What’s going on in that noggin of hers anyway?
Below are life updates I send manually via email once every 6 or so weeks. If you’d like to be added to the mailing list, pls click that mail icon on the top right of the page so I can add you <3
Being back in Europe feels like embracing the warmth of an ex who was only ever good to you. The smile that stretched across my face as I got off the airport tram was one bred from familiarity, safety, and homecoming. This was a place where, should you misplace a piece of your belongings on an airplane, half a dozen airport staff and travelers alike will help you retrieve it back. Where theft is not the least of your concern.
It’s like that ex your family still asks you about. All your friends know them, know that you two had a great time, remind you that they treated you well. Someone you come back to because you feel safe in their arms. The architecture is familiar; the cathedrals, the cobblestones, just like certain patterns of body hair, the folds of an anus, the way their hips move when they walk. You tell yourself you’ve moved on, are on to better things, yet something draws you back. In it, in him, you find safety, acceptance, comfort.
I’ve spent the last two summers in Europe and told myself this year that I was not to return; I wanted to explore a different part of the world. But on some overcast day in March I found a flight for $276 to Edinburgh and decided that the Highlands shall be explored. The rest of my trip emerged like this: Copenhagen, because I’d been meaning to visit and my Norwegian friend Johannes keeps telling me how much I’d love it. I have an open invite from my friend who lives in Helsinki so I thought I’d tack that on. And lastly, the cheapest flight back to Vancouver from all of Europe was out of Iceland, so that followed naturally as the last stop of my itinerary.
Things are unfolding as planned.
It’s only been twenty-four hours since I’ve escaped the matrix of Toronto and I feel just as much at home as I feel outside of it. I’m staying at this beautiful hostel where 61 people are living long term. They volunteer to clean and to receive people and in return they get their bed for free. There’s a nurse here and a children’s book illustrator and an analyst of geological samples of old British buildings. Everyone’s food is kept in blue storage bins and a dozen fridges with different days of the week labeled to indicate the days on which they get cleaned out. I’ve just finished having my dinner of pasta with chicken breast and arugula, rocket, and a salmon bagel. I’ve been so spoiled by wood-fired Montreal bagels back home and this doughy, New York-style bagel was so astoundingly disappointing. I ate with a fellow from New Zealand who got a three-year work visa for the U.K. and who had just applied for jobs in some organic food stores. For the past ten years he’s worked in organic horticulture and decided that it was time to take a break on account of it being too hard on the body.
I can’t stop thinking about how white traveling is as a hobby, as a lifestyle. How white all of the hostels I’ve stayed at have been, how much of a privilege it is to be able to do so. Surely travel is seen as a necessity for these folks. I later learned that it was a thing for British people to live in hostels when they’re in between jobs. If you’re a person of colour and you’re broke, you work so you make enough money for a roof over your head. If you’re white and you’re broke, you move to a different country to be broke in a different former colony.
I started to understand colonialism. You do the dirty work (but perceived as such only in retrospect) so that your descendants can be set for life. It’s really not that much different from the life where immigrant parents work and sacrifice everything so that their kids don’t have to, but just at a macro, intergenerational, intercenturial level. You take over the world so your former colonies can all have working visa agreements with each other hundreds of years later, and the children there can all communicate with each other and also the rest of the world with their mother tongue. I wish China had colonized the world. I suppose they’re trying their best to catch up.
Ex-horticulture dude and I spoke about communal living and I concluded that everyone in Canada lives in comfortable misery. It’s not something I haven’t heard before. Most recently from a Sri Lankan Uber driver and my friend Mario, whose crowning achievement was spending two years walking the length of Africa from Capetown to Cairo. The first said that he wished he’d never left his home country, because though the country is poor, at least the people were happy. The latter is only in Toronto in between his expeditions as a professional explorer. He always maintained that Toronto is a bubble. I understood it only theoretically but today I got what he meant. Everyone in Toronto is doing more or less the same thing. And they’re at the same time convinced that everyone else in the world is doing that too. I can assure you, they are not. And it only took me 24 hours in a place as unassuming and tame as Edinburgh to be reminded of that.
–
Things are not unfolding as planned.
Dad and I couldn’t hire a car for the highlands because his driver’s license didn’t have English on it and I’d forgotten the pin for my credit card and so couldn’t put down a deposit. The car rental process is brutal, and it has been every single time I’ve had the misfortune of going through it.
We booked the next flight out to Copenhagen. A shame he couldn’t get to see the highlands, but I am happy to be spending a couple more days in Copenhagen.
–
The short answer: softis. Scandinavia does soft serve right. I was so obsessed with softis the past two years I was in Norway that I looked into soft serve production and the key to a smooth, creamy soft serve is having the correct temperature in the machine. It’s always a crapshoot back home— 8 times out of 10 they do it wrong and it’s too icy. 1 time out of 10 the ice cream machine is “broken”, (McDonald’s has figured it out) and so you’re down to a 10% chance of getting a soft serve with good texture and consistency. And then it’s probably too sweet.
The long answer: I was born in a cold place, grew up in a cold place, and live in a cold place. Oslo reminds me of home. I enjoy low sensory, bland assembled ingredients. People dress well here (in stark contrast to most rest of Europe, full offence).
Couple years ago I decided to conduct my life like a white man because it felt like he was the epitome of what a human is under our current paradigm. Unburdened, unbothered, unbridled reign to exercise his existence in this world. Not in survival mode. Not fighting for his life. Asserting himself in every possible way.
I went on a design tour in Copenhagen today and there was so much talk about how the Danes designed their city and all I could think about was how, you could say trivial, the worries people have are when they’ve got all their needs met. Smooth cobblestones laid adjacent to regular ones to reduce the noise bikes make when ridden over them. Copenhagen this, Copenhagen that. Copenhagen as a prefix to describe meticulously thought-out design choices. Like the givingness of bench planks, degrees at which they tilt when leaned back against, how many hours they want their citizens to spend in them (2 hours and 5 minutes per week). The Nordics are the nation equivalents of the white man. They’re striving for the tip of Maslow’s pyramid.
