Hello again

So...where did we leave off?

I think it was June of 2020. An announcement that we were closing our business. That was my last post on my now deleted blog, Sweet Fine Day, but in truth, I hadn’t kept up the writing in years. Five years of sporadic, half-hearted updates if I’m being honest.

In reality, the cadence of daily posts became unsustainable and I developed a strange form of guilt for not keeping up. I began to wonder, who was I writing for anyway? When we shut down our bakery business for good, I gave myself permission to stop.

Like many things during the pandemic, the blog stood frozen in time for years. Forever June 2020. But behind that final post stood 14 years of my life online, until one day earlier this year, it was gone, unceremoniously, by a hacker of all things.

I know you can never completely erase things once it’s out there, but something about the blog being deleted off the face of the internet felt liberating, like a release. I’m sure you’ve heard stories of people who felt like they’ve reemerged from the pandemic a different person. Maybe you are one of those. I know I am, so it felt like a slate wiped clean.

Reinvention is now a cyclical necessity of modern life—I’m convinced of it. Sometimes we anticipate it and fling the door wide open ourselves, but other times it takes events beyond our control to force us out of our comfortable nest. It can often feel cruel and abrupt like most things do when we’re not ready for it.

How many times have I been here before? Many. But this time around, I can’t quite figure out if I actually believe that I’ve been given a sign that I need to own my own time or if I’m just rationalizing the unexpected changes in life by creating some sort of self-serving narrative.

So why start again now?

I remembered when I was in the flow for that good 6-7 year stretch of writing nearly daily, it was deeply grounding and a form of self therapy. Every night when my family went to bed, I would write for a few hours and release; it allowed me to go to bed with a clearer head.

The last 8-10 years have been a lot. A lot of changes, a lot of loss, a lot of endings, a lot of milestones, but there was also joy in there too. What was missing from those years, however, was time to process it all.

The decision to start writing on Substack is part of my process, born out of a period of transition as I reevaluate what work looks like. But I need to tell you that it’s also scary to dive back in. The internal/external scrutiny, the pressure to send out a newsletter every single week (I’m actually low-key terrified of this), the imposter syndrome because I’m not a “Writer.” Why invite all that? Well, I need that lifeline—something—to tether myself while I’m on this self-prescribed journey.

From my about page:

…this newsletter is a collection of personal essays about the joys of midlife (a little sarcasm there), raising teens (who have already started to leave the nest), caring for elderly parents (only one living now), processing death and grief (it’s a long journey, folks), navigating another new shift in my design career (I have failed miserably at every turn in my quest for better work/life balance), and my ongoing journey getting back in touch with my Korean heritage.

So here it is. Newsletter #1.

—

*I learned the word liminal from my coworker and friend, Sarah, a few years ago. It’s wild that I never heard the word before (where have I been?), but that in-between feeling of being neither young, nor old, of being both a mother and a daughter—and taking care of everyone—felt captured so perfectly in a single word.

---