lie no. 26 | part iii | 09.08.19

My entire body tensed up at the sight of him, just as I imagine it would’ve if he’d been there physically. He had watched my Instagram story. The nerve. So once again he reigned at the top of the list of its viewers as if no time had gone by, as if all the months in the distance suddenly appeared larger than they actually were in the side mirror of the past.

Didn’t he know how desperate I was to turn this page I’d been stuck on? Didn’t he know this trip was the first blank page I’d seen in months? Didn’t he know this was the start of a new chapter, one I was flying halfway around the world to ensure he played no part in? Of course he didn’t know. He didn’t even know me.

I didn’t know what I hated more in that moment—him, for showing up now of all times uninvited, or the app’s algorithm, for giving him that top spot above my husband, my family, my friends.

I deleted the app. I didn’t have time for this. I had 48 hours in Hong Kong and was not about to give myself the option of obsessing over questions I couldn’t answer, people I couldn’t control and things that don’t matter. Then I texted Matt and my mother to let them know I’d landed, grateful, if nothing else, for the slap-in-the-face reminder to do so.

The app was back on my phone’s home screen minutes into the ride to my hotel. It’s an app for crying out loud and I’m an adult. Plus, people had sent a bunch of recommendations for the city and I hadn’t pulled them from my messages before hastily deleting it. If a virtual door slams and no one hears it, did it even happen? I considered trespassing over on his page, seeing if he had a story up I could view—I knew how to fight fire with fire, ask anyone related to me. 

Instead, I shook the Etch-A-Sketch of my mind till its screen wiped clear. This did not demand a response, and it most certainly did not warrant a reaction. The craziest part? It actually worked. I forgot the whole thing until months later.

At the top of nearly everyone’s list of recommendations was the city’s famous light show and with the sun setting shortly that seemed as good a place to start as any. I texted a buddy living in Hong Kong and asked for the best spot to see it—48-hour trips leave no time to waste. My room had a city view, so I didn’t see the epic water view with its entire other skyline, unlike anything I’d ever seen before, until I got back down to the lobby. The view from the sweeping wall of windows overlooking Victoria Bay would be hard to beat, but I couldn’t afford to spend more time than I had to in my hotel.

I walked along the water and couldn’t help but stare. I should just watch it from here, I thought. Ultimately I gave in to his recommendation. He lives here, after all, I’m sure he knows best. With the show starting soon, I followed the map on my phone, hesitating and looking back to the bay as each block taking me further and further from the water. The place had a clubby feel, once I finally found it inside some kind of mall megaplex. The space was dark, the drinks expensive. I was surrounded by businessmen speaking English and the view wasn’t even that great.

Over drinks with my buddy the next night, he confessed that locals don’t like the light show, so his recommendation had been more of a scene-first, show-second suggestion. Like Parisians who dislike the Eiffel Tower’s twinkling lights and Washingtonians who’d rather gouge their eyeballs out with plastic spoons than see the Cherry Blossoms at peak bloom, perhaps. Tourists and locals have different priorities. With the clock continuing to count down till time to go back to the airport, I decided to start trusting my gut a bit more than my laundry list of crowdsourced mustn’t misses.

On my last day in Hong Kong, with nearly 38 hours in the books and 10 to go, there was only one more thing I really wanted to see before taking off that night: the Big Buddha.

The concierge was as flabbergasted by this idea as he’d been over the brevity of my trip—he’d taken to tapping his watch in jest every time I rushed past him in the lobby. My rational mind, and his too, apparently, knew it would be a mistake, a waste of time I didn’t have. He talked me out of it—something I wish he’d done the day before when I’d asked to go see what Instagram had led me to believe was a picture-perfect, rainbow-colored basketball court that turned out to be part of a public housing development. I felt like such an asshole and was once again mad at that stupid app.

There was still so much for me to see in the city, the concierge suggested I save the trek out to Lantau Island for another trip when I have more time. It would be a logistical nightmare to get out by the airport, back to the city to get my things and then all the way back to the airport again. And taking my suitcase there wasn’t an option.