Copenhagen keeps turning car parks into skate parks. Even underground car parks are abandoned simply due to their attracting more traffic. America rids of sidewalks altogether. When people chant, “people over profit,” it’s not empty, because there are places in the world doing just that. Why is America so obsessed with money? Is it because of a scarcity mindset after the Great Depression? It’s definitely why the Chinese are. They’ve been without for so long. Yet Norway was dirt poor and was literally owned by their neighbour until mere decades ago. I bootlicking white people, but save for the plight of the coldness of its peoples and the standard issue problems that face all privileged nations (xenophobia, indigenous issues), they’ve really done a lot of things right.
-
Dad and I toured the Rosenburg castle today. I learned that the Danish flag and monarchy are the oldest in existence. In the treasury there were Crown Jewels and swords and regalia. I thought a lot about power and the seeming necessity of violence in its acquisition. If women ran the world, would there be wars? Given that lesbian relationships have the highest rates of domestic violence, I’m uncertain we should think not. I think women are just as nasty as men. This one queen in ancient China blinded, muted (by way of cutting her tongue off), and chopped off all the limbs of her late husband’s mistress and kept her alive for decades. There’s a Chinese saying that goes, “the most venomous is but the woman’s heart.”
A couple days later we went to visit Freetown Christiana, a self governing, autonomous region in the centre of Copenhagen. Carved into the wooden gates as you walk out was, “You are now entering the E.U.'' The place was inhabited by people I could only describe as odds and ends. People who were not black but who had dreadlocs. People with missing teeth. They all had leathery tanned skin. There was a cafe in there that was Greenland themed, and the people seemed to be of that heritage and speaking that language. I find it endearing that the polar bear is a symbol of Greenland.
It’s a place where weed is legal, and where people are, “free to do as they please so long as it doesn’t interfere with the freedom of others.” The roads were unkept and full of puddles. We had gone on a Sunday night and there was a band playing. I got a glimpse of what concerts must’ve been like in the 70’s. It was a band of men in their 60’s and 70’s performing classic rock numbers. The audience too was filled with people of that demographic. There was a woman in her 50’s or 60’s, a resident I was sure, in a leopard print sports bra, standing on top of a table, dancing like nobody was watching. I watched her and thought that I’d like to be her when I grow up.
Though I’d not yet been, the whole place felt like a permanent burning man. There was street art everywhere, sculptures, a psychedelic indoor skatepark that was handbuilt in the year I was born. People there smoked a lot, and my father made a remark about people not enjoying the fine, pristine fresh air. Are the smokers infringing upon my father’s right to enjoy the untainted air?
I thought if I should like to live in a community like that. I told my dad that it wasn’t that those were my people, because they were not, but it wasn’t that they weren’t either. I for sure wouldn’t reside there permanently, but I would jump at the opportunity to live there for a short while. He exclaimed that those were definitely not his people. That if not for anything the people there simply looked unhealthy. He wasn’t wrong. But I also think if perhaps they even care about such things as skin and oral health. Do we take for granted that a person should care about his health?
Later on a post-dinner walk around the neighborhood I asked my father if he should prefer to have power or freedom. He said that he’d prefer to have freedom. I asked him if he thought that those people living in freetown had more freedom or the royals who lived in the Rosenburg palace. I think we settled on the royals. They could always, and have historically, abdicated. He then talked about how I was too power-hungry and that it was a symptom of having too much undue self-importance. Power in itself is neutral, but it’s how you use it that matters, he tells me. I did at one point want a large amount of money so that after my personal frivolities were satisfied, I could build rehab centres for those with substance abuse issues.
I dropped by the Soho house and attended a workshop by a woman who runs a coaching program called, “The Simplified Method.” She was the token millennial girl boss. Having worked alongside founders and CEOs and in a plethora of global markets, she started her practice of coaching leaders on how to be more mindful, how to slow down. There’s something very late-stage capitalistic-dystopian about this entire venture, but I can’t be bothered to do a deep dive into that depressing thought. But being born at the cusp of the millennial-gen z divide, and myself having referred to myself as a millennial when I was a teenager because that was the up and coming generation at the time, I couldn’t help but be grossly enamoured by this woman who was 39, looked about 28, who’s had such a vastly cosmopolitan career, who too was so successful with her own business, and who presented without a hint of neuroticism. I looked at her website and one of her testimonials was the founder of Hinter, a collection of vacation homes in the Laurentian forest, one of which I decided I had to book for my birthday. At the time it was so obvious why I literally had to, but a few weeks later I see how silly it is to think it anything other than a collection of well-marketed, beautifully branded airbnbs.
That same day, too at the Soho House, I took two yoga classes. There was only one other student in the noon class. She was a woman in her 40’s (or looked to be anyway) who told me in her heavy accent that she was, “Korean, from New York.” Does everyone who lives in New York for any amount of time just claim to be from there? I think back to my high school boyfriend who claimed to be from New York, while we were in Vancouver, even though all he’d done was go to college there. She had on a fabulous coat which I complimented and when I introduced myself and held out my hand she refused to shake it. She only shakes hands in business proceedings.
“I always hug or kiss.” I’m not one to judge people for their cultural practices but give me a fucking break. You’re Korean, from New York, meeting a Chinese-Canadian woman at the Soho House in Copenhagen for the first time after a yoga class. You can shake my goddamned hand.
Copenhagen ended with a brief make out session with a Polish-Moroccan British… videographer/content producer (?) in Soren Kierkegaard’s grave. But the fact that it had been in Kierkergaard’s grave was the most interesting part about the whole affair.
