31

“I’m leaving because I need to do this for me. And I need to do this for us.”

I’m sat there on the couch dumbfounded like a toddler who just discovered that food has the ability to burn your own tongue.

She packs up her bags, I help take them down the stairs, and ask one more time if there’s anything I can do to make her stay. The “no” lands flat like a rock that skips only once in the water and sinks. All I can really do at this point is lunge upstairs. Don’t look back.

One day turns into a few weeks, a few weeks turns into her wanting to get their own apartment. She eventually signs a lease which then turns into a long call where I finally wake up to the fact that she’d been soft launching the breakup while I kept holding on hoping it was a puzzle that could be solved.

When I was a kid, I never imagined being alone in my 30s. Let alone, it being after my partner walked out on me. I guess I can add that to the long list of things in life that don’t pan out how we thought they would.

Everyone deals with breakups differently. One person’s basic move is another person’s crash out.  As you get older, pain becomes more predictable in the way you know you’ve survived before so you know you’ll survive again. The belief is there, but the work isn’t any easier.

June is gloom. July’s a blur. August becomes a season of loving myself again.

Craft a couple of doomer Spotify playlists. Walk 30 miles through NYC just to feel something. Get a haircut. Go back to the home state to contextualize one’s roots. Spend four nights in the backcountry to remember you’re insignificant. Sign up for a Shaolin training course in China cause Wemby did it too.

After spending a few weeks on the road, I get back to NYC in August to crack open my laptop for the first meeting of the day. Pull up at 9:30am just to see my uninvited Chief of Staff looking somber. Last we talked, she had just given me a $50 gift card for topping the leaderboard in my company walking challenge, but I’ve seen this movie too many times before. I start making copies of design files between the words “eliminate your position” and horde what I can before my access is shut off 2 minutes later. This L goes down easy though in comparison.

That leads me to spend the next two weeks freelancing and getting my shit together before a family trip to China. But the week before I leave, a water pipe bursts upstairs and completely torches my unit leaking all the way down past more units to the ground floor. After spending hours on the phone with neighbors, flooding contractors, and claims reps before the sun has come up, I find myself laughing at the turn of events.

Maybe I’m delusional or maybe all that emotional regulation training my newly minted ex told me I needed is actually working. I’m taking this all right. All that’s left for me to do is bask in this divine plan and wonder how else this summer is going to haze me.

So a few days later, I hop on a flight to Shanghai at peace with the fact I may be coming back to an uninhabitable home and potentially months of working through claims.

After the first few nights of good food and bad sleep, I visit the senior home where my Grandpa had been put on a feeding tube two weeks prior after having lost the ability to eat.

I walk into a well lit room after nurses had told us my Wai Gong had woken up. There he was. Mouth agape, no words, and eyes glassy. He stopped recognizing me a few years ago, but still I stand there petrified to see him tied down to the bed.

My mom wanted to keep me and my sister away from this burden she’s had to shoulder with my dad. In her defense, she didn’t want to leave us with this memory of him, but relented when we told her we didn’t want to regret not seeing him one last time. Now that I’m here, I want nothing more than to cling onto the memory of Wai Gong peddling me on the back of his bike to the vegetable markets or the way he’d sneak me rock sugar as an after school snack.

As I sit in the chair next to him, I look down at his hand that’s still radiating with warmth. Looks like he’s been getting some sunshine which is good. Hesitation courses through me as I wonder if I should grab it.  Would he flinch and convulse leading the staff to come in and tell me off? Would I be at a loss of words? Would I be transported back to the bottom bunk of my childhood bedroom like this was all some bad dream and I get to shuffle into the kitchen to see Wai Gong there serving up plain congee and fried eggs dipped in soy sauce?

I reach for his hand and rub it softly with my index and thumb. He doesn’t react and all our throats clench as my mom keeps repeating his name to try to get a reaction from him. Each attempt ending in more tears until her voice is no more than a squeak.

Life’s full of loss and time is relentless with how fast life comes at us.

In Chinese culture, there’s the virtue of chi ku, literally meaning to eat bitterness. Essentially, the value of perseverance through hardship. My grandparents and parents generation having gone through hard times including war, famine, political instability, immigration, and assimilation. It’s easy to discredit our own struggles in comparison. I’ve come to realize though that it’s like comparing different eras of basketball. 10 out of 10 times I’m going to choose this era to play in since it affords me privileges past generations didn’t have access to. But we should also see that just because the challenges each generation goes through are different, doesn’t mean what’s experienced in this life isn’t real.

So as I sit with this summer of blows, I think of their example that we all got to chi ku to find some life meaning. Ultimately, I know that there’s growth and new perspective loading on the other side of all of this. Good things typically come from the lows

I know too that it’s never been more important to show compassion to the people in your life, relinquish control of the things you can’t control, and to enjoy the little things because you don’t know when time’s up or the pendulum swings against you. Let the tears out because it does honestly help. Give yourself space to feel out a shit situation and never ever forget to be kind to yourself.

After all, the best thing about bottoming out is there’s only one way to go from here.

For now though, I’m embodying a new slogan my friends have been affectionately belting out with reckless abandon. I invite you join me in doing the same because we still got so much to celebrate everyday.