5000 miles (五千英里)

Five thousand miles is the kind of number that sounds clean until you try to live inside it.

It’s a number you can Google. Taipei to Seattle. The little airplane icon. The curved line across the Pacific that makes the world look smooth, like distance is just geometry.

But distance is not geometry.

Distance is your mother’s voice arriving half a second late on FaceTime.

Distance is “你吃飯了沒?” spoken through a bad connection, and your automatic “吃了” even when you haven’t.

Distance is time zones that turn intimacy into scheduling.

Five thousand miles is not dramatic. It doesn’t look like anything.

It looks like a kitchen with lights off because it’s 1:17 a.m. and you don’t want to wake your brother. It looks like your backpack half-open on the floor, papers spilling out like evidence. It looks like a girl tying her hair too tight in the bathroom mirror because if she pulls hard enough, maybe she can pull herself together.

I don’t think I realized I was living with distance until seventh grade, when “missing someone” stopped being a feeling and became a routine.

A routine is a dangerous thing. It makes anything survivable.

It makes absence normal.

I don’t blame my parents. That sentence always feels like it needs to be said first, like a disclaimer, like a legal statement. They worked. They cared. They were building something. They were trying to do the adult version of love: the kind that looks like sacrifice.

But love can be real and still not be physically there.

And when the people who love you are five thousand miles away, you learn to build other kinds of closeness.

Or you learn to build walls.

Sometimes the walls are made of achievements. Sometimes they are made of silence. Sometimes they are made of food, or the refusal of it.

Sometimes they are made of the kind of “discipline” that looks like maturity and feels like a cage.

By high school, I had learned to become legible.

That’s what I wanted more than anything: to be legible.

To be a person who could be summarized. To be a person whose life could be translated into something simple enough to send across an ocean. A report card. A list. A highlight reel.

I didn’t want my parents to worry.

I didn’t want to be the problem they couldn’t fix from far away.

So I did what I’ve always been good at: I made myself into proof.

Grades, deadlines, competitions, leadership, service hours, projects— my life became a clean list that could be read quickly.

If I was impressive enough, then no one would ask the question underneath everything.

你還好嗎?

So I performed “fine.”

And the thing about performing “fine” is that it works. People believe you. They reward you. They praise you.

They say you’re disciplined.

They say you’re mature.

They say you’re going places.

They do not notice that you are building a life out of bracing.

The first time I noticed that my life didn’t feel like mine was not a breakdown.

It was a morning.

A normal school morning where I had to take care of my younger brother, where I had to make sure he ate, where I had to make sure he had what he needed, where I had to make sure the house looked like someone responsible lived there.

I remember standing in the bathroom, staring into the mirror and thinking:

I feel older than I am.

Not in a proud way. In a tired way.

Like my age was a costume and I was wearing it wrong.

That morning, I walked into school and felt the familiar sensation: everyone else living in real time, and me living in a future I was already trying to manage.

I think that’s when the loop began.

The loop is not a single habit. It’s a system. it’s a belief structure.

It’s the feeling that every day is an exam you are taking alone, and every mistake is evidence that you are failing at something larger than the moment.

The loop shows up as school stress because school is the easiest place for it to hide. School gives you numbers. School gives you rankings. School gives you measurable outcomes that look like truth.

The loop shows up in your body, too, because your body is the one place you can always try to control.

You can call it health. You can call it discipline. You can call it self-improvement.

But if you’re honest, it’s often about fear.

Fear that if you loosen your grip, you will become someone unrecognizable.

Someone who cannot be loved.

Someone who cannot be respected.

Someone who cannot even respect herself.

When your parents are far away, you learn to treat stability like a duty.

You learn to send evidence.

You learn to compress your life into something that can survive distance.

And you start confusing evidence with selfhood.

I started treating my life like something I had to earn.

Earn rest. Earn food. Earn kindness. Earn the right to feel okay.