–
I’ve been traveling for exactly three weeks now. I’m staying at my friend’s place in Helsinki and living with her and her mom who’s come to visit from Vietnam. Yesterday her Russian friends sent her homemade Russian food: rye bread, lard, green onions, borscht, and these crepes filled with ground meat. It was delicious.
Helsinki is an extremely underwhelming city. It’s very drab, for lack of a better word. It’s not as refined as Copenhagen, not as elegant as Oslo. The people dress in whatever. The buildings are grey and dull. I shouldn’t want to return.
Thuy has been indoctrinating me on her socialist and anti-work ideals and it’s been working. On Monday morning I smugly remarked at our both being working women, only to be met with her disdain.
“I should be chilling on a beach eating berries, not destroying my posture and eyesight working in front of a laptop.” And she wasn’t saying it because she saw an aspirational tweet or tiktok about it on her timeline and felt that, theoretically, she could be chilling on a beach eating blackberries. She said it with her whole chest; and because every chance she gets, she does something akin to eating blueberries on a beach.
That day I went for a walk in the forest. The next day I decided to do the same, and as I was leaving, her mom asked if I would pick some wild flowers on my way back. My heart burst, but why of course I will do that, with every last drop of my being, I will do that. I felt that my life had peaked in that very moment. It was what I was born to do. And so I did. I left with her mother’s clippers, gathered a bunch of odds and ends, dead branches and dandelions and some fuzzy white clusters and some fuzzy mauve and magenta clusters, and brought back with me those fragments and an entire colony of ants.
I’ve been burning through books on this trip. I rekindled my love for Joan Didion, grew a love for Edith Wharton, was thoroughly disappointed by Susan Sontag, and felt both incredibly in awe and unsettled by Henry Miller. I rediscover, each time I’m on a reading spree, how most delightful reading is; yet for some reason always, after a period of frenzy, stop.
I predictably deactivated IG again and predictably feel measurably better about myself and the world around me. I rediscover, each time I do, how most delightful being disconnected is; yet for some reason resort always, after a period of peace and clarity, to redownloading the damned thing.
I’ve done three 10ks in the past 2 weeks. The first one I could barely finish since I hadn’t run in a month due to an injury. The second was much better. I ran circles in Soren Kierkegaard’s grave. I’m serious. He’s buried in a cemetery in the middle of Copenhagen, alongside Hans Christian Andersson and other prominent Danes. It’s a great park to run and relax in. The last one was by the forest right behind Thuy’s apartment. My average heart rate has decreased, though my time has remained more or less the same, and I wonder if that’s a sign of improvement.
The pack of gum I bought in a convenience store in a Helsinki subway station, which I carefully selected for its standard and unremarkable packaging, was more than 2 euros.
Thuy told me that people in Finland really don’t care about money or status or anything like that.
“What do they care about then?”
“Who you are as a person.” I was genuinely shocked that there were places in the world where people actually cared about that. Not in a fastidious, self-righteous way, but in a genuine way that the Vietnamese girl who came here for school ten years ago and who has fully integrated will vouch for it to her Canadian friend coming to visit.
Citing Mario, citing the Sri Lankan Uber driver, citing my other friend in Finland who tells me that he moved here because it's supposedly the happiest country on earth– evidently, it seems, that everyone knows something we North Americans are not privy to.
I’m reminded of a conversation I had with my friend Arthur in Norway on a pier in Oslo at sundown.
“I never want to be like ‘oh, sorry I can’t help you with this because I’m trying to make partner.” I think about the never-ending packages that arrive at my doorstep. I think about the $7 coffees I’ve accepted as a sunken cost of living in the city. I think about the time I save by putting laundry in the dryer instead of on a drying rack; oh how tortured one’s life must be to need to save oneself the 10 minutes a week required to hang up laundry? It was the complete antithesis to Naval’s advice of ascribing an hourly rate to your time. I won’t say it’s complete bullocks, but it’s necessary that we understand both ends of the spectrum: at one end, ascribing your time the value of $5000 an hour (actual example he gave), and outsourcing anything in your life that would cost less than that to someone else, and at the other, finding the value in the time and consideration you take by hanging up your underwear to dry, one by one.
How much of the marketing message today is about freeing up time so you can, “focus on what’s important?” Isn’t that a bit of an odd statement to make? If it’s important, wouldn’t you already be focused on it? One of our clients is an executive assistant staffing agency, and one of the value props is that their assistants free up time for you to do what actually matters. But could it be that each moment has the potential, if you allow it, to have just as much value as any other one in time? That the time you spend mindfully taking a shit, without a phone in hand, could be just as valuable as one where you’re cumming on top of the love of your life? Or watching your kid utter their first word or get your PhD or whatever for all you folks much more civilized than I.
At that Palestinian girl boss who’d just relocated from Hong Kong to Copenhagen’s workshop, she talked about slowing down. How you start by simply doing everything slower. Brushing your teeth, eating your meals, cooking. I didn’t quite understand it at the time (a week ago), but I think I’m starting to get it now? Food tastes better when you slow down to chew. You also realize how quickly you’ve been chewing. What are you in a rush for? The way the sea glistens under the sun when you stop to look at it, and I mean really look at it, is as breathtaking as any experience you could pay for.
When I first moved to Toronto my biggest takeaway was that everyone in Toronto was doing something (aspirational), and that everyone in Vancouver was just chilling (derogatory). I finally see the errors of my ways. I think it’s such that there is so little life, and by life I mean nature, and the contending with it, that people must manufacture things to do in Toronto. Conversely, in Vancouver and places like the Nordics, the tropics, islands in general, nature is so vast and awe-inspiring that it succeeds, if only ever so slightly, in challenging capitalism and the Puritan work ethic. Thuy and I concurred that the point of travelling wasn’t to see the buildings, landmarks, but to experience how other people live.
