Every year, for a few years now, my friends and I have practiced this exercise in lieu of resolutions: we come up with three words that serve as themes we set out for the rest of the year. Goal-based resolutions like losing ten pounds or to get a promotion have always felt flat and one-dimensional to me. Instead, by having these three words, you can use them as signposts to help you make decisions with more intention throughout the year or even the rest of your life. This past January, the person who’d introduced me to this exercise Alexa and I were going through our words for 2018 over dinner. These were mine:

“Steadfast” I had said. I want to be more persistent and work on building habits that would be resilient to the natural change of my life. I want to build stamina. Between traveling, my career, and my social life, trying to find some constants to anchor my life has historically been a challenge. Taking care of my body, staying creative every day, tending to my relationships…these are all things I want to be more regular about. I want some things in my life to become as inevitable as the sun rising and setting each day.

“Expression” was another word. I feel like I have work — thoughts, ideas, feelings — hiding inside of me that isn’t visible to the world. I keep things in more than I’d like. In other words, I feel like I haven’t been authentic to myself: who I am on the outside doesn’t fully feel like who I am on the inside. How do I be the person I want to be in a way that others can see? Do I dress the way I want others to see me? Do I make my thoughts known to others, in my writing and in what I say? This is less about making sure other people know what I feel, think, and believe and more about being less shy to express myself, for me. How do I present myself to the world in a way that is true to myself, regardless of who will see me?

But there’s one word that was on my mind leading up to this dinner and the word I’ve been thinking the most about this year: bravery. Now halfway through the year, it’s what I want to write about today: what it means to be brave.

I think from the outside looking in, a lot of people don’t think I have trouble doing what seems outlandish, intense, or scary. I came out as gay when I was 14. I’ve picked up and traveled the world while working full time as a nomad for several years. In the past, I’ve committed myself fully to a hard, improbable romance for a long period of time. I’ve started plenty of ambitious, tricky projects professionally and in my volunteer work that can go sideways at any time. Risk is something baked into everyone’s lives, but I’ve managed to sprinkle my life with a pinch or two more of danger. To understand why, there are three things to know about how I make decisions.

First, when I’m confronted with weighing an opportunity, I default to doing the exciting, vital thing. Sure, I’ll go on that weekend trip with you. Yes, I’ll buy tickets for that festival. Why not help you start this pet venture of yours? There are a few justifications at arm’s reach for this default. There’s the clichéd carpe diem response “You only live once.” Something else I remember pretty vividly is the advice “You miss all the shots you don’t take.” There’s a sea of platitudes I could draw from, but in the end, I think I’m just built this way. Unless I find a good reason not to do something, I’ll tend to just go for it. For me, taking action pulls me in like gravity: it takes a lot of effort to escape it.

Second, even though I’m working with a default that spurs me to action, I’m always thinking about how to minimize risk. If something requires some consideration, I’ll do everything I can to minimize what seems dangerous: lowering the stakes mentally, preparing for things ahead of time, building an encyclopedic knowledge about what I’m about to attempt. A big part of this process is breaking these problems down, and it’s a skill I think can be taught. Take traveling the world for three months while working full time, something I first considered years ago. Becoming a nomad was a daunting possibility. After several months of mulling on the idea, I was able to turn that possibility into just a few essential questions:

1. What do I do about my apartment? Can I rent it out to pay for my travel?
2. Where do I want to go? How do I go to and stay in each place?
3. How do I work with my team remotely? What do I need to broadcast about my working habits? What about Internet?
4. What do I need to pack? What can I buy along the way?

Each of those questions were sizable in their own right, but I could figure each out with some work. Suddenly, the big question “should I travel the world for three months while I work” became much less frightening. After some meticulous planning, going nomadic became an exciting adventure, one that I relished as I went through it. The same thing goes for starting a new creative project, tackling a complicated recipe for a dinner party, or even going onstage to give a talk. Those things seem like exciting opportunities with some mitigation. “Think of the realistic worst possible scenario,” a mentor had once told me. “If you think about it carefully and believe you can recover from it, go for it. You have nothing to lose.”

Third and lastly, I’ll bail when it’s sensible. With everything I’ve explained before, you might be tempted to jump to the conclusion that I believe you can do anything. I’m not saying that all risky things aren’t really risky, just that there’s a way to make really exciting opportunities more approachable. There are some stupid things you just shouldn’t do, and some failures you really can’t recover from. After breaking the problems down, seriously considering them, and weighing the cost and benefits, some crazy things really are just crazy—so don’t do them. The method here just makes the field of possibility a little wider in life.

So why is one of my words for 2018 “bravery”?

With these three things put together — a mental default to action, knowing how to break big decisions down, and having some perspective about when to quit — I feel like I’ve managed to open up a lot of opportunity in my life that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. This philosophy has helped me in my career, my social life, and my personal growth. But there is one problem. No matter how much planning, rationalizing, and considering I do, there is still one thing that I can’t control for, something that I think has limited me for most of my life:

Fear.

I don’t think I do very well with fear. There are a handful of horror movies I’ve actually watched beginning-to-end. I never learned to ride a bike as a kid because I was nervous of falling and embarrassing myself. I ended up wearing glasses most of my teenage years because the idea of putting lenses in my eyes scared me senseless. To this day, I get squeamish being around little children with balloon animals because I’m terrified their squeaky toy will pop right next to me. You get the idea.

You see, my entire philosophy around decision making and taking on risk is about minimizing fear, and that’s because I’m terrible at getting through fear. Did coming out at such a young age scare me? Yes, of course it did. So I made every preparation, considered every scenario, and set everything up just the way I wanted it so that when I was ready to come out, it didn’t feel like such a heavy lift. Did the possibility of packing my life into a backpack to explore an unfamiliar world shake my bones? Yes, it absolutely did. So I studied and planned and worked to make sure everything was in order so the excitement of traveling to new places would overcome my anxiety of the unknown. So much of my energy and my time goes into thinking about how to minimize risk and fear in my life because making big leaps of faith is not something I am very comfortable doing...at all. My inability to engage with fear directly has motivated me to minimize it and ultimately avoid it at almost any expense.

For the most part, this approach has been fruitful. It’s taught me really valuable skills and opened up a lot of doors along the way. But the other edge of the sword cuts in such a way that there are some opportunities — no matter how much planning, studying, or calculating I do — that I choose to pass on. Why? It’s not because I don’t want to take the opportunity. It’s not because I haven’t been able to break something down. It’s not even a bad idea to take the leap after all that consideration. It’s because I simply can’t get through the fear that remains after all that work.

These decisions and opportunities are big and small and range from the life-changing to the ordinary. I can’t tell you how many crushes I’ve let go of simply because I was too afraid to admit my feelings — they’re opportunities that might have turned into really meaningful relationships. Starting my own company in earnest, with funding and people I’m responsible for and real customers I serve, has never really happened because I am afraid I will fail, even if I might have a better chance than most at succeeding. What I’m describing is the kind of fear that holds me back from opportunities, many times big opportunities, that I have every reason to take. It’s the kind of fear that you can’t minimize, that is big-by-design, and that you have to get through instead of around.

I’m tired of letting those opportunities pass me by.

For me, being brave isn’t about dispelling or minimizing fear like I have been — it’s about being terrified and doing what I set out to do anyways. I think that starts with understanding what I’m scared of. I’m learning that my fear is just a way for my body to tell me something: that I am afraid of losing something that matters to me in a way that I can’t control. I’m learning that once I understand what it is that I stand to lose and once I can let go of the control I feel like I need to have, I can move past my doubt. If I treat my fear as a tool and not as my enemy, perhaps I can do the things that have always made me quake.

