lifetime ago. And it felt like yesterday. It felt like another person’s life. Yet, all the little bits of the year in Philadelphia, traveling to NYC, to Canada, to Boston, had become milestones and bookmarks and monuments in the life I have today. 

The last time I travel internationally is March 2020, 2 days before the pandemic was declared and the world shuts down. Plans were postponed and canceled. Life as we knew it was altered. We all wanted to be safe. We all prayed to be safe. We hope that others will be safe (well, maybe the majority of us). And we stayed in place. To be safe. 2 years. 2 jobs. 2 false starts. I am now in the air, to Boston. I had a financial year-end review with my boss yesterday and the feedback was 95% positive. At the lowest of my lows, people reminded me that I am still a high-functioning, beautiful mess.

And I know I was supposed to be grateful to be safe. I know I was supposed to feel privileged and blessed (because I am). I know I am incredibly lucky to be here today. I know all that. I know.

Yet when I look outside the window of my home office, look at the little loops I do walk in, look at the beautiful and affordable city (that keeps voting racist anti-trans conservatives O&G beholden zealots into power), look at the booming tech community (that is struggling to define itself), my life feels small, trapped, insignificant, and isolated. It’s an island of quietness. It’s an island of barely enough attention and safety to survive, but never enough support and love to thrive. It’s an island of social networks and never enough real-life connections. It’s an endless Instagram scroll – beautiful and fun, attractive and engaging, but never really truly means anything.

“Was I safe, or was I suffocating?

Because the bird is in the cage and the cage is in the town and the town is made of blinding white flowers and beautiful lies

Maybe we can’t help the things we dream of any more than we can’t help the things that we are made of

Or maybe we can  

If we can finally the lies and the town and the cage we are inside of, we can see so many other things too

We can see the door – a way out – and we can fly away”

– Little fire everywhere

So, I have a bare minimum itinerary of what I am going to do in Boston. The friend I’m visiting is a homebody who doesn’t drink, doesn’t eat out, and doesn’t love going out. So it’ll be interesting. I love traveling solo, btw. I don’t mind it. It reminds me of that 21-year-old who is clueless and fearless, who is lost and intuitive, who is depressed and hopeful. It reminds me that I can still do it, fly away, to the world that is out there, figuratively and literally. 

And maybe, maybe, one day, I can inspire someone to fly away with me, too. Maybe, just maybe. One day, we can find a place where we can both truly belong, together, where we can grow up and grow old together. 

Without the cage, and the anchor, and the beautiful lies and the deafening comfort. 

Maybe one day we can put the phones down, unplug, and sleep peacefully in an island that is embraced by the endless blue sky, and the family and friends and the people in our lives who love us, as flawed, as sad, as isolated we are at times.

Before the fear in me turned into the unrelenting demon wanting to forever run away from it all and never come back.

 “You’re not here. When you’re here, you’re not here.”

I don’t know how often, how loving, or how loud I have to say certain things for them to be heard. I don’t know if we should pay someone $190 an hour so that they can be a proxy to say it. I don’t know if the silence in my meditation and my learning to let go of these thoughts would also let go of the part that made us who we were.

“At some point, you just need to learn to be happy.” It sounds like a poster on a wall of a beautiful glass house in a beautful wonderland of no one. It sounds like gaslighting to the ears of the abused. It sounds like privilege to the ears of the oppressed. 

I am lucky, and I am priviledged. The world is on fire. People are going through the pandemic, and uncertainty. And so in my privilege of being safe, and healthy, and financially safe, I need to learn to be happy and let go of this nagging feeling of numbness and isolation.

What do I really want?

Maybe I want to be alive. I want to walk out in the sun, feeling the ocean wind, feeling the blisters in my feet. I want to raise garden beds. I want to talk on the streets and look at people. 

Maybe I want to be connected. I want to have conversations. I want to laugh. I want to compete.

Maybe I want to be heard. I want someone being present when they are with me. I want to be a priority, not an afterthought. I want to be invited, not rejected. 

Maybe I want to be acknowledged, for my existence, my struggles, my contradictions, my talents, my flaws.

Maybe I want to rest. I want to not be stuck in this limbo of barely enough attention to keep my grounded, but not enough to make me happy. Maybe I want to be thriving, not surviving. Maybe I want to be loved, not just be told that I am loved.

“You don’t know what you want”

I do. Maybe I want you to listen. 

Can you be surrounded by people,
and still be alone?

Can you have friends without the burden of their problems?

Can you have love without being desired?

Can you carry the weight of the lights, with the vast emptiness of the shadow?

I asked myself
in the shadow.

