Re:

Another month (or so) of clinical rotations has ended, and I think it’s safe to say we’ve all hit our first slump.

Through all the sleepless nights, the unexpected crashes, the innumerable times we’ve been made to feel incompetent (both by others and perhaps more so by ourselves, hello self-deprecation), there’s been growth. Messy, uncalculated, frustrating, imperfect growth.

I don’t think anyone ever told me how growth works, so I have no one to blame — but I think at one point I had the notion in my head that ‘growth’ was similar to ‘polishing’ — growth was akin to chipping away at a block of marble, and when I’d finally carved out my own version of The Thinker I’d know where I was going with my life. Or something to that effect.

Unfortunately, I’m coming to the slow realization that growing is unlearning. It’s going back to the assumptions and truths we held near and dear and realizing that what we held to be absolute is actually just as shakable as salt and pepper. Not that there’s anything wrong with polishing, but it’s not the main event. It’s tearing down our idea of The Thinker and considering the fact that perhaps we were never meant to be sculptors, or perhaps our idea of what made a good sculptor was actually a bunch of gobbledygook.

This was originally going to be a post written for my pre-vet self. My post-bachelor’s, pre-veterinary self, with a list of preconceived notions about what consisted of success and a heart that loved everything around it but itself. A heart that thought, for sure, that making sacrifices was necessary to achieve happiness. A sense of purpose. A feeling of self-worth.

But as I’m sitting here in the middle of Houston Chinatown, my mind can’t help but stray to a place of nostalgia that encompasses more than veterinary medicine. And as it makes its way down these old paths, I think it’s starting to grasp more and more that the essence of growth is not linear, but rather cyclical. Circular.

I revisit. Reply. Rewrite. Rethink. Review.
With each do-over, go-over, I’m practicing and polishing, rehearsing and redoing. There are no missed opportunities, just ones that present themselves again in different iterations.

Up to this point in my life, I don’t think I’ve really found value in repetition. I’m always on the lookout for a new restaurant to try, new country to visit, new music to listen to, new books, shows, movies, hobbies, you name it. I hardly watch things again for the sake of comfort (. I haven’t even reread my favorite books more than twice. (Classical music, Studio Ghibli, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are the exceptions to the rule, but that’s a different topic for a different time.)

I always feel that there is so much out there that it’s hard to ‘turn around’ and go back to something familiar. But I want to take some time today and put it down in ink that novelty can spring from familiarity as well. To leave something for a while and return, is to bring a set of new eyes to something that has probably also changed in the interim. I know it sounds trite. But as it is with old adages, it takes the true lived experience to internalize a message, n’est-ce pas?

An institution as old as Houston Chinatown is a microcosm in itself. It’s one of the top 3 largest Chinatowns in the United States, and the amount of grocery stores, restaurants, dessert bars, and bubble tea shops is enough gastronomic adventuring to intimidate even the most willing foodies.

I’ve been coming here since I was born, more or less, and to observe the range of stores and shops that have been open for as long (or longer) than I’ve been alive is… well, to observe history. The weathered signage, bilingual menus, no frills cash-only registers, sketchy bathrooms, and self-serve utensil bars all hark back to a simpler time. (I could take some time here to explain the evolution of the Asian grocery store from its dingy beginnings, but I think that’s also a separate topic for a separate time.)

Of course, what sets this place apart from just another old neighborhood is that it’s distinctly alive and expanding. New shops and restaurants pop up often, and they reflect trends that are booming in the motherlands. Korean corn dogs, eclectic soft serve, and twists on the familiar boba tea pop up just as quickly here as they do across an ocean, and for that I’m forever thankful.

This is what I love about America. This is what makes America a wonderful place, this tenacity of the immigrant experience.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve been in College Station for the past three years, that these nostalgic feelings are heightened. I’m in Chinatown, which is nothing particularly special, in a shop that’s not of particular significance, and yet as I watch customers walk in and out, a grandmother braiding the hair of her granddaughter, an uncle ordering his food, parents chatting with their little children, using the same phrases my own used as I was growing up, I’ve never felt this bittersweet mixture of nostalgia, familiarity, and distance. Like looking at oneself through a telescope, standing on a planet far away, through a the cloudy lens of a dream. How strange, to be able to evoke these feelings of belonging from sitting in a bubble tea shop, on an otherwise normal Sunday afternoon.

I guess I’ve officially entered a new stage of my life. Lol.

This past week I’ve been in Houston has been an opportunity to revisit old haunts from my undergrad days. Coffee shops (I see you, Common Bond), pizza parlors (my favorite Luna Pizzeria), barbeque establishments (finally got my beef rib at Pinkerton’s!) among new places. Breweries out the wazoo. And of course, all the road rage I could ever ask for, both from the potholes that give me a potty-mouth and from those who received their licenses but still don’t know how to signal.

