Year of the Dragon

February 27, 2024

Chuc mung nam moi!

It’s finally my year, the year of the dragon! Here are some dragon horoscopes I found for all my fellow dragons. For the most part they sound like me, while there are definitely a few aspects I don’t totally agree with and some are a stretch. But it’s all in good fun so I take everything with a grain of salt.

The year that is ruled by the same master of the year is usually very positive for that sign (similar to golden birthdays). The compatibility of the energy of the ruling sign lifts up and enhances the year. This is especially true for the majestic Dragon. Therefore 2024 promises many pleasant and joyful moments. As the energy of the Dragon perfectly harmonizes with the Dragon ruling the year, the period is set to be flowing and stable in almost all aspects of the Dragon’s life.

In 2024, Dragons should prepare for significant yet favorable changes in many aspects of their lives. This year will be filled with vibrant events, positivity, and a constant sense of celebration. The Dragons will constantly find themselves at the center of events. There is a great chance of going on a prolonged trip, changing cