Negative Space

Foster sensitivity for the around and in-between

24.42

Hi architects,

Consider the two photos below. What were the first things you noticed about each photo? Try to be as specific as possible. If you transported yourself into the venue from the perspectives in the images, describe what you see and hear around you. How large is the venue? How loud is it and what kind of personalities stand around you? If you’re not familiar with the artist, what does the music sound like? Start with the obvious and work toward the implicit. Paint an image before reading on.

Last October, I was assigned to cover an Arlo Parks concert at The Independent, an intimate, divey music venue tucked in a busy stretch of Divisadero. It was my first time at this venue. Past the ticket booth and foyer was a long corridor, dimly lit and decorated with framed portraits of artists and celebrities who’ve walked through here before me. The hallway felt like it stretched on for longer on my way in than on my way out.

The venue’s unique challenges—dim lighting, dense crowd, and immobility—were clear from the opening act. An hour and some hundred shutters later, I faced the same challenges when Arlo Parks came on. I was so focused on nailing my first assignment of the season, I didn’t notice my knees stiffening until a few songs in. I usually only get the first three songs for show assignments, but at The Independent, I had the entire set. This gave me space to manage these challenges and notice what was happening both on stage and off the stage.

Halfway through her set, I put away my camera for a few songs. I noticed a couple standing in front of me—one who had memorized every lyric and the other appearing much more entertained by their partner’s enthusiasm than the show itself. Around me, some younger crowds of friends filmed on Snapchat and a few older concertgoers who seemed very familiar with the venue rooted along the edges, taking occasional sips from their cocktails. I could never imagine this mix of people crammed into the same room, but Arlo Park’s r&b ballads melted the eclectic crowd into a layered sea. I alternated between blending into the audience and capturing instants of when the lights, my framing, and Arlo Parks’ expression eclipsed.

In photography, "negative space" refers to the space around and between the subject of an image. You can think of it as the background, or context of a photo. The negative space forms shapes that share edges with the positive space, helping define the boundaries of the foreground and balance the composition of a photo. How would you describe the composition of the unedited photos from earlier, and how would you edit them to tell a more vivid story?

In addition to exposure, color, and tone, subtle composition edits can enhance your photography in powerful ways. I was able to get an unobstructed shot of Arlo Parks singing in the blue (left) image so I wanted her portrait to dominate the image. I cropped in the top and sides of the image so that she can take up most of the composition. The flowers, drum set, and other background objects were distracting, so I blended them into the background. Then, I exposed and graded the image to create a sharper contrast between her and the background while still protecting her skin tone. The tight composition and intense lighting highlight her impassioned performance.

When I saw the raw yellow (right) image, I almost deleted it with my other underexposed shots. Instead, I decided to keep her silhouette to represent a more emotional part of her setlist. I centered her silhouette, illuminated the guitarist on her left side, and obscured the rest of the image. Unlike the blue image, I decided to keep the negative in the upper half of this photo to make the image feel as dynamic and tangled as some of her poignant songwriting. The negative space in the blue image focuses on Arlo Parks’ emotional performance and that in the yellow image focuses on her show’s atmosphere.

How do these edits rebalance the subject and background in the above images and how do they affect what’s conveyed about the show?

Framing and composition are indispensable skills in photography. They are the two concepts I would encourage any beginner to focus on before anything else. They apply to all forms of photography, whether you’re taking a photo of a person, landscape, or object. They are simple to grasp and difficult to hone. If you understand how to compose your photos, you can easily capture beautiful images with the camera already in your pocket. But, if you grow aware of and control the negative space in your photo, you can produce images that tell the story you want.

Arlo Parks’ handwritten poem held by the fan she gave it to after her reading.

With the power to turn stills into stories, photographers need to be aware of their own biases. Photographers are better storytellers when they are sensitive to the context of their work—the most beloved or controversial art is often the one that bends conventions to convey the creator’s perspective. Multiple photographers capturing the same event, model, or sunrise will carry different perspectives that influence their end creation. Some differences are purely aesthetic, but many are social or political. The only truth a photographer can tell is their own.

I do have my own personal convictions and values, and I live by those. But as an artist, as a portrait photographer, my job is to tell the truth and to capture someone's spirit on a certain day. And it's never the whole truth; it's the truth I experience in a very intense and intimate fashion.

Platon

Negative space is a valuable concept for both the artist and the viewer. Photographers express it as the background; musicians express it as periods of silence; poets express it as empty spaces or line breaks. Next time a photo, song, or piece of writing resonates with you, consider the elements the artist used to connect with you. When art upsets you, look for the employed or neglected elements that provoked you. Whether through appreciation or criticism, we, as the viewer, can engage with a subject more meaningfully when we foster sensitivity for the around and in-between. Invert your focus on the positive space and then ask yourself again—what do you see?

In Pursuit of Wholeheartedness

23.95

I write sitting at the corner of the parklet at Atlas Café. Light peeks through the tree branches dancing to a benign breeze. I watch the pockets of light flicker for a moment before writing again. S is sitting across from me with his headphones on and a few pens and highlighters tucked beneath an unwritten, light blue Hallmark card. We’re both drafting letters. Mine through keystrokes and him through stick-figure drawings of memories with his girlfriend from their first month together. “We can exchange words over text, so I want to draw instead”, he tells me. I nod, silently agreeing on the limitations of words.

