i spent the last two weeks in singapore and malaysia, mostly seeing family and eating more than i'd thought possible. kway teow soup, assam laksa, satay, roti prata, bak kut teh. meal after meal of food you can't get the real version of back home.

the strangest part was how slow everything felt. the days stretched out, and by the end it felt like i'd been gone far longer than two weeks, in the best possible way. away from work and routine, i could finally see how much of my life they usually fill: how much of my attention they quietly take, and how little is left when they're done. for two weeks there was nothing i had to be doing, and the time opened up. i had room to ground myself, to sit with things i don't normally get to.

i also came away with a wider sense of the world than i usually carry. the trip put me around lives that share almost nothing with mine: family who built theirs on the other side of the planet, strangers whose worlds barely touch my own. seeing them up close stretches what you let yourself believe a life can even be.

it was the people, though, more than anything. i saw extended family i hadn't seen in years. my grandma made 粽子 (sticky rice dumplings) and 萝卜糕 (radish cake) for me — homemade, neither of which i'd had since she moved away. she made them specially, because she knows how much i love them. there's a particular warmth in being fed by someone who's known you your whole life, and i'd forgotten how much i missed it.

the last couple of years have been rough on my mom's side of the family, and getting everyone in one room without friction wasn't a given. so it meant more than i expected to see them all gathered this time, actually getting along, the tension set down at least for a few days. being all together, for no reason beyond being together, was the best part of the whole trip.

a big thank you to the people who made those two weeks what they were. to my parents and my brother, who flew out from the states with me. to my uncle, who spent a week showing us his malaysia. to my grandma and my aunt. i don't get time like this with any of you often, and i felt that the whole way through.

what follows are a few of the things from those weeks i haven't been able to put down.

a "rich" life

i want to be rich.

not in the way you're supposed to wave it off — the quick laugh, the line about money and happiness. i mean it plainly. and i've stopped dressing it up as something noble: i used to keep my distance from people who chased this, certain i wanted something cleaner than they did, and i'm less certain now.

it isn't the objects. i can see why people want the watches and the bags with the right names on them, and i mostly don't. what i want is the part that doesn't photograph: the life it makes possible.

the dinners were with people my parents knew and i didn't — a man who'd been cfo of a chinese bank, a woman who'd sat in singapore's parliament, the chairman of one of the banks the country runs on. jobs like those are why their families live the way they do: the schooling, the travel, the quiet assumption that the world will say yes.

at one of them, a dinner at the cricket club, i spent most of the night talking to someone's eleven-year-old granddaughter. she told me about skiing in chamonix and the trip to vietnam she was taking next week with her best friend, and she said all of it the way i'd have told you about a sleepover — no sense that any of it was rare, because to her it wasn't. she was poised and curious, quicker than most adults i talk to. nothing in her was showing off. the world was simply open to her, and always had been; she didn't yet know it was a thing some people had and others didn't.

that's the thing i want. not the chamonix; the open world behind it — a childhood where curiosity is never foreclosed by what it costs. i want to be able to give that.

and not just to a kid i might have. i want to be able to give to the people already in my life: to pick up the check without the small math running underneath, to help someone who needs it without the help costing me anything i'd feel. and, someday, a wedding where i don't have to cut the list, where everyone i'd want there is there, and no one was left off over the price of a seat.

after you

manners were drilled into me before i understood what they were for. greet everyone when you walk in. let the elders sit first, eat first, speak first. don't take the last piece, don't take the biggest one. my parents ran it into me so constantly that it stopped being instruction and turned into reflex. i still feel a small wrongness if i reach for the food before the oldest person at the table has touched theirs.

for a long time i half-suspected the whole thing was theater. manners are easy to dismiss that way: a performance of being good, a set of moves you make so people approve of you, nothing underneath. fake, a little fussy, maybe even a class thing.

i don't think that anymore, and it's because i've watched what their absence looks like. this trip i've been around someone newer to the family, who wasn't raised the way i was. it shows in small ways, none of them dramatic. she starts eating before others have been served, takes from the middle of the table without checking there's enough to go around. back at the apartment, she's first into the shower while the rest of us wait. none of it is cruelty; i don't think she means anything by any of it. that's almost the point: the habit of catching yourself was simply never built in her.

and watching her, i finally got what the drilling had been for. manners aren't a performance of goodness. they're the trained habit of remembering that the other people in the room are as real as you are — as hungry, as tired, as eager to go first. taking the most food, grabbing the first shower: those aren't etiquette slips. they're small ways of moving through the world as if you're the only person actually in it.

after you. someone reaches the door first and holds it; someone gets to the table first and waits. it's two words and a half-second of going second, and that half-second is the whole of it — the small, constant proof that you know you're not the only one here. i was drilled in it until it ran on its own, and of everything i was handed that way, it's the one piece i'd never give back.

escapement

i spent an afternoon working through the luxury watch stores on orchard road, pretending to be someone who could buy something. i told each salesperson the same story, a cousin's wedding tomorrow and a watch i needed for it, and watched the warmth switch on: the trays coming out, the whole performance of service a store puts on for someone it thinks is about to spend. none of it was true. i had no intention of buying anything, and after a few hours i hadn't seen a single watch that moved me. they were beautiful and they were boring. luxury with nothing behind it.

then i walked into breguet.

four people stood at the back, bent over blown-up models of watch movements, tinkering with mechanisms the size of dinner plates. one of them, french and maybe fifty, came over almost at once, and instead of selling me anything he asked, with real urgency, whether i knew what an escapement was. i didn't. for the next half hour he showed me. the escapement, it turns out, is the part that releases the mainspring's energy in tiny measured beats — the thing that makes a watch tick instead of spending itself all at once. the heart of the whole machine. he walked me through how this one worked, a movement inside a 490,000-dollar watch, and most of it went straight over my head. i caught maybe a tenth of the words. but i caught all of him. the man was lit up. he talked about the watch, and the two centuries of it, the way people talk about the thing they'd do for free, and that came across the counter perfectly intact even as the mechanics dissolved on the way to me.

the watch talk turned into other talk. somewhere in it we'd moved to a cozy alcove off to the side, tucked away from the people drifting past, and sat there another half hour, on to nothing in particular — life in singapore, how he'd ended up here. it came out almost in passing that he runs breguet for all of southeast asia, that he'd built a whole life around this: married here, kids in school here, decades in the trade. i'd half-assumed passion like that was a young man's thing, the enthusiasm you have before the work grinds it out of you. but here was someone at the very top of it, who'd been doing this longer than i've been alive, still stopping a stranger in his shop to make sure he understood why an escapement matters.

i walked out thinking about the look on his face. caring about something so much you can't not talk about it, so much it survives the decades and follows you home — that's what i envy. not the watch, not the expertise, just having a thing that does that to you. i don't know what mine is yet. i have things i reach for, but nothing i'd stop a stranger in a store to explain. i want, more than almost anything, to find the thing i would.

my first wedding

my cousin got married, and it was the first wedding i'd ever been to. a traditional chinese one — the tea ceremony, the long banquet, the whole family there. and i mean the whole family: cousins and aunts and uncles we hadn't seen in years, all of us in one room again. there were happy tears all over the room, and so much smiling that my own face ached by the end of the night.

what stays with me isn't any single part of it. it's that the day was happy in an uncomplicated way i'm not used to. families mostly gather for the hard things; this was the rare time we were all together for something purely good. i went home a little stunned by how much it had moved me.

langkawi

langkawi was nothing like where we'd come from. corrugated metal roofs, rusted at the edges. paint gone from most of the buildings. everything sun-bleached and salt-worn, like the heat had been working on it for years and winning. the people moved through it the way you do when it's just your life — bare feet gone black from the ground, clothes worn thin, skin scorched dark by a sun that never lets up. mosquitoes everywhere, feasting, and mostly no one bothering to swat them.

we walked through a food market. a few fans turned overhead and did almost nothing; the flies they were meant to move just settled back onto the food, which sat out uncovered in the heat. dogs threaded between the stalls. a couple of monkeys watched from a roofline. cats slept in whatever shade they could find.

my first reaction wasn't a kind one. i recoiled before i'd thought anything at all.

but none of it is unusual. this is how a huge share of the world lives, on almost nothing by the standards i'd flown in with. people are born here, raise their kids here, grow old here, and i'd flinched within ten minutes of arriving. i left embarrassed by how narrow my sense of normal had been, and reminded how much of the world i never have to think about.

doing hard things

it was my first real hike. bukit mertajam, a forest park in malaysia, with my brother, my uncle, and my uncle's friend, all three far out of my league. my brother had just gotten back from a month-long trip: acatenango, machu picchu, patagonia. my uncle and his friend have stood at everest base camp. i'd never done any of it, and the whole way there i was quietly worried i'd be the one slowing everyone down.

we'd been up since six, and i was carrying about forty pounds of gear i wasn't used to carrying.

i should say i don't really like hiking. you walk for hours and the scenery barely changes — the same green wall of trees giving way to the same green wall of trees, mile after mile. people talk about hiking like it does something to them. it mostly just makes me tired.

and this one was rough. malaysian jungle: the trail rugged and root-knotted, the air thick enough to drink. mosquitoes the whole way. a centipede the length of my forearm that i'm still not over. monkeys somewhere overhead, and things in the brush i couldn't name and didn't want to meet.

then, for an hour, the sky opened and dumped rain on us, and we kept walking through it, soaked to the skin. my uncle and his friend are almost sixty; neither of them broke. the last stretch got genuinely hard, hard enough that we stopped talking and it became one foot, then the next. and i made it. i kept up.

none of this was a surprise to me. i knew going in exactly why i was there, because it's the same reason every time. i don't do it for the hike. i do it for the end of the hike — for the fact, afterward, that my body did something i wasn't sure it could. and under that, something simpler and truer about me: i like having hiked a lot more than i like hiking. i like the done thing, the box checked, the proof i moved forward. it's just how i'm built. i'll never love the trail, but i'll keep doing hard things, because i like who i am by the end of them.

blood sweat money

my uncle took us to his friend's durian farm. the road up was barely a road — steep and tight and switchbacking, room for one car and nothing coming the other way. i spent the climb quietly hoping the engine would hold.

at the top a man came out to meet us, tan from a life spent outside, two teeth left along the bottom and a smile that used both of them. he lives on the farm with his brother and his son. a few dogs announced us and then lost interest. he was gracious before we'd done anything to earn it, waving us toward the food like we were the reason he'd gotten up that morning.

and then we ate. durian, mostly, though the trees around us were heavy with rambutan, mangosteen and longan too. a single well off to the side did everything out there: drinking, washing hands, showers, laundry. he kept pressing more on us. "还要吗," he'd say, "do you still want more?" already reaching for the next one before we'd answered. we tried black thorn, red prawn, musang king (the expensive ones, i'm only now learning), and i ate until i was sure i'd burst.

after, he walked us through the farm. i'd never once thought about how a durian gets from the tree to my hands, and it turns out the answer is: hard. someone climbs these trees. someone strings nets beneath them so the fruit doesn't smash on the ground when it drops. someone does it in that heat, on that hill, every day of the season. there's a phrase in chinese, "血汗钱," for money earned the hardest way — it translates, literally, to "blood sweat money." standing in the middle of his farm, i understood it as something more than a figure of speech.

it changes what the food is worth to you, seeing where it comes from. i've spent my whole life buying the cheap version of everything; i think now i'll pay for the local one, the one with a person and a hill behind it. and what stays with me is that the hands doing all that climbing were the same ones refilling my plate. he handed us the most expensive thing his body makes, by the armful, and kept asking if we wanted more.

i don't know anyone who lives like this. everyone in my life works a job at a desk, mine included. i'm grateful to my uncle for the day — for knowing a man like that, and for driving me up that hill to be fed by him.

a chinese time in my life

two weeks of speaking nothing but chinese and mine came back to me. i could hear the difference by the end: words i'd lost surfacing again, sentences coming faster, my ear catching things it would have missed on the first day. it turns out the language is still in there. it just goes quiet when i don't live in it.

and i don't, most of the time. i live in english, eat what's easy, keep the traditions i can keep alone and let the rest thin out. the trip reminded me how much of myself is stored in a language and a culture i only visit now.

i think that's the real reason i'd want someone from the same background. not anything i'd defend in an argument — something plainer. a home where chinese gets spoken without it being an occasion, where the food i grew up on is just dinner, where the traditions don't have to be explained before they can be shared, because the other person grew up inside the same ones. none of it would be mine to keep alive alone, or to soften for company.

there's an understanding that's there before you've earned it — present in the first conversation, because you both started from the same place. i want to build a life on that head start: to keep being chinese, out loud, with someone who doesn't need it explained.

last night i lost track of the hours with someone i'd just met. clicking with someone like that, right away, feels good in a way i don't need to talk myself into. what gets me is how far it goes, how deep you can get with someone you barely know.

it shouldn't be possible. the people who've earned the long version of you — who know the history, who've been around for years — should be the ones you can say anything to. often they're the last. somehow a stranger gets the unguarded thing first, before they've earned a minute of it.

part of it is curiosity, the real kind. when you know nothing about someone, every question is live, asked to find out rather than to confirm. and part of it is the nerve to answer in kind, to be honest early, while you could still get away with less.

the rest of it is less flattering. a stranger holds no record of you. there's no version of you they're keeping, nothing to stay consistent with, no one you'll have to face later. you can be that open because the weight isn't there yet — because you might never see them again. the openness is paid for by the exit.

which means the leaving was never the threat. it was the condition. she flies home today, the math was always against us, and that distance is the whole reason the night went where it did. nothing to protect, so nothing held back.

we stayed up until five, and i went to work on two hours of sleep waiting for the crash. it never came. i've been running on that night all day, more awake than the sleep has any right to leave me.

last night started small and warm: four of us tucked into a cocktail bar, the dim and low-lit kind, all amber light and small tables and a hush you could actually talk across, the hour before a night has decided what it's going to become. i ordered something called "colorful and fruity," which it mostly wasn't: a sweet potato shochu over ice, smooth and a little sweet, the kind of drink that goes down so easy you've ordered a second before you meant to. i drank more than i'd have liked. i usually do.

then the tipsiness made its case for going out, and out meant the loud place. you know the kind. packed body to body, the air thick and warm and sweet with perfume and spilled liquor, light swinging red and blue across a hundred faces, a bass line so low you stop hearing it and start standing inside it. i watched the room give itself over: the drinking, the dancing, the men leaning in close with their practiced lines, the whole hungry churn of a saturday night in this city. and i didn't feel above any of it. i felt the pull of it. i understood it completely, because it really isn't complicated: every person in that room was just trying to get out of their own head for a few hours, and a place this loud is how you do it. i know that wish. i've given in to it before and i'll give in again.

it's only that it isn't my way out. hedonism and solitude are the same instinct facing opposite directions. both are escapes. theirs is loud and mine is quiet, and standing in the middle of all of it, i wanted the quiet so badly i could taste it.

then the walk home, just the two of us, the last of the club still fading out of my ears, the avenues wide and nearly empty, all that earlier energy drained out of them. somewhere along the way we'd gotten onto telling each other something we'd never told anyone. i've only hung out with her a few times, so i don't fully know what made me go where i went, but mine came out anyway: that i want to disappear for a while. a few months. no plans, no one. i'd never said it out loud to a single person before. and she said, like it was nothing, that she already does exactly that. months at a time. that she likes being alone so much she has to remind herself to put people back on the calendar.

i didn't believe her at first. i think i actually said no way out loud. she lives the thing i only ever get to sneak for a morning at a time, and she lives it on purpose.

• • •

i woke up hungover. the light through the blinds felt like an accusation, my pulse keeping slow time behind my eyes, and somehow that helped: it settled the day before i could argue with it. i wasn't going anywhere. a saturday in this city is one long advertisement for everything you aren't doing, and for once i couldn't hear it over my own headache.

so i stayed in. i made a real breakfast and ate it slowly. then i cleaned — and i mean really cleaned, head and shoulders pushed into the dark of the oven, the sponge working at baked-on years of somebody else's cooking — until i put my hand somewhere i shouldn't have and the thing bit me. a bright electric snap, straight up the arm. i came out fast, sat down hard on the kitchen floor, and laughed, more awake in that second than i'd been all morning. then the gym, where i worked until everything in me finally went still.

and the whole time, in the gaps, i kept drifting back to the walk home. to what she'd said, and to the question sitting underneath it that i'd never really asked myself straight: why do i like being alone this much? what is it actually doing for me?

here's what i landed on. i'm a judgmental person. i size people up fast, and i assume they're sizing me up the same way. it's on almost all the time, and i'm only half aware of it. being alone is the one place it shuts off. when no one's around, i don't have to judge anyone, and i don't have to brace for being judged. it's the closest thing i have to a safe space. that's the real reason the quiet feels like relief, and not just rest.

it's also where i think, where i can actually hear myself. and it's where i feel in control of my own life. alone, the day is mine to shape: what i do and when and with whom, or with no one at all. every hour belongs to me. i got better at wanting this after college, when the days became more mine and there was less pressure to always be somewhere, with someone. i've learned i can be on my own without being lonely, that the two were never the same thing, and that i understand what i want far more clearly when the only voice in the room is mine. it keeps me honest. it keeps me grounded.

i'm writing this from the window now. it's been raining since i woke up, steady and unhurried, beading on the glass and turning the street below into smears of brake-light and umbrella. there's classical music on, low, the strings moving through the room. the cats have gone heavy and boneless in my lap, purring from somewhere far down. the new apartment holds its quiet carefully, like it hasn't decided yet whether to trust me with it. and somewhere in the middle of all of it my whole body has come loose, the way it only does when there's nothing left to brace against. i don't want to be anywhere else. i can't remember the last time that was true.

my lease is up at the end of may, and our cats need somewhere to stay for six weeks. my new roommates are allergic; so are my old roommates'. a friend is willing to take them in mid-july, but not before. someone has to take the cats until then.

one of my roommates mentioned bruce. bruce lives in the apartment above ours, has three cats of his own, and apparently said once, in passing, that he'd happily watch ours anytime. i had never actually spoken to him. he had knocked on our door once, months ago, because we'd dumped cat litter straight into the building's communal trash bin and the smell had migrated, and he hadn't been polite about it. if anything, he had been mean, in the way that older men in old buildings can be when they've decided you're a tenant who hasn't learned how things are done.

i had also, on rare occasion passing by his door, started noticing it. it wasn't a uniform blue, more like a blue that had been painted and repainted and let to peel in some places, with patterns carved into the wood and small metal embellishments hammered in along the edges. it looked like a door someone had been working on for a long time.

last night i knocked, and he opened, and behind him was an apartment unlike anything i had walked into.

i am extremely tidy, and stingy enough that the tidiness is partly accidental — there isn't much to put away. our apartment has a small couch and a dinner table. nothing on the walls, no decor of any kind. i had thought of myself, in a quiet way, as having taste. minimalism was the floor; more elaborate things, i assumed, got built on top of it.

bruce's apartment was not built on top of it. bruce's apartment was a different building entirely.

the first thing i registered was that there was nowhere to look that wasn't doing something. wooden planks ran above my head like a small subway map, one rail leading into another, all of them sized for cats. the walls were a faded painted green that was peeling in places to reveal another color underneath, and another color under that. dressers had been fitted into wall cavities, or maybe the walls had been built around the dressers; it was hard to tell which had come first. pots hung from the ceiling on chains, some with plants, some with what looked like small bells. books lined every wall that wasn't already lined with something else. a paint set was laid out on a low table as if interrupted. a dusty old macintosh, the original kind, sat on a shelf next to a stack of records. cat toys were everywhere — not in a basket, not contained, just everywhere, like leaves on a forest floor. nothing was minimalist, nothing was put away, and somehow none of it looked like clutter. it looked, instead, like someone had been adding to this apartment for a very long time, and had never seen any reason to subtract.

three cats lived there. one was seventeen years old, a tiny thing with patchy fur and eyes that didn't focus on me when i crouched to greet her, and she made clear without moving that she did not want to be petted. the other two were a pair of orange brothers, peeking down from the highest platform of a many-tiered cat tree, who melted backwards into the wood like the dark was a place they could enter whenever i shifted my weight.

an older woman was sitting in a chair toward the back, half-hidden behind a hanging plant. bruce introduced her, though i didn't entirely catch what their relationship was. she had moved in forty-five years ago, he told me, the first tenant in the apartment; the place was rent-stabilized. "you can do whatever you want," bruce said, "if no one ever comes to check on you." she smiled at me politely and went back to whatever she was reading.

we talked, and i made the ask. bruce was kind about it but hedged — five cats, an older cat against kittens, brothers against brothers, none of which i had thought through before showing up at his door. he wasn't really mean, i could see now. just quirky in his mannerisms, particular in his word choice — someone who could come across hard in a hallway and softer once you were inside. he said they'd think about it, and i nodded and thanked him, and somewhere behind us a cat knocked something over and neither of them turned to look.

before i left he showed me the roof patio. a small door at the back of the apartment opened onto it, and there were plants in pots and pots and pots — some thriving, some skeletal, some being convalesced from one state into another. there was a skylight set into the floor that looked down into the apartment beneath, where, he mentioned, a young jewish family now lived but where, decades earlier, a sweatshop had operated. i looked through and could see a child's toy on a rug.

walking back up to our apartment i thought i would not be able to leave my cats there. i had liked the place, and i had not liked the place. there was a film of dust on most surfaces. i had counted, on the way in, three dead cockroaches on the staircase, and i thought of the cockroach remains my cats sometimes leave for me on our floor, small reminders that whatever i pretend about being clean, the building has its own ideas. ming is feisty, and ming would start something. and even if he didn't, i wasn't sure my kittens would come back out of those forty-five years of accumulated everything in the same condition they went in.

but the practical worry wasn't what stayed with me. what stayed with me was that on the same floor where i sleep, in a building i thought i understood the shape of, a man had built a small contained world out of planks and peeling paint and pots, and a woman had been quietly living in it for nearly half a century, and three cats were treating the whole thing like terrain. i had been living a few feet from all of this for months without thinking about it. i had assumed, without ever putting it to myself in words, that the other apartments in this building were variations on mine — slightly bigger, slightly smaller, slightly differently lit. they were not. one of them looked like an antique bookstore with three cats living inside it. the apartment beneath it had been a place where people sewed clothes for money before becoming a place where a family raised children. two floors up, a russian woman is doing god knows what — though we found out once, when she flooded her apartment and water came dripping through our ceiling.

there are paintings, the kind where someone has rendered a cross-section of an apartment building, and in every window something different is happening: someone is arguing, someone is dancing, someone is sleeping with their mouth open, someone is making a cake. as a kid i thought those paintings were a joke about how strange people are; i think now they're closer to documentary.

i went in to ask about cats and came out wanting to knock on more doors. the small space of my own apartment, scrubbed and bare and pleasing to me, is one window in a wall of windows, and whoever painted the building did not stop at mine.

it's the highway at midnight, both of you in the car, no one reaching for the radio. the dashboard glows green. the road sound is a long held note. you pass a sign for a town neither of you has ever heard of and neither of you says anything about it. you look over once, see the side of their face lit blue by a passing truck, and look back. the quiet has weight. no one is looking for the next thing to say. no one has to. you arrive two hours later having said maybe thirty words between you, and you are not embarrassed about it.

or it's a saturday morning. you both got up earlier than you needed to. coffee is in two mugs. the radiator clicks. one of you is at the window, one of you on the couch, and good morning hasn't happened yet — not because it would be wrong, but because it isn't required. the light comes in slow and gray. a neighbor's dog barks once, far away. you stay like that until the coffee is cold.

or it's the walk home — after a funeral, a wedding, or an argument with someone else's family. two in the morning. the streets wet, your shoes loud. no one says "well, that was something." no one tries to talk it through. you walk. your friend lights a cigarette they shouldn't have. a cab passes with its light on and neither of you waves it down. you carry it together for forty blocks without either of you having to put it into words, and somewhere around block thirty it gets lighter.

• • •

people often think silence is the absence of something. it's the opposite. silence is what's left when nothing in you needs translating — when the other person already knows what you're carrying. most company is constant labor: the face to wear, the version of the day to share, the part of yourself you let into the room. with this person, all of it falls away. you are simply there. so are they. nothing else is required. when the moment ends, it lingers in you the way a dream does after waking — still there for a while, then quietly gone.

i say "trauma builds character" all the time. semi-ironically, mostly — at the gym after a hard set, when a friend is venting about something that went sideways at work, in my own head when i'm trying to convince myself that some inconvenience is going to mean something later. the phrase is a tic at this point. and like most tics, it's pointing at something i haven't fully looked at.

most of the things i call trauma aren't. the college decisions that didn't go my way. winding up in minnesota when i'd had bigger plans. a friend group whose ambitions felt smaller than mine — or that i'd convinced myself were smaller, which is its own kind of close-mindedness i wasn't ready to see at the time. these were disappointments. at 17 i called them trauma because at 17 every disappointment feels like the floor giving out, and i don't think i was wrong to feel that way. i was wrong about the size of it — about how much room a feeling is supposed to take up in a life.

one of them actually was. the second relationship was the real thing — the one that messed with me in ways i'm still picking apart, hiding in the same sentence as everything else.

and the part of me that built a life in response to all of it didn't bother distinguishing.

• • •

i played league of legends until four in the morning. swim practice was at 5:30. i skipped it more weeks than not. we had a saying among my friends: we could never end on a loss. so the next ranked game became three more games, then four, most of them lost because by 2am i was tilting and tired. some nights we were trapped, descending into madness, loss after loss after loss. homework slid off the desk. i'd start it at midnight and pretend that was a strategy. the fact that i was watching myself do this and couldn't stop felt, at the time, like the kind of suffering that meant something.

my first girlfriend, my second girlfriend — i don't remember the specifics of what i wanted from them so much as i remember the feeling of needing to text them. between classes, on the bus, while my mom was talking to me. needing to be hanging out, or to be planning the next time we'd be hanging out, or to be in their head. they were not the most extraordinary people i'd later meet. but at 16 and 17 they were the most-extraordinary-thing-in-front-of-me, which was enough.

i kept a journal for one year that grew past 400 pages. it stopped being a journal somewhere around page 150 and became a closed loop — me writing about thinking about feeling, each entry more granular and less honest than the one before. i had to force myself to stop. closing it felt like a small loss, even though closing it was the only sane thing i did that year. the death spiral was highkey depressing — that's a phrase i used at the time, in the journal, about the journal.

none of this was trauma. it was being 17. but at 17, the difference between "trauma" and "the most i've ever felt" wasn't available to me. those were the same word, said with the same weight.

