08 How Can I Let Go of People I Love?

This letter was written for episode 08

Dear Surrender,

I’ll admit something to you. I’ve never been good at letting go. The potential of it petrifies me, as much as the idea that something might be ripped out from inside me. And so, at a very young age, so young I can't even really remember, I decided I would never let anything be so important to me, that I couldn’t just…leave first. I decided never to need to let go.

When I made this decision, I was much too young to navigate things like love, loneliness and disappointment all by myself, to make big decisions like this…but so many of us find ourselves in positions where we have to, don’t we? Especially when we are just trying to survive as best we can with the tools we have. We create stories like “if I don’t care, they can’t hurt me” or “I can’t be disappointed if I never expect anything.” And these stories help us make sense of this big world and its complexities, especially when we are so small we can’t see the whole picture, even if we stand on our tippy toes. 

And this protected me for the many years I needed it. Shielding me from hurts I didn’t have names for until eventually it became second nature to move through the world, believing I never truly needed anyone. Or more that I never learned how to need. 

For so much of my life, I was alone.  I often disappeared for months or years at a time without communication. I just didn’t know what I would talk to someone about daily, I didn’t understand the concept of it. But in contrast, I would also happily give and support others in an instant if they reached out, in fact it was something I loved to do. Though when it came to myself, I never dared to call out for help, maybe because I was afraid no one would show up. And I was quite happy, safe behind my thick fortress, all by myself.

Until, one day, I got curious and peeked over those walls. Maybe I was starting to get bored by myself, maybe I was feeling lonely, or maybe I was beginning to outgrow the safe space I’d created. When I did, I saw “connection” all around me. All kinds of love and deep friendships that equally intrigued me and confused me.

I wondered, “Why on earth would my friend call me after her laptop crashed, and ask me to go with her to the repair shop if all I would be doing is sitting there? What’s the point?” or “Why are these friends asking me questions they could just research and find answers to?”

I began to notice things like ladies in their sixties, at a restaurant table beside me, having been friends for so long that even their laughs sounded the same, like lionesses hissing. A part of me was envious and I wondered, what does it take to have friendships like that?

And as I ventured bit by bit out into the world, friends began offering help with things like watering my plants while I traveled. It was something that baffled me as I felt perfectly fine with my complicated self-rigged watering system I learned from youtube tutorials involving buckets, tubes and negative pressure and a 50% survival rate. 

I began to dream of building places outside this fortress, a home, where I could feed others, where we could gather around a table and I could care for them, knowing that it would also require me to be vulnerable enough to be cared for too. So I challenged myself to ask for help and receive help, the kind that says, “I don’t need you to be here, but it’s so much nicer because you are.”

As I did, bit by bit, my friends, who knew me so well, who had been trying to love me through that wall, watered my plants. (which means, they practically stole a set of my house keys in order for me to finally surrender) and I was so grateful they did, and that they showed up and showed me that often, people do show up. 

Bit by bit, I learned what it meant to receive as much love and support I wanted to give. Bit by bit, I learned to live in community, being a part of people’s daily lives, and allowing them to be woven into mine.

Just as I was starting to feel like I was getting the handle of this connection thing, motherhood happened. As you probably already know, Surrender, that this challenged, like nothing else, my fear of being vulnerable in love.

It’s true what they say, that having a child is like having your heart get up and walk outside your body and into the world, and you can’t do anything to protect it. Only they didn’t say that your heart would be a toddler wanting to jump off tall things head first, or be sixteen going to sketchy house parties. They didn’t say that your whole body cringes every time your baby is about to hit their head on the corner of a table, for the rest of your life. 

They definitely didn’t say, or maybe they did and I didn’t listen, that it’s the kind of love where you say, “yes, it’s nicer because you’re here, but I also need you to be here, because there’s a chance I might lose faith in life itself if one day, for some reason, you weren’t.”

I had never known what it meant to love something so much that I, without a conscious thought, reversed the childhood decision I made that had ruled my life until that point. That I actually let something be so important to me, that I couldn’t imagine not showing up no matter how scary it was or how vulnerable I felt.

Now, Surrender, you must be wondering why I’m telling you this extremely abbreviated story of a woman learning, very awkwardly, how to truly love. I wanted to tell you this story because I want to say, first and foremost, congratulations. It seems to me that you have already fought half the battle that I struggled with, that you do know love very well, the true value of it and the bravery to do so openly. That you love people so deeply that you fear losing them. I think that’s an accomplishment to be applauded, as strange as it sounds.

