Tonight, I reunited with a former colleague who experienced a lot of the same sexism and discrimination at my last company as I did. It was so refreshing to have drinks with a former colleague who felt exactly the way I did about the last place I worked, and as bad as it sounds, had it even worse than I did day to day. She experienced near daily sexism from her direct manager, and HR did pretty much nothing to address it. It was just accepted as the “way things were there.” And when you have a company where people hire their wives and best friends to report directly to them, who’s going to stop them from their bullshit and delusion?

It’s sad that companies still exist like this, even in the 21st century, even when companies as high profile as Uber are having their very public reputations unravel. But who cares about smaller no-name startups like my last company that are netting probably no revenue?

Toward the end of the work day, the sky literally broke. What was a clear blue sky suddenly turned dark grey, and the lightning and thunder came. The tumultuous rain soon followed. And just my luck, I had no rain coat, no rain boots, no umbrella. I was lucky enough to have a nice colleague who walked me to the subway station with his umbrella. I finally can say I have good-hearted colleagues.

When I got out of the train at 83rd street, it was pouring, and I had to walk in the pouring rain for four blocks and arrived home completely drenched.

I somehow managed to bring a bunch of bubble wrap home from the office during the office move to re-purpose for our apartment move. I slowly started wrapping up fragile items in the apartment and taping them up, and suddenly out of nowhere, I thought about Ed. He’s only ever seen my Elmhurst apartment while I’ve been in New York, and he never saw this apartment. If he ever saw this apartment, he’d be appalled at how small it is. And if he saw my new and upcoming apartment building, he’d probably marvel at how nice it was and ask me how much we would be paying for it. And suddenly I found myself feeling so miserable, lamenting my dead brother and how he’d never see me move into a nice apartment near Columbus Circle and never visit this new and shiny apartment his little sister would be moving into.

We’re slowly approaching his death anniversary, so I guess it makes sense that I’d be thinking about him more and feeling sad at his absence in my life. There’s so much my brother missed out on. He never truly got to experience the joys of adulthood, of truly having ownership over anything, of truly trusting another human being the way I trust Chris, or even the way I trust my closest friends. But these are the moments I think of him most — when I’m at new and pivotal stages of life, whether it’s a new job or a new home, where I think… why can’t I share it with my Ed? Why can’t he be here to be happy for me? Or, more significantly, why can’t he be here to share these types of news with me about his life? He never moved out of the wretched house we grew up in. And that infuriates me.

This year, he would be turning 38. That fucking hurts.

Whenever I chat with my friend who is in a neurology residency program, I always feel a little guilty talking about my life — everything from the trips I am taking to the flexibility of my job to the fact that I can work remotely (doctors… can’t really work remotely). But today, I actually got angry at her industry when she told me that at the current hospital where she’s working, there is no recognized family leave, maternal or paternal. When the doctors in the hospital have a baby, they have to take time out of their sick leave (which is only about a week and a half) and their vacation time (that’s only two-ish weeks). Then, they have to make up that time later. 

“What the fuck?” I just blurted it out, not that my friend minds my occasional potty mouth, but I was just in total shock and disgust. I know at this point, I really should not be surprised at all; the U.S. is the only industrialized country in the world to have zero legal paid family leave (wasn’t it only Papua New Guinea that didn’t… and it’s sad to even put ourselves in the same category as them?) and to not recognize that new parents should be with their children. But it hurts even more to think that those in the medical profession, people who are devoting their lives to the health and wellness of others, can’t even take care of themselves and their new family members, and their lives are discounted.

It’s no wonder doctors are committing suicide and burning out at faster rates than the average person. Their lives and even their babies’ lives don’t matter to their employers.

I don’t think any of us will ever fully understand our parents. Regardless of generation, what year you were born, what life experiences you may or may not have had, I think that because of the hierarchical relationship between parent and child, a child will never fully know her parent, and at the same time, a parent will never fully know her child. I mean, does anyone ever fully know anyone, anyway?

I came back to my parents’ house tonight for the first time during this trip back. The last time I was here was at the end of January. And when I went into my room, I noticed that the framed childhood photo of my brother and me was no longer on the shelf where it’s been sitting ever since I was a toddler; it was missing. That’s one of my favorite photos of us together. Where was it? Who moved it, and why?

So, my dad moved it. In fact, he moved it and cannot seem to remember where he put it. “I was just clearing away things and getting rid of junk, and so I may have taken it down,” he said nonchalantly. “I’ll try to see if I can remember where I put it, but I may have thrown it out.”

Junk? Childhood photos of your own children…. are junk that need to be cleared away and even thrown out?

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Tonight, we went to see Ronny Chieng, one of the Daily Show correspondents, perform some test material, and his opening act was Adam Lowitt, who is also a Daily Show contributor (I think his official title is “Senior Jewish Correspondent”). If anyone has any doubt that “white privilege” exists and is real, they should have heard what he had to say tonight.