“It seems that you’re having a good trip.”
I went to the sauna today. Sauna is such a huge part of Finnish culture that it’s a standard fixing of every apartment. In fact the word sauna is Finnish. There are public ones that cost five euros and also a bunch that are free. The one I went to was much more expensive (25 whole euros), and was catered towards tourists. It had four different sauna rooms, and it was right on the water so you could jump into the ocean to cool down. I forgot how nice doing rounds of hot/cold therapy felt– like my body was getting an oil change.
One thing that has been a persistent thing I’ve noticed in the past little bit was how exotic and posh something can sound simply by virtue of it being expressed in a language other than that of its origin. China is not the chicest country by any means, but the sentence, “I had xiaolongbao in Shanghai” is. France is on the other end of the spectrum, but talking about manger des baguettes a Bordeaux loses its charm (the charm remains here because I’m writing in English, but I don’t imagine it anymore exciting than, “I’m getting timbits in Calgary.”)
-
Thuy, her mom, her friend Maria and I went on a little road trip into the lake district of Finland over the weekend. The more I travel the more I appreciate B.C. There truly is nothing like it in the entire world. Finland reminded me a lot of Ontario. They too have a cottage culture here. They call it Mökki.
I feel so grateful to have been able to live as the locals do in the places I travel to, and I found myself so privileged as I drove through the Finnish countryside.
As we stopped along the way we found wild blueberries and strawberries and raspberries. After tasting those I realized that it’s not that artificial flavours of things don’t taste like the real thing– it’s that the real thing we get isn’t so very real after all.
“We are working when we could be picking berries.”
“We have to work during the few hours of the day when there is actually sunlight in the wintertime.”
We talked about cults and I professed that I’d be the first person to join a cult; I’ve always been extremely impressionable. But recently I’ve realized that no one is really correct about anything. Thuy is a socialist because she lives in Finland and is part of the workforce. If her circumstances were different her views would be too. I don’t really hold any political views because I see my role in society as fluid. And I never hold myself to any moral high ground over evil capitalists because I know for sure that I would likely make the same choices if I were in their shoes. Or perhaps that doesn’t prove anything other than the fact that I am an evil capitalist. Thing is, we don’t know, and that’s what irks me most about discussions surrounding politics or really anything about which people hold strong opinions. They are so painfully unaware of how their views are influenced by their circumstances– most of the time, it’s in its totality. My very view of this is influenced by my exposure to different ideas and perspectives through travelling and living in different places. Maybe one’s views ought be more firm. But for the pursuit of what? Continuity or stability? Most definitely. But it’d be detrimental to other pursuits, like neuroplasticity or existentialism. And which of these is more valuable? Do you catch my drift?
I’m going to give up my apartment in Toronto and become fully nomadic next year. I don’t think there’s much left for me in Toronto. My only qualm is that my current apartment is very close to UofT and I do have intentions of pursuing an MA there. But I feel as though I’m learning and doing so much more philosophy traveling than I could possibly by reading. The real, applicable stuff anyway. I feel like the ancient philosophers did philosophy to figure out how to live, and the latter ones to intellectually entertain themselves, measure their dicks amongst their predecessors, and be written into canon. HOT TAKE I KNOW!!!!
I thought about if I knew anyone who was on a similar life path as me, and three people came to mind. First was one of my jiu jitsu coaches. He’d moved to Mexico for 5 years and then trained in Rio for 6 months before returning back to Toronto. I don’t think it’s quite the same as what I’m looking for but it is similar. The second is somebody I knew in college who travels to the most Instagrammable places imaginable with his yoga teacher girlfriend. I went to look on his Instagram to be sure, and through meticulously crafted reels of exotic locations, aspirational music and truly breathtaking scenery, I couldn’t help but feel that it was all a little too perfect. Perfect bodies, perfect sunsets, perfect willpower and discipline, a perfect couple. I think back to when I spoke to him about Vipassana and he told me that he’d already, “passed that level.” The last person I thought of felt to be the most aligned with my values. He’s the one whose house I stayed at last year in northern Norway. He’d purchased a farmhouse with a sizable slice of land on an island. He travels for half the year with his girlfriend and stays on the island the rest of the year, continuously renovating the place by himself. Arthur, the one who prioritizes helping his brother over making partner. He decided to stop using imessage and is now only reachable by email. Fucking guy. But I respect the hustle against the hustle.
I ran again yesterday. This time around the lake by Thuy’s house, and I saw one of the most gorgeous sunsets of my life. That was after driving back all day from the cottage where we’d spent the weekend, around 11pm. That was my reward for pulling myself on that run, I thought.
–
I’ve been thinking about how glad I am to have successfully de-centered men in my life. I have a body of writing from between 2019-2022 centered around the tumultuous feelings I experienced as a woman with self-diagnosed BPD, mostly regarding the men I loved. After a boatload of psychedelics, therapy, journalling, and meditation, I can confidently say that I’ve cured myself of the ailment. And I don’t really feel for men the way I used to. I lamented to Josh that I don’t know what to write about anymore. He said that I would write about inner peace, like the old masters.
Modern men are pretty fucked, much more than the modern woman. Men’s life expectancy are statistically lengthened when they’re married, while women are statistically more likely to die. I journaled about this moments ago, about how I don’t hate men, I just feel bad for them. I pity them. Oh to be a man in modern society, where if you’re lucky enough to escape the Andrew Tate manosphere, you end up in the realm of Youtube personalities selling you courses on affiliate marketing.
Thuy talked about a street interview she saw on Tiktok about how women were asked whether they’d rather be stuck in the woods with a man or a bear. The consensus was a bear.