A lot of things have changed in a short period of time. Summer arrives with people moving to new cities, new jobs, and new relationships. I feel the bustle of familiar streets and the revival of passions deferred. People rejoice at a band performance in Precita Park, travelers and locals alike roam down Market Street, and the parklets and the slow streets lay their roots. The days are longer and we want them to be. But, what we see in the streets and on-screen—friends in bars, on yachts, and flaunting their window seat views—suppress the anxieties that still remain a reality for many. There is no denying some kind of revival here, but we’ve grown too much to call it a return. Moving through the visible flourishing and less visible trauma, what personal philosophies and values will we choose to carry with us?

Lately, I’ve noticed more wholeheartedness among my friends and peers. When I catch up with S or a number of other friends, their words carry more honesty to them. D and S are finally getting married. S, T, and B have severed their golden handcuffs for more adventurous ventures in radiology software and publisher & creator tools. Another S is trading LA sunshine for New York bustle to pursue a degree in education. A is scaling his agency and moving back to the east coast to be closer to his parents. Some relationships feel like they haven’t changed, but I prioritize them differently. Many of the same stressors still occupy my thoughts, but I’ve crystallized new ways to cope with them. Whether it’s in our relationships, careers, or self-care, we are striving for more and settling for less.

Wholeheartedness = sincerity (paying attention, refining instinct) + commitment (making decisions, being patient)

Wholeheartedness begins with paying attention to the parts of your life that tether you, but persists only through commitment. What are you embarrassed by because it goes against others’ expectations of you? What are the activities and people you devote time towards most effortlessly? To be wholehearted means you not only recognize these values and desires but endure the doubts and judgment that come with it. This is the half that I’ve struggled more with lately. I often try to optimize decisions and time my actions to avoid mistakes, failing to realize that it will never feel like the right time. I wish to replicate events and feelings because they’re familiar. Wholeheartedness without sincerity is just blind ambition; wholeheartedness without commitment is just self-aware wishful thinking.

When I doubt my intuition and get overwhelmed by the noise of infinite “should’s”, I remind myself that the most transformative times in my life have all required instinct and some leap of faith. I think of the anti-social eight-year-old who spent all his waking hours outside of school in the Tae-Kwon-Do dojo and the richness of the friendships I made there. I imagine the timid high-school freshman who grew into a leader among his peer after leaping into a serendipitous opportunity. I transport myself back to show day to experience the full range of feelings I felt stepping onto the stage to showcase what we invested in and created. These memories and conversations with friends reassure me that the world is more malleable than we credit it to be.

There is, of course, no universally correct response to whether our commitments will be worth it, especially in this cautiously optimistic time. We each carry our own losses, anxieties, and challenges that are deeply personal. We each operate on our own concepts of seasons, trying to forecast how many weeks of winter are left. But, one of my biggest fears is that I’ll lead a life of jaded ambivalence—to walk into and get lost in a forest of muted colors and textures. We owe it to ourselves to lead ourselves out of the dismal forest—to leave ourselves room for new explorations and little bets. Challenge your half-hearted moments with a capacity for forgiveness and faith in the resilient version of yourself that you have already proven yourself to be.

Pouring Hearts

23.54

Dinnertime was one of the few pockets in my day I had with my parents. One evening, my dad had made water spinach, long hot pepper beef, 香干炒肉 (smoked bean curd), and 苦瓜 (bitter melon) for dinner. “Try the bitter melon, it tastes great”, my dad insisted. My dad wolfed down his bowl of rice. I glanced at my mom carefully picking dishes into her bowl. I clearly had gotten my eating habits from one and carefulness from the other. We ate in the comfort of silence, broken only by the tapping of chopsticks against ceramic. This is still the dinner setting most familiar to me.

A few weeks later, my dad and I were strolling down a path in our wooded neighborhood. My parents had just fought. After the dinner, my mom went on a tirade, criticizing everything from my dad’s dinners to his role in their marriage and the household. The tension throughout the house was palpable. They fought in a way I hadn’t seen in some time. I wanted to ask him about it on the walk, but I couldn’t find the words. A language barrier always made communicating with my dad difficult, but there was another invisible force at play: I didn’t know how to talk about intimate topics with him. So we walked, as we often ate, in comfortable silence.

Of all the things I’ve learned from my parents growing up, intimacy and affection don’t naturally come to mind. I didn’t grow up in an affectionate household. “I love you” only came from TV shows I watched and books I didn’t read. Hugs were reserved for long goodbyes. Once my family was dropping off my mom at the airport, and my dad went over to hug my mom goodbye. My sister and I jokingly shot back in shock as if he had tackled her instead. Although I knew this wasn’t normal, I never questioned the sincerity of my parents’ love for each other and for my sister and me. I was aware that we were different from my friends’ households, but so too were the scents of our home and the dinners we ate. You learn what is visible growing up. Observational learning is why I eat too fast and why some words come too slow.