Visiting places close to my old apartment complex, noticing shops I hadn’t bothered to visit five or so years ago, making a pit stop by a campus where I’d hurt myself time and time again from my lack of confidence and short-sightedness in my capabilities, remembering how I’d more or less given up on my lifelong dream behind those hedges — if only I’d had someone to give me a few words of advice or guidance during those hectic early twenties, I found myself thinking. But then again, would I have listened? Things happen for a reason; things happen for multiple reasons.

Learning how to forgive myself for what I thought I should have become has been the lesson of these past eight years. I feel I’ve gotten to a point where I have many, many things to say to the young woman who was running into walls, because she kept those words from herself for such a long time. I’ve also realized that sometimes, we don’t need words to speak.

If this is my “summer break” for 2021, then I’ll take it. All these places, ever present, yet changed enough to feel distinctly new. People at all walks of life, speaking all sorts of languages, bidding each other hello and goodbye in foreign tongues, and me, trying to scoop as much of this into my pockets as I can, wrap myself in this blanket, this hustle and bustle of the city, chaotic and exciting.

I wave at it and it smiles back at me, each toothy possibility flashing mischievously.

I’ve been to a good number of places in my life, but today marks the first day I feel just as excited about somewhere I’ve been as I am about somewhere I’m going. We all need some form of a modest café Sunday to keep ourselves going. I’ll be coming back to this moment in future months when life isn’t quite as forgiving: sun shining in from the windows, indie music trailing out of the speakers, dressed in bright green and trying to remember what it was like to be in undergrad.

Not that I’d do it again. Things can be clearer in hindsight, but things can also seem rosy.

I’ve asked myself this question time and time again since graduating Rice. ‘If you could do it all over again, would you?’ I think initially I was ambivalent, because I didn’t want to choose a different school. To choose something different from my initial decision felt somewhat like a betrayal (and I knew this was unreasonable thinking, but bear with me here), so I didn’t want to admit outright that I didn’t like Rice.

Eventually I confessed my dislike. I even went to far as to say I had an awful experience. I was lost, and hurt, confused, indecisive. I didn’t understand why. Why do we need to feel horrible? Is it possible to grow without feeling like this, or do we all have to feel dumpy once in our lives to get to the next stage?

Being back in the city has got me ruminating on this question again. And I guess I really have gotten to this last stage of healing, because I find myself entertaining the thought that maybe I would try again with Rice. I would do it all differently, of course, but I think I’d be able to make it a pleasant experience. In the end it’s all speculation, and I know there’s a bright future ahead of me regardless of the way I was. Or should I say, because of the way I was.

Perhaps I could call this spiritual growth, this acceptance that things will turn out alright. This knowledge that I went through the things I did because I wasn’t ready for the things I now want to pursue. In the end, we falter due to our own selves, and I’m not willing to allow the demons of my mind to run the show any longer.

If anything, I’ll partner with them.

They say that you only live once, but I guess I’d challenge this: we live multiple times, within the span of what our mortal bodies will allow. How many deaths have I already had? How many times have I reemerged from a cocoon, unwilling to flap my brilliant wings? We’re creatures of routine — sleeping, waking, eating, commuting, over and over again — but there is purpose to that as well. There is perspective.

All things said and considered, I’m thankful. I’m thankful that I can return to this Chinatown and feel its growth. I’m thankful that perhaps I sense my own reflection this way, an individual in tandem with the larger society around me. I walk through the Chinatowns of my own mind represented by skyscrapers, sweaty summer nights tinged with street food smoke, foggy evenings and cobblestoned paths back to my university dorm. I sit in the backseat of a car on the way back from the movie theater as I pull the curtains on my first love, and I allow myself to cry on the bus alongside a younger version of myself as she leaves a future in Japan, violently biting her own lip so as to not let the tears fall.

I’ve been out of touch with my writer’s heart lately. Bowled over by professional school, occupied with stuffing facts and treatment protocols into my mind, that I haven’t had the time to clear out a room of my own in my head to put it all down into words. I haven’t been reading; haven’t been writing; haven’t had time to digest; haven’t had the time to pursue newness.

But I think, after these two-and-a-half (or so) decades, I can start looking backwards in a way I haven’t been able to before. Without realizing it, the small town of my mind has expanded into a budding metropolis, an amalgamation of split identities and reinterpretations of truth and belonging and perhaps more importantly, forgiveness. Perhaps most importantly, love.

Life’s been good. Here’s to all the tomorrows.