In my effort to prove this truly was a mileage run and not a luxury solo vacation, I skipped many of the must-dos I’d been given by well-meaning friends: tea at the Ritz, cocktails at UpperHouse, brunch at The Peninsula. There was too much else to see and do. I made an exception on my last morning with all those found hours I’d saved by skipping out on Buddha.

The Peninsula brunch was exquisite, but I still felt unsatisfied after. It was obscenely priced, as fancy hotel buffets tend to be—as unjustifiable as it gets for people like me who can’t resist filling up on the so-called low-value offerings of croissants and sweet rolls. The people watching on the other hand: a solid 11 out of 10.

I made a wrong turn on my way out—a rather difficult thing to do when you’re not headed anywhere in particular—and wound up wandering through the hotel’s high-end boutiques. I hadn’t done any shopping on this trip. The confines of time acting as an invisible fence preventing wastefulness, of both time and money. But with a sudden bit of the former to spare, I continued wandering around the shopping district, doing a quick loop to check the box and burn off the $50 muffins. Shopping, especially of this caliber, had lost much of its appeal for me in the past year. It left more money in my pocket, so I never thought to dig deeper to understand what was driving it beneath the surface.

When I stumbled on one shop in particular, I thought about a promise I’d made myself at the start of the year and all but forgotten. I told myself if I reached a certain revenue goal, one I knew I’d never reach in year one, I would buy myself a particular piece of jewelry.

I stood outside and looked through the window at the embarrassingly expensive pieces and laughed at myself for setting such a silly goal. When I find myself entrenched in humiliation I tend to react cruelly or cattily. When there’s no one but myself to blame for causing it, I know I better buckle up and brace for the impact of my insults about to be launched in my direction.

Part of me wanted to grab my own hand in that moment and cross the street to get out of harms way before I had a chance to begin berating myself, dwelling on all I didn’t do or did wrong. Another part wanted to force myself to stand there and stare my very definition of success in the eye as a form of punishment, a reminder of everything I had not achieved—and worse, all I had been stupid enough to think I could achieve. Like rubbing a puppy’s nose in the carpet after an accident, as if it should know better than to slip up on something it’s still learning.

Instead, while my mind was busy scripting the various characters it expected me to play in this scene I was fairly sure I’d never seen before, I noticed I didn’t have the urge to run or fight. I had no desire to criticize or punish myself. In fact, I kind of loved that here I was, on this crazy adventure by myself, at the end of an even crazier year, facing my reflection in this window. My laugh hadn’t been one of cruelty it turned out, but of compassion. Wait a minute... I’d done it. I survived the year in all its intense highs and lows. I survived the loneliness, the letdowns, the losses. I also survived all the gains and I’d grown as a result. It’s so easy to forget about those pesky pains that often accompany growth, to forget how they go hand in hand.

I sat down on the sidewalk, surrounded by luxury boutiques and the well-heeled Hong Kongers who frequent them, overcome with an increasingly familiar urge I’d learned it’s easier to accommodate than ignore—I had to write this down.

I’d been on a bit of a letter-writing kick for a while, but hadn’t written one to myself until that day. All my letters to strangers, in hindsight, serving as self-expression practice, teaching me to take note of the little things and notice how each made me feel.

I had so much to tell myself, the me who only a year earlier had little more than a surplus of uncertainty and not a plan in sight. The me who was about to learn I was mourning the loss of my perceived path more than the career itself.

I couldn’t wait to report back, to tell myself what happens, how it all plays out. I didn’t reach that revenue goal and I didn’t get the bracelet but I did reach lots of other goals and I could always aim for the gold the next year, if I still wanted it.

I had to tell myself it all works out—maybe not how I envisioned a year earlier, maybe not how I envisioned ever—but it does work out. How one day, another trip around the sun later, I’ll find myself staring my very definition of success, of making it, in the face as it dangles in front of me, within reach but not. How instead of feeling bad and beating myself up for failing or making excuses and blaming anything and everything, I’ll actually be incredibly proud of myself—not for hitting arbitrary KPIs and goals, but for realizing I like the places I end up when I don’t let them do all the driving. How I’m starting to see that spreadsheets don’t make the best North Stars. And, how when I start listening to the internal gps, it will take me on the trip of a lifetime, to Hong Kong. Little did I know then that was only the beginning.

