Today is Tuesday. I don't know what day it's supposed to feel like because, frankly, I've stopped keeping track. It's hard to sort out the days – and my emotions – around a global pandemic. Remember those cartoons where someone would go rolling down a hill of snow and start to get balled up into a giant snowball? That's how each day feels and I'm covered and surrounded by feelings of anxiety, stress, sadness, and occasional bits of peace.

It's odd to grieve the lives we were used to. I now wonder if I took it for granted too: chasing after the bus, walking down the street to the coffee shop, being able to see my grandparents. I try not to think too much about the people I shared my daily commute with on the bus or the funny staff members at the cafe who liked to make people smile or my grandparents alone in a wheelchair or hospital bed.

It's all a bit grim, isn't it?

Anyways. Here's an audio story I did about making pasta:

We say postponed, I think, because "canceled" is too harsh. In reality, I think we all know the truth.

Three-hundred and fifty miles away, up north, yeh-yeh and ma-ma are in a nursing home that's been locked down from outside visitors. At 98 and 96 years old, I wonder if they're wondering why the daily visits from family have stopped. I think yeh-yeh must know, at least. He's still sharp and has been reading the Chinese newspapers frequently, when he gets them. Last month when I saw him, he told us there were people dying in China and we should be careful.



One of the hardest parts about this new reality we've found ourselves in is not knowing how long it will be before we can all see each other again. It isn't just the physical distance that keeps us apart right now; it's also the technology barrier – the lack of means to even communicate – and, most importantly, the language barrier.

I used to envy my friends whose relationships with their grandparents were built on conversations that extended beyond, "Have you eaten today?"/"Yes." But my poor Cantonese and my grandparents' broken English ... We've always struggled to really communicate.

And yet I know, without question, that we love each other as much as people who can speak to one another every day. During last month's visit, I showed ma-ma pictures on my phone of Disney trips and my life at USC, and in between drifting in and out of consciousness, she would nod and smile and point to the familiar faces she knew.

Yeh-yeh is more talkative because, by nature of his life, he's had to be. We still joke around in small ways and he remembers how old I am. But he doesn't know what I do for a living or how I spend my days or what music I listen to or what foods I've decided I like and dislike.

But none of that really matters. What matters is that I miss them.

Now, onto the post:

I haven't been writing so far this year. Actually, this blog has kind of slowed down a lot in the past two years. So much of it, I now know, was because I had given up. Somewhere between my year of creating and now, I found myself unsure if I really had a voice.

But this can't be a post about what I've lost. It has to be about finding it – whatever that is: voice, faith, agency, trust – again.



When I was in college, people knew me as a bit of an Energizer Bunny. I couldn't stand seeing a blank space on my calendar. If I wasn't in class, I was at the newspaper; if I wasn't at the newspaper, I was filling my time with friends and friends of friends.

But it was exhausting, and I felt guilty about feeling exhausted. It wasn't until senior year when things came crashing to a halt because my anxieties merged too deeply with the stress of...well, everything. And suddenly I changed from someone who liked keeping busy to someone who needed to be busy in order to feel worthy.

"Slow down," my friend Jason would say to me, over and over. I started forcing myself to paint my nails at odd hours of the evening so that I couldn't do anything but sit there and watch them dry. No multitasking allowed. It worked. I still do it to this day (although now you can tell how anxious I am by how often I change my nail polish).

But isn't that a problem? In the 9 years since I've graduated, I still have trouble slowing down. If I'm not physically running around, my mind is bouncing from one worry to another – all things that I typically have no control over.

When that happens, I try to remind myself: Take a breath. Slow down.

The most recent journal I kept regularly updated has entries marked at late hours of the night. To remember what I turned to in order to keep my anxieties at bay then is somehow remarkably comforting right now. I know the answer. I've always known the answer. "Sometimes the mountain that needs moving is inside you."

We're in a storm. And we've weathered them before, and there will continue to be more storms. The world is filled with so much uncertainty right now, and so many things that can end up being out of our control. But what I know can control is how I walk through this storm. The rest is out of my hands.