Yes it’s been a month since my last newsletter (maybe longer? I refuse to check). In that time I have completed one full draft of a feature- my first one! It stole my time and brain cells that are usually dedicated to this space but now I am done with that and can relocate that brain space back to this newsletter. What is the newsletter? I don’t know and it seems every week it tends to stray further from it’s original intention but I’m enjoying writing these and I hope you enjoy digging them out of your promotions tab to read.
I do know I started this newsletter partly as transparency for what I am doing in light of the awful news and world we live in. Usually I like to end with recs on what I am watching/loving but this newsletter I will put where I am donating and learning about the rise of hatred centered on the AAPI community.
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During the pandemic, an unexpected relationship came into my life. Over the last year of isolation I was able to finally find someone who has become my best partner. It’s been my healthiest relationship because this relationship is solely between me and myself. I have come to the realization that I just… love to be alone. It’s something I’ve brushed up against my entire life and I finally relented when the only option I had was to be alone for an entire year.
It’s a contrast to the turn our lives took one year ago- spending a year in forced isolation and reckoning with the reality of people being shunned out of your day to day seems at odds with the feeling I have now. But I love being alone because of the lack of life commitment it has brought me, not because I love to be away from people. In fact I absolutely cannot wait to be surrounded by other people. In the last year I have dreamed of being at an overcrowded bar, a rave, traveling Europe packed to the seams with people around me, ET CETERA. I want to fully be around people again to take in their postures, gestures and speaking patterns and listen to their life’s anecdotes. I’ve always loved to be the last person at a party but I have found that I also love to come home to an empty house (and I don’t mean completely empty since I do have a roommate, but I genuinely cherish that moment when I get to step into my room and be fully alone).
I’ve read a lot about being alone versus being lonely, so I do want to detach this new relationship from the anxiety and sadness that has come with a year void of memories with friends. I’ve experienced loneliness and it sucks and it’s bad and it’s a space I don’t like being in at all. But I’ve come to value more than ever the feeling of being alone- it’s freeing nature and the air of mystery it brings to my future. I do think this feeling has been rumbling in me unnoticed but now I want to sink deeper into it before it’s gone. For instance I’ve always enjoyed running for it’s solitariness. I trained and ran the marathon alone because I needed to do it alone or else I would have given up. Running allows me to shut the world off and be fully on my own, so doing it contingent on someone else’s pace or conversation would ruin my experience. I’ve never needed a running partner and in the same way right now I don’t need a life partner.
The best way to sum up how I’m looking for someone currently: I’m more desperate for in-laws than I am for a partner. I crave companionship in intervals, rather than a static reality. I love peeking into other’s lived experiences rather than tying their lives to mine for the long haul. Not being engrained to another’s identity or timeline but still being present enough to feed off their energy. My other dream scenario is a two bedroom apartment with someone, not to make the second bedroom an office, but to make the second bedroom a separate space from each other.
Part of this realization stems from my anxiety over age. I’ve been anxious about my age and finally feeling “older” and how “behind” I am compared to my peers. In my twenties when my high school and church friends were buying houses and creating kids, I was able to dissociate from them because I had chosen the Big Pond Little Fish life over the mortgage and preschool life. But now as my Big Pond Little Fish peers are banging out kids, marriage certificates and upping their residences from apartments to houses with yards, my anxiety around my age has skyrocketed. I’ve created a habit of asking how old someone is or instantly googling the age of whatever celebrity I am watching on TV in front of me. I don’t do it out of guilt for not having that life, I do it to make sure I am okay with the life I am living. I have anxiety that my decision to wait to have children or get married is unhealthy or even weird. I fear that wanting to still travel and not be tied down is immature compared to what those my age are already doing. There’s still a lot I want to do, and at times being 34 with this mentality seems impossible except deep down I know it’s not impossible and I know it’s really where I want to be at. I love being in a spot where nothing has been ultimately decided. I feel an odd sense of relief that I’m not quite there yet. I have a lot more I want to do and even though I would love to feel settled at times, the unsettling part I will miss down the line.
