things don't work out (until suddenly they do)
a job is a job is a job (there's also a part about past connections and another about scrapbooking)
In the span of 24 hours: an ominously-worded email, a never-ending train ride accompanied with delays and midnight passport checks at Kings Cross St. Pancras, a night of broken sleep, a bottle of Advil, a half-an-hour long conversation.
One year ago from writing this, on the 20th of September, I posted a video on TikTok, a TikTok which ended up going viral, a ten second clip about working at a record label. I posted a video about how the album I had been working towards releasing was finally out in the world for everyone to hear, and while my involvement in the release was merely within its messaging, messaging through social media posts that people saw, liked, and then probably forgot about two scrolls later, exactly one trip around the sun — on the very same day — moments after finalising a “One Year Album Anniversary” post, I was made redundant from my job. One year ago, to the day, and probably to the hour, I was having what I would later realise was the most stressful week of my career, crying over a spreadsheet of posts and hounding people to approve them, feeling the pressure of a number on a chart and a ticking clock, and now, as I type this, the same stress seems to have seeped its way back into my bones.
I did not know how to process the redundancy, I honestly, probably have yet to. The anticipation of walking into a meeting ominously described via email as “discussing the future of your role…” exhausted every ounce of anxiety in my body — so much so, that by the time I learned that the worst case scenario I had mentally prepared for was actually true, all that was left for me to do was to nod and avoid contact with my manager’s glossy eyes and return to my corner of the table. I spun around in my swivel chair and opened my laptop, and suddenly my migraine went away, which feels like the opposite of what should happen when you get made redundant from the job you’ve been working at for two years, but I had been so panicked by the Ominous Email that it almost felt like a relief after the words came out of their mouths: Your role has been made redundant, we’re sorry. I knew this was not going to be my forever job, but at the very least, I wanted the end of my journey to be marked on my own terms. Rarely is it ever enjoyable being the person broken up with, but I do firmly believe it is monumentally more difficult to be the breaker-upper. You carry the guilt of choosing “you” at the expense of someone else’s heart (or in this case, their career).
A pattern seems to be recurring, where each return to California is marked by somewhat traumatic experiences that aren’t necessarily attached to — but happen to be intertwined with — complications with my visa status (or a lack thereof). For those unaware, I am from California but I have been living in England for the last four years, and yes, I, too routinely question why I would leave a near-perfect state for nine months of rain and fog and beige cuisine. I digress. In February, my great grandma passed away, and my immediate thought after hanging up the Worst FaceTime Call of My Life was “Shit. I can’t go to the funeral because of my visa application.” If you must know the intricacies of being a foreigner abroad — and what most conversations with fellow expats in England devolve into — in March, I was preparing to apply for a visa, which meant I was unable to travel outside the country once my application was submitted. Then, a few days before my grandma’s funeral, I learned that, in fact, because of some strange new rule, I had to leave the country ASAP and apply for my new visa from America. Things didn’t work out, and then suddenly they did; I got to attend my grandma’s memorial service, and then I got to return to the U.K. with a new stamp in my passport, my grandma’s letters safely stowed between the pages in my journal, and very sore, very dry eyes. Sure, I might have been in California for a total of 4 days, and sure, I might have only adjusted to the time difference while on the plane ride back to London, but at least I got to say goodbye to my great grandma one last time, wearing her gold and silver ring on my pointer finger, questioning my decision to have ever left in the first place while staring into the clouds.
History repeats itself, yes, but I was not expecting history to repeat itself within the same calendar year. I was in Amsterdam for much of last week, and then on the last day of my holiday I received The Email that 1. made my heart sink 2. spiked my cortisol levels and 3. has made me vow to forever turn off all Outlook notifications when embarking on future holidays, and then the following afternoon during my first day back at work I found out that I have been made redundant, and then in three days I am returning to America for up to one and a half months to spend half of my savings in order to apply for yet another visa. Unlike the last time this happened, I had more than five days’ notice to prepare for my departure, but instead of the loss of a family member (which I am still grappling with), I am now internally battling with the loss of a job.
A job is a job is a job, I know, but my particular job is (was? will have been?) deeply intertwined with my personal life, and much of my social life, too (welcome to the music industry). When you work for a musician, especially in a management capacity, your artist inadvertently becomes your whole world. For better or for worse, I can tell you exactly what cities and what venues the artists I work for have been in the last year, I cannot tell you what I had for dinner two nights ago (last year they were starting their world tour in Mexico City, I genuinely cannot recall Friday night’s dinner). My coworkers are my close friends and the office is my routine and this job — this life — is what I know best. In addition to snails, caterpillars, and most men, change and loss and uncertainty sit among the shelf of items which I fear most. The trepidation of the unknown takes over and I shrivel up and shut down and take paracetamol until the headache goes away. Or I welcome healthy distraction, which I did last night.
