Beating.

The heart grows stronger with every beating—

Is that perhaps why they call it a beat—

Like throwing punches,

a thump, a thud.

Violent, heavy

these words we use

To describe this fragile thing

we take for granted.

In sorrow, in love,

it expands, contracts.

In tears, it tears,

With heed, it heals

Like any muscle,

It soldiers on

without a choice.

The heart grows stronger with every beating—

Relentless in its resolve to overcome

Lest it be overcome—

By this dull ache

Radiating, pulsing,

Surfacing, ebbing, finally flowing,

Until something has you

Beat.

Take heart, reset.

Still here, it says.

Bleeding, throbbing,

Hobbling, mending.

The heart grew stronger from every

beating.

You are not fine, but you will be

Unlike a headache or stomachache, when you’re going through something like this, you sometimes have no idea. It’s just one bad day, or a bad week, you think. It’s just because I’m fighting with Mom, you think. It’s because I’m tired, you think, and the reasons go on. Only when you don’t feel it anymore do you realize that there was, in fact, something wrong.

I can talk about it and even write about it now because it’s over. But I couldn’t then. While I used to babble and vent to my boyfriend whenever something was wrong, there instead was a glazed silence. I’ll tell him tomorrow, I don’t feel like it now, I think. I stopped writing—I had neither inspiration nor desire, and styling for my blog felt like a chore. It was a sudden disappearance of energy, vivacity, even taking a shower felt like it demanded energy I couldn’t afford. I wanted to get things over with, anything, everything like I’m waiting for something but I looked forward to nothing. I felt neither nostalgia for the past, nor excitement for the future but I didn’t want to be in the present either.

Maybe I was waiting, I was waiting for my boyfriend to visit that Christmas. I thought his presence and support would pick me up, or at the very least distract me. I thought I’d tell him everything I was feeling then. But perhaps that was the biggest mistake I made. Because when he arrived and nothing changed, it plunged me into deeper isolation, watching his happy face while we prepared our skis or sat on the flying swings, I was irritated that he could enjoy the same moment that I couldn’t, that I was forced to perform the same motions but feel none of the same exhilaration. I felt stuck.

Stuck. Something I felt daily for the last few months, the feeling of wanting to run away but having nowhere to run to. Sometimes my thoughts and emotions spin around so much, growing heavier until I feel like I need to back away from myself, but I can’t. I felt stuck. I felt stuck after many inconclusive quarrels with my mom, all of which had roots in the anger and disappointment I’ve buried from my childhood, but only came to light upon my moving back. So when my longtime best friend who’s known me and my mother since forever candidly asked one day, “Do you think your mom will ever be the mom you need her to be?” and I finally admitted to myself, “No,” I felt stuck because I naively thought this realization would automatically lead to acceptance and forgiveness but it predictably didn’t.

Just as there are a several inches between the brain and the heart, there is similarly a lag time between logically comprehending something and feeling okay with it. It is not, as I had thought and hoped, a matter of flipping a switch. Upon finally seeing my mother for who she was, I thought things would only get better from there, so when they didn’t, I then pointed a finger at myself and asked, so is the problem me? Is there something wrong with me that I can’t seem to get a handle on this fact? Turns out, the only problem with me was that I forgot to let myself grieve. To grieve the fictitious mother I clung onto, but now know she could never be. I forgot that where I used to feel anger, I will naturally feel sadness because to be angry is to still have hope for change, but when the hope disappears there leaves a trail of sadness, a period of mourning for what will never be. Instead, I subconsciously slapped myself with some sort of absurd deadline, as if it were crucial to stop feeling animosity right now. I forgot to give myself time.

Thankfully, I spoke to a friend who relieved many of my anxieties, most of which I learned were entirely self-imposed and therefore self-relievable. But most importantly, she uttered the words I hadn’t known I was waiting to hear: “Take your time,” she said. These words felt like a warm hand on my shoulder that replaced the imaginary burden I bore because for so long I forgot I was allowed to. Allowed to take my time, allowed to be sad, allowed to be anything but okay, right now. It’s an obvious truth that we all, sadly, forget sometimes.

That following day as I took a shower, I felt a strange peace. I had no reason to feel particularly elated but at that moment at the very least, I felt neither anger or sadness. I didn’t feel worried or anxious or tired, and it was only then did I realize I had been wearing the tinted glasses of depression and only now, for the first time in months, had they been removed. 

P.S. I wrote this for anyone who has ever been plagued by depression. Many will say you’re just having a few bad days, that you don’t have a reason to be unhappy, that you just need to look on the bright side. But there isn’t always a reason, it isn’t something you can will yourself back to health or logic yourself out of. So you just have to know that you are not alone and it will pass, maybe not today or tomorrow but it will. Just take your time. 

An Open Letter To Everyone Who Asks Me “How’s the writing going?” I Love You. But Please Stop.

When I first moved back home, I was determined to land myself a freelance gig before I met up with any of my friends to deflect the inevitable “So what are you doing now that you’re home?” question. That way, I can be all casual and say, “Oh I’m doing some freelancing.” If I'm being honest, it accounts for 60 percent for why I picked up freelancing—to get people off my back.

The other 40 percent of the reason is so that I would be keeping my knives sharp, being given consistent deadlines to meet so as to not fall into a rut. But who am I kidding? I have a blog where I have self-imposed deadlines already so really it’s just to get people off my back.

But my clever friends are not to be fooled and would often press further, making me reveal that actually, I’d like to spend my “funemployment” doing some writing thankyouverymuch. No, not for a magazine. No not really purely for my blog either. Ugh, I don’t know! Just! Writing, dammit!

You see why the question causes much anxiety.

