It’s hard to believe that over three years have passed since my Ed committed suicide. Sometimes, I still wake up and wonder if it was all a terrible dream, and then I look up at the photos of him on my wall next to my bed and am crushed, hit by the reality that he really is gone. Some days, life just feels so cruel.

I’ve been participating in the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) Out of the Darkness Walk for the last three years, and somehow I’ve managed to raise just shy of $10,000. It’s a bit surreal to think that I was able to do this on my own, without a team, and just with the sad story of my brother. I’ve oftentimes felt discouraged, even annoyed when less people are donating, fewer people are responding or expressing interest in my fundraising or my cause. But like Tony Robbins says, a lot of our disappointments in life are really just because of us, our own expectations. Maybe we shouldn’t expect so much of others. Maybe if we replaced our “expectations” with “appreciation,” we’d be happier people. And when I heard him say this, I realized how true it was. I shouldn’t expect anyone to donate anything; in fact, why the hell should they care about my loss or my pain? What have I done for them (thinking in the quid pro quo train of thought)? But when they do, I should appreciate it. I do appreciate it. I’ve been surprised so many times in the last three years when colleagues I barely speak to have donated insane three-digit amounts, or when old friends I’m only connected to on Facebook but never speak with anymore contribute donations to my drive. There have been a handful of times when complete strangers, touched by the story I’ve written on my page, have felt compelled to donate something even though they’ve never even met me even once. That feeling of surprise and appreciation has been very overwhelming, sometimes catching me off guard and making me lose my train of thought to just bask in the glow of an unexpected person’s unfounded generosity for me and my little cause.

I try to be optimistic about the future. I hope that the world will be a better place for our future children, the future generations of the world. I want the world to be a more open-minded, progressive, caring, and empathetic place. I think about all the bullying and criticism my brother endured as a young child and then through adulthood, from his misguided classmates to his unprofessional teachers to even our own parents, and I physically feel pain in my body thinking of how insignificant he felt throughout the course of his life to finally decide to put a complete end to it all. I need to have hope, if not for myself, then hope in my brother’s memory to help others. And all the support, whether it’s verbal or monetary, through this drive, has really helped drive my optimism and my desire to continue fundraising and to continue sharing my story. As the delusional Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire once said, “I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers.” Yes, she was delusional living in her own world, but there is some truth in this statement. As human beings, we depend on others being honest and kind to us, even when we are not in the position to do anything to benefit them in return. So many distant people have surprised me in this fundraising journey, and I know I have a lot to be thankful for. I think Ed would agree.

Up until I was 24, I barely saw any of the world. I barely saw any of this country, and if it weren’t for getting accepted to and attending Wellesley, I probably wouldn’t have seen anywhere as much of the East Coast as I had. If I hadn’t gotten a scholarship to study in China for a month in 2006, I probably would have graduated from college without even owning a passport or having left this freaking country.

This isn’t me complaining; I’m just stating what I know to be facts. I was raised in a house that taught me to think (I never did believe this, though) that travel was only for the *super* rich; everyday people like my family and I weren’t suited for travel. But since I first left the country to see just a dot of China, I was certain that I needed to see more of the world. And then, I fell in love with my long-time friend and now husband who had already been privileged to see so much of the world, and now wanted to share his travels with me.

Fast forward six years later, and I’ve been spoiled enough to travel to Australia four times (and a fifth trip is coming this December), Europe five times, and Asia five times. I’ve visited Canada once a year since 2013, and have seen 38 out of 50 U.S. states. I even went to Brazil for the World Cup in 2014, and in Rio, Chris proposed. And now, here I am, in the Worldly-Wise Wellesley secret Facebook group, giving travel advice and recommendations to other Wellesley alums for cities and regions literally all over the world, and even giving my brother-in-law, an obsessed world traveler, travel advice for Asia and even his own home country. I feel like a role reversal has happened in the last few years, and I never really saw that coming. I never thought I’d be the person giving travel advice to other people who consider themselves well traveled or “worldly.” It’s funny how times and circumstances can change.

We had a meeting today where a Twitter rep from one of my accounts came into the office. Before she arrived, I quickly took a look at her LinkedIn profile and noticed that she had Wellesley listed as an undergraduate institution she attended, as well as Barnard/Columbia after it. Hmmm, I wondered. She must have started undergrad at Wellesley, hated it for whatever reason, and then transferred.

