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A 500-year-old word for something I’ve been doing since I was 12

There’s an art, architecture, design, and photography bookstore nearby that I adore. It’s a curated collection of interesting things, run by an interesting man. Ross is a creative, who used to work in tech, and now runs a bookstore. Talk about living the dream. 

Anyway, we often pop in if we’re walking by, just to chat. And because he loves saying hi to Kona.

During one of those random pop-in conversations, I think we were talking about Italian fashion — or maybe just Italy, or maybe just fashion — and he asked if I was familiar with the concept of sprezzatura. 

“Can you spell that?”

Sprezzatura is the art of making something effortful look effortless. Coined in the 1500s, it was originally about how a courtier should dress: thrown together, a little undone, like you couldn’t be bothered, while secretly having agonized over every single thread. The classic move is the bottom button of a suit jacket, left undone on purpose, because doing it up reads as trying too hard. 

I recognized it before I went home and researched it to understand it. As Ross was describing sprezzatura, my spiritual bottom button came undone.

I realized I did this constantly in school. I was a good student. Admittedly, a lot of it was because “school” came naturally to me. But there were times I would really study, flashcards, the whole shebang, and then act completely unbothered about the grade, like it had just happened to me. Like the A was something that just happened rather than something I built. If someone asked how much I’d studied, I’d say something like “eh, a little,” which was a lie of proportion if not of fact. I just needed you to think I hadn’t. I needed you to think I wasn’t a try-hard.

I’ve spent a while trying to figure out why. The easy answer is that trying hard and failing is humiliating in a way that not trying and failing isn’t. If you didn’t really try, the failure doesn’t mean anything about you. But I didn’t fail. I got the A. And I still couldn’t let anyone watch me earn it…?

Which brings me to Substack, and the fact that I’m… kinda doing this to you right now.

I write these essays and then I go back and sometimes unpolish them. I polish some things, and deliberately unpolish others. I like it when my voice comes out in my writing, like you can imagine me actually saying these words to you. If a sentence sounds too clean, too composed, like I sat down and crafted it on purpose, sometimes I’ll rough it up. Break it into fragments (not gonna lie, I hate that AI writing loves sentence fragments. That’s how I write! Stop thinking I’m AI!). I’ll throw in a “lol” or a parenthetical that undercuts whatever I just said before it gets too sincere (see previous sentence. And this one). I want it to read like I’m sitting with you and talking to you, not performing for you — but sometimes the talking-to-you voice is itself a performance, workshopped and revised until it sounds unworkshopped. Buttoned all the way up, then one button undone right before you see it. A few well-placed wrinkles so you know I’m a human being living in these clothes.

Social media is just this, run through an amplifier. The #nofilter caption on the photo that took 20 takes. The #iwokeuplikethis selfie that shows perfectly unkempt hair and the golden hour light beaming into a dreamy bedroom. The vulnerable, off-the-cuff caption that got written, deleted, and rewritten five times to find the version of off-the-cuff that read best. We’re all courtiers now, dressing for an audience of strangers, and the whole game is convincing them we didn’t dress for anyone at all.

I wanted to think sprezzatura was the opposite of perfectionism — one is trying so hard it shows, the other is trying so hard it doesn’t. But I don’t think that’s right. I think they’re the same fear wearing different outfits. The perfectionist is scared of what happens if she tries and it’s not good enough. The sprezzatura girl is scared of the exact same thing, she’s just found a way to protect herself from it in advance. She’s nonchalant. If no one knows you tried, no one can tell you the trying wasn’t enough.

I don’t have a fix, or a conclusion. I’m not going to tell you I’ve started leaving my effort visible, announcing how much I’m trying, posting all 20 takes. I am going to tell you this essay feels very meta in that I’m actually not going back to rough it up a bit.

What I do know is that the word followed me home from that bookstore for a reason. It named something I’d been doing since I was 12, something I’m doing in this sentence, probably, if I’m honest, which… see? There. I almost edited that.

There’s no “jump to recipe” button on this one, sorry.

Lamb keema — concisely: ground lamb with spices — is often served with pasta in my house. Not naan, not rice. Pasta. Ideally a short, tube-shaped pasta, as is appropriate for a ragu. And keema could be classified as a ragu (cue angry nonnas everywhere).

It’s spiced ground meat over pasta, and it’s delicious, and it makes complete sense if you don’t spend too much time thinking about whether it’s supposed to.

I had it for the first time in my in-laws’ house in New Jersey, made by Rita Auntie — who is actually R’s aunt, and not even his aunt by blood or even by marriage, but by the kind of decades-long friendship with his parents that makes those distinctions feel silly. An auntie, even not by actual familial relation, is still an auntie. In many cases, those “aunties” are closer than family. 

Anyway. 

She and Uncle were around that season to help my father-in-law out with cooking and housework — all the things my mother-in-law did — and to keep him company during a tough time. As real family does. My mother-in-law’s cancer was back, after five years in remission, and it had taken a turn for the worse. She was at least out of the hospital and moved to a physical rehab center half a mile down the road from the house. It was one of those periods where people show up and either bring or make for everyone because it’s the thing that can be done.

One night, dinner was keema pasta. Auntie told us she started making keema with pasta because her grandkids preferred pasta over rice. How American! But she learned to love it too. And what was there not to love? I had two helpings… possibly three.

