DAY ELEVEN: i won’t expect anything from anyone

Things Doublelift Taught Me (About Love and Everything Else).

It is possible to grow as a person. It may take years, it may take getting famously kicked off a famous roster, it may take many iterations, many relationships, many mistakes. People may continue to hate you for the mistakes you’ve made in the past. There are some relationships you won’t get back, or if you do, they will be different. But we are not solely defined by the worst behaviors of our past. When we grow into better people, when we show that we have become better people, we are rewarded for it.

There is a world out there where a scrawny Chinese-American with a terrible haircut and a tendency to put his foot in his mouth can be famous for all the right reasons. Not all famous Asians have to be like Doublelift. Not all Asians have to be like Doublelift. But Doublelift made a space for himself, and it’s a space that includes fans around the world, who have followed him for years and years. So maybe there is hope for the rest of us.

Once someone told me, “when you have sex with someone, you are having sex with everyone they ever had sex with.” When you talk with someone, you are talking to everyone that ever mattered to them, for better or worse. We are a sum of our parts: our friends, our loved ones, our families — the ones we are born with and the ones we choose. We are a culmination of their love, their sacrifices, their pain, their mistakes. And when we love someone else, we keep them alive.

We don’t always plan for the best things in life.

Sometimes, they just happen.

Your first relationship doesn’t have to be your last. You will bring into every relationship the lessons you have learned from the others. Each relationship makes you a better, stronger person. That doesn’t mean you need to keep breaking relationships to enter into new ones. Just that there will be something good and bad about every person you are with. There will be edges that need to be shaved down, absences that you need to fill, compromises that can only be made with great sacrifices. And sometimes, it’s incredibly hard to judge when you have sacrificed too much, when you have lost sight of what you can bring into the relationship instead of what you can give up to the relationship.

The reality is that some relationships — many relationships — do not last forever. But even if they are temporary, even if they fall apart, for a moment, they were good for something once. Not all pain is pain forever. Some pain readies you for future happiness. Some pain is an affirmation that there was something worth remembering. Some pain is a sign that there is something better waiting for you down the line.

Self-confidence is spending the entirety of your professional career, which requires you to appear regularly on camera, sporting a bowlcut.

I believe we all have the capacity for great tenderness within us but the world makes it difficult for us to show it. We are afraid that others will mock us for it, or that it will be taken advantage of, and so we confuse it with a showing of weakness. I think for men it is even harder. These moments, when men are openly tender with each other, especially in view of others, are shockingly rare.

What I want is to always live in a world where tenderness is possible. What I want for everyone is to live in a world full of tenderness. What I want for the world is tender, and I believe it is strength.

The value of old friends is that they know you. No matter how honest we try to be there is always a period of discovery when we meet new people where we tried to hide our worst inclinations. There is nothing like an old friend to call you out on your bullshit. And there is nothing like an old friend to know that beyond that bullshit is a person worth knowing for years. Our oldest friends are not always our closest, or our best, or the ones we see most often. But when you need one, there is nothing that can take their place.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, and try again.

(This post is part of 12 Days of Esports for 2018.)