At the end of our meeting, I told her I had looked at her LinkedIn and noticed she went to Wellesley, and I also told her I was part of the Class of 2008. She would have been Class of 2011, but she transferred, just as her profile had hinted at. She said the academics at Wellesley were some of the best classes and professors of her life, but socially she just didn’t feel like she fit in. How funny, I responded. That’s how I felt. We’re pretty much the same in that regard. She also said that when she transferred to Barnard/Columbia, the academics were nothing compared to what she had at Wellesley, but she fit in significantly more there socially than at Wellesley — the trade-offs we make in life.

I always wondered what it would have been like if I did transfer after my first two years, but I’m not sure where I would have transferred to. Due to Wellesley’s grade inflation policy that restricted the number of As given in classes that had over a certain number of students, my GPA wasn’t show-stopping by any means, so that wouldn’t have helped my transfer admissions. I also would have looked at it as a failure, something I didn’t see through to the end. My parents never would have supported it and probably would have been outraged and terrorized me about it (what did they support anyway, other than getting a degree?).

It’s comforting to meet other people who feel the same way I do, though, about Wellesley. I always look back at my classes fondly and the discussions we had in class as some of the most challenging and rigorous I’d had in my life. People were never shy in my classes to disagree and argue things out, and not in a hostile, passive aggressive way, but in a smart, educated, “look at every perspective” way. At times, it was so emotionally and mentally draining to be in class. There I was, a naive, narrow-minded, small-world American who had barely left California state before arriving at Wellesley, coming to an institution where for the first time in my entire life, I was meeting women from over 50 different countries, every state in the U.S., who had traveled extensively, lived in multiple countries, and had a far more worldly perspective than what I was exposed to. Just within my first week, I met a woman who was born in the U.S. but raised in Cairo, Egypt, another woman who was Turkish but raised in Greece, and women from Malaysia and Singapore who attended private American high school in Taiwan and spoke with American-accented English (when I was 18, I thought, what language do they speak natively in Malaysia and Singapore? How would I know? I knew so little). In college, I learned about all the other cuisines of China other than Cantonese, met Vietnamese women from all around the U.S. where there were small Vietnamese populations as a result of the Vietnamese refugees from the Vietnam War (how was I supposed to know that there were large Vietnamese populations in Minnesota and Arkansas?!).

I look back on what I learned very fondly, not just academically but about my classmates and the rest of the world. I’m looking forward to learning more about my rep’s experiences and what she thought of another women’s college that’s right here in New York.

I finally started reading a book that’s been on my reading list for a long time called Fortune Cookie Chronicles. The book delves into the history of Chinese food in America, spanning all the way back to the 1850s when Chinese from Toisan (ya, aka Taishan, which is my paternal side’s region of origin) were trying to come to America in herds, looking for gold, riches, and opportunity. The book does a pretty good history lesson when reviewing newspaper articles and magazine publications at the time, denouncing these “strange” looking Chinese people with their even stranger and disgusting food.

Reading the quotes from these old articles in the mid to late 1800s, I couldn’t help but feel a strong sense of anger and disdain for the ignorant mindsets of local, predominantly white people of European descent at the time. They really believed that their boring baked potatoes and pot roasts were the true, civilized sustenance, and anything that had spice or was stir-fried (so novel at the time!) was filthy, made of chopped up rats, or encouraged promiscuity. Today, Chinese food is far more embraced by non-Chinese people, whether it’s for the “authentic” Chinese food I know and am still getting to know (I truly don’t think anyone on this earth, even those who live in China and travel all over China, will ever know ALL there is to know about Chinese food given how ridiculously diverse it is depending on the region you’re in), or for the generic Americanized dishes like General Tso’s chicken or stir-fried beef and broccoli. I still get frustrated when I hear people say that they don’t like Chinese food or Asian food because chances are that they haven’t had the “real thing,” or a true representation of how great the cuisine can be. But then I think, it’s really not all that bad. Ignorance will never fully be eliminated. And it just means I should appreciate people more who do appreciate cuisines that are different to what they grew up with and are used to eating.

It was a rainy, miserable day outside today, so other than seeing a show down in Astor Place early in the evening, Chris and I stayed home most of the day, cooking, cleaning, eating, and watching Tony Robbins speak at the Dream Force conference. I never really knew much about Tony Robbins other than the fact that he was a very successful and wealthy motivational speaker, but today while streaming his talk that happened earlier in the week in San Francisco, I realized why he had been so successful at his job. Despite all the setbacks he’s faced in life, the negligent father, the abusive and drunken mother, the health episodes he’s had, he still keeps going and uses all of his life adversities to motivate his next steps in helping the entire world. He doesn’t have any self pity. He doesn’t have a single fear, he said. And based on the way he delivered his talk and the way he’s lived his life, I actually don’t doubt his sincerity at all.