I know it sounds extreme when it’s written in one line. In real life it was subtle. It was ordinary. It was socially rewarded.

It looked like a girl who always had something due. A girl who always had a plan. A girl who always had a goal.

It looked like “productive.”

It looked like success.

And that was the problem.

Because when your coping mechanism looks like success, nobody tells you to stop.

They congratulate you.

They hand you more responsibility.

They assume you can carry it.

And you assume you must.

At some point, the strain stopped being something I carried.

It became something I was.

Depression is difficult to describe without sounding like you’re trying to be poetic, which is embarrassing, because depression is not poetic.

Depression is repetitive. Depression is the feeling of watching your own life from behind glass. Depression is waking up and already feeeling late, already feeling guilty, already feeling like you owe the world an apology for existing.

Some days I felt sad. Some days I felt nothing. Some days I felt too much.

Some days I felt like my brain was a room full of fluorescent lights that never turned off.

I could still achieve things.

That’s the part people don’t understand. I could still do homework. I could still show up. I could still win things. I could still be “fine.”

That’s how the loop survives.

It doesn’t have to destroy you.

It just has to keep you moving.

Eventually, I started going to church.

This is the part where some stories turn into testimonies. Mine doesn’t.

I didn’t go to church because I suddenly understood God.

I didn’t go because I had an epiphany in a beam of light.

I went because I was tired.

Not “I didn’t;t sleep enough” tired.

A deeper tired.

The kind of tired where your brain is constantly narrating your failures and you would do almost anything for a room that feels quieter inside.

Church, at first, was just a room.

A room with bad coffee. A room with folding chairs. A room where people said “good morning” like they meant it.

A room where the lights were warm instead of fluorescent.

A room where nobody asked for my GPA.

That last part mattered more than I wanted to admit.

The first few times I went, I sat in the back. not because I was humble. Because I didn’t want to be perceived. I didn’t want someone to look at me the way people at school look at me— like I’m a list of traits.

Smart. Busy. Talented. Stressed.

I didn’t want to be categorized.

I wanted to disappear without vanishing.

During worship, I would watch people sing and feel like an anthropologist. Like I was observing a culture that wasn’t mine. People raised their hands. People closed their eyes. People looked like they were giving their weight to something invisible.

I didn’t know if I believed in what they believed.

I still don't know, completely.

Sometimes I feel something. Sometimes I feel nothing. Sometimes I feel like I’m pretending.

Sometimes the word “God” feels too large to hold in my mouth.

But I started to notice something else: believed it wasn't the only thing happening in the room.

There was acceptance.

Not acceptance as in denial.

Acceptance as in: you are allowed to be here even if you don’t have the right words

你可以不確定。

你可以不完美。

你可以只存在。

That kind of acceptance is rare.

And when you find it, you realize how hungry you were.

I think I had been starving for years— not for food exactly, but for permission.

Permission to not be impressive. Permission to not be okay. Permission to be unfinished.

The hardest part was realizing I didn't know how to receive permission without trying to earn it first.

I caught myself doing it automatically: making church another checklist. Another place to “do well.”

Listen carefully. Participate. Look like you belong. Be polite. Be good.

Even grace, apparently, can be turned into a competition if you're talented at self-pressure.

But over time, something shifted.

The shift was not “I started believing in God.”

The shift was smaller and more honest:

I started believing I could stop auditioning.

I started believing my life didn’t have to be justified by output.

I started believing I could be a person instead of a performance.

The moment I realized this was also not dramatic.

It happened in the stupidest way possible.

It was after service. People were talking in clusters. Someone offered me a paper plate with a cookie on it. I almost said no without thinking, the way I always do—like refusal is a virtue.

Then I stopped.

I took the cookie.

Not because I was trying to be brave.

Because I was trying to be normal.

I ate it standing there, in public, in a room where no one was watching me the way I watch myself.

Nothing bad happened.

Nobody judged me.

The ceiling didn’t collapse. My body didn't become a moral failure. My future didn’t get canceled.

