It’s still the height of summer. Days are warm and sunsets are late. I used to secretly envy people who would go away for the summer. My friend Monica would go on family trips and send me post cards. We never went on family trips when I was growing up. That was a luxury that I never even dreamed about as a kid. But as an adult, I still loved the fictional characters who would go to Cape Cod or the Hamptons to beat the city heat. Somewhere that sounded rich and indulgent where one would lazily spend the day curled up in a loungchair reading some novel. I remember those days as a kid where I would spend in the backyard reading. I guess I’m just nostalgic for those innocent days.

Last few summers, I’ve lived out my fantasy of spending summers away. Two summers ago during the first year of COVID pandemic was in Vermont. In 2022, I traveled to be with my partner in So. Korea where I muddled through the heat, humidity, and a new culture. And this year, I’ve returned to Orange County, a different culture in itself far removed from the Bay Area. It’s not so fun this summer, full of dramas introduced almost every other day. But certainly, it’s been an spiritual exercise, transforming what I believed my character to be. I’m switching up roles constantly and reflecting how each day is teaching me something new. It’s too soon to say how I’m changing. It’s too uncomfortable right now. But I feel my insides being pulled and stretched. Exciting times are ahead. I know because it’s already underfoot.

Eleven years ago, I gave advice to my friend who was contemplating moving to another country for a woman. I urged him to reconsider moving because of the likely outcome that he would be left heartbroken. With him making the sacrifices and compromises by moving, he would tip the power balance in her favor and he may eventually come to resent her. I’m not sure if my words convinced him but he didn’t go.

In summer of 2022, I found myself in a similar situation where I was willing and ready to quit my job, curtail my pension, and take on teaching English in a foreign country. All so that I could be together with the man with whom I was madly in love.

I had some wisdom back in 2011. But I ignored it in 2022. I was willing to make significant life changes to be with him. He had always maintained that he had his goal of teaching internationally. I was willing to go along in the beginning because at first I wanted to explore what this relationship could be, and then I was in love and wanted to be with him. Ironically, it was unbalanced in a way that he didn’t realize or at least couldn’t, didn’t acknowledge to me. Either I was to follow wherever he journeyed or the romantic love was gone. That didn’t sound like a partnership to me. Instead, it sounded like a power play. That as long as I adhered to the script he created, he was happy. He wanted the ideal – someone who had the same aspirations as he so that there would be no need for compromises or rather, no need for him to make any shift in his plans.

He supported me through emotional turmoil with my mother and sister and I relied on him for a majority of our time together. He was my coach, my cheerleader but he was also my friend, my lover. I have so much gratitude for what he gave me and for what we shared. But it’s not a debt to be paid back. It was an investment into our relationship. He supported me because he cared. Just as I would have supported him when he needed it.

In our human relationships, it’s best when we don’t keep scorecards of who gives what and when. Resentment too often builds because it’s impossible to keep track. Giving and receiving in relationships is inherently reciprocal not transactional. We’re talking about the ephemeral feelings of the heart that isn’t quantifiable. It’s not to say we give and give and hope to receive in return in the future. The best way to give is to not expect anything in return. Give what you can afford without losing your essence. Give with love. Otherwise, invest ourselves slowly. Give and receive, give and receive. Happiness is only achieved when we accept what is reality without expectations or hope.

It’s hard to separate emotionally when my partner and I had spent most of our relationship physically apart. In a normal relationship, after you stop seeing each other that loss of physical presence affords some visceral conclusion to a relationship. When a long distance relationship ends, circumstances stay relatively the same minus the talking. All breakups are hard but this felt particularly incomplete.

I blamed myself at first for everything that went wrong, for what I could have done but didn’t, wish I did but couldn’t, tried but failed. Then I realized that I was only one part of the equation, that maybe the emotional bank accounts for both us were withdrawn except I was still agreeable and willing to stay. One of the best qualities of our relationship was that we gave each other the benefit of the doubt, and believed we both were doing the best we could with the best of intentions. I felt known and understood and accepted by him. And I thought he did too.

Yet towards the end, I felt so defensive of his criticism, felt like he persisted in thinking the worse of me. I kept trying to explain, kept trying to convince him of my right intentions and usually coming away from those conversations, contrite and a little sad that I even had to try win him over. Somewhere along the way, we had a mistep, then another and then increasingly the gap widened until suddenly nothing we said to each other made sense to the other. We had lost trust in each other.

I tried. I worked on being accountable for my actions. I listened and acknowledged his concerns and his criticisms and worked on what I thought was true. I read books on communication and practiced being an empathetic listener with my friends and family so that I could try to do it effortlessly with him.

