a decade passed…
“That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.”
This is a first and foremost a love note to my friends. thank you. And of course, my family and my younger self, I love you so dearly.
For each person, I believe there is a day. The day that completely changes life’s axis and there is only before and after. For some, that is the day they meet the love of their life. For others, the day they lose something terribly valuable, priceless. A day seemingly insignificant to many but to one, the world. A day that signals an overcoming, a becoming, an accepting, a letting go—
My day is April 16th, 2014.
For me, there is always going to be my life before and my life after. And every day after has been felt and counted because every single day since April 16th, living has been a testament to my belief in a light at the end of the tunnel. A guiding light that dimmed but luckily never dimmed out. You would never guess how dark it got and I really believed at times that the light was no longer on. The house was deserted and all the love that people brought to fill the space up was now, vacant.
When I was fifteen, I began a journey that I didn’t know what quite to make of. Doctors at the time told me I had nothing to worry about. I floated in and out of hospitals for an unexplainable lung condition but I was determined to not let the most painful things of my life restrict all the ideas I wanted to implement and the dreams I aspired to. So I didn’t. I lived quite literally like each day was my last and I achieved so many things I still have a hard time processing that I did. Yet, it took a few years later when I was eighteen to truly begin to grieve what I had lost but never could accept. I lost a zest for life, an ability I had cherished as a child. Rather than being able to relinquish control and open myself up to the serendipity, crazy, spectacularly unpredictable things of this world, I had my fists tightly clenched in resentment and paranoia. Every day became a form of apprehensiveness to breathe. I couldn’t accept that for the first time in my life, I could not plan enough to orchestrate elements of my life into the outcomes I could predict and wanted. I choose not to. I was angry. I was angry at the people who I thought would stick with me forever. I was angry at the fragility of life. But sadly, I was most angry at myself. I was angry for feeling the way I did and for feeling so small and broken. I felt strong resentment towards my body in particular, for letting me down. I did everything right. Yet in being so fixated in my obsession to never treat others as a means to an end, I became the biggest hypocrite of all. I did not see how I was using my own body as a means to an end. I did not see how I saw rest and care as part of a process to some sort of outcome. I wanted in exchange for eating healthy, sleeping the right amount of hours, and exercising, the strength to accomplish x, y, and z.
Nonetheless, despite these painful lessons, I still actively continued to make the choice to continue hinging on my desperate need for controlling outcomes I wanted until I turned twenty. During that year, I was forced to confront one of the scariest moment of my life. Having moved to Paris on a bit of a whim but with a lot of careful planning, I was allowing the childhood dream of Paris unfold. In Paris, I found myself and I rediscovered all the parts of me that I used to hate but could begin to accept and later, love. My semester abroad became the best decision to fully internalize how “to be” and live in the essence of the present without always needing “to do.” Yet while I had thought 2014 through 2017 were some of the most physically painful and emotionally excruciating moments of my life, nothing could prepare me for my worst nightmare. Amidst the beautiful ebbs and flows of living in a new city for half a year and discovering all the sweet nothings that came from passing time just with myself, I finally found my appetite again and could feel myself thriving. Indeed, my memories of Paris still remain some of the best of my life.
On one of the first solo European trips post my move to Paris, I had decided to visit some Italian cities and quite quickly, I found myself trying to survive for my life with broken Italian in a ER without English speaking doctors. The chronic chest pain that I had started dealing with post second lung surgery in 2017 was terrifying. I knew no one. I had no one. I found it hard to breathe. My family was asleep, thousands of miles away. I found myself at a rock bottom I did not know existed because I had prepped for all the worst case scenarios except this one. My various rehearsals of my medical history in French could not serve me here in Florence. That was the very first time, I knew absolutely nothing. 0. This time was the beginning, I truly felt what it was like to have something go so awry despite my meticulous planning. Or at least meticulous as it could be. There was nothing left to control because this was something entirely out of my hands. A a Christian that’s grown up in the church, I knew as a kid I had absolute no doubt to go to God first in all circumstances and I did. It had been so long since I had. I had always gone to myself and suffered in a neurotic dependency on utter self sufficiency. But in that overwhelming form of despair I could not believe possible, I did once again call to God first in that ER. I prayed as I dialled international insurance companies and my university’s global assistance hotline. And as I sat in that ER shivering and hungry, I prayed that I would not have to go under general anesthesia before I could get a chance to tell my parents. God, help me. please.
Time is funny. It plays tricks. When I was on bed rest for different weeks of my life in the hospital, the different pain drugs warped my perceptions of reality and prolonged time in ways that were unfathomably unbearable. In countless ERs, the time slows and thins and then it stretches terribly. When I got back to Paris after finding out everything was fine, I bawled upon receiving a chocolat chaud instead of a pain au chocolat. My pronunciation off and my frustration wearing thin, I dumped my favourite drink into the green waste bins of the Cité and I got into my bed and felt all the years of work I had put into not letting the worst moments of my life define me go down the drain. I couldn’t do it. I felt the suffocating thoughts of negative self talk rise to the surface and this cycle, one I could not comprehend continue on…
This story of mine it may seem a bit dark or a bit depressing. I can’t promise you it was better as life has its cycles and different seasons but I do think it got better mostly because of love. A decade passed is such a powerful phrase to me because it literally brings me to tears. At the time when I found myself with, what I thought was, a lifetime punishment in the beginnings of January 2017 from my thoracic surgeon, that this would keep happening. Maybe give it another five years. I could not see past the five years she had mentioned. Five years? Ten? Even one? How could that be possible? That things might look better then on out? I can’t begin to tell you how many times I would count the days up to a year, then the next, and then slowly but surely I found myself opening up my hands again and I began to forget the counts. I was so frustrated the amount of times I thought I was healed, but just to find out I actually wasn’t. Even today, if I’m not careful touching the scars blotched across my ribs brings pain. But I never forget when I run or when I swim, how important and grateful I am for breath. For painless breath. For painless getting up out of bed. This gratitude at the heart of my story revives me and replenishes my often physical cup. At the heart of this story is also a story of love from others and love for myself. This love story really metamorphisized during my time in NY. And as I read back on my blogs from 2021 through 2023, I see more and more love sprinkled in there and that truly, makes me very happy.
In 2020, I started going to therapy after finally realizing that the way I thought about and talked to myself was very dangerous. The realization came from unknowingly following the book recommendations of friends (ie. A Little Life). The book snapped me in two because it made me confront very real and dark ways I thought of myself and that was really only possible because I read my thoughts on the page and had to come to terms with the final outcome of the main protagonist. It was three years of consistently, brutally hard (heart) work. I often cried and I again felt a variety of emotions brought about by sessions that I did not know I could feel. After struggling for the longest time by denying that anything was wrong and that everyone thought this way, by a stroke of luck with the university enhancing the coverage for counselling during Covid, I felt like I had nothing to lose. It was going to be free anyways and what harm would be done just by talking if I loved to talk? A couple months in, I felt upset that people often talked about the benefits of therapy without touching on the very very dark and lonely lows of it too. I felt hurt. I felt hurt for things that I didn’t know I had repressed or forgotten about. Even a year and a half in, I wondered when I could finally fulfill the promise I had made my childhood self in the mirror, that I would love myself. That one day down the road, I could look at myself and feel proud, feel happy, and feel overwhelmed with joy.
A good spoiler alert! The thing my childhood self would be proud of my today self for is that I can sincerely look in the mirror today and believe that. The biggest accomplishment by far, is that I not only believe that I deserve love from others but that I also love myself. I’ll be completely honest. For the longest time, I may have foolishly thought that I did. Or foolishly thought I had healed… but the greatest gift that April 16th of 2014 gave me was that it catalyzed the starts of a self love journey that has opened up the floodgates of this life that I could have never imagined possible. It took a decade, but we are here now.
There is still a lot that I won’t share here but my greatest friends know the depths of that journey of coming to terms with how to love my body and to honour and to nurture it after all it has gone through. It was never easy. It’s not going to be easy. It will continue to be a commitment and hard work. And because I believe love is an active choice and is filled with immense responsibility, I know it deeply that it has taken a lot of work to fully and properly heal the wounds that I had so hastily tried to get over and move past. I know now that a lot of my physical health journey was intertwined with the mental health journey of being extensively bullied as a child and navigating emotional / verbal abuse. Over the years I have filled journals and pages with reflections as well as talked the ears off of many loved ones on this past decade and what it has meant for me as well as taught me. It has made me every part who I am, one who strives to ensure others are seen and accepted as best as I can. I do not regret a thing but I don’t know if I ever would want to relive the past decade again either.
As a kid, I blogged and I wrote extensively. If you’ve been along for the ride you would know that very well. Perhaps, to a bit of a fault. The way I made sense of the world was always to hold onto the glass half full. In any situation, I wanted to see the good. In any person, I wanted to believe in their potential to be good. In every person, I believed in their inherent dignity and worth. The vice was that I did often get so fixated into the positivity and I do not blame myself as a kid going through these challenges because my own words gave me the strength to keep going. But as I get older, I want to be honest. And this past decade has brought me so much joy but it has also been filled with so much pain, hurt, grief, and exhaustion. Somedays, the physical pain was (is) too much to bear and I didn’t want to bear it any longer. Somedays, the emotional agony of not knowing how long the pain would last or continue to unpredictably show up again, was like a bus hitting me all over. Emotionally bruised and completely sore. And while I know that I am now better for it, the lessons I’ve learned and the new found appreciation I have for who I am…I would be absolutely lying to say that I had thought that at all at many points during the past ten years.
Often in the depths of pain, it can be hard to know why this matters or to find the reason if any reason at all. I’m here with you on that. If you are grieving or are in pain, I hope you know that that is more than okay. It is okay to feel the emotions you do. It is okay that you are not yet able to see a light or to believe that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. It is okay to be angry that no one understands you because most often they will not, because they are not experiencing the same experience you are. It is okay to be so hurt and alone and feel that people you cared about have not shown up for you, because indeed people are human and they will fail and they will fail time and time again. But I want you to know that you are here. You are trying. You are more than trying. And if it hurts a lot and yet you still have the voice that tells you to try to get up this morning, you are doing it. You are. When the time has come, I hope you find the courage within you to seek for the help you need because we all need help. It took me six years to do so. And so if it’s hard, I know. I know. Even now, I struggle with asking for help. But please if I can tell you one thing it’s that, you may not feel like it’s worth it. Heck, you may not feel like you are worth it. But only in asking for help, can we receive unsurmountable, undeniably powerful love. Only in asking for help can we be able to lean on the ones we love and the ones who love us. And that’s really what brings me to this part of the blog. This part that is going to tear me up because where would I be without love?
I can honestly tell you that I wouldn’t be here without God’s love, without my family’s love, and without my friends’ love. And this decade that has passed is really a living testament to the goodness of people. The overwhelming kindness that is possible. I have had countless people walk into my life and change me so much for the better. Complete strangers. Professors. Bosses. Colleagues. Classmates. My best of friends. But it was also their patience. Their patience to show me the way or to wait with me so that I could believe that there was a light on and a light worth fighting for. I often look back and I do not understand how I did it. How I put one foot in front of another. And indeed, it was not I. It was a community of people who cheered me on in their ways of loving me in the ways I needed to be loved. Not the ways I wanted, but what I needed. These included hard truths, tough conversations, and tough love. There are many moments of learning. But a key one that I’ll share is that I came to understand that all my life, I set up the expectation for people around me to make me feel loved or to feel worthy. And that of course is beautiful and good. But it is also not going to be enough, as they will fail and I will fail to love others in the way they need to be as well because we are all human. The greatest most incredible gift my friends have given me the past few years is that they have taught me that self love, the act of setting aside time and working on asserting my boundaries is necessary because it allows me to come through for myself even when others cannot. Self love ensures that there is no dependency on validation from others. My wonderful friends have taught me how when I practice self love, it also makes it easier for the people around me to show me the love I need and want.
Today, I have the ability to love because I have been loved by wonderful wonderful people. Today, I have the ability to breathe because I have been cared for by kind kind people. Today, I have the ability to cherish all that life has given me because in the upshot, the situations I’ve gone through have brought me to the best best people.
This blog really is for you. My friend. Thank you’s are never going to be enough. They will never be enough for what you’ve done for me. For loving me as I am but also being able to help me voice the pain I could not find the words for. The pain of not being able to reach out to hold my inner child for so long to tell her that it would be okay and that she is wonderfully spectacular. Just for being patient with me and accepting me in all aspects of my weirdo-ness. Some of you have walked in and out of my life and that’s okay. As a highly sentimental person, I still have the written notes or cards (or texts) you’ve given me. Every single one tucked in a box that kept me going on my darkest days. I will always cherish your friendship even if the timing and circumstances of life have drawn us away from one another. I will always be rooting you on and smiling from ear to ear. For the friends who stayed, the friends in the here and now. I am so damn lucky. Every single day, I think about you. I think about how you show up when it isn’t easy, not just for me but for those you love. I think about how attentive you are to the details and the ways you show and receive love because they are beautiful examples for me as someone who is still learning, one step at a time. I think about how you’ve taught me how to live with arms and heart wide open. I think about how you’ve taught me how to show up for myself, for you, and for others. I think about how you teach me to live, to live as best as I can. I am brave because of you xx This year in particular, I decided to hold onto that and start saying yes with the intention not to over think but to just stop and savour the ability to figure it out. I stopped waiting around and asked guys I had crushes on out. I talked to even more strangers and listened to their “why’s.” I applied to things I didn’t think were possible. And you know, you win some, you lose some :)
The past ten years have rolled by so slowly yet also so quickly. But most important of all, I feel challenged and loved and cared for and I feel championed. As friends, you have taught me that individually we are whole but together, in life, we can be so much more. Amidst the heartbreak and the agony of my pain throughout the health journey, there were times I felt that my burdens were too much to bear and that I needed to go at it alone because I didn’t want to share that pain with others. I didn’t feel worthy or felt deserving enough to be listened to. I also didn’t want that pain to be experienced twice even though I would have given anything to just let my burdens down by being okay with crumbling and not having to have everything together. But because of you, I know now that there is absolutely nothing I can or cannot do that would make you like me less or more. That sharing the highs and the lows is an essential part of the human experience. I shied away from true emotional intimacy because I struggled with the ultimate fear that I would be abandoned after people got to know the real me. The utterly broken and terrible and all these other human things about me. However, in that strand of growth and patience, you helped me understand what true vulnerability looks like. Emotional intimacy from our friendship requires believing that I am deserving and capable of being loved. And that it comes from sharing not all just the good but also all the bad. To share when I’m hurting or when I’m in pain and to allow it to be seen. It isn’t just being able to love you or another. But before any action, there needs to also come a fundamental belief. I do now believe. In utter acceptance, you carried me through this most humbling adventure. And taught me how to love myself by being honest. I realize now through my research and what is the essence of some of the most fruitful products of my life, do not come from conflict aversion. In fact, the very opposite. Conflict is scary but I now know, it can be productive. It allows me to understand my own boundaries and it also teaches me what I value the most. And by being myself, my truest self with you, there is conflict. But you’ve allowed me to see the healthy productive elements of conflict that have strengthened our friendships. Thank you for telling me as it is and telling me to be direct and to communicate what it is that I need.
This past year in particular, I fell off the virtual face of the earth. I minimized myself because again, fear came in another form. Not being enough in my pursuits. Not being enough for a future partner. A lot of these fears became illuminated when a previous date had reached out despite not understanding that such a relationship was in the past. Even now, these words can be read by them and I hope that they know while I wish them the best, I also cherish my space and boundaries and would very much like to have that honoured. I still journaled but it’s only today, I’ve also come to the realization that as of late, I’ve unknowingly relinquished parts of me or my life that are so life giving when I started my PhD. I stopped sharing my personal writing with others. I forgot how much joy that gave me. And I also got so fixated in the work I was doing that I started to see my body again as a means to an end. But full stop… the situations in the early parts of this year were so terrible and they cascaded into really difficult and painful health circumstances once again.
But “what matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.” - Gabriel Garcia Márquez. And if you know me well enough, you know that I like to take time to think, ponder, and reflect with others. Taking the time to do this has been meaningful—it always will be. Living in remembrance is a process of allowing myself to cherish every step of the journey. It is also by looking to the past that I can be reminded on how to accept the unknown future. Remembrance is what has gotten me through this past decade because it has allowed me to draw on the deep pockets of love. Love notes from individuals sprinkled throughout every spectacularly intense moment of the past ten years. I hope you can also take time to remember. I know that there is power in living in the present and there is power in living for the future. The past, the present, and the future self are all ones I think we can sit with at different times to gain tremendous insights from. Sometimes, the past is too painful to delve into. Sometimes, the future is too daunting to think about. Sometimes, the present is incomprehensible. These feelings too will ebb and flow with the tides and so when the time is right, I do wish you the ability to navigate all those versions of yourself that deserve cherishing. In many ways, they were or are elements of the person you are, right now.
Now, I want to ask you. What is your day? How has your day changed you? And if it wasn’t just a single day, what were the formation of days that were the most pivotal?
Today and everyday, I’m going to know how pivotal April 16th, 2014 was for me.
However, the day that I met you and got to call you my friend is also a day I know that is marked so special and bright. Out of all the billions of people in this entire world, I got to meet you. I got to eventually be loved by you. What is a privilege and honour that is. And it is because of your love that I got through the bluest of blues. Your love is warmth and it is golden, all encompassing around me like daylight. Liquid daylight. That is what has given me permission to live this life more fearlessly and to live this life, seeking to try again both in love and health.
xx, C
These are just some of the photos from the past year until 2021 and I still couldn’t include them all! Other lovely photos of you all are spread across my blogs :)
epigraph: a particular thank you to CH, GA, TT, NS, EK, GL, EP, LW, YP, FL, RH, KT, EK, KC, CZ, CS + RC, BW, NB, MA, SF + JF, ET, BH, and HT for getting me through the very rough months post apartment flooding this year. And to my newfound friends from the Shaper’s Adirondacks Retreat IO, MS, BW I am also grateful for the joy you’ve brought me amidst such fatigue.
