Off the record

I'm right back here at square one again.

It dawned on me that if someone took the time to read what you're reading now—LYD as a mailing list through Substack, I mean—from start to finish, they'd likely find themselves scratching their heads over the last few entries. I mean, I just went through the site myself, and even I was scratching my head. I started this Substack in 2019, trying to write regularly and get some sort of mojo back. And I was doing okay up until 2020 or 2021.

Those were heavy times, you know? My sister had just started feeling the power of being able to refuse anti-psychotic medication and had started beating my mother. My dad was forgetting things, which became dementia, which then became Alzheimer's, and a whole bunch of intense stuff just kept piling on. 2020 hit, and there I was with everyone else, trying to wade through all that trauma. And then I stopped writing.

---

---

There's, like, one post in 2021, but otherwise, radio silence throughout 2022.

And when I finally reappeared, I came out with a post about Tailwind.

What the actual fuck? If I were reading these posts sequentially, I, too, would be like, "fuck Tailwind." And while it's my right to be all, "fuck all y'all, I'm writing about Tailwind," if I were reading this and suddenly it dovetailed into "I'm going to write about Personal Knowledge Management software now," I would want to know what the fuck was going on—maybe just a teeny tiny bit.

What was going on was that, from the end of 2019 to 2021, everything just… unraveled.

A couple of years earlier, a group of people I once considered my closest friends fired me the day before I was to return from a 3-month sabbatical for burnout, causing a job search that triggered a full identity crisis.

I broke up with my partner at the time around September, but we lived under the same roof until I moved back to California in January 2022.

Now, I have to tread cautiously because I want to respect his privacy and all that. We're still in the process of splitting up the house we bought together. And Miami property is more valuable than human life, if you ask some real estate agents in South Florida.

So what do I say?

I'll say I became incredibly angry—whether this anger was justified or not is up to you to judge.

I'll say I lost my shit over a Sweetgreen order that didn't come through.

Yes, Sweetgreen, the Chipotle clone, but with $27 salads.

And the resulting argument that came from that and the fallout… we both knew. It was time. And it was unsalvageable from there.

Then came the period of "what now?" I had to pick a new city—New York was on the list, Austin too, Portland, Seattle. Hell, my friend Royce ended up moving to Chicago because he thought it sounded cool, and he'd never been there before. Meanwhile, I'm thinking about where I'd fit in and wondering what an Asian person could do in Nashville.

That lasted for two days.

Because Dad's situation suddenly became dire. My mom was clearly overwhelmed with his 24-hour care needs. I tried hiring home health aides for him, assistants for her, but both my parents kicked them out for various reasons. It became obvious he needed a home, and that responsibility landed on me. My aunt did help—a bit of a family drama there since she and my mom don't exactly get along—but we found him a nice place nearby.

And on one of the coldest days on record, I moved back into the condo I bought with Dad in 2004—a place that represented being suffocated by his control. It felt gross moving back there, like I'd lost somehow.

Because I did lose. I lost things, I lost people, and I lost at life.

We tried transporting Dad a couple of times; each attempt ended in him throwing a tantrum—locking himself in the bathroom once and sitting down on the floor of the garage, his arms folded in protest.

He's no longer the military man I was terrified of, the authority figure I felt I could never live up to or make happy through no fault of my own. He was, literally, a 91-year-old man throwing a temper tantrum because he knew something bad was gonna happen.

The two Filipino workers from the facility looked at me and shook their heads. We can't take him like this, they said silently.

We eventually settled him down with some sedation pills. He was told he was going to the doctor, and as the van drove away, only we knew that he wasn't coming back.

Mom visits him way less than you'd think, given she's only a few blocks away—just four times since he moved there in the 1.5 years he's been there. There's always an excuse: I woke up at 2 in the afternoon, but they eat dinner at 4. But there's another reason: she found a letter where Dad admitted in shaky Chinese cursive that he hadn't married her out of love but out of obligation—to please *his* father, because his father was convinced that he would be dead at 50 and he needed proof the Hsiung name would continue.

Hand to God, that's what Mom told me.

The writing in the letter is shaky. Was it written when he was having a moment of clarity and needed to get it off his chest? Did he write it when his paranoia was at an all-time high, the same time he accused me of trying to steal his assets because being gay—and somehow, Florida—turned me evil? Will we ever truly know? And more importantly, does it even matter?

---

When I took a screenwriting course with Sundance—TL;DR, fun little class, nothing came out of it—you learn that everything worth reading is supposed to tie back together into a neat packaged lesson. And the screenplay treatment that had so much potential I just couldn't resolve in my head, because in the movies, there are lessons to be learned, characters who evolve and change, learning something when that's not happening in real life. There will be no final words with Dad because he has literally forgotten how to words.

Maybe no one's actions are meant to be deciphered. Maybe the act of trying is where the damage has been happening.

So maybe that's why, after a brief but unsuccessful attempt at a rebranding, I'm right back here at square one again. This act of trying to capture the noise and put it into words, broken up by a listicle or a how-to guide—maybe that’s all it’ll ever be: a momentary reprieve in a world that’s always unraveling.

Writing may not solve anything, but it's the one thing I've noticed that stays—messy, inconsistent, sometimes filled with nothing but noise.

Maybe that's enough. Maybe that's all I have now.