"Go back to sleep"

In 2016 I was twenty, and my grandma heated up some milk for me to drink before bed.

I had just come off a long flight, having just spent the last two years of my life living alone after moving out from my childhood home to pursue a university degree. Suddenly I had to do everything myself: cooking my own food, doing the laundry, changing my bedsheets. Keeping on top of assignments, working a part-time job to pay rent, and somehow also having a social life.

But this winter break was different. My grandma had written to my mother: “Would Becky like to come to LA for Christmas? She can stay with me and go to Disneyland.” (She’s not biologically my grandma, but she bought my study desk as a kid and helped raise me from afar.)

I thought I was supposed to have life figured out at twenty. There’s a big “2” in front of my age, after all. I was supposed to know what I want, wake up energetic every day, exercise, be healthy.

I knew my mother in her twenties raising me, peeling herself out of bed, being a department store employee in daytime and being a mother at night.

In my twenties, my grandmother would take the cup filled with milk out of the microwave and squeeze some chocolate syrup in. She would take a spoon out of her cream drawers under the kitchen island and stir it gently.

*

It’s May 2026, and I’m unable to get out of bed.

I had just come off a fourteen-hour flight from Hong Kong. I had hoped to come here all pumped and energetic, but the truth is I arrived here burnt out.

I had been holding up decently well since mid-March when I handed in my notice unexpectedly and tried to hold life together as it unraveled by the seams. The rest tumbled out unfashionably.

I landed trying to shake the third cold I had experienced in the last six weeks. I wanted to show up for my grandparents. I had come brandishing my international driving licence, hoping to shoulder some day-to-day errands at least for the 2.5 weeks that I’m here. When I was here eight months ago I had noticed how old they were getting, how slow they were walking, how careful they were moving.

Instead I am hunkered under the blanket in my cousin’s bedroom, cold sweat pulling me under as I doze in and out, fighting jet lag, burnout, and the cold.

My grandparents ended up bringing back some soup for me to eat. And right after I had cleaned my bowl up, my grandma cut some fruit, handed me some vitamins and told me gently to go back to sleep.

I’m unlearning that being an adult means you don’t need to be taken care of. That at some point the milk and the soup are supposed to stop, and you’re supposed to just handle it. But I flew fourteen hours to the opposite side of the world from where I grew up, and the thing that put me back together wasn’t discipline or a plan. It was my grandma telling me to go back to sleep.

At thirty, I can still be a kid again.

Update log:

• 🚋 Ticked off a bucket list item to ride the AmTrak. Thanks for getting me on my first one Steven Foster!

• 🖌️ Sketched my first sketch of 2026 also thanks to a drawing sketchbook gifted by Steven.

• 😮‍💨 Feeling the burnout setting in so I’m starting to let some clients go.

• 🛬 Landed in LAX for Press Publish LA! So excited to connect with other people in the creator space.

• 🖥️ Bought myself an Espresso monitor - a portable second monitor for remote working. I’m loving this baby already.

• 🎙️ New Small Creator Big World episode: Garnish Your Spaghetti

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