For the last few years I’ve been trying to come up with an appropriate way of sharing out personal news. It was convenient to post on social media, but I was getting increasingly wary of the lack of alignment between my desired outcome in posting and that of the platforms themselves. (And yeah, I have even more conviction in this mismatch now than I did back then!)
So I quit social media in the beginning of 2021 thinking, “If I really need to tell people what’s going on in my life, I’ll figure out a way to do it.” And welllll I have not lol.
And things! Were! Happening! Folks whom I’ve chatted with (text, phone, in person) know what’s been going on. But I was still lacking that environment where I could just like, put stuff out there. Emails felt too direct and kind of intrusive (though I will say that I love reading the casting-a-wide-net email updates that I do get every once in a while). And the concept of “following” and “feeds” … just felt too binding of a social contract for my own content. Yes I’m 95% sure I’m overthinking this.
My desired outcome is having a way of putting stuff out there with no other expectations, while allowing for the possibility of discovery. Maybe there’s a situation where someone who cares enough to check in will come across the stuff and be like “Wait Yoko runs now?” And when I meet with them at some point they can be like “I thought you hated running?” and we could talk about it. But I don’t like how email and social seek to hasten this interaction!
I’m now like 99% sure I’m overthinking this. And maybe most of my motivation to put stuff out there is just that I want to do it, for myself. Email and social assume that there is an explicitly assigned audience on the other side that isn’t me. Updating my own website though … it could be anyone, including me. Or no one.
OKAY SO that was a really long windup to the content of this post, which is a list of all of the THINGS that have HAPPENED in the last few years that have been/are currently shaping me. By writing it down on the internet I’m opening up the topics for discussion. If you read it, cool. If you is actually just me, well that’s cool too. Shoutout to future me.
Oh, and as part of releasing my content from the social contract of feeds, I’m also going to try disabling the RSS/Atom/whatever generation that Jekyll does when compiling.
In chronological order:
- Mar 2020 - My dad dies at 81. Stuff relating to cancer. Just a week after, NYC enters its first pandemic lockdown.
- Jul 2020 - After years of thinking about it and struggling to overcome the hurdle of searching, I find and start seeing a therapist for the first time.
- Sep 2020 - Kevin and I move to our second apartment in Sunset Park. Twice the bedrooms. Twice the bathrooms. Twice the rent. There is a DISHWASHER and the refrigerator has an ICE MACHINE. We buy an IN-UNIT WASHER-DRYER. We live in the lap of luxury now and we know we can never go back.
- Jan(-ish) 2021 - After independently dabbling in virtual office hours, I join Merit and start mentoring.
- Mar 2021 - Maybe as an early attempt to re-think this content-sharing social contract, I make and send my first zine.
- Apr 2021 - Kevin and I get married in our home. My mom comes down from uptown to attend in person. Sachi and Rachel buy me flowers, which Rachel, ~8mo pregnant, hand-delivers to me outside our apartment. We dial in Kevin’s family, and Gary Chou marries us over Zoom. It was so different from what we had originally planned, but/and I would not have had it any other way. Here’s a lil video Kevin made about it.
- Jun 2021 - I break up with my therapist. I had hit a ceiling with what I was getting out of working with them. But I leave the relationship with more clarity around what I actually need. For that, I’m grateful.
- Oct 2021 - Kevin and I adopt a cat!!! He is g r e a t
- Mar 2022 - Kevin and I resume plane travel to go to a wedding. And then we go to three more weddings this year, all but one in NorCal or the Bay.
- Sep 2022 - I get a promotion at work. My new title is “staff product designer.”
- Oct 2022 - I find out I’m pregnant, and then have a miscarriage about two weeks later while on a business trip in Mexico City. I slog through a week of working-not-working and then I take the following week completely off. Even after talking about it with some of my close friends, I have so many unresolved lamentations about this whole process. I would love to talk about this with someone! Are you out there??
- Nov 2022 - My 6wk work sabbatical, which I earned after working at Etsy for five years, begins. During which:
- Kevin runs his first NYC marathon
- Kevin and I go to Hawai’i for a long-awaited honeymoon
- I hire a running coach and, later, learn that I won a lottery entry to the NYC Half Marathon in March 2023
- I go to Japan from Hawai’i, my first trip since Jan 2020 right before pandemic
- All of my cousins gather in Nara to celebrate my grandmother’s 100th birthday