VOL.01—Hiatus
"a pause or gap in a sequence, series, or process."
✉️ Letter—22.68
Let’s try this again…
Hello readers (or let’s be honest, reader*),
If you read my first post, I lied.
I promised that I would publish a new piece every other week in hopes of turning this whole personal writing thing into a habit. Ironically, I didn’t share this project with a single soul, and we’re all familiar with the classic thought experiment: if a promise is made in a forest and no one is around to hear it, was Brandon just being dumb?
The short answer is yes. But, what’s a thought experiment without a little unpacking?
Stepping out of SFO for the first time, I was riding on blind optimism. The idea of self-reinvention that once lived in my subconscious became ever so appealing. “Now was the time”, I inevitably repeated to myself. It’s why I decided to pour thousands of dollars into new photography gear, tens of hours into discovering new closet pieces, and plenty of chemicals into my own hair. In the big existential question mark that comes after leaving a college campus bubble, these activities became coping mechanisms—synthetic representations of a change I could not see, but chased anyways. But, after an 8-month writing hiatus, it turns out changing one’s life doesn’t always change one’s self as much as we may like to think. I did like my perm, though.
So, what does it take to change yourself? Discipline? Heartbreak? Trauma? Grit?
This was a question that floated through my mind and came up in conversation while I was catching up with a childhood friend last week. We began listing out decisions and life events that we considered major turning points, and tried to pinpoint what made them special. After several turns of therapy, we didn’t come to any conclusive answer. But, we realized that when you ask yourself the “what”, it’s equally as important to ask yourself the “why”—why are you actively seeking change in the first place? When you are lacking fulfillment, does it come from a place of envy, FOMO, boredom? Whichever the case, if you’re going to be running, it’s often better to be running towards something rather than away from something.
While it feels a bit silly and embarrassing to be talking about this relatively trivial topic with everything going on in the world right now, it’s also these times that have forced me to reflect on change in the first place. To all of our brave frontline workers, I am extremely thankful, and to those who have lost a loved one, job, or anything else, my thoughts are with you. But for the rest of us, privileged enough to be working from home, spending time with family, dusting off old hobbies, and binging TV shows, I invite you to consider for a moment what normalcy will look like on the other side of this tunnel? This post may be my return to writing, but all of us are still caught in another hiatus—one from normalcy. I don’t know when we will return, or even if the normalcy we left will still exist for us to return to. Like a drop of black dye in water, this pandemic is rippling through our generation’s everyday lives and slowly staining our worldview. With each day, giving us reasons to be pessimistic, hopeful, grateful, and disappointed all within one scroll of our news feeds, perhaps the answer is really however we choose to see and project those feelings onto the people around us.
Stay healthy, hydrated, and home,
Brandon
P.S. I’m still experimenting with the structure and frequency of these newsletters, but for now, I’m thinking of the following at least once per month:
Letter—life updates and thoughts (won’t always be as heavy as this one lol)
Curiosity—summary/reflection on a subject matter that I’m curious about
Curated—list of creative works that I enjoyed recently
This may be biting off more than I can chew, but I’m open to feedback. Thanks for reading :’)
🧠 Curiosity—Literary Sentimentalism
Lately, I’ve been more self-conscious about my writing and communication. Aside from my two curses—being self-critical and perfectionist, I never understood why personal writing felt any different than other interests I’ve explored in the past.
So, being the self-therapy veteran that I am, I dove into my childhood for answers. Growing up, I was probably the opposite of a book worm. In Ms. Scott’s first grade class, when it was time for language arts (wow, do they still call it that?), I was always one of two students who had to pack their plastic Rubbermaid school boxes and switch classrooms. It wasn’t until late middle school, when it dawned on me that those were for ESL classes. Even at the start of college, I dropped my original plan to study philosophy and politics because of how much I doubted my reading and writing abilities. Hiding behind utility functions and data structures, I realized I was evading the insecure as much as I was pursuing the pragmatic. I was just never a book worm, and clearly I wasn’t the sharpest pencil in the Rubbermaid box.
Then, last week, a friend showed me an essay passage from Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams. In her essay, “In Defense of Saccharine”, on literary sentimentalism, the following struck a serious chord with me:
Perhaps if we say it straight, we suspect, if we express our sentiments too excessively or too directly, we’ll find we’re nothing but banal. There are several fears inscribed in this suspicion: not simply about melodrama or simplicity but about commonality, the fear that our feelings will resemble everyone else’s. This is why we want to dismiss sentimentality, to assert instead that our emotional responses are more sophisticated than other people’s, that our aesthetic sensibilities testify, iceberg style, to an entire landscape of interior depth.
With one of my insecurities spelled out line by line, I felt attacked and comforted at the same time. Leslie, here, considers our ego and how we balance pathos and melodrama when we express our ideas, thoughts, and opinions. It’s a fear that sharing our rawest selves directly, not via casual/backdoor/internet banter, will expose us as frauds or god forbid, bAsIc. On the web, especially, it’s why we sometimes find it stressful to make social media posts or annoying when we’re told we fit a certain trope or “starter pack”. In the Western world where we value and wish to be unique and authentic, performativity is baked in. So, what is one to do? Delete Instagram, again? Cancel your Internet subscription? Pursue a nomadic life in the forests of the Pacific Northwest? Sure, but wait, wouldn’t these actions, too, carry their own performativity? That’s the catch-22.
Maybe I am overthinking all of this, and I’m happy for those of you who find it easy to present your most authentic self. But, if you are at all like me, I hope this segment resonated with you. While I, admittedly, still need to finish the rest of her essay and think there’s a long way to go before I’m comfortable being completely honest with myself on paper, bluprint feels like a step in the right direction. If we are going to be overthinking 80% of the time anyways, why not at least try to turn a curse into a superpower?
🎨 Curated
I’m slowly becoming obsessed with micro-apartments—just look at that functional wall slider, the passageway to the bathroom, and the tile-timbre TONES.
Celebrate a belated Earth Day and upcoming Mother’s Day with this ethereal song and music video by the next lo-fi, r&b sensation, UMI.
There are few things that amaze me more than when artists can connect and communicate with one another through their craft, without the need for words. Check out this new collaboration project by Tom Misch and Yusef Dayes, who bring out the best in each other.
Tired of CNN and Fox News spinning a global pandemic for their own political agendas? Check out SomeGoodNews for the soul. The world could use some more John Krasinski right now.
by Brandon Lu
Brandon (blu) is a product manager, creative, and chronic over-thinker driven by projects that empower entrepreneurial and creative thinking. While a impatient north-easterner at heart, he is currently based in San Francisco building merchant business solutions and freelancing lifestyle and music photography.