I wrote a long letter to him in the end, trying to convince him of times when I could attribute failure on both our parts. I wanted to him to share the responsibility on how the relationship deteriorated. But after writing it, I decided not to send it. The letter had I sent it would have been perceived as casting blame on him. And that was far from my intention. Aside from being cathartic, in the process of writing it, I realized that nothing I did now would have an impact on our relationship. It no longer mattered who was at fault and when or whether or not he accepted any responsibility for past actions. He had already removed himself from the romantic relationship; there was no longer anything to be fixed or resolved. In the words that he hates but essentially embodied, “he was done”.

The problem was that I didn’t feel done. I was far from done. I was ready to fight for us again. I was more than ready to take responsibility for my actions and to change anything that I could change to improve our relationship. But I can’t fight the law of physics. The more I tried to pull him closer, the further in the opposite direction he swung, becoming more adamant and sure that the best way forward was by moving apart.

I don’t describe myself as being clingy but I do find myself obstinately attached once I’ve made a commitment. Yet I know I have to let go of the hope that I can fix my romantic relationship. I have no choice but to surrender to the present reality. This is huge for me since I’m not one to give up easily. And in the present reality, we are emotionally and physically apart and no longer in each other’s lives. Resisting the present reality is to resist the universe, a futile effort that only expends energy with no desired outcome. Learning to accept the present reality means that I have to accept this moment, this set of circumstances is how it should be be. I’ve never been able to do that before and it hurts. I see how easily one can succumb to depression but I don’t. Regardless, the melancholy never fully dissipates.

What is different from past breakups is that I have no intention of escaping into another relationship in order to avoid the sadness or to avoid being alone. I want to learn as much as I can from this relationship and mine it for the rough diamonds. I’m breaking the destructive habit of jumping from relationship to relationship. I choose to be alone for now. Time to identify and face my greatest fears. Time to figure out what I want and start doing it. It’s time for Betty time.

After a life time of learning how to numb myself, I took efforts not to repeat this pattern of indifference after my partner decided he wanted us to go our separate ways. I wanted to feel emotions. I wanted to feel alive. I wanted to feel what it meant to care.

So I took my yoga practice to a new level. I started taking bikram at my friend’s studio. Classes with Dash kicks my butt every time but classes need to be sporadic for my body to recuperate from the exertion. After the separation from my partner, I amped up the frequency, sometimes taking his classes on several days in succession.

It worked. To the extreme. I was physically exhausted during class, incapacitated after, and put my body into stress related heat rashes, and headaches. Emotionally I was a mess, unable to prevent outbursts of crying. It felt unfamiliar to have my emotions be so accessible. To have pain so visceral. To feel the physical impact on my chest, in my heart and not have it be some theoretical notion. At some point, I began to feel like I was being masochist and that I was punishing my body at a time when I most needed healing.

How do we allow others take such a prominent place in our heart that their absence seems like unfillable void? When do we come to rely on them to find stability in our lives, leaning on them for support? Is that what love requires? Does love require us to be attached to them?

I don’t know the answers to these questions yet. That’ll probably be the subject of a future post.

With a little perspective that a month of grieving can give, I saw to my dismay the same destructive habitual patterns that I had been perpetuating unknowingly with my partner. I had once again started to follow the way of the stronger individual who knew decidedly what they wanted in life in lieu of the meandering journey of my own life. A life where at 49 years of age, I’m still learning what it is that I want to do with the second half.

I wanted security of the known path, of the path that has been tread by others. But I’m learning that my happiness is elusive when I’m treading that path – the path of the career with a dependable retirement, a partner with a second income. I’ve found that neither has afforded me any true fulfillment or lasting comfort. And I’m bored.

But I knew I couldn’t follow him where he wanted me to go. On his path, to follow his dreams. I knew I couldn’t go until I knew what I wanted. I knew that if I did go along now, I would once again lose my path towards myself. Yet I couldn’t say those words aloud to him. I didn’t trust myself. So I sought the advice of others, of family, of friends, even an astrologer until their words strengthened my resolve.

My love for him wasn’t what I questioned. I loved him, adored him, thought him handsome and brilliant. I felt lucky to be with him. But I was questioning myself on why I was so willing to subjugate myself for someone else, even someone I was so in love with, when I didn’t even know if he was willing to do that for me, when signs seem to indicate that he wouldn’t. How do I balance prioritizing taking care of myself without feeling guilty for doing so? It’s the basic tenets of life that we all seem to forget until we get on an airplane and we hear again the instructions of the flight attendant for putting on our oxygen mask first before helping others. Makes perfect sense when our basic survival depends on it but how many of us can actually do that in our normal lives? How many of us can listen to our inner voice of intuition and wisdom and actually pay attention? I certainly have trouble with that even after more than a decade of meditation practice. Obviously, I was overdue for more contemplation and reflection and hopefully insight.

So I signed up for a Vipassana silent retreat, was waitlisted, and then later was accepted to my great excitement. I was primed and ready to go find my inner self. And then my mom fell. And everything changed again.

