March 2023 Stand-up
I just really wish that I was better at writing down my feelings.
I’ve been in 5 different countries this month. Full stop, I am just filled with gratitude that I get to live my life this way. If you told me a year ago that this is what my life would look like, I would have probably calmly nodded and thought, “well good, because that’s what I’m manifesting”. If you told me this is what it would have looked like 4 years ago, or 5 years ago, I would have broken down and started crying, because I really used to wonder how the hell life could be worth living, in any size, shape, or form.
That’s a heavy intro for a heavy newsletter. I’ll give you all the warning now, but not an apology. After all, you’ve opted into being here. This month, I’ll be getting into:
My time in Vietnam: holy shit, I understand why I am the way that I am so much more now.
Ethical non-monogamy, and being in France
Ear candy and a mind tickle
Planning and plotting for next month
Going back to Vietnam
I spent two weeks in Vietnam, meeting up with my mom who had been back there visiting for a month before I arrived. We kicked things off with a big celebration for my grandpa’s 90th birthday— the Vietnamese translation for the occasion is literally “the golden age”. It was a wonderful, big party that shut down the street in front of my grandpa’s house. There was lots of food, karaoke (of course), moonshine, and photos. Endless photos. Outfit changes for photos. Photos with the cake, with the flowers, with my grandpa, without my grandpa.
I could only be a good sport, posing for photos, for the one day, I realized. The day after his birthday celebration, I went on a week long tour of Vietnam with my mom, her 5 sisters, and her sister-in-law + two of her friends. All older, Vietnamese women, some of which emigrated overseas like my mom, but all the same in that they wanted the best fucking shot. Of everything. And when you’re a 60+ Vietnamese woman who’s not comfortable with the fact that you’re aging, getting that “best fucking shot” is difficult. I had a meltdown by the second day and eventually omitted myself from most of the photos.
But, on a lighter note, one of the “revelations” I had was that I’m a true North Vietnamese woman, through and through. When we were in Central Vietnam, our tour guide made a joke about how men from Central Vietnam could never take up with a North Vietnamese woman, because they’ll yell at you for something you didn’t do, only after they’ve done the thing. Essentially, I come from a strong lineage of women who don’t take shit, who are fast to raise their voice and put their foot down, who never fail to critique the food in front of them. It all makes sense to me now.
This trip also made me realize why my dad is the way that he is— even at my ripe age of 26, before going anywhere, he’ll tell me about 5 times that we’re leaving at this time, right on time, and to not be late. He’s done this my whole life, and while I used to get annoyed and think it was patronizing (I still think some of it is), I realize it’s because Vietnamese people describe their time as “elastic time”. Everything is an approximation, or a guideline at best. I think my dad left the country and quickly realized that time was not elastic elsewhere.
Ultimately, I was really glad that I had the chance to go back for a lot of reasons. My grandpa is not in good shape, and this doesn’t sadden me because he’s lived a hell of a life— but I’m not the first to say that it would be a miracle and a blessing if he made it to 91 years old. I’m glad I got to see him again. I’m also glad I got to spend time with my mom for more than a few hours at a time. While some days it felt like too much, I realized it’s one of the last times I’ll spend that much time with her, especially as life gets a lot more serious and family vacations are sparse.
Ethical non-monogamy (aka an open relationship) and going to France
Here’s a bomb: I’m in an open relationship with my boyfriend. I never know how to approach telling people this when it comes up. I think some people find it amusing to do the mind gymnastics of picturing themselves in an open relationship, I think some people think it makes my relationship less serious. But I think all of that is to avoid the fact that it’s uncomfortable to watch someone question the values and expectations that create the fabric of our society.
I’ve always wondered about living a non-monogamous life. For one, I had issues with infidelity in past relationships. But much larger than that is the fact that I just like to like people. I love flirting, learning, and playing a lot.
When I was with my ex, there was even barely room for me to have platonic friends that were men, let alone experiment with non-monogamy. When we broke up, I kept feeling enormous waves of regret about the breakup, wondering if it was the right decision, until finally, my therapist told me to write down all of the reasons why I broke up with him. So, I did that, and then, because I like to over-achieve, I wrote a list of things I’m really excited to explore and entertain now that I was single. I wrote:
Having new kinds of relationships; potentially poly, gay, etc.