I’m thinking about taking out a lump sum of cash every month and just paying for things with that. There are far too few barriers between me and my Apple Pay, and it’s concerning. It’s been more than once that before I could change my mind about a purchase, my Face ID has already registered my face and paid for the damn thing.
A lot of changes are coming, good changes. I asked my friend who’d called off her engagement, quit her job, and sold everything she had to travel, how far along she was in that journey, and what her plans were afterwards. She said that she genuinely doesn’t know, and I thought that to be so much fun. Life is a game, and a game’s only fun when you don’t know what’s going to happen next.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my future children. How I’d raise them, the type of messaging and conditioning I’d give them. Because really, you could instill any belief you want to in children. You could do the same to yourself too, it just takes a lot more work. I thought about all the things I’d do differently from the way my mother raised me. And then I thought about how I’m viewing child rearing as a way to redo my own life, when the reality is that I have that opportunity every second that I am alive. I could change, I could unlearn, I could rewire. For example, the fact that I have no limitations to do anything I wanted to was a concept that I only believed in after Josh told me that merely four years ago. The fact that I could do anything, because I’m a girl, wasn’t instilled in me until a B.C. Ferries attendant gave me some tape after I’d asked her if she had anything to help me fix my broken backpack. Imagine how different my life would be if that were instilled in us as children, I remember lamenting to Ashley, my travel companion. These are things I’d like my children to know in their heart to be unshakeable truths.
I’m looking into sailing lessons for when I get back to Vancouver at the end of the month. I’m going to sail across an ocean. Do the PCT. Ride horses in Mongolia. Do ayahuasca in Ecuador with a shaman the local guide I had on my volunteer trip I took a decade ago knows. Free dive with whales in Tonga. Spelunk the world’s largest cave.
Back when men were still the main focus of my life, I’d still wanted to do all these things. I’d wanted my proposal to happen in a hot air balloon in Cappadocia. But then two years ago I went to Turkey so I just did it myself. I thought I’d do the cave on my honeymoon. It’s scheduled to happen either next winter or the winter after that. I think about all the adventures that Santi has with his girlfriend, and they look fun enough, but there is something profoundly beautiful about travelling the world with the only true and permanent love of your life: yourself. The grapes here are indeed sour.
I’ve been dreaming about moving to New York for some years now, but I decided that I would go after I see the world. It’s a good microcosm, a distilled version of the world. But if you were to live there before seeing the actual world, you’re bound to think pyrite gold.
Hello or hello again darling,
Happy pride!
As soon as I finished the last piece I immediately had more thoughts I wanted to explore. I wanted to do it as a short follow up but since then more substantial things have come up so we’ll see where we go with this one.
Part 1: Make your psyche a pleasant place to be.
I come from a separated family. Literally. My parents spent 6 months living in the same place after they got married before my father moved to a different city for work, and they’ve been in a long-distance marriage since. It'll have been 30 years in September.
My mom and I moved to Canada when I was 6 years old and my father has split his time between Vancouver and China since then, continuing now to this day. And ever since I moved to Toronto two years ago, the three of us (I’m an only child) have lived our separate lives in different corners of the earth. I like to call this family dynamic the Vancouver special, except my dad doesn’t have a second family in China as is common with this model.
He’s a very hard worker. He often tells me that the money he makes is through sweat and hard work rather than smarts. On top of working very hard, he spends half the year on his own, and he has for the majority of his marriage and family life. I give this context so you understand the conditions which I believe were at least in part responsible for my father’s astute stoicism. He doesn’t have too many vices or “red flags”, as we call them now, save for the fact that he, like every respectable father and cringeworthy boy, likes his craft IPAs a bit too much and thinks alcohol bottles constitute decor.
He’s always told me that as people we will spend the majority of our lives alone. This checks out, as the way I describe what being an only child is like to others is that you are so lonely that it it your normal. Being lonely is the time you spend with your eyes open, and not being lonely is the time you spend blinking. Thoguh I don't think I was ever truly lonely. My father always speaks of the distinction between being alone and being lonely. "When one cannot withstand being alone, one becomes lonely".
The question of, "how can they live like this?", comes up a lot when we hear of things like people who use 16-in-1 body wash, or eating only once a day, or carrying over thousands in credit card debt. Surely my mode of existence is one unimaginable to those with siblings and big families. But it is the one I know best, and it is the one I would probably choose over other alternatives.
I was walking down Spadina by myself when I thought about this. We spend so much time alone, we must make our psyche a pleasant place to be. To plant some flowers, sweep it up now and again, decorate it with things we enjoy looking at.
Too many people have neglected and abused their psyche that they cannot bear being in it, and escape it via different routes– substances, sex, food, video games, shopping, and that’s no way to live. How can they live like that? How can I live like this?
Part 2. Freedom vs. Love
My therapist talks about how there is a freedom train and a love train. And that when made to choose, men will always pick the freedom train, and women will always pick the love train. I think he’s correct for the most part. But recently, again as I was walking up Spadina, after running a 10k, I started thinking about all of my favourite things to do– jiu jitsu, pole, surfing, snowboarding, horseback riding, and why I do them. For many of them, the first word that came to mind was liberation.
I’d been thinking a lot about how perhaps I should like to settle down in the next few years with someone I already knew, like an ex (I remain friends with all but one) or a long time friend perhaps. Someone I already knew. Like really knew. Someone who’s proven that they’re not going to leave at the first sign of obstruction.
I talked about this with my friend Reem, and she asked me why I wanted to do that. I told her that it’s because I wanted a big family, three children, and I’d always thought that I’d like to finish producing my family by my mid to late 30’s. She asked me what I’d say if she told me that that was her plan, and I told her that I’d support her but that I’d think that she'd be selling herself short. And she said that that’s exactly how she feels about me. Reem is one of my wisest friends and I take her opinion with a lot of weight.