But I also want to say that the surrender of it all is indeed the other half of the battle. One does not come without the other, unfortunately. And there is no trick I’ve discovered, no wise piece of advice I can give you to learn how to let go in a way that is less painful. Because it is the way of life that the more we love, the harder it will be to let go, and we must do both. They are the two sides of a coin, one doesn’t exist without the other. Because if you love without letting go, then it is just an act of loving yourself more than the other. People we love are not ours to have. And if you let go without truly loving, then you only experience a shadow of love, as I once did.

The true challenge is to love deeply knowing that one day, you will be asked to let go wholly. To dive into those deep waters knowing that you will need to come up for air. It is just a law of nature, of relationships. And it’s inevitable that one day someone will mourn us too.

Letting go is hard, loss is hard, harder than words can explain, and yet we must do it because we love. Loving, as beautiful as it is, it is hard too, and if I am an example, there really is no other way. So know that you are battling what I believe to be the greatest human battle. There is nothing harder, no cause more worthy, no person braver than one who conquers the ability to love deeply and yet loves like water, giving life where it flows and yet never grasping upstream.

07 How can I find passion?

This letter was written as the conclusion to episode 07

Dear Daydreamer, 

There are two distinct times in my life where passion seemed to evade me. 

The first time I didn’t even know I was looking for passion, it just felt like something was amiss. I had accomplished everything I was told I was supposed to accomplish in order to have a fulfilling life: a steady job, a car, a home, a husband and yet I still felt empty. And by the time I knew I felt empty, maybe I felt even emptier because I no longer had the distraction of chasing the things I thought would fill it. 

I remember waking up each morning in a fog - so sad and so lost. If I’d done everything that could possibly do to make me feel happy and complete, and I don’t…so then what is left for me? Am I hopeless? I asked myself questions like this late into the night, circling myself until the cold blue light of morning peeked through the blinds. 

Now, some of you may remember this time of my life from my book, but I’ll tell an abbreviated version for those of you that may not have heard this already. This was the first time in my life that I had paused to question what I wanted for my own life. It was the first time it dawned on me that what I wanted might be different than what I was supposed to want. Growing up in an immigrant family, and in the generation that I did, it was frowned upon and considered selfish to think of your own desires and needs before that of others. I believe so much of this thinking stemmed from the necessity for collectivism in times of survival. And the generations before me were surviving wars and famine, surviving the many kinds of poverty that often come with immigration. But because my parents worked so hard to secure my survival, my generation was liberated to strive for happiness instead, only we had been taught just one path to it, and we had been taught to fear falling off the path, and the shame of it, too. Though because I was walking a path that was so obviously not mine, and I believed there to be only one path, I fell into a deep depression and struggled to make sense of how I was to live at all.

And then came the chocolate chip cookie. This story I’ve told so many times, but I want to tell it again because it’s exactly what Natasha and I discussed – it was a seed.

As I layed there each morning in a fog, in an effort to will myself to live another day, I would imagine eating a chocolate chip cookie. It was a tiny thing that gave me joy, like a point on the horizon to focus on. So I did so every day I could. And as days, months and years passed, eating a chocolate chip cookie turned into wondering which bakery had the best ones, which evolved into wondering if I could bake better ones, turning into an all-consuming obsession with baking, leading me to study pastry in Paris and eventually opening my own bakery.

Even after the bakery was running, I continued to follow each curiosity, water every seed, indulge in my daydreams, creating pathways so far, curving and spiraling in every which direction, that curiosities kept unfolding, and on and on they went.

I started a pastry tour in Paris, wanting a reason to visit the city often. I began traveling to far flung parts of the world to write about food which all stemmed from one small article I agreed to do for a tiny trade magazine about holiday baking. I included a couple anecdotes accompanying the recipes, which were the real project. And when editors of other publications read it, they liked it enough to suggest I write another article here or there, and I liked writing them enough to do it again and again, and this path eventually led to writing a memoir. 

Three were many more moments like this, but you see, along the way, following these tiny curiosities led me to discovering this thing called passion. 

The second time passion seemed to evade me was about 5 years ago. After I had sold my bakery, and my memoir had been published, I decided to take a break from traveling and writing and I had stopped the pastry tours altogether. From the outside it probably seemed like I was at the height of creating, the height of summer, but really, I was withering from exhaustion. Winter had started to set in and I needed to rest.

Now, I could have been passionate about wintertime, curious about my own hibernation. I could have allowed it and even supported it, but instead I resisted it with all the energy I had left. You see, being a “passionate person” had become a part of my identity. I thought showing how to live a passionate life was the value I had to give to others, not seeing that my worth was and is, me. 

So, once more, I found myself at crossroads where I chose not to follow my own path, again and again. I was desperate to keep following the one path that I thought others wanted me to take, as if I had an obligation to them, to be something for other people. And as I ignored my curiosity for slower, shorter days and longer nights, my passion was ignored too.

I found myself so lost again, having ignored what I truly needed and desired, so much so that I no longer knew what that even was. I searched out of fear that the passion would never return. 

I remember waking up in the mornings, aching for the passion I had once felt. I was consumed by an irritating feeling of being somehow disjointed, incomplete. I felt as if my legs were pointing the wrong way, awkward and unnatural. And there was also this distinct feeling of agonizing fire in me, a raw desire to do something, to create something, to make something happen, the longing to be connected to something, but because I didn’t know what I wanted to do, this fire was trapped inside, burning me day after day. 

So I pushed my tired body to produce something, anything, until my engine went completely dead and then there was silence…for years. It was silent for so long that I wondered if I had imagined a thing such as passion, if I had fabricated it in my head. 

And it was not until I finally stopped searching, I let go and eased into the dark wet earth, like a seed, and accepted that I could not control the seasons…it wasn’t until then that I became quiet enough for me to understand – that passions can be still too. 

That sometimes we don’t need to journey on meandering paths for our passions, but that passions are also hiding in the gratitude of where we already are. That maybe our passions are not a destination, or a bucket list, it isn’t what we do. But maybe passion is the way we look at and engage in our present reality, as it is. Maybe it’s how we live the small and big moments in our lives and everything in between. And so with that, all my paths, the ones I thought I “should” take or otherwise, melted away, and with it, the desperation for a path did too. And slowly, I was free to be curious again, to daydream once more.

To you, who wonders about the light at the end of the tunnel.

“To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings.
And is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.”

— WENDELL BERRY

When you’re living in a dark space, hearing that there’s “a light at the end of the tunnel” can sometimes feel burdensome, even painful. When in a tunnel so dark that you breathe its thickness, or so dense that you can’t see where you end and the darkness begins, the promise of light is a sharp reminder of its absence and our aching for it. I’ve found it especially sorrowful to hear it when I have been in the tunnel for so long that I could barely remember light at all. Was it good and warm? Does it really exist…for me?

As pithy as the saying can sound, I believe it’s true, but not in the way that one might think.  As surely as there is up, there is down. For every push, there is a pull. And if there is dark, light must also exist, except that I don’t believe it appears at the end of the tunnel. For me, light and dark come and go throughout our lives like day and night, like seasons of long, lazing light and months hidden under wet earth. Both are breathed in and out, in and out, like an ocean wave. 

On one hand, this may sound hopeful. Everything is impermanent; this darkness, too, shall inevitably end. Though this too could also sound awfully tiring, knowing the dark will come back again and again.

For me, it began to feel less burdensome when I began to see the intricate beauties that shadows cast. In the dance between dark and light, I began to recognize that knowing both darkness and light is what it means to be human: to be frail, humble, enduring, ancient, made to love and be loved, yearning for sun. Because it is in the dark that we fully understand light, including the light within ourselves. 

I am still learning this lesson. I am only coming to appreciate the crucial role that the dark plays in my humanity. The dark makes me compassionate, it calls me to be brave. It forces me to open my eyes, to face myself, to look carefully at the life I have created, and to question the changes that need to be made in order to let the light in. 

In darkness, I am blind and forced to accept what I cannot control. I am forced to let go, to breathe out the air in my clenched lungs. It can be tiring at times, I won’t lie. But I do this because sometimes the only way out is the way on, and from traveling this path I can see now that “the dark, too, blooms and sings.” 

I know this is all easier said than done. Asking someone in the midst of a depression to appreciate the darkness is like throwing a flower to someone drowning. But I also know that everyone walks a path the same way: one gentle step after gentle step. In the meantime, here are a few steps that I have taken in the past, which I offer to you in hopes that it might inspire you to keep walking.

