"You don't need someone to complete you, you only need someone to accept you completely." - Unknown
During my therapy session this week, I shared how I spent my week off conducting a social experiment embracing my independence without people pleasing. What did that look like and how did I show up for myself? How did it feel to curate my own itinerary, to only do the activities that I wanted to do, and to create peak experiences? Every decision was made out of desire. Big decisions like what hotel I was going to stay at, where I was going to sit for the Silk Sonic concert, and what night I was going to visit Partage for the tasting menu experience. To the minute decisions like what times I was going to utilize the hotel gym and pool, which ended up being the earlier the better before both places got too crowded. Anxiety attack aside (read last week's blog detailing that), the result was that I felt a sense of validation once I acknowledged that I accomplished everything I set out to do in the 48 hours I was there. Now there may be something to the fact that I struggled with being idle and that once I completed my checklist I felt no desire to remain in Las Vegas. Could I have easily remained in Las Vegas for another day, lounge at the pool, and eat my way through Chinatown? Sure, but I still carried the PTSD in regards to COVID safety and was relieved to have experienced and escaped Las Vegas remaining COVID free.
We then spoke about the feelings of solitude and loneliness I felt during my trip. Food and music in particular are communal experiences that unifies people from all walks of life. Tangent: in general I prefer comfort dining to the often pretentious nature of fine dining. Plus I resent the cultural superiority of Western European cuisines given more prestige in the culinary world than foods from Asia, Latin America, and African regions which often are regarded as "homey" due to their presentation and require "less technique". Reserving a table at Partage was truly a departure from my regular dining habits, and a chance to allow myself to indulge in an elaborate tasting menu, there was this compulsion to share this experience with someone. I struck up conversations with the bartenders and patrons adjacent to me at the bar discussing certain dishes and observing their reactions to see if they were enjoying the experience as much as I was. Upon leaving the restaurant I shared pictures of the dishes with several friends and curated an Instagram reel of the meal set to Jessie Ware's "Ooh La La" to evoke the feeling of eating my way through Paris. I don't want to get into another rant about the Yondr pouches (they've received enough of my vitriol last week) but when the concert concluded the next night, I lamented that I wouldn't be able to adequately share why Silk Sonic was one of most incredible live shows I attended. Especially when it comes to my connection with music, an expression of that love and appreciation toward the artist is sharing their music with others, whether it's through all the mixtapes (from cassettes, CD's, to now playlists) I've curated to writing album reviews like I used to on rap forum sites. Granted you'd have to be living under a rock to have not heard "Leave the Door Open" yet (after all the song won Grammys for Record of the Year and Song of the Year), but it's one thing to listen to the song on the radio or your favorite streaming platform (go f*ck yourself Joe R*gan) but it's another when you experience the song with thousands of women screaming for Bruno Mars while you are transfixed at Anderson .Paak's and his short bob wig majestically flowing through the air.
What are some of the happiest times of your life? My therapist asked as I sat pensively looking back at the zoom screen. Professionally, it was during my time as Managing Director of KAFE and MCing our professional development workshops. When you belong to a marginalized group, it's hard to express the level of validation you feel when you're in a room surrounded by educators, young and experienced in their careers, representing 2 dozen different states, show genuine interest in learning about your cultural history and experience and brainstorm ways they can share this newfound knowledge with their students. It was also at my current job, seeing a domestic violence survivor move into her new apartment with newfound self-confidence after successfully completing our Transitional Living program. It was more difficult to answer personal moments. I thought of my birthday brunch when I had my friends meet one another for the first time. I thought of going to concerts with my friends Connie or Amy. I thought of hikes with Connie and her French bulldog Niko, when he was younger and would effortlessly plod through trails. It was watching a performance from my friend Marissa's non-profit 4C Lab. It was a day trip to Solvang with Piper and her children. It was the day I was told "I love you" before my hopes were complicated by timing, circumstances, and chemistry.
Self actualized people can cultivate deep and loving relationships with others
What my therapist noticed were that all of the happiest moments I shared had something in common: desire for connection and community. This wasn't necessarily a surprise, humans are social beings after all and as the pandemic drove the point home: people crave social interaction (sometimes to the detriment of our collective public safety, thanks for nothing to those who've remained maskless and unvaxxed throughout. I hope you feel some level of culpability for the hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths). As much as I'm an introvert and crave solitude to recharge, I'm not Henry David Thoreau writing Walden, living in a cabin for 2 years as a social experiment to escape "over-civilization" in search of the "savage delights" of the wilderness. Nor am I Tom Hanks in Castaway, though my volleyball companion would almost assuredly be named after Baby Yoda. As much as I might welcome the idea of solitude for the first several days and weeks, I know for certain I would drive myself crazy if I were left to my thoughts unchecked.
Is my introverted nature inherently at odds with my desire for connection and community? Am I even capable of forming and maintaining those deep connections or does my desire for solitude inevitably lead to self-sabotage?
When you're an only child, one of the first questions you're asked is
do you wish you had siblings? I never had a great response to this question. My cousin was 2 years younger than me and we did spend a significant part of our childhood together. That did give me a little taste of what it would be like to have a brother. So maybe I would have loved to have had a sister. But my childhood was my only frame of reference so I didn't know I was missing out on anything until I attended school and observed the other kids. Or it's the assumption that
you must have liked all the attention, right? Um, not if you're the child of AAPI tiger parents and struggling to live up to the model minority myth. Not if you're an introvert who wanted to be left alone most of the time anyways. What I really missed and craved was a feeling of connection and community. Maybe a sibling would have filled that void or maybe I would have still been that loner that wanted to spend hours alone in my room listening to music, reading comic books, and drawing.
You can't pick the family you're born into but you can pick the family you identify with. It's been one of the many mantras I've carried with me. (I don't know how many mantras one is allowed to have, but whatever the appropriate number is, I'm right on the cusp.) Whether it's finding other Korean Americans and more broadly other AAPI who exist in a hyphenated space and don't feel like they belong in either Korean or American spaces. Whether it's other "bad Koreans" who rejected the model minority myth and dared to forge their own paths. Whether it's finding others who were raised in the Protestant church but rebelled against the rigidity of its structure and its problematic views on the LGBTQ+ community. Whether it's finding others committed to social justice, advocating for marginalized communities, or those striving for authentic self-expression. I would like to think I've valued and nurtured those handful of deep friendships over pursuing casual, interactional friendships.
Maybe you've heard of the quote attributed to motivational speaker and self-help guru Jim Rohn that "you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with". While I don't think it's so cut and dry, I do think there's some value to it. I have had a core group of about five friends at various points in my life and when I reflect back they've been indicative of where I was in my journey at the time. My group of close friends who would currently compose my top-5 (like the Top-8 we used to do in the MySpace days, and yes I spent way too much time thinking about where people were slotted on the Top-8 and who's profile was next to who) is an accurate reflection of who I am as a person today. For the friends who've "fallen' out of my top-5, I don't think says anything negative about them, but more so that life, situation, and circumstance has made it so that we are no longer the central cast in each other's stories: we may return from time to time as a recurring guest star.
Another tangent: I think a problem I've experienced in some of my dating relationships was where a significant other fits within that top-5 dynamic. One might assume that anyone you're dating should automatically be one of those 5 people you spend the most time with, but it hasn't been that way for me. It takes a while for me to warm up to a person, build trust, and let them all the way in. And that trust in its infancy stages can be very fragile. On a few occasions, I observed some resentment when I seemed to be more more intimate with my close friends (who are also women) than the person I'm dating. Not to say I'm right, they're wrong, or vice versa. *Putting a pin on this and seeing if I revisit this later.*
The conclusion I'm arriving at is that being the self-actualized version of myself requires a very specific alchemy of introversion, introspection, intention, and intimacy (I ran out of words that begin with "i").
Portrait Photography by: https://www.zacharyleeportrait.com
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