Now halfway through the year, I find myself wanting to be scared more and doing what I want to do in spite of the dread that stills my heart. I look at my fear like a challenge now. Being brave is about having courage, and the thing about courage is that it’s like a muscle. It only gets stronger with use, with failure, and with recovery. I’m taking on the things that are risky and calculated and still failing, so that I am less afraid of failing the next time. I’m speaking up more for what I believe in when I am afraid of what people will think of me. I’m getting better at apologizing, when I’ve been hesitant to take responsibility before. I want to tell my would-be crushes that I want to go on that first date. I finally want to learn how to ride a bike. It’s getting easier with each new feat.

I’ve been putting off exercising my courage my whole my life. In fact, I’ve done everything in my power to avoid being brave, without even knowing that’s what I’ve been doing. Now that I do, it’s finally time to flex.

Think about the most controversial but delicious food you know about. Really pause a moment, and think about it. You’re probably thinking about a bird, one that gets deliberately fattened by force feeding before being slaughtered, prized by famous chefs and indulgent diners the world over. You’re probably thinking it’s a dish that’s been illegal to serve in many places around the world. You’re probably thinking the dish is French.

You’d be right about all of these things…but I’m not talking about foie gras.

A Mysterious Meal

Yesterday, I came across a painting by Carl Bloch called “In a Roman Osteria” painted in 1866:

It’s a beautiful painting, noteworthy for its photographic realism and its demonstrated mastery of portraiture. I had practiced as an artist for almost ten years starting when I was eight, moving from pastels on parchment, to charcoal on canvas, and eventually to portraiture with oils. I was captured. As you scan the painting, the first thing you’ll probably notice is the piercing stares of the diners in the forefront of the scene, as if you’ve been caught taking a photograph with your phone without their permission. But it’s not just people stalking you; it’s also the little cat, perched near the left edge of the frame. In the background, the work’s commissioner, a merchant and friend of Bloch’s, is depicted at the back table speaking with two friends, with Bloch himself turned away from the viewer. This is how I had studied the painting. I was so interested in Bloch’s technique and composition that I had almost overlooked one of the most obvious oddities of the painting. When I finally noticed it, my one thought rang in my mind like a loud singular gong in an otherwise silent monastery:

Why in the world does that woman have a napkin on her head?

It turns out that the woman depicted in this painting is probably eating a songbird called the ortolan bunting. It’s a small bird, and it’s also become the most recent object of my grand obsession.

The Practice of Gluttony

Ortolan is a delicacy, most famously served and adorned by the French. It’s noted for its unctuous, complex, hazelnut-like flavor and eating the bird is considered a rite of passage for French gourmets. Some people consider the ortolan the soul of the country. Proust wrote about eating ortolans. The French gastronomic giant Alain Ducasse, who currently holds an astonishing twenty-one Michelin stars, served ortolans during his 1995 visit to the legendary Le Cirque in New York. Earlier that year, the former French President François Mitterrand had his infamous last meal on New Year’s Eve consisting of foie gras, thirty Marennes oysters, capon, and not one but two ortolans before dying of prostate cancer a few days later.

In 1975, Craig Claiborne, the famed New York Times food critic, wrote about a contest he had entered sponsored by American Express to a dinner for two at any restaurant in the world, provided the establishment accepted their credit card. Claiborne won the auction and decided to eat a three-part, 31 course meal in France with some of the finest wines in the world and the bill came out to $4,000…the equivalent of over $18,000 today. When Claiborne was trying to choose which restaurant to go to, he went to Chez Denise in Paris and met Mr. Denise himself at a test meal there, and what was he served? Ortolan. Unsurprisingly, Claiborne ate the bird again as part of his return trip to Chez Denise for the real meal.

In more recent times, ortolan still captures the imagination of chefs, learned diners, and the public. Anthony Bourdain described his experience eating ortolan to Stephen Colbert, singing its praises: “It’s a hot rush of fat, guts, bones, blood, and meat…and it’s really delicious. It’s one of the great, most extraordinary dining experiences you can have.” The modern television series Hannibal depicts its notoriously gruesome titular character Hannibal Lecter as an exquisitely masterful chef and…cannibal. In a particularly sensual and almost erotic scene, the show features ortolan flambéd:

Ortolan has a long, indulgent, and gluttonous history, but not only for tradition and its taste. Like many storied delicacies such as foie gras, fugu, and san-nakji, the dish has a deeply sinister side. In my opinion, the little bird hovers near the top of my list of morbid gastronomic curiosities.

First of all, catching and selling ortolans is illegal in France, as it is in almost every part of the world where it is found because it is rare and endangered. Thousands of the songbirds were once caught every year as they migrated south from Europe to Africa, and since the ban, a black market has risen where the thumb-sized birds sometimes sell for hundreds of dollars apiece. But eating an endangered species is the least scandalous part of having this dish. The real scandal is in how the baby-fist-sized birds are captured, prepared, and eaten. Ortolans are typically captured alive; they’re far too small to be shot with pellets like other eaten game. Instead, they’re caught with nets, sometimes entangling other birds that may be endangered as well. Some are lucky to be captured in ground cages, baited with seed. In Cyprus, ortolans are trapped with limesticks, long wooden branches lathered with a white, tar-like glue that are planted in juniper bushes to snare the birds on their tail feathers. After the birds are captured, they are fattened. People discovered that ortolans naturally gorge themselves at night, so they are kept in black boxes with little to no light and plenty of seed to feast on. They are manipulated to eat until they can barely move and balloon to twice their original size. It’s said that Roman Emperors used to stab their eyes out and blind them into a perpetual night to make them consume even more. When the bird is sufficiently fattened, the traditional preparation calls for the still-living ortolan to be drowned in Armagnac, a brandy made in Gascony, southwest France. This practice both kills the bird and allows the flesh to marinate in the liquor before being plucked of its feet and defeathered. Once prepped, the little bird is heated and served, usually as one of the final courses. The proper way to eat ortolan is to eat it hot and whole in one mouthful: flesh, bone, beak, and all. One bird, one bite. The crunch of the bones, the savoriness of the guts, and the mashing of the little brain against the shattering skull is all supposed to be part of the experience. It’s also supposed to be transcendentally delicious.

This brings me back to Bloch’s painting and the woman with the white napkin on her head. When eating ortolan, it’s ceremonial custom to cover your face with a napkin so you can hide from the judgment of God when eating such an indulgent and morally depraved dish. Supposedly, it was a Catholic Cardinal who first started the napkin tradition. In old French songs, the ortolan is praised as a symbol of innocence and the love of Christ. Now, the French say it’s best to hide under the napkin so your fellow diners don’t need to watch you spit out the bird’s larger bones that you couldn’t crush with your molars.

The Taste of Sin

I have never tried ortolan. I will probably never try ortolan. Not only is it illegal to acquire or have served in any restaurant I could get easy access to, but it is deeply disturbing in its capture and preparation. But this unlikelihood of trying ortolan is more of a practical obstacle rather than a necessarily principled one. I can’t deny that the history and scandal of this dish deeply fascinates me and sparks a tremendous curious itch I am eager to scratch. I am an adventurer, a risk-taker, and so far, a relative amoralist with food. I’ve eaten the still-moving tentacles that have been snipped from an infant octopus before my eyes; I’ve been eager to try potentially lethal fish flesh that can contain a neurotoxin a hundred times more poisonous than cyanide; and I certainly don’t think twice about eating goose liver paté on a slice of toast. The conflict between what is so clearly immoral but at the same time so immensely seductive is at the heart of my obsession with ortolan. I may never get the chance to try it, but if I did I would feel deep ambivalence about taking that chance in a way I haven’t with other foods. Knowing what I know about ortolan, this is the one dish that sits so clearly in the gray area that it dangerously stokes the flames of my curiosity like the ashen embers of an ancient but once roaring fire.

