Over the past few weeks, I’ve been defrosting. I’m trying to lead a healthy life, feel real feelings, and be less of a corporate robot. It’s been working, and I finally understand why people have been telling me to take time to heal and not rush into a new job. I know even know what I really want or who I really am without the layers of having spent so much time playing different roles to be with different people and hold different jobs.

It’s almost like I’m letting the valve of my subconscious mind open in spurts to release pent up energy, and every day things get just a little bit clearer. Most notably, I’ve been feeling disappointment and pain a lot more and in a more real way that I had previously. When I was working, you could have told me the world was going to end, and I would have coldly and immediately started asking questions to diagnose the gravity of the situation, drafting up a workplan, and assembling a team to save it. And then having regular and daily check-ins as necessary to make sure we were on track. With only resolve and determination, only affected passion (no real emotion), and no real fear. Dead inside. When you’ve gone through so much shit and calamity and everything is crumbling around you, and you’re the only one doing anything about it, and it is exhausting but effective, it’s pretty easy to get in that mode. War. Survival. Live another day. Fight this battle but know there will be the next one coming up in minutes. Nothing could phase me. I was broken inside and despairing, but on the outside, especially when it came to work, everything was goal-oriented and transactional.

Now it’s all starting to come out. Not as meltdowns or anything, but I am grieving for myself for long-term things and more short-term incidents. I am allowing myself to feel sad. As I closed the door to my Meditasi bungalow, I let myself weep a little for how I had felt in the days prior. I’ve cried on a few occasions during this trip asking myself how I let myself stay in my old job for as long as I did and be treated so poorly when it was nearly killing me – it had certainly taken my soul. When these moments come up, they always seem to come unexpectedly like a roiling shit. Ahhhhhh, gotta start sobbing…now! Head down, tears falling immediately, with little in the way of notice or direct triggers. Can’t hold it back. Not even really thinking about anything.

On the most recent occasion, I was laying down on a massage table in one of the most beautiful locations, atop a hill over the ocean in Amed, Bali. The waves crashed around me, and my facialist started vigorously rubbing my face. It was lovely. She started rubbing my forehead and the pressure points around my eyes and cheeks, and uh oh. I could feel one tear start to drip surreptitiously down my cheek. Then another on the other cheek. It was just one on each side blending into whatever facial goo she had been using at the time, and I figured it wasn’t too noticeable.

And then in my mind’s eye, I saw…holy shit…my mother. But not the idea and vague impression of my mother that I can invoke pretty readily, but the real her, the feeling of her and her form. Well, this is interesting. Engage. One of my therapists had written me earlier that morning. Maybe there was some connection there. Reality calling me back from island life. Or maybe my brain was mentally ready to process.

When I was 22, my mother decided to leave. It was spring 2004, and I had been on my way to a Random House interview. I was walking to the subway when I received a call from my dad. He asked me if I had heard from my mother. Negatory, and that was a good thing. He told me she had left. She had emptied the entire house of all its possessions that day with a bunch of movers (the neighbors had observed this) and left with no goodbye or warning. She had drained the family’s bank accounts and my dad’s business accounts. She had even taken my things – my piano (she doesn’t even play the piano!), my photos, my diaries. Everything was gone.

My world came crashing down on me, not because it’s a traumatic thing to be abandoned, but because now I had no compelling reason to ostracize my family. I had to renegotiate my entire conception of the world and who I am! She was an evil person and my nemesis – and she was gone! No need to get into the details, but when I read the book Unbroken and the description of the crazy POW camp leader Watanabe, I was like OMG that’s my mother!!! Damn, I wonder what they would have been like as a couple. Scary.

So yes, I was happy she was gone – this is the moment I had been waiting for – but I was now massively confused about what I needed to do for my father. We were not exactly estranged, but in my mind, he was complicit and aligned with my mother. Her unhappy but willing sidekick.

Until then, our relationship mostly consisted of a few simple words.

Dad: “How are you?”
Me: “I’m good.”
Dad: “Call me.”
Me: “Okay.”
Dad: “You okay?”
Me: “Yes.”
Dad: “Okay.”
Sometimes I would try to say something real, but this was always cut off with… “OK.”
Me: “How are you?”
Dad: “Good.”
Me: “What’s new?”
Dad: “Nothing. Okay, bye.”
Me: “Bye.”

I’m pretty sure decades passed by with us only going through the motions of this one conversation, not veering off-script. I wondered why we even bothered to call each other.

Our conversation diversified a bit after my mom left, and I would go visit him for my max 24-48-hour visits.

“You hungry?” “No.” “Eat this.” “No, I’m not hungry.”

“You need to get married! Have a baby. Make a family.” “No, I’m good. I’m never getting married.”

Or him asking me about my sister and being perpetually worried about her no matter what she was doing in life.

Sometimes we would get into history and politics, which would be a bit shocking. My dad knows a lot, but he just doesn’t talk…to me. And yet he’s a social butterfly among the Korean-Boston community.

Navigating and creating this new relationship instead of writing off my family completely based on the past has been difficult. I feel that there have been a lot of wrongs, and forgiveness is a hard thing. Creating content in a mostly unspoken silent relationship spanning decades is also difficult. Just throw on a language barrier on top of that too. Please, why not?

So when I was on that massage table seeing my mother so clearly in front of me – the essence of her, not just the idea – and how she made so much of my life a living hell, I let myself feel it. I let the flashes of memory come in and flashes of alternate realities. My own powerlessness to change things and yet what I wished I could have done to reverse history. And I let the tears flow hoping it would help release all that is stuck inside me from past hurt and wrongs. My chest throbbed, but I was okay. No meetings to go through. No title to live up to. No schedule other than my own to keep. I was in a beautiful place with a Balinese facialist who probably thought I was nuts but had probably seen worse. I hoped that in the aftermath, the tears would bring at least some relief and some healing. If not, I would settle for having the self-compassion to allow myself to be a little more human.

DAAAAMN, shit’s getting real in this blog. This is not the type of stuff you’re supposed to write on the internet and have it be traceable to you hahahaha. Whatever.