I looked at the time and noticed I still had enough of it left to get to the Big Buddha before my flight if I wanted. I also noticed I hadn’t checked my email all morning, which meant an entire U.S. business day had come and gone since I’d last checked in. I’d pitched new business to two prospective clients my first day day there, before the sun came up over Hong Kong. Old habits in proving something to no one die hard, apparently. One pitch imploded (gotta appreciate a quick no, I’ve learned!) and the other seemed dead in the water, or so I thought. Disappointment tastes less bitter in faraway places, I’ve found.

When I opened my inbox I had an email from the CEO I’d pitched. Not only did I win the business, he wanted to nearly double the scope of work and start immediately. I did some quick math in my head as I wrote him back to accept it. I smiled so big as I realized the extended scope would put me over goal. I hit send as I walked into the store, as grateful for the new business as I was to be sitting on a curb outside a Cartier in Kowloon when I reached the goal. I had a bracelet to buy before I talked myself out of it. It was no longer about the goal—which I’d stopped focusing on so I didn’t realize how close I actually was to reaching it—or about the bracelet anymore.

If I was learning to graciously accept myself when I didn’t hit the mark, who was I to deprive myself of the same respect when I did? A promise is a promise. Next, I went to see a man about a Buddha.

My intuitive mind—unlike that rational one that had just managed to spend significantly more than the entire trip cost in less than two hours, I’d like to point out—wasn’t letting this Buddha business go. Fortunately the concierge’s rational brain must’ve been on break by the time I got back. He greeted me at the door like it was The Amazing Race, as if he’d been waiting to give me the clue to my next destination.

He instructed me to pack up and check out. He’d come up with a plan for me and he’d have it ready by then. Not 10 minutes later I was in a taxi, leaving the city and my suitcase behind.

I started to panic a few minutes into the ride to Lantau Island, a growing list of all the things that could go wrong filling the space in my mind where moments earlier Natasha Bedingfield belted out “the rest is still unwritten” as we drove across a bridge, the wind whipping through my hair. It started to rain. I’ve spent 35 years in this head of mine and yet the degree to which its winds can shift so dramatically and suddenly still catches me off guard.

A few hours later the hotel’s car service would drive my bag out to the airport, where someone on the hotel staff would secure it until I arrived a few hours later. The concierge wrote down instructions for me to hand my cab driver when I was en route to the airport. After reading them, the cabbie made a quick call I couldn’t understand and drove toward the airport. A man in white gloves was waiting on the curb with my suitcase when we pulled up. He escorted me to security, wished me safe travels and told me to enjoy wherever I was headed to next. I thought ahead to Mexico, and started bracing for my month-plus layover in D.C.

While I waited for my flight I thought about my experience on Lantau Island. At the time, that same side mirror that temporarily tricked me on a flight two days earlier made my experience there appear bigger than it now seems in hindsight, towering over all the smaller moments before it as if they mattered less. I hadn’t felt magic like that, like I did that day as I wandered down the aptly named Wisdom Path earlier, in so long it blinded me. A special place for sure, and one I’ll always remember as the scene of my first spiritual experience, not that I called it that at the time. But it wasn’t about the path, or the Buddha or the monastery or the Heart Sutra inscriptions—it was all the magical moments that had led me there. I relearned so many lessons about myself, ones I already knew deep down, it felt like I was taking back more than I brought with me. It felt like I was supposed to be there in that exact place at that exact time. I was grateful I hadn’t let the morning’s Google search results showing the enormous crowds, on-site 7-Eleven and the Buddha’s 1993 construction—how wise could a millennial Buddha really be?—dissuade me from going with my gut.

Trusting my gut always felt a bit like the blind leading the blind. I was unaware of any software updates out there for guts, and as the programmer of mine, I knew what it knew, so why would I trust it to ever know better than Guru Google? The funny thing is, when I started listening to my intuition, I stopped feeling lost.