Dear friend,

Hey there, how’s it going?

September has been super busy for me — starting off with a memorable 25th high school reunion and ended with a trip to Thailand! In fact, I’m actually writing you from Chiang Mai right now, so greetings from a very humid, insect-filled future! Resilience has been top of mind this month, but this newsletter is a long one so let’s first start from the beginning…

Act I: The Road to Resilience##

Ms. Kulkarni, my 10th-grade geometry teacher, once told me during my last year of high school, “I don’t think you realize how special this school is until you can look back to this moment from the future.” This sentence has never truly left my mind, and it took me so many years to fully realize what she saw at the time — a place so diverse and challenging, yet so spirited and creative by the community and cultures we created on our own. My 4 years spent in that environment during that particular time was so unique and something I’ve never again experienced in my life.

My high school years were both spent with countless friends in classes but also deeply in the closet and with a constant fear for my safety. And because of this duality — of being well supported in some classes but blatantly bullied in others — I developed a strong sense of “us vs them” binary: These are my people, those are not. And it took me a very long time (honestly, just in the past few years) to untangle this line of thinking and to finally grow into my current sense of appreciation for everything this school had provided me.

Through countless therapy sessions and overall maturity, I learned not to discount the hardships and traumatic moments, but to see them as opportunities to build resiliency toward my future self. I realized the people who bullied me likely had their own issues at the time, and with that I could finally forgive them and genuinely wish them well. And most importantly I now see how it’s not about how different we are, but really that we’re cut from this same cloth. We may be all taking different paths, but as we’re stemmed from this place, all of us were shaped by our teachers and by each other to be who we all are today.

So the fact that we’re still able to have this 25th-year high school reunion event, still planned and organized by our beloved class president, was something I was very much looking forward to. Despite being terribly forgetful, I recognized so many people at the event, and with them so many memories we all shared — something only an in-person event like this can do, and more potent than any social media algorithm can even attempt. At this event I saw everyone older, wiser, but still here and beautiful, and by the time we left my heart was so, so full.

Act II: Live As The Gift That You Are##

I’ve been lucky enough to have kept in touch with a number of teachers over the years, and so I invited some of them to send us a video message for the high school reunion. Our history teacher and counselor, Mr Denny — left a heart-felt message for us to “live as the gift as we are”, because that’s what we were to him while he was teaching there. Separately, when (my favorite teacher) Ms Haines’s video was shown on the TV, a lot of people gasped and yelped “Ms Haines!”, followed by “How does she look exactly the same?” Her message for us was beautiful and had us in tears. This is who we are, and as our principal once said, “Once a Burtonian, always a Burtonian.”

Throughout September I had routinely pondered how best to “live as a gift that I am”. So far I think is to live authentically as myself, and to contribute authentically to others. Firstly, it’s because I did so little of these two things during my high school years that to be able to do so now really is to give a gift for myself and no one else. But more importantly, to live authentically as myself and the contribution to my community are the two not-secret things consistently mentioned across the many books, TED Talks, and other courses I came across on how to live a happy and meaningful life.

Both parts require me to deeply understand who I am and to listen to others’ lived experiences; both parts require me to give grace to myself in order to give my self to others. All of these are lifelong practices, but this line of thinking helps add even more meaning to the things I already enjoying doing: journaling, meditating, reading, volunteering. 

• This book made me a happier person (Also this)
• Jenny Odell – How to do nothing

Act III: Resilience in Practice##

All of this brings me back here in Chiang Mai — something that self-admittedly was not on my bingo card for 2025. The honest truth is that I am here plainly because my mother asked me to visit my brother. Growing up there was only a year or so where I felt truly close to my brother, but that feeling was fleeting — he moved to Asia once I was in college and our relationship has since devolved to at best a couple cordial texts several times a year.

Those in my life know how envious I get of my friends who have close relationships with their siblings. I sometimes even get choked up when watching certain Hank and John Green videos, simply of the way they play, interact, and otherwise do siblings stuff together. It’s something I wish to have in my life; sometimes I even try to imagine the infinite steps it’d take to build toward that ideal relationship.

So armed only with my anxiety (fueled by my past experiences) and without knowing how this week will go, I told Ian that my mantra/strategy for this trip would be, “I’m not here to fix things. I’m not here to be right. I’m simply here to be present in the company of others”. In the past few days my brother and I have spent together, and against all my pre-planned worries, how it’s going is ironically (coincidentally?) everything I’ve already told you — how we’re very different people but nonetheless cut from the same cloth (and that’s absolutely okay). This unplanned trip is also a good practice to live as a gift — specifically that after so many years without seeing my brother I’m finally able to share my authentic self with him while being genuinely curious about his life in Thailand.

We had dinner at this restaurant last night overlooking the Ping River, and I told my anxiety, right as I felt my overactive brain pulsate with every scenario on how this trip can go wrong — that even if there are headwinds of any kind, I now have the wisdom — as taught and supported by so many in my life — to keep only what serves me as learnings while leaving the rest behind, to let them flow by like this river before my eyes.

• If Hank and John Were God for 15 Minutes

• Let's Just Be Stupid For a Moment

And here's the rest of it…

Thanks for reading this and being with me on this journey. Let me know what’s going on in your world and be sure to share something with me that’s been giving you life! You can also check out past issues of Dear Friend, on my website. Here’s the rest of it:

• The photos I took this month
• What’s Worth Remembering in September

• Interesting enough to share but not enough to write about:

  • Jimmy Kimmel is Back! (This monologue alone should win an Emmy)
  • Brandy & Monica Break Down 19 Looks
  • Inside San Francisco's Golden Gate Park