Four years ago I moved to London with two suitcases, a backpack, and the blissful ignorance of the GOV.UK website and NHS surcharges, knowing no one but an old college roommate of mine who was making her way to New York City, and last night, I hosted a scrapbooking event with 15 lovely internet strangers-turned-friends, one whom moved to London the very same day I celebrated my fourth year of living here, another who started scrapbooking because of my own digital scrapbooking, and a third who owns the same gingham journal as I do, but in a different colour (mine is light blue with a pink ribbon, hers is light red with a deep red ribbon, both are equally as cute as the other). While creating the junk journaling kits for the attendees of my event, I watched a YouTube video where Anna, the host, described fall as a new start, almost like a new school year, marked by a shift in the colour of the leaves and the appetite to learn something new; the appetite to assign oneself a certain kind of curriculum, even if the “curriculum” is to learn how to cook a new recipe, or pick up an old hobby, or finish the book you are reading.
Something about the crisp air in the autumnal months — the leaves falling off the trees and piling up on the pavement, Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well (10 minute version)” soundtracking the season, the switch from an iced coffee to a warm chai — feels different and encouraging, and in some ways, I can sense that a new start is on the horizon. It feels oddly serendipitous that the day after I found out I was made redundant from the job that much of my life is built around, and four days after I made a Notes App list called “things I would do if I wasn’t working all the time,” is the same day that I would dedicate all of my energy to my creative hobbies and connecting with my online community face to face, in a tiny shop in central London, surrounded by other girls who also save receipts with cursive letters, and wear ruffled phone straps slung across their shoulder, and have over five keychains on their carabiners, and deeply appreciate something like an old ticket stub or a doily served at a restaurant or a cutout from a vintage magazine. Perhaps that was the point of it all, to help me understand what life could be like — and might be like — if I am not spending Monday to Friday in an office, every day, panicking over things that would be embarrassing to admit out loud (after all, I am a social media manager, I am not a heart surgeon, it’s just an Instagram reel it’s fine it’s fine I’m fine). Perhaps my craft night wasn’t a distraction, but rather a glimpse of what is to come, should I choose to let it. An invitation to accept change, to let the leaves change colour and create a branch anew.
I feel like I should be freaking out, especially given the amount of “How are you?” and “I’m so sorry” messages I have been receiving, and trust me — I appreciate the kind words and I probably will freak out in two months time when I realise I won’t be seeing the people that I see more than my own partner on a daily basis (baristas included, Colin I will never forget you and your perfect oat milk lattes) and I already have FOMO from the exciting year I had thought was en route (my artists are playing Coachella and in college I set myself the career goal of attending Coachella on an artist’s team, hey ho) — but, for some reason, in this very moment I am instead choosing to remain calm, and kind of excited, and maybe even the most microscopic amount relieved. Endless possibilities lie ahead: I can go back to working at a flower shop where my biggest stressor was packaging leis for the local high school graduation, I can re-attempt the unstructured life of a “freelance creative” and wander down Broadway Market at 12pm, wondering what the hell everyone does for work before questioning what the hell I am doing for work, I can use my airline points to visit my best friends in New York City, I can host more craft nights and connect with likeminded people in London, I can apply to work at my favourite stationary store in Covent Garden or at the Californian bakery down the road, I can kickstart the YouTube channel I hardly post to, and I know it is easy to romanticise each of these lifestyles (when I was 16 I worked at an ice cream shop where I was once yelled at by a customer who didn’t understand what a brownie bite was; when I explained it was a brownie cut into bite sized pieces she demanded a visual and, of course, ended up not ordering brownie bites) but my point is that my next chapter is entirely up to me. And especially as someone who cannot make decisions, that can be a terrifying thought — the endless possibilities of what your life could be (à la The Midnight Library and the Fig Tree which I will soon mention) — but I am choosing to see this change of pace as an opportunity to come back to myself.
I am a simple girl: I make adult money, I transfer a small portion of it to my savings, and I spend the rest on rent and clothes. The height of quarantine marked the height of my obsession with finding small fashion brands — mainly through the likes of TikTok, Emma Chamberlain, and Ashley a.k.a. bestdressed (sigh, I miss her) — and one of these brands happened to be Gia Milan Co., a 20-something year old artist who hand paints tiny portraits, movie stills, and other scenes on pointelle t-shirts and tank tops. During one of her clothing drops, I wound up panic purchasing a tank top called “the fig tree.” It is white with lace lining and in the centre of it is a delicately sewn-on patch with a flower and the Sylvia Plath quote painted in miniature strokes:
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was…”
Full disclosure: my main reason for purchasing the tank top was because I wanted to own a Gia Milan Co. tank top. I did not once stop to consider the substance of the quote I was wearing to bed every other night, and no, neither of these are behaviours that I presently condone. The years passed, I grew older, things almost happened (like the time I agreed to move to Sweden to work at a music tech company or the time I chose to hang out with my now-partner instead of an ex-situationship), the branches of the fig tree made themselves known, and eventually I became ever-so-slightly obsessed with the idea of what and who could have been (and became aware that panic purchasing is not sustainable for my wallet or my wardrobe or the planet), and, naturally, I came to understand the significance of the Plath quote, as most people in their twenties — and most people on this platform — seem to do.
Things don’t work out until suddenly, they do. Many moons ago (thirty five of them, I think), my dad missed his connecting flight from Amsterdam to Hawaii, and the airline compensated him with a stay in a hotel room near the San Francisco Airport — the very same hotel that my mom happened to be sipping a vodka cranberry at. When my flight to move from California to London was cancelled, my dad reassured me that everything would be okay. I wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for a missed flight, after all, but have I ever stopped to consider what came before it?
Yes, today I got made redundant from my job (I now have zero excuse for having not written on Substack since July) but two days ago I was in the Netherlands in an attempt to 1. see my little brother, who is travelling through Europe right now and 2. connect with my Dutch roots. My dad is from Holland and he moved to America when he was in his twenties; both of his parents passed away when he was young, and all of the bits and pieces of his childhood that I have managed to piece together take place on a farm, or in a mobile home, or in a river. My dad spent his formative years riding ponies bareback, swimming in swamps, making some pocket change through the bike re-sale market (wink wink), and participating in what can accurately be described as shenanigans or hooliganisms. Recently, my mom found the address of my dad’s childhood home, and out of sheer curiosity I decided to visit it. Initially, I was not going to, but then something in my gut told me I should, and so Nielsan and I took a train to the nearest city and then called an Uber to, seemingly, the middle of nowhere.
Suddenly, the farm town I only knew in my imagination was passing before my eyes, a teeny tiny village with an even tinier river running parallel to a single, long road lined with cottages, each equipped with a bridge to cross over the stream. One of them had a dam and a well that looked like it had been there for at least a century, and a handful of them had gingham-lined tables with handwritten signs reading “take X amount of eggs/flowers/etc. and leave X euros in the box…”
The village was small, in a way that I can only think relate it to Schitt’s Creek - everyone probably knows everyone, and the person who works at the shop might also work at the gas station and perhaps they are also the pastor at the church, too. It had two establishments: a Chinese restaurant and an ice-cream parlour, which kind of makes sense because my dad’s two favourite foods are Chinese takeout and ice-cream. As I tried to retrace the steps of my dad’s life on this winding road surrounded by hay bales and a rusty Ford pickup truck, I finally made it to the house with the black roof, exactly like the one in the Google Maps screenshot my mom had sent. I held the photo up against the view of the house, and then I Facetimed my parents to show them where I was. “Wow, I can’t believe you’re there,” my dad said.
And so, my dad led me across the bridge and around the corridor, where there was a lady with two dogs. She was watering sunflowers, and she was also the first and only person I had seen in the village; it was 3:30PM on a gloomy, grey day, and it was raining and windy, so using an umbrella was useless because not only would it flip inside out, but the rain would head directly into your face, smudging your glasses and subsequently blurring the world. The dogs ran up to Nielsan and I and the lady spoke to us in Dutch. “I’m so sorry, I speak English! My dad used to live here,” I said, showing her my dad on the call. The lady smiled at me. “Ah, yes, [Insert my dad’s Very Unique Dutch Name here]. I know your dad,” she smiled. I looked back down at my phone and my dad was, in fact, as red as a tomato. My mom was no longer in frame. At first, I was like, “What the f*ck? How does she know him?” and then, I was like, “If they know each other, then why aren’t they talking to one another?” and then I remembered that in February I ran into an ex-friend in public, at a market, who I haven’t talked to in almost two years, and my immediate instinct upon realising it was them was to run into the crowd and hide. Another time, I was in a cafe facing a window and a different ex-friend appeared outside said window, and I buried my face in my journal and telepathically lured them away from wanting to enter the cafe. It is funny, how a person can know all of our secrets, and familiarise themselves with all of our idiosyncrasies, like the way we like our tea or our favourite fork to use or the fact that we don’t like beer but we do like the fancy Fentimans lemonade, a person can become a part of our daily routines, and us, theirs, and then eventually, somehow, life happens and you become footnotes in each other’s stories, a removed tattoo, an erased memory, old letters and cards and photos placed in a shoebox and tucked into the corner of a closet, running away to another country, into a sea of people, running away at the thought of ever encountering each other ever again.
It did not take long to connect the dots: this woman was my dad’s ex-girlfriend, Sarah*. Of seven years. Who he left shortly after meeting my mom. Whose name he had tattoo-ed on his forearm, a now-patch of soft skin which was once a name etched in cursive. Who still lives in the very house I came to see, the one with the black roof. Where she moved after living with my dad in California very briefly. Where she took care of my father’s dad until he passed away. Who was the only person outside in this tiny village at three o’clock in the afternoon. With her dogs, watering sunflowers, on a rainy day.
*pseudonym for privacy purposes
Amidst the palpable, awkward tension of two 62 year olds who were at once 21, I remained on the FaceTime call as Sarah showed us around her garden and the inside of the house. I played with her dogs as I tried to imagine my dad’s childhood stories bound to the warm living room with hardwood floors and the steep wooden stairs freshly painted in a coat of white. At first, my dad and Sarah were deliberately avoiding talking to one another, instead talking to me about their individual experiences in their shared home, and then, eventually, they started catching up. I grew up hearing my dad speak Dutch so often, but I never actually learned the language myself (as is the same with my mom and her native language, Tagalog), and because of this I can tell when people are speaking Dutch (and Tagalog) but I have zero clue what is actually being said. Nielsan speaks German and describes Dutch as “drunken German,” and he was laughing along with whatever was occurring because if there is one thing to know about my dad, it is that he will make you laugh, no matter the situation you find yourself in (or I suppose, the situations he finds himself in). At some point, I heard the names of my aunts and uncles, I think they were talking about everything being bigger in America (my dad panned the camera to our living room), and I also heard something about Facebook and something else about me living far away. After I hung up, she told me that things did not end well between them. “When your dad met your mom, he left me,” Sarah said. “We were together from ages 14-21 and I was very young. I was so heartbroken, it took me a very long time to move on.” To my knowledge, it was their first time talking in over 30 years, and then I realised that perhaps there are more reasons as to why my dad hasn’t been back to the Netherlands since he left. Again, the guilt we carry from choosing ourselves at the expense of someone else’s heart.
Up until this point, I only knew Sarah as a removed tattoo, an ex-partner of my dad’s, the woman who came before my mom, but when I met her, I felt a sense of remorse for my ignorance. Because at one point, I, too was 21 and heartbroken from a relationship that I never thought I would have the strength to move past. We’ve all been there, have we not? But then I got over it, and I decided to make a zine about it, which led me to apply for a Master’s Degree in London, and I continued my life in a foreign country, and then I met Nielsan, and here we were, the two of us in a small village in the middle of the Netherlands, standing in my dad’s childhood home with his ex-partner, Sarah, as they stood face to face (albeit virtually) for the first time in over three decades.
I would not exist if Sarah did not date my dad. I would not be with Nielsan if I was not completely heartbroken in 2020. A string of events had to occur in order for my dad to meet my mom, and him being with Sarah was one of them. A seemingly small decision can change the course of our lives without us knowing it: sending a letter, taking a seat next to someone in a university classroom, missing a flight, commenting on a video. Two of my favourite films are Past Lives and Before Sunrise, and if you are like me, then I am sure you also 1. yearn, frequently and 2. thought of these two perfect films while reading this, and I can feel the tears welling in my eyes thinking about their respective endings. While my dad was speaking to Sarah for the first time since they were in their twenties, I couldn’t help but think of in-yun.
In Past Lives, when the protagonist, Nora, meets her soon-to-be boyfriend-turned-husband at a writing retreat, she says: “There is a word in Korean: In-Yun. It means “providence” or “fate”. But it’s specifically about relationships between people. I think it comes from Buddhism and reincarnation. It’s an In-Yun if two strangers even walk by each other in the street and their clothes accidentally brush. Because it means there must have been something between them in their past lives. If two people get married, they say it’s because there have been 8,000 layers of In-Yun over 8,000 lifetimes.”
I am the kind of person who sits on a train and wonders how — of all the places in the world we could be — we all happen to be coexisting at the same time, at the same place, at the same moment. While I might be daydreaming about being with my family across the world, and the person next to me might be running late to an important meeting, we are existing next to each other, with each other, even if only for a very brief moment between two stations. And none of these synchronicities seem to mean anything until you are dating your now-partner of three years, and both of you realise that three months before you met, you were both at Harry Styles’ “One Night Only” concert, on the same night, standing on the left-hand side of the O2 Academy Brixton (a very small venue), and afterwards at 10:02 P.M. and 10:03 P.M., respectively, you both took selfies at the same spot outside of the venue, just below the marquee. You might have brushed shoulders and you might have appeared as blurs in each other’s camera rolls, and that is because it wasn’t the right time for you to meet, not just yet. It was our in-yun, perhaps one of many. One of 8,000.
And I am sure, in some ways, it feels strange to write about my dad and his ex-partner, and I know my mom is reading this (and I hope this is okay with you, mom), but I’d like to believe that, through me envisioning my dad’s childhood through the kitchenette and wildflowers and the black roof and the sheep, that Sarah was able to receive some amount of closure from it all.
It has now been exactly one week since meeting Sarah, which means it has been five days since I have been made redundant from my job, which means it has been four days since I scrapbooked with my online friends, which means that tomorrow I am returning to America for an unpredictable amount of time. I packed two suitcases, one filled with summer clothes and one filled with autumn clothes, and I also brought some miscellaneous craft supplies, because halfway into packing I checked the weather app and California is still 90 degrees, and, as it stands, I do not know when my return flight is, so my journal, my stationary, and my rosette-making kits are an absolute must. My best friend Paisley and I see each other once or twice a year, whenever we happen to be in the same city. We always say “I’ll see you when I see you” to one another, one of the beauties of a 20+ year old cross-continental friendship, and I suppose what I am trying to say is that I will see London whenever I see London. I will apply for my visa and I will return to London and I will find a new job and maybe I will even begin one of the tasks on my list of things I’d like to do, now that I have the time to. Uncertainty awaits but so does a fresh start. A fresh branch on my fig tree.
As I sit in my airplane seat surrounded by strangers who happen to be in the same place, at the same time, travelling from London to San Francisco, floating in the air together for the next eight hours, I think about how lucky I am to have coworkers who are also my close friends, and how lucky I am to have worked at a record label for the last two years (something 18 year old me had dreamt of doing), and how lucky I am to have a partner who tells me how pretty I am the moment I wake up, with my retainers glued to my mouth and pimple patches stuck in my hair, and how lucky I am to be growing with the Before Sunrise trilogy, and how lucky I am to have stepped into my dad’s childhood home and to have met someone who was once a part of his life, and how lucky I am to have a healthy and loving relationship with my parents who have a healthy and loving relationship with each other. I think about how lucky I am to have connected face to face with 15 online friends last weekend, and how lucky I am to have built a life for myself in London, one that is filled with community and friendship, one that is worth the stress of a visa application and the stress of living so far away from home, and how lucky I am to even have a home and a family to return to in this strange, interim period of being 27, living in two countries at once, and ultimately, I think about how lucky I am that things don’t work out, until suddenly they do.
HI from california! it is sunny here and this morning i went to the farmer’s market with my parents and my little brother (he’s 25 and 6’2) and we got pastries and coffee and strawberries and randomly ran into my dad’s friend slash my “uncle” who is also from the tiny town in holland and for that i am grateful. as always, if you made it this far thank you for taking the time to read this post! i haven’t written a substack piece since july, mainly because i wasn’t feeling very inspired, and because there just aren’t enough hours in the damn day, but after meeting Sarah i just knew i needed to do *something* about it. then i lost my job . LOL.
also i felt apprehensive to publish this one because i feel ashamed to admit i’ve been made redundant from my job that i talk about a lot, but hopefully it can serve as a source of comfort for anyone else who has been affected by redundancies, too. life is uncertain right now, but i’m just going to let it work out like it always seems to…. also if you live in london expect some more community craft nights once i’m back :-)
tata for now!
your writing is like a very very very big mug of tea that stays miraculously warm despite how long you've been nursing it <3 such a lovely and dare i say inspiring post? maybe i'll quit my job? fly to california? put my toes in the sand and read all the books i want!!!
What an incredible read on my morning commute! I’ve been feeling quite lost in life lately and you’ve reminded me of how things have always worked out one way or another. I’m also trying to navigate my late twenties whilst enjoying every small moment. Now I’m just going to trust the process, thank you sm for this 💗🥹