In the “before” days, I interpreted this microfiction to be a hearstoppingly tragic story of a lost family vision. Now that my brain has been reformatted into mom mode, my mind now jumps to new interpretations:
The story is an indictment of corporations preying on new parents’ fears and ignorance so they buy more baby things than possibly needed.
Indeed, baby clothing sizing is crazy. Who sizes humans by age?
The story is a hilarious commentary on the myriad useless baby objects— babies don’t need shoes because they can’t walk.
The story shows the futility of dressing rolling babies in clothes that are not well designed for easy on/off.
The story is a celebration of living in a tropical paradise because Hawaiian babies don’t need shoes, or most clothing.
The story shows overeager purchasing by new moms who order clothes that take months to arrive from off island and the baby grows out of it long before wearing it.
At one of our first social gatherings after giving birth, someone asked, “How’s motherhood?”
I haltingly answered, “I’m… not… very… sleep… full.”
Sleep deprivation is brain damage!
Nevertheless, even when I was at my most sleep deprived and averaging 5 hours a day fragmented into 2 hour chunks, instead of sleeping while my baby slept, I’d zoom up on the baby monitor to see if he was still breathing. Babyvision was my favorite tv show— we’d put his video feed up on the TV to watch him fling himself around in his sleep.
My husband would implore me to sleep, but it was hard to not watch the baby. Oscillating between awe and anxiety, I’d stare at how beautiful he was.
“The camera got unplugged. Should we go in his room to fix it?”
“No, just go to sleep. If he’s dead, he’s dead!”
As soon as I appreciate something about my baby, the next moment I scare myself because what if he loses it? He’s so cute— but what if he gets disfigured by some horrible accident?! He laughs so easily— but what if he gets traumatized by something bad?! He’s so sweet and smiley— but what if he gets taken advantage of by some predator?! Staying sane is an exercise in non-attachment.
When I’m so exhausted and angry and tell my husband, “Let’s send him to boarding school,” I just take another hit of breastfeeding MDMA and I’m back to “I’m going to home school him.”
Now it makes sense why I watched Dune repeatedly in the week before giving birth— the fantasy of psychedelic spice being the most powerful substance in the universe that lets humans bend space time appealed to me because my consciousness intuited the parallels to the altered state of motherhood. The spice agony of breastfeeding has transformed my body and mind beyond baseline humanity. Motherhood’s prescience, ancestral memory, and heightened awareness gave me the power to form the future of our species and hence our universe! And the only costs are: I fall into a spice trance whenever I inhale too much of my baby; I must maintain strict water discipline when it comes to my milk, sleep, emotions, and other reserves lest I die in the desert; and the spice addiction to my baby sandworm and never being able to return to paradise…
Anyway, for my first mother’s day, I’m celebrating how awesome I am! I’ve only bumped his head against stuff twice (that I’m aware of). I change his diaper with superhuman efficiency, pulling wipes out in advance so they don’t get tangled in the dispenser, positioning his new diaper underneath the old one so there aren’t leaks, and all my supermom techniques. I can get him to sleep or stop crying with a single boob. He literally sucks my blood in the form of breastmilk and is so addicted to it he sometimes can’t sleep without it. I can hear his cry even if I’m dead asleep several rooms away and I stagger up no matter what like an aging prizefighter. I buy all the crazy mom stuff I see ads for. I excel at dressing my entire family in matching outfits. I finally mastered babywearing, my version of the Fremen stillsuit. And I have a lot of baby shoes he’s never worn if you want them. Happy mother’s day!
When they flung him onto my chest, he flopped like a silent swamp creature, dripping with yellow goop. Gaping and groping, staring with crazy eyes, toes flexing far apart like monkey hands, he didn’t resemble anyone I knew. As I gazed into the uncanny valley of this newborn baby, I lay frozen in horror.
Amit said, “Look at him move; he’s like a robot. Maybe he’s jerky because he’s moving through air instead of liquid for the first time.” They took him into the corner to be suctioned and poked and processed. He let out his first sound, a wail.
“Don’t look over there,” Amit said. Turning away from the cluster of nurses with their tubes, I glanced down where a doctor was blithely stitching me up while chatting with another doctor. “Don’t look down there either,” Amit said. “Look at me. How do you feel?”
“Weirded out. Relieved it’s over.” I thought the baby was gross, but I didn’t want to say that in front of all these women who probably thought he was adorable. “Do you feel love at first sight for this baby?”
We both shook our heads no.
All in all, labor lasted 16 hours. I hadn’t slept in more than 24 hours, so I took a nap. Upon waking maybe an hour later, my first words were, “My vag is on fire.”
When we settled into our hospital room, the baby was in another room under a heating lamp. Amit said, “I was looking at him through the window laying in his box. No one was paying attention to him and he’s all alone. I feel sorry for him. He’s too small to be alive.”
I felt a surge of love for Amit’s compassion and soft heartedness. “Aw, you’re so caring. He still doesn’t feel like he’s ours.”
“I hope he’ll be happy.”
Amit’s helpless pity for this creature triggered my pity too. The feeling was familiar, like my pity for cats and dogs and most animals. I didn’t know it then, but this pity quickly segued into love.
We hired a confinement nanny “yue sau” to live with us and take care of everything for up to the first 26 days. She cooked, cleaned, and mainly kept the baby in her room, only bringing him out for me to breastfeed. She promised to take care of everything, but I found I didn’t want her to. She kept wanting me to sleep, but I often couldn’t. At the hospital, I only slept 2 hours a night because of all the interruptions, but at home I still couldn’t sleep. Maybe I was still amped up on hormones.
I wanted to know everything about the baby. My modus operandi was the same as how I cared for my cat— keeping notes on her ailments and patterns, constantly inspecting her for changes, continuously testing new theories in hopes of understanding her better. Similarly, I wanted to change his diaper so I could see all his poops so I knew their colors and textures to discern how he was digesting what we’d fed him 2 hours prior, I wanted to inspect every fleeting rash and groom the gunk in all his folds and pry open his fingers to get the lint he’s clutching, I wanted to learn all his noises and signals so I could anticipate his needs before he felt discomfort.
Because of the connection between my breasts and his stomach, I knew he was awake and went to feed him in the middle of the night before he made a peep. After the second day of me constantly knocking to check on him, the nanny put a pillow on the floor of her room as a doorstop to keep the door open enough for me to stick my head in to watch him breathe.
After 6 days, she said, “Maybe I should go home early. You don’t need me. You’re strong, and you delivered vaginally. Most of my customers don’t leave the bed for 10 days, but you went out walking and shopping today. The baby’s also particularly sweet and well behaved. It must be because he came 2 weeks late so he’s actually older.”
Although sending the nanny home early was what my husband and I had been thinking because the nanny was expensive, that night I burst into tears. “She’s supposed to want to take care of me but I’m too annoying. She wants to take care of the baby, not me.”
My husband got the nanny. “Nancy’s crying because she thinks you hate her.”
“I don’t hate you!” the nanny said. “Don’t cry or it’ll poison your milk. I’m thinking of you as my daughter because I don’t have a daughter. I’m too expensive for what you have me doing. Usually the grandparents pay for me. Of course I like you. Anyone who’s vegetarian is a good person.”
She eventually convinced me that it was purely a cost calculation she’d been making on our behalf. That night, we moved the crib into our room to do a trial run of what would happen if she left.
At 4am, Amit found me crying and desperately asking chatgpt what to do about milk blisters that had appeared on my nipples after my pump had been adjusted to the wrong setting. “This is the nanny’s fault. She insisted I had to go on a higher suction but now I have milk blisters! And it made almost no milk whereas I was doing great on the lower setting so now I have to stay awake to breastfeed even though it hurts. She sucks! And I hate breastfeeding. Why am I doing this? My clogged ducts hurt and I’m scared of getting an infection. On reddit, this woman had a huge abscess inside her boob that had to get drained. The lactation consultant is an idiot and wants me to wake up every hour to feed him. She didn’t even ask me any questions about my goals or anything. I hate her. Why am I hurting my body? Everyone else is on formula!”
At around 5am, the nanny woke up and came out. Seeing my sleepless, tearstained face, she said, “Give me the baby. Get some rest.”
Amit said, “This was a successful trial. Now we know what could happen if we have her leave.” We moved the crib back into the nanny’s room.
