Hi Reader,
It's been a while. Longer than I intended.
Life got loud — the way it does sometimes — and the writing stopped. In the chaos that followed, a decision I'd been sitting with for a long time finally moved.
I downsized.
Same city, new flat, very different chapter.
The place came with a private rooftop. I've put up a canopy and some lights. On good evenings, Marcus and I sit up there and it feels like exactly the kind of reset I was looking for.
New beginnings are rarely as clean as we imagine them.
Less than a month after moving in, Marcus and I got locked inside the apartment. Not locked out — inside. The double lock on our front door failed completely, and by early morning we couldn't get out. Marcus missed school. I spent hours calling the landlord, then his agent — nothing back but silence. Eventually I did what you do in an emergency: found a locksmith, got us cut out, and paid for it myself.
The whole ordeal started at 6am. A new lock wasn't installed until 8pm. For ten of those hours, I had no lock on my front door at all.
In the midst of it all came the landlord's response.
He refused to cover the cost. Said it was my responsibility as the tenant. Never mind that the landlord is responsible for the property's security fixtures. Never mind that I'd lived there less than a month. Never mind that two independent technicians confirmed the lock had pre-existing structural failure. Never mind that we were trapped which created an immediate safety hazard, and I couldn't reach anyone for hours.
I was furious.
I did what I do when I'm angry and I know I'm right: I researched everything. Tenant rights in Hong Kong, complaint channels, mediation services, the Rating and Valuation Department, the Small Claims Tribunal. I built my case carefully — receipts, timestamped messages, technical confirmations, the law. All of it. I was in constant contact with the agent, figuring out what to write, how to write it, how to be firm without torching the relationship I'd barely had time to build.
On top of the anger, that drained me completely. Emotionally, physically — I was scraped clean.
And through all of it, one thought kept me going: there is no freaking way I am letting this go. I will fight for this until the end.
Then, gradually, the shift happened.
It wasn't one moment. It was a calculation — slow, uncomfortable, and completely clear once it landed.
In Hong Kong, landlords hold enormous power over their tenants. They can raise rent at renewal. They can choose not to renew a lease without giving a reason. And I had just moved into a home Marcus and I genuinely love, in one of the most expensive and exhausting cities in the world to move around of.
I ran the numbers. Not the financial ones — the real ones.
Fight, and I become a troubled tenant. He raises the rent. He ignores future requests. He doesn't renew. I spend the next two years walking on eggshells in my own home, then face the brutal cost and chaos of moving again. Don't fight, and I absorb the loss, keep the home, protect the stability we'd just barely started to build.
Fight or not, I lose either way.
So I chose my battle carefully, and I let it go.
I want to be honest about what that felt like — because I think there's a version of this story where I wrap it in a neat lesson about acceptance and non-attachment and choosing peace, and that version would be incomplete.
The truth is it felt like helplessness. It felt like smallness. Two thoughts I remember clearly, sitting in that flat with no lock on the door: I feel like nothing. I feel beneath.
Not because I made the wrong choice. I think I made the right one. But making the right choice and feeling good about it are not the same thing. Sometimes the most strategic, clear-eyed decision still sits in your chest like something swallowed wrong.
People talk about letting go like it's a release. This didn't feel like a release. It felt like putting something down because your arms gave out. Maybe that counts. I'm still deciding.
I think that's partly why I do this work — not from a place of having it all sorted, but because I know what it feels like when the body absorbs what the mind has no good place to put. If you haven't read The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, it changed the way I understand this entirely.
The rooftop lights are up. Marcus is settled. And I'm slowly finding my footing in this new chapter — which is partly why I'm writing to you today.
I've missed this. I've missed you. And I have a lot more to share.
I'm glad you're still here.
With gratitude,