In retrospect, how this would translate into my romantic life shouldn’t have surprised me. I felt as if I had failed to love in the past, or at least the kind predicated on verbal and outward affection. I realized how I would avoid depending on others, withdraw from difficult situations, or suppress feeling to be accomodating. I noticed how I put some things on pedestals for no good reason. I preoccupied myself with the fear of regretting words said when the words unsaid were more pernicious. The irony for those who struggle with affection is that words carry too little meaning when received and too much meaning when given. Most people cope in one of two ways: either preoccupy yourself with work, hobbies, friends, hookups until you go numb, or soul-search yourself toward an unattainable nirvana. I landed somewhere in-between. It was easiest to blame my environment growing up and move on.

But, on that walk with my dad, I eventually broke the silence. I wanted to try, language barrier and all, to understand why we express the receive love the way we do in this family. I asked him about their marriage, and he told me about how they were introduced to one another and started dating. He told me about how they both received and gave love differently, yet were able to mold together tolerance, patience, and directness. He told me how he wrote her an apology note and woke up an extra hour before she did at sunrise to prepare a lunch for her. Our conversation was as mundane as it was romantic. It was a lesson on love and intimacy in of the last places I expected. A flower blossoming in the snowy path.

My time at home had been the longest period I’ve spent with my parents in five years, and five formative years at that. Over dinners, walks, and chats with my parents, I paid more attention to the invisible forces that tied my family together—food, sacrifice, shared presence, and other less apparent things. It gave me a window to see the good, bad, and ugly parts of my character that I’ve learned growing up. I’m learning to appreciate these learnings rather than blame them.

Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate dissimilarity that is the true marker of the “right” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn’t be its precondition.

Alain de Botton, The Course of Love

I long held onto a narrow view of intimacy—that it only came from the exceptionally romantic. This intimacy lives along the curves down their spine, the coarseness of their hair, the contours of their face, the mixture of pheromones and perfumes that comprise their scent, or the affirmation of their words. But, intimacy is also fantasy turned into thousands of tedious things. This form lives in the little routines and beliefs. How do you spend your mornings? What values do you quietly hold? Intimacy flows through shared histories, memories, and spaces where propriety fades away. It exists between you and your friend spewing insecurities and nonsense into the void on a late-night drive, between you and the bitter melon your dad cooked in your rice bowl, and between you and yourself in times of solitude.

There is still so much I will learn about intimacy, just ask… never mind, but expanding its definition is a start. Find in someone else not only euphoria but also stillness. Seek those with whom time moves so fast, it is almost still. And when that feels foolish, ask what we are doing with time but trying to find something worth stopping it over? Some will choose to avoid this stillness, but others will choose to include you in the minutia of their world. Others will know that in a world of infinite choices, intimacy comes from those we choose to commit to time and time again.

Nostalgia beyond Memories

23.45

At my desk, I sit a few feet away from boxes of old notes and yellowed journals tucked away in my drawer. Every now and then, I find old photos of myself, like a pin from kindergarten when my head was too big for my body or a print of me holding a round snowball up to my even rounder face. The memorabilia around me, from the sentimental to the comical, has turned my childhood bedroom into a pseudo-time machine. I’ve been traveling a lot lately, just not through space, but time.

The other night, I decided to re-read one of the yellowed journals. It started in the fall of my freshman year of college, a time when my handwriting was more legible. There were names I wrote about as if we had been best friends that I can barely recall today. There was a grease smudge on the page I wrote about treating myself to a breakfast pork roll from Lyn’s while skipping math lecture. Then, there was a breadcrumb of rose-tinted nights with a doomed romantic relationship written between the lines. That was my cue to close the journal, but my eyes glued to the disaster as if I were driving past it on the side of the freeway.

Without getting into the details, I eventually remembered that I used to only write in this journal when I was upset. I thought of my friend S, who would tell me that she didn’t like to go through old journals, as they were better off just for catharsis. This must’ve been what my seventeen-year-old self intended for as well, but I still caught myself reminiscing. Usually, when people describe nostalgia, they refer to a longing for a time or place with happy associations. But, my experience here was the contrary—feeling contentment for a time with unhappy associations. It was nostalgia, inverted.

I thought I was being delusional, so I asked M to describe how he experiences nostalgia. To my surprise, he told me that nostalgia had always been a positive emotion for him. He always seemed to be able to look back fondly on memories without the need to sulk over, compare, or replicate his past experiences in the present. I figured this was a good start, but I knew that there was more to nostalgia.

So, down the rabbit hole, I went.

Coined by Swiss physician Johannes Hofer in 1688, “nostalgia” was a medical term used to describe soldiers and sailors with a melancholic longing to return home (nostos means the desire to return home and algos means pain). By the early 20th century, ‘home’ began to be interpreted more broadly to include abstract places such as past experiences or moments. Then, researchers began to characterize nostalgia by three components: cognitive, affective, and conative. The traditional view became that for each instance of nostalgia, there was a retrieval of autobiographical memories, a negative emotion, and a desire to relive or re-experience something.

However, Felipe De Brigard, associate professor of philosophy at Duke, goes on to challenge each of these components in his essay, “Nostalgia Reimagined”. He discusses some key scientific developments in memory and imagination, but I’ll try my best to summarize some of his points:

1. We are capable of feeling nostalgic for a variety of events and times, even those that we have not personally experienced because nostalgia doesn’t need autobiographical memories.