It was just a cookie.

But in my brian, it was a tiny revolt against the loop.

Because the loop depends on the idea that everything means everything.

That one choice will define you.

that one mistake will ruin you.

That one slip proves you are weak.

And in that moment, I let something go—not completely, not forever, but enough to feel air enter a part of me that had been holding its breath.

Later that week, I was doing math homework and felt the familiar panic rise.

Math is brutal because it refuses to your charisma. you can’t write your way out. You can’t aesthetic your way out. You can’t charm the equation into being kind.

There is an answer, and if you don’t know it, you are simply wrong.

That feeling—wrong—has always been dangerous for me.

wrong makes my brian spiral into everything else I’ve ever been wrong about.

Wrong makes me think about being far from home.

Wrong makes me think about being the one who has to handle things.

Wrong makes me think about my body.

Wrong makes me think about the version of myself I keep failing to become.

That night, I stared at a problem until the numbers blurred, and I felt the loop begin its familiar speech:

Reset.

Skip dinner. punish yourself. Study harder. Fix it. earn forgiveness. Earn relief.

And this time—maybe because of church, maybe because of sheer exhaustion, maybe because I finally reached the edge of my own patience— I did something different.

I didn’t reset.

I just sat there and admitted, quietly:

I don't understand this

Not as a confession. As a fact.

我真的不懂。

And for the first time, that didn’t immediately translate into: I don’t deserve peace.

I texted someone for help. I looked up a tutorial. I let myself be confused without turning confusion into a moral failure.

This is what acceptance looked like in real life.

Not a montage.

Not a transformation.

Not a perfect ending.

Just one moment where I chose not to punish myself for being human.

And that’s when I started to understand what letting go actually is.

Letting go is not throwing your problems off a cliff.

Letting go is loosening your grip on the story that says your worth is conditional.

The story that says your life belongs to the people watching.

The story that says if you don’t perform “fine,” you will become unlovable.

When your parents are far away, it’s easy to start living like you owe them constant evidence that you are okay.

Evidence that their distance didn’t break you.

Evidence that their sacrifice was worth it.

Evidence that you are grateful.

But evidence can become a prison.

Because if you live only to send proof of “fine,” you start forgetting what you actually feel.

You start forgetting what you want.

You start forgetting that your life is not a progress report.

You start forgetting that your life is yours.

I’m still figuring out what I believe.

Sometimes the songs at church make me, and sometimes they make me feel like an outsider. Sometimes I pray, and sometimes I don’t know who I’m talking to.

Sometimes faith feels like an idea I can almost touch

Sometimes it feels like a language I don’t fully speak.

But something has changed for the better, and I know that much.

Because the church didn’t give me certainty.

it gave me space.

And space is what you need to become a reason again.

Space is what you need to stop living like you’re constantly being evaluated.

Space is what you need to let go of the loop.

I still struggle. I still overthink. I still feel overwhelmed sometimes. I still catch myself trying to earn the right to rest, trying to earn the right to eat, trying to earn the right to be okay.

But now, when the loop tells me to reset, I can recognize it as habit instead of truth.

And sometimes- enough times to matter—I can choose a different voice.

Not the voice that says, be here. Maybe that’s what acceptance is.

Not a feeling. Not a belief. Not even a conclusion.

A decision to stay in your own life without constantly trying to restart it.

A decision to let your life be imperfect and still yours

A decision to stop auditioning, even when you’re scared.

I used to think five thousand miles meant I had to become someone stronger than myself.

Someone who didn’t need help.

Someone who didn’t feel lonely.

Someone who didn’t fall apart.

Now I think five thousand miles taught me something else.

It taught me that distance doesn’t decide who I am.

Neither do grades.

Neither do numbers.

Neither does the way I look in a mirror on a bad day.

Neither does the version of “fine” I’ve spent years trying to perform.

My life is not something I have to earn.

My life is not something I have to prove.

My life is mine.

我的人生是我的。