But if I do decide to somehow take the chance one day and try ortolan, I will definitely have a napkin over my head. Not shielding me from the judgment of God, but protecting me from the possibility of having Bloch’s painting re-created in the modern era. If I am sure about anything with this dish, it’s that I would never want a photo of me, napkin half over my head, with my surprised and sin-soaked eyes staring at you from across the dining room.

Originally published at jonhmchan.com on August 8, 2017.

For the last four months, I’ve been away from my home base in New York City, and I’ve spent time in cities throughout Taiwan, South Korea, Croatia, and Spain, each for different reasons. In every place, I’ve learned something new about myself, as I always do with travel. I’ve been traveling nomadically like this for my entire professional life, but there’s something special about particularly long trips like this one. I don’t just grow; I evolve.

One of the things I became acutely aware of on this trip was religion. In Croatia, nearly everyone I met is Catholic. Traveling to Spain, I visited Catedral de Santa María de la Sede, the third-largest church in the world. I also learned about the cathedral’s history as a Muslim mosque and about the many Islamic threads that run through the entire city of Seville. Near the end of my trip, I even had a conversation with my boyfriend about Eastern figures in philosophy that I’ve always known about, but never understood: Confucius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Mencius. I’ve been exposing myself to many religious environments and practices in a short period of time, and as I reflect more about these experiences, I’ve began to think to myself: why don’t I explore these different religions to learn in the same way I travel to different places in the world to learn?

I have a complicated relationship with religion. I think most people do at some point in their life, whether they grew up around faith or not. As someone who is openly gay, a dedicated student of analytic philosophy and science, and a lifelong agnostic if not outright atheist, I haven’t been very fond of religion. If anything, I’ve had an antagonistic relationship with it because I thought most religions rejected me, the people I love, and the values I hold dear in my life. I’ve once felt that religious people are close-minded and intolerant of other ways of thinking. Amongst those closest to me, there’s sometimes even outright dismissal of religion as a concept. As I reflect more on these notions, I think: isn’t it just as narrow-minded and intolerant of me to reject these cultures without an honest effort to understand them? How am I any better than the people I accused of being closed off?

What I am quickly discovering as I travel more and more is how little I really know about different faiths from around the world, and how beautiful, practical, and meaningful religious traditions of all types can be. Seeing my coworkers observe the Sabbath to reflect, disconnect, and recharge, I think about how both enjoyable and healthful it can be. I can’t think of many more experiential and more widely practiced reflections of self-restraint and compassion as Ramadan and Lent. Practicing mindfulness meditation in the Buddhist tradition has done wonders for me and my mental health. I think about the contagious gratitude I feel whenever I witness one of my closest friends say grace before every meal we have together.

Slowly, I’ve resolved to shift my old views on spirituality and try to gain a better understanding of religions of all kinds. Over the last several weeks, I’ve begun to learn more about the different spiritual traditions of the world, and I’ve treated this experience the same way as I do traveling to different countries to learn about different cultures. It’s just the beginning of what will be a very long, very gradual process. It may last me a lifetime, and it starts small. Perhaps I’ll step into a mosque for the first time looking to hear the adahn I’ve always found so beautiful. Maybe I’ll properly learn Omairi and visit the shrines during my upcoming visit to Japan. I might even finally try yoga, against all my initial aversion to the idea, just to gain a better understanding of Hinduism.

At this point, you might be wondering if I’m looking to become religious. You might even be wondering if I’m looking to cherry pick from many different faiths, to mix and match. Here’s something I read recently from the Dalai Lama:

People from different traditions should keep their own, rather than change. However, some Tibetan may prefer Islam, so he can follow it. Some Spanish prefer Buddhism; so follow it. But think about it carefully. Don’t do it for fashion. Some people start Christian, follow Islam, then Buddhism, then nothing.

In the United States I have seen people who embrace Buddhism and change their clothes! Like the New Age. They take something Hindu, something Buddhist, something, something… That is not healthy.

For individual practitioners, having one truth, one religion, is very important. Several truths, several religions, is contradictory.

I am Buddhist. Therefore, Buddhism is the only truth for me, the only religion. To my Christian friend, Christianity is the only truth, the only religion. To my Muslim friend, [Islam] is the only truth, the only religion. In the meantime, I respect and admire my Christian friend and my Muslim friend. If by unifying you mean mixing, that is impossible; useless.

I have my own truth, and in this exercise, I am looking to see what I can learn and appreciate about different faiths, with curiosity. In the same way that I travel neither looking for a place to move to nor to assimilate myself into, I am seeking to learn about and from religion without looking to subscribe to a particular faith. I’m not saying it’s impossible. In fact, quite the opposite. I think there is something to learn from almost all religions and perhaps even something to incorporate into my daily life. Who knows?

I’m keeping an open mind and an open heart, and I’m excited about the journey.

Originally published at jonhmchan.com on July 25th, 2017.

When I was learning to code, it was before learning to code was a popular thing to do. Back then, learning to code meant dealing with a crawling dial-up connection, sifting through borrowed programming books at the library, or just copying some code from an article and hoping the compiler didn’t blow up.

It was a lot of fun — and I did it because it was fun — but it was often incredibly frustrating as well. Becoming a self-taught developer is the gym rat’s approach to learning to code. You have to like the pain at least a little bit to really get through the thing. People learning to code now aren’t getting it much easier.

Learning to code feels hard. For a really long time, I’ve been trying to sort out how to describe this feeling accurately. On the surface, it really doesn’t make sense: with all of the new tutorials, videos, and countless other resources now available, it really should be easier, but it isn’t. Why? It’s a question I’ve tried to solve with my work on Bento and with Stack Overflow for years now. For anyone who wants to be a developer, whether you decide to go through a bootcamp, get a degree, or teach yourself, this is what I want you know:

Being a programmer feels like walking into a maze in the dark every day.

A lot of people have this idea that learning to code is just about accumulating knowledge and applying it until it becomes really, really solid in your mind. That perhaps if you just read enough books, burn through enough online tutorials, and watch enough walkthrough videos, the knowledge will pour into your head like coffee into a very large, but eventually fillable, mug. The painful truth is: it just doesn’t work that way.

Whenever you’re coding, you’re walking into a maze in the dark. Your job is not to get a map of the maze beforehand, figure out the path from the entrance to the exit, memorize the solution, and then walk in confidently knowing exactly what to do. No, your job is to walk right into darkness, armed with little more than your wits, and feel your way through it.

As it is with all mazes, you will inevitably run into a wall. As a developer, your job is not to collapse on the floor and give up in a puddle of your own tears. Your job is to encounter the obstacle before you, rub your bruised nose, and begin to look for clues. You need to stretch out your arms, groping for the dark edges of the walls around you, and slowly feel your way out. You’ll eventually find a path forward, test it, and keep going deeper into the maze. Sometimes, you will run into dead ends. Sometimes, you will find yourself looping in elaborate circles. But your job is to persist, to keep looking for hints, and eventually find your way to the light.

One of the very first questions people will usually ask me when they begin to learn to code is: how do you know all this stuff? There seem to be hundreds of languages, frameworks, tools, and technologies to learn. To beginners, experienced developers must seem like superhuman repositories of technical knowledge that mere mortals couldn’t begin to compare themselves to. As much as we’d like to think of ourselves that way (on special occasions), the not-so-secret secret is that most experienced developers really don’t know everything off the top of their heads, but we are confident we can learn what we don’t know.

You see, experienced developers don’t magically have the solution to the maze pre-seared into their minds when we get out of developer school. Experienced developers are just more comfortable walking into the maze. The shape of the walls feels familiar to them. The tricky paths don’t fool them so easily. After years of running through the maze, the pace of their steps in the darkness is a little more brisk. Some of them even like being in the maze.

The thing to take away from this story is: persist. Know that coding is about learning your way out of problems you will inevitably run into. You’re not supposed to know everything. More than picking up some syntax, getting better at tooling, riding the wave of the newest language fad, getting good at learning and persevering in the face of the unknown is the core skill you must nurture as a developer. How good are you at finding answers to your programming questions? How precise are you when debugging your own and other people’s code? How thorough are you sifting through documentation about something you don’t know? How do you endure fixing the same error after hours and hours sitting staring at your screen?

Your ability and willingness to learn something you don’t know is precisely what makes you a developer. You’ll learn dozens, if not hundreds of times each time you open up your editor. Encountering and facing the unknown is what makes programming so hard (and fun), but your ability and courage in the face of the unknown is also what makes you so incredibly valuable as a developer.

So, the next time that you run into a compiler error, know that it’s just part of the journey out of the maze. The next time you walk away from a tutorial feeling incomplete, it means you need to take the other path at the fork and find another solution. The next time you want to give it all up because learning to code is just too hard, take a deep breath in the darkness, and maybe you’ll find some unexpected light shining from a path you haven’t yet explored.

When all else fails, just know that there are others here in the maze with you. One of the things that makes being a developer a joy is just how generous the learning community can be. When you find yourself despairing, and when you need the help, reach out. Ask a friend, a colleague, a professor, a stranger on the Internet. Someone may brush by you in the darkness, and gladly take you by the hand a little closer towards the light.

Thanks to Alexa, Kasra, Hoon, and Tiffany for reading early drafts of this post.

Originally published at jonhmchan.com.

As the year quickly came to a close, I found myself thinking a lot about endings. As I wrote about most recently, I’ve had a lot of endings lately. As a result, there are new fissures in my mind. I finished Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal not too long ago, a book on palliative care and how medicine wrestles with terminal patients. It’s filled with stories of the dying: dying with tragedy, dying with fear, and dying with grace. After publishing my last essay, I spoke with a number of people — many of whom I haven’t connected with in several years — about our shared experiences of loss and transition. They’ve told me tales of abuse, of abandonment, of finally letting go when the pressure made their souls crack. This time of year naturally prompts us to reflect; it’s just that for me, this time around, my thoughts feel heavier having recently been soaked with endings, stained in the spots where tears have dried up, and lined with the scars left over from healing. My mind is heavier with these thoughts like the lacquerware of kintsugi, the Japanese art that mends broken pottery with powdered gold to highlight where the fractures have been. This time around, I find myself plagued with the knowledge of one of the few certain facts of life: that everything ends.

I want to write about how to live with the knowledge of endings.

Truth and Nihilism

My favorite interviewer, Krista Tippett, always asks her guests at the beginning of each session, “What is the religious or spiritual background of your childhood?” I have this recurring nightmare that one day I’ll have cause to be interviewed by her, and I’ll give a shallow and embarrassingly pedantic answer to this question. I’m not a strictly religious person, but I am a child of philosophy. At an early age, I remember many of my first spiritual musings would orbit around nihilism.

I remember when I was younger, laying in my bed at night and staring at the ceiling, I would envision the vastness of the world and of time and thinking about how insignificant it would make me feel. I would think about how old I am, where I stood in the normal lifespan of a human being, and how many breaths that would mean I had left. I would think about what I could accomplish, my greatest ambitions and dreams and desires, and how quickly they would be forgotten in time, like raindrops in a roaring river. I would remind myself of my religious skepticism, that chances are, there really was just stark nothingness after death. I would think about my family, my friends, my great loves in life, and how we would all return to the earth and ash and dust. I would think about the entirety of human history, our wars, our triumphs, our future endeavours, and what an infinitesimally small sliver of time we would occupy in the vastness of the cosmos. I would think about the sheer size of our world, and what a tiny speck we must be in comparison to the countless other planets among stars among galaxies among clusters among superclusters and beyond. I would think about heat death, and how eventually, space itself would tear the stars apart until everything cooled into a frozen blackness. Everything will end. Nothing will be remembered. All things will stop. It made me feel small, meaningless, and most of all, powerless. I remember I would tremble underneath my blanket and the sheets just pondering these ideas. Truth would lead me to nihilism into the long night that would make me shake with angst.

It’s their ineffable truth that makes these thoughts so unsettling. There are few things in life that are so certain, and the things that are feel profoundly and unfortunately perilous and merciless. I know that all things will end and so perhaps all things are even meaningless. Yet, I want so desperately for there to be meaning in my life. The knowledge of nihilism is so fixed, so sure, that at best I can only look in the other direction for relief, temporarily happy in my attempt at finding purpose anyways. I can tuck my thoughts about endings away into the darker corners of my mind, and instead focus on what is in front of me, right here, right now, where the light briefly but brightly shines. I can busy myself with work, with love, with life’s little chores that carry me from one place to another, and countless other distractions…but the truth of nihilism is omnipresent. It’s always with me, in the back of my mind, no matter how well I disguise it, ignore it, and smother it. I want so desperately for nihilism not to be true, yet it’s always there, dormant, stalking me.

I mulled those thoughts then, and I do now. What I think is so important about these thoughts is how they come packaged with modern living. We live in an increasingly secular, starkly realist, and information-soaked world. There is an almost brutal commitment to truth, to science, to honesty and an evacuation of anything that might seem mystical, traditional, or overly sentimental. Yet, the ultimate price for this commitment to realism is often a fast-track ticket to nihilism. It’s the crisis of our generation and so many before us: to live a life where we try our best to be serious with ourselves and find meaning but in a universe without God, ensnared with human folly, and probable oblivion. Mortality, temporality, and emptiness aren’t things people like to think about on a regular basis, if at all. It makes people anxious, sometimes to the point of creating unforgiving, quaking fear in someone’s heart as it has with mine. But right now, I’m sitting next to these thoughts, not with alarm, but with a curiosity about how to live with them.

What if we decided not to turn away from this truth? Like so many modern people who consider themselves secular, committed to truth and science, and as comprehensively honest to themselves as possible, why do I make an exception of nihilism and flee? Why is it that when we are faced with thinking about annihilation that we are terrified to look at it in the eye, as if we would turn into stone at first sight? What if, instead of running from this idea, we could embrace it?

What if there’s something beautiful beyond the fear?

A Brief Sample of Existentialism

When I first started studying philosophy and literature in school, some of the first few texts I came across were by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. The problem of nihilism isn’t a new one, but it is newly relevant in today’s fast-paced, secularizing, and infinitely possible world. Existentialism has been the response of the last few centuries’ philosophical thinkers: not just Sartre and Camus but also commonly Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dostoyevsky. It’s the tradition of philosophical inquiry into the human condition in the face of an ostensibly meaningless world: how do human beings find meaning in a universe that appears cold and indifferent to our dramas? It’s where the term “existential crisis” comes from: the period(s) of life where one is confronted with the task of assigning purpose or value to their being. What do these thinkers say about nihilism? How do they confront this truth?

Sartre, in short, says that if the universe is not given any intrinsic meaning, it is our job to give it. If the universe has no inherent purpose, then there are no rules, no values, no guidelines to follow. We are free…frighteningly free. We alone hold all the responsibility of giving our lives meaning. Sartre proclaims that we must live our lives authentically. That is, with so much freedom granted by the truth of nihilism, we must avoid acting in mauvaise foi or “bad faith”, mindlessly doing the default, automatic thing that society, governments, or religions may prescribe us. In the absence of any given meaning to the universe, we are wholly free to determine its meaning.

Camus, though he rejected the label “existentialist”, nonetheless thought and wrote about the human condition in the face of nihilism, perhaps most provocatively amongst his peers. In his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, he begins:

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide…Judging whether life is or is not worth living, that is the fundamental question of philosophy.

— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

In this same essay, Camus provides a familiar conclusion that serious philosophical inquiry necessarily leads to a meaningless world, one that is indifferent to the human condition, absent of any a priori value, and ultimately vacuous. So it follows that when presented with nihilism, someone might naturally contemplate suicide. Why should someone live if there is no meaning to life? This conundrum is called the Absurd, the conflict between the human tendency to seek meaning in life and the inevitable failure to find any. Like Sartre, Camus also offers that human beings can provide their own lives meaning, but he differs in that he believes any meaning must be personal and ultimately futile in the face of the Absurd. In other words, Camus tells us that in spite of a cold world, we must persevere. He invokes the image of Sisyphus, who is condemned to eternal punishment pushing a boulder up a steep mountain, only to have it roll down again for him to repeat the arduous task. We are like Sisyphus, fighting against the gravity of truth and nihilism by living with self-proclaimed purpose, only to be defeated endlessly, again and again. Ultimately, Camus says we must imagine Sisyphus happy, that though his efforts — like ours — are doomed in the grand scheme of things, he must smile, as we must enjoy ourselves in spite of the Absurd and live life fully. We should relish life, Camus says: its immense pleasures, its ordinary, and its spectacular. Camus’ vision of the human condition in spite of nihilism is a refreshing one, and a vision I’ve adored since discovering him nearly a decade ago.

Modern Existentialism

I love the existentialists. They laid the groundwork for how to live a modern life, and forged a path forward that doesn’t betray a commitment to serious thought. Yet, to me, these answers still feel lacking in the context of our modern world. So yes, the universe is indifferent and we should live in spite of the fact. So yes, we may prescribe our own meaning, whether that meaning is true like it might be for Sartre, or simply an exercise like it may seem for Camus. But how should we live? The existentialists offer that we should live authentically, sometimes with celebration, because nihilism offers us freedom, opportunity, and urgency. Yet, something about these traditional thoughts lead me to faint whispers of hedonism, selfishness, and indulgence that I know portends personal ruin. Something about these responses still suggest a wholesale rejection of millenia of spiritual teachings, an apathy towards human injustice, and the rightful position of some lingering bleakness. Something about these answers feels…unforgiving. The offers of our traditional existential thinkers leave me warmer than the pitiless zero of nihilism, but still not warm enough to slacken my mind’s grip on my heart. There needs to be something more than just “not-nothing”. Positively, what should we do?

So here’s my own take. Like Camus, I, too, offer that the only serious philosophical problem is suicide, but framed differently: what if we were granted practical immortality? Given the opportunity to live as long as we would like, without the philosophical trappings of crippling old age or other similar technicalities, how should we conduct ourselves in an indifferent universe? I offer that you’d want to fulfill yourself, to become as authentically you as you could until you would want to commit suicide, when you have lived life so fully such that you’d neither need nor want any more life to live. How could you disappear completely into oblivion, happily, having done and experienced all that you wanted? This is how I think we should behave even without the prospect of immortality, of meaning, or of answers.

I offer that to live truthfully in a godless world, you need to grapple with the fact that we are just matter, yet rejoice in the knowledge that we are deeply interconnected matter, that we are all made of the same stuff forged in the cores of exploding stars billions of years ago and have a shared ancestry with all things, living and dead, before and after us. I offer that to happily leave behind a meaningless life, you live it compassionately rather than greedily, knowing that joy is in giving and being in the service of others, not in the fleeting comforts of mindless bacchanals. I offer that to happily fade into oblivion, you tend to and savor your relationships rather than indulge yourself at the expense of others, because almost any pleasure alone pales in comparison with the vitality of shared experience. I offer that to give yourself purpose in the face of the Absurd, you become your very best potential self and know that being a miniature of you at the point of annihilation is an existential disappointment. I offer that to run the full course of life, you should mine for gems of great wisdom in as many old religions, philosophies, and cultures, because they can surprise you if you put aside your stubborn skepticism. I offer that to die happy, you acknowledge the truth of how positive the human experience is and can be on the whole, rather than focus myopically on the dark, the disheartening, and the impoverished facts of our universe.

In less lofty words, I’m asking all of us to stay positive, in spite of, because of, and in company of all the inevitable endings of life. All things end. Relationships end, whether they are summer flings that are doomed as the autumn comes, or decades-long marriages when our bodies finally give out; what is important is that you’ve had them and enjoyed them. So, pursue them. Careers end, whether they are in the small in helping somebody find the right shoes, or grand like those of tycoons who shape the world like clay; what is important is that you find your calling in your work. So, pursue your passions.

This is where I’ve arrived in thinking a lot about endings around this time of year, and it reminds me of how I should relish and pursue what comes my way before the endings arrive knocking on my door. In short, a serious philosophical investigation coupled with a commitment to secularism, science, and modern thinking inevitably leads us into nihilism, but I’m offering a worldview that isn’t as bleak as that conclusion may first appear. I think it is empowering to be responsible for giving your life meaning, in a way that is not “backed by” traditional systems of value. A godless world can still be an awesomely beautiful one. A commitment to secularism charges us with the merry task of discovering our own purpose. A commitment to science as a way the world works can still be enriched by the religious wisdom of how to live a good life. A life that ends in oblivion is the only kind of life worth living. In other essays, I like to write about the many dimensions of this positivity in spite of these endings, like facets of a diamond that represents the only modern way I know how to live. As I finish this particular essay, I’m reminded of a beautiful poem I heard read today by Nikki Giovanni:

I know my upper arms will grow
flabby; it’s true
of all the women in my family.

I know that the purple veins
like dead fish in the Seine
will dot my legs one day
and my hands will whither while
my hair turns grayish white. I know that
one day, my teeth will move when
my lips smile
and a flutter of hair will appear
below my nose. I hope
my skin doesn’t change to those blotchy
colors.

I want my menses to be undifficult
I’d very much prefer staying firm and slim
to grow old like a vintage wine fermenting
in old wooden vats with style
I’d like to be exquisite I think

I will look forward to grandchildren
and my flowers all my knickknacks in their places
and that quiet of the bombs not falling in Cambodia
settling over my sagging breast

I hope my shoulder finds a head that needs nestling
and my feet find a footstool after a good soaking
with Epsom salts

I hope I die
warmed
by the life that I tried
to live.

— Nikki Giovanni, The Life I Led

I, too, hope I die warmed by the life that I tried to live. I hope, on the path to oblivion, we all do.

Originally published at jonhmchan.com.

Love is like walking into the ocean, looking for a boat.

When you first experience love, it’s joyous and it’s thrilling. Your first crush. Your first time locking eyes with someone after avoiding glances. Love is playful, like a child’s game. These are your earliest memories of love. It’s like stepping into the ocean for the first time: the white-hot sun is high, the coarse sand warm on your feet, and the sudden chill of the sea rushing up against your ankles. Every moment is a thrill, always something new and exciting. You’re testing the waters, and your curiosity is piqued.

You step deeper into the water. Now you’re waist-deep. Maybe you’re a teenager now. You’ve entertained a few crushes, talking about it in whispers and playing some of them out in secret. The emotions stirring within you…they feel stronger, like rehearsals for something about to hit the shore. A wave comes: you have your first boyfriend or girlfriend. It’s still joyous, actually even more fun than before. Wave after wave, one fling after another. At this depth, you can hold yourself steady, losing yourself in the thrill of the surf. You’re getting the hang of it, so you step in deeper. Now the water is chest-high, but you know how to balance yourself with the rush of the tide and how to jump at the crests of the water. The sun is still high.

Then, when you least expect it, an enormous wave crashes into your back and consumes you as it takes you under.

This wave is different. You’re falling in love, and it’s unlike anything you’ve experienced before. It envelopes you, like the sea coiling around your body as you get thrust into its depths. This kind of love catches you off guard. Your feet lose the ground. It’s no longer just a wave, but a maelstrom, swirling with the rush of adoration, admiration, perhaps even obsession. It’s the first time your sunbaked brow actually feels the cool of the ocean and the salt stings your virgin eyes. This is what the true sea feels like, you think. This is what real love feels like: it swallows you, until you find a way to break out to the surface again.