He talked about how he and his wife were driving with their infant baby in the backseat in Jersey, and he was speeding because that’s just what he does. A police siren goes off, and he realizes it’s for him. So he pulls over, and the police officer approaches and starts speaking in a loud voice. Without even realizing why this would be a bad idea, Adam immediately says “Shhhhhh!! (looks to the back of the car) The baby is sleeping.” And not only does the police officer lower his voice in response, he lets Adam and his wife go simply on a warning.

Adam admitted it. He said he took advantage of his white privilege then by speaking in such an irreverent way to a police officer without even thinking. If he were a person of color, he never would have done that, and if he did, he probably would not have been treated as well as he was.

If that were Chris driving, or if that were a black or another brown person who tried to “shhhhh” a police officer, what do you think would have happened? I don’t think any person of color would even dream of “shhhh”ing a police officer. In fact, Chris and I have gotten pulled over twice, once for speeding and another time because Chris forgot to turn his headlights on at night. The police officer who pulled us over for the lack of headlights was angrier than angry that Chris didn’t immediately pull over (Chris said he got confused and wasn’t sure it was for him), and then got even more mad when Chris answered one of his questions the wrong way. I always look back on those moments and think, would that police officer have responded the same way if Chris were white?

Sometimes, the world seems like a very large place. That is, until you realize that the people you have met know other people you know and associate with even though they are all from very different places, and then you find out that your friends are sharing scandalous details of the lives of people you interacted with only once or twice.

I recently interviewed with a company that I decided in the end I was not going to be serious about, and the primary hiring manager seemed unusually kind and sensitive. If I had to be a little paranoid about this, I’d even go so far as to say that he may have been interested in me. While all that is flattering, what is not flattering is what I just learned about him through a friend, whose company partners with his. My friend told me that he found out recently through a mutual source that this guy was fired from a previous company for using company dollars to take out over 20 different women on dates, and also was caught sending naked photos of himself to female employees at that company. My friend said to me, “This isn’t the kind of person you want to associate with!” I laughed and said, “Well, it’s clear you don’t want me to associate with him because you’re trying to be my protector.”

Good friends want to protect you from crap. And good friends also want to make sure you know the truth. I told Chris this story, and he responded, “But that is just what happens every day.” He doesn’t think this is scandalous. I guess in some ways, it isn’t because the expensing of personal expenses — it’s very likely true (as I have personally seen from those around me without naming names) that people do this all the time; what ends up mattering in the end is who gets caught. This is the world we live in. Integrity is not a given anymore.

My head has spent the last week being a bit muddled. There have been highs and lows, but mostly conflicting thoughts. And when that tends to happen, Ed tends to show up out of nowhere in his sneaky, subtle ways.

In my dream, he was sitting at the dining room table having a passive aggressive argument about the house with our father. Our father didn’t want to address him directly (which was usual behavior), so he made indirect comments that were obviously meant for Ed. Ed muttered negative things under his breath, which no one could hear or make out other than me. I sat there silently, which was also the norm in my dreams.

Muddled subconscious really means I will just have more conflicting and uneasy dreams with my parents, which inevitably include Ed.

Since I was 11, I’ve been actively reading about mental health, illness, and suicide. It was obviously influenced by my brother’s first suicide attempt and his condition, as I’m quite certain the average 11-year-old doesn’t seek out information like this in his/her free time. Now, as a suicide loss survivor (as I’m told I am labeled now), I still actively read news and publications around mental health and suicide prevention. It seems as though it doesn’t matter whether I am 11 or 31, or whether I am a loss survivor or potentially one day a social worker or mental health educator; we will never fully know “enough” to completely and truly understand the complexities of depression, the desire for suicide, or the ultimate ways to rationally separate the notion of ending suffering from ending life for someone who is in need.

So a few days ago, a TED Talk from November 2016 popped up in my Facebook feed, and it happened to be done by Sue Klebold, the mother of Dylan Klebold, one of the two teenagers who were responsible for the mass murder at Columbine High School in 1999. Her son was deeply depressed, but his depression went completely undetected by both her and her husband, their older son, and the school and its staff. That then begs the question of: how does a suicidal tendency become a homicidal one at the same time? She doesn’t answer the question in her TED talk, as that would be very difficult to answer given the sparse data we have on this, but she does touch on the suffering that can go undetected with even the most careful eyes, and the idea that no matter how loving and attentive you are as a parent, you may never fully know your children at all.

It was only about 15 minutes of presentation, but it was still really hard for me to watch. We forget this when we remember Columbine, but it was a mass murder and a suicide. Two boys took their own lives after killing 13 others. Their parents have to live every day knowing that not only did their sons murder over a dozen people, but their sons also shot themselves dead by choice. I still have moments throughout the day now when I acutely feel the pain of losing my brother to suicide, and it’s been over three and a half years now. I cannot even begin to fathom the pain of losing him and knowing that he could have taken the lives of others, as well.

Isn’t that a scary thought, though, that you could bring human beings into the world who you never ultimately know or understand at all? The thought is so chilling.

That’s kind of how I feel about my parents. Except at least I’m not a mass murderer.