How we change
And how we hold on
I rarely re-read old journal entries. I would much rather purge my old journals to the flame. I visualize the paper feeding the hunger of an ever-growing fire. It satisfies me. Those painful memories, burnt to ashes.
I am learning to pick up the pencil when I am joyful. I am learning to access words through the vessel of optimism and wholeness rather than fear and emptiness. Joyful creation feels like a violation of some sorts. The belief in scarcity of joy filled my mind for most of my life. In some spaces I occupy, scarcity is the default in the system. I am learning to go against the default flow in those systems. I am learning to reject one thing to accept something else, that something occasionally being a choice to give myself some reprieve from the hedonic treadmill. It is draining.
It is a recent revelation that joy is always welcome. I am allowed to experiment, to say yes and say no, to give myself permission to experience joy even amidst great challenge.
Change is a strange thing. A life-changing moment is not a life-changing moment until much later, when that moment becomes a memory. Then the small seeds of change begin to flourish, like the change that came with embracing joy.
Change can be unintentional. It can be a byproduct of another byproduct of another byproduct.
When I look in the mirror, my body looks the same as it did fifteen years ago. I know that is biologically impossible, and yet, the brain refuses to acknowledge that truth.
The body experiences lifetimes of change. A teenage girl grows into a woman. She eats dining hall buffet-style meals in college and discovers her love of Ube ice cream at the mom and pop shop just around the corner. She climbs steep hills with a homemade plexiglass writing surface for her geologic maps and rips a few pairs of pants in the process of sliding down scree-filled slopes. She consistently looks at her own body with shame and pride, simultaneously. She learns to appreciate how her body gives every fiber of its being to support her when her mind shuts down.
These days, people who seldom see me will first comment on my external appearance. You’ve gotten so thin. This, more often than not, comes from extended family members or my parents’ longtime friends. To them, it’s an innocuous comment, just an observation. It’s what they do in Asia—they simply say what they think. To me, it is confusing.
I wasn’t a physically active child. Although never explicitly stated, I always knew that athleticism was not viewed with reverence in my family. With little self-awareness, I chased what defined me at the time, which was how others perceived me: book-smart and a competitive musician for my age. I was overwhelmed with the idea of scarcity. I wanted a more meaningful social circle, but many of my peers only found me useful to them in the context of homework and wouldn’t engage with me otherwise. So I took every bit of social interaction I could get through the lens of “doing homework.” I wasn’t supposed to be an athlete, so I stayed out of that realm—being fit, fast, and allowed to even take space on the track, field, or court was not something in my future. It belonged to others, but not to me.
I sat a lot. I would sit in class, sit for recess and lunch, sit at home for snacks and dinner. I would sit for hours to study and do homework. I would sit to practice piano and cello. Sit, sit, sit. I didn’t feel like I was allowed to give myself permission to enjoy movement because movement was reserved for those who belonged in a category I was not allowed to identify with.
I like to think that teenage me had the wisdom to know that there was more in her than what others saw, but she did not know how to execute on the dormant dreams and desired pursuits that lay within her.
This month, I arrived at a medical clinic and was alarmed at the number on the scale when weighed. It was the lowest that I could register in my mind for numbers I have historically seen on the scale. Perhaps it was a piece of data that validated what others had been saying as of late, you’re so thin, which never jived with what I saw in the mirror. Perhaps it was the discrepancy with the identity I have held since I was a girl, that I am sedentary and stubbornly sit for long hours, which I falsely believed was how I held on to academic achievements and musical prowess.
Of course my body has changed over time. I have long let go of the sitting and allowed myself to slowly enter the world of movement beyond recreational exercise for the sake of exercise. I love the sensation of long runs. I love pushing myself up steep slopes and listening to the feedback my body gives me. I love taking Hubble out for exercise, watching his legs shuffle along with excitement with every new step and smell that intrigues him.
Running, especially, has gifted me mental clarity and self-compassion, and taught me that I can hold compassion and elicit joy from within, especially when doing something hard—even when I take a hard fall, scraping my skin and running with dried blood that looks like red crayon drawn on my legs. My body heals the wound as best it can while giving me strength to keep moving. That, to me, feels like magic.