You survive, fazed, but still full of energy. You go deeper, out into the open ocean. The sun is setting. You’re an adult now. Now it’s just wave after heavy wave. You go on one date, and it’s lame and unsatisfying. You go on another, and you get fooled and betrayed. You fall in love and go back into the depths again, but this time, you think you might drown. Your arms and legs feel weak, your nose and throat sore with salt. You gasp for a breath of air, escaping the clutches of the sea, just hoping it might stop. Wave after heavy wave. Over and over. The sun is gone. It’s all just the same now. You tread deeper into the ocean, weak with cold.

Then it stops. You’re so far out in the sea that the waters are calm. You’ve stopped trying to swim and now you’re just…floating. What’s the point, you think. You remember what it was like in beginning, when you were just off the shore, splashing in the sunlight. Why did I come out here, you ask yourself. It felt good then. You’re just floating now…just trying to survive. Why does anyone do this?

This isn’t the end of the story.

When I was younger, I didn’t fully understand the toil of love. I think many of my single friends still don’t. The moment conflict inevitably came my way in dating, I defected and moved on to the next candidate I was already considering. I had convinced myself that I was just hedging my bets by talking to more than one person at a time because I was never in a “real” relationship, never committing, when really I was shooting myself in the foot by playing it safe.

I think back to that time now and the people I know who still do this, and I don’t feel shame, I feel pity. I don’t think people who have this mindset are bad people. As has almost always been the case from my experience, people who might seem like bad people are usually just scared, insecure, or lost. What I realized when I was in this mindset was that I was just afraid of being hurt. I was afraid of being pulled under again. I had tried too many times to put myself out there, had too many dates not work out because of my naiveté, surfed too many tall waves, that it was better if I treated love shallowly and filled my time with frivolous dates that I could easily discard and forget. Because of this fear, I became part of a problem that convinced myself and others that it was okay to throw your broken bonds with people away. It quickly spiraled out of control. I became so fearful of having my heart broken and so accustomed to this fruitless cycle, I figured I should eventually give up dating altogether because I wasn’t sure I could pull the pieces back together next time. I was floating. I was losing hope.

Then things changed. I’m currently in a long distance relationship with my boyfriend. I’m in New York City, and he’s in Taipei. We’re halfway across the world from each other, and we can’t be much further apart. As any person that’s been in one can tell you, relationships are hard. For many, long distance relationships feel even harder. It’s only been a little over a year for my boyfriend and I, but with the distance, I joke to my friends that we’re measuring our relationship in dog years. It takes work, it takes faith, and when you’re separated by an ocean, it requires these things and countless others by orders of magnitude more.

One of the reasons I love my boyfriend so much — and the reason I’m telling this story — is that he works with me on this relationship. He understands the toil of love. He really does. He’s willing to lean in, take this enormous risk of the heart with me, and toil. This is despite how much easier it would be to find someone else local, someone else he could spend more than a few months at a time with, and all with the click of an app. There are so many convenient reasons to give up, but he doesn’t and he doesn’t let me, even when I want to take the easy way out. We know what we signed up for, and we’re going to do everything in our power to try and make this work. Against the odds. He saved me from giving up on love. He saved me from drowning.

When I think about this understanding about the toil of love, I think about this story I tell my friends when they’re in despair. When they’re tired, as I was, of the search. I tell them: love is walking into the ocean, looking for a boat. I tell them this story of the coming up to the shore, feeling the rush of your first waves, of feeling pulled under by surprise, of feeling exhausted, and finally…of floating. They’re floating right now, just trying to survive. But the important thing to remember, the most important thing to remember, is that you have to go out into deep water to find a boat: they don’t sit out on the beach.

You’re trying to cross an ocean in love and you have to swim to open water first. There, out in the endless blue, is where you’ll find your boat.

Originally published at jonhmchan.com.

November 2nd, 2017 was a very long, very difficult day. That morning, I was getting ready to board a flight from Taipei to Los Angeles that was taking off at noon. I was breaking up with my boyfriend that day. After having made the decision three weeks before, we decided to officially split and end things at the airport, right before I entered the security checkpoint. After we separated, I thought the worst was over. I even took the rest of the week off from work, knowing I would need the time to recover. I just had to get through the 14-hour flight back home, where my mother was going to pick me up at the airport. I tried to keep things together on the plane. I failed a few times. I was lucky I slept a little. When I landed in California, I remember just feeling a bit relieved. I could just go home. I could just rest. Because of the way the time zones worked, I actually ended up landing at noon the same day. It was still November 2nd.

Still in my seat on the plane, I turned my phone on.

I was getting emails, texts, voicemails. I was expecting a flurry of notifications since I had been out of the country for a month, but not this many. Something was wrong. The little strip at the top of my phone kept filling with ominous words and phrases: “farewell,” “my last day,” “sad news”… What was happening? I rushed to get off the plane, hoping to get a better signal so I could actually read the messages that weren’t fully loading on my phone. It wasn’t working. I remember every ping was another blow to the gut. I was panicking. I still had to get through immigration, baggage claim, another security checkpoint…it took me about an hour after getting off the plane before I could really read all the messages. Finally, I had figured it out: my company had conducted layoffs just an hour before I landed in Los Angeles.

The rest of the day was just more bad news and scrambling to figure out what had happened. Who was leaving? What are they going to do? What about their families, their new kids, the houses they just bought? What does this mean for the company? For our community? For me? Many of these people that were going I knew since they started at the company. I’d traveled to visit them overseas. I’ve had dinner with their families. Some of them I had even interviewed. That day, when I boarded my flight, I thought I was only losing one person in my life. By the end of the day, I had lost many, many more.

It’s been over a month since that day.

Up to that day, I don’t think I had ever really experienced grief. So far, death and sickness have been kept at bay in my family. A nomadic lifestyle has taught me how to keep ties with people regardless of where I am, so I’ve never really had to say goodbye to my friends. I’ve never even owned a pet that I’ve lost. What I felt that day I could only describe as grief, my first grief. It was the first time I had ever had a boyfriend, and I lost him. It was the first time I had felt so close to so many I worked with, and I lost them.

Most of all, I felt like I lost who I was. I defined my life around my work, my freedom, and my relationship. In a single day, my world shrank into something much smaller. It shrank into what was happening right in front of me, right now. I wasn’t thinking about exploring the world anymore. I wasn’t thinking about how to make change and how to be an agent for good. Now it was just about survival. Now it was just about putting one foot in front of the other. Now it was just about getting through the next second, the next minute, the next hour, the next day…one after another.

It’s been over a month since that day.

Coping

There are lots of ways to work through grief, through suffering. I’ll admit, there were a few not-so-great methods I used to get past that first day (weed and an In-N-Out burger helps a lot). But I didn’t want to be destructive to myself or to others. The first day was shock, then pain — blinding pain, then heartbreak. It was a whirlwind. But in the midst of all that, I was able to do a few wise things. Over the course of a month or so, these things have saved me, and I want to share what I’ve learned with you.

Show your pain

The first day this all happened, I was simply overwhelmed. At the airport that afternoon, I was numbed by what had happened, just completely shell-shocked. The first few hours were a hazy blur and I remember my body being on autopilot: I remember getting into the car, going to get lunch with my sister, arriving at my parent’s house, going to my room, and then finally…I just lost it. I hadn’t had time since the morning I was in Taiwan several hours before to be completely alone in a private place. I had kept everything that had happened to me bottled up through the transcontinental flight and the journey to my parent’s place. When I finally got to my room that day, it was the first opportunity I had time to myself in over 20 hours. I think it was the first time I let myself really feel my suffering. I feel like I had downed a massive cocktail of emotions: loss, fear, confusion, shaken with a tinge of jet lag, and I was just starting to feel the massive hangover.

This is how I normally operate. When I encounter stress, or pain, or danger, my instinct is to harden my resolve and to become a rock. I’m used to being the counselor and the anchor in times of crisis. It’s something that has helped the people that have come to me through their own hardship, and I shield others from my own pain to stabilize the environment around me. I rarely asked people to help me because I was so used to trying to help others. I never want to be a burden to anyone. But what about now? What about when my world gets turned inside out and almost everything I know has changed? Who was I helping by crushing my grief under the pressure of my guilt? No one.

So I showed my pain. I asked for help.

This was the first wise thing I did. I showed my pain, and when I did, people came to offer their help. I was shocked by this. People from everywhere, people I hadn’t spoken to in years, people I thought had forgotten about me, reached out with a text, a call, and a listening ear. My tribe had come for me when I needed them most.

After I explained what had happened, almost every person had asked, “What can I do to help?” At first, I didn’t know what to say. What could they do? They couldn’t bring my boyfriend back. They couldn’t save my friends’ jobs. They couldn’t do anything. Then I realized it wasn’t about anything they could do. What I needed was simply them, their presence. I just needed to know there were others around me whom I could lean on. In a time of crisis, you can suddenly feel profoundly alone in the world, and simply showing your pain to remember you’re never really alone is the first best medicine in grief.

“Nothing.” I remember replying. “You just reaching out is more than enough.”

Rest

In grief, you’re going to need rest. Fortunately, I had come prepared to grant myself just that. Others weren’t so lucky to have the heads up. I knew ahead of time that I was going to be in pain, and I knew that plunging myself into work or exercise or intoxication wasn’t going to help me through that pain. What I needed to do was to really confront my feelings and regulate those feelings with things that would be healthy, healing, and easing.

For me, rest means rituals. It means a daily hour-long walk to ponder, starting from my parent’s house to the end of my neighborhood and back. It means sitting at the edge of my bed every morning, eyes closed, being diligent about learning to live with my thoughts. It means talking to my parents in our back patio a few nights a week, maybe with a glass of wine in hand, and not resorting to anger or dismissal or denial in talking through my suffering. I did the things that have always made me feel renewed, refreshed. Rest meant leaning on the practices that have kept me on balance my whole life, not to distract me from the pain, but to arm me so I could fully engage with my situation.

Forgive and be thankful

In trying times like this, it’s really tempting to assign blame. Why did this happen? Whose fault is this? How should they be punished? How did I deserve this? It’s not surprising that in times of suffering that people shrink into thinking about how they are being treated and they quickly search for retribution with a finger on the trigger. In mild cases, this anger just distracts people from and extends their suffering on a personal level; they believe the anger helps them cope without understanding that it’s just postponing the resolution. In more extreme cases, people turn their anger into scapegoating or revenge with lasting damage and life-altering consequences. Very rarely does anger-turned-retribution provide any meaningful kind of closure.

For me, I don’t see much use in anger. Anger feels like a waste of energy, and a seductive but ultimately deceptive way of drawing out your suffering and dragging others into it. For me, I had to muster the courage to forgive. I had to believe that it was neither my own nor my ex’s fault that we had to split, and to forgive him. I had to believe that everyone at my company did everything they could to keep things together, and to forgive them. I had to understand that I had poured myself into my relationship and my work and that even though I had failed, I had to forgive myself too. As I’ve written before in other essays, forgiving is not about releasing the recipient. Forgiving someone isn’t about saying that what they did was excusable, and forgiving someone doesn’t mean you should let the mistakes that were made happen again. Forgiving my ex, my company, and myself does not absolve anyone from the responsibility of their actions — but it does free me from the pointless anger that serves only to chain me endlessly to my pain. Forgiving means letting go, and freeing yourself.

Better yet, I could be thankful. I could look at everything — my relationship, my work, my time during this period — and feel deep gratitude for what has been and that I still have. I experienced a moving and rapturous love. I got to travel the world and work for a company whose mission I still believe in. Even the period of recovery in the last month or so has been filled with moments of deep connection, vulnerability, and nobility. I was able to salvage what I believe will be a truly great friendship with my ex. I still have my job, and I’m optimistic about my company’s future. The people who were let go I know are taken care of, and many of them have already gotten back on their feet. Most of all, I’m thankful to all the people who have reached out to me in my time of need — my tribe — for guiding me to a better place with vigilence.

I have so much I still have: a good home, loving people around me, and my hope.

Finally, give back

Nothing breaks through the cloud of grief like service. It seems paradoxical: the best way to make yourself feel better is not to try to make yourself feel better, but instead to help others do so. In suffering, it is tempting to think only about yourself. I need more space. I need more time. I need to be alone. The first traumatic day of this journey, all I could think about was what I needed too.

The second day, I did what I could to reach out to others. I’ve been keeping in touch with my ex to make sure our new friendship starts out on the right foot. I started asking my remaining colleagues about how they were feeling: not only my peers, but also our leadership — they had swung the sword and I knew they were shaken too. I reached out to my friends who were let go and offered my help placing them into jobs if I could give any. I got right back into my volunteer work, knowing that doing so was medicine for me.

Lastly, I finally finished this essay. I started a draft of this piece the day the hammer dropped, on November 2nd, 2017. I thought I could get this written in a few days, then a few weeks, which has now turned into over a month. Something always kept me from revisiting the draft. There would be a new revelation in the resulting fallout, another incident that would rip open the wounds I’ve been tending to. Even now, I still have my moments. I’ll be walking on the street, or buying groceries, and I’ll be struck. They’re like unexpected waves of sadness or pain that suddenly wash over me and it takes the wind out of me. In many ways, this essay is one of my final steps in giving back and healing. I felt like I couldn’t write anything else without finishing this first.

The road to recovery is a long one, and I’m still on it. This essay is a signpost on the path. This is a summary of what I’ve learned so far, and it’s what I want to offer to anyone who finds themselves in true hardship like I have. It’s not much.

…but I hope it’s enough to get you through the next day.

Originally published at jonhmchan.com on December 15, 2017.

I think eventually every person finds themselves in a difficult relationship with someone or something in their life that they can’t seem to get themselves out of. Perhaps it’s a job that you feel treats you unfairly or a difficult friend who comes off as disrespectful more than occasionally. These are relationships that seem like endless fountains of anguish and pain that drain the energy out of you. They exhaust you. Yet, for some reason or another, we find some sort of justification for staying in these relationships:

“My job is completely chaotic and it’s not what I want to do, but I need the money right now and think I can make things better with my team.”

“I’m fighting almost every day with my mother for weeks, but I can see that she’s trying to make things better and she just gets carried away with her emotions.”

“My friend keeps flaking on me, but we’ve been close since we were kids and I know they’re just really busy all the time.”

What is hardest about these kinds of relationships is that they make you feel trapped. You don’t know where to draw the line and declare bankruptcy. Should you stick it out and keep hoping that it’s going to improve with time? Do you have enough energy and the patience to wait for it to improve? I’ve found myself in this kind of relationship multiple times in my life, and I’ve built up a framework to help me make a decision around these sorts of relationships easier. I’ve figured out a way to know when to say “no more.”

A State of Doubt

The first step in this framework is figuring out if you are in a state of doubt about the relationship. In other words, you need to recognize if you have serious existential uncertainty about the relationship for an extended period of time.

This is different from the normal feelings of ambivalence that come with rough patches in a relationship. Every relationship, whether it is with someone you’re dating, or a client, or anything else, is bound to encounter conflict at some point or another. Couples will fight occasionally over things like who did the dishes last time or how to spend their holiday bonuses on a vacation. Jobs will have their demanding moments during peak seasons and you’ll have disagreements over the way forward with your colleagues. Relationships are rarely completely devoid of conflict, and conflict that is dealt with maturely and constructively is perfectly normal and to be expected.

However, there are situations where unhealthy conflict, chaos, and strife on a regular basis will have you thinking about the relationship in existential terms for relatively long periods of time. These thoughts endure and can’t be easily shaken off. You start wondering if this is the right person for you in a long-term romantic relationship, and thoughts about breaking up continuously glance your mind for weeks or even months. You suffer multiple 80-hour work weeks that affect your friends and family without much respite, and you start wondering if you should start looking for another job. When you start lingering about whether you should stay in a relationship for extended periods of time, you are in what I call a state of doubt.

It’s also worth mentioning that what you’re pinpointing is what you feel about the relationship. You are not considering whether the doubt you feel is warranted or if there is a good excuse for the questions you have in mind. You are simply wondering if true, unmistakable doubt is present in the relationship or not. It’s there or it isn’t there. Just focus on the feeling, and instinctively, you’ll know if you’re in a state of doubt.

A Dangerous Dance

Once you recognize you are in a state of doubt, this doesn’t mean the relationship is doomed. In fact, this moment might be the best opportunity of turning your relationship around. You are simply aware that your relationship is in peril, and that means you already are or probably should be engaged in seriously addressing the apprehension. At this point, the goal is to actively work on the relationship to take yourself out of that state of doubt, and if you can do so, you should feel glad you were able to bring things back on course.

If you’re having trouble with a friend who’s not dependable, this is the time to sit them down and have a frank conversation about why you’re not a priority and how to rebuild trust. If you’re overworked at your job, now is the time to talk to your boss about shifting responsibilities or getting a raise so you feel valued for the effort. This process of working at the relationship is always a difficult one, and it probably won’t get resolved quickly. However, being honest with yourself about whether a relationship is in danger is the first and best chance you have at recourse.

That being said, there is another thing to keep in mind once you recognize your state of doubt: you are now in a dangerous dance with hope. Chances are, you are staying in painful relationships because you are clinging to the possibility that things will get better with time and effort. As you work through the issues in your relationship, you may see that there is clear progress in how you are being treated. The fights are getting shorter, the conflicts are less emotional, and perhaps the other party is even becoming more self-aware of their behavior. What is important to recognize while you are working towards getting out of doubt is that you are racing against your time, your energy, and your patience. Hope is making you stay in this relationship, and what will happen if an offense reoccurs is that you will find every excuse to forgive the incident. Your hope will convince you forgive missteps and keep working at the relationship at great cost. You have to remember that being in a state of doubt and trying to actively resolve the dysfunction is a dangerous dance.

Three Strikes

So, knowing the danger of staying in a perpetual state of doubt and locked in this dance, you must also set a clear limit to your efforts the moment you recognize the doubt. The worst thing you can do is skip this step because your instincts, your emotional core, your hope will lead you to come up with every excuse to continue repairing your relationship no matter the personal cost. This is dangerous. Not setting up a pre-emptive bright line to your efforts may crush you emotionally and lead to an explosive end to the affair. Once you recognize the state of doubt, set a limit at the outset and stick to it.

What I’ve come up with as a limit is three emotional strikes. Strikes are offenses that are so severe that they take you from a state of doubt into a deep, sharp sense of violation. In other words, these are offenses that cross a line from being a forgivable speed bump on the way to recovery and into something that is memorably damaging. Your friend who regularly flakes out on you misses a concert last minute. You saved up for weeks to buy these expensive tickets and you can’t get a refund and can’t resell. You’ve talked to them about this several times and already expressed your concerns seriously, but the friend shows little remorse. Your boss tells you last minute that you can’t take the day off so you’ll miss your flight, even after a month’s heads up that you’re planning a family trip to see an aging relative. This is weeks after he’s given you the approval and promised you he could find a replacement if an emergency came up, which he’s clearly failed to do. You’ll know in your gut when someone violates your trust and gets a strike. Like recognizing a state of doubt, what is important is recognizing the feeling of violation, and not the reasons for it. You’re not choosing to give someone a strike, you feel the offense as an emotion. Remember that you are in a dangerous dance with hope, and you are fighting the instinctual reaction to excuse the violation. You have the feeling or you don’t, and it’s not something you can ignore.

Now that you know what an emotional strike is, it’s also important to know how many to have. I give myself three. The first strike is an excusable violation to me. I feel they get a clear pass if I’m actively working on the relationship, they are really trying, and the incident is just a forgivable stumble I’ve come to expect as I work through our issues. The second is sign that violations are developing into a pattern, and emergency steps need to be taken. This is when my state of doubt tends to really solidify and the canary flees the coalmine. Finally, the third strike is pulling out the white flag and surrendering. The violations are clearly a pattern, and my state of doubt has turned into flat out rejection despite my best efforts to repair the damage.

When the final strike you’ve set up for yourself is hit, that’s when it’s time to say “no more.” It doesn’t matter how many strikes you give yourself, as long as you have a number in mind at the outset and you stick to it. I personally choose three for most relationships. One of my closest friends said he’d only give one to any relationship. However many it may be, crossing the final strike is when to go. You may not need to tell the other party you’re finished with the relationship immediately, but this is when you have to be determined to get yourself out of the arrangement and actively plan your exit. This may be before you have completely run out of options to address the dysfunction, before you feel utterly exhausted and spent, but that’s the entire point. The purpose of the strike framework is to decide to get yourself out of a toxic relationship before it turns disastrous and really runs you dry.

What I find most useful about this framework is that it takes the agency out of making a difficult decision like this. Every step of the framework has clear instructions about what to do and the emotional turning points are large and bright. The way I explain this to my friends is that it feels like following directions on a clearly marked highway instead of wandering through a labyrinthine parking lot looking for an exit. It turns the emotions you are feeling into signposts on a road towards recovery instead of putting these untamed feelings in the driver’s seat so the wild ride never ends. The decision is made outside of you. You’re not personally giving up on the relationship and not giving in to the guilt of abandoning what feels like an unhealthy arrangement. Instead, it feels like you’re just following the rules of a framework that you know is sensible, well outside the irrational, emotional turmoil of the parties involved.

Remember to Forgive

Finally, regardless of how this framework works for you — whether you need just one strike or five, whether you have a different bar for what constitutes an emotional strike, anything — after the dust settles, remember to forgive. Being in a difficult relationship is a draining affair, especially if it is entered into with the best intentions and it’s arduous for an extended period of time. Because of the pain you’ve experienced, it’s tempting to hold on to hard feelings even after you finally exit your state of doubt. That’s both for relationships that recover to a healthy state and those that end entirely after the final strike.

“Why should I forgive someone that has caused me so much pain?” people ask me. I can write a whole other post about forgiveness (and I probably will one day). The best reason I can give is not to forgive just for the sake of the other person, but for yourself. You don’t need to forgive because someone deserves it. You don’t need to forgive because you think someone’s behavior was excusable and you’re saying it’s okay. You forgive for yourself. Holding onto the anger, frustration, and pain after going through such a taxing ordeal means you will continue to suffer even after the episode is over. If you do not forgive, you will never really be free from the anguish you worked so hard to escape in the first place. Forgiveness is the final step of the framework, and for many, it’s almost always the hardest part.

So if and when you find yourself in a difficult relationship, I hope that working through your issues will eventually take you out of doubt before you reach your emotional limit. If you do end up passing that final strike, remember that leaving a toxic relationship is for your own health and well-being, and there is no shame in looking out for yourself. Regardless of how things pan out, remember to forgive and it will finally set you free from your pain. I hope this framework provides some clarity in what I know is a harrowing experience for anyone who goes through a difficult relationship. It’s saved my life more than a few times.

Originally published at jonhmchan.com on October 20, 2017.