I wasn’t in the kitchen when she made dinner that night, so I asked her for a recipe, because I needed to know how to recreate something that delicious.

“Do you know how to make chicken curry?”

I said yes — because my mother-in-law had taught me. 

“Ok,” Auntie said. “It’s the same thing, except with ground lamb. Onion, garlic, ginger, masala, meat, simmer, garam masala to finish.”

That was the lesson. It’s been a few years, so I don’t remember, but she might not have listed the ingredients, actually. She might have just said it’s the same as chicken curry. lol.

I think about that “lesson” every time I make keema. There’s something in the geometry of it that I find so sweet and so… mom-like: Auntie teaching me a recipe not by giving me a recipe, but by pointing at knowledge my mother-in-law had already given me. In my mother-in-law’s kitchen, while my mother-in-law wasn’t there to know it was happening. Her teaching was not specific but still useful, and tied to a lesson I had actually learned step by step. My mother-in-law taught me chicken curry. Auntie taught me that chicken curry was the base for other things. That unlocked something in my brain and I realized I know how to cook so many more things than I thought.

The pasta thing is its own lesson. Keema is keema, and then you put it over whatever makes sense for your table. Auntie’s grandkids wanted pasta, so pasta it is. No “authenticity” policing (you know how I feel about “authenticity”), no announcement that they were eating “fusion”. The kids like pasta, the keema goes on pasta, it’s delicious on pasta. What else do you need to know?

I’ve experimented with different pasta shapes. I’ve gone back to rice, just to try it. And I can say with confidence that I like it more on pasta! It doesn’t really matter what kind. What can I say? I’m a noodle girl through and through.

Recipes never travel as themselves. They travel as what someone showed you, in someone’s kitchen, on a specific day. There’s context. You can follow a recipe from a cookbook and make it perfectly and it will taste delicious but won’t feel like anything. But if someone looks at you across the kitchen counter and tells you, “You already know how to do this,” that hits different. I could have learned the recipe from any YouTube video. But I learned it from Rita Auntie, in my mother-in-law’s kitchen, during a time when we were all looking for joy and peace and normalcy. And I look back and realize how lucky we were to have that time together, despite the less-than-ideal circumstances.

The keema is a way of keeping the thread with Auntie (and Uncle) open — every time we text her that we made it, it feels like a report back. A shared experience we can all point back to. It’s saying, “I still have this gift you gave us, and we use it all the time, thank you.”

I now want to share this gift with you. I wrote down the recipe for chicken curry after countless watches of a video of my mother-in-law making it. I adapted it to read like a recipe anyone can read, and that I now follow every time.

—

Lamb keema pasta

—

Rita Auntie’s recipe

Equipment

• Stockpot for making pasta
• Medium/large pan or pot with lid for making keema

Ingredients

In the same bowl (Bowl 1: aromatics and tomatoes bowl):

• 1 heaping tsp minced ginger
• 1 heaping tsp minced garlic
• 2 Roma tomatoes, diced
• 1 dried bay leaf 

In the same bowl (Bowl 2: spice bowl):

• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1 tsp ground coriander
• 1 tsp ground turmeric
• ½ tsp ground black pepper

Other ingredients:

• 2 TBSP cooking oil
• 1 lb pasta (I personally like this with tube-shaped pastas, like penne or rigatoni, but you do you!)
• 1 medium onion, diced
• 1 lb ground lamb (can sub with chicken, turkey, pork, beef)
• 1 tsp Indian chili powder (or cayenne powder. NOT American chili powder because that’s for making chili)
• 1 cup water
• ½ tsp garam masala
• cilantro leaves (optional, for garnish)

Instructions

1. Start boiling water in your preferred pasta-making pot, and salt it generously. When the water boils, turn down the heat, keep the lid on, and save your hot water for later. We’ll cook the pasta last.
2. In the meantime, heat 2 TBSP oil in a saute pan on medium heat.
3. Add onion and cook until soft and translucent, about 5 minutes.
4. Add Bowl 1 (aromatics and tomatoes: ginger, garlic, bay leaf, tomatoes) and cook for a few minutes, until aromatic and the tomatoes are cooked down a bit. Then add Bowl 2 (spice bowl: cumin, coriander, turmeric, and black pepper) and mix together. Cook for another few minutes, until the raw smell of spices disappears. If spices start to stick, add a few drops of water so they don’t burn. 
5. Add the ground meat and break it apart so it’s extra minced. Sprinkle on some salt to taste (start with about 1 tsp). Add some chili powder for heat (optional). Cook the meat for 5-7 minutes on medium heat, continuing to break it apart as it cooks so that there are no large lumps.
6. Add 1 cup of water to deglaze and make sauce for simmering (add more liquid if you want more gravy). Add garam masala to pan and cover, and simmer for 10-15 minutes (about the time it takes to cook pasta!). Skim off any fat that floats to the top, if desired.
7. While the keema is simmering, cook your pasta (remember that pasta water you already boiled?) and drain it. Reserve about a half cup of pasta water on the side.
8. Taste the keema gravy and add more salt or chili powder to taste. Add it to the drained pasta, and add a few TBSP of reserved pasta water if it needs to be loosened up.
9. Garnish with cilantro leaves and enjoy! Maybe even grate some Parmesan cheese on top…

Reps, free throws, and the DMs I still haven’t sent

A few months ago, a chat notification popped up. A writer I’d been following — someone whose essays I’d read and mentally bookmarked (because I always actually bookmark them and forget bookmarks exist), someone I’d been meaning to reach out to, someone I wish I were friends with in real life — had sent me a note first. Warm, friendly, casual, real. 

hi!!! I just want to say I think you’re great and am glad we are connected. If you ever want to *gasp* chat face to face, I’d love to do a little virtual coffee chat (as much as I hate the term, it works here!)

