trekking onwards
it was love all along
for awhile now, i’ve told people around me that i’m in a rut. i’d been restless and stuck because i couldn’t find a clear solution to my pursuit of ‘fulfillment.’ for most of my post-grad life, i’ve been able to find it in my work. these past few months, i’d been so disillusioned at work that everything else had returned to demand its reckoning.
my career and life goals are murky and fickle, but one constant is my desire to be a mother. when i was younger, i daydreamed about the specifics of the future: the hobbies my kids might do, the sheer, flowy curtains we’d have in the house, the photos of them at graduation, the way i’d navigate conflicts differently than my parents had handled ours. maybe they’d grow up playing piano, like i did. maybe they’d become skateboarders, because my ex longboarded. i convinced myself that if i could see it with enough fidelity, it would all come true.
but these were just arbitrary fantasies, unable to stand their own without the necessary groundwork. it wasn’t enough to think of such domestic bliss. i didn’t know how to sustain a life like that yet.
i have shifted this mode of thinking to be broader and simpler. the mother i want to be is one that shares what she loves with her children. love takes time to cultivate, time beyond our primal brain’s ability to grasp in any one instant. we’re too wired by the promise of instant gratification to reliably compute the outcome of something that could take years to unfold.
the lesson i am learning is how to tender something that lasts. to do so, i must understand the shape of my motivations.
J has a beautiful way of articulating his. to paraphrase, he lives life on ‘hard mode’ by doing things at the highest level he is capable of. i’ve seen this apply to his craft, to his work, to his competition driving, and have always admired the intensity and output of such dedication. regardless the opinions of others, this underscores how he approaches the world. this is intention that is pure.
for most of my life, my intentions haven’t been wholly pure. my upbringing conditioned me well to follow direction from others, and i had no conception of intrinsic motivation. upon entering university, i floundered. i was easily swayed by the desire to fit in — to be cool enough to hang out with people i considered cool. since then, it has been an arduous process to become legible to myself and draw inspiration not from outside, but from within.
much of what i’ve agonized about over the last couple years is the ideal of finding my creative ‘life’s work.’ as much as i drew inspiration from the craft of the people around me, it became difficult to disambiguate inspiration from the familiar conditioning to be told what to do, or the strain of unhealthy fomo that plagued my younger self. in lieu of explicit direction, what i admired became what i attempted to emulate.
i tried writing. i tried reviving my art practice. i composed narratives for why i should be doing these things and why it made sense for me to: i enjoyed drawing as a kid, it’s something i’ve come back to over the years, i should keep drawing now. lots of ‘creative’ people in tech adjacent fields draw…. or, everyone is writing on substack nowadays, i should add my voice to the discourse. girlhood! navigating the early 20s! the immigrant eldest daughter experience! my stories must be told!
although i have put out some work i am proud of, too much of it still felt too forced, like i had to try a little too hard to justify its’ existence and worth.
the underlying assumption was that my life’s work would bring me Fulfillment. if i found Fulfillment, i could lay upon my deathbed with a full heart and no regret. the fallacy was i’d never defined what fulfillment meant. it became an easy catch-all for unconscious and competing urges — the desire to fit in, the pursuit of happiness, the search for something ‘greater than myself.’ i was no longer able to clearly disambiguate my own narratives’ from the ones i constructed in society’s facade. was i searching for fulfillment because it seemed like a noble thing to do?
this spiral also precluded my ability to do things with joy. i was putting all these expectations on my hobbies and willing them to become something greater, like trying to marry somebody before you properly date them. with such restriction, you don’t give them the ability to grow into who they are meant to, nor do they get the chance to subvert your image of what else they could become.
i was doing to myself what my parents years ago had done to me.
sometime amidst this all, i realized i was scrutinizing the wrong places. i kept stubbornly trying to find holes in my reasoning to understand why i couldn’t just do the things i willed myself to do, that i didn’t notice that i already was doing things i wanted. perhaps because they had crept upon me so silently. perhaps because my self-perception is well-trained to hone in on my flaws.
once the realization struck, i was like oh...i’m so foolish. while i’d unwittingly been doing some things right all along, other things had been so blindly wrong.
in pursuit of Fulfillment, i had overlooked what i have long claimed to value. how many times have i written some variation of living with love? not only treating others with love and moving through the world with love, but doing the things i love as well.
it is fulfillment enough to live a life with love.