Okay so, they now know that I want to spend the next year pounding on the keyboard for some vague purpose but that actually leads to the worst question in the history of all questions: The of innocent inquiry of “So how’s the writing going?” inserted near the beginning of every exchange of pleasantries. In the case of my gym trainer, that’s as often as twice a week and that’s just one guy. If I had a dollar for every time I was asked The Question in the past fortnight, I’d be J.K. Rowling minus the actually writing half a dozen best-selling novels part.

You see, when someone asks The Question, writers often hear it as if we were caught not doing our homework. No matter the inflection, we hear it like “So, how’s the ‘writing’ going?” And then, like having an accusatory finger pointed at our noses, we’re quietly panicking, saying “I’m working on it, I swear!” but on the surface all we say is, “It’s going okay.” 

Because really, how do we quantify progress in writing anyway? In the number of pages we’ve written in between our meetings? Because if that’s the case, I can churn out 25 pages of correctly spelled words in proper syntax that form grammatically sound sentences every day if that’ll answer the question. That came out sassier than I intended. I apologize.

But before I burn every bridge in my life, I have to say that the completely sane side of me (if that exists) knows that this question is asked out of love and not harassment. You see, the reason why The Question comes across as such is because it’s like the verbal incarnation of the black cloud hovering over every writer, a constant reminder whispering Hey, you haven’t written anything awesome lately. So when the dreaded Question is heard outside our own self-berating heads, it feels like an accusation at ourselves by ourselves through the inquirer. I told you I'm sane.

What many people don’t understand (and it was something I used to feel guilty about but now know it’s an inescapable plague all writers share) is that writing often looks like doing nothing at all. In a panel called What’s Character Got To Do With It? the revered writer of The West Wing and the new Steve Jobs biopic Aaron Sorkin said:

“I'm often asked ‘How long does it take you to write a movie?’ The answer is actually a couple of years. But most of that doesn't look like what a passer-by would say was writing.  It looks a lot like me lying on my couch or watching ESPN.”

Or, in this not-as-articulate excerpt from Jenny Lawson’s book Furiously Happy, she writes:

“There’s a lot of behind-the-scenes work that non-right-brained people don’t see happening. For example, when I have writer’s block, I sometimes have to ‘refill my creative cup.’ [It] means different things to different people but to me it looks a lot like watching Doctor Who marathons or reading David Sedaris books while screaming, ‘WHY DO YOU MAKE IT LOOK SO EASY?’ In summation, I spend an impressive amount of time doing absolutely nothing. Like, I’m at pro level. Because that’s how artistic genius works. And because I’m very, very lazy.”

So how does one say “I watched Gossip Girl till three in the morning then bore witness to my foolhardy Schnauzers picking a fight with the cat for half an hour but trust me it was integral to my next piece of writing” to my politely concerned gym trainer?

The answer is, you don’t. You say, “It’s going okay.”

The Pursuit of Imperfection

I find myself at a crossroads in my career and like a grandpa inundated by the different kinds of milk at the grocery store nowadays (would you like skim, two percent, whole, almond or soy? In a quart or gallon? which brand?) I am rendered completely petrified. In a way, yes it’s a good—and dare I say—privileged problem to have, that I have so many opportunities to cherry pick from. But what’s interesting is it’s not the plethora of options that’s hindering me, but rather the fear of picking the wrong one. And perhaps more infuriatingly, when there really isn’t a “wrong” choice, how the hell can I know what the “right” choice is?

I reckon it must be how this girl felt in a reality TV show I was watching. She always had a knack for coloring—that’s right, not drawing but coloring—because she felt relieved of the pressure of actually creating the picture and could (excuse the cliché) stay within the lines. So when she was invited to an artist’s studio and the artist offered to teach her a lesson in sketching, the girl froze, her pencil centimeters from the page. Her mind went blank and she had no idea what to draw. “I can’t do this,” she said. The artist then laughed gently and said, “Most people think they can’t draw because they’re too concerned about making it pretty or perfect. Sometimes you just have to start drawing.”

It suddenly struck me that sometimes the drive for perfection can be the very thing that stunts us from doing the thing we most want to do. Not just in art, but also in life, because perfection is neither realistic nor meaningful.

I can be an inveterate prude when it comes to certain things, never choosing to act until I’ve carefully analyzed every angle. My boyfriend also noticed that when I do well on a test, for example, I would immediately say “Well, it was probably just an easy test.” I wish I could tell you it was to feign humility, but I do in fact believe that. When I tried to find the root of this insatiable thirst for perfection, my gaze invariably landed on my parents once again (when in doubt, blame your parents, right?) but this time I still couldn’t find the grounds to assign fault. Sure, they gave me the finger-wag if I didn’t do well in grade school, but before long they were singing quite the opposite tune, telling me to go to bed and stop stressing about my tests as early as in middle school. So what could it be? Is it simply, as Julia Roberts said in Pretty Woman, “It’s easier to believe the bad stuff?” 

It turns out that while my parents dole out their fair share of obligatory “I’m so proud of yous” and “It’s okay to fail sometimes,” the truth is, I’ve never actually seen them fail. Neither do they ever speak of their struggles or frustrations in front of little ol’ me. So subconsciously, I may have learned to discount the praise as mere courtesy. Unhealthy, I know, but still, not their fault entirely.

Once again, it was my suddenly omniscient boyfriend who nailed it on the head. It would appear that I can’t seem to take a compliment or make spontaneous decisions because I lack courage in myself, the courage to believe that I am indeed deserving of praise and that I would have the strength to overcome it if I made the wrong decision and failed. I may not be able to command the elements and guarantee calm waters before I set sail, but if it’s a matter of courage, it’s good to know at least that’s something I can control. So instead of pursuing perfection, maybe it’s time I acquire some grit.