I typed back immediately. omg you are so sweet! i’m so glad we found each other here — obviously i think you’re great too!

Sent it, smiled, and felt weird about it. Not because I thought the interaction was weird or that I was weird. But because I had been meaning to send a message first. For months.

Then we had our little coffee chat, and we talked about just this, but in a slightly different context: Everything you do can be a rep. Like free throws (she says, never having practiced free throws because lol sports?, but work with me here). It came up when we were talking about networking, about how networking (barf) is not something that comes naturally to either of us. But what if we treated it like a muscle we have to train? When you want to get better at something, you practice it — not in some abstract, aspirational way, but literally, repeatedly, until the motion stops feeling like a forced motion.

Shooting my shot with people I don’t know yet? These are not Amanda’s Natural Gifts. These are, apparently, reps I have to do. The good news is I know this works. I have evidence.

Work presentations used to make me want to crawl out of my own skin (ok, they still do). I hated them. Despised them. The nerves, the feeling of being judged by strangers, all of it. Then I kept doing these godforsaken presentations because the job required it, and eventually that miserable repetition became slightly more bearable. The reps compounded. I got better. I got — not comfortable exactly, but capable. “Fake it til you make it” until you actually make it.

I started writing on Substack about a year ago, just to get my thoughts out. Somewhere, anywhere, it didn’t even matter if anyone read them. What kept me here was the people — other writers, readers who’d left comments, followers who’ve engaged in banter on Notes. I’ve thought: I should message them. I should reach out. 

I should do the rep.

… I did not do the rep.

I’ve thought about it. Then I’ve talked myself out of them on the grounds that they might think I was weird, or too much, or too eager, or, I don’t know, something. Insert any insecurity here. The fear was never fully formed enough to argue with. But it was there.

In the meantime, those exact people started reaching out to me.

And it’s been genuinely lovely! And also a little humiliating, if only to myself. Because every time someone beats me to it, I say something like “I’ve been meaning to reach out!” and have it be true, which is somehow worse than if it were a polite lie. 

I am standing at the free throw line holding the ball, having watched five other people make the shot, and I am still just standing here.

With kickoff presentations, what’s at stake is competence. They might think I’m bad at my job. Fine, I’ll do more reps, I’ll get better, there’s a path from here to not-terrible. Sending a note to a writer I’ve been reading for months, talking to a reader like they’re already my friend — that’s not competence on the line. There’s no rubric, no feedback form, no way to tell if it landed. It’s me saying “I see you and I’d like you to see me too, and can we be friends?”, and waiting to find out if that reads as warm and lovely or as a lot. Whether I seem like someone they’d want to know, or someone who sends slightly too-earnest DMs to strangers on the internet.

That is, it turns out, a much scarier rep. Because failing at a presentation means I need more practice. Failing at this means — I don’t know. Something worse.

I haven’t sent the DMs to everyone I’ve wanted to “meet”. Not yet.

But I’m writing this, which is something. Putting the undone rep on the page, on Substack, where the exact people I haven’t reached out to might read it, lol. Which is either a very roundabout way of doing the rep, or it’s just another way of standing at the line. Maybe that counts, maybe this is the practice.

Or maybe I’ll finish this essay, hit publish, and then finally just send the message. (I’ve been meaning to.)

Is every night out a date night?

Somewhere between being coworkers and being us, I ended up with keys to an apartment on the Upper West Side.

We met at work. We were friends who ate lunch together most days for about two years, and then we were more than that. That’s the origin story. There was no first date I can point to. We just became.

June 19 was our dating anniversary. Fifteen years. That’s nearly 40 percent of my life. I did the math a few times to make sure, and because I’m bad at math.

I don’t really know how to mark a dating anniversary when you don’t remember dating. We didn’t do the thing where you go on dates. There was no “talking” period or courtship period. We did the thing where you’re suddenly in each other’s lives so completely that the category stops applying.

The wedding anniversary in October is the one we celebrate properly. If we’re not somewhere far away, we’re at a special dinner, probably one with a tasting menu and wine pairing. The dating anniversary is more low key. We notice the date. We spend the day together — easier now that Juneteenth is a holiday — and we go out to dinner somewhere we already like. One of us says it at the table: Wow, fifteen years.

This raises a question I’ve been sitting with: is every dinner out a date night?

We go out to eat a lot (but not often enough). We love to eat. We try new places and we return to old ones and sometimes we end up somewhere because it was close and we were hungry. Is that dating? Is fifteen years of that… dating? What makes a “dinner out night” a Date Night?

I think at some point the question stops being a question. You’re not dating. You just are.

