Essays, poems, and meditations on life, love, cancer, and joy.
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Ever so often, a sentence arrives that splits me open. Two weeks ago, one did.
I need to tell you something. I don’t know what to say.
My scans are tomorrow, and in honor of whatever may come, I wanted to share something with you.
I married myself a few weeks ago. Well, if we are being technical, I am in an eternal partnership with myself, but the sentiment is the...
For when you're carrying something heavy.
A few days ago, I showered for the first time without fear of my hair falling out.
Do you ever think / how the tide goes out / each evening, / not to abandon the shore,
I lost my hair a couple of days ago. While baldness is somewhat of a cancer cliché within popular media, only 30-40% of cancer patients...
I came back to San Francisco a few days ago to pack up my apartment. My heart breaks to leave my sanctuary again, but it breaks more to...
I write this on my way back from Europe for my third cancer therapeutic peptide vaccine.
I’m about as well as one could expect given the circumstances. It's funny. Now that I’ve had a minute to digest, all my emotions have...
Because life is also beautiful.
I think the hardest thing in the world is to be a mother, and perhaps the second hardest is to fathom how none of this would exist...
2025 may have been the worst year of my life by any external measure. And yet, when I look back, it actually was the best.
I am exhausted. Worn down to my bones. My scans came back not clean, but stable, that strange purgatory of continuation.
I’ve lived long enough in cities / to lose the sound of a body / falling apart slowly, / like fruit on the branch.
august triptych / I. / Freedom is the fence gone slack, / but the horses do not run.
The River Ván / They say Fenrir’s drool / was called / Hope.
In a year full of difficult news, I finally, thankfully, have been graced with some good.
the forest path / God is in the light, / but holier, / maybe,
I woke up a few days ago to a surprise from my team at [Batuta](https://batuta.com/), the cybersecurity company I co-founded several...
The deeper questions about meaning and being.
I write this from 30,000 feet en route to Germany for a novel treatment I never imagined possible.
Sui Hui’s Star Gauge Poem - it can be read in different directions to generate over 3,000 different poems.
The last few months have been the hardest physically on my body and on my mind in ways I wasn’t expecting.
Here’s a fun fact you may not know (or if you’ve followed me for any length of time, you may already be aware): there is a flock of wild...
A few days ago, a former colleague at IVP, the venture capital fund where I used to work, asked me how to practically apply some of the...
I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately. It comes from questioning how I best spend my limited time, but also what time fundamentally is.
Brief meditations. Beauty in a breath.
The most important relationship you'll ever have.
I love traveling alone. And, like anything, there is an art to doing it. I wouldn't deign to say that I've mastered it.
Because I love to analyze the world and my brain inherently thinks in systems, I’ve been thinking a lot about friendship and how to know...
Like any good introvert, I spend a disproportionate amount of time in my head. My thoughts are sometimes practical, but more often than...
I think about safety more than the average person. Safety is something I’ve always been acutely aware of - what feels safe? Is this a...
In the last few days following my post, I have been flooded with outreach and love. I cannot begin to tell you how much it means to me.
AI, dreams, and the bigger questions.
I'm writing this as the sun is rising, the sky shifting from cool violet to amber as it climbs.
A painting of my dreamscape / The butterfly dream / I dream the sleep that sleeps in me. / The lie lies still.
I’ve been thinking about this quote from Dave Chapelle for the last few weeks, “In your life, in any given moment, the strongest dream...
Everything else worth reading.
I’ve never spent more time questioning what it means to be human than I have the last two weeks.
A couple of days ago, I went surfing for the first time in more than a year. My cancerversary was last week, my initial diagnosis of...
This time last year at [Forest Path](https://www.forestpath.co/) (photo not mine).
This week was supposed to be a week of triumph, of gentle applause, of exhaling in the quiet.
To set the ambience, I share with you a poem to encapsulate my experience:
Treatment ends with bell-ringing. Recovery begins in silence with the slow work of reclaiming what medicine broke.
I find myself apologizing to my body for what I've put it through, then remembering we're on the same side of this war.
My mom’s birthday is today, and I truly have no words for how grateful I am for her.
I am almost done with this cycle of chemoradiation—I finished chemotherapy today and have two external radiation sessions left.
The battlefield surrounds me. The enemy is multi-dimensional, multi-modular. I duck from the bullets whirling past me.
I’m in the darkness. There is no light around me. I hang onto my tether and breathe.
I was late to church and desperately needed a shower, and there it was - directly in the basin of my tub.
I am an astronaut in space now. I wave hello to Earth. The signal is static. The messages are garbled.
I’m treating this as my north star as I start to undergo chemo, radiation, and other treatments.
I wanted to do a photo shoot at home with my parrots before leaving SF, but they’re wild. I never know when they will come and go.
There isn’t any easy way to say it, so I’ll just say it: I have cervical cancer. It’s invasive, seemingly advanced, and terrifying.
I've always struggled with how much of my persona I want to show publicly. By withholding, remaining limited in my interactions on...