2. Nostalgia can be bittersweet—involving both positive and negative valences. De Brigard also believes that most researchers have the causation order for nostalgia backward: nostalgia doesn’t always cause negative affect, but rather, is caused by negative affect.

3. The object of nostalgia’s desire is a place-in-time. In other words, a person can desire something but remain unsatisfied when they get the object of desire because either the place or time did not match up.

While knowing all the different ways to analyze nostalgia may be unnecessary for the average person, his premise has stuck with me: nostalgia doesn’t need real memories. As someone who has obsessed with documenting their life lately, this is unsettling at first. It highlights our fallibility, bias, and irrationality. Ironically, these are also what makes us most human. His premise also suggests that nostalgia is not just a fleeting emotion, but a powerful force of inspiration with potential for good or bad. De Brigard ends his essay with a relevant note on nostalgia’s role in political propaganda and the dangers of when imagined pasts turn into delusions, so, I’ll close instead with imagined nostalgia’s potential for good.

When I find myself reminiscing—diving into old journals, photo albums, and automated “On This Day” reminders, I realize I’m seeking some kind of comfort. In happier memories, that is rather simple so long as I don’t overstay my welcome. In sadder memories, it’s more complicated, but I can find it by recognizing things I’ve been able to move on from that I may have once felt I never would. This is of course easier said than done, but it’s reassuring to know that I can discover meaningful reflections, as I am sharing right now.

Just as we travel to new places to stimulate behaviors, thoughts, and feelings and learn something new about ourselves, perhaps my recent mind-wandering of nostalgia throughout this pandemic shares similar motivations. I’m curious as to how we will choose to remember the pandemic in both the history books and in our minds. Many of us will try to archive it deep within our minds as soon as possible. Yet, part of me wants to believe that perhaps it will be pleasant someday to remember even this time—that when our present and future turn to the past, a combination of our memory and imagination will allow us to preserve the gratitude and clarity we sought all along.

Reframing Gratitude

23.36

The other day, I was checking in on C, a friend who was in his fifth week recovering from COVID. I couldn’t begin to imagine how hard it’s been for him, but when C picked up the call, he responded with the same lightness he always would. “Damn, it’s been a while since I’ve heard that deep of a voice”, he joked. I asked how he was feeling, expecting him to describe how hard it’s been. But he instead talked about how grateful he was, for his friends, doctors, and the COVID subreddits who’ve helped him over the past month. When I praised him for being so positive, he replied:

“It’s all I can be right now.”

Lately, I’ve been considering my relationship with gratitude. Growing up, I valued prudence over many things. Partly due to nature, but definitely due to nurture, I convinced myself there wasn’t an insult or argument important enough to get angry over. I used reason like a surge protector for the unfavorable emotions in life and I was good at it. As I got older, this level-headedness applied to my view of gratitude: no failure was worth being ungrateful over.

Though this rule has saved me in countless embarrassing or extreme situations, it was also repressive. While quarantining alone over the summer, I tried to cope by being grateful whenever I could. I wrote about people I missed like M for how open I could always be around her, and more trivial things like how the workers at the El Farolito taqueria down the street would leave extra salsa for me. But the habit eventually wore on my stoic endurance. On days when the gratitude felt forced, self-doubt led to the very cynicism that I had been trying to avoid in the first place.

Yet, there’s no shortage of studies selling the refrain: grateful people are more likely to be generous, loyal, and less materialistic; grateful people are more likely to help others or even exercise more. It’s becoming popular to be or at least appear grateful. Counted “blessings” and other ambiguous thanks are just a few scrolls away online. But, this framing falls flat on my ears. When marketed like a psychological cure-all, gratitude feels more like a commodity than an emotion.

How did gratitude which is a function of the heart, get usurped by the mind?

Elizabeth Welles

Especially in times of grief, gratitude can be more than a self-help tool. Poet and author, Elizabeth Welles describes gratitude as, above all else, a social emotion. In this sense, thankfulness underpins our most meaningful relationships. It holds the space between ourselves and those who’ve extended a hand to us—a reminder of the tremendous good that exists in our friends, neighbors, and even enemies. It lets us deepen our faiths and belong to something beyond ourselves. Weaved into the fabric of our collective healing, gratitude is better when it’s not forced by reason.

I’m not dismissing the psychological benefits of gratitude. There is a lot of good in making a habit out of expressing and receiving thanks, and I plan on sticking to that. But, we should also know when and how to be less grateful. Unqualified positivity can be as harmful as unqualified negativity. It can cause guilt for feeling anything short of thankfulness and further invalidate our feelings. So, telegraph gratitude, anger, and sadness as they come. And when we do count our blessings, remember to have a place for every feeling and every feeling in its place.

Toward Disorder

23.28

In a distant universe, mechanical aliens notice that clocks across their world appear to be running fast. These beings live by breathing in subterranean argon (pressurized air) through interchangeable lungs, but little else is known about their anatomy.

Faced with the puzzling clock incident, a mechanical scientist performs an auto-dissection to test a bleak hypothesis. While observing their own brain’s mechanical conduits and subassemblies, the scientist learns that their brain, like their lungs, also depends on the flow of pressurized air. The scientist deduces that it is not the clocks that are all running fast, but the argon flowing through their minds that is running slow. The mechanical race had begun to deplete their subterranean argon supply. “It will be the end of pressure, the end of motive power, the end of thought. The universe will have reached perfect equilibrium”, the scientist writes.

