Essays
Some of these essays were written and submitted with a specific intent--and some were just my independent exploration of thought.
rejecting linear
It was an uninspiring day in mid-March, the sky gloomy and the air thick with moisture when I learned a life lesson camouflaged in the comforting guise of algebra. I was parked between my mother and the stale hospital wall, my fingers picking at my cuticles when I met Dr Chung. She kept her hair short– not quite a pixie cut, but not a bob either, just a neat coif of gray-streaked brown to match the coffee color of her eyes. It was the lines of her face though, not her hair, that stuck out to me: the little crinkle of crow-feet next to her eyes, the horizontal scrawls across her forehead, and the little indents that framed the faint whisper of her smile.
I remember her frowning severely as she told me, among the tidbits of medical information, something that stuck, hibernating deep inside me. The recovery isn’t linear, she said, her jaw held tightly.
I was fourteen then. I was fourteen through three successive concussions and fourteen for the diagnosis to follow. Post Concussion Syndrome was the term she kept using, but I was deaf to everything but the pounding of blood rushing unsolicitedly to the delicate folds of my brain.
In the months to follow the diagnosis, I rested obsessively, like it was a skill I could master. In the crevices of my mind, I thought that the more I rested, the better I would feel. I defaulted to the same notion of a linear relationship; if I worked harder at recovery, I would feel better. If I rested and slept more, the more my brain would heal.
Unfortunately, no mathematical equation could predict the complexities of my brain and its healing process because it’s not linear. Recovery, from any psychological or physical trauma, is not simple enough to be defined by two variables and one straightforward line.
Recoveries, complex and volatile as they are, pale in comparison to the intricacies of life, which is why no mathematical parameters can define the reality of what it means to be human. No two variables can account for the infinite set of cause-and-effect relationships that dictate our world, and no single equation could ever capture the beauty of life’s non-linear, ever-changing trajectory.
I remember in the early stages of Post Concussion Syndrome, my brain delicately aware of noise and light, describing to my doctor that I could pick apart the different frequencies of sound. That my brain could feel them, as though the vibrations of noise were gentle tugs on the fabric of my mind. And I could see them when I closed my eyes to drown out the severe stare of the hospital’s LED lights: little lines skating around each other, intersecting and traversing away.
I think those lines, with their little, unpredictable, unmeasurable spikes and dips, are more beautiful than any graph I’ve seen in any classroom. And, between the coffee of her eyes and that downcast frown, the lines that creased so determinedly on Dr Chung’s face are so much more satisfying than any mathematical model can project.
I don’t lead a linear life, and I don’t think I want to. I want the curve of crow feet adorning my eyes and the jagged lines of my fingernails to reverberate on the cherry-wood counter as I keep the beat to a Dolly Parton song. I don’t want a perfectly linear life, one that grows perfectly proportionately with time; a life with no mathematical margin for error or change.
I want the line of my life to look like one of those monitors with a line that dips up and down, up and down, and follows the delicate, turbulent intervals of a heart– steady, fluttering, and, despite it all, strong.
where am i from?
At any given time, I have approximately three pairs of hiking shoes, a bulging bag of trail mix, a constellation guide, and roughly ten pounds of camping gear in my dirt-stained, sticker-coated 2007 Honda Fit.
On Highway 1, which connects Mill Valley’s Dipsea trail and Muir Woods to Point Reyes National Seashore and Big Sur, the back of my trunk is a jangling chorus of REI’s best-selling merchandise.
If the clutter has ever bothered me though, it’s diminished by the high opportunistic value of always having consistent means to swerve onto a pull-out and disappear into the limitless expanse of ocean, forest, or marshland.
Following my family’s example, I find my community cartwheeling in the blossoming poppies of the California coast, trudging through the muddy trails that weave around the town I grew up in, and floating in the salty, tempestuous waves of the Pacific Ocean.
As a kid, I encountered (either stepped on or ran away from) 10 different species of snakes; visited 12 national parks; and hiked the Half Dome, Angels’ Landing, Pacific Crest, John Muir, and Navajo Loop trails. Our vacations were spent road-tripping between state and national parks, eating 7-11 dinners in our car, and revering trail maps like the Bible.