I lost the love of my life. It was my first adult romantic relationship – it was crushing, humbling, illuminating, thrilling. Frankly, I don’t know how people can choose to go through this more than once. He’s a person I admired, respected, really liked who I loved and who loved me. And then it was over.

Well, it wasn’t as sudden as that, as anyone who knows me can attest. I get attached to people and things long after their expiration date. It’s still hard to get accustomed to say things in past tense.

I held on not wanting to let go, held on hoping that a solution would emerge that would bring us back together. Each of us was at an impasse, unwilling to move forward and make a move that would make us vulnerable. Neither of us was totally right, nor totally wrong which makes the ending all the more sad.

It was my first true heartbreak and in the first four weeks of grieving, I opened my heart to the pain and to the sadness. The first thought of every morning was the realization that it was over. And the second thought was to stay in bed and pull the covers over my head. I cried during reality shows, I cried every day during yoga, feeling my heart pound with such ferocity that I could barely lay with my chest on the floor.

I’m glad to have loved with such intensity, with intention and trust, and above all with tenderness. After my relationship with the narcissist, one would have thought I would be cynical and jaded. I had reason to be but I wasn’t. I was vulnerable to someone for whom I cared deeply, sharing deep secrets, deep insecurities, scared at first for not being loved as a deeply flawed human. When I was loved, I was deeply grateful for our time together and awed that I could finally experience this deep connection. I was in love until my love was rejected and given back, like a letter returned in the mail and unopened. How could my love be rejected? It was unfathomable to me and still is.

I suppose I had something to do with that. Maybe, I didn’t adequately play the game of being hard to get. I just gave him my heart and trusted that he take care of it. I thought he was worthy but he gave up on us. Time is our most valuable resource and I suppose he didn’t think I was worth the wait. That’s a challenge that I’m willing to take and prove him wrong by realizing my exalted self and living my best life and have that be a testament to who I am.

In the aftermath, I felt emotion creep slowly over me like a heavy blanket or explode within me, like a soda pop that has been shaken too many times before being opened. One morning during one of my meditation sits, I felt sadness and then an outburst of joy upon remembering our shared experience on the magic carpet ride. Love enveloped me, embraced me, made me feel connected to the Divine and to all those who had loved before and who had felt the pain of heartbreak.

I’ve moved past the acute stage of short outbursts of emotion and into the weight of sadness that laid stubbornly on my chest. I understand the emotion of heartbreak so much more deeply now. As I lingered too long over some sappy love song and when I could feel my sadness turn to some kind of mawkish indulgence, I would check myself and regain my bearing. I am not unique and not terribly that special. I had loved, I had lost and I am still here. I still have to work, go through the motions of life but now I have been made more tender, made more open, and finally more connected to people with whom I had always had a bit disdain and distrust for their feelings, feelings which I had deemed too sentimental and entirely not rational. Now ironically, I was finally one of them.

I’m at the age that some of my friends have kids in college. It’s mind boggling. I went through a phase where the idea of children would come up periodically usually after I had spent time with other people’s kids and I would entertain the notion semi-seriously. Finally went to my gynecologist for some blood tests and even bought some prenatal vitamins that were on sale just in case I got pregnant. But at my age of 49, people don’t normally just get pregnant, the process is very intentional. It takes effort, time, commitment, and bit of money. And my partner wasn’t keen on the idea having already raised two grown sons of his own with his first wife. Having a baby now would mean that would need to leave the best adult relationship I have ever had and to be doing it on my own.

Part of my perseveration was that I envied my partner’s bond with his ex-wife that was cemented by his kids. And I wondered if I could ever have that level of connection with a partner without having kids. As I sat with the prospect of having children, it became apparent to me that my motivation for having kids was very selfish. It was about me having the experience to nurture and to know how it felt to give birth to a living being. It could be my contribution to the world to produce a human being capable of making a valuable impact on humanity. I could do it and do it well, I think.

To have children always seemed to be a selfish decision. No child ever asked to be born. But to have a child at my age is a scientific experiment and perhaps even a moral dilemma. The increased risks of birth defects, the higher likelihood of having averse impact on my health, the questionable financial and emotional security that I could guarantee my child — all these unknown variables were exacerbated because of my age and it weighed heavily on me. The alternatives of fostering and adopting another child was not a consideration. Even one story was too many of mismatching kids with parents or the long term effects of children’s hidden traumas seemed to not be worth the risks. I would be a single parent like my mom and that’s not a family structure I want to intentionally raise a child in.

So the question emerges. If I don’t have kids, what do I do with the rest of my life? How do I make the most of it, other than to simply enjoying it and living it out till the end? How can I make my life meaningful?

I’ve been a people pleaser for most of my life. In general, there’s nothing wrong with doing things for people because you love them. And from an early age, I had learned to please my mom and accommodate her wishes. At some point though, I think I started doing things for other people and deferring to other’s opinions or desires because it was a lot easier than deciding what I wanted.

