On Carrying the Right Things

I arrived in 2021 with two suitcases, a degree to finish, and a version of the future that still felt negotiable.

At Cornell, life still carried a certain structure. There were hard days, of course, but there was also momentum. I was learning, building, meeting people who would stay with me long after the classes ended. I met some remarkable friends there, people who made a new country feel less unfamiliar. For a while, it was easy to believe that effort would move in a straight line: study hard, find the right job, build a good life, make everyone back home proud.

Then real life began, and it was less elegant than I had imagined.

I moved for work at a time when the job market was uncertain, and I did not land the role I thought I wanted. I stayed anyway. What began as compromise slowly became competence. Then it became growth. I learned the work deeply. I led teams. I shipped products that mattered, products that were far from small. From the outside, it may have looked like progress in the way people recognize it. And in some ways, it was.

But immigrant life has a way of splitting every experience into two truths at once.

You can be doing well and still feel deeply unsettled. You can be building a career and still feel that your real life is paused somewhere else. You can be surrounded by people and still carry a private loneliness that is difficult to explain to anyone who has never had to make a home out of distance.

There were practical struggles, the kind that rarely sound poetic when spoken out loud. Money was tight. Some friendships did not survive the transition. New ones did. Responsibilities grew quietly and then all at once. My parents were getting older while I was learning how to be an adult from far away. Four years passed without going home. People I loved got sick. Some passed away. There were moments when going back was not possible, even when every part of me wanted to be there. Grief became something I had to carry across time zones, work meetings, and ordinary weekdays.

What I did not expect was how often paralysis would become part of the experience. Not dramatic collapse, just a steady inability to know what to do next. The day job took most of my energy. Taking care of myself took the rest. Somewhere in between, I was supposed to apply for new roles, prepare for interviews, stay technically sharp, remain hopeful, and act like this was all manageable. Consistency became hard. Mindfulness became harder. Comparison became almost automatic. It was difficult not to measure my life against the visible success of others, people who seemed to be moving faster, earning more, settling sooner, wanting less.

There is a particular exhaustion that comes from carrying ambition and uncertainty at the same time. You are expected to be grateful, resilient, disciplined, optimistic, and productive, often all in the same breath. And when you are an immigrant, the stakes rarely feel personal only. Your choices carry the weight of the people who raised you, the sacrifices that made your life possible, and the quiet hope that all of this will amount to something more than survival.

I think that is what I would want to tell my younger self now: survival is not a small thing.

There were years when simply continuing required more strength than I gave myself credit for. Showing up to work, meeting responsibilities, paying bills, answering calls from home, grieving privately, trying again, staying decent through it all — none of that was minor. I used to think progress would feel clearer while I was inside it. Instead, much of it felt like endurance.

And yet, somewhere in that endurance, I learned something I had resisted for a long time. Happiness was not going to arrive only when life became fully resolved. There was no clean future waiting for me on the other side of uncertainty where everything would finally make sense. I had to learn how to live inside the unfinishedness of things. I had to learn how to enjoy parts of the journey, not because the journey was easy, but because I could not afford to postpone my life until I felt secure enough to deserve it.

That lesson also forced me to confront some of my own illusions. I had my own biases about how the world worked. I thought fairness would be more visible. I thought effort would be more neatly rewarded. I thought doing the right things would produce the right outcomes on a reliable timeline. But the world is often unfiltered. It does not organize itself around our plans. And when that becomes clear, something in you hardens, but something else becomes wiser.

I have come to believe that in the hardest seasons, very little is fully in your control. But a few things are. Your health. Your integrity. Your ability to keep learning. Your willingness to keep your mind clear enough to act when the moment comes. Your refusal to become someone you do not respect just because life became difficult.

That, more than anything, is what I want to remember and what I want future readers to hold onto.

Keep your circle small and trustworthy. Stay close to your roots, especially when life tries to convince you that reinvention requires erasure. Protect your values. Do not do things that leave you unable to live with yourself afterward. There will be moments when desperation makes compromise sound practical, even necessary. But not every opportunity is worth the cost of becoming unfamiliar to yourself.

Immigrant life can teach you how much a person can carry. It can also teach you how important it is to carry the right things.

So this is a letter to the version of me that was trying to hold it all together, and maybe to someone else who is doing the same now: I know this has been heavier than you expected. I know some of your strength came from having no other choice. I know there were years when nobody could fully see what it took just to keep going.

But you kept going. You built. You adapted. You lost and found people. You became more capable, and also more honest. You learned that making it is not always one grand arrival. Sometimes it is a series of quiet decisions to remain steady, to remain kind, to remain awake to your own life.

And sometimes, that is enough to call a life meaningful while it is still being made.