Don’t Stop Believing
The other night in bed, I turned to my husband and asked him, “When did I stop believing in myself? When did I stop thinking I could do anything, accomplish anything?” Maybe it’s turning 40, but these questions have been preying on my mind a lot recently.
In college, I thought I could conquer the world, even as the world literally crumbled around me (next week, my niece moves into the same dorm in NYC I lived in 20 years ago and in which I watched 9/11 unfold, wrapped in a towel, on a beanbag next to my best friends.) I interned at the UN. I was the only non-Chinese person in my Chinese-for-native-speakers classes. I sat with my girlfriends on the Columbia steps, haughtily sneering at passerbys we disdained—ok: maybe that was a bit too far, too confident, too much. But still, the hubris of youth! In graduate school, I insisted on a place in Jonathan Spence’s advanced seminar on Chinese history, supposedly only open to Yale history PhD students.
I breezed into law school a few years later—full scholarship, new haircut, total confidence; and I think that’s when things started to take a turn. My mom got cancer. My scholarship got ripped away from me due to Brooklyn Law School’s unscrupulous 1L section placement practices. I started dating a guy who abused me mentally and emotionally such that the scars still start even 13 years later. The world devolved into a global economic mess. My mother lost her home. My chances at a Big Law career vanished.
My belief in myself continued to dwindle, even as I secured a very good job immediately after graduation and passed the New York Bar exam on my first try (reportedly it took JFK, Jr. three times to pass; I believe it—that shit is HARD.) I fell in love with the best man. I moved across an ocean. I got married. And I applied to over 100 law jobs in London and barely even got one interview. Anyhoo, at some point along the way, I stopped. I stopped trying. I stopped believing. And I stopped feeling like the myself I once was. But, as Frank Costanza once said, “I’m back, BABYYY!”
This pandemic has taken so much from us, so much from me—I haven’t seen family and friends in nearly two years—but it’s also given me the space to pause, to think, to read, to reevaluate, to write and to cook. It’s given me the quietude to remember who I am, what I value and what I can do. And right now, that’s writing a book proposal and reading academic tomes once again and experimenting in the kitchen and here’s a picture of tomatoes because technically it’s still summer.
