If He’s Such a Wonderful Man, What Are You Afraid Of?

A note before you begin: Today’s story includes discussions of childhood physical and sexual abuse, domestic violence, addiction, grief, suicide attempts, self-harm, and mental health hospitalization. Please take care of yourself while reading. If any part of this feels too heavy or brings up emotions you’re not ready to revisit today, it’s okay to step away and come back when you’re ready.

If you are struggling with thoughts of suicide or are worried you may harm yourself, please reach out to someone you trust or contact a crisis service in your area. If you’re in the United States or Canada, you can call or text 988 to connect with the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. You don’t have to carry what you’re going through by yourself.

Happy Tuesday, you guys.

I’ve been sitting at my desk today, working, writing, designing, answering messages, and trying to get through everything I need to finish before I leave the country.

Yesterday, I received an email from someone at Google.

I don’t know if you remember, but a couple of days ago, I made a post explaining that the return address on my Letters Beyond Borders envelopes throughout May, June, and the first week of July was incorrect.

Instead of the envelopes having my correct office number, 1505, it had 1503.

I still don’t understand how it happened. Somewhere between me, my assistant, and hundreds of envelopes going out into the world.

That meant all of the letters you mailed back to me were being delivered to the office next door.

Last Friday, I actually walked over to the building and tried to find the office myself, but I got lost. I don’t know how I got lost when the building is literally right next to mine, but somehow I couldn’t find the correct floor. I was walking around that building completely confused, trying to figure out where months’ worth of letters had gone.

Then yesterday, someone from Google emailed me and said, “Hey, we’ve been receiving a lot of mail for you. Can you provide us with a good address so we can get it to you?”

They could have returned every letter to the sender.

They could have left them sitting in a pile.

They could have thrown them back into the mail and decided it wasn’t their responsibility.

Instead, this person saw my name on envelope after envelope, Googled me, found my email address, and reached out to make sure the letters eventually made their way into my hands.

I appreciate people like that so much.

People who take an extra step when they don’t have to.

People who understand that something may not belong to them, but it still belongs to somebody.

Soon, all of those missing letters will finally be with me.

I don’t think I can explain how grateful that makes me feel.

Every letter matters to me.

Every person who takes the time to fill out an application to join Letters Beyond Borders matters to me. Every story you trust me with matters. Every envelope you address, every stamp you place in the corner, every page you sit down and write when you could be doing a thousand other things—it all matters.

You share your lives with me, and I share mine with you.

We laugh together. We cry together. We pray for one another. We celebrate birthdays, new jobs, heartbreaks, babies, healing, disappointments, dreams, and all the strange little things that happen between one letter and the next.

I started Letters Beyond Borders only a few months ago, and now there are more than four hundred of you.

Sometimes I sit back and think, How did this even happen?

Something that began as a simple desire to write to people has grown into a community stretching across the world.

I have a much bigger vision for it. I can already see what it could become. But even if it never became anything more than what it is today, I would still be grateful, because it has reminded me that people want to be known.

People want to feel like their lives matter to someone.

They want somewhere they can put the things they have been carrying.

And sometimes those letters make me look at parts of myself that I have been avoiding.

One of the letters I recently received came from a pen pal who asked me a question.

I’ve been thinking about it for hours.

You know how I am. When something sits heavily in my heart, I have to write while I am still inside of the feeling. I can’t wait until next week, when I’ve had enough time to make it sound prettier or more reasonable.

My best writing comes from whatever I am feeling right now.

So I opened my laptop.

The question was:

“If he’s such a wonderful man, what are you afraid of? Why won’t you let him love you?”

I don’t think my pen pal meant it judgmentally.

I think she asked a question that many people have probably wondered, especially those of you who discovered me through the story of the Whole Foods Guy.

Some of you have followed me for more than a decade. You watched me move from Dallas to Los Angeles. You watched me build businesses, lose things, start over, return to Dallas, fall apart, rebuild again, and now prepare to move across the world.

Some of you just found me last week.