As I was thinking about all of my hobbies, I realized how the common thread amongst so many of my favourite things to do was the feeling of liberation, and how I’d be acting in literally my worst interest by choosing to settle down with someone for instrumental and not intrinsic value.
One time I was getting coffee with a lover and I asked him where he saw himself in 5 years. He said that kids would probably be in the picture. He asked me and I said the same, that I’d probably be looking for a sperm donor, or asking one of my friends for a donation. I’d both jokingly and seriously asked more than one of my exes if they’d be willing to do that for me. No confirmations yet.
“You don’t want a husband?” he asked me. I didn’t not want a husband. But I didn’t necessarily want one either. What I wanted was to raise children. Whether I do that by myself or with a man is irrelevant.
Lots of my friends have pets. And I have developed forms of attachment to the animals that have lived at my house (evidently not very deeply). I see my friends pour so much love into their pets and receive as much back. I have one friend who walks her dog four times a day, every day. One of her closest friends is the owner of her dog’s best friend. Her life revolves around Milo and she wouldn’t have it any other way.
I held my roommate in my arms as she broke down as her rabbit passed away in her arms in the Uber I called her on her way to the vet. She’s grown up with animals her entire life and she extends so much care to all of her animals. But that’s not me. I can do without the love. I like my ability to fly anywhere on a whim too much. Or perhaps it's because I have enough self-love.
My roommate’s friend celebrated her 30th at our house last night, and this afternoon she told me about how her boyfriend took her shopping all day, got her an iPad, got her two cakes because he’d messed up the first one. One of her friends got her a baby pink mini cocotte amongst other cute gifts, and I thought about how nice a friend she was. My good friend’s younger brother just got a girlfriend as well and he sent me a photo of him making chocolate covered strawberries for her. It got me thinking, is this what I want? On paper it seems obvious, who doesn’t want a boyfriend who spoils them? But I just wasn’t sure that that would make me happy. Sure, it'd be sweet, but it just wouldn't hit the spot. I thought about what a partner could do to make me happy, and it really wasn’t any of those things. I think those things are cute, but I generally use cute more than slightly derogatorily. Cute, as in, juvenile, as in, inconsequential, as in, dismissible.
My top two love languages are physical touch and food, but perhaps there is a more nuanced third one: freedom.
–
Life is pretty crazy. Every day I am discovering so many things about myself. Recently it’s been my queerness and kinkiness. I had sex with my first they/them recently. Nonbinary dude. My binary mind had a pretty hard time understanding it. My best friend Tina, when I went to visit her last fall in Edmonton, said that it’s pretty perverted to be so focused on people’s genitals when we were having a discussion about trans people. I think she may have been right.
I also went to a queer rope event. I felt so relaxed and calm, my parasympathetic nervous system was fully activated. I’m not in queer spaces much so it was a very interesting juxtaposition to the straight spaces I’m always in, namely my jiu jitsu gym. The energy was night and day. And for the first time I was able to attach that feeling of safety to the pride and trans flags.
I’ve never felt a strong connection to pride even though I am part of the community. Last year at my work’s pride event the drag queen MC’ing talked about how pride is not about gays, straights, trans, it’s about being proud of who you are whatever the fuck that may be. That resonated with me so much, and the baby queer in me felt so seen.
I may be going to a sex party with a rigger (somebody who ties) I found on fetlife. I sent him a google meets invite to get some face time to sus out the vibes and I’m meeting him for coffee tomorrow before my pole class. It was all very corporate.
I may be competing in two jiu jitsu competitions next weekend and the weekend after that.
Thanks for reading doll, appreciate you taking the time and effort to reciprocate my efforts to connect with you. Talk to you in a few weeks <3
Xoxo
LZ
P.S. I've started taking bachata classes and have fallen in love with it!
P.P.S. If you're new and would like to see the previous edit, pls lmk and I'll send it to you!
Hello darling,
I’m so flattered that you’re here. And I’m so excited to spend the next little bit with you.
I’m typing away at the pretzel lounge of the Soho House in Toronto. Adelaide and Simcoe, right downtown in the entertainment district.
It’s Sunday, May 22nd, and it’s a beautiful sunny day. I’m listening to Grimes.
This first bit is NSFW, so skip as needed.
—
Last Friday I finally got to do something that I’ve been meaning to try for years. It was in a neighbourhood I’d never been to before, Davenport. I took the College streetcar up to its terminal station and walked up Landsdowne for about thirty minutes up to 1444 Dupont. On my way, I stopped by one of my favourite ice cream shops in the city, Ruru Baked, and got a mini split of cornbread and vegan tofu pudding ice cream. The cornbread one was delicious, while the tofu one tasted as I had expected. I don’t like vegan ice cream.
I was walking myself to an introductory Shibari class. Japanese rope bondage.
I don’t know when or how I was introduced to such a concept, but I’d known for all of my adult life that I liked being tied up. After the class there was an open salon, or a rope party, as they call it, where people would come to tie and be tied up. I was speaking to this Chinese man who was also a first-timer, and he asked me if I liked being tied up because it made me feel safe. I’d never thought about that before, but I suppose it is not entirely different from a tight whole-body hug, or a 360-degree weighted blanket.
I was late because I thought the class started at 7:30 when it started at 7 pm. As I was walking in I heard the instructor say, “Now let’s get to the fun stuff”, and I knew that I was right on time.
The instructor was a tall white man in his 40s. I’d later find out that he was engaged to a much younger Asian woman, the one who checked me in at the door. Judgements were passed.
In the class I learned the single-column tie, the double-column tie, and what they call a Yuki knot. There were a few couples there, some older, some younger, some white, some people of colour. At the end of the class the instructor did a demonstration with his fiancé where he did a few different poses and suspensions. Throughout the demonstration, the two of them exchanged little bits of affection, like a boop on the nose, a sweeping of the hair away from the face, and I remember finding it rather sappy.