I convinced myself that I took a very rational approach to making decisions. Usually, I would look at all of the available options and then try to think through the merits or disadvantages of each. Unfortunately, what also usually happened was that I would get overwhelmed by all choices by the end and I would get stuck. Even if there only two options, it was one too many and I just got lost.

While I realized the dilemma I had placed myself in, I could never climb out of it myself. I needed someone to tell me what was the best choice to hard decisions. I looked for answers from all around me, external of me, seeking others’ guidance. Astrologer after astrologer. My mom’s was my de facto tie breaker. If she felt so strongly about something, I figured there was a good reason for it. I trusted her more than I trusted myself to make decisions for my own life.

My inability to make difficult decisions on my own usually also meant I would slide into decisions. I would passively go along without any preference and let the circumstances decide for me.

So using these two very solid strategies for making life decisions, I realized in my early forties that life was unfulfilling (surprise). I had no idea what would make me happy. I just knew that something was missing, that I had no real purpose in life. Nothing really excited me to rouse myself out of bed in the morning.

So what was wrong with my whole life approach? Simple. I forgot to tap into my intuition. I used only my head and not my heart. I forgot to ask myself, “how do I feel?”

Feelings for me have been in an untapped, inaccessible place for so long that asking myself how I felt about options didn’t even occur to me. I was too wrapped up in my own confused head about what I thought.

The answers were given to me in so many different ways and I realized it was all the same. That I had the power to change my destiny. That I had the power to CREATE my destiny.

I didn’t realized that deciding on what I wanted my destiny to be was going to be the easy part. The commitment and follow through has been even tougher.

What is a moment?

The moment is now.  ‘

Yeah, but how long does a moment last? A second, a minute?

The now lasts as long as you are present.

Thay Thich Nhat Hanh passed away on January 22, 2022 at 00:00. Peace is every step. Mindfulness in every step. Those are his words I vividly remember albeit slightly paraphrased.

The repeating 2’s and the 0’s in the date and time of his passing seems too precise, too symmetrical to be random. Indeed, if i see them as angel numbers, numbers which the spiritual world may use to communicate with the secular, the numbers may signify the beginning of a cycle or the close of one or both happening one after the other. I believe that he left this world with foreknowledge of the timing of his death, an ability that the high lamas of Tibet possessed.

I am a keen albeit sporadic student of Thay. His teachings spoken in his soft kind voice (I can hear it now as I read his words) were thoughtful, spare, and beautiful. Every time, I eat a meal and finish without even remembering what it tastes like, I remember Thay. When I wash my dishes and I wish I was doing something else, I remember Thay. When I become absentminded while my partner is sharing his day, I remember Thay and I breathe. And then take another breath. And another until I recenter myself to the present. Thay taught us that life was here in the now, not in the past where it is dead, and not in the future where it is yet to be. If I continue this stream of logic, I realize that now IS the past, future, and present. Time is fluid and we must flow with it.

His influence in my life was prominent but I was oddly not devastated by the news of his passing. In contrast, when I found out the day before that one of my favorite restaurants in the bay area, Bette’s Diner had closed permanently. I was numb. I hadn’t had a chance to pay homage to Bette’s once more before it closed. I had so many fond memories of eating there with my friends, my family, former partners. I felt like I missed my chance to relive another dining experience at Bette’s.

Yet when people started sending me condolences about Thay’s passing, i realized that I wasn’t grieving. He was after all 95. He had lived a long and full life imbuing the lives of others with meaning, thoughtfulness, and intention. And his books and recorded lectures and his calligraphy are his recorded legacy. His physical body may have passed on but his spirit still thrives in the lives he changed with his words and by his example. I think what we can do now to make his work meaningful is to apply his teachings to live a more virtuous and compassionate life. I hope to do that myself and remember always to breathe and remember that I’m alive now and life must be lived in this moment.

If you know me or at least have had a glimpse of my room, you’ll know that I love inspirational quotes. The space above my desk is covered with little post-its (all neatly arranged in a grid like pattern).

I just turned 49. I figured I should do something that I’ve always wanted to do but have procrastinated. Not sure if I have something worth sharing on this blog but this is mostly for me. And though I’m introvert, I admit that I do like a bit of attention, hence a blog and not just a private journal. I’m a complicated sign <sigh>. Mostly, I want to be known for myself. No pretensions, no more masking.

At 49, I have a long list of things I want to do. It would have been longer if I hadn’t forgotten most of them. I think it means they weren’t that important to me to begin with and the added benefit is that the previously long list has been curated by time to be more realistic to accomplish. My intention is to at least get started on the top 5 items on my list this year. So here I am, writing my blog. Twenty or so years after I first starting thinking about it.