Turning 30 Reflections

I turn 30 this month. “Wait this dude is 30?? Thought he was 25??” Yeah yeah yeah, I get it, I’m a lil baby-faced. I am starting to feel it, but not in an intense panic kind of way. It feels like I am passing a sign that says, “You are at 30 miles.” In many ways, I still feel like I am 24, in others I feel like I am 21.

Here is an uninteresting blog / reflection / word vomit that isn’t necessarily about turning 30 but about simply everything. I feel like I would want to do this, so that I can look back on it when I’m 40.

I split it up into 5 sections: Friends, Family, Love, Career, Self

Friends (Making, Keeping, and Losing Them)

I think friends is what I’ve struggled with the most, especially in San Francisco. I find it hard to have a regular group of friends who meet up and hang out, outside of my roommates. I appreciate having a friend group who are interested in the same museums as me, galleries, and movies, but that’s always hard to find and sustain.

When I was 27, I found that the easiest fix to this problem was to create my own events and invite the people I want to see, and if people weren’t interested then I would just go do it alone. I started to have a nice consistent small friend group. Then the major tech layoffs happened and scattered my close friends all across the world. Being in a transient city where people come and go wasn’t very helpful as well.

I started to feel lonely again a few months ago and my roommate reminded me that I needed to start hosting events again – which I did. Community building and seeing people come together, drinking and eating, is so satisfying, and I believe it stems from my extended family always hosting nhậu’s.

There are occasional hardships in my life in terms of friend groups, and each hardship has really tested which people in my life care about me, and who I feel the most trust in. I still have college friends that I’ve known now for over 10 years, and I end up frequently hopping on calls with them when major events happen. I’ve also learned that an invaluable friend is one that, when I’ve done something that hurts them, they confront me about it. It takes a lot of trust and courage to do so. I remember crying in the kitchen and hugging my friends, feeling so grateful that they would stand up to me when they called me out on really toxic behavior.

I’ve also let a lot of people go in my life. I think there comes a point where a friendship has overstayed it’s welcome. The most obvious split-ups are when the other person is obviously really toxic. I had met a friend during one of my breakups, and we bonded while I was depressed. They were really helpful during that stage of my life, but I started to make choices to pull me out of depression. At some point, I was happier and he was still depressed and choosing addictive behaviors. I tried to help him out at first, but it was clear he didn’t want to change. The friendship ended when he sent me a message, “Henry, I liked you better when you were depressed.” I think that certain friends make sense for different stages of life. There are different versions of myself every year, and one version will probably not have the same friends as another version.

A non-obvious friend split up I had was with a friend who was becoming jealous of me. I would show them my accomplishments or a project that I just completed and demoed and they would go quiet or despondent. They constantly compared themselves to me and my technical skills. They eventually just told me that they were jealous of me. I loved them as a friend and wanted to help them out, but they didn’t want any of my help. They had different values and ways of living from me, and they wanted to see their methodology succeed more than mine. At some points, it felt like a competition of “how to live life” that I wasn’t willing to participate in. I can honestly say that I loved this friend, deep in my heart, because they helped me become who I am today – but I outgrew them.

Family

Around 2 years ago, I cut off communication with my parents. Therapy helped me make this decision. I started making choices that weren’t influenced by them – I stopped asking them for permission to travel, quit my job, or to move. The more time I spent without them, I started to see them more as overgrown toddlers who throw tantrums and are emotionally immature.

After a year of not being influenced by them, I felt like I wanted to rebuild my relationship. I started calling them more often, checking in on them. My mom sent me a heartfelt message telling me that she supported my decision to pursue game development, which was the first time I ever felt support from her in that way. Just a few years ago she had been trying to convince me not to quit my job. I came back to visit my parents a few times after that, with the expectation that they were emotionally still just little kids trying to do their best – and with that, I found the ability to hug my dad for the first time.

I recently went on a trip in Greece that totally destroyed me emotionally and felt like it reversed everything that I worked on in therapy. I agreed to it with my mom because I felt like she had spent time reflecting and healing a lot, and I also felt like I had lower expectations for it. I knew that my mom will be a little complaining toddler that I would have to take care of, be slower for, or hold hands for – and so when I arrived and that was exactly how she acted, I didn’t take anything personally. My sister took every single word personally, as if it were her fault. There was a huge disparity, my sister felt extreme anxiety and stress from my mom while I was chill and uncaring. This led to her barraging me with hurtful words to try to bring me to her level of anxiety. I felt a toxic side of myself come out because of this dynamic, and I didn’t like who I was becoming during the trip. At the end of the trip, when my sister and I were alone, she brought on a torrent of childhood memories and hurtful words that led me to crying.

