Twenty Something

I am delighted.

Spring is here.

I walk around and I can smell it in the air. Spring is here.

Just like how the sun will always rise the next day, whether you can see it or not, my favorite season has silently arrived. But not silently at all. It is screaming its grand arrival.

On my usual way to the train station for work, I suddenly realized that a full wall of roses had blossomed along the entire road by my neighbors’ houses. I had no idea there were roses planted there the whole time, hidden by the early dark skies and the still naked branches of the trees through late autumn and the chilly winter months. Overnight, spring has turned nature into a grand, beautiful stage dressed in colorful decorations. Even better, it has brought talented musicians who chirp and sing all day long. And I have somehow found myself in a front row seat, ready to enjoy this improv show.

I can’t believe it is almost already April. We are still in the very first season of the year yet it seems like so much has happened. As the world is overwhelmed, from someone’s small inconviniences at work, a friend who did you wrong, anxiety and panic of what to do after finishing school, all the way to families praying for soldiers to come home safely, as some are praying for the lives of tomorrow. This improv show surely has left a very intense first impression of its performance.

As I am writing this, I want to really share how I have been reading more lately.

If you do not know this yet, I too am a fresh out of college newbie at work. After a very, very dreadful yet eventful few months of roaming around the East Coast, a time I would love to write about in a separate post, I finally found my first opportunity all the way in sunny California and stepped into my so called “corporate girlie” era. And to the version of me who thought the war would be over once I landed a job five months ago, oh honey, you were so wrong.

The void, and the depth of the void, waiting to be filled, and could only be filled by myself, felt dark and hollow. To go from what I now believe is one of the most social periods of life to living alone in a brand new city, a strange land really, is a perspective shifting kind of event. Suddenly, stories and posts on Instagram started screaming louder, you envy those who are traveling and taking a gap year, those who got into grad school and got to stay in that little Heaven you once had for just a little more, and those who might be working a job that you once dreamed of, the list goes on…

Maybe the cold, windy nights and the rainy Bay Area winter made it worse, but the loneliness, the total sense of being lost at work, and the constant comparisons to people across every platform made me realize that if I kept living this way, I would only sink deeper into that dark void. So I began reading, at first as nothing more than a substitute for the hours I used to spend on social media. After my first read of the year, The Life Impossible by Matt Haig, which was so lovely by the way, I picked up my second book just as I was stepping into this Spring’s improv show: All About Love by Bell Hooks. I know that probably sounds like a pretty “cringy” title to some people, because it is about love, a word that everyone seems to resent these days and treat like it is somehow deeply uncool. We live in a time when independence and individuality are so strongly emphasized that yearning for love, and wanting to be loved, can make you seem like a total loser or, worse, what people now call “desperate.”

As I am now halfway through this book, I realized that I too was once part of the crowd that despised love, I too, used to make comments like, “It is so sad how much he likes her, what a simp,” or, “Ugh, another typical romcom. You can never find someone like that in real life.” But deep inside, in that same dark void, do we not all carry a deeper desire to be loved, to be seen, and to be recognized?

No matter whether it is romantic love, friendship, or family, I have come to terms with the fact that perfect love does not exist between us humans. As the book explored the ways we can love better, through honesty, commitment, community, and the unlearning of toxic lessons from childhood, all of which felt deeply essential and eye opening to me, I began to understand that perhaps the best way to love is simply to give it everything you have, to become the characters in those movies you once despised.

It is certainly a privilege to be able to shut out the cynicism and weight of the world, and to live as though you are the one writing the story of your life. It is the simplest, yet often the hardest thing for us to do: to let go, to care less about how we are seen, and to become that “maniac.”

It might really be the book, or the flowers and the blue sunny sky, as the season has changed from winter to spring, the show goes on and I decided to change as well. That is to love bravely, and whole heartedly. To love the green grass I walked pass, to love the smiles strangers deliver to me kindly on the train, to love a good glass of wine as I am writing this, and to love that someone despite everything and anything.

We may still be living in the deep, dark void we imagine ourselves trapped in, but are these not good changes after all?