Life is a fight against entropy. This is the idea from the title story of Ted Chiang’s Exhalations that has been on my mind lately.

Since August, I’ve been putting an obsessive amount of attention toward journaling. I write about things I’m grateful for, moments, habits, and other scattered thoughts. I use physical and digital mediums, slowly accumulating stickie notes, index cards, and Notion pages until they create more clutter than they originally meant to organize. Getting started was hard, but not atypical for me. I’ve always been selectively organized about these types of hobbies; they help tether my stubborn side.

But, in this exacerbated-pandemic limbo, I realized my journaling habit is not just a symptom of my stubbornness but also my need for order. The average daily new cases in Philadelphia is up 700% from a few months ago. Our hyperawareness from March has turned into fatigue. My mother and sister, as healthcare workers, witness the fatigue firsthand, not just in the patients, but in their colleagues. I worry about them especially within this purgatory of anxiety.

So, I turn to more straightforward parts of my life—a filled journal page, tidy bed, and clean dishes—for predictability. But, entropy lives here too. It’s silly to think about how much energy we use each day simply to keep something as it is. The pages, bed, and dishes can become empty, untidy, and dirty again in seconds. Staying in shape, growing knowledge, and building relationships all require consistent energy and more of it than it takes to lose them. We are amorphous blobs maintaining perpetually, shaped by our battles and choices.

I am both disheartened and lifted by this idea. It feels natural to preoccupy ourselves with the elements we can control. But, entropy doesn’t discriminate on prudence, so I wonder if it’s better to accept entropy rather than fight it head-on. If I can understand how the destructive and beautiful sides of nature are sometimes one and the same—how autumn is both decay and simultaneously per Albert Camus, a second spring where every leaf is a flower—perhaps disorder is not so foreign. The promise that nothing stays as we leave it is itself, a form of optimism.

Back in the mechanical world, a portion of the mechanical society called Reversalists tries to build artificial air pressurizers to replenish the depleted argon. The scientist does not share their optimism, understanding that the machines require more argon to operate than they can produce. Yet, I can’t help but sympathize with the Reversalists. I imagine the Reversalists, like myself, have misunderstood agency sometime in their past. Wired to optimize for output, they cling to the notion that if they work smart and efficiently enough, that they can overcome anything, even time. But, agency doesn’t work this way. While the Reversalists try to manipulate their obstacle to themselves, the scientist chooses acceptance. In a closing message to whoever discovers their journal, the scientist writes not with despair, but deference:

Your lives will end just as ours did, just as everyone’s must. No matter how long it takes, eventually equilibrium will be reached. I hope you are not saddened by that awareness. I hope that your expedition was more than a search for other universes to use as reservoirs. I hope that you were motivated by a desire for knowledge, a yearning to see what can arise from a universe’s exhalation. Because even if a universe’s life span is calculable, the variety of life that is generated within it is not…Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so. I feel I have the right to tell you this because, as I am inscribing these words, I am doing the same.

Accepting entropy requires a tolerance for uncertainty. When days grow tenuous, dig for your resilience, but remain self-compassionate if you’re unable to find it. Lean on the simpler things. Whether that is a made bed, a filled journal, or the coziness and unconditional love of a companion, touchstones of familiarity can keep us abreast. Disorder may be inevitable, but the lives we lead never were so keep showing up for what you love. Create art and music; share laughs recklessly. Lean toward the tide of disorder, and when it inevitably crashes over, choose to create and laugh again.

Recess

22.92

It’s an early summer afternoon in fifth-grade social studies—yellowed world maps plaster the walls and sun rays start to leak beneath the shades. Having just finished drawing in my last few latitude and longitude lines on the day’s worksheet, I glance back and forth between the clock and my preoccupied teacher. There are five minutes left in the period. I brush the eraser shavings off my desk and take inventory of my pencil case, twice. The sun’s warmth hits my leg, offsetting the aggressively frigid AC air. Restless, I check the clock again. Only fifteen seconds have passed. It’s the longest period of the day—the five minutes before recess.

In elementary school, I remember the mad rush in the hallways as the recess bell rang—kids bursting out their classrooms and a building bursting at the seams.

Behind my elementary school, there were two woodchip islands for jungle gyms—one with a metal slide and one with a plastic slide where kids played ‘gorilla tag’, a tag variation where you weren’t allowed to touch the ground. The swings and see-saws were where kids ‘gossiped’; the basketball court was where all the sporty kids played ‘knockout’; but the most fascinating were the kids who’d just run around the field and invent games. I remember some of my friends and I pretending we were characters from Sonic the Hedgehog, a video game I was obsessed with growing up. We’d turn open fields and colored metal structures standing over mulch into Green Hill Zone (see below) and make up the rules of the game as we went. Yet, as creative as we were, I don’t remember ever thinking too much about it (a concept). For thirty minutes, it was simply fun for the sake of fun.

Lately, the topic of career has been top of mind, not in the sense of corporate advancement, but rather what I’m most curious about, who I can help most, and what lifestyle I want to have. I’ve fully abandoned the absurd idea that college is where you discover yourself and instead have turned to the ten-year-old-me for some advice.

I had a variety of dream careers growing up, but the one I remember most vividly was to become an architect. I was a Lego boy, but I also loved this one hand-me-down set from my childhood neighbor. It was a set of blue and yellow square and rectangular block pieces that attached at the edges (think a cross between legos and puzzle pieces). I would build and carry farmhouses and buildings bigger than my own short, chubby body downstairs to show my dad. I also have a vivid memory, a few years later, of me sitting on my skateboard in the middle of my cul-de-sac. Drawing sketches of hoverboards, I was certain that I was going to be the first person to design and invent the “air board.”

But somewhere along the way, there was an inflection point. I was never great at sketching nor did I believe I had the eye for design. So, in high school, like many of those around me, I got practical. There’s nothing wrong with making practical life choices, per se. But I’m starting to reflect on how my family has raised me to value practicality and stability (this is another whole letter), and to reconsider what my touchstones should be going forward.

In navigating the river of our careers, there’s value in living with your inner child in mind. Even in the workplace, I just see us as kids who have learned to suppress ourselves in the name of professionalism. One of my fears is the idea of life losing its shine—the awe of learning a new skill or simply opening a letter from a friend. So, I’ve been trying to redirect any excess value I place on status and material things. It’s okay to take yourself less seriously. It’s okay to just play. Go roll down a hill this weekend. Our inner children were imaginative, creative, and kind, and we should hold onto them before the next bell.

Finding Center

22.84

Happy first week of summer! I want to try something a little different for this volume by focusing on the ✉️ . Let me know if you prefer more focus or variety in these newsletters, and as always, my inbox is open for feedback, thoughts, and reactions.

A few months ago, I flew back to Philadelphia to celebrate my college dance team’s 15th anniversary. Fresh off a red-eye, I made my first stop at berg, a tucked-away dance studio where many of my rehearsals used to be. A year had passed, but berg was exactly as I remembered it. Inside, two stripes of tape lined the width of the studio, splitting the floor into equal thirds. Abandoned water bottles and umbrellas bunched into a graveyard at the foot of the couch, and sneaker marks traced across the floor.

In dance, there is a concept of “finding center”. In the literal sense, this means knowing where you stand relative to the rest of the stage, formation, or audience. For rehearsals in berg, we would use the Marley tape and a few of the graveyard water bottles as stage markers. But ever since this trip back, I’ve been reflecting on dance’s impact on me and some other interpretations of this idea.

Center of Body—balancing intuition.

In times of self-doubt, I think back to how I used to always avoid freestyles. I dreaded them during auditions, dances circles, and the dedicated freestyle sections we included in our performances. We were never short of volunteers for these sections, and I envied those comfortable enough to step into the spotlight. For a member of a performing arts group, I was quite anxious about performing, and frankly still am. A part of this anxiety stemmed from my difficulty identifying as a dancer. Perhaps I was worried that if I danced without choreography as a safety net, it would expose me for the fraud I often thought I was.

Though, over the past few years, I began to see freestyle differently. Freestyle, while nerve-racking, is spontaneous, and this quality gives it its social gravity. It takes a baseline level of confidence to step into the center, but after that, I believe it becomes more about taking one’s self less seriously (a concept). For the people with this ability, it matters less how “good” of a dancer they are and more how sincere they appear. We all love watching displays of musicality, rhythm, and creativity, but fundamentally, what draws us into a dance circle is the chance to see personality on display in its most natural, uninhibited form.

When placed between two choreographed segments, freestyles help create cadence and make a performance more dynamic. In our daily cadence, there’s a similar balance to strike between intention and spontaneity; work and leisure. Like freestyle dancing, finding our “center of body” isn’t always a scientific or intellectual task, but a physical one. With that said, I still think I suck at freestyle dance. But, just as we won’t always be able to prepare before a friend pushes us into the dance circle, we won’t always be able to reason with our own intuition, and in those moments, I’m trying to learn how to freestyle better, both on and off the stage.

Center of Gravity—tracing purpose.

This past year has felt, for a lack of a better word, still. Despite many new life transitions—moving across the country, starting my first full-time job, and quarantining during a global pandemic—I still feel caught in the middle of an intermission, waiting for the next act. In other words, I have no clue what I’m doing.

In these moments of limbo, I interpret “center of gravity” as purpose, and through the lens of two types of choreography—solo and group. In a solo, our responsibilities are relatively simpler. Center of gravity and body are one. Our movements and use of the stage matter, but what makes solos unique and memorable is our autonomy over the performance. In solos, we choose the tempo we follow, the beats we hit, and the lyrics we illustrate. Just like dancers on stage, we should take the task of finding purpose at our own pace, emphasizing authenticity in what we choose to do and experiment with.

At the same time, group choreography gives us the unique opportunity to create something bigger than the sum of its parts. Here, our center of gravity is relative. As the choreographer, we are not only responsible for the technicalities, expressions, and textures of everyone’s movements, but how these elements interact across each dancer. Individual leaps, spins, tilts, and stunts always please audiences, but formations—the dancers’ positions relative to each other—can achieve awe-inspiring effects. As we work on being more authentic, sometimes purposeful work can be the work that extends beyond ourselves.

Center of Mind—focusing thought.

On show day, each person tries to combat pre-show jitters with their own rituals. But just before the show starts, the President traditionally gives us all a speech. For a few minutes, we reflect on the surreal journey that has led up to this point—the countless hours we spent in rehearsals, meetings, and production shoots. Our minds calm and our racing thoughts ease. Then, the President closes with our team chant, reminding us that all there is left to do is to have fun and to “leave everything on stage”.

A whole year is spent painstakingly preparing, rehearsing, and stressing over just four hours on stage. Yet, what is most powerful about the message—“leave everything on stage”—is that it ignores those details. It redirects our thoughts away from the struggles of yesterday and the withdrawals of tomorrow, to the present moment.

We often focus too closely on destinations—always optimizing how to get somewhere or something with “productivity” as the de facto social currency. While destinations exist in dance, reaching them isn’t the main goal. As dancers, we don’t choreograph a piece to simply reach the end. We create pictures throughout the piece, focusing on how we frame and arrive at them. Hard work, planning, and discipline are necessary to become the people we strive to be, but not at the expense of being present. When I need this reminder, as I often do, I picture myself back on stage. There, my thoughts refocus and my body, guided by the rhythm, takes each movement, one by one.

Dance on.

“An ability to affirm life demands bodily practices that discipline our minds to elemental rhythms, to the creativity of our senses, and to the ‘great reason’, our body, ‘that does not say “I” but does ‘I”.’

- Kimerer LaMothe, philosopher, dancer & scholar of religion

For dancers, dance can be a precise execution of sequenced steps or a free-willed display of emotional release. We celebrate, grieve, and heal with dance physically and emotionally. Through rhythm, our bodies move as vessels to express and to connect. Whether it’s a solo dancer’s vulnerability, a duo’s chemistry, or a group’s breathtaking synchrony, there are few feelings that compare to those felt through movement.

But, for all of us, dancer or not, dance is an affirmation of what it means to be. More frankly, dance is about having fun. It is a universal language that teaches us to make room for play, to follow our own tempo, and to be present—simultaneously acting with intention and trusting our senses to guide our next movements. And although I don’t technically consider myself a dancer anymore, I don’t plan to stop awkwardly grooving at the bus stop any time soon. In times of joy and grief, dance can ground us, and if we ever lose sight of these lessons, all we’ll need is to find center again.

Listening & Learning

22.80

Before I begin, I would like to preface by saying that I am no expert; I do not have any answers, and it is in no way my intention to take focus away from black narratives. But, as outcries reverberate across all fifty states and the globe, I believe it would be remiss of me to not speak up. I dedicate this volume to furthering my understanding of what it means to stand in solidarity—how to listen and how to learn.

In the wake of events these past few weeks, I’ve had to step away from the ever-flowing stream of social media; to collect my thoughts.

In these moments, I sit with two versions of myself—present and past, to ask, wholeheartedly, what it means to stand in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. As an Asian-American, this starts by looking at my own biases.

As COVID-19 spread across the country, our communities grounded to a halt. And just as it’s easier to focus on an object at rest, the stillness made us see our nation’s greatest disparities. Black Americans were disproportionately affected by the health crisis and Asian Americans increasingly became targets of hate crimes. It became frustratingly and shamefully clear that the “model minority myth” not only failed to protect any of us in times of uncertainty, but that white institutions have always weaponized it to propagate anti-blackness. In The Color of Success, Ellen Wu, Associate Professor at the Indiana University Bloomington, adds the following color to this idea:

The backdrop of the growing Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s caused white Americans to double down on the model minority myth, as “proof that the right kind of minority group could achieve the American dream,” on their own and without support. “The insinuation was that hard work along with unwavering faith in the government and liberal democracy as opposed to political protest were the keys to overcoming racial barriers as well as achieving full citizenship.”

These disparities, though more visible now, have long existed. I don’t want to focus on my narrative here, but I wish to recognize one aspect. As a previous member of a predominantly Asian hip-hop dance crew, I’ve cherry-picked elements from black culture—particularly hip-hop dance and music—for my own benefit without a proper appreciation for the culture. It provided me with community, expression, joy, and I can no longer atone for that kind of complicity. Going forward, I will also call out such cases in myself and others around me.

James Baldwin famously said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced”, and I believe such is true for the self.

Before we can listen and self-educate effectively, we must create the capacity for it. The outflow of donations, pre-drafted e-mails, and antiracist curricula across social media is awe-inspiring, but without space within ourselves to listen, I frankly cannot disassociate viral hashtags and two-click-solidarity from performance. The notion that we can earn solidarity through an activism laundry list is a dangerous oversimplification of the issue, and it begs the question: when there is no audience, how can we ensure our values remain resilient?

On the pendulum of either engulfing one’s self in social media or taking a step back for mental clarity, I have benefited and am learning from the latter. I encourage my fellow non-black readers to use that time to face one’s past complicity—seeking not an absolution of guilt, but a greater capacity for compassion that equips us to take action within our locus of control—who we influence, what we consume, how we spend our money—with sincerity. For therein lies, as it always has, our fundamental responsibilities to seek discomfort, to consider the invisible forces at play, and simply, to just be decent.

Saturday Baos

22.76

I’ve been spending my Saturday mornings at the bakery. Recognizable by its bright orange awning, Good Mong Kok Bakery is a no-frills Cantonese mom & pop shop. Inside, bao-filled steamers stack high. Large pots of congee sit discretely along the back wall. Trays of egg tarts cool by the window, luring in even those with the strongest of wills. Like members of a conductorless orchestra, bakers take bilingual orders, swap out empty trays, and roll in crates of produce with ease. They only speak using terse gestures and one-liners, but over time, these exchanges grow familiar. There are no glittery cupcakes, Instagram traps, or sterile white tables. It’s just you, the bakers, and the baos—simple, and, that’s exactly how I’d describe my days lately.

I still remember the stress of deciding to stay put rather than fly back to New Jersey with my parents. My family and I had agreed to give it two weeks and monitor the situation. Meanwhile, everyone else seemed to be fleeing from their cities in droves. Some returned to their parents’ delicious home cooking and others to their significant other’s company, and suddenly the weight of indefinite solitude sunk in. Two weeks turned into three, three into six, and now I’ve lost track. Gratefully, the whole family is still well (and roasting me in Pictionary).

As far as solitude goes, it has been a blessing and a curse. Some days, I would succumb to the random urge to leap onto my couch and roll around like a labrador with an itch they can’t scratch. After, I would just lay there, staring at the ceiling until either I started levitating or my Outlook fired another work notification—whichever came first. Other days, I would sit on my living room floor with my back against the couch just because the carpet hit different. But then, I would listen to the soundtrack of my neighborhood—a mix of birds chirping, car doors slamming, and neighbors blasting Spanish music. I suddenly didn’t seem to mind, though. What once were annoyances became reminders of something familiar.

Otherwise, solitude has been restful. When I first told my friends I had been living alone, I got a lot of “you must be so lonely” or “oh, I could never do that”, and while the concerns are appreciated, they remind me how we often overlook the benefits of simple living and solitude—too quick to equate being alone with being lonely. Another misconception is that our capacity for solitude is dependent on our introversion.

Instead, research points to a personality characteristic known as “dispositional autonomy”, which is essentially one’s capacity to regulate daily experiences at will. So, whether you are a closeted introvert or diehard extrovert, we can all free ourselves from the chains of this oversimplified spectrum. With that said, it’s important to recognize that it’s never a good idea to stay in solitude when it’s no longer beneficial. It always boils down to balance. But for those who actively avoid being alone, solitude may just be a blessing in disguise.

I could blame quarantine for a lot of things, but I would rather thank it for replacing the excess with the simple—taking walks, calling loved ones, reading books, playing music, and singing and dancing around the house like nobody’s watching because, for once, nobody is. It’s been an exercise in romanticizing even the smallest parts of my days—turning my Saturday bakery runs into puzzles where I solve for the ultimate ratio of sweet to savory or semblances of home that remind me of my childhood as much as they do lunchtime. And with each bite I take out of a bao, I am reminded that sometimes the simple life can be the good life.

"Hi, how are you?"

22.71

Before I start, I want to thank you for subscribing to my newsletter and for making space for me in your crowded inbox. This whole personal writing thing is pretty new to me, so I’m open to chat if you have any ideas, feedback, or thoughts on your mind! Now onto this week’s dose of overthinking:

My quarantine days, like those of many others, have consisted of a lot more FaceTime calls, Zoom hangouts, and Skype meetings (yes, my company is stuck in 2011). But as I’ve racked up call hours these past two months, all of my conversations have seemed to start the same—with a familiar “hi, how are you?” followed by a collective reassurance of how “good” everyone is. Until now, I never questioned why we greet each other this way, but it has felt particularly hollow in the COVID-19 era.

Back in March, I had a harder time answering this question, sometimes taking an extra second before responding. I would describe this pause as if I were bungee-jumping into my consciousness in search of a fitting answer, only to be snapped back by the cord with nothing but a nervous chuckle and a “great, just taking it day by day”.

As a greeting, “how are you?” feels like the only question we ask where we don’t expect a genuine answer; we just hope for a polite one. As long as we follow the script, smile, and, for the love of God, don’t inconvenience whomever we’re talking to, the exchange is harmless. But, for those who are far from “good”, “great”, or “fine” nowadays, there isn’t a socially acceptable “none of the above” bubble to fill in. This leaves someone with two options—commit a faux pas or lie to someone’s face, and whether it’s my coworker or Jordan, my fictional Trader Joe’s cashier, it’s uncomfortably obvious when someone does the latter. We’re lying to each other a lot, and we’re not even good liars.

With that, I don’t mean to over-intellectualize the words, “how are you?”. It’s not about the words, but rather the normalization of a culture where we pretend to be okay when we’re not. I just find it ironic how we are taught to greet people by asking about their well-being, while simultaneously expecting nothing but pleasantry in return, and we should recognize that.

Of course, this doesn’t mean we should start playing everyone’s therapist or spilling all of our problems to Jordan while they ring up our produce, but we can spare people the pressure to lie and welcome more genuine answers from those closest to us. One of my good friends loves to double down on her “how are you”?”—following up on any hesitant “good” with “okay, but how are you really?” (she’s called me out a few times with this one). I, alternatively, have started asking “what’s been on your mind lately?”, and while these may not solve any of our problems overnight, they may just be what some people need to hear most right now.