I stayed for the rope party afterward and had an elderly gentleman named Paul put me in a Kazami-ryu takatekote. He wasn’t very good as he had asked me to try to escape and I did.
There were two people at the party who stood out to me. One was a woman who was celebrating her birthday that night who had a severe limp in her leg. The play was that she was going to be tied up and suspended from one side of the room to the other. She wore a grapefruit lace bodysuit that was cut high, which revealed the sides of her red lace thong. She was pretty.
I thought about the intermingling of disability and rope.
The other one was a big, bald man who was on the heavier side. He spent about an hour doing multiple different transitions on a very small Asian woman. The harness he gave her was beautiful, it was done with red rope and reminded me of Chinese knots.
I was then tied up by my instructor, who put me in a similar harness, but then suspended me, turned me upside down, suspended by my thighs into a slanted mermaid shape with my knees bent, before turning me all the way upside down, hung by my feet.
It was an experience that’s difficult to put into words. The instructor had talked about how in their classes they train their students to tie so that it becomes muscle memory so that they can focus on their connection with their partner rather than figuring out what to do next with the rope. And he had demonstrated the type of expertise, especially when compared to Paul, of a skilled musician. There was a level of both focus and detachment that was present in his energy. The way he moved my arms, the way he ran his ringers on my body to locate a nerve, whether to avoid or to circumvent I wasn’t certain, the way he handled the rope as it went over and underneath my body. My entire body was filled with arousal. It was just hits and hits of dopamine, from anticipation, from surrendering myself, from I wasn’t sure what else but there was definitely something else.
The entire process lasted about twenty minutes, and after he untied me, we chatted a bit about aftercare. He introduced me to a website called fetlife which was an online kink community. He said that he had met many people who’d caught the rope bug, and I didn’t tell him that I felt like I was changed forever.
There are a few things that I’d tried in recent years through which I felt a distinct before and after. The first time I went scuba diving, seeing what I’d ever only ever seen below me, schools of fish, above me, is a memory I will forever cherish. It was my ticket of admission into the ocean, somewhere I’d always felt was home. And then there’s jiu jitsu. There’s who I was before I started training jiu jitsu, and there’s who I’ve been after. And then there’s shibari.
After the intro class but before the salon, the instructor’s fiancé asked me how I’d found out about this. I gave her the answer I explained earlier on in this piece, and she asked me if it was porn. Interestingly enough I’d never watched porn of that sort. It was genuinely an innate knowing.
It’s been less than 48 hours since the experience so I’m not sure what effect this will have on me, but for now, all I can say is that I feel I’d opened the doors to a part of me I’d always been curious about.
One way I can say for certain it has changed me is that it made me question the speed at which I pass judgment. The first thing I thought about when I walked into the room was about the general midness of the room. I spend a lot of time at Barry’s Bootcamp and pilates studios, and I generally select for physical attractiveness for my friends and lovers so I’m used to seeing conventionally attractive people.
I remember reading this one post in r/blackpeopletwitter about how people need to stop using social media because she saw men of all shapes, sizes, incomes, and women of all weights sizes, with and without children loved and loved well. And on Friday night it was something that I saw with my own eyes. The bigger, bald gentleman had a beautiful partner who had greeted him with kisses, and after his session with the small Asian lady I oversaw the two of them cuddling on the couch in the lounge area, talking, laughing, her hand over his chest.
There was another couple, and for the entire time they were there, there was not a moment when I didn’t see them smile and look lovingly into each other’s eyes. The man was around the same height as the woman, and he had a smaller build than her.
And another couple, they walked in a little bit later, a heavier Asian man with a very skinny white girl with blue hair and facial piercings. They too displayed such fondness and affection toward each other. In fact, after I was untied by the instructor she came over and asked if I wanted a cup of hot water. I felt like I was taken care of by a rave mom.
The sensation was not unlike being on drugs. And afterward it did feel like I was coming down on MDMA. There was an emptiness, a stark contrast to the overstimulation that my brain experienced during the experience. It was by then around 11:30 pm, and I ubered home shortly. It was cold and rainy, and I thought about how this is something I’d much rather do with a partner.
Even though I’d known about the Toronto Kinabalu Salon for years now, it wasn’t until a girl at my pole studio talked about it that I decided to finally go to a class. She said that it was meditative and liberating, both of which I can vouch for.
I thought about how much Japanese culture (jiu jitsu, ikebana, and now shibari) I practice, and if in fact I’ve been a weeb all along.
After I got home my friend who’d gone with her ex-boyfriend described it as nice because it felt like she was a little ham. And then I saw all the plants hanging in their macrame and could not ever look at them the same.
—
I went back to China for two month in the wintertime, and I really did not have a good time. I had to contend with all the darker sides of my family that I’d never had to before, when I would visit China as a kid, just to shop and eat and have fun. I had to witness my grand aunt’s crippling depression, selfishness, and human nature, my grandfather’s exhausting narcissism, the abuse experienced by more than one aunt, and the simultaneous helplessness and oblivion of the Chinese person to the forces of their government, and the weight and effects thereof of five millennia of history has on the common person.
Because of the above-mentioned factors, isolation from my usual support systems, and a disturbed sleep schedule for I was still working partial EST hours, as soon as I got back to Toronto, I was focused on getting my life back to the norm. I purposefully neglected my relationship with my grandmother and my parents. It was simply too painful.
That was over three months ago, and recently during the ice bath portion of an exposure therapy session, all of my repressed emotions were finally exorcised. My good friend KP was in the tub with me and I can only imagine her thoughts as she saw me make faces that can only be described as gargoylesque. Afterwards in the sauna I told her what that was about, and that I was going to talk to my grandma about why I’d been distant.