Depending on when you arrived, you know a different version of me.

You know whatever part of my life was visible when you started watching.

That’s the strange thing about social media.

People can know so much about you while also knowing almost nothing about you.

You can watch someone build a business. You can see where they travel, what they eat, who they date, what they are afraid of, what made them laugh that morning, and what made them cry the night before.

You can know their favorite dessert, their birthday, the cities they have lived in, and the name of the man they are falling in love with.

You can watch their life every day and still not know what it took for their heart to arrive at that moment.

People see a good man.

They see someone showing up for me, caring about me, traveling to see me, including me in his life, and making an effort.

What they don’t always see is everything my heart survived before he ever walked back into my life.

They don’t see the home I grew up in.

They don’t see the bruises.

They don’t see the little girl who learned very early that love and pain could come from the same hands.

They don’t see the seven- or eight-year-old child who had to run out of a room because an adult touched her in a way she already knew was wrong, even though she didn’t yet have the words to explain why.

They don’t see the relationship where being slapped felt familiar enough that I stayed.

They don’t see the husband I thought I would grow old with.

They don’t see the phone calls, the highway, the hospital, or the moment my entire future disappeared.

They don’t see the bathroom floor, the knife, the pills, the ambulance, the charcoal, the psychiatric floor, or the version of me who didn’t want to wake up the next morning.

Those experiences don’t disappear because a kind man enters your life.

Healing does not work that way.

Love does not work that way either.

I’ve reached a point where I can tell these stories without completely falling apart.

That doesn’t mean they are easy to tell.

There are things I have healed from that I still have to take a breath before saying out loud.

But I also know there is someone reading this who has been trying to understand why they react the way they do.

Someone who has questioned why being loved makes them uncomfortable.

Someone who has met a good person and still felt the urge to run.

Someone who keeps telling themselves, “Nothing bad is happening, so why am I so afraid?”

Maybe this will help you understand that fear does not always begin with the person standing in front of you.

Sometimes fear is much older than the relationship you are currently in.

I grew up in a strict Vietnamese household.

My parents came from Vietnam and were given an opportunity to build a life in America. They did not have much. They were trying to survive, raise children, work, pay bills, and understand a country and culture that were completely different from the one they knew.

They made sure we had food.

They made sure we had clothes.

They made sure we went to school and received an education.

They gave us what they understood children needed to survive.

I can acknowledge that while also acknowledging the ways I was hurt.

Both things can be true.

Sometimes people believe that forgiving your parents means pretending nothing happened.

I don’t believe that.

I can forgive my father and still say he abused me.

I can understand that he disciplined his children in the only way he knew and still say that the way he disciplined me caused harm.

I can love my parents and still speak truthfully about my childhood.

In many Asian households, children are expected to excel.

You need good grades. You need to behave. You need to make the family proud. You don’t talk back. You don’t embarrass your parents. You don’t question why the rules are the way they are.

And if you disappoint them, you will hear about it.

Sometimes loudly.

Sometimes with a flip-flop, a belt, a stick, or whatever else is close enough to reach.

People laugh about Asian parents throwing slippers at their children because it is such a common cultural joke.

But there are parts of it that were never funny.

Growing up, I did not know I was being abused.

I thought that was what happened when children got in trouble.

I thought fathers hit their daughters.

I thought love could include fear.

I thought home was supposed to be the place where you were fed, clothed, protected, and also afraid of making one wrong move.

I was the oldest of three children, and somehow I was almost always the one who got hit.

I would take the blame for my siblings. Sometimes I would get in trouble for being outside too long, climbing on a mailbox, coming home late, or doing the normal things children do when they are curious and still learning where the boundaries are.

I was not an easy child.

I can admit that.

The stricter my parents became, the more I learned to do things behind their backs. I lied. I snuck around. I tested every rule. I probably drove them crazy.

But I was also a child.

I would go to school with bruises and marks on my body.

My teachers noticed.

They would pull me aside and ask if I was okay at home. They took me to the office. They documented the bruises. They took pictures.