My mom has always thought of me as the golden child and always compared my sister to me. I looked up to my sister growing up – she made me my first AIM screen name and helped me make a neopets account. She is the reason why I am the person I am today. She spent so much time with me playing video games. She was the role model growing up, and so whenever my mom dared to call her anything less than me I always fought back every time to defend her. I hated the way my mom treated her when I was younger. I never chose to be the golden child, I never made any conscious decision to want to be my mom’s favorite. The most painful thing for me is to know that just by existing, I am the cause of my sister’s depression – and I didn’t choose any of it. I wanted a sister so bad, because I felt like this was the closest I had to someone who was exactly like me – someone who understood me. My game, Last Seen Online, is a depiction of not just mine but both of our childhoods.

I think that my relationship with my parents is close to being the exact same as it was before Greece. I have set my boundaries, I have realistic expectations for them, and I no longer feel shackled by them. The relationship I have with my sister now is harder to determine. I don’t have the capacity to be around someone who deals with their own anxiety in a way that takes other people down with them.

Love

I have lived so many different lives when it comes to romance, and I don’t ever know if I’ve learned a lesson when I come out of those lives.

I remember the trenches of trying to find a girlfriend between 20-25. There is something wrong when there is one girl and three guys in the same room trying to compete to out-peacock each other, and the girl is being incredibly ambiguous with everyone. Yes, I did win one of the peacock competitions. No, I will not participate in anymore peacock competitions. I’ve got a theory that clear upfront communication before dating determines the communication style while dating.

At 29, I’ve officially been in 4 long-term relationships, each averaging about 1.5 years long.

I broke up 3 of those relationships, and was broken up with when I was in high school. I was so so immature in all those relationships. Women should just not trust a sweet-looking nerdy skinny Asian man with glasses… Like bro, Vietnamese man from San Jose with mommy issues? Come onnn… But thanks for taking a chance on me :)

I’ve written so much about love in the past, and I can boil it down to the main points in which I failed in past relationships:

1. I didn’t like who I was.

2. I was dating someone who liked me. (But I didn’t like me.)

3. I lacked any emotional or romantic role models.

Not liking who I was and not making the major decisions to changing that aspect about me meant that I was looking for another person to fill that role of making me like myself, and that’s a crazy role for anybody to fill.

There was a lot of self-sabotage that would occur during these relationships. Why on earth could this person that I am with even like me, when I didn’t even like myself? I felt like a loser inside, and that I was mentally broken and didn’t deserve the other person. After the limerence phase of our relationship I kept pushing and testing to see if this person still liked me. I didn’t feel like they saw who I really was, and if they ever found out, they would abandon me.

I used to identify way too much with my thoughts, and so all the negative intrusive and impulsive thoughts were me – even the suicidal ones. At 29, I still have the same thoughts that I did when I was younger, but I am able to let them go or choose to accept which thoughts really matter. This is thanks to therapy and meditation. Back when I was in these relationships, I acted directly upon these thoughts thinking, “This is the real me, and if they just see who the real me is, then they would hate me.” Of course it wrecked our relationship when I acted directly on each thought that came to me.

Fun fact, did you know that I listen to Phoebe Bridgers or Sarah Kinsley not because I relate directly to the lyrics, but because it helps me understand what it might have felt like to be my ex in a relationship? There is a lot of pain that these ex-lovers felt that are symmetrical to the pain that I also felt – like the other half of the puzzle piece.

When it came to dealing with conflict and the emotional aspects of a relationship, I was fucking dead in the goddamn water. Dude I learned how to deal with conflict by arguing with people on Youtube Comments about atheism. I’m a fucking idiot when it comes to this. What is “validating other people’s emotions?” What is “accepting that other people can experience a reality different from our own?” No dude. My role models for love was Marty McFly from Back to the Future who left his girlfriend passed out in an alley, or Ryan Gosling in Blue Valentine which depicted a >>failed marriage.<<

I think a lot of conflicts that happen in relationships also happen with close friends. With a lot of practice with my friends, I now understand that “winning” in a conflict means finding beautiful compromises that aren’t the exact things that each person wants, but satisfies the underlying need that each person expresses. It’s beautiful collaboration that is so so joyful and releases way more dopamine than feeling “right” in an argument. Validate the other’s feelings, figure out their core needs, and compromise. It’s beautiful.

I’ve also come to be more accepting with the emotions and feelings that I have. Instead of fighting with my feelings, I’ve been trying a lot more to just let them happen. I don’t get to choose which emotion I am having, and I don’t think anyone else chooses their emotions as well. Other people’s emotions happen because of a subjective reality they are perceiving. If I’ve hurt other people in my life, and it was unintentional, I don’t take it personally but I try to take responsibility. Sometimes bad things happen because of the unluckiness of the universe.

A lot of this development happened when I chose to remain single for one year, and to explore single-hood and loving myself in that year. I love myself now! After that year was over, I tried my hand at the Hinge dating scene.

I wrote already about my Hinge dating spree. It sucked. I don’t like online dating. I think it’s unnecessarily draining and I would rather be doing something else. Casual hookups and emotional unavailability has ruined modern dating, etc. I don’t do it anymore.