There’s a version of this essay where I say something about how R is my best friend and I love him to the moon and back, and I mean it, but I also don’t want to write that sentence because it sounds like a toast and this isn’t a toast. What I mean is something I genuinely don’t know how to say: I don’t remember my life without him. Not “I can’t imagine it” — I literally cannot retrieve it. He’s been there for 40 percent of my life. He was there when I finished grad school, when we both decided to pack up and move to Denver, when we traveled the world, when we got Kona, when my dad died, every time I got a new job, every time I was laid off from that job. The before-him era exists somewhere in my memory like all the times I visited Disney World as a kid. I know I was there, but I can’t really picture it.

We were friends before we were “we”. By the time we were more than that, we’d already seen each other on bad days. I already knew he annoyingly lets everyone off the elevator first, even if that means he’s standing in the way. He already knew I sing the guitar solo or other instrumental break of every song. There was no performance of a first date because we’d already skipped past it somehow.

Then keys to an apartment on the Upper West Side.

We’ve lived in about six places since then. That W 85th Street fifth-floor walkup (and our terrible landlord) is long gone from our lives. But that’s the closest thing I have to a beginning. Not a specific moment. Just: keys.

Fifteen years later, we go out to dinner and a show (an Iration concert, hi Kathi!) and we say the number out loud and it sounds made up. We’re not the people we were 15 years ago, not exactly. We’ve changed in ways that are hard to inventory — some of it together, some of it separately, some of it because of each other. Every version of who I’ve been in the last fifteen years had him in it.

That’s the thing worth noticing, more than the date.

(He promised me 50 years of marriage. We’ve got 40 of those years left.)

A friends’ birthday tradition, actually answered this year

I was into musicals before it was cool. I wouldn’t say I was a theater kid, but if you’ve been here a while, you know music is a core part of me.

I know how that sounds now, in the era of Hamilton and Wicked. But when I was growing up, this was not a culturally safe thing to be into. Neither was anime (Sailor Moon, Neon Genesis Evangelion, to name a few), or J-pop (Utada Hikaru, Ayumi Hamasaki) — and then K-pop (H.O.T., S.E.S.), before K-pop became mainstream in America. I was — am — an introvert with very specific taste who was not, for the record, doing the “cool girl” thing. No parties, no sports. Japanese RPGs and learning all the words of the Cinderella soundtrack. The Brandy and Whitney Houston one. The one with Paolo Montalban as the prince (iykyk).

I didn’t know then that I would look back at this girl and think she had it right all along.

—

My friends have a birthday tradition. Every year, the person celebrating answers three questions:

What from the last year are you carrying with you?

What are you leaving behind?

What are you excited about?

It started, I think, as a party game and became something more — a ritual you say out loud to the people who love you, which makes it more real than a journal entry… or a Substack post.

This year, I actually thought about my answers.

—

What I’m carrying with me

Somewhere between college and learning to go out and be a person in the world, I set some things down. The way you set something down when your hands are full — you mean to come back for it, and then you forget where you put it.

I stopped gaming. I stopped watching anime. I let the K-pop comebacks happen without getting too excited about them. I stopped doing things partly because there wasn’t time, and partly because I had started running everything through a filter in a way I’d never done before. Is this a thing I’m supposed to like? Is this a thing a person my age does? I had decided — whether consciously or not — that some interests were teenage interests. Things to grow out of rather than grow with.

I was recently singing “Cool Rider” — yes, from the Grease 2 soundtrack — and imagining I was a young Michelle Pfeiffer dreaming about a bad boy on a motorcycle. And I thought “oh. I was always this girl.”

I remembered that girl with the niche taste and the strong opinions and zero interest in going to the party. She was ahead on the K-pop thing by years. But more than that, she just liked what she liked. No filter. No running it by the committee of who she was supposed to be. She trusted herself. And this year gave me that back. I’m carrying it into the next year with me.

What I’m leaving behind

Self-doubt. Took long enough. It’s a practice every day, but I’m trying my damnedest to leave it behind.

What I’m excited about

More. More of figuring out what I like, and more of trusting it once I find it. More learning the shape of my own taste. The things I keep coming back to, what I thought I wanted but actually don’t, what I wrote off and shouldn’t have. More friends, more love. More travel, always.

—

Teenage me would be delighted. She’d probably also say “I told you so.”

I like her a lot.

From Lei Day to distress call in 31 days. (ok, maybe being a little dramatic)

On May Day, we hiked Diamond Head before it got hot.

Ok, that’s not entirely true — it got hot. More like humid. But we started early enough (6am!) that the worst of it hit on the way back down, when we were already done being heroic about it. Fried rice from Rainbow Drive-In in our immediate future. Rainbow Drive-In is a plate lunch institution, the kind of place that has a line at 9am and should, and the fried rice is exactly what you want after a hike. The hike was a bit harder than we thought it was going to be, mostly because we are no longer used to humidity. But it was worth it. We’d earned it. We’d earned being in Hawaii, even without the hike.

We were in Honolulu to reward ourselves — for surviving a half year that had featured more appointments to a retina specialist than I care to recount. (If you’re new here: my husband has had three eye surgeries since Thanksgiving. Detached retina and related issues.) 

You slog through the adversity, you book the trip for as soon as you’re clear to travel, you go eat fried rice on a Friday morning on an island where it’s warm and the flowers are everywhere and it’s May Day, which in Hawaii is Lei Day, which means the whole city is doing something fun and festive.

