Shanzhai Lu

it's 2010.

wow. where'd the decade go.

i spent much of new years eve on a flight from boston to los angeles looking back on the past ten years. a little out of character for me because i am perpetually moving forward trying to outrun myself and i hate looking back. but a 6 hour flight across the country on new years eve will do that to a person i guess.

ten years ago i was living in shanghai. 23 years old who refused to spend her post college years climbing a corporate ladder within the confines of an office cubicle. china dotcom bubble was in full swing. i had to be in shanghai. it was my first failed startup. and i was hooked. drive fast, take chances my friend jd used to say in our early days in china. lots of crazy drunken nights at bonne sante with jeff, weaver, miyuki, sok, sam, michelle...

i spent 5 fast paced years in shanghai. new york on crack people sometimes say. i loved it most of the times. i hated it towards the end. the money was good. the work hard, drink hard took its toll. you worked hard to try and keep up with the pace of the city. a city constantly torn down and rebuilt while you were living in it. you drank hard because at times it seemed the only thing left to do at the end of the day. i dated a nice australian guy for much of those years. he wanted to marry me. it took me one question about where i wanted to live in sydney to realize i didn't feel the same. i was 27. i missed the states. my parents were aging. my marketing director position was getting localized. a new version of shanghai was emerging. one that didn't need me anymore i felt. it was time to head home.

i looked to hawaii as a transition in 2003. i met joe and can honestly say i know what it feels like to fall madly -- and blindly -- in love with someone. i knew i was going to marry him. i even told miyuki nine months before he asked me. he was a naval officer. a navy diver. and a nuclear engineer. we eloped in hawaii. we were so happy. that was half a decade ago. it sounds more dramatic when you can say it that way. i'm a drama queen at times so indulge me for the duration of the blog post.

life. seriously, you can't script this stuff. because if you could, i certainly wouldn't have written the next chapter the following way.

my sister susie committed suicide 3 days after joe and i got our marriage certificate. i became pregnant with my son a month after. 4 months after he was born, joe deployed to iraq on an aircraft carrier. 6 months after that we were trying to piece our marriage back together. 6 months later the bush administration got the idea to do a surge deployment. off he went again. 3 months later we were trying to piece our marriage back together - again. 6 months after that he left us. 6 months after that the divorce was finalized.

as downward spirals go, we never stood a chance.

...

the past ten years of my life. exhausting at best. depressing at worst. but absolutely necessary in lessons learned about myself.

so what do you do when you find yourself afraid of standing still for fear that you'll stop dreaming.

1. you work.
2. hustle with purpose. because you're a single mom with a boy who needs you.
3. challenge old thinking. because you realize everyone is making things up as they go along in life. some are just better than the rest of us at pretending they know what they're doing and where they're going. 
4. disrupt with new ideas. because change really is the only constant. and i don't know about you but it's much more fun being part of change than holding it back.
5. connect and share. because you realize you spent an insecure part of your 20s thinking you had to deal with a wide variety of assholes who knew better than you in order to move forward. then you wake up one day and realize it doesn't have to be that way. no more. you choose to surround yourself with good people. devil's advocate to your dreams. what is that? sorry. there is no room in my life for the devil or anyone who advocates on his behalf. 
6. move forward. because moving forward is all you really can do when you don't have much to look back on. the other alternative to that would be to stand still ...and stop dreaming. that's just not an option for me. my big sister's depression taught me that.

so here i am. moving forward into the new decade simplifying my life with three lessons i'm carrying over from the last one.

...

stay resilient.

surround myself with good people.

don't stop dreaming.

...and do it all from hawaii. i can't wait.

...

happy new decade.