That was maybe a week or so ago, and a few nights ago I finally told my grandma all that was going through my mind. Her response was rather comedic. She said something to the effect of, “That’s a lot of questions! I have a lot of work I need to do before going to Canada, I’ll get back to you when I have a bit more time”. Mind you the questions in question were things like how she conceptualized love throughout different points of her life, how familial love differs from romantic love, and things to that effect. Now that I think about it I mean, fair, those are heavy questions, and she’s a busy gal. I hope I too have enough things going on in my life that I must tell my granddaughter that I’ll respond in 3-5 business days when I’m 82.
She eventually did send me many voice notes, explaining how her and my grandfathers’ genders, orders of birth, and upbringing dictated the dynamics of their relationship. That he did care for her when she was ill, that she grew up used to letting many things go, that her high school crush asked her out eventually but it was too late because she’d already met my grandfather. It’s very sweet that she still remembers. The guy’s probably dead if we’re being real here, but he lives on in her memory.
—
I’m going to be traveling again soon. I’m flying into Edinburgh, meeting up with my good friend Chloe for a long weekend, and then meeting up with my dad to do a road trip through the Highlands. After that, we’ll be spending a few days in Copenhagen, after which he’ll fly back to Vancouver. I will continue on to Finland to see a friend I met at Cannes last year, and then hopping over to Iceland to meet up with my friend Rennae before heading back to Vancouver. My mother’s in Shenyang right now and I found out recently that my grandparents will be coming back to Vancouver with her. I’ll be spending most of August in Vancouver with the big fam, which I’m very excited about. I miss my house, I miss my patio, I miss my kitchen and the dishwasher.
I’m excited to see my blueberry bushes and eat her fruits.
I’ve been grappling with the ethics of my work a lot recently. You know the ads that show up on your feed more than organic posts these days it seems? I make those. Or as I’d like to call it, digital garbage. I had a talk with my boss about this and he explained it in quite a simple way.
“Think about if this were hundreds of years ago, you’d have a market where people gather to buy things right? And each vendor would need a sign that says what they’re selling. We’re basically the people who write those signs.”
And I mean heck, we are just providing a service. It’s convoluted beyond belief, but it’s really not all that different from a barber giving haircuts. At least that’s what I’m telling myself to tide myself over until my next shrooms trip.
—
Mother’s Day was last week, and that was the shrooms trip that made me think about my job. It was difficult as it always is. I’ve had a tumultuous relationship with my mother, and though I think that we’ve moved beyond it, it is still a sore spot. So when I was peaking on shrooms, seeing people walk on Dundas with their mothers, with no respect or consideration to my circumstances, I was surely glad to have worn sunglasses.
—
I spent the past three months dating people from Hinge, which came to a very conclusive end recently when I finally read The Moon and the Sixpence and realized that no boy from Hinge will ever stimulate me more than Maugham.
I’m in a really good place right now and I genuinely do not see a place for a relationship in my life right now. I get plenty of love, affection, physical touch, quality time, and positive energetic exchange from my best friends here. Casual sex is predictively unfulfilling, and I’ve learned that as an introvert I cannot afford the energetic expenditure.
My roommate Emily calls the men I see my “flavours of the week.” When my intern asked me what my flavour of the week was, I told her, “Didion”.
—
I’m reading her book, “The White Album”, which is her recount of the events that happened in America in the 60’s. I’m not as familiar with Americana as I sometimes pretend to be, so a lot of the references get lost. But alas, one of the reviews for the book on Goodreads was, “She’s such a cunt. I love her”, and I have to agree.
—
The weather is finally nice in Toronto. It’s actually my first May here. And I’m so sorry I missed it for the past two years. I think I made a really good decision to go away in the deep summer this year, because I really could get used to weather like this.
—
I’m doing a pole competition next Thursday that I’ve been rehearsing for. I’m very excited. I’ve been doing pole for nearly a year and a half but only recently got pole shoes. They’re clear with sparkles that float around like a snow globe.
—
I’ve also been doing a lot of jiu jitsu. I switched to a new gym in February and have learned more in two months than I did the entire year I was at my last gym. I feel really good about my jiu jitsu. A guy visiting from Montreal told me that I ought to go train at his gym in Montreal, because “we’re all savages like you”. I tapped a brown belt twice in one round, and I was as surprised as he for getting the guillotine. Another blue belt complimented me on my attacks, calling them something to the effect of sharp. Few things give me as much happiness as jiu jitsu, and few compliments mean as much to me as compliments on my game.
I’ve always been a passive player who stays on the defensive side, mostly due to laziness, but recently I’ve been a lot more offensive. Partly because I’ve learned more attacks, partly because I’ve been rolling with people who make me feel safe to attack them.
All the coaches at this new gym are great, but two stand out. One talks about really high-level stuff, real psychological stuff, which most coaches never talk about. And the other just has this jiu jitsu instinct in him. It’s like he was born to do jiu jitsu, it’s very metaphysical. I’ve never seen anything like it.
—
I’m really excited to go back to school in September. I registered as a non-degree student and I’m probably going to take a course in either linguistics or computational logic. I find myself straying away from stoicism which has been my modus operandi for a few years now. Josh has maintained that I will find more solace in eastern philosophy, and I think I am finally coming around. I also find myself interested in more quantitative subjects. Regardless of what course I take it’ll be very nice to reverse some of the brain rot I experience every day making digital garbage.
—
That was a lot. Thanks for staying with me til the end. Share your thoughts if you feel inclined. Give me your life updates. How are your pets doing? What’s keeping you going these days? New treat you discovered in a cafe in the neighbourhood?
I don’t use social media anymore and I started this mailing list so that I can connect with people who care to stay in touch. You’ve made it this far, so stay in touch!!!!!
Xoxo,
LZ