That afternoon, we visited Shangri-La, Doris Duke’s vacation home turned museum of Islamic art, right on the water. She knew what she was doing, real estate-wise. The lusterware mihrab was the star of the show, and I could have sat in front of it all day listening to our tour guides, whose level of knowledge was giving full PhD dissertation energy.

We walked Chinatown — downtown Honolulu — where everyone was having a party and a sale simultaneously, which is a combo I fully support. I was handed a glass of prosecco just for walking into a shop. We wandered into what we thought was an art gallery and turned out to be another curated home goods store. With party drinks! I was so wiped from the day that I found a vintage chair in the corner and just sat in it while R and our friends chatted up the owner. I didn’t even pretend to browse. I just sat there, in a stranger’s nice chair, in a room full of things I wasn’t buying, and it was perfect.

That evening we had dinner at Fete, which might be the best restaurant in Honolulu, which might mean I have to go back and confirm. You know, for research.

The rest of the week was like that.  I was doing stuff, but I was decompressing. I know how to say it without guilt now: I was resting. On purpose. 

Then I came home.

The job offer came fast — faster than I expected, which is funny because I thought I was ready, I’d been waiting for it, and yet. I wasn’t expecting the CEO’s Slack DM at 7:30am on the day I returned. I scrambled. We talked through paperwork and logistics, and then I hit the ground running the following Monday. Hit the ground running. A phrase I’d forgotten I knew how to do… which maybe should have been a warning. Oops.

The first couple weeks back I kept catching myself mid-meeting, surprised I still remembered how to do this. How to context-switch. How to move with urgency. The vocabulary came back like muscle memory — syncing, aligning, circling back, let’s find time — a whole language I’d spent the majority of 2025 not speaking, and I was suddenly fluent again. I clocked more hours than I probably should have. I felt that productive exhaustion I’d almost forgotten I used to run on.

Almost forgotten. And then immediately remembered. Snapped right back into it.

What my body had to say about all of this: No.

Or more like: Hell no. It was more like a door that just stops opening. I got diagnosed with a frozen shoulder — the joint capsule tightens, mobility decreases, treatment is physical therapy a few times a week, and every day at home, until things loosen up, which takes months. Cool, cool cool. A frozen shoulder is exactly what it sounds like. I did not need it explained to me. I understood it immediately, physically, because my body was making a point.

I had been going to the pottery studio every week, often multiple times a week, for hours. It was the thing that had nothing to do with output or productivity or any of the words that used to follow me around — just clay and community and a two-hour block where I made things that were sometimes beautiful and sometimes fell apart. Unfortunately, that time is now dedicated to physical therapy (or physio, as it’s known in Canada and now in my lexicon). I need the physio more than the studio needs me. I know this, but it doesn’t make the absence smaller.

All things considered, I’m doing ok. The job is ok. My shoulder will thaw. I’ll get back to the studio eventually.

But not gonna lie, May hit me like a truck. A truck wearing a lei.

I miss Hawaii. I need another trip to reward me for enduring the month of May.

we walked into that one. and made friends.

The shoes are brown oxfords. So soft out of the box, as Italian shoes are. I haven’t worn them in a while — because I don’t need to wear brown oxfords when my daily outfits are big concert tees and shorts.

We wandered into the shoe store because it was our first trip to Florence — Firenze if ya nasty — and we were told we had to buy Italian shoes. Makes sense. We had stopped by some random little artisan workshop I learned about in one of my internet black holes, but that was a bust. I did not need custom shoes with a long lead time and high price tag because they would be handmade by an Italian grandpa. Anyway, we stopped into this store because shoes were displayed in the window, and we figured why not. He didn’t find a pair he liked in his size. I found a pair I liked in mine. We bought the shoes.

That part of the story has a clean ending. Girl sees shoes. Girl buys shoes. Girl wears shoes.

Inside the shop, a fabulous couple was browsing, and wondering aloud — in English —  whether to buy these gorgeous red boots. R, after a few days of hearing zero English being spoken and getting by on “grazie” and “prego” while I stumbled through the rudimentary Italian I learned on the plane, was so excited to hear words he understood. I cannot overstate how elated he was to hear English. (We are so American.) He commented that the shoes are amazing and they should buy them. We started talking — the way you sometimes do with strangers when you’re traveling and your guard is down and you have nowhere to be. We asked if they had bought shoes here before (low key, R and I just wanted to know if we had stumbled into the Payless of Italy). They told us they buy multiple pairs of shoes at this store every time they’re in Florence. Solid endorsement.

They ended up not buying the red boots, because the store was out of stock in their size. They left, I browsed, I bought the aforementioned brown oxfords.

When we left, we thought: That was nice, they were so sweet. We’ll never see them again.

We walked out of the store, new shoes in hand, and got gelato from our spot across the street: La Carraia. (Yes, it was our first time in Florence, but we already had a favorite gelato spot.) For me, a lighter, likely fruity flavor. For him, something chocolate. Now with shoes and gelato in tow, we started our walk across the bridge (Ponte alla Carraia) back to our hotel.

And there they were. On Ponte alla Carraia. With gelato from La Carraia. 

I don’t know exactly what we said in that moment. It was probably like, “oh hi, what are the odds?” — whatever you say when you’re surprised and slightly delighted and don’t yet understand that the moment you’re standing in is going to matter. 