A newsletter I habitually read and the one that inspired me to start this one is Haley Nahman’s Maybe Baby. This week she touched on the feelings of anticipation vs. the reality of what you were anticipating. She mentions a study that shows planning a vacation can leave you more satisfied than the actual vacation itself. The moments dreaming of what you will do, go and see outweigh the moments you spend doing it. Currently my favorite thing to do is go to the beach for a run. After my run I get an oat latte with a donut and sit on one of the benches on the Manhattan Beach pier to watch people surf. I try to let this time be uninterrupted by social media or texts and give way to dreaming of things I want to do, places I want to go or things I want to write… which gross, total main character vibes I know and I am sorry for this sentence.
The other night I was thinking about doing my beach runs with someone but I realized that no partner or person can make that time better because that time of imagining is sacred to me and shouldn’t be met with an outcome. My imagination can be anything in that moment compared to a fixed visual reality in front of me. It’s like watching the movie version of the book you just read- it simply will not compare. When I opened Haley’s newsletter the next morning to that study- and this quote- it cemented how much I need to cherish the uncommitted life I’m in.
The period of anticipation is intoxicating; rather than being limited to the present moment, you get to imagine enjoying infinite things in infinite future moments.
I like to spend my time on the pier in anticipation because I know one day I will look back and miss those moments more than anything. I already mourn my time in 2017 when I started taking myself on dates because I was frustrated that no one was taking me on dates. I would aim once a month to go to the Americana, do some light window shopping, order a pretzel and a coke and watch a movie by myself. It was some of the best movie theater experiences of my life and I loved walking back to my car holding onto only my own opinion of the movie without it being complicated by someone else’s differing take.
I never thought of myself as someone who craves being alone because I never saw how beneficial it was to my health. In my twenties I cried, a lot, about the fear of being alone. I’ve now been able to unpack a few… dramatic… responses I’ve administered to guys calling it off with me as more to do with my time being messed with than to do with the person that was leaving me behind. I was less scared of losing them and more fearful of potentially going through the motions of life alone. Maybe it’s cultural conditioning but in the back of my head being alone was also an indicator of being unwanted. I wanted a boyfriend to prove my worth to others rather than letting my worth be decided by the relationship I had with myself.
I don’t write this as a statement of wanting to stay single and alone forever, more I just want to really cherish and dig my heels into appreciation for this time I have right now. I still swipe around on Hinge (won’t download anything else cause I am too lazy to make other profiles) and do have a list in my notes app of names for my future kids. I look forward to hopefully having a family someday but I don’t want to waste my thirties waiting for anyone when I have the most PERFECT and GORGEOUS and FUNNY and, by the way, EXCELLENT WRITER (I mean, you should absolutely hire her for your shows) to be with right now.
re: what’s going on
As I mentioned above here are some resources I’ve come across. Most of these have spread through Instagram/Twitter like wild fire but in case you missed something, here is a small gathering of info.
For a deeper dive into the statistics on the hatred towards the AAPI community, here is the Stop AAPI Hate National Report. It details and breaks down the 3,795 incidents and gives a clearer picture of what is happening compared to the generic and broad headlines we see over most of media when reporting on this terrible uptick of hatred.
GoFundMe’s for the families of the victim’s of the Atlanta mass shooting:
-Elcias Hernandez Ortiz, survivor of the shooting
-Support the AAPI Community GoFundMe
-Other places to donate: Red Canary Song, National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, and Asian American Advancing Justice.
Some history to read on that I know I missed in my education: How the 1982 Murder of Vincent Chin Ignited a Push for Asian American Rights, The Rock Springs Massacre, and for a more condensed look that I suggest you do more research into each event: The long, ugly history of anti-Asian racism and violence in the U.S. Also I am accepting anything you have come across that you think has been left out of history (which is probably a lot).
A brief and heartbreaking look into the lives lost: These Are the Victims of the Atlanta Spa Shootings
Bystander Training Resources provided by Hollaback! that I have not done yet but intend on doing.
See you in two(ish).
Waiting for your next update!