• • •

freshman year of college, i was at the university of minnesota. i had not wanted to be at the university of minnesota. the schools i'd wanted didn't want me back, and so the next-best option became the option. the U was where i'd competed in high school — i'd swum at the jean k freeman aquatic center for years and never once imagined going to school there. when i became a student, i remember piecing the campus together for the first time, with those weekend-meet buildings becoming the route to my classes.

i'd visit friends at usc, at northeastern, and they were sitting at lunch with someone from italy, someone from san francisco, someone from dubai. i'd come back to my dorm and the people in it were nice. it's important to say they were nice. they were also from minnesota, and from the same neighborhoods in minnesota, going home to those neighborhoods on the weekends, content with that pattern in a way that felt, to me at the time, like a refusal to want more. my current roommate and i later coined a phrase for it: the minnesota mindset. midwest safe. it's not actually a fair phrase. the people we used it about were just choosing different things. but at 17 i was unwilling to grant that. i thought i could see something they couldn't.

i'd done well in school the way you're supposed to. 4.0 gpa. class rank three. 35 on the act. piano and violin since i was small enough to need a stool — the typical asian kid starter pack. extracurriculars listed two columns deep on the resume. i'd been good at the path because the path was the only thing i was given to be good at. and now the path had ended at a school i'd only ever known from the swim deck, and for the first time i had to ask why i'd been on it, and i didn't have an answer beyond because. my parents had wanted it. their parents had wanted it for them. i'd inherited the wanting without inheriting the reasons.

my second relationship was happening at me through all of this. it took things from me that i'm still finding again — capacity for trust, willingness to feel without flinching, ability to be in a room without scanning for threat. i'm not going to write the specifics. they belong somewhere else, or maybe nowhere. but the part that matters for this piece is that it was the only thing on the list that was the size of the word i was using.

the rest of it — minnesota, the campus, the path, the people i was unfair to — was disappointment. real, but the size of disappointment. except at 17 i couldn't tell. one of the things in my life genuinely was trauma, and so all of the things in my life felt like trauma by association. the air in the room had changed; i couldn't isolate what had changed it.

so i made a decision i had no business making: that i would, for the first time, focus on myself. on something. on anything. what something would mean i'd have to figure out by trying.

• • •

what i tried, first, was working out.

i picked it because it was the most legible thing on the list. mental health was hard to measure. friendships were hard to measure. being a person on purpose was hard to measure. but a barbell goes up by five pounds or it doesn't, and either way the data is honest with you.

i wrote a program. i had never written a program before. i put it in a google sheet with columns for movement, sets, reps, weight, RPE, total time, and entry fatigue rated 1-10. each lift had its own tab. each tab had a chart that updated as i logged. i programmed the exact movements i would do six days a week — push, pull, legs, push, pull, legs, rest — and the weights i'd hit on each. i hit them. when i missed them, i logged that too.

i started cooking. i'd never cooked before either. i went hard on the gym-bro template — ground beef, white rice, broccoli, tupperwared into seven containers on sundays. i'd tweak the macros each week. i'd weigh the rice raw. i kept this up for months and it worked. i put on muscle quickly. i'd been the skinny-abs guy my whole life. abs visible because nothing covered them, not because i'd earned them. now i was something else. i had energy at 6am that i'd never had at any time of any day.

i made my bed every morning. i set up google calendar. every meeting, every workout, every skincare routine, color-coded. i looked at it more than i looked at anything else, including my phone, including my own thoughts. i locked in for recruiting. i put together a spreadsheet of every firm, every contact, every deadline.

it worked. that's the part that has to be said first. i became the kind of person who could be relied on, including by myself. i was progressing — a word i'd never had reason to use about my own life before.