We learned their names, Robert and Mark. That La Carraia was their gelato spot too. That they’re from San Francisco. That they were on their honeymoon. And — within the first ten minutes of talking — that Robert was R and Mark was me. The gay alternate-universe versions of us, personality-wise.

We planned dinner for a few nights later.

Robert and Mark are now some of our dearest friends.

They’re the kind of friends you make plans around, like adjusting your Hawaiian vacation dates so that it overlapped with theirs. The kind whose texts light up your day. The kind where we’ve stayed at their San Francisco apartment when they were out of town, because we were in town, and they insisted we shouldn’t stay at a hotel. The kind that refer to their guest bedroom as “your second home”.

We found them in a shoe store we walked into because… there were cute shoes in the window. As is the case with shoe stores.

I think about the version of that afternoon where we don’t stop. Where we’re on our way somewhere, or the window catches our eye and we keep moving anyway. I’ve kept moving past a lot of windows.

What would Florence have been? Still great. We’d have hit our reservations, seen the things on the list, gone shopping, come home and said it was wonderful.

And Robert and Mark would exist somewhere in the world, and we’d have no idea. We wouldn’t miss them. You can’t miss people you’ve never met.

That’s the part I can’t shake. The loss is invisible. You come home full and happy and completely unaware of what you didn’t find.

There’s a version of this essay where I say something about luck, about how you can’t engineer the best things in your life. And that’s true, but it’s not really what I’m sitting with.

What I’m sitting with is: I didn’t choose the accident. The shoes were in the window, we stopped, Robert and Mark happened to be in that shop on that particular afternoon, we all wanted gelato, we all walked on the same bridge home. None of that was a pre-planned decision.

But everything after was. The dinner we said yes to. The choice to invite them to our wedding. The next trip we overlapped on. The friendship we decided, slowly and without ceremony, to keep building.

The luck got us to the bridge. We did the rest.

I’ve been thinking about them a lot lately — we just saw them in Hawaii, and we’re making plans to visit them in San Francisco in a few weeks. When we tell people how we met, it sounds unbelievable. And I keep wondering how many bridges I’ve crossed where I just didn’t happen to look up.

What I know is that Robert and Mark are in our lives and we’re better for it in ways I couldn’t have predicted — and it started with a shoe store we almost didn’t walk into.

I still have the shoes. Brown oxfords, soft as anything. Worth every bit of stopping.

The friendship was not on the receipt, but I’m keeping it anyway.

I got a job and have a lot of feelings about it

“I saw you got a full-time offer. Congrats?”

The people who know me well were the ones who included a question mark with their congratulations. They are spot on. The question mark is exactly how I feel about the whole thing.

I came home from Hawaii tan, rested, and connected with the ocean, and got hit in the face with a full-time offer from the company I’d been contracting with. The catch: GTM Architect, a job I’ve never done before (GTM = go-to-market). The gist is working with companies to implement their GTM operations infrastructure and technology. I’ve never worked in a GTM organization before — what even is a GTM organization? I know how to log into Salesforce and that’s pretty much it.

I was hesitant to say yes because it felt like a trap. I wanted to make sure we were aligned on expectations — like, if you think I have experience in any of this, you are sorely mistaken — and that I would actually be set up for success. The CEO booked time on my calendar to “close” me. (Nothing like a sales call about your own employment.)

He told me that I already do the hard stuff: the stakeholder management, the clear communication, the relationship-building, the “executive presence” (yuck, I hate that term, but I understood what he meant). The team is committed to ramping me up on the technical stuff. He admitted that people who have all the GTM experience and technical skills are not always good at this job, because it’s the people stuff that can be difficult.

To be honest, that was validating and reassuring and made me feel so good about myself. They realized that the “soft skills” I’m good at are… well, skills, and skills that are more difficult for them to teach. Perhaps for the first time in my career, a company saw me for my potential and not just what I’d already done. And I’m not even a white man!

The last year and change had been genuinely amazing. Turns out not being on the late-stage capitalism hamster wheel does wonders for your mental health — who knew? I loved the freedom to do what I wanted, and to not have anyone have control over my time. I loved waking up to decide I wanted to spend the entire afternoon in the pottery studio, being glued to the wheel and not a screen, with nowhere else to be. 

What I didn’t love was being broke. I was moving money around from savings and living paycheck to paycheck in a way I’d never done before, because wow, bills are expensive and they do not care about your personal growth arc.

Truly, one of my first questions when I got the offer was: “what does this mean for my studio time?” Which tells you everything about who I’ve become over the last year. Which also made me a little afraid of who I’m about to become again.

Part of me thought accepting this job would contradict — set back, even — everything I’ve been trying to do in the design of my life. I’ve been writing about my freedom and rediscovery of myself and everything important to me, and how my nervous system is finally in a stable place, and how I have time to create art with no pressure from anyone but myself. Working a 9-5 again goes against much of that.

I originally wrote “takes away,” but I backspaced the hell out of it. I think the only thing I lose is time, if I do this right. But that’s a big if. And it has a smaller, meaner question underneath it: will I do this right?

