Today marks 20 years since my father's death. I look across space and time, over a distance of two decades, and I see the teenage girl I was. I see her in the cramped hospital room where the news of his death was delivered. I hear my mother scream. I feel my body go limp. I look up at the ceiling. I do not make a sound.
I have never left that room. I have never walked out of that hospital. My life has been one long waiting room, an inescapable purgatory between life and death. I could not go back to the wholeness of my childhood, and I could not move forward to a reparative adulthood.
How can it be 20 years? From the moment he died, he haunted me. I grieved him as a way to continue loving him and holding on to him. The suffering was the cost of our bond. I learned at 16 that love can disappear, that people can cease to exist in an instant. One moment you are flesh, the next you are an embalmed corpse in a casket.
I see how young I was, how vulnerable, how failed and abandoned. I was a girl who just wanted her father back. But I could not have him back. Me and my mother only had each other. Our wounded souls were fused together for two decades until she also died in 2025.
My long and agonizing grief over him was also an angry refusal to accept his death—and maybe a more monumental resistance against death itself. No, you will not make me let go. No, you will not make me get over it. No, I will have my suffering. I will honor the sacredness of the love I felt for this man. I refused to stay silent about it. I refused to move on.
But that meant I did not know how to live. I retreated from the world, became agoraphobic, distanced myself from life itself. I became frozen, self-destructive, consumed by his death, haunted by both his unfinished life and my own unlived life. I am still crawling my way out of the darkness and the pain.
One of the reasons why I stopped sharing on social media is that I felt like my life was not of interest to others. I think it's because I am not aspirational. I can't tell you how happy and vibrant I am as a 36-year-old woman. I don't have boyfriends to post and travels to share. I'm not hot and attractive. I can't lift you up and give you hope.
I can't even relate to most of you, for you've probably known things that I have not. You've had lovers, built good careers, had the support of your family, maybe even both your parents are still alive. My life is alien to you. I started to realize that over the last few years. We like strange and unlikable women in movies and books; we don't have as much tolerance for them in real life.
No, I'm not aspirational. Instead of a partner, there is my aching loneliness and the absence of any romantic love ever in my life. Instead of travels, there is my bedroom and my porch. Instead of a wonderful career, I put my life on hold and spent over 5 years in the traumatic hell of caregiving, trying to navigate the horrific American health care system as I watched my mother suffer. Instead of family, there is myself and a few precious online friends that I've managed to find. My own grandfather doesn't even remember my birthday.
No one is coming to save me.
I have stopped submitting my life to the evaluation of online strangers and algorithms. I have stopped trying to connect with those who listen to me or follow me. Too many experiences were hurtful, and I think it's because so few people can understand my life. Things have come easy for them that did not come easy for me. They started from a different place and many lack the compassion and empathy to meet me where I am in my life.
I started in that hospital room. I was swallowed by the earth all at once. I became a haunted woman, a drowning woman, a deeply wounded woman, maybe even a difficult woman. Despite it all, I have done my best.
My life might not be interesting to a lot of people. I might not be beautiful and mesmerizing to the shallow people on Instagram. From the outside, perhaps I seem pathetic and sad. But I know what I've survived. I know how hard I have tried—to connect, to live, to find belonging and love. I know that I am still doing my best every day to find beauty, to share my passions, to be a good person, to say something honest and true and meaningful through my podcast, to improve my life within my very limited circumstances.
I'll never forget a scene in Virginia Woolf's novel, Mrs. Dalloway. The protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, has a dream about holding her life in her hands and showing it to her dead parents. She wonders what they will think of it. I've often wondered the same. If I could show my life to my father, what would he say? Would he be proud? Would he understand that I tried to gather the ruins and make a home? Would that be enough?
"Into the Magic Land" by Boards of Canada