Eventually, someone called Child Protective Services.

For a period of time, I was removed from my home and sent to stay with another family while my parents were investigated.

Can you imagine being a child and not fully understanding why you cannot go home?

Not knowing what abuse means, but knowing that adults are looking at the marks on your body and telling you that something is wrong?

At the time, I did not have the emotional language to understand any of it.

I only knew I wanted my family, even though my family was also where I had been hurt.

That is one of the most confusing things about childhood trauma.

Children do not stop loving the people who hurt them.

They often learn to blame themselves instead.

You start believing that if you were quieter, smarter, more obedient, less emotional, less difficult, or less yourself, perhaps the people you love would not hurt you.

You don’t think, “My parent does not know how to regulate their anger.”

You think, “I made my parent angry.”

You don’t think, “This adult is responsible for protecting me.”

You think, “I should have known better.”

Then you carry that thinking into adulthood.

You become someone who is always trying to be good enough not to be hurt.

Around seven or eight years old, I experienced something else that changed how safe I felt around people.

I was at my aunt’s house, sitting on a bed and playing with my toys.

My uncle put his hand between my inner thighs.

His face came close to my neck.

I remember feeling uncomfortable before I even understood what was happening.

My body knew.

That is something I have never forgotten. Sometimes a child’s body understands danger long before her mind knows what to call it.

I screamed, ran out of the room, went downstairs, and crossed over to my grandmother’s place.

I was crying and trying to explain in Vietnamese, “Chú đụng vào con.”

My uncle touched me.

My grandmother tried to calm me down. She told me to breathe. Later, she told my mother, and she confronted my aunt. She asked why her husband was behaving that way with a child and told her she needed to watch him.

But families are complicated.

Especially when speaking the truth would disrupt marriages, relationships, holidays, and the version of the family everyone is trying to protect.

Nothing went further that day, and I think some people decided that meant it was not serious.

But a child does not measure harm by how far an adult managed to go.

The harm was in what happened.

The harm was in knowing that an adult I was supposed to trust looked at me in a way no adult should look at a child.

The harm was in having to see him again.

For the rest of my life, whenever there was a family holiday, dinner, birthday, or special event, I would see my uncle.

I stayed cordial.

I said hello.

I kept my distance.

I think some family members believed I forgot because I was so young.

I did not forget.

Children remember more than adults want to believe.

Even now, I can still see that room.

I can see the bed.

I can remember where I was sitting.

I can remember running.

I can remember the panic in my body before I knew enough about the world to understand what I was panicking about.

When those kinds of experiences happen early, they affect the way you understand love, trust, safety, affection, and your own instincts.

Then I grew up and dated a man named Seth.

We had known each other since high school. Eventually, he moved to Port Arthur.

He struggled with alcohol and gambling, and I was constantly sending him money.

When he lost, he needed more.

When I did not send it, he became angry.

I would drive eight hours to see him, and the visits were rarely peaceful. There was always a problem. There was always something he needed. There was always some way I had disappointed him.

I remember one day I refused to do what he wanted, and he slapped me across the face.

And I stayed.

I stayed because, at that point in my life, being hurt by someone who said they loved me did not feel as abnormal as it should have.

It felt familiar.

That is difficult to admit.

People often ask why someone stays in an abusive relationship.

They imagine abuse begins on the first date.

They imagine a man introduces himself, takes you to dinner, and slaps you before dessert.

It doesn’t usually happen that way.

It grows inside the relationship.

It arrives after attachment, memories, apologies, promises, financial dependence, shared plans, and the belief that the person you met in the beginning is still somewhere inside the person hurting you now.

And when you grew up in an abusive home, your definition of what is unacceptable can become distorted.

You tell yourself, “He only hit me once.”

You tell yourself, “He was angry.”

You tell yourself, “He had been drinking.”

You tell yourself, “He is going through something.”

You tell yourself, “I shouldn’t have said that.”

You tell yourself anything that allows you to stay attached to the person without having to admit they are not safe.