We found our community in public restrooms, asking other families for toothpaste while camping in Yosemite; on trails where we shared camelbacks with strangers in the 100-degree heat of the Grand Canyon; and aboard rafts while we plunged into rapids of vicious snow melt in Jackson Hole.
We found our community exploring the intricacies of nature, adventuring beyond our comfort, and following the raw curiosity that lived in our souls. I find my community exploring fields of flowers, hiking up mountains, and chasing the curiosity that lives boundlessly in my mind.
the morally reprehensible latte
Every so often, when I feel the insurmountable weight of my sins, I emotionally manipulate myself into going to confession, where, for as brief a period as I enable, St Patrick’s Catholic Church hears the entirety of my wrongdoings.
The broad appeal of confession, I would imagine, is the fact that the priest, the auditory recipient of one’s internal grievances, is not allowed to judge, report, or tattle-tale anything one may confess. The point of this is to encourage honesty before the eyes of God and simultaneously foster an easy environment for the confessor. Consequently, people go to confess a myriad of sins; anything from stealing a child’s bubble gum to admitting to murder is fair game.
But some faults, missteps, and egregious human errors are beyond penance. Some mistakes cut so deep into the heart of humanity that they dare not be uttered, even in the presence of an ever-forgiving God.
I have confessed many things, but one horrific err I refuse to utter even in the private, Jesus-bedecked walls of the Catholic church remains a silent sin, gripping my conscience and effectively blockading my ascension into heaven. Because, somehow, lost in the folds of God’s immaculate creation, I was born with an incomprehensible defect: I like drinking lukewarm beverages.
Not hot drinks, nor ones with ice– just slightly above room temperature beverages. My heaven is at the pick-up desk at Starbucks, sipping my iced latte with no ice. It sounds like an oxymoron, but my preferred term is perfection.
Cold water, which is modernly achieved via ice, has symbolic significance in the Bible. For example, in Matthew 10:42, the verse states, “Give a cool cup of water to someone who is thirsty, for instance”. In the biblical context, cool water is a coveted commodity, especially for merchants and travelers in caravans stuck in dry, Middle Eastern deserts. Thus, cool water is, in some ways, an extension of God’s grace or even his favor. Someone who is the recipient of cold water is essentially blessed.
But beyond the Bible, cold, iced beverages are a staple of Californian culture. Popularized largely in the Industrial Revolution, the use of ice in drinks was eagerly adopted in the Sunbelt of the US. And in California, especially, iced beverages are remarkably prevalent.
So, essentially, I had everything going for me. I had God’s infallible word, as well as the unmistakable California-iced-latte-girl culture to guide me… and yet somehow I failed. I failed to love, appreciate–or even tolerate– ice.
And while my weird preferences may seem harmless– innocent even– sometimes I feel it: God’s disapproving eye. Every once in a while, he sends messengers down in the form of baristas. Ignoring my order, hard-earned through corporate labor, 7 dollars, and the look of need on my face, his divine missionaries will serve me a drink with ice.
I’m not sure whether the planting of ice cubes in my innocent latte is God somehow telling me he is giving me a second chance, his forgiveness in the shape of cold, solidified water as he beseeches me to re-evaluate my sinful ways; if he’s trying to emphasize the pure virtue of patience, as I sit there, waiting for the devil cubes to melt into a sheer layer of diluted brown mush; or if he is taunting me with a morsel of his wrath, giving me a cold, aggressive taste of the hell that awaits me.
And as much as I earnestly tried to ignore it, the displeasure of God and his mundane prophets grew increasingly inflamed– so much so that it became clear I could not go on as I had been; something needed to change.
So, channeling the valor of Joan the Arc and the immeasurable fortitude of Saint Grace, my eponym, I began my journey to be born again– into a new era of Jesus and beverage temperature. Ditching my prior adamance for no ice, I began to request, instead, two cubes of it in my drink orders. At home, staring at the ornamental cross perched above our dining table, I began to scoop a cube or two into my perfectly lukewarm water in the afternoons and tepid coffee in the mornings.
But try as I may, something feral and instinctual within me can’t help it– I hate ice. I hate the space it consumes, stupid blocks absorbing the limited volume of a container. I hate the cold, slippery feeling of ice on the roof of my mouth and the stupid way it looks, little buoys bobbing up and down in a swirling drink. But most of all, I hate the cool sensation of my fingertips gripping an icy drink and the excruciating experience of cold liquid violating my throat as I swallow.