Opportunity to tune into myself and work
Travel, travel, travel!
Healing, loving, and trusting myself
Meeting new people with perspectives I could never imagine
Then, I had the year that I did: traveled a ton, met my boyfriend and began a monogamous relationship with him, and started working for a dating app that provides space for those with “unconventional” relationship structures. Then, there was months and months of reading, research, talking through hypothetical scenarios, talking about boundaries, until finally, we were just open.
I didn’t know where things were going to go, but I did know that I felt secure, safe, and very supported by my boyfriend. I felt happy I could explore my feelings and thoughts candidly with him, and felt even happier that he wanted to explore alongside me. I also know that I felt, and still feel, like I can love him and still feel so much love, affection, and attraction for others. That life and the possibility of connection shouldn’t be limited just because we’ve been told we’re only allowed to feel those things for one person at a time. And I really felt like there were people I’ve encountered throughout my life who I wanted to see again. Like the chapter we wrote wasn’t long enough, like the hypothetical reunion we have shouldn’t be polite and platonic, but should be fiery and raging and passionate.
Soo.. France?
That’s how I feel about T— a pseudonym for a French gentleman a few years my senior whom I met in Nicaragua in 2018. I was on my first solo trip ever, backpacking in Nicaragua and volunteering on a permaculture farm. I found my way into town, about 3-4 km away from where I was volunteering, and in such a small community, hitch hiking was normal. But I was shy and I hadn’t learned Spanish yet, so I had accepted my fate of walking over an hour in the sweltering sun, when I came across a guy who looked like he would speak English, getting off of his motobike to go to a street-side store. I asked him for a ride, and in his thick Frnech accent, he said he really would love to, “like, really”, but that there were customers at his bar and he had run out to get ice to make them drinks. He asked if I was going to the full-moon party that night, where I saw him. Then I saw him the day after that, and the day after that one.
T ran a rum bar— that’s sort of Nicaragua’s thing, rum. But he infused rum with fruit, spices, and a snake (???). The bar was more of a wooden and straw hut, with a lofted area built on top of all of the bottles where T had a mattress and slept. I was enthralled with him— we were enthralled with each other. He’d pick me up from the farm after my work day was over and bring me around the island, take me back to the bar/his house, hang out with Pav, his dog he dragged there from France, and smoke a lot of weed. I loved our conversations, and loved how tenacious he was, and loved drinking his rum.
From the time I saw him on the street, until literally the morning I left Nicaragua, I saw him daily. I remember I had arranged for a taxi to take me from the farm to the ferry port, and I queued up a Spanish translation on my phone for, “can we stop here for a minute?”, so that I could ask my driver to stop outside of T’s bar. I ran up to the open, wooden hut, gave his dog Pav a kiss, and started climbing up the ladder to the lofted area where he stuck his head over the side for a smooch. The taxi driver gave me a smirk after I got back in the car.
I suppose you could write this off as just a travel hook up, or a fling. But I came to Nicaragua after spending a year of living in torturous suicidal ideation, and I was fucking scared that there was nothing beyond becoming a cog in the machine, a life filled with school, then work, then kids, all the while pretending not to feel miserable and lost. I went there to work on a farm, to unplug from social media and my life, to be outside all of the time. What I didn’t expect to meet was an island full of people who felt exactly how I did, and threw in the towel on the norms of Western society and came to Nicaragua to live simply, live fully, and unbothered. T was one of the many people there who made me feel less alone in the belief that life as we’re raised to understand it kind of sucks.
The years that proceeded this included hand-written letters, mailed to each other only when he was back in France for a short holiday visit because Nicaragua didn’t have a mail service. Messages exchanged, photos exchanged, talk of trips that never happened, etc. Then, in 2020, I got to see him again on my big grad trip.
It’s been a really nice relationship of popping in and out of each other’s lives. We didn’t speak much the last few years, as we both had entered serious, monogamous relationships, and being peak COVID times meant that fantasizing about traveling was depressing, not fun.