I think a part of me believed that if someone was not hurting me, they did not really love me.

That was the language I had been taught.

I had to unlearn it.

Eventually, that relationship ended.

Then I met Michael.

Michael was one of the sweetest and most handsome men I had ever known.

For the first time, I experienced a love that felt different.

I thought we were going to grow old together.

I believed I had finally reached the part of my life where everything before him would make sense.

Maybe all the pain had led me to this person.

Maybe this was the relationship that would rewrite everything I thought love was.

Then, in July 2012, ten days before my birthday, Michael died in a car accident after an eighteen-wheeler collided with his vehicle on his way to work.

The night before he died, he was taking pictures of me while I slept.

It was around midnight, maybe one o’clock in the morning, and the flash kept hitting my face.

I opened my eyes and said, “Babe, go to sleep. Why are you taking pictures of me?”

He said, “You’re so beautiful. I just want to take pictures of you before I leave.”

Before I leave.

I remember thinking, Leave where?

It was the middle of the night.

Where was this man planning to go?

Was he leaving me? Was something happening that I did not know about? Why did he keep saying it that way?

I was tired and annoyed by the flash, so I told him to stop and went back to sleep.

I later learned that while I was lying next to him, he had texted his ex-girlfriend and tried to see her that night.

She did not respond, and they did not meet.

That discovery added another kind of pain to a day that was already impossible to survive.

The next morning, I was getting ready for work.

I had just stepped out of the shower when I saw him sitting on the corner of the bed.

He wanted me to apologize.

I said, “Apologize for what, Michael?”

He told me I had been mean to him the night before when he was trying to take pictures of me.

I said, “You were taking pictures of me at midnight while I was trying to sleep. The flash was in my face.”

He said again, “I know, but you’re so beautiful. I wanted to take pictures of you before I leave.”

There were those words again.

Before I leave.

At the time, I still did not understand them.

I apologized.

He forgave me.

Looking back, I am grateful we had that conversation.

Imagine losing someone after an argument and being left with the knowledge that the last words you exchanged were angry ones over something that did not matter.

That morning, I was supposed to drive him to work because his car needed an oil change. We had plans to attend my friend’s boyfriend’s birthday celebration that weekend, and we wanted the car ready for the trip.

He told me not to worry about it.

He said he would drive himself and get the oil changed after work.

“I’ll see you when I get home,” he said.

I kissed him at the door.

I told him to have a good day at work.

Normally, he called me as soon as he arrived.

Seven o’clock came, and he had not called.

Then 7:30.

Still nothing.

His manager called me.

“Is Michael coming in today?”

I said, “What do you mean? He should already be there.”

His manager told me he had never arrived.

I called Michael.

Voicemail.

I called again.

Voicemail.

Again.

Voicemail.

My body knew before my mind was willing to accept anything.

Something was wrong.

A couple of hours later, one of my uncles called and said there had been a terrible accident on Interstate 35. A car involved looked like Michael’s.

I ran downstairs, got into my car, and drove toward the highway.

By the time I arrived, the traffic had cleared and the scene was gone.

Then Michael’s mother called.

There had been an accident.

They were taking him to Harris Hospital.

I rushed to the hospital and waited.

I waited while people tried to tell us what had happened.

I waited until we had to identify his body.

The man who told me that morning, “I’ll see you when I get home,” never came home.

I don’t want to go into every detail about what happened with his family afterward. That part of the story has its own pain. Grief can bring people together, but it can also make people cruel. Everyone is suffering, everyone wants someone to blame, and sometimes the person closest to the one who died becomes the easiest target.

The years 2012, 2013, and 2014 were some of the hardest years of my life.

I had to grieve Michael.

I had to grieve our future.

I had to grieve the children we would never have, the home we would never grow old in, and the ordinary mornings I had assumed would continue for decades.

That is another thing people do not always understand about losing a partner.

You are not only grieving the person who died.

You are grieving every version of yourself you were supposed to become beside them.

