Speaking about leaning into what we’re feeling and not pushing it aside, these questions offered by Catherine Andrews are a great place to start.

• Am I attempting to mind-read somebody else’s intentions in this situation?
• How could I give myself what I’m hoping this other person will give me?
• Is this thought arising from shame or fear? What is a thought I can have from self-compassion or hope instead?
• Can I name three things I need right now?
• Can I name three things I could let go of right now?
• Can I figure out a way to make this 5% easier on myself?
• What answer feels easiest to me?
• What if what felt right to me, was right?
• Who may be benefiting from how I am thinking or feeling right now?
• Is there a way I am benefiting or protecting myself from continuing to believe or act this way?
• Where is this situation reflecting some hurt inside of me, and how can I tend to that hurt?
• Where am I feeling this in my body? What wisdom does that sensation have to tell me?
• If nobody was watching or judging me, what decision would I make?
• What would 5-years-down-the-road-me tell me to do?
• What would it look like to trust?
• Would this decision make my life bigger or smaller?
• Is it true? (hat tip to the great Byron Katie)
• Do I want to keep thinking this thing? Why or why not?

When trying show up everyday to do courageous work, every part of our lives matter. Different spheres of our lives either give or drain us of energy, and I’ve too often let myself run dry.

Ending toxic relationships, sleeping 7-8 hours a night, eating nutritious foods, spending below our means, or setting time aside for restorative rest is not just healthy living, but intentionally designing our lives to be the best environment for us show up and do the hard work before us.

In other words, I’m helping future Minnow do his best work.

For me, that’s been about focusing on my breath. My therapist and I have been talking about me learning to accept all the ranges of emotion I have, not just the happy feel good ones. In our last session she said, “When you feel all the emotions, you live a more vibrant life, but you have to tend to them. If you don’t tend to your emotions, you will be reactive.”

So now, whenever I feel an emotion I would’ve rather not dealt with, I’m working on identifying what I’m feeling, locating where in my body it is, and breathing into it rather than reacting or suppressing.

The goal is to express what I’m feeling or needing without being defensive, emotional, or passive aggressive.

You’re welcome future Minnow.

A goal I have with my clients is to help them get to a place where they can say:

”Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.” — Audre Lorde

Because usually the person diminishing us isn’t others, but ourselves. If we can own our story, we go from being driven by our ego to being pulled by a calling. It’s a simple but profound transformation that affects every part of our creative journey.

I’ve found the path to getting there is nuanced and unique to each person. Much of it has to do with unlearning rather than learning anything new or profound.

We have to unlearn the framing we put around our lives in; unlearn the reasons for doing what we are doing.

Shame accuses us, with, “Who do you think you are?” But our soul wonders, “What is life expecting of me, and how can I answer its call?”

Creating a space for that still, small voice to be heard and nurtured is how we own our story. In that space, shame suffocates and our soul breathes anew.

I recently found out my mom had dreams to become a writer. I knew she loved books and majored in German literature, but I never knew she wanted to be a writer.

Growing up, my mom would always have K-Radio 1660 AM on at home while doing chores and cooking. There weren’t many Korean TV channels back then, and this was one of the few Korean radio stations in NYC.

There was a program (loosely translated) called “Immigrant Diaries” that she loved. Listeners would submit stories about their experiences as immigrants, and some of them would be chosen to be read on air. Mom told me she’d sometimes cry listening to the show, hearing her own experiences reflected back in these stories. She felt seen and heard, connected to other Korean New Yorkers living parallel lives.

My mom didn’t tell us she had written an essay and submitted it, until she found out it was chosen to be read. I was around 13 years old and the scene I remember is my mom rushing over to the radio as she heard the host introduce her essay. She pressed record on the tape deck and had a big blushing smile on her face as we heard the host’s familiar voice read my mom’s words.

That day, listening to the reading and seeing my mom’s reaction impressed on me for the first time the gravity and power of written words.

She told me she wrote that essay after a phone call with her professor years after she moved to the States. He encouraged her to keep writing, to express herself. I don’t remember her writing anything else after that though. She had put her dreams aside, giving all her energy and focus to raising my brother and I.

I told my mom the other day, I think I got my love for music from dad and my love for words from her. Almost twenty five years later, I’ve seemed to have taken up her dream and made it my own.

Yesterday was my 100th day of publishing a post everyday on my blog. This essay started as a lessons I learned from writing consistently for 100 days, but I realized my lessons started long before then.

But what have I learned after 100 days of daily writing? Well, I’ve learned how to have an idea and see it through from from start to finish. I’ve gained the stamina to trudge through a shitty first draft. I’ve learned that great writing is in the editing. I’ve learned I’m able to express myself with words, more than I ever could with images.

And yet the greatest, most frightening lesson I’ve learned is that I want to be a really good writer. I want to be a wordsmith, sharpening each piece of writing until it can pierce through the noise.