1. Connect. People you feel safe with are your life raft. Whether it is family, friends, a therapist, or even going to a coffee shop to be in the midst of strangers, it is all healing. Reach out, even when a voice is telling you not to. There is light anywhere there is love.

2. Breathe. Take a walk, or just sit on a bench, and breathe in some fresh air. When your body feels full and stale, I’ve found that being in nature can carry me forward. Close your eyes, take a deep breath and smell the forest floor, the ocean, or the rain on pavement…whatever is outside.

3. Tiny sparks. Write a list of tiny things that make you even a little bit happy, and do them all. Whether it be taking a bath, drinking your morning coffee by a window, wearing your favorite socks, or eating a popsicle. And once this list is done, do it again if you like, or make another list. Small gestures are as powerful as big ones. The power is carried in the intention. 

4. Look at the light. Take some photographs. Search for beautiful light and shadows wherever you are. Observe how both define the form, texture, shape and depth that render something plain, beautiful. If you don’t want to take a photo, look up others’ photos. I love Sebastiao Salgado’s work, his shadows are just as stunning as the light, and both tell the narrative of the moment.

5. Face the dark. If you feel ready, and with a trained professional you trust, begin to work on examining what changes you’d like to make so that life can align more with you. This can be a daunting process, but this, like anything, is also done gentle step by gentle step. 

6. Journal. You don’t have to be a writer, it doesn’t have to be beautiful. It can be cathartic to write your thoughts, and it can be even more so to read them back.

7. Go gently. Above all else, do everything with loving kindness towards yourself. There is no right or wrong, there will be ups and downs, but the most important part is just to take each step with genuine care for yourself.

It took me a while to answer your question on how to get out of the dark. It is because, even after living many summers of wild color and winters so cold I couldn't get out of bed, the darkness still waxes and wanes in me, even today. I was writing this to myself as well. I, too, am still learning that it’s not really about getting out of the dark, but more about appreciating what I can now see in it. I can look at you and say, “I see you. I see your pain, but I also see the joy in you, too. Open your eyes and take a look.”

Fear of Living

I had no fear of death. At one point, I thought this to be bravery, but now I know, it is rather that living…truly living, strikes the deepest fear in me. The vulnerability of it all, of being hurt. Will it be unbearable?

This is natural to be afraid. It’s frightening to imagine loving with whole hearts and losing, paralyzing to speak our hopes knowing the possibility of defeat. It’s heartbreaking to think that something we cherish could break.

Though, our fear doesn’t disappear when we close our eyes, and if we hide, our fear alone hides with us.

And these fears are meant to exist, too. Our mind is simply doing its job, trying to protect us. Though if, for a moment, we allow ourselves to be truly brave, not in the face of death…but instead, brave enough to open our eyes to life, we will see that the fear and joy of living can co-exist. We are big and expansive enough, and created to feel them both…and that all of it - the pain and the peace together - make up the utter perfection of what it means to be human.

A Thought on Gratitude

What you already have - the relationships, the things, the opportunities, the body, the love, the time - must mean more to you than what you don’t have - the relationship, the thing, the opportunity, the body, the love, the time.

If not, what you already have, will eventually become what you pine for.

I had a friend who dreamt of a certain kind of love, so much so that every other thing in her life was hidden behind this desire. She yearned for this love, convinced she would never know love until she had it, but she didn’t see that all of us were loving her already. So she walked away, in search for love.

How do I continue to hope?

I’m no expert in hope. In fact, I feel as lost as the next. So when it appeared repeatedly in the list of topics you wanted me to speak to you about, I was surprised. Apart from daily pleasantries, “hope” hadn’t been a part of my vocabulary for years, and I found myself wondering: why hope? What have you been hoping for? 

These questions galloped through my mind in the wee hours, and after some thought, I remembered a time when I had lost all hope in the beauty of tomorrow. So I wrote this first letter to you, who have lost hope in life itself.

In the past, I believed “hope” to be a word without much substance, no more than a watered down plan. It seemed inactive, requiring me to be passive, to wait for desires to be bestowed on me. I’ve witnessed hopes fracture with every disappointment, every heartbreak, and crumble with every dashed dream. And this is exactly what I didn’t care for. I simply couldn’t have my happiness depend on something so fragile.

So instead of hoping, I relied on doing. I did what I could to create the things I desired to see. I chose destinations and moved forward when I could. When the path veered unexpectedly, I did my best to surrender to the change. And if a path ended, I knew new paths would faithfully appear, because they always had. 

One day, however, all my paths seemed to come to a dead end. Until that point, I had been going hard, traveling, taking in the world, running at an endless pace, living a life full of good tomorrows, and the moment I stopped at the end of that path, stillness washed over me. I have yet to fully understand why, but I can see now that I was falling into another depression, this time so slowly that I barely noticed I was underwater and that I had stopped breathing in life. Unexpectedly, my mind felt like it was filled with deep ocean, my thoughts were muffled and my precious ability to create, and to choose, seemed chopped into confusing fragments. 

I was paralyzed by exhaustion, only seeing beauty and not able to engage with it. So I hung onto beauty as a lifeline to the living. I refused to accept this place, so I willed myself to search for a way out of that forest, to “do” myself forward. But by now daylight had gone and not only was it too dark to see a path out, but it was too dark to see beauty too. 

After some time, I understood that perhaps I was simply living through a winter season in life. (Winters are a necessary cycle and happen at one time or another I believe.) So I waited and waited. It was dark but I knew spring would surely come. 

I waited more. It went darker and colder but I knew tomorrow would come, and with it, the beauty that meant so much to me… wouldn’t it? I mean, hadn’t it always before? 

I waited longer and longer until there were no sounds, no signs of life left around me. In this solitary haze, my mind began to play tricks. I began to wonder if I had made it all up, if spring was a lie I had told myself about before, that perhaps things were never meant to bloom again at all. That darkness went on for longer than long. And when the darkness finally seeped into me, I finally lost hope.

At that moment, I imagined life without hope and it seemed so unbearably meaningless.  Then I remembered all the times I’ve lifted my face to the summer sun, feeling its warmth as I closed my eyes, and what it would be like to believe there was a purpose to it all, regardless of the outcome. 

I had a simple choice. Am I the kind of person that believes the sun will rise again, or not? Will I choose to hope or not? And if I did, then I must choose to hope even when all is bleak, no…only when all is bleak, since believing that summer exists when the sun is shining is of little use.

I say all this not to convince you to hope. Choosing between one or the other may not make a difference to anyone else but you, it is your choice to make. I tell you this story just to say that you are not alone and that I understand what hopelessness feels like.

I chose hope, to believe that summer would come again, not because there was proof it would. And it was certainly not a flimsy desire without conviction. I chose to hope because after every disappointment, every heartbreak, every dashed dream, there was only hope that remained, or nothing at all. 

Though my garden doesn’t seem to have bloomed quite yet, I sense that dawn is beginning to crack. And, in writing this, I wonder if this was all a sort of blossoming in and of itself. 

Life is Unresolved

Life is unresolved. It doesn’t have clean boundaries, no blacks and whites, it cannot be tucked neatly into categories. In spite of this, we tend to exhaust ourselves trying to keep all the stubbornly stray pieces of life in a neat line, when in reality, they are not “stray” at all.

I, like you, find myself surrounded by the buzzing of daily life. My head clouded with the usual anxieties of motherhood, while sitting with dear friends struggling with heartbreak. Looming alongside today’s to-do lists are the usual “what ifs” and “what if nots.”

I desperately want to fix, to decide (even prematurely if just to have it decided), to try and relieve the breaking hearts of my dear friends. In these moments, I hasten to action precisely to ignore the reality of how I feel: scared. Scared because I am not in control. Scared because my friends are in pain and I can’t make it go away… I’m not meant to. Scared because it reminds me of how vulnerable I am too, vulnerable to the pain of something long past, or something that hasn’t yet come to pass.

But life is messy. It spills and bleeds into intricate shapes and colours with such unexpected beauty that, when standing back to admire, we see a larger picture and are humbled at the perfection of chaos. So we must try, if we can, to let it be messy. We must try to trust the natural unfolding of life: the moments of joy, peace, happiness, pain, sadness, and confusion. Despite how unnatural it may feel, it can remain unresolved, for as long as it needs to be, until one day it isn’t.

Be gentle, be kind, allow yourself space to just be, without doing, and know that you are safe even in the discomfort of the “in-between.” Because it is from that vantage point that you see the unexpected perfection of your life’s story.