It’s easy to talk myself into why this is great. A full-time job is really all I’d ever known until recently. It’s familiar. It comes with a regular paycheck and health insurance — and after R’s unexpected eye surgeries, plural, having actual insurance that will cover an emergency is not nothing. (It is, in fact, a lot.) The company is small, I like the people, and I will not pretend the idea of a bi-monthly paycheck didn’t make me exhale in a way I hadn’t in a while. (Side note: the word bi-monthly is ridiculous. In this case, it’s 2x a month.)

But I’ve also learned that a full-time job is not safe. It gives the illusion of safety. They could decide they don’t want to employ me anymore, for any reason. That hasn’t changed.

And if I’m being really honest with myself, what scares me more than getting laid off is getting so deep in it that I lose the plot.

For starters, I’ve already googled basic GTM things. Things I probably should have known before saying yes, though I think I’ve done a decent job of making them believe I know them. I also may have asked Claude to explain RevOps to me like I was five. The “I know how to log into Salesforce” bar is even lower than I made it sound.

And an underlying fear is that saying yes makes me a hypocrite. Or worse, a failure. Like I couldn’t actually make it work any other way, and the full-time job was always going to be the ending, and everything I wrote this year was just a very long way of arriving back where I started. I don’t fully believe that, but I believed it for like 45 minutes while I was spiraling, so I’m including it for accuracy.

The thing I’m actually really scared of is the nervous system response to an unexpected Slack message, or a terse comment on a call, that sends my body into full threat-response mode — heart rate up, jaw tight, that flavor of dread that makes no evolutionary sense because it is a frickin Slack message, Amanda — as if I’m being stalked by a tiger and not pinged by a coworker about a deck. I spent a year getting that response to quiet down. I do not want it back.

That’s the real loss I’m calculating. Not the time, exactly, though that is a loss I’m grieving. But the nervous system.

The question mark in “Congrats?” isn’t pessimism. It’s my friends knowing me well enough to understand that I don’t experience things cleanly. I said yes to the offer. I think it was the right call, or at least a reasonable one, or at least the one I made.

I had to remind myself that nothing is permanent. This is my reality until it isn’t. I could leave if it sucks. Past Amanda would have never considered quitting an option. Past Amanda would have ground it out and called it resilience.

The question mark stays.

or: Where are you really from?

My grandmother had remarkable, somehow ageless skin. Like she discovered the whole glass skin thing before glass skin had a name and was a beauty trend. She also had a perfect perm — the Asian grandma perm — for as long as I could remember. It always worked for her, and I never knew how.

I also never knew how to tell her any of this. She didn’t speak much English. I don’t speak Toisanese, or any Chinese dialect for that matter, besides what little Mandarin I struggled to learn in Chinese 101. So mostly what I did was sit across from her and smile and eat whatever appeared in front of me and hope the smiling and the eating said what I meant, which was: Thank you. Your cooking is incredible. You look incredible. You are incredible. I genuinely hope I got your genes.

This is, more or less, my experience of being Chinese-American.

I didn’t go to Chinese school on the weekends. I took exactly one piano lesson — because my cousins were taking lessons, and I showed up and assessed the situation and decided “nahhhh”. I did not attend an Ivy League university; I went to *gasp* a state school. I am not a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer. I’ve definitely been the only Asian person in a meeting full of white men, and I always knew my shit — which, yes, is just who I am, but also: it was never not a choice. (Unless it was math. I am pretty bad at math.)

Not stereotypically Asian-American. In certain circles, this has been noted.

But I’m also not what *ahem* many Americans consider American. I look the way I look, and in certain rooms, that’s the thing that gets clocked first — before the New York-adjacent attitude, before anything else about me. 

Then there’s The Dreaded Question: “Where are you from?” (New York. Jersey City. Take your pick.) 

“No, but where are you really from?” (Did you not hear me the first time?) 

We do a few rounds until I get frustrated and say something resembling “I’m Chinese-American.”

My name is a case study. Amanda: after the Dynasty character, apparently; a few of my cousins also have Dynasty names. Jane: after Jane Pauley, of the Today show. Lee is the Chinese part, the one that arrives before I do. Primetime soap, network news anchor, Chinese surname… about as American a name as you can have.

I do have a Chinese name — it’s Toisanese, something to do with the moon. We think. Based on my best phonetic guess and a Gemini search, it might be “Ngut Vah” which means “Moon Flower”. But I’ll never know for sure, because the only person who knew for certain was my grandmother, and she’s gone. (P.S. Any Toisanese speakers here who can help me decipher my own name?)

So. Not Chinese enough. Not American enough. The in-between — which is a lot of us.

The label situation does not help. First generation or second generation — I have been trying to get a straight answer on this for a while. My parents immigrated here, which technically makes me first gen: first born in America, first to grow up here. My parents have referred to me as first gen my whole life. But there’s a whole discourse about whether claiming that for myself diminishes my parents, who are American, who are citizens, who have been building their lives here for decades. They are not less American because they were born somewhere else. The word “immigrant,” used a certain way, implies they never fully arrived. They were the first gen to build their lives in America; they just weren’t born here.

The labels are contested and probably always will be. I’ve started using “third culture kid” — a term that describes those raised in one culture, tethered to another, not fully fluent in either. American enough to feel out of place in China. Chinese enough that America occasionally reminds me I don’t always belong.

The third culture isn’t the absence of two others. It’s the thing that forms in between. 

Recently, on vacation, my husband looked at me — he’s Indian-American, his own flavor of third culture — and said, “I’m so glad I don’t have to explain myself to you.” Different Asian heritage, same general territory. 