it is obvious in hindsight. i had written about driving, about hosting, about playing Pump it Up without fully recognizing it. this past month of fervent hiking is what finally opened my eyes.
perhaps because of how unexpectedly it came about. of all the ways my life looks different than my younger selves could have pictured, this was a particular surprise. my entire life, my anemia had so unreasonably distorted my perception of my physical capabilities that i’d resigned myself to being forever incapable.
this became a massive point of inferiority in college. i tried going on a couple hikes and ended up turning around midway through. the people i’d gone with also had to turn back, and i was so mortified that i gave up on it entirely.
the first time we went camping together, G and i drove north of Clearlake, and i did my first hike in years. when we visited Death Valley later, it was a natural inclination to go hiking there as well. in 2025, my New Year’s resolutions included walking 10k steps a day and hiking twice a month. there were many weekends J/G and i would drive out to Pacifica or Mt. Tam and meander along the cliffs. i bought a pair of trail-runners and AllTrails premium.
in the spring, i completed one of the hikes i hadn’t been able to a couple years ago. hikes started to become part of my travel itineraries — seattle, vancouver, and arizona were all accompanied by roadtrips to the mountains. after hearing all of J’s backpacking stories, i bought an old backpack at a flea market (for electronics, lmao).
i’m not sure when or how it happened, but sometime over the past year, the routine became ritual, and the ritual became something more. i was no longer content to simply take in what i could easily see. i remember standing atop the rim of the Grand Canyon and thinking it was beautiful, but it wasn’t until hiking miles down and watching the sun rise on the canyon walls that my chest then filled with some deep ache i couldn’t quite place. with every few footfalls, the colors would shift, dusky indigos and pale pinks brought abloom by the rising sun. every shadow and striation came alight in a blaze of vermillion and bright, bright ochre. i felt so moved, surrounded by a creation so immovable.
this past New Year’s, i completed the second hike i wasn’t able to in college; my father and i summitted Camelback at sunrise and we watched my hometown awaken beneath us. in early May, i roadtripped with friends to Utah solely to boulder and hike. the weekend after, i went backpacking in Big Sur for the first time with J and G. this past weekend, G and i went backpacking again just out Yosemite.
however much i struggled to rationalize my reasons for doing other things, i felt no such dissonance here. it crept upon me, this love. it was irrational, a compulsion that needed no explanation. it carved out the space it craved, and that was enough.
when i hike, my mind is silent. there is only the next step, one foot in front of the other. open eyes for the grasses and the wildflowers and the towering peaks. open ears for the rush of water over stone and the song of a hundred birds. an open heart as i walk onwards.
it is enough to just be.
ps,
this song (also the titular song of the album!), is one i hold dearly. i hear revelry for a life well-lived and well-loved. if you desire, please give it a listen :)
my mind has a tendency to drown out my heart, and it is difficult to distinguish the tone of one over the other. the lesson here is once again to trust my desires more.
i felt so silly as i thought about this over the last weeks and wrote it all out. classic grace behavior to overcomplicate things and assume the worst in myself lol. i feel at peace now. my mind is clearer than it has been in awhile.
it is enough to live a life with love.
throughout this last year, i have drawn strength and shed many tears from the writings of so many great figures — Muir, Snyder, and more. the prospect of knowing a wilderness so deeply, to have spent decades tracing and retracing paths old and new, is something unfathomable to me. until i know devotion of that nature, it is a reminder to remain humble and stalwart and carry onwards.
from Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain:
The talking tribe, I find, want sensation from the mountain….Beginners, not unnaturally, do the same—I did myself...Yet often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him.
like all profound mysteries, it is so simple that it frightens me... It does nothing, absolutely nothing, but be itself.
with so much love and gratitude to G and J for the hundreds of miles we’ve walked, the thousands of miles we’ve driven, and the millions of conversations we’ve shared in those liminal moments.
to S and V for recent conversations, and to rabbitholeathon for providing me the space to tumble into the wondrous expanse of nature writing.
and to the living mountains, for reminding me how to be myself.
as always, with love. see you in the next <3
pps.
random after-notes
the hikes i re-did were:
Camelback in Phoenix (either the Echo Canyon or Cholla trail
Pinnacles loop (one of them, i think this one)
i bought my backpack at the SJ electronics flea market, truly so random but the market is super cool, would highly recommend checking it out sometime.
lmk if you ever want trail recs :D
so grateful to read this 🌅
always love reading about the beautiful way you see things 💕