Author : Kim

628 posts

Chubs’ Death Anniversary

Today is the death anniversary of our beloved cockatiel named Chubs. He lived to be 12 years old and I raised him since he was a month old.

Chubs and me in June 2007

We loved the little bugger dearly. My mom said she cried for a week straight after he passed on. I still have my heartstrings being pulled and get tears in my eyes when I think of him even today.

I had remembered my floofy boy had passed away during March of last year, but I didn’t know it was exactly today until my mom had told me today. She said she remembered because she had written it down. It’s so touching that she wanted to remember the exact day. In a lot of Asian cultures, we celebrate death anniversaries, where we honor and remember the day a loved one passed away.

Even though it has been a year, I still talk about him fairly frequently and I keep telling my boyfriend I wish he could have met him.

He was such a cute, weird, and smart little guy.

I love you, Chubs, and I miss you lots.

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3 Events That Changed My Life, and Post-Graduation

In the last two years of optometry school, there were 3 different life-changing things that I struggled with: My 12 year old feathered baby died. My ten year relationship came to an end. I was physically assaulted.

The evening before I took one of my national board exams, my cockatiel died from choking on food. He was my 12 year old baby. I got him when he was 1 month old and he lived with us until he was nearly 12 years old. I was living away from home and never had the chance to spend more time with him before he passed away unexpectedly and I never got to say goodbye. Sometimes when I take out my keys to open the front door, I still expect my little guy to chirp excitedly at me to take him out to play.

I initiated stepping away from someone I loved with every inch of my being because I knew it was what he needed to get out of his rut and reach the potential I knew he had in him. I still remember how scary it was doing it because I couldn’t imagine a life without him. I had hope that maybe if things were meant to be, we could be a part of each other’s lives again. I met him when I was a teenager in high school and we grew together over the next decade. Nearly 10 years of struggles and triumphs and honestly the best years of my life. It’s not often that even after a decade of being together, you still get butterflies in your stomach and you can’t wait to spend more time together. Sadly, our love story only became a long and tragic one and we grew into complete strangers. We tried over and over to slowly pick things back up, but one day it just stopped and I was ghosted. I think the hardest part for me was being left hanging and never getting closure. Someone I completely trusted suddenly disappeared and I didn’t even know if this person was even alive anymore.

To numb the pain I had tried dating again.

This led to me being raped by someone I had only known for a few hours. For a while it didn’t feel like a big deal. But over time, it ate away at me and ate away until I didn’t really feel like a person anymore. I could barely just keep going, anything to numb the pain.

I did a lot of things I’m not proud of because in some way, I had wanted some kind of control back in my life and I honestly didn’t really care if I ended up dying in the process.

It still chokes me up to remember those days in school where I wished I could have gotten help. Someone would stop in the hallway to greet me and ask me how I was doing, when all I really wanted to say was, “I’m not okay. I need help.” But I never could do that and so I would respond like a robot, “Good, how are you?” Honestly anyone time someone asked me the “How are you?” question, I felt like crying on the spot. On some mornings before my clinic shift, I would cry in my car and just sit there to give myself time to look normal again, and then go to clinic with a smile because I knew it was time to take care of patients and make some people happy.

I easily lost 10 pounds during that year and when I realized it, I thought, “Well, if I can’t feel happy maybe I can keep losing more and feel beautiful.”

Sidenote: if you’ve ever wondered about or considered therapy…speaking from experience, don’t hesitate, just do it. You don’t have to go through things alone and why would you want to prolong your healing process? I came to realize that yes, although you may feel like you could deal with it on your own, why not have help coping in a healthy way, promote your well-being, and cut down your healing time exponentially? There’s such a bad stigma attached to therapy but it makes so much sense.

Even without the external factors in my life, optometry school was hard for me. I was used to an entire lifestyle of cramming and easily being a top student but in optometry school, I found myself barely holding on. I found myself surrounded by intelligent colleagues, whose brilliance I’d marvel at. I always felt like the weak link of the bunch and I knew that if I didn’t work hard, I wouldn’t be able to keep up. There were times every single year out of those four years where I felt like, “I’m not going to make it to the next year.” It takes a real toll on you for a full four years while everyone around you seems so beautiful, smart, and successful.

Even after graduation rolled by, I still didn’t get my wings because I was still having trouble passing one of my national board exams. I had my diploma but I didn’t have my license. This put me far behind in the race and left me, again, crawling far behind my classmates. It didn’t feel good. But here I am, I finally jumped through the hurdles and though I’m late, I crossed that finish line! Maybe that’s just always been my style; slow and steady wins the race. One of my friends did nickname me the “comeback kid,” in college, after all.

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First ocular migraine

I’ve been sick this week and today I’ve been mostly sleeping in my bed. I woke up in the evening and checked my phone, only to notice it was a little hard to read the text on my phone. My vision was a little off, kind of like when you stand up too quickly and feel like everything is swimming around. It was sort of like a zigzag structure coming from the right periphery of my vision down towards the center of my vision. This YouTube video is not exactly what I saw, but the shape and orientation of the zigzag is exactly the same! It was much more subtle than the rainbow/black color in the video. The outline of the zigzag was very shiny and glittery and flashing. Where the zigzag was, it made my vision kind of cloudy and hard to see, as if you just woke up and rubbed your eyes. It must have gone away in 10 minutes and everything was back to normal again. So strange!