It is strange to know that I see my body as such a static being when, in fact, it is ever-changing by the minute. How has this static belief in how I perceive my body has not evolved with the rest of myself? The identity of being a physically undesirable girl, someone undesirable beyond what her brains could churn out, and realizing that I hold on to that identity—for unknown reasons other than that this identity is the only thing that I could possibly ever be—is something I am slowly learning to change.
I wonder if subconsciously, I have been overdoing the running. It is undeniable that running has been such a great gift to me; yet, do I use the gift of internal confidence, of mental clarity, as an excuse to run when I should rest? When I take a nasty fall over a rock, is it because my legs are so tired that I’m barely able to lift them, and my mind fatigued that I didn’t see the rocks in my path beforehand? That I make myself run when my body is asking me to pause? Am I punishing myself for all those years I wore baggy pants and shirts to hide my evolving body during puberty? Am I running so much to prove something to the people who never saw me as a physically fit person? Do I keep making excuses to avoid races because I am afraid that racing, that having a timestamp to a run, would put me outside the box of the non-athlete, the unfit, the sit-and-work person that I was for so many of my pivotal coming-of-age years? Do I not sign up for a race because the person I see in the mirror is someone I do not allow in the athletic space?
I have a visceral urge to keep running even when I am winded, and I struggle with leaning in to the reasons of doing it for myself—to push myself, to experience how acts of consistency can bring about pivotal moments of recognizing the improvement that has occurred—and also grappling with the reasons of doing it to keep telling myself, you have to keep running to show that you’re not the same person you were fifteen years ago, because deep inside, you still see that little girl who felt like she couldn’t allow herself to experience the joy of movement. And, beneath all these voices is the most malicious of all that says, you will never be thin enough. You will never be small enough. Why take up more space?
And yet, the irony is that running makes my heart feel like it is allowed to take up more space. It makes me realize there is enough room in this world for us to bring our whole selves to the places we inhabit. Do I run to enrich my life or to physically shrink my body? Do I do both?
I vividly remember running on the track stadium at my college campus minutes before the track and field team were about to start training. The head coach looked at me in horror, and stopped me mid-run to inform me that I was breathing incorrectly, that my form was wrong, that maybe I should try something other than running.
Maybe he was right about some things, but he was wrong that I should try something other than running.
If it was his intention to usher me off the stadium so his team could train, he should have said that instead.
My body used to support me through my lack of mobility. Now, it is adapting to my love to run, my desire to keep moving, showing me that it can handle the extremes of what I desire: sit and think and produce for hours on end, or move and eat and drink for the same duration.
How little sense it makes to look in the mirror and think that I look the same as I did fifteen years ago. I can’t help but wonder what self-invented categories I have boxed myself in all these years, what restrictions I unknowingly give myself due to an identity I once held and, perhaps, still subconsciously keep in my grasp.
Nick Thompson beautifully wrote, We give our children our genes and our love, and we don't have any idea of what, in the end, they'll do with them. I now know how much love my parents poured into raising me, even though it took me so long to recognize that love. The love that comes from their endless hours of working jobs that didn’t always result in fruits from their labor. The love that comes from immigrating to a country where they struggled to learn the language, where they continue to struggle with cultural barriers. The love that comes from teaching me how to take care of myself, because at the end of the day, I might be the only one who can. I don’t know that they will ever let go of who they hoped I would be, or if they would ever candidly share with me the details of who they hoped I would be. I don’t dare to ask. But I believe that the best way to honor my parents’ love for me is to continue giving back to myself, to embrace the seeds of change, to release an identity that no longer aligns with who I am, and most importantly, to love all versions of me, especially the little girl who internalized external perceptions. She will always live in me. And together we acknowledge the growth, the change, that allows us to keep courageously showing up for ourselves.
Why do we climb mountains? Because they're there. Why do we run? Because we can. Your growth is inspiring :)
Also I want ube ice cream now
Beautifully written.