• • •

and then.

the same machinery that built the discipline started running on its own. i wasn't logging the lift to track the lift. i was logging the lift because i had to log the lift. the satisfaction had moved from the workout to the entry. if i forgot to log, i'd come back to the spreadsheet at 10pm with a low-grade panic, trying to remember what RPE i'd hit at 6am and writing it in anyway, even knowing i was just making it up.

a missed meal prep sunday felt enormous. a meeting that ran over and bumped my calendar felt enormous. an unmade bed felt enormous. these were not enormous. but the same temperament that had once kept me up until 4am playing league had found a new game, and the new game was discipline itself. the system had become the thing i was addicted to.

i didn't want to stop. what i'd built was real — it had given me a self i hadn't had before, and i could feel that self being real. but the structure i'd built was eating me. the thing keeping me alive was the thing exhausting me, and i didn't know how to keep one without the other.

• • •

the turn took longer than i'd like to admit. it wasn't a single moment. it was a slow re-asking of the question i'd never asked before about anything: why am i doing this? not in the existential sense; i'd done plenty of that. in the practical sense, the boring sense. why am i logging this entry? to track progress, or to feel like i tracked it? if i didn't log it, would the lift have happened? would the day have happened?

i still keep most of the habits. i still meal prep — same meal since last august, baked chicken, rice or quinoa, frozen vegetables. simpler than the gym-bro template, chosen for the version i could cook without thinking rather than the one that maxed macros. i still use google calendar. i still lift on a program. but the spreadsheet is less detailed than it used to be. some weeks i skip meal prep because i let myself live: plans to eat out, time to see my friends. the systems are still there; they just don't run me anymore.

some of this was probably just my brain getting older. less teenage angst. less raw need to log my own existence to confirm it. it's a humbling thing, to be 22 and realize that some of what you'd taken for hard-won self-knowledge was actually just being out of high school.

which brings me back to the phrase. trauma builds character. most of what i called trauma wasn't — i'd been over-feeling the size of disappointments, calling everything by its biggest available name. but one of the things in my life had actually been trauma. and the response i built to it didn't know the difference. the same machinery worked indiscriminately on the real wound and the inflated ones, and what it built was, unmistakably, character.

i braced for a year that would swallow me whole. i had signed up for the kind of job that takes your evenings as quiet collateral, and i made peace with the trade before it even started. so when march tipped into april, then april into may, i didn't know what to do with the surplus. the work stayed manageable. the weekends stayed mine. the nights kept opening up. you can prepare for a thing being hard. you can't quite prepare for it being easier than you expected.

i thought i'd care more about the job, too. i'm fine at it. i like the people (enough). but it doesn't pull at the part of me that used to want it most. that part is awake now, looking around for somewhere else to go.

a few weeks ago i was at lincoln center, alone, after what consulting calls a beach day — a day with no work to do. there's a small grass terrace on the roof of a nearby restaurant and i found myself sitting on it with my legs stretched out, watching the plaza below soften into its slower self. people met friends and tilted their faces toward each other. someone laughed too loud at something a date said. the fountain caught the last of the light and held it there, glittering, for longer than seemed fair.

what i kept noticing, sitting up there, was how easy it would be to miss all of this.

i sat up there thinking how good it would be, eventually, to write something here. to put words down somewhere quiet while the city kept moving without me. the last time i'd written anything for the pure fun of it was sixth grade, a fantasy story about a life inside minecraft, written with my friends, taken very seriously by all of us. somewhere between then and now i had stopped reaching for words to make sense of my own life and started using them only to perform a job. that was the first time this, whatever this is, felt like a real idea instead of a passing one.

nyc was supposed to solve the social part. people warned me it wouldn't and i didn't believe them. but you really can be in the densest place in the country and still spend most evenings alone with your own head. that isn't a complaint exactly. it's just the weather i've been writing from.

i've been more reflective than usual lately. some of it is the unexpected time. some of it is a girl i met recently — limerence, as a friend put it: the involuntary state of being mentally fixated on someone, turning the volume up on every other thought you were already having. either way, the noise in my head got loud enough that it needed somewhere to land.

i watch college friends disappear into investment banking, into routines that sometimes ask a hundred hours a week of them, and i don't think they're wrong. they've made trades i can see the logic in but can't make myself want. i pity the version of myself that would look up at thirty, blink, and find that he had paid for the last decade in installments he barely noticed making — a quiet life of weekends he doesn't remember, friendships he let thin, a body that started to ache in places he hadn't earned yet.

i've always been growth-oriented, which is a slightly embarrassing way to put it. i have a tattoo of a flower for it, which is a more embarrassing way still. but the truth underneath the embarrassment is that i want to be a more thoughtful person at thirty than i am at twenty-two, and i don't think that happens by accident. it happens by paying attention. and writing, for me, is one of the few reliable ways to make myself pay attention.

so. this. a place to notice things. somewhere to put the noise.