At first I thought I was having a retinal detachment because of the flashing I was seeing. I closed one eye and then the other but it didn’t go away so it was in both eyes (not likely to be a retinal detachment). Luckily I’ve had patients before who described to me what their ocular migraines looked like. Had I not been aware, I think I would have seriously freaked out way more than I did.

Apparently migraines can be commonly caused by congested sinuses. I’ve been super congested recently so that makes sense!

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Beyond the Breakup: Part 1

Hello, again. It’s been a long time. My life in a nutshell since graduating in May of this year:

  • I went on an amazing trip to Asia in June (2 weeks in Japan and 1 week in Vietnam).
  • I studied my ass off to retake (for the 4th time) my national board exam in August.
  • I had to wait anxiously for 2 months for my score to be released.
  • I reconnected with a lot of good friends.
  • I continued a lot of online dating.
  • I started talking to a really amazing guy (now boyfriend) in June and things just drastically turned around for me. I’m no longer a serial dater with a high level of detachment.
  • I started going to therapy to deal with my lingering emotional turmoils & past trauma.
  • I found out I finally PASSED the national board exam!
  • I studied for the last and final exam required for my license: the state law exam – and PASSED!

So now I am playing the waiting game to have my license processed before I can officially start working. Yes, it’s been almost half a year since graduation and although I had a lot of obstacles delaying everything, I’m finally at the end of the tunnel. At this point in my life, I’m hoping to tie up loose ends and do things I need to do while I still have a ridiculous amount of free time.

I decided to create a series called Beyond the Breakup. I don’t think I will post all of the Parts as public. But, I think I feel comfortable posting this as the beginning, Part 1. I thought it might be time to pick a little bit at the old scabs and slowly dive into memorabilia from Mart so that I can slowly let them go & throw them away. I’m doing excellent these days, compared to how miserable I was two years ago. I’m going to keep working on being the best version of myself, continue healing myself, and continue tying up all the loose ends dangling.

One year Mart gave me a lovely red leather box that has a clear window on the lid. He decorated it with stars in the shape of “20” for my 20th birthday. This was in 2009. I had forgotten that inside the clear window was actually a little card-stock with a birthday letter written on it for me.

It reads:

Dear Kimmy,

Today is a very special day, the day you [were] born and the day a star came to life. Yes, Kimmy, you are that star, MY morning star. And for twenty years, you shone bright and brightened up my life. Ever since I met you, my world became a happier place and I’m able to experience so many new things with you. Thank you so much Kimmy. Words can’t describe how much you mean to me and how much I love you. I’m so grateful for this day and I hope I can make it special for you Kimmy.

This was a little over two years into our relationship. It was a special time. That must have been when I had gone into my second year of college.

I’m crying just a little bit, but nothing like the soul-crushing sobs I used to have. Of course I feel emotional. A tiny bit is from feeling the nostalgia and the lingering sadness of how things didn’t last forever.

But, I also feel a bit happy and I’m loving this feeling. I really like this letter. It was such a simple birthday letter from him and as I’m reading it 9 years later, I think I can still really feel the pure love and meaning he had intended behind those words. The whole concept behind it is beautiful. If I was never born, if I never met him, if I never made the moves (heck yeah, always a go-getter) on him, I never would have been able to impact his life positively. Up until that point in his life, he had never felt true happiness and love before. And he was able to make me the happiest I had been in that point of my life as well. How special and amazing that is. Not everyone is able to say they were able to share almost a decade of their youth (16 to 26) with someone. Although it didn’t last forever, we struggled and triumphed and experienced so many different stages of life together. Although it didn’t last forever, at least we had each other at the time. That is truly amazing.

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Graduation – I’m a doctor now!

On Wednesday, May 23rd 2018, I finally got “hooded” at my graduation ceremony for receiving my doctoral degree and I walked across the stage as an eye doctor.

A few of my closest friends were able to attend my graduation ceremony (Ricky, Julie, Hatsuho, and Steven). Julie had bought a plane ticket in order to fly down from NorCal to see me at graduation. My brother, father, and mother were also there, of course. Even one of the former technicians from the naval hospital I externed at was there to cheer us on! She had recently left the military and moved to SoCal for school, and came to our graduation. That was so sweet of her. I felt so incredibly grateful that these special people were there to support me.

Before my friends left for dinner (I already had celebrated with them the evening before because I knew my family and I were going to celebrate with a dinner immediately after graduation), I ended up sobbing so much. I felt so much love. I was just so overwhelmed. So grateful they were there to support me at that moment, and there to support me throughout all of these difficult, sometimes unbearable years. It felt unreal that I was finally reaching the light at the end of the tunnel, when there were times where everything just seemed impossible.

I inevitably thought of Mart, and my heart really ached for him, wishing he was there. A third of my life he was there to cheer me on; he was there for my high school and college graduations. Now… he was absent for my doctoral degree and absent from my life.

I also didn’t feel right celebrating graduation since I didn’t pass all of my exams yet. I would feel more complete if everything was done and squared away.

So, when people ask me if I’m excited and happy, well, I wish they wouldn’t ask me. I know they are asking out of happiness for me and out of cordial conversation, but it hurts a little each time. Regardless…I know I’ve earned my graduation. I’ve successfully completed 4 years of optometry school – all of my classes, exams, skills proficiencies, clinic hours – and nobody can take that away from me.

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