I am Creating

I finally have a rare hour alone, with no obligations other than to myself, and I find myself sitting in front of a blank screen, cursor blinking. You see, I think a lot about writing more than I write. I think about painting more than I paint. I think a lot about the art I want to make, the stories I want to tell, the projects I want to start more than I create them. There are plenty of reasons for this. The world has shut down. I’m navigating new parenthood. I’m navigating a career switch. I’m always telling myself a version when I finally lay my head to rest after a full day of keeping a toddler entertained during a pandemic, and I say, “Tomorrow. Tomorrow I will ….” Tomorrow comes and goes and the desire to make art stays inside.

I used to spend as much time thinking about all of this as I did working on figuring out ways to get past my “blocks” and self-doubt and whatever else I thought was in the way of doing art. Why am I not making more art more often? Why am I not achieving the level of success I admire in my peers? Why is that unfinished manuscript still sitting on my nightstand so many years later?

In the past few months there’s been a small, but significant shift in my perspective. I do fall back to these lines of thought here and there, I am human after all. But for the most part my new narrative is this: I am creating. What am I doing right now? Writing. What did I do last month when I had another rare block of time to do whatever I wanted? Paint. And that novel I started to write, oh, I don’t know, 10 years ago? I took step one of revisiting those pages today. Just because I started writing many years ago doesn’t mean I failed. It just means that this is my journey.

There’s a lot about living in a capitalist society that has us thinking more in timelines and ladders— where we’re so focused on the linear. Whether that’s moving up faster, hitting milestones sooner, making more money so that we can enjoy the fruits of our labor, it’s only natural that I’ve spent most of my adulthood thinking that I’m not doing enough. That I’m not enough. Add being a woman to that. Add being a mixed Asian American to that. Well, it’s a lot of mental gymnastics.

So I’m here to tell you, I’m willing to bet a million bucks that you are certainly doing enough. And I know for a fact that you are enough. I’m also here to tell myself that.

Time to Vote

For much of 2020, time has been elusive. January was a month for cleansing, for dreaming, for planning, for feeling like there was a whole year to do all the things. February was a time for signing up and committing to the calendar. A marathon here, a wedding there, a vacation here, a dentist appointment there. Then came March and this mysterious virus and keeping count of the days and weeks since quarantine, since the first case in the US, since the first death, since they told us not to wear masks, since they told us to wear masks, since the last time I could secure disinfectant wipes, since they officially announced it a pandemic. Then the police shootings, then the protests, then the counter-protests and all the while a “leader” refusing to acknowledge racist systems that have always existed, refusing to acknowledge the scientific community who knew how to stop the spread of the virus. Time moved slowly. But I did believe, eventually, we would get through this and some sense of “normal” would return. 

And then it didn’t. And then time faded away. It was all a blur of groceries and cooking then cleaning or not cleaning and keeping up with a little human who, amidst a global pandemic, was taking her first steps, learning her first words and week by week was in desperate need for friends her own size. And then the heat waves and fires, which seem to rage bigger and earlier each year. Apocalyptic skies. Impossible air. Confined to the indoors when we were already confined to the indoors. At a certain point I think I stopped caring what day or week or month it was. I’m sure many of us have had a funny relationship to time in a year where “unprecedented” seems like the overall throughline. But then time kind of came to a screeching halt back in 2016, too. 

