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.
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