Before Michael died, I had already been struggling emotionally.

There were moments when my life became so dark that I tried to end it.

Twice.

I am not saying that casually.

I am not saying it for shock.

I am saying it because it happened, and because I know somebody reading this has been in a bathroom with the door locked, believing everyone else would be better off if they disappeared.

One day, I was in the bathroom cutting my wrists.

I had also taken hydrocodone and other medication because I wanted the pain to stop.

Michael was in the living room playing video games.

After I had been in the bathroom for too long, he started asking if I was okay.

I did not answer him.

Eventually, he forced the door open and saw me sitting there with a knife in my hand.

He called 911.

The paramedics came. At the hospital, they gave me activated charcoal because of what I had taken.

I will never forget it.

For days afterward, everything leaving my body was black. That is one of those details people do not put into the dramatic movie version of a suicide attempt.

There was nothing beautiful about it.

There was no peaceful fading away.

It was frightening, humiliating, painful, messy, and very real.

Afterward, I was placed under a seventy-two-hour psychiatric observation at JPS.

I was sent to the tenth floor.

I remember sitting in a common area with other patients when a man next to me said, “There’s a ghost beside you. Do you want to say hello?”

I said, “No. How about you leave me alone?”

He kept talking to me, and I remember sitting there thinking, I am not crazy. I made a terrible decision, but I am not crazy.

I know now that even the way I thought about the people around me came from fear and ignorance. We were all there because our minds had taken us somewhere we could not safely navigate alone.

Some people were experiencing psychosis.

Some were severely depressed.

Some were manic.

Some had nowhere else to go.

Some had probably been abandoned by every person who was supposed to protect them.

And I was not better than any of them.

I was simply someone whose pain had taken a different shape.

At one point, I needed to use the restroom, but the patient restroom was occupied and dirty. I asked one of the staff members if I could use the employee restroom.

I said, “I promise I’m not crazy.”

I was working in healthcare at the time, and I think I believed that if they knew I was educated, functioning, and able to speak calmly, they would understand that I did not belong there.

But pain does not care what job you have.

Depression does not care whether you went to college.

Trauma does not care whether you can look put together in front of other people.

You can spend all day caring for patients and still go home unable to care for yourself.

Every day, we sat in group sessions.

We talked about what we were feeling, why we had tried to hurt ourselves, what had brought us there, and what we needed to do to leave safely.

Eventually, I was discharged.

My parents picked me up because the staff did not want Michael to take me home. They believed the relationship might have contributed to what happened.

It wasn’t because of him.

At least, I don’t remember it being because of him.

I still cannot fully explain what was happening inside of me during that period. I only remember being tired of hurting.

I wanted the pain to stop, and for a moment, I could not imagine another way to make it stop.

That experience changed how I see people.

Working in healthcare changed it too.

I have met patients who could not sleep because their minds would not stop.

Patients experiencing panic attacks who believed they were dying.

Patients asking for medication because they needed relief from something they did not know how to name.

I used to see people come in asking for Wellbutrin, Xanax, or anything that might quiet their minds long enough for them to breathe.

Medication can help people. I want to be clear about that.

There are people alive today because they had access to the right treatment and medication. I would never tell someone to stop taking something prescribed by their doctor.

But medication cannot always resolve the experiences underneath the symptoms by itself.

Sometimes people become so focused on numbing the pain that they never have the support, safety, or resources to understand where the pain began.

That is why I encourage people to talk.

Go to therapy if you have access to it.

Speak with a counselor.

Find a psychiatrist who listens to you instead of only writing a prescription and sending you home.

Talk to someone you trust.

Write the letter you never plan to send.

Say the thing out loud.

Your feelings need somewhere to go.

Maybe that is also part of why I created Letters Beyond Borders.

There are so many people struggling quietly.

People who wake up, go to work, smile, answer emails, take care of children, post beautiful pictures, and then lie awake at night wondering how much longer they can keep carrying everything by themselves.

Sometimes a letter gives them somewhere to put it.