The strongest people will never have self pity or self loathing for a long period of time. They might mourn the loss of a loved one, be frustrated temporarily by losing a job or having some inconvenient life event happen. But the strongest of the strong will see all these “setbacks” as motivators to do better moving forward, and the best will help others with their knowledge and experience. As sad as it was, I thought about my cousin in Brooklyn a little when watching Tony Robbins speak, thinking of his dysfunctional marriage and his young son celebrating his fourth birthday this afternoon. He will never be strong because all he thinks is “poor me” for every possible reason in the universe. People can only be positively affected by someone like Tony Robbins who are open to change and open to leading happier, more productive lives. Tony Robbins said tonight that most of our disappointments in life could be solved by replacing our “expectations with appreciation,” and I realized how true it was. The more we expect of others, the worse we will be and the more upset we will get because no one in the universe will ever meet *all* of our expectations. But when people in our lives end up doing things that we love that make us happy either for ourselves or for them, if we appreciated it and expressed that appreciation and gratitude more, we’d be so much happier and more fulfilled. I never thought about it that way, but it’s so true and resonates through my life and even my own parents’. So many people in my life could benefit from Tony Robbins’s teachings, but they would be deaf to hear him speak.

Today, I took a break at a nearby coffee shop with a colleague who I’ve been working with for over two years. I knew a while back that mental illness affected her family, but recently I found out via a message she sent to me attached to the donation she gave to my AFSP drive that her brother was recently hospitalized for a relapse in alcoholism and seriously expressed a desire to harm himself. We spoke a lot about her family’s struggle to grasp her brother’s problem and her own desire to help him despite distance. Her family, like mine, doesn’t openly talk about mental illness or depression, but her parents have already started attending a support group for families who are touched by at a local hospital. I was pleasantly surprised to hear this, and sadly wished that my parents could have even considered for a second.

It was really hard for me at times to listen to what she was saying, not because I didn’t want to listen, but because it hit so close to home for me in terms of her fears, her frustrations, and her anger about the way her parents were handling the situation, and the way society handles or refuses to address mental illness. Her fear of losing her big brother is the same fear I had of losing Ed in the months leading up to his suicide. Her feeling of helplessness is the same as how I felt. “I’m scared that next year, I’m going to be joining you in your fight, that I will lose my brother the same way you lost yours three years ago,” she said to me. I had to keep my tears back as she looked me in the eye while saying that.

She told me she wished more people would be open about talking about mental illness in the way I was, and she was really happy to have the opportunity to speak with me. “You’re just so brave to share your story and all the details of your brother’s life through your fundraiser,” she said to me. The truth is that I don’t really think what I’m doing is brave. I just think it would be very selfish if I never tried to help anyone else who may be suffering from mental illness after what my brother went through. I wasn’t able to do enough to help him. But if I could do something small to help someone in the future, I think that is the very least I could do in his memory. I can’t fail my brother and what he meant to me.

If there are themes I drew from the RNC speeches last week, they were that of division, negativity for the future, hate, anger, anti-tolerance masked as tolerance (Peter Thiel – really? Do you really think the Republican party sees you as a true equal when if you wanted, they wouldn’t even approve of your marriage because you’re gay?), and a deep desire for Hillary Clinton to be dead. The idea that grown adults could say that Hillary Clinton had a partnership with Lucifer seems pretty senseless and embarrassing to me.

Yes, there was yelling at the first night of the Democratic National Convention, and yes, there were Bernie protesters and divisiveness in the DNC crow;,yes, there was criticism of Trump, but one thing that resonated throughout is optimism for our country and the future. When Michelle Obama spoke these words, I could feel tears in my eyes welling up:

“That is the story of this country, the story that has brought me to this stage tonight, the story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, but who kept on striving and hoping and doing what needed to be done so that today I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.

And I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent, black young women playing with their dogs on the White House lawn.

And because of Hillary Clinton, my daughters and all our sons and daughters now take for granted that a woman can be president of the United States.”

The White House was built by slaves. Who ever mentions that — ever? And the idea that it’s actually a realistic possibility that the United States could have its very first female president 240 years after being founded — it’s absolutely chilling to me — in a good way. This is a potentially historic moment that awaits us. Eight years ago, we elected the first (half) black president of the United States. Eight years later, we could be electing the first female president of the United States. Progress is possible. Acceptance of progress is possible.

Michelle Obama’s speech made me feel proud to be American, and I honestly rarely feel that pride ever. I’m sure her speech made many others proud to be Americans, as well, or living in America with the privileges that many of us take for granted. How incredible it could be if one day, it was just a normal thing to see women running and getting elected for the highest office in the land right here in this country.