Tea too hot to drink.

If I could offer some reflections in my early 20s. If I could go back in time to tell you these things and help guide you through them.

You've internalized the good and bad from our Asian American, multigenerational, US-"imperialized" family. They did their best, and like every other institution, including the "biological" family, you must unlearn these practices to allow space for healing.

A list of reflections because I know you love lists:

Ask for help. Don't avoid help in order to appear confident, smart, put together. The appearance of perfectionism will only destroy you.

Our boundaries that were often associated with shame and guilt should be honored. Invite motion and movement, clarity and communication, respect and responsibility for yourself and others.

Ask questions. Question everything.

Speak, write, type your truth without fear. Your emotions are valid. Don't suppress them in order to make space for the harmer / abuser / gaslighter. You must recognize that you've been harmed and it's okay to tell the person who hurt you without having solutions ready. You don't need to fix everything, you should acknowledge it though.

Center impact and intention. You can be well-intentioned while having a negative impact. Communicating this will be difficult, especially with your older siblings and mother.

Even though it was modeled poorly and associated with a lot of guilt / shame in your family, accountability does not need to be about shaming or guilt-tripping anyone. Accountability does not seek to punish, it seeks to heal and respect.

Be tender. Embrace the masculine parts of your identity and the feminine. Neither is bad, neither is good. You'll show up differently and communicate differently because you're nuanced, multidimensional, and hold various identities.

It's okay to use humor to laugh through difficult moments.

Listen to your body more. Tune into the channels that are speaking to you because they have a message you need to heed.

None of this will be simple or easy. You'll meet many friends who model it for you, many friends you'll love, many friends who are just as angry as you are and are working through their traumas too. You won't always be a loving or lovable person. But I hope you open yourself up to the idea that you can be.  

Love,

Thursday night was the first time my dad spent some time alone at my home. I was worried that he might fall, hurt himself, bruise himself again. But he was fine. I came home and he hadn't fallen.

The past few months with him here have been a major learning curve.

When I think back to another time that I was in so much transition and change, it was probably 2017. I had just graduated from college, heartbroken, and wasn't sure what to do with my life. I didn't want to study for the DAT to get into dental school anymore.

In Boston, I was lost. I had no motivation. I quit my job to move across the country for my at-the-time boyfriend.

I didn't feel like me. And I kinda spent the entirety of 2025 meandering, trying to wait for that moment where things came together.

On a October evening in Boston I actually got a call from my family that my dad had fallen. It was a sign and I knew deep down in my gut that even though the fall wasn't terrible at the time, that something ominous was looming over us.

And unfortunately I was right. I took my dad in for an appointment in February and the cardiac failure doctor looked at me and my dad with a grimace. We had my dad scheduled for a series of evaluations to assess whether he should be placed on the heart transplant list.

At the end of March, his heart failed and he nearly died in my car as I was speeding down to Rock Vista Kaiser emergency room.

Grief is a nuanced emotion that is hard for me to understand.

It is simultaneously the joy of knowing that my dad is alive and the fear that he will go, as such is the cycle of life.

Grief is simultaneously the relief that my dad got the heart transplant and is able to continue life -- maybe with a new attitude and the loss of my ability to do things whenever I want to because I now have to care for someone else.

It hurts -- I feel like you love bombed me at the beginning and even nearly had me meet your son in February which is not what I wanted. I know I could have been more firm in the beginning and really asked to slow down and go slow like I originally intended but it also felt really nice for us to both want to explore what that looked like and felt for us.

I feel like when you wanted to pump the brakes and slow down, it really threw me for a whiplash because you had said all of these things about meeting your parents, calling me your girlfriend, telling your friends about me. And that kinda happened after we took some x and I said all of the things i said that night. Which I don't regret but made me feel really freaking stupid for expressing how I felt and then made me really confused because you retreated. I started to feel like we were off kilter because here you were going fast, i wasn't expressing i was not comfortable with all of that. Then after I said everything that night, you wanted to go slow. And I felt so incredibly dumb.

So I didn't know how vulnerable I could be around you in case you would retreat every time I wanted to express my feelings. Which are just feelings -- not the truth.

Then I blabbered again that I wish I could fast forward 2 years and it sucked that you kept holding it over my head 😪 when I just wish I could have said what I meant: I wish we could have explored how to better communicate and work through what we feel, what we mean, and what we understand about each other.

It made me so mad i felt like John Wick where as I am carrying Chaco and Iago, Ibam hunting these punks down.

Here we are standing in front of one another, you looking at your next house, me also expressing my thoughts and opinions about each place. Then i say something stupid:

We should move in together... Eventually though, not now.

Your face darkens and gets that annoyed look. You sigh deeply. You say

Yeah I don't know about that.

I just want to tell you because I think there is still a part of me that still desires to see you, hug you, intimacy, flirting and honestly you. I also recognize that is not the most fair to you or the most honest as I'm still processing my break up, grief, change, and need to focus on what is important about relationships for me.

I never ask to eat much from you because idk it's just how I was raised.

R.R shows up and he's mad. I can sense it. He asks S.T to switch seats so that I'm now sitting next to him. I play it off and I say hi how are you doing and how is it going. He whispers, "Did you forget it was my birthday? September 27 or 28. How could you forget? I have an ex Krysa Cheese who's been texting you and you forgot? You're a terrible partner." And then proceeds to angrily finger f*ck me!!! Like wtf!!! I'm next to a friend and my sister AND we're in a school auditorium!! I stop him and I tell him "I'm sorry. Meet me outside after class" and I leave.

I try to park my car in a charging spot and discover a whole parking lot just to charge so I go there. Then I'm realizing I don't know if there's more classes or not so I don't know if R.R is coming. We're texting and he's saying it's hard because he has a flight to catch at 3pm and class ends at 2pm.

I text him back I'm sorry. Again. And that maybe there's another time I can take him on a wild goose ride if now doesn't work.

Went to the bathroom and everything was rearranged. Took me a while to find my desk again

Huge event at night - some fashion show. Saw Breanna Huizar who was on photo / video. Took a video of me walking downstairs to the gala. I'm wearing jeans and a shirt. Not dressed up at all. I'm walking with 3 other coworkers who are walking fast and are ahead of me. We get to a curve in the staircase I hear they exclaim, "of my gosh it's so good to see you!" And then they disappear.

We tied a rope around the dogs neck to hang it. Lucy was suffocating it. But it didn't die. I then tried to choke it and it bit me and left marks all over my hands.