one year out

things that happened after i left med school www.instagram.com/koreabootrash/ mobile header image credit to Nyxia Grey, from the zine "You Matter Always" https://www.etsy.com/shop/ZinesByNyxia

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072119 Diary comics 🖤

Also hey yall! My piece “buzzcut” about buzzing my head, coming into my genderqueer identity, and korean bodies interacting in America without language was just published as part of episode 4 of Self Evident podcast—a podcast which tells Asian American stories. Check it out if you’re interested :) I start at the time stamp below

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Transcript of the footnote: *the second half of med school consists of a series of stints in a number of fields—surgery, ob/gyn, psychiatry, pediatrics—you get the idea. This is understood to be a particularly time-consuming, sleep-depriving, and difficult time.

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122718 - excerpts from my therapy sessions (1). So I’m actually back in med school! Who wudda thunk? I just read “My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness” last night and enjoyed it on many levels. It did make me think about though how so many narratives of fracture/leaving, especially narrated by professional artists, resolve with the protagonist finding a true self that is completely separated from the things they knew before—family expectations, work, school, etc. I resonate with these themes and know that needing to separate from these things is incredibly difficult. I’m also aware of how my experience is a little different—I’m telling a story where the protagonist fractures but then returns from where they left in some senses, and must reckon with that. Back when I left med school over a year ago I thought the only way to be free and true was to leave everything that I’d known behind. Now I know that it’s been a bit more complex than that.

Also I’ve been reading some case studies written by therapists lately and have been toying with the idea of narrating therapy from the clients side. You know, switch up that power dynamic! Who’s narrating who! Haha

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NaNoWriMo Day 2, a meditation on parks

“What do you like about parks? Like what do you get out of them?” My friend Sindhu asked me.

Her voice was with me as I sat on a stone in Prospect Park. The canada geese who had been by me just 15 minutes ago slowly drifted so far to the other side of the lake that for a moment—when I had realized the changed state of affairs—I wasn’t sure that those specks in the distance were really the ones who had been so close.

In the park I was so happy to find a path that was almost completely covered overhead by the branches of its bordering trees. To walk into it felt like walking into a wood, so that one felt compelled to marvel at solid old trunks.

I occasionally check my therapist’s instagram. For a lot of reasons—partially because it’s public so I can. And partially because I see so many parallels between my self and my therapist that seeing images of the life of someone like me but 8 years older gives me the idea that there is a life for me also 8 years out. On one of my most recent forays into typing his name into Instagram’s search function I came across some tiles of towering trees. In that moment I felt a longing for a wilderness to venture into.

And here I was.

I think about how beautiful it is to be able to write a story about myself, where I can think of myself as arriving here—both by happenstance and by the design of my life. A longing fulfilled. And how beautiful it was to be write a story about my loved ones—the burdens they struggle under, the simple actions they take. I often think about my friend Meesoh an ocean away, I think of Sam and my other writing friends plugging away at their craft—constructing castles of glass, setting sail on an inner sea. And here me, the leaves coming to part on the view of a shimmering pond, where I would find the geese.

Yesterday at the toy model boat pond in Grand Central Park my older sister and I came down the hill to arrive and I gasped at a majestic bird, glossy with black feathers sitting on a plastic box slowly drifting across the pond. The S-shaped neck and a long hooked yellow bill for catching fish marked it as a cormorant—the first one I had seen in my life. With approach though we saw how its neck spasmed and its head ticked again again again and i felt a bit sick.

During one of my first days of medical school I was walking back home with a trio of students when we came across a small bird, head twisting in a spasm. It was the size of a sparrow but I had never seen one with such a curved bill. As we came closer it repeatedly would try to fly away before crashing into the ground, always veering too much to the left when I was a child there was a bug with many legs on my family’s deck and someone had stepped on it, crushing some of its legs so it could no longer walk. My parents said it would be better if it was put it out of its misery, I lifted a sandaled foot and stepped on it firmly, solidly but when I lifted my shoe it was nowhere to be found and I cried imagining it squirming painfully helplessly beneath the crevice that ran in between the planks of the dock.

The last time I was with my older sister we were walking through the shuttle tunnels below city hall when we passed a homeless man lying on the floor who seemed not fully conscious. A police man was standing above him, asking him if he knew where he was. As we passed my sight trailed behind me still on him, but my older sister hurried me on—impatient with a flight she had to wake up early for the next day and the fact that I had already kept her waiting with my ambivalence about going out to my own birthday dinner.

“I wish we had stopped to at least be with him until the ambulance showed up,” I said jerkily.

“He’ll probably be fine, I mean the police man was there.” she had said.

“But... the police...”

I crouched on the ground, googling animal control in New York City. There was a woman with some European accent watching the bird too, repeating that she looked sick (at first the woman had used “he” to describe the bird, but catching herself she settled on using the feminine pronoun). I ended up leaving a message on what seemed to be the right department’s answering machine.

“Thank you, now I can leave. You are very brave,” the woman said.

In Prospect Park I saw a large hawk like bird perched on a sign. It then hopped with a couple lazy flops of its wings into a nearby tree.

“Is it... an osprey?” I asked the man next to me.

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Did this story resonate with you? I’d love to know 🖤 let me know here, on insta, via email~

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NaNoWriMo DAY 1! A quote from my contribution to @somethingsareup ‘s fantasy roleplaying game universe~ I’ll be trying to write something almost every day this month and posting the products of my labor here 🔑 encouragement to all my other writing friends who are also setting out with me, gratitude for those following along 🌸

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“St. Louis”

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a portrait of my younger sister and me from earlier today 🌸 ♉️♏️

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053018 - Figs

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051918 - telegraph.

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05/12/18 - living situation.

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04/28/18 - Contact. That’s my friend meesoh in the third panel!

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04/14/18 - And this brings us up to present day :)

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If you like these comics, resonate with them, recognize yourself in them, I’d love to hear about that :) Send me a message about it.

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03/27/18 - There is something different about this comic

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03/18/18 - Interesting repetition of numbers in the dates of this comic and the one before it owo

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03/03/18 - birds and deer have been a blessing in the loneliness of suburbia.

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03/01/18 - This was drawn shortly after a whole bunch of stuff in Philadelphia went down and I beat a retreat back to my parent’s house and my childhood home. Settling into a six panel format here.

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02/16/18 - It took me nearly three months to draw another comic because it took me that long to begin to think of my daily lived experience in a reasonably cogent matter.

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11/28/17 - Still reflecting on rough times. You can see that I had a little mistake in that last panel.