I grew up desperately wanting Lunchables. Not my mai fun and soup — the actual good food my mom packed — but the little plastic trays with the crackers and questionable meat slices and artificial cheese. I wanted bologna and cheese on white bread. Something unremarkable, something that wouldn’t require explaining. I had to explain my mai fun and soup every time.

I am now an adult who is vocally, almost aggressively, proud of that same food. Who will argue about where to get the best dumplings and order whatever comes with the head still on and feel a specific territorial joy when someone discovers Chinese food and acts like they invented it. And who is, if I’m being honest, a little mortified that I ever wanted to trade any of it for a Lunchable. I can’t even think of Lunchables right now without gagging a little. (I did love those Kraft Handi-Snacks cheese and crackers though. The one with the plastic red stick.)

The third culture-ness is a low-grade ambient condition, mostly. Something you move through without naming, until something forces you to name it. A heritage month. A question that won’t take Jersey City for an answer.

My grandmother would be at family gatherings and we’d sit across from each other, smiling and eating. She would gesture for me to put food on my plate before I finished — the universal grandmother move, which requires no language and no explanation. I am not entirely sure what she thought of me; I don’t know if anything got lost when my mom or aunts acted as translator.

I’m still hoping I got her genes.

I learn through suffering.

I know how seatbelts and airbags work because I was in a car crash. 

We were driving out from New York to Colorado and had just left Kansas City, way early in the morning. I was snoozing in the passenger seat when I felt the car rapidly decelerating. I opened my eyes, and my little Honda Fit (RIP Blueberry) smacked right into a deer.

I felt the seatbelt yank my body so that I was pinned to my seat. The airbags didn’t deploy. We were shaken up, but unscathed. I learned later that the technology in cars is so advanced — it made a series of split-second decisions based on perceived impact. Blueberry detected it was a collision, so it wound the seatbelts back on their spools, and deployed the tiny explosive in them to lock them in place (this is why you need to replace seatbelts after a crash). It also decided that we didn’t need airbags in that particular crash, because of where and how we hit the deer.

I likely would have never looked any of this up if it hadn’t happened to me. The experience made me care enough to wonder. 

This is how I learn. 

You know the Trammps song “Disco Inferno”? Turns out “disco inferno” in Latin translates loosely to “I learn through suffering / hell.” Probably not what they had in mind — they were definitely talking about discotheque — but here we are.

I am a disco inferno learner. I don’t always heed warnings. I don’t always learn from other people’s mistakes. I learn from mine. I often don’t even care until there’s an inferno.

It’s not always the heavy stuff either.

I first drove stick shift in someone else’s Mini Cooper — I tried in a parking lot, but it wasn’t very big, or very empty. I stalled almost every time I tried to drive. I didn’t get out of first gear. Anyone backing out of a parking space freaked me out. I panicked. That very specific panic when the car jerks and you smell burning clutch and you hope no one is behind you. 

I know that life is short — really short, YOLO short — because I lost my dad and my in-laws. They all died relatively young, in their sixties and seventies, not from old age. I knew intellectually that people die young, that time is finite, that we should etc. etc. etc. I had heard the speeches. But I never truly understood it until my grief forced me to. We finally took the trip to Thailand last year — the one we’d been postponing for over a decade because “we’ll make it there eventually.”

I learned that I cannot give my entire self to a job because I’ve been laid off three times. I’m not telling you this for sympathy — I’ve written about it before, I’ve made my peace with most of it. I’m telling you because three times is a lot of times to learn the same lesson. The first time I thought it was a fluke. The second time, bad luck (the blow was softened by a generous severance, and I was there for only a few months anyway). The third time: OK… I see what’s happening here. The job was never going to love me back. Companies don’t, actually — they care about productivity, not people, and I had to get laid off three times to really believe it.I know this now. It’s lodged in my body in a way no career coach could have put it there.

There’s a part of this disco inferno realization that I keep wrestling with. 

I write. I write about the things I’ve lived through, the lessons that cost something, the patterns I finally saw after I’d already paid the tuition. I write hoping that someone reads it and maybe doesn’t have to learn it the hard way. Which is insane, right? Because I am Exhibit A of the person who needs to learn the hard way.

I spent years in program management doing the same thing professionally. Being the person who’d seen the pattern before, who’d watched a similar project collapse for the same reasons, who’d say — gently, then less gently, then really less gently — “I think we should think about XYZ”. And then watching the company have to live through XYZ anyway. And then being joylessly right about XYZ. There is no satisfaction in the “I told you so”… ok, maybe a tiny bit of satisfaction. But I would have rather they listened to me in the first place.

So what am I doing here?

I think — and I’m still working this out — I’m not actually writing so you won’t have to learn it the hard way. I’ve made my peace with the fact that you probably will. I think I’m writing so that when you’re in it — when the seatbelt catches, when the room gets quiet, when you’re shipping your company laptop back for the third time — you might remember: “someone was here before me. It was like this for them too.”

Not a warning. More like finding someone else’s handwriting in the margins.

Disco inferno. I learn through suffering. I write through the fire too, apparently. And maybe that’s the only honest thing I can offer — not the lesson in advance, but the proof that you can come out the other side of it and still think it was worth writing down… even if nobody learns a thing.