I did a thing where I traveled across the country to go on a date with someone I thought was really really cool, and I thought they were interested in me too. Didn’t work out. But hell, it was heartbreaking, romantic, and fun, and I would be an idiot in love just because it’s fun to be an idiot in love.

Nowadays, I think I just want to vibe and live my life, and if someone happens to be showing up in my life a little bit more often than usual then maybe something cool will happen. I’m not going to try to chase anyone down anymore, bend over backwards to be someone else for another person, and I never want to convince someone that they should love me. My mantras are, “I deserve to love someone who wants me.” and “I’ll meet that person exactly where I am.”

If I find someone where everything feels as effortless as it is with my closest friends, fuck it I’ll move to whatever city they’re in and plan out dates. That’s the idiot in me. If I meet someone, think they’re cool, but they don’t want to be with me – well, I can’t control love and I don’t think it’d work out anyways if it’s one-sided. I’m still friends with many people who were genuine and nice but it just didn’t work out.

I’ve got a vision for my 30’s. I want to marry and have kids when I’m 38, and inject a bunch of steroids into my knees so I can play catch with them in old age. But before that I want to practice by having an Australian Shepherd which I’ll probably adopt while I’m single. Also I want to travel and live in a bunch of countries / cities before I get married. This is not super solid but definitely a recurring daydream. If I end my 30’s still being single, then meh, I’ll get a dog :)

Career

I am going to return to a cushy big tech job if my game dev career fails. I’ve got a really big safety net set up just in case I fall, but that doesn’t mean I’m not gonna try my hardest to do my own thing.

Time and time again I keep telling people that I’m following my dreams, or that I am going after the dream job. This time around, I am not going after my dream job. I am going after what feels like the easiest and most effortless thing for me to do.

Making games is not going to pay the bills, for now, but for me it feels like I am weightless. I used to code a lot when I was younger and coding would bring me to a natural flow state of calm, destress, and meditation. I loved it. When I started coding for other people at a job, it became a source of stress and anxiety and what sucked was I didn’t have the appetite to code when I got home from my job. For some people, they like working out, or playing the piano, but my relaxation is coding and I lost that. Building games again brings back that beautiful calm in my life that I was looking for, and it feels so much easier to do.

I also love writing stories and narratives, and I love designing and playing escape rooms. I don’t feel like I am forcing myself to do any of these things, or that I am trying to bend myself backwards to learn a new skill. These are all skills I feel like are inherent to who I am, and the games I make all lean on them.

I don’t think I am pushing myself hard or grinding towards getting a dream job, instead I am being extremely lazy and leaning into that laziness to the max. It’s so weirdly contradictory! There are still extremely hard parts to make a game that I end up learning new skills from just because everything else in the game development cycle is so easy and satisfying. People management skills, LLC forming and taxes, how to release a game on Steam, marketing skills, and networking skills. This really doesn’t feel like a grind, not in the same way as working my way up a corporate ladder or reviewing computer science stuff for interviews feels like a grind. I feel refreshed and energized by all of this.

I also don’t think I am taking that big of a risk by doing what I am doing. I worked for 5 years in a corporate tech job, 3 of those years I lived at home for, and so I have a pretty good financial safety net set up below me. I also have the confidence that I can return to corporate at any time. I have to be honest with this because I don’t want people to be convinced to make major life decisions because of me, but don’t have the flexibility to go backwards on them.

I also don’t really hate big tech as much as I make it out that I do. I think a lot of the bad things that happened working at big tech was from my own inability to have confidence in myself. Like in my love life, this part of my career was during a phase of my life where I didn’t like myself. In corporate, I learned a lot about collaboration, organization, communication, and management. I spent many hours reading ancient internal Google docs about the old challenges they faced as a small company. I still write PRD’s and design docs for music and art in my games hahahaha.

Self

I spent a lot of time in my late 20’s redirecting my focus on parts of my life that I didn’t like. I didn’t like how emotionally unaware I was. I didn’t like how I basically did nothing for my physical health. I didn’t like how I wasn’t spending as much time with my friends. I was bad at listening. I didn’t know how to cook. I took all of those “I didn’t like”s and I turned them into a list of tiny little achievable goals. And that shit has been satisfying to slowly cross out over time.

Boom, ran a 10k then a year after that I ran a half-marathon. Boom, paid for a therapist, then couldn’t afford a therapist so paid for self-help books. Boom, I can cook a Banh Xeo and I make a mean Pho Bo. Boom, I’m hosting movie nights for friends and calling and checking up on them. Boom boom boom boom BOOM!

I like myself now. And even if there are parts of me that I still don’t like, I have a lot of confidence that I can grow and make change happen in my life. I’ve focused a lot on my physical health too. I’m entering my 30’s hot, talented, confident, and with a higher EQ. I’ll be spending a part of my 30’s in a totally different country. I’m building out a game studio. I’ve healed my relationship with my parents. I’m working on cool artistic shit. I am surrounded by kind and inspiring people. I’m very excited.

Step through time to see the multiverse of Henrys in his 20’s.

Slowly figuring out my hair situation.