Maybe hell awaits me. Maybe my reckoning will find me on some hot, summer day when I am least expecting it. Maybe I’m not a real follower of Christ, a traitor to my religion and God.
Or maybe, like the nine-part sugar, one-part coffee atio of my vanilla latte– it’s just not that deep.
if the shoe fits
If you were to imagine a 10-year-old's most expensive shoes, you might mentally conjure light-up sneakers from Jojo Siwa’s brand deals, or maybe some sparkly flats with encrusted gold sequins that leave a trail. The envisioned budget of these shoes is probably in the fifties– max. Kids shoes are inexpensive, cheaply made, and designed to sustain kids' feet only as long as they will retain their size (which is not long).
At age 10, my most expensive shoes– my most expensive anything– were a soft pink color. Satin and the color of the fragrant roses from my grandma’s front yard garden.
At age 10, I owned designer shoes. Not just designer- but custom shoes, tailored exactly to my feet. I treated them with the same sanctity I would an altar; they were my holy grail, my reason for waking up, and the drive behind my 10-year-old life.
They were my first pair of pointe shoes, the pair I still have hung on my wall.
For reference, pointe shoes are the altar of dance, the holy vessels of dance, the ornaments that transform a mundane dancer. Your first pair is the ultimate rite of passage– your transformation into a ballet dancer, not just a hobbyist.
The first day I got my pointe shoes, my little child's fingers clung to them, scared they would cease to exist. Beyond my holy grail and the most substantial source of external validation I had experienced until that point in my life, they represented me (the narrow, high arches of my feet).
As a twin– with three older siblings and twenty-two cousins, I grew up existing in brown-haired, brown-eyed homogeneity. I was a part of my familial tapestry of symmetry; my face a pile of my family’s features, bleeding hazily from me onto my siblings.
So these new shoes– if you can consider them that– were special. They were mine, uniquely. They didn’t reflect every other aspect of me– women’s-factory-size small, average height, average weight, average hair, average eyes, average skin-tone, average number of freckles, average number of fingers. They represented the one part of my identity that distinguished me as an individual, as one specific granddaughter, rather than just the fifteenth of twenty-two.
Ironically, those shoes, which epitomized the establishment of my individual identity, only launched me into a new, graduated, era of conformity. Pointe shoes, externally, look identical from one dancer to the next. Calling these shoes ‘custom’, while technically being correct, is misleading. While they are physically unique, they are visually undistinctive.
In ballet, the visual objective is symmetry. Dancers become two-dimensional mirrors of each other on stage. The identical blush pink of our shoes is a component of that.
Given my convictions about my invisible existence in my family, it’s bizarre that this core principle of ballet never bothered me. Homogeneity is beautiful when it’s voluntary– so is conformity when it revolves around something worthwhile.
When I was 10 I thought it was so freaking awesome that I had custom shoes– and that they matched with all of my best friends. I loved the matching sea of leotards and tights all the same colors and all the little girls with identical buns held together with hair pins and prayers.
I welcomed the conformity of ballet despite pursuing my own identity. I flung myself into a world that stomps on individuality, personality, and ideological or aesthetic diversity. Somehow, I reconciled the sacrifice of my authenticity with my love for dance.
At age 10, I lost myself in the trap of propagated conformity– exchanging my individuality for something bigger than myself; in dance, molding myself to fit the group. Through that experience, though, I found passion, community, and an inescapable sense of love for what I was doing.
I think society is so obsessed with people existing as individuals that it minimizes the value of people existing in the quiet invisibility of homogeneity.
As a near-adult, I think it’s nice that the hues of my hair and eyes mold into my family’s finite color palate. Now, I welcome the homogeneity of my family, rationalizing that they are no longer people I need to establish individuality from. My voice, hair, and eyes are all interchangeable features from one of my cousins to the next– something I find more humor in than frustration.
It’s fun to revel in the dominance of my family’s ridiculously strong irish genetics, the culprit of our lack of visual diversity. Ultimately, it’s comforting to exist non-distinctly, a fact I discovered when I was 10.
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