We were at a bar down the street, having beers, watching the election results roll in. Early in the night the energy was joyous, vibrant, light and loud. As we kept our eyes glued to the screens the bar got more and more quiet, people started closing out their tabs, and then they began to leave, one by one, like slow motion, including us. I had to get to Hemet that night for a work trip. It was already much later then we’d planned to leave. After all, we thought we’d know by now. We went to bed in a Hampton Inn, phones decidedly put away, with a sinking feeling in our gut that we refused to fully acknowledge. We woke up and it was done. It could not be undone. My husband couldn’t get out of bed. I wasn’t sure I could either. How do you move forward when the unimaginable has become reality? But I had to get to work. Fox news was playing in the breakfast room. I didn’t want to watch but it was on every screen. I was already thinking about November 2020. I’m sure many of us have our 2016 election story. It was like 9-11, you remember where you were and who you were with when you heard the news.  And though I thought the 4 years would never end, here we are. With less than a month left until the election, time is on my mind again. It’s speeding up and slowing down with every crazy news story coming out of the White House, daily, sometimes hourly. It feels as though I can’t move forward until after November. Big questions like buying a house, moving cities, embarking on a new career, are all hanging in the air until November. Sometimes I feel like this year was lost. Sometimes I feel like the last 4 years were wasted. 

Another way to look at it: In the last four years I made new life-long friends, I reconnected with my love of writing and of art, I traveled, I even had a baby. I also woke up out of the comfortable slumber I was in, a bed of “it will all work out, it always does.” I felt comfortable in Obama’s America. But in the last few years I woke up, like a lot of us, to the overwhelming realities of global warming and climate change and racial injustice and systemic racism and income inequality and transphobia and the evils of ICE and all the systems of oppression imbedded in our country. Though I lean towards optimism out of habit as much as principle, I am also aware that the bed I was sleeping in was incredibly privileged. If we inaugurate a different president on January 20th I don’t expect these realities to be fixed. But if we get the same person for another four years, I’m afraid we’ll get too far off course to come back and fix anything at all. I hope that after November time will feel normal again, that I can continue with life decisions because it doesn’t feel like the world is ending, that I can look forward to little things like trips and museums, and big things like gun reform and abolishing ICE and universal healthcare.

Also, just in case this wasn’t clear: please vote =)

the new past I'll crave

For a brief moment (toddler’s aren’t really known to slow down, so...) my daughter and I were sitting on a bench looking out at these trees, California live oaks. One moment I was hunched over, for the millionth time that day, making sure she didn’t trip over a train track or put a rock in her mouth, and the next I found myself staring out at this magical woodland. I felt a pause, a calm, and then nostalgia (I’m always feeling nostalgic) for hot and sweaty summers running around Topanga Canyon in oversized Elizabethan dresses with friends from theater camp, warm fall afternoons busily moving from one side of our high school campus to the other amidst such trees off Mulholland Drive, and hiking Temescal, Runyon, or the many other trails throughout the Santa Monica Mountains with my dad and sister. At once I felt a longing for my adolescence, a sadness that it’s gone and that life (and the world) looks so different now. I didn’t realize until this very moment that it’s not just California palm trees I have an affinity for— California live oaks hold a special space in my heart, too.

Like many parents struggling to raise their children in a pandemic, I’m feeling lost, exhausted, and like I’m failing my daughter by not giving her playdates and waterparks and museums and dance class. I feel like I’m failing myself by not getting the laundry done, the dishes done, the mail sorted, the business launched, the website updated, the friends called, the yoga class zoomed. Is she getting enough stimulation? Is she bored? Is she learning? Is she growing? Am I making the most of my time? Am I doing enough for myself? Should I have kept my job even though I was losing my mind working and raising a child? We could use the money. But I could use my mind. Have I wasted a summer? A year? I know it’s out of a desire to connect, but I dread the questions: “How are you doing?” and “What are you up to?” or “What’s new?” IHAVENOIDEA .

And then once the thoughts kind of settled, I was able to see the trees, really see them— how the leaves shimmer the same way the ocean does when the sun hits the water, how the branches wind up like a child’s arms asking to be picked up, how the tree trunks lean in and out like they are in conversation with one another. My daughter probably won’t remember this particular moment, or any trips we’ve been taking to the gardens around Los Angeles lately—and maybe I wont either. But I know we have many more benches to sit on and trees to look up to making the unsorted mail and laundry meaningless, and cementing her childhood memories and my new past, which I will undoubtedly feel nostalgic for.