But earlier this year, I was back in Nicaragua for a month, feeling thankful as hell because I love that damn country (in no small amount due to T). He posted a photo of his backpack on a train, and I just asked him where he was going. How funny it would have been if he was heading back to Nica while I was there. His response was that he was still in France, going to the countryside to live at home while he starts a farm-to-table project, and honestly, has just had a real shit go of it the last few years, between bad relationships and bad jobs.
We caught up a bit, and I told him that I was no longer with my ex (and the dog), but I was in a new relationship, that’s open. I told him I was planning on spending some time in Europe in the spring, and that if he wanted to, he could join me in Porto when I was planning on being there.
Long story short, we settled on me coming to the area of France he’s living in for a week, with a visit to Barcelona before/after, which is exactly what I’m living right now. He had to stay back in France, so I’m here in Barcelona solo for one night.
It has been a magical, cathartic, heart warming, heart breaking, fun week. Part of it is that both us realized that we’re not two crazy kids in their early 20s in Nicaragua anymore— we’re in the villages and community where he’s doing work, where his family lives. We both have jobs we’re passionate about, routines we need to keep, people we love. And I think, for me, there was some fear that the magic would have been lost in this new and more grown-up situation.
When you have a travel fling like I did, you always stop yourself from getting too excited, because you don’t want to make it bigger in your head than it really was in reality. But this week was a week of both of us realizing we both felt like meeting each other was a big fucking thing. And it felt really good for me to hear that T felt really moved, happy, grateful that he had met me in Nicaragua, because I felt the same for him, and that feeling didn’t fade over the years. In fact, for many years, thinking about him gave me some solace in the world.
T took me around and made me eat only the Frenchest of foods, or, the most Catalan dishes. We went to an organic co-op store to get local cheeses and meats and organic wine. One night, his brother and brother’s friend had a barbecue, and they invited us. We sat around a table that had three baguettes in the middle, tearing pieces off with our hands, eating grilled meat with fresh aioli, and drinking wine.
At the surface, it’s just an incredibly romantic story, in a romantic country. I was really excited to see France alongside a local, and to see a different part of it (I went to Paris and Bordeaux my first time in the country). The AirBnB we stayed in was located in the proclaimed sunniest village in France, and it had a 360 view of the Pyrenees Mountains.
And I get to feel and experience all of that and still feel, and commit to, and love, my boyfriend, AKA the greatest man in the world and my entire heart. None of this French love story needs to contradict the love and commitment I have for my boyfriend. In turn, I get to further continue to grow as my own person, learn about myself and others, and he gets to do the same.
While it is fun to be able to sleep with whoever we desire, and while the jealousy is really difficult, I feel like I’m living my dream life. It’s not because I can fly to France and sleep with whoever I’d like. It’s because I’m with someone who genuinely wants to be open to more in this world, and to see me grow and experience more, too. Why should I stop seeing and spending time with the T’s of the world? Why should my boyfriend deny himself the opportunity to meet, connect with, and be with folks who inspire him, who get him going? Why do we have to choose one or the other?
I’m not shaming monogamy. In fact, I believe boyfriend and I will go through phases where we want to be monogamous with each other, and some where we don’t. I’m just saying, it’s worth the conversation, or at least a question to ask yourself.
Ear candy and a mind tickle
Double expresso - L’embrouille. Take a listen and see if you like French rap. It’s good, I swear.
CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST - Tyler, the Creator. I love him, I’m so happy he put this out.
Everything I Know About Love - Dolly Alderton. Great book, I’m still not finished reading it, but I just love the thoughtful, funny vignettes from the author.
Planning and Plotting for the next month
I’m flying to Portugal this weekend, and will spend over 2 weeks there with the love of my life (my boyfriend lol). We’ll spend our mornings walking along the water, eating pastries, drinking coffee, and working in the afternoons and evenings. Then, we’ll do like the Portuguese do and have dinner at 10PM.
I’m back in Canada at the end of the month, for a while. So, count me in when it comes to parties, brunches, and cocktails. As always, please send me your voice messages, updates, love, etc.
Love and smiles,
Julie