These days writing, especially online writing, is treated like an asset, judged on metrics of growth and sales. It’s what I thought all writing should be, but after going through these last 100 days, I want to pursue writing as a craft not as a product.

So after a 100 days, I’m done with daily blogging. I’ll still write everyday but not to publish for quantity, but edit for quality.

Today also marks the anniversary of Becky and my pandemic year. This time last year we decided to stay home, stopping our routine of freely taking the subway, eating out, and seeing friends. New York would shut down a week later.

I feared whether this quieter life would drain an extrovert like me, but it’s been the opposite. I’ve love the routine and the stillness. “Everyday life” has taken on a new meaning, one that feels full of possibility.

“If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds — wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

The sunken feelings of my enormous past are being raised up these days, demanding to be captured with words. I find myself trying to describe every thought or moment with language. I’m starting to hear the rhythms of syllables, the timbre of each word, and how all of that can subliminally carrying the reader along my prose.

These are the lessons I’m carrying with me going forward. It’s been a year of tragedy, rebuilding, and emerging. For anyone needing encouragement to do something courageous, please reply back to this email and let me know what’s keeping you stuck.

Two years ago, this one quote broke the inertia to help me start writing. Today is the 100th day I’ve been writing consistently on this blog. Just thought it was apt to share again. Thank you Anne Lamott.

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you’re conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of. Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don’t be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done. If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability.

I stumbled upon this video again of Jony Ive speaking 6 years ago. Back then I was too enamored with the man to ever listen to what he was really saying. Now that the myth of Ive has receded, I’m taking away timeless lessons from this video namely, care in our work.

“I believe that we sense, I can’t articulate it, when there’s been care taken with a product, just in the same way we sense carelessness. Sadly, most of our manufactured environment I think testifies to a degree of carelessness.”

In another video he says, “People really do care, if given the choice.”

If given the choice. Meaning, the fault isn’t with the audience, but with the creative.

So much writing these days, is a race to the bottom of the brain stem, using our base instincts to get us to care. But the work that’s created is as careless as those products, force fed to us through feeds and algorithms.

People want to read something and be moved. People want to care. It’s us who has to create something worth caring about.

I finished reading Cathy Park Hong’s book “Minor Feelings” a few days ago. I wish it was written 20 years ago when I was trying to understand myself and my identity.

I’m still digesting the ideas, but I attended a talk she had with another author and one of the questions that was asked was for her to define what she means by minor feelings.

She started to answer, but said that she should just read the definition rather than try to answer it herself. She decided to rely on the words she wrote, rather than what she would say at the moment.

It makes total sense. The words in that book were labored over and thought through with such care and craft. Unless she memorized what shew rote, reading what she did was the most perfect way she could ever explain it.

That, to me was the power and beauty of writing. Being able to clarify our thoughts better than we can at any moment.

A few quotes I’ve recently collected about owning our stories.

A foreign accent is a sign of bravery. — Amy Chua

The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck. — Paul Virilio

What I cannot create, I do not understand. — Richard Feynman

Find out who you are and do it on purpose. — Dolly Parton

It is better to follow your own path, however imperfectly, than to follow someone else’s perfectly. — Bhagavad-Gita

The world conspires to hold us back, but it can’t do that without our permission. — Seth Godin

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.” — CS Lewis

My last newsletter had the most responses from my readers. And the simple, but difficult reason why, is because I’m owning my story and sharing it.

The parts I have to own have to do with my pain and shame, two gauntlets through which I am finding my truth.

Life is a stacking of layers—layers of beauty and joy sandwiched in by pain and shame. If we can dig into it, understand it, and own it we are on our way to a greater story.

I’ve danced around this for too long. Five years of thinking about wanting to write, then two years of consistent writing has led me to that truth embodied in one essay last week.

The resonance I was looking to hit started with a bell inside of me.

So why is this under a series on membership and community? Because this is where I break ground and start to build the foundation.

I’ve reset the counter. This is where I start again.

This past year, I feel as if I’ve traveled through a circle of racial identity. I came into this year with a complacency created by the busyness of my life. I just didn’t have time to think about these things.

But this pandemic year dismantled everything I had built around me. It forced me to stop and digg into myself, carving out my assumptions about who I was and what I was doing. Then the summer came, and I leapt outwards learning to empathize and understand the oppressive effects of systemic racism and white supremacy. I wanted to understand and feel the pain of my fellow Americans whom I was told growing up to keep at a distance.

I’ve come back around to myself, examining my experience as an Asian American, the experience of other Asian Americans, and our collective experience.

It’s easy for me to point at the superstructure of whiteness and say that is the problem. I can clearly see what I am against, but that doesn’t mean I know what I am for.

I want a clear, specific, and wise vision I can live for even if I can’t see it fulfilled in my life time.

In our session last night, my therapist reminded me it starts with understanding my story, who I am, the pain and shame I’ve carried. If I can’t create space for that, then I can’t actually articulate what I am for.