“What is wrong, love?” – they ask
and they walk away before the answer
before the shadow reaches them
before the sun arrives and the shadow becomes too looming large

“What is to blame, love?” – they ask
and they walk away because the answer wasn’t simple
and the answer requires them to work

You see, it’s not an exorcism
without the work
It’s not help, if it’s all rainbow and positive vibe only 
and “Can we talk about me now?”

In the shadow 
of the vast blue sky
and the breathtaking prairie sunset,
there’s this loneliness
looming
larger than than you, and me, and us
but only I do see it

I sit in the shadow
with my breath
quietly resigning

“Who is there, love?” – I ask

No one answered.

I think I might have figured out the source of my troubles – depression lately. And in the most Buddhist sense of why I have been depressed my whole life, it’s with the sense of self. This time, it manifested with Rejection.

I was catching up with a friend that I have not seen in a while. We actually knew each other in university. Well, knew of. I was sort of dating his friend when he was just kind of hovering. And so it is kinda funny when I said I was kinda alone and rejected by my community when I was doing my masters, he said “What do you think a chubby gay man feel, just hovering in the background?”. The world is not kind to gay men who look like us. 

A lot of my life was with rejection. Rejection for being a geek. Rejection because others are not ready. Rejection – repeatedly – from someone who said they loved me but he didn’t think I was attractive or desirable. There was once in my life that I was desperate, and pathetic, so much so that I resonated with Grey’s Anatomy. Yes, that. “Okay, here it is. Your choice. It’s simple. She or me. And I’m sure she’s really great. But Derek, I love you, in a really, really big – pretend to like your taste in music, let you eat the last piece of cheesecake, hold a radio over my head outside your window – unfortunate way that makes me hate you, love you. So pick me. Choose me. Love me.” 

I could be really lazy and said it was all deep-rooted in the way I was brought up. My mom doesn’t tolerate failures in the house. Second place in school? Not the best at the city level? Failed an Olympiad? I faced disappointment and the silent treatment for those, and hence this deep-rooted fear of failures because it’s just rejection. People who don’t succeed get rejected. 

I could be a bit less lazy and said it was because I was in the closet for a long time. And being a geeky Asian without access to good hair products, high school wasn’t kind, the undergraduate school wasn’t kind, California was exceptionally wasn’t kind. Internalized racism mixed with internalized homophobia creates this intoxicating mix of self-deprecation and overdrive to perform to not be rejected. 

And maybe the reason why staying back in Calgary has stressed me so much in the past months. It’s the rejection. I was rejected, repeatedly, for 6 months when I was trying to look for work here. So any early signs of my work that I’m not getting up to speed fast enough, or that I’m not performing at my self-imposed optimal result, I get really really stressed out about it.

It’s our life here. Let’s watch a movie? No. Let’s go out? No. Let’s spend some time together? No. I drove myself into spiral insanity when my partner would say yes to someone else for the same thing he had said no to me. Insecure. Unreasonable. Needy. All that. And I know it. And rationally I know it’s not fair or healthy or productive, but here it is. And the fact is that (maybe valid) fear and feeling are so often dismissed, it manifests itself as a form of rejection. I was truly hoping a new city, a different place, a more open community will give us a chance to reconnect and do the things we used to love doing together.

Yes, my sense of self-worth and well-being should not be based on the validation of others. And I know this, rationally. Yet, when something so minute and seemingly so irrelevant come up, I could feel a pang in my chest and internally desperately grasp for air. 

I wondered to myself what would have happened if I have noticed Zac in the background and if I have tried to be his friend back then. A lot of the best friends I had in life are my rag-tag crew of rejects. Black queer women. Nerdy Asians that failed their parents. Chubby queer men under-represented in the community. Older people make an impact in the increasingly ageist world. 

I wondered what would have happened to me if someone had noticed me, picked me, chose me.

I was in a one-on-one with a team member and his wife walks in to deliver his lunch, so I told him Dan usually doesn’t cook. “Who’s Dan? Your roommate?” “My husband.” I met up with an old friend – colleague for dinner. The last time we met was pre-pandemic/pre-wedding. And we talked about married life. He’s a straight man and an immigrant from Mexico. 

The thing about coming out is you do it over and over and over again. And if you are lucky, like me, you don’t think much about it every time you have to do it. 

I can’t believe it’s been 10 years since I left Singapore. It was a big chapter in my life, not only because it was a large part of my early adulthood, but it also marks the first, and darkest part, of my mental health, my identity, and my work. I can almost remember vividly the stress, the shame, and the fear that one has to live in a country when a normal act of being with another human being is both socially and criminally judged. I can remember the feeling that people like me are told we are good contributing members of society, as long as you keep working hard, keeping your head low, and don’t discuss who you are if you are not part of the norm. It opens up the people for a lot of abuse, internalized homophobia, and even open the community up to scammers and abuse. 

I’m sure things have gotten better since. I have gotten a lot older, a little bit wiser, and more confident, since. I wonder how much of it is because I didn’t have to hide anymore. I wonder how much of my life growth and career growth is because I am free, a bit from the judgement of others, but mostly from the judgement of myself. 

People do 10-year-challenge on social media as a form of showing off how well they’ve aged. To be honest, at 37, my joy looks very different now. My stress and anxiety look very different too (and I would argue I’m a bit better equipped at dealing with them). 

People know me in my 20s would probably remember me as a loud, joyful person. And I was. People who know me now would probably think of me as a loud, joyful person. And I am. So it’s incredibly poignant to me that someone that many people know as joyful can have so much fear, anxiety, depression, just simply because of who they are. 

For that I am forever grateful. I am one of those lucky very few people who have the opportunity and the privilege to be authentic in a world that so often rejects us. I know calling it “lucky” diminishes the resiliency, the energy, and the injustice that have been brought upon to people like me. But I didn’t want to not acknowledge that it wasn’t just strength alone that got me here. I am forever grateful to my friends, my mentors, my co workers, and the kindness of strangers and pioneers in this space that have fought for us to be here. 

I am just grateful to be here. Yet, I am grateful for Singapore, forever ago, no matter how tough that was, for equipping me with what was needed to be here today. 

” It’s always darkest before the dawn”

Everyone on social media and at work is encouraging each other to “Reflect on 2021”. I don’t know if I’m ready for that yet. I don’t know if I processed 2021 (or even 2020) enough to reflect on it without breaking down and panic cry over a tub of ice cream quite yet.

In 2021 we thought the pandemic was over. And the vaccine did help. For a while. We gleefully declared we’re “Open for summer”, and then “Open for good” and snarkily making fun of people “needing to get over it” on Twitter. Turned out the real pandemic is the ones with humanity no longer trusting each other, no longer believing in the greater good, and no longer trusting evidence or science.

In 2021 we faced “Stop Asian Hate” straight on. And while Canadians and my friends gleefully declare racism is not here, I wish I could have an honest, open conversation about the microaggression, the subtle discrimination I still feel at the grocery store, at work, or even within different Asian communities and queer communities. You see, when you are a successful director of a tech company, people often think you should shut up and not bite the hands that feed you, or your friends will tell you “Can’t change the fact that I’m white and privileged”. 

In 2021, I faced the loss of “what could have been”. We decided not to adopt because “Jason, you want to move to Ontario. We can’t adopt in Alberta”, so I felt like it was my fault we had to make that change. And of course, now I am not moving anymore, so I’ve lost that too. As I continue to chat with my new boss (and his firm belief the future is remote/hybrid 100%), I couldn’t help but feel like there are these hundreds of doors that are open before us, and my feet are grounded solidly in a house, a mortgage, and three feet of the Calgary snow (and subtle microaggressions – refer to point 2).

In 2021, I had 2 job changes. While I am incredibly grateful for the opportunities and the success they bring, learning new things and going through 2 probations in a year is incredibly taxing (on an already anxious mind), on the backdrop of a pandemic. Companies that turned me down this time last year are reaching out again, trying to recruit me (because the Great Resignation happens, and because I now have the title that matches their AI searches). It’s cynical, I know. But I do think I have a lot to offer in my professional life and to the people that I work with, and the 2021 workplace is just a strange landscape to be in.

In 2021, most importantly, in my comfy “work from home” desk, I feel isolated. I feel pretty much alone and taken for granted in my little happy corner of the world. I feel the burden of the world, at times as ridiculously light as air, at times as ridiculously heavy as a chest pain, and most of the time just this unexplainable anxiety about things starting to crumble and my perfect little suburban life is corroding who I am as a person. 

So yeah, I am not sure I am ready to reflect on 2021 quite yet. I am not sure I’m in the place where I can even sit and reflect on things. Maybe the dawn will come. Maybe after the Winter Soltice, as the days get longer and the Chinook bring some warmth and I can be outside in the sun, all these darkness will slowly fade into my breath of the winter air during meditation.

Meanwhile, I’ll just sit and breathe.

(I didn’t want this to be all gloom and doom so I put it as Part 1 – to offer some hope. Let’s see if there is part 2. Maybe in the next 2 weeks)