Sometimes being witnessed is enough to help someone make it through another night.

So when my pen pal asked me, “If he’s such a wonderful man, what are you afraid of? Why won’t you let him love you?” I knew I could not answer that question with one sentence.

It is not that I will not let him love me.

I do let him love me.

But I also allow myself to move carefully.

People see caution and call it fear.

Sometimes it is fear.

Sometimes it is wisdom earned through experiences you would never choose for yourself.

I have loved people who hurt me.

I have trusted people who did not protect me.

I have built a future with someone and watched that future disappear in a single morning.

I know how quickly life changes.

I know that someone can love you deeply and still leave the house one morning and never return.

I know people’s feelings change.

I know the person standing in front of you today may not be the same person six months from now.

That does not mean I believe everyone will hurt me.

It means I no longer rush simply because other people are impatient to see the ending.

What is the point of rushing love?

Why should I commit to someone simply because he is kind to me?

Kindness matters. Showing up matters. Consistency matters. But those things are not debts I repay by handing someone my entire life before I am ready.

A man can be wonderful, and I can still need time.

Both things can be true.

People act as though receiving love means you must immediately know what to do with it.

But when love has been tied to abuse, abandonment, betrayal, or loss, healthy love can feel unfamiliar.

Sometimes chaos feels more recognizable than peace.

Sometimes your nervous system distrusts calm because calm was always what came right before something bad happened.

Sometimes the hardest person to trust is not the person loving you.

It is yourself.

Can I trust myself to recognize danger?

Can I trust myself to leave if something changes?

Can I trust myself not to lose my identity inside another relationship?

Can I trust myself to survive another loss?

Can I love someone without turning them into the center of my existence?

Can I let someone close without asking them to carry every wound I have not yet learned to hold?

Those are the questions underneath the question.

I still have things to sort through within myself.

That is not an insult to the person I am dating.

It is actually one of the most loving things I can admit.

It would not be fair to place all of my unresolved trauma into another person’s hands and tell him it is now his responsibility to heal what he did not break.

A partner can love you.

A partner can support you.

A partner can sit with you while you are struggling.

But they cannot become your therapist, your savior, your entire support system, and the only reason you wake up in the morning.

That is too much weight to place on another human being.

It is exhausting to love someone who refuses to open up, but there is also a difference between refusing to open up and opening slowly.

I do open up to him.

He knows parts of me that social media does not.

Our relationship is not exactly what people imagine it should be, and it does not need to be.

The dynamic between two people belongs to those two people.

Social media has made people feel entitled to relationships they are not inside of.

Someone watches a few posts and builds an entire narrative.

They decide who is more invested.

They decide who is afraid.

They decide who should move, who should commit, who should apologize, who should get married, and when the relationship should reach the next step.

They want to skip to the ending.

But why are we rushing toward the finish line?

For what?

Life is not a checklist where you go to school, find a career, get married, have children, buy a house, and then receive a certificate saying you completed life correctly.

That was the version of success my mother understood.

Go to school.

Become a nurse.

Get married.

Have children.

Build a respectable life.

There is nothing wrong with that life.

It is beautiful for the people who want it.

But it is not the only beautiful life available.

Success means something different to every person.

Maybe success is marriage.

Maybe it is motherhood.

Maybe it is building a business.

Maybe it is leaving an abusive home.

Maybe it is waking up without wanting to die.

Maybe it is moving to another country at thirty-seven because you finally have the courage and freedom to do it.

Maybe it is learning to receive love without abandoning yourself.

Maybe it is simply choosing a life that feels like your own.

People’s timelines are different because people’s lives are different.

Someone might be thirty-seven and unmarried, but you do not know that she was married before and buried her husband.

Someone might be forty-two before having her first child, but you do not know how many miscarriages, appointments, injections, IVF treatments, prayers, disappointments, and years of trying came before that child.

Someone might be living with their parents at thirty, but you do not know whether they are caring for a sick mother, rebuilding after a divorce, paying off debt, or starting over after losing everything.