A week later, I had throbbing pain in my arms and hands from holding the baby for breastfeeding 12 hours a day. I had the special breastfeeding pillows but the internet said it was the relaxin hormones deforming my joints. I could barely move. Amit and the nanny had to dock the baby’s mouth and the breast pump onto my boobs while I sat in pain, ice packed around both arms and hands. When Amit turned on the pump, the default setting was the highest suction possible and I gasped in pain. Trying to put the flange on my nipple, the nanny spilled breast milk over me and the couch, causing me to yelp and exclaim, “You put it on upside down!” Ignoring my pain, the baby guzzled away at the other breast.
Later that night, I burst into tears again. “I peed myself heading to the bathroom and was struggling to change my ice packed, blood soaked underwear when the baby started crying. I couldn’t even move my arms to put on new underwear and had to go get the nanny without underwear. She’d seen my boobs before but not my vag. I hate this! What if I’m incontinent forever? What if I have tendonitis and carpal tunnel and arthritis and swelling and sciatica forever? My face and feet are so swollen. I can’t even sleep because of the pain radiating everywhere. What if I can’t use my hands and arms and have to learn to be like that Olympics archer who shoots with her feet? Why am I hurting my body?”
Breastfeeding was so much harder than pregnancy or labor. Many times, I wanted to quit, but I’d decided to breastfeed till 6 weeks because that’s when people said it normalized, so I kept suffering through it. I could always quit then. This was all temporary. This was a universal human experience that I needed to endure if only to build character and empathy for other moms. How did everyone else do this? Did everyone really do this? I spent sleepless days and nights icing, heating, and massaging my breasts, icing my hands and arms, and researching newborns and breastfeeding.
Just like with pregnancy, I tried many tactics and theories for breastfeeding. Just like with pregnancy, things improved due to time passing. He changed and grew every day. At 2 weeks postpartum, we moved the crib back into our room to do another trial. This time, I took care of the baby through the night by myself without incident and wrote up a checklist for nighttime, general instructions that I translated into Chinese for the nanny, and notes on my key learnings. After a few days of this, the nanny said she was going to look for flights to go home.
I got the urge to be with other moms and babies. I went from knowing almost nothing about babies and breastfeeding to reading and watching everything I could find, but I still only had experience with my baby. I wanted to breastfeed another baby to gain context for what they were like. I texted other moms asking for advice. “You’ve changed,” my friend said. “When we FaceTimed I used to angle the camera away from my kid and avoid mentioning him because I thought it’d make you mad, but now you want to talk to him and you’re showing him to your husband.” Having a baby has unlocked the part of my brain that used to be devoted to animals. If you want to talk about babies, ping me.
He seems like the archetypal baby, doing things that probably all newborns do, but that I’m seeing for the first time: his squeaky hiccups, his tragic frown mask, his instant placid calm when he’s soothed, his inchworm-like arches and faceplants, his blind motorboat mouth, his unproductive kicks and beating fists as I’m trying to give him what he wants, his flapping hands when he’s relaxed, his fingernails pricking my chest, his sudden fling backwards when he’s had enough, his hands mashing his face as he grins with his eyes closed, his beautiful smile, his creepy laugh as he sleeps, his smears of bright orange or mustard poop that smell like fresh bread (apparently normal), his glowing skin with angry rashes that come and go in hours and days, how intently he feasts like it’s his job, which it is… So many things. I feel awe when I find his tiny, perfectly curled eyelash on my chest. Everything he does makes me laugh. His cries are so cartoonish with his quivering chin, pouting frown, vibrating tongue, and toothless mouth. His butt really is insanely soft. He’s like what all babies are like, and yet it seems freshly delightful. It’s like how all cats are similar and I can love them all, but I especially know and love the random one that’s mine.
Breastfeeding’s release of oxytocin is like a partial dose of MDMA every 2-3 hours every day. Like with MDMA, as soon as each session starts, I feel insanely thirsty, my individual teeth clicking dryly in my mouth. After a few days of this, I was obsessed with my baby. After a week, I felt universal love for all humans. “You’re ooey gooey now,” Amit said. “You love all babies, and anyone who has ever been a baby. Don’t forget, you made me promise to prioritize us above the baby. You vowed you’d love us first, then our dog, and babies last.” But the hormones were changing me.
I saw a homeless addict and cried. This person had probably been treasured by their mother. And even if not, someone had cared about them enough to keep them alive as a helpless newborn that needed feeding every 2 hours for months. Attention had gone into this person, and now this was their life. What if this happened to my boy? There would be nothing I could do to fight the world and its suffering and my kid’s choices. I could only love him and let the heartbreak of existence wash over me without drowning in it.
A video of kids killed in a war zone made me sob. Eyes closed, they looked just like my kid when he slept. I let myself feel the heartbreak of their pain, feeling the cuts on their bodies slice through my heart. I felt how we’re all connected, and that as long as there’s indifference, ignorance, scarcity, blame, and danger in the world, my child wouldn’t be safe. I wanted to protect him so the world could never hurt him, but I saw the futility of it, because cruelty, ignorance, and violence are inside each of us, born from the same womb as love, curiosity, and drive. All I want is for my child to be happy, but I can’t control that. I can only love him, and let my heart break again and again as long as the world exists with us in it. My child, I already weep for your inevitable hurts, but my heartbreak deepens my awe that you or any of us are alive.
[Note: Going forward, I’m trying out moving some of my writing to nhua.substack.com. If you’d like a code for a free subscription, LMK. ]
Before my western wedding ceremony, I kept tearing up thinking about what I wanted to say for my vows as the make-up artist was applying things to my face. Every few minutes, she’d stop to blot my tears. I warned, “I’m going to be crying for the next few hours.” I wept thinking about how much Amit and I loved each other and how lucky I was to be marrying him. All my prior promises and contracts had been about protecting me for when the other person inevitably broke my trust, but this time it was different.
On our first date, I was scared. I’d been assaulted before and hadn’t fully felt it, so part of me really thought he might attack me while I was on his Kauai turf, alone with him without anyone I knew. I made him promise not to touch me unless I said it was ok. After a hike, when he held out his hand for a high five, I felt a stab of fear. “He’s trying to push my boundaries and expects me to have sex with him because I came all this way for our date!” But then seeing how nice he was to everyone, I realized that he wasn’t at all like the person who’d hurt me in the past, and I wasn’t the person I was then either and could trust myself to protect myself more. I didn’t have to be scared of him or extract this no-touch promise to create the illusion of safety. I was safe with him, at least physically.
Years later, after Amit proposed and was at peak happiness with me, I told him that if he ever cheated on me, I wanted all his money. Amit is a very frugal person and surviving leukemia has made him even more scared of getting sick and not being able to work again. Thus the prospect of losing all his money is a visceral, traumatic fear that I wanted to use to my advantage. If he ever left me, I’d be devastated, so I figured the very least that I could do in return would be to threaten to render him penniless. Amit said, “I’ll never cheat on you, so sure.” Then I think he got nervous because when he went surfing, he told Doug, “Nancy told her lawyer that if I ever cheat on her, she gets every last cent.” Doug said, “That’s not legally enforceable so it doesn’t matter.” I seethed, “Doug, you’re supposed to be MY friend!” But as marriage approached, I found I didn’t even care anymore.
I saw how I was trying to use this agreement to avoid pain, but heartbreak is part of loving someone. Risking pain is part of love, and I wanted to take the risk because it was worth it.
I never knew that it was possible to trust someone more than I trusted myself. What would that even mean? But Amit is such a good person and in many ways sees me better than I do. Anyone who knows him knows we can trust him to make the best choice not just for him but for everyone. He cares about everyone else and thinks about them before doing anything.
I love and admire him so much and feel lucky to get to love him and risk heartbreak with him. The best vow I can imagine is devoting myself to loving him more every day.
Dmitri said he teared up during my vows and Gemma told him, “This is how her weekly Apptimize all-hands were too.” I miss giving speeches and living with my friends and seeing them every day for hours. The wish that kept recurring for me while seeing everyone during our wedding was that I wanted to deepen my love with everyone. Even though I don’t live near many of my friends anymore, I hold each of them close to my heart. I have pictures of you guys around my house that I see every day and I can’t wait to hang out together again.
Our weddings, in particular my outfits
We first got married legally last year with only our parents present because I wanted to lock Amit down before we started trying to have a kid. We hadn’t set a date for a formal ceremony and I feared Amit would die or leave me before we could actually wed and I’d be left a single mom who no one would ever want to marry so I’d have to eschew romance and pretend momming was my #1 joy all along.
An unforeseen side effect of this fear driven choice is that when Lisa’s NYT reporter friend offered to write about our wedding in the NYT vows section, we couldn’t do it because we were technically already married and that violates one of their rules. I wondered, “Should we get our marriage annulled?”
Honestly, if I thought that that would’ve worked, I would’ve done it to get the article, but I didn’t get the sense that the NYT would like that we were playing fast and loose with the sanctity of marriage. The NYT supposedly sends their own photographer to your legal wedding and now this was impossible, so we were sad and I felt bad that my fear had caused us to lose out on this status symbol, especially because our love story is riveting, our wedding was going to be cinematically unique and fun, and I love status.
Amit’s parents planned an Indian wedding for their friends. I think they spent 5x more on this wedding than we ended up spending on the Western one. I knew almost no one there and expected the whole thing to just be a random sequence of events involving fire rituals that held no meaning for me, but to my surprise I did feel more connected to Amit’s family afterwards. Why the change when we were already legally wed? I guess it’s a primal human thing where we need group ceremonies to digest things.
About 2 months later, I couldn’t even sleep because I felt like shit. After several covid tests, I learned I’d gotten pregnant a week after the Indian wedding. We wondered, should we go ahead with having a Western wedding next year as planned, or should we wait until after I was done being pregnant? After some debate, we decided to have a tiny wedding in a few months. This didn’t give our guests a ton of time, but almost everyone said yes and RSVP-ed their kids so that we were actually kind of oversubscribed. Having lost 10 pounds in 1 month due to nausea, I felt weak and sick and worried I’d barf at the wedding. We kept wondering if we should cancel, but decided to push forward. I consoled myself that one day we could still have a California wedding as originally envisioned. Almost all the planning went to Amit. I did secure the locations and accompanying permits, but the food and everything else was Amit. Thankfully, many of our friends helped tremendously and organized and volunteered everything from finding our DJ, making our playlists, to making dessert.
Just in time, I started feeling better a few weeks before the wedding and sprang into action by fretting about what I was going to wear. I couldn’t sleep because of both pregnancy insomnia and anxiously scouring the internet for ideas. Love is Blind always has a wedding dress scene so I wondered, “Should I go shopping in an actual wedding dress store?” This hadn’t occurred to me before seeing the show because I never leave my house and do my shopping online, but I didn’t want to deprive myself of what seemed to be a rite of passage. Would I weep when I saw the dress like these women did? That seemed unlikely, but I wanted to try.
When setting the appointment, I told them my criteria: I was 5 months pregnant so I didn’t want anything pressing down on my stomach, and I wanted something unique and channeled the wholistic power of the divine feminine versus just the “princess” or “lover” archetypes. In retrospect, it should’ve been obvious that my art direction would make no sense to the average wedding dress boutique, or probably any normal person. Arriving at the store, I immediately knew they had zero dresses that held allure for me. All the dresses looked exactly like every wedding dress I’d ever seen, and their solution to the pregnancy thing was just to ignore it because the sample dresses kind of fit me the same anyway— huge with clamps holding everything together. Plus, at 5 months pregnant, I still weighed less than when I’d gotten pregnant because I couldn’t keep food down. Nevertheless, I enjoyed validating that I looked great in any dress template from mermaid to princess even though I felt like a mess.
Having failed at human interactions for wedding dress shopping, I ended up describing my dress vision (“futuristic sculptural, beautiful, strange, next-level-what-is-she-wearing-crazy”) to Midjourney, who generated tons of designs, and I made Amit rank the dresses I found that accompanied each design. I teased him, “You always choose the most expensive dresses.” Alarmed, he said, “I change my ranking— you should go with the cheapest one!” I wished that I had a woman to discuss avant garde fashion with, but I don’t think my girlfriends have an interest in looking weird, whereas Amit is a designer and encourages me, “You should go weirder.” Amit is my Kanye. I love looking bizarre and telling a story with my clothes. I prioritize storytelling elements above being beautiful because I know I’m always beautiful.
With the wedding 2 weeks away, I had very little time and finally ordered my dress online 8 days before the ceremony. It arrived 4 days before the ceremony and is one size fits all, so all I had to do then was worry about how I was going to style it. When we finally saw the dress in person, Amit said, “You’re like a sculpture. Where even are your arms?” so I knew it was the right choice.
Our vision for our wedding was to create a romantic adventure vacation for everyone. Our friends helped organize group activities for everyone, so people went hiking, surfing, and hung out at the beach. I hoped to seduce people into coming to visit us more or, better yet, move to live near us. For weeks, one friend foraged for rare tropical fruits that are impossible to buy, stashing them in refrigerators around the island so that he could present a never before seen fruit spread and have people taste previously unheard of exotic fruits. Another friend made custom ice cream made of all local ingredients. I felt FOMO at my own wedding because the group chat was rowdy with everyone bus-ing around together and singing drunkenly. People formed friendships and now hang out without me!
Although we’d wed twice before, I felt even more married after this wedding. I felt so full of love and gratitude for everyone that I cried constantly and didn’t want anyone to leave. I vow that we will do it again with ever more friends and families!
Getting my veil cut: I couldn’t find a veil I liked so I ordered a really long one on Amazon. It arrived the day of the ceremony and my hairdresser cut it to the shape I wanted. She kept saying, “You want shorter? You sure?”I cried so much during the ceremony that I washed all my makeup off immediately after and undid my hair. Amit kept rushing me about how the sun was setting so I had no time to do anything. But crying actually makes me look good unless I’m wildly sobbing, so that ended up being fine.Reception: My design philosophy for this reception look was “the maiden.” Lisa said weddings are “the death of the maiden” and I wanted to give my maiden’s innocence and youth a time to shine before she got defiled and stepped aside for the lover, mother, and wife archetypes (don’t worry, all our personas are always all there).I chose a Melitta Baumeister dress for the ceremony because I wanted to wear a work of art. For me, the look channels the primordial goddess who creates and destroys all life, powerful and mysterious.The direction I gave for the “avant garde crown” that I wanted to “elevate the look” is that the dress has “egg/ universe/ everything energy with an all being god persona… Feminine energy is a force field that contains everything.” The lei artist asked, “Is your dress still red?” and I was like, “O, now it’s ivory,” but it was just a few days before the ceremony so we stuck with red for the crown and it, like everything, all worked out well anyway.We had 20ish speeches during dinner and I wept the whole time.
After Amit proposed to me in January, the marriage visioning process has led me to rejoin the sisterhood of women. How did I leave the sisterhood in the first place? What did it mean to rejoin the sisterhood? Read on…
It all started with me wondering about my wedding gown. After 6+ years of RTR (get 40% off), I’ve long since normalized wearing bizarre outfits in my daily life, so I wanted my wedding gown to be next level “what is she wearing” crazy. I described the look as “futuristic sculptural,” wanted it to be something breathtakingly beautiful and strange that no one had ever seen before while also costing as little as possible, etc. I texted my middle school friends who I barely talk to anymore and learned that they know a LOT about style theory. I inhaled books based on the concepts they alluded to on color theory, bone structure, style essence…
My friend Kat coached and challenged me to talk with my vagina and I channeled a new persona: Nancy Hua Kardashian. Here’s what she had to say to my conscious leadership forum through my vag:
Elated by my vision, I wrote in a chat group:
i want to have a bridal shower where a pro stylist, makeup artist, and colorist come to analyze us so we can take our learnings into the future. i love experimenting on myself and self diagnosing from articles and youtube but i've never had a pro. i think it'd be fun to learn together so we can compare how to make someone else's look work for us and why it needs adjustment, etc… nancy kardashian's purpose is to inspire and teach people how to be more beautiful than they could've imagined, and she's a real ally to me when i thnk about the purpose of my wedding celebrations. how can i bring learning about love and beauty into my events so all my loved ones can connect and grow together??
I wasn’t sure what to call this event because my experience of the normal sequence of events is that we set a wedding date, I anoint a maid of honor who plans a bachelorette party (and maybe also a bridal shower?), then we fly somewhere and get drunk. I don’t drink, we hadn’t set the wedding date (and due to all the scope creep, we still haven’t set a date. Amit is the one with the big, unique wedding vision— none of the boring parts, so much love and togetherness and fun, totally on brand for our (especially Amit’s) love of delighting people with innovative, new experiences— so while we were forming our wedding vision, I pushed forward with bachelorette weekend planning), choosing a maid of honor stressed me out (and indeed, choosing who to invite to this bachelorette weekend was also stressful and caused women to sob, including of course myself), and submitting to someone else’s plans also stressed me out because I had my own unique vision of what I wanted to do, which was not something I could hand off because, like many of my innovative notions, the idea was still forming as I was conceiving and planning it— you can’t outsource the MVP.
In deciding who to invite, I felt fear. A middle school friend who had seemed so into the idea didn’t want to come. Why? Did she actually hate me? I was offering this irresistible invitation that I was so sure she’d like but she’s saying she doesn’t have a free weekend for months? What’d I expect— I barely talked with or saw her anymore. Since I’d entered the workforce, all my friends were guys because HFT and startup founding are male dominated— I didn’t have enough female friends. I cried and hated her, and cried and slowly let go of all my blame, and cried and told her how I felt. I cry a lot now that I’m more in touch with my feelings and liberating my feminine energy, etc.
I had so many women I wanted to invite but didn’t for various reasons that caused sobbing. I was scared to invite women I liked “too much” (ie. more than I think was warranted based on our hang out time, or more than I thought they liked me) because I didn’t want them to think I was a friendless loser. I was scared to invite friends who I thought would say no because I was scared of rejection. I was scared to invite friends who wouldn’t dote on me as much as I wanted.
It’s weird how this was the event that finally made me see how much I’m scared of rejection. I’m not scared of rejection at all in business. Who cares? It’s just business. You pitch a bunch of VC’s/ buyers and the right ones say yes and the right ones say no. But with my friends, rejection hurts. I saw how I do this dance where I make sure I like the person at most as much as they like me, because I don’t want to feel the pain if they reject me.
This is the video I sent to the women coming to my bachelorette weekend:
I spent hours choosing the vendors and shed many tears. Amit kept crowing, “I love how stressed you are about this!” I think he actually trusted me more in planning our wedding after seeing me plan this weekend, because previously I’d poo-pooed the difficulty in planning the wedding events he wanted and hadn’t empathized with his stress over it. I learned that minimizing/ arguing about someone else’s stress (ie. “Who cares? They’ll figure out how to get there”) might make them more stressed; people need empathy and acceptance first (ie. “You’re right, we do need to think about that”).
I messaged a friend:
in organizing this wkd, i see how i was getting really serious bc i wanted everyone to have an amazing time and this was ironically making it really un-fun for me
When the weekend finally came, Scarlet surprised me with amazing decorations and custom bags, schedules, and decorations that she designed herself. Everyone was really nice to me and seemed happy.
In contrast, I was scared it was going to be bad. People flew in for this! My fears of rejection/ abandonment were harder to ignore than usual. Part of me was scared that, even though no one in this group had rejected me yet, if the weekend didn’t go well, then they’d reject me. Part of me was always looking for rejection from people I loved.
During the ceremony with Diana, a middle school friend brought up my parents and how my mom had left me, and Diana sagely nodded. My themes of abandonment kept coming up again and again. Was it so obvious to everyone? I bet most people would be surprised I felt this much fear when I seem so bold and outgoing. But I’m only fearless when I don’t care about the person yet. Rejection only hurts when I need you, that’s why needing someone is scary.
Driving to the styling session at Danielle’s boutique with Erin Mathis, Lynn was talking about her daughter realizing that in some ways being a boy was “better.” This is how I felt from age ~15 to ~35. It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve gone through the final arc of this supercycle of my heroine’s journey, going from judging, fearing, and denying my feminine side (enshrining my Steve Jobs persona and having contempt for my Snow White) to embracing her unique gifts.
The heroine’s journey is what my movie and other creative projects show. I learned I needed to grow both my masculine and feminine sides to trust myself fully and feel more alive.
Hero’s Journey
Heroine’s Journey
My growth arc
I’m strong and independent. I can do it myself. I need to prove I’m as good as/ better than X.
I know I can do it myself, AND I need others. I’m enough. I don’t need to compete or adopt less than/ better than values. The feminine and masculine need each other. The masculine grows lonely, senseless, and lifeless without the feminine, while the feminine is chaotic and confused without the masculine.
How I see life
What’s “heroine’s journey?” Hero’s journey is all there is and it rocks.
When you’ve achieved everything you’ve wanted and realize it’s not enough, then you see you’re in the heroine’s journey (both genders can go on both journeys)— the hero’s journey was a side quest.
Hero vs Heroine’s Journey
I left the sisterhood of women when I entered the work world because the fields I was in were very masculine (I was the only woman in some of my MIT math classes, I was the only woman trader in the office for years, I was the CEO of a mobile SDK B2B SaaS startup and only met 1 other woman founder in any of those categories for years). The universally accepted approach to my work rewarded my Steve Jobs and other male personas, whereas my feminine personas like Snow White were more of a liability, especially because they weren’t mature yet, and I hadn’t known this or made any effort in helping Snow White grow up from a girl to a queen. In contrast, I’d put in a lot of effort in growing up my Steve Jobs, making him more and more formidable, smart, and ruthless. I loved my masculine side for his strength and only saw my feminine side’s weakness, so I pushed her aside. Until wedding planning invited her out, and I was learning about all her gifts.
I saw how the masculine side longed for and needed my feminine side, but I needed to help her grow up before I could trust her. I saw how I’d never fully trust myself if I never trusted my feminine side, regardless of how strong my masculine side was. No matter how rich and smart and hot I was, or how many martial arts I did, I needed to invest in the side of me that was sensitive, delicate, and loving to live a life that was meaningful to me. My feminine energy had always been there, but I didn’t appreciate her and I ignored her desires (she’s so unproductive and needy). Now I saw how she was a powerful part of me, how impossible and painful it was to deny her, and how she got everything she wanted so easily. My masculine side thinks it needs to grind away and toil and suffer because that’s how he thinks he’s gotten everything we have, but my feminine side sees how the best things we got were effortless, just us being ourselves and trusting the universe. My feminine side charmed and enraptured Amit, my friends, and everyone who’s believed in me, all through unlikely circumstances that my masculine side couldn’t have conceived.
Anyway, the style session was awesome. I’d never been to Danielle’s boutique before and it was amazing. I loved getting styled and changed my outfit plan for the photo shoot. I finally understood what stylists even do and why women packed so many things. This trip was the first in a 6+ week travel sequence for me that spanned many time and weather zones and my masculine side had packed minimally, but I saw how my feminine side needed variety due to the shapes and colors in my face (assuming I wanted my clothes to draw the viewer’s eyes to my face). Afterwards, Sonali said it was a relief that the style session was good because otherwise I would’ve been upset all weekend. Sonali’s smart.
We had a makeup class with Soyi Makeup and everyone collectively gasped when Kelly showed how to do eyebrows properly and transformed my face. Apparently everyone had been applying blush wrong, except Lisa who always knows everything.
Deena found a book Amit wrote at the Airbnb we were staying at and it turned out the host had a fine art tableau vivant photograph featuring Amit in her house! How lucky am I, marrying someone so famous!
Then Anna-Alexia came to do photography. I chose Anna because the women in the group are used to being photographed for Forbes and the NYT and stuff, and we know how to be cute/ hot for instagram, but Anna is another level: her portraits pushed our edges beyond professional/ pretty to: what if we’re works of art?
The unedited outtakes:
Nancy Hua’s bridal weekend friendsNancy Hua liberating the femine
The fine art portrait:
Nancy Hua art portrait by Anna-Alexia BasileNancy Hua bridal weekend deepening feminine energy
Anyway, this is just the start of my amazing events, some related to our wedding, others mostly not. I’m leveling up as a host and reviews have been effusive. I’m holding more events as Diana’s manifestation ceremony revealed that I want to go out into my community and have a unique opportunity to craft it to my vision. Here’s a hint of what we’re planning for our wedding, from Nancy Hua Kardashian speaking from my V, to my conscious leadership forum:
