My Dearest Eric

My Dearest Eric,

Where do I begin To find words that even come close To describing the way I feel about you? It’s like doing a pencil sketch of a sunset; Perhaps I can create a lovely work of art, But it’s only the faintest skeleton of the thing. Without the context of a thousand micro-colors To give it value and shade and form, I find a need to question shadow-making For the purpose of shadow-making.

But here I am, making muddles of words anyway Expressing nothing but my own overwhelm At attempting to define something So massively beautiful, eloquent, deep, rich… With thousands of descriptors Yet to be created to even come close To encapsulating your likeness. Why even attempt to paraphrase perfection?

Before I knew you, I dreamed of a love that was a pencil sketch Of the sunset that we now share, and Piled hopes high on birthday-caked candlesticks And stars on missions across the sky And tarnished pennies at the bottom of pools. I told myself that I believed in a love like ours And I crossed my fingers and toes Long after the light in old relationships dimmed And died. Until I wondered if there was anything left To believe in.

Then in you walked, A thunderstorm on an autumn Kentucky night, And you took my struggles And loved them. Somehow together we transformed, Carbon crunching under pressure, Rearranging form.

And with you in my life, I feel stronger, freer, more alive Because you bring out the best in me In ways I never anticipated needing. Before your eyes, I swear Not a single pair of irises ever truly saw me, Never looked past the light in their own eyes To truly see me. And in your eyes, I see you. You delight me, you astonish me. I am in awe of you, my love.

And I will nurture this With all the love and resources that I have to give To create a garden that blooms Beyond our wildest dreams. I will show up every day, With respect and honesty and kindness With appreciation and awareness With a willingness to be brave, Especially when it is hard.

Because we matter. This matters.

I am yours, Forevermore.

Love, Your Tien

A New Chapter

Life has such a funny way of surprising you. You can have all these thoughts and ideas and plans that you’ve become attached to over time. Pictures that you’ve painted that you like so much that it never occurs to you to sit and try painting something new. You fall into habits and routines. You give up on dreams of yesteryear because they feel impossible. You hang your assumptions on the coat rack and there they sit, greeting you every time you come and go. And it’s comfortable and you call it normal and you decide that’s all life has to offer.

But then you realize that you’ve been lying to yourself, hiding, running away. You change your mind. But you go beyond just that — you change your habitual ways of being, too. You start showing up as the person you want to be, not just the person that you fell into by default. You choose to change… and then you do change. Once you show life that you are serious, life starts responding in kind. The degree to which you choose to show up is the degree to which the world around you will begin mirroring that back to you. And understanding this conceptually is completely different than experiencing it firsthand. There’s an eerie sense of perfection to things; You begin to feel a little bit like Truman, with events being orchestrated around you in scary synchronicity. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

In early September, my life fell apart.

My fiancé broke things off with me after cheating on me and lying to both me and the woman he cheated on me with. I lost my home, my entire future that I had mapped out, and also the person that I had become and had been desperately hanging on to. The week that all of this happened was one of the two worst weeks of my life (the other worst week was when my grandma tried to kill herself.) I fought hard for my relationship, but it became clear that there was nothing I could do to keep it. It was falling apart, whether I liked it or not.

In the past, I would have crumbled under pressure and become a melted ball of misery and hopelessness. I would have hidden away from the world and fallen into patterns of hating myself again. But after six months of working tirelessly on myself, I wasn’t the same Tien anymore. I dove deeply into my pain, crying into the same old dirty pair of contacts day after day and processing to my video journals. I decided that I was going to work on the only relationship that I had control over — the relationship with myself.

I began giving myself the deep and unconditional love that I was longing for. I wrote myself a list of promises: that I was going to honor myself and be kind to myself, be my own greatest support, listen to what I feel, be as honest with myself as I can, challenge myself, be my own best friend, be forgiving of myself, and always reach for better choices. And then in the days that followed, I kept those promises to myself.

I allowed myself to fully, deeply grieve all that I had lost… and then with time I moved on. I discovered a whole new level of courage when I decided to start my YouTube channel and began talking about some of the insights I’ve been having and other things that I want to talk about. For the girl who grew up with severe social anxiety to go full badass and make vulnerable videos on the internet, this was a big deal. Suddenly the Tien that I always wanted to be had arrived.

I let go, and stepped into the flow of life.

And yet, I was still fighting with it, to a degree. In the debris from my breakup, I decided that I was done with romance for a while and was going to choose to be single and focus completely on myself. This was my time to reevaluate my career and my life direction and perhaps steer my ship towards entirely new horizons, and I wasn’t quite sure what that might look like yet. It was time for just Tien.

It’s funny how we can sometimes put so much focus on not putting ourselves in a box, that we don’t even realize we’re fitting ourselves in another, different box. In my stubborn need to insist that I know best, I almost missed out on the most incredible man I’ve ever met in my life.

“I need to be single for at least a year,” I stubbornly declared to the 13-year-old girl that mistakenly thought he and I were together. My adamant (and somewhat tangential) reaction to an innocent question surprised me. Why was I so insistent on putting distance between the two of us? Maybe because I really, really like him, I thought to myself, as I simultaneously stuffed the feelings into the corner of my mind.

We spent seven days straight getting to know each other and walls began to wobble. We stayed up late playing games and talking into the middle of the night. The more I got to know him, the more astonished I was by how much we have in common. I couldn’t keep myself from being attracted to him if I tried (I tried.)

We both value our own growth above everything else. We are both deeply introspective and thoughtful and open-minded and constantly questioning everything. Honesty and authenticity is everything to us. We both blend together logic and reasoning with creativity and innovation. We both have a gift for seeing and understanding human behavior and emotions and motivations. We both are constantly working on being the best versions of ourselves that we can be.

We both love writing and music and art. We used to play all of the same computer games as kids and were equally obsessed with DDR as teenagers. We both love tabletop games. We both frequently imagine games that we would design. We analyze our dreams together, we talk about our biggest fears together, and we both have the capacity to be deeply present and really listen to each other. We are in similar places in our lives. We want similar things. Every single conversation we have is vastly different from the last and always takes us to new and incredible places together.

“Better together is an incredible way to start,” he said to me, and that’s exactly how I feel. In this last month of getting to know him really well and spending hours a day talking, I am already floored by how naturally and easily he and I both bring out the very best in each other. The process of us coming together has felt like the easiest, most organic unfolding I have ever experienced. It’s like we’re two objects in motion that have been headed towards each other for a long time but didn’t know it, and now here we are.

We get laughing so hard together that it hurts. After one night of revising and mashing together old, tired idioms into new and hilariously upside-down expressions, my abs screamed at me and my cheeks hurt from the pain of being unable to stop laughing. The only other person that I know who I have ever laughed this hard with and in this way, is my childhood best friend, Brooke.

Eric absolutely astounds me. I love how different he is; it reminds me of me. I feel like we understand each other in a way that others never have been able to. All of the things that I have ever wanted in a relationship suddenly appeared in front of me, in the form of a truly singular man, and all I had to do was let go and stop fighting with this crazy idea of how things “should be,” hanging on to this need to be single, to be autonomous, to fight romance. I finally realized that the man standing in front of me was so amazing, I would be an idiot to let fears or doubts keep me from nurturing my feelings for him.

I surrendered, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. Every day that I know him more deeply, the more utterly blown away I am by how special this is. It is still early, and we are taking it day by day, but neither of us is taking this for granted. If you took the amount of time that normal people would spend getting to know each other over a 4-6 month period and then condensed that to a month, you’d have an idea of how much time we have been spending getting to know each other better.

Oh, and then you add to all of that the endless synchronicity. Like the fact that I recently found a sketch I did ten years ago of a face that popped into my head when I was imagining the kind of relationship I wanted. A sketch that looks so much like Eric, it’s spooky.

They say that when you aren’t looking for love, it finds you. I feel a bit like this is an understatement. Maybe because I went further than ‘not looking for love’ to “I refuse love right now, it will have to wait,” life went above and beyond, and handed me a love that was so great, that I’d come to believe over the years it wasn’t possible. I’m really not exaggerating when I say he is everything that I have wanted for so long.

Well-meaning people keep pointing out to me all of the reasons why we should be cautious and have doubts and fears. It makes me laugh. Of course we have all the same ones. Of course. But doubts and fears are a terrible reason to pass up on the most amazing person you’ve ever met in your life. I am more than willing to have my heart broken again if need be. Heartbreak is painful but not the end of the world. It can be one of life’s greatest teachers. And what if, just like all the rest, those fears are just lies? Sure, I’ll listen to everyone else, and run away and miss out on one of the best things that has ever happened to me. Right.

I’m done with running.

One thing is for sure: I’m going to bring my very best to this beautiful thing. I’m going to show up as the person that I most want to be and make choices from that space. I’m going to live and breathe the things that I believe and my integrity and values. I’m going to bring deep presence to all that I do, and hold the entire thing loosely and lovingly in the palm of my hand.

I really, really like us. More than I could have anticipated. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

A Blazing Holy Fire

Watching the Holy Fire grow from the sweat of an excessively hot Southern California Monday into a 4000-acre blaze over the span of about eight hours and then continue to grow to 10,000 acres over the last few days has been a little unnerving. I live smack dab in the center of Rancho Santa Margarita, which has had a front row view of the burning hillside for three days now. My apartment is tucked behind the foothills of those mountains, located roughly seven miles drive from the source of the fire.

It’s been an interesting experience watching the last few days unfold as the fire grows, and it’s strange being this close to the blaze and yet not in any danger. The flames have continued to spread to the east towards Lake Elsinore, leaving those of us to the southwest in awe of the thick, bruise-purple cloud over our heads and the sharp cut of smoke visibly choking the air. In between speeding off in cars with self-important determination to prove life as usual through shitty driving habits, people can’t help but hesitate here and there, pausing to stare at the apocalyptic landscape and take photos with their phones.

I was pissed this morning when I went down to the gym at our apartment to run on the treadmill, only to find that some asshole left the door open and the gym was full of smoke. I decided to pass on my run, but later felt like a pansy when I watched a man cycling down the street in full gear, determined to get his daily exercise in, in spite of any discomfort to his throat and lungs. Hell, I once watched a woman jogging down the street in Hemet while smoking a cigarette at the same time. So I suppose, why not?

The worried text messages from loved ones have been both endearing and also a little stressful. Right now, we are okay where we are, and if that changes we won’t hesitate to evacuate. But we have some amazing firemen who know what they are doing and they are working their asses off to keep us safe. I’m certain that if anything changes, they will begin evacuating the housing tracks to the north and east of us before they evacuate us. I am keeping a close eye on everything.

Panicked text messages because you can see the flames cresting Santiago Peak in the dark from your bedroom window in central Irvine are not really helping. I know you can see it. Most of us here in the OC can see it driving home on the freeway. I trust the professionals to do their job and to give us notice the moment anything changes.

It’s amazing how much the presence of this fire has cast a surreal light on the city around me. People work, shop, and keep on doing normal things in between trying to hide feelings of being unsettled. It’s easy to be indifferent when it’s happening to someone else, but when there’s no glowing screen between you and the disaster, it’s a little bit different.

Nevertheless, Southern Californians will do our best to put on our fiercest faces. We’re used to all the cameras.