Hey 2023 me,
I know that the tail end of 2023 was a little tumultuous to say the least. You worried if you would ever get the same psychological stability that you started the year with — a stable baseline from which the rest of your life could start flourishing through. You worried about whether things would be good again. You worried whether the taste of the life you had at the start of the year would eventually come back.
Well, I’ll start off with some reassurance: the foundations are good.
I actually had a really hard time writing this year’s letter in part because all of the previous ones were marked by single memorable events that happened throughout the year. Of course, this year had events too but none that defined the year the previous years did. Rather, the routine is what made it memorable: things I returned to week after week that gave the tapestry of 2024 texture.
So rather, instead of describing all the events that happened this year, I’m going to tell you about all the threads and patterns that made my life wonderful this year.
Missing Pieces, Flawed Mangoes
In January, S, K and I met for the first time to talk about what would eventually become Playspace1 — the name of what we ended up calling the regular co-working/co-writing/co-learning sessions you wanted to start.
It’s a cozy little crew of people. Every Sunday, two co-hosts volunteer to run a session and prepare a little snack. People start streaming in around 1pm and chat about the last week amongst each other. Then, we split into small intro circles and answer a question, usually something whimsical but a little introspective like “what kitchen utensil do you think best represents you” or “what would you do with your time if you could just take a year off to explore whatever you wanted.” People split off for some silent focus time, some playing instruments outside, others writing journals and essays, others still arranging flowers or solving new algorithms problems.
I like the format a lot.
There’s that one meme that goes something like “how life feels when there’s a confirmed hang out at the end of the week” and I think that captures why Playspace feels so special to me. It’s honestly such an important backbone to my week to the point that I’ve scheduled trips around making sure I can return each Sunday for it. I’m excited for you to experience it for yourself too, I think you’ll like it a lot.
Sometime through the year, THE GROUPCHAT came into existence. It’s a squad of some of the most whimsical, funny, but also intentional and driven people I know. Late night MarioKart, afternoons laying in the park, board game nights, cafe coworking, concerts, star gazing, camping — not a moment is dull with them.
It’s spontaneous, haphazard at times and I think thats what makes it beautiful. I love receiving “hey, wanna go read in a park today?” or texting variations of “yo can i come to cowork” and “are you going to the pottery studio today.” The implicit permission of ‘yes’ is that we are happy to carve out time and space for each other.
Now is perhaps one of the few points in my life that I don’t feel like a burden for asking for the company of others. I know it’s okay if they say “no sorry, had something else today” or “maybe tomorrow?” because they truly mean tomorrow — there are countless opportunities for our lives to intersect because we’ve made the act of asking so simple and easy.
These people mean the world to me and I’m excited for you to get to meet all of them.
Craft became a very central part of my identity of why I do things. It gave me reason to anchor a lot of what I do in celebrating the act of doing the thing itself.
I finally made 50 pounds of ceramics! I learned I absolutely love clay as a material. In it holds a beautiful act of metamorphosis, the transformation of what is basically wet dirt into beautiful forms that live on through their second lives as cups, bowls, and vases.
Pottery also taught me that somethings are learned only via embodied experience — the act of raw doing rather than thinking about doing or watching someone else doing2. Watch all the videos you want on the subject but the only way you can get better is to quite literally get your hands dirty and throw it over and over again until something eventually clicks in the motion of your hands or how you recognize the right level of dryness in the clay to trim or the sound of a wall that is about to be too thin. With enough repetition, something in your peripheral awareness unlocks and you start being able to distinguish what you couldn’t distinguish before. This is what allows you to improve your craft.
The end of May also marked the end of my 3 and a half year relationship with A. With a breakup also comes the complex dance of asking yourself 1) how do I figure out what I’m actually feeling? and 2) how do I talk to other people about it? I noticed that purely in the act of verbalizing my feelings, I inadvertently hyper-therapized it, morphing what I really felt into something that was neat and sterile.
At some point I decided to spend a weekend solo backpacking Mount Langley. Out on the gravel and dirt, the hours of silence strip away the layers of what you tell others until all the remains is the act of reckoning with the rawness of the emotion.
I thought about Martha Nussbaum who was against mankind’s over-reliance on intellect and reason on the matters of the heart. I thought about the feeling of freefall, of weightlessness, and of having let go of solid ground without knowing what you might fall into next. I thought about commitment. What does it mean to promise? What does it mean to be a different person than who you were when promised? I thought about feeling invisible — the slow bleed of feeling like they somehow don’t see you the way they used to. I thought about how much we change ourselves to make ourselves feel seen. I thought about the idea and irony of self-effacing end and how love is a self-effacing end. I thought about how one fills the cavity of loss. I thought about whether loss leaves a hole for light to shine on where it may not have shone before. I thought about the hope of what might now grow.
On that hike, I saw the sun set into a blazing sky that birthed a river of stars. Under the light of a tiny headlamp, those thoughts became the bullet points for what would eventually become the basis for a proper reflection that would come much later.
I think I came away from that trip with a quiet self-assuredness that I made the right decision for myself.
There’s a scene in The Farewell where the family decides to keep the knowledge of 奶奶’s cancer from her. “The burden is better shouldered by the collective,” they justify. The irony haunts me though: in their rush to shoulder the burden collectively, they strip away the individual’s choice to carry the weight themselves. It’s a peculiar form of love that assumes it knows better than the person being loved.
My parents move through the world with this same philosophy. They’ll stand behind any version of me that fits within the margins they’ve drawn, an “I love you” with the hidden parenthetical being “(as long as you are who we think you should be).” Never will they ask “who do you want to be” because they already have their own answer to that question.
Maria Popova on David Whyte’s Consolation II: “Because what is visible is vulnerable, because what can be seen can be touched and what can be touched can be wounded.” What is one to do other than to make the parts of yourself that lay outside of the margins invisible? I realized that you can never fully be someone else’s idea of who you should be.
I do think that things have been net better this year though. Their actions are not ill-intentioned, they come from a place of love in the best way they knew how to give it. But seeing the life I am slowly carving out for myself and how happy it makes me, they don’t fight as hard for their worldview to be right anymore — it’s more of a quiet disapproval rather than an act of theirs cannibalizing mine.
I hope it means that in some small way, they also believe that my way of seeing the world will work out too.
As I write this, it is now only a few hours until 2025 rolls around. I’m listening to Flawed Mangoes on repeat and I’m figuring out how to write these words.
I liked 2024 a lot, it gave me a lot of hope that a year lived intentionally and with structure can give rise to something wonderful.
In hopes of carrying that intentionality forward:
- I hope you continue to have a deep appreciation for the world and our brief time within it. I hope you take a few weeks off to explore and backpack the outdoors.
- I hope you continue to hold a great deal of space and care for my friends.
- I hope you treat all the things you care about like craft. I hope you continue to do things for the sake of doing the thing.
- I want to be good at what I do but not let ego cloud how I perceive others. I want to keep an eternal beginners mindset.
Some rituals I want to continue and start:
- Keep Playspace going weekly :)
- Show up at the pottery studio three times a week.
- Climb three times a week, make at least 4 outdoor trips!
- Carve out 30 minutes in the morning for quiet existence without internet. Drink some tea, make breakfast, read a bit.
[affirmations font] The tapestry is still being woven. Keep going!
Kindly,
Your present self
Footnotes
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Someone described it as secular maker church and honestly its not too far off. ↩
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I’d like to think that a lot of this carried over into my work as an engineer too! I take a lot of pride in the code I write. Part of why I enjoy my job so much is the process of finding the right abstractions / protocol design / data structure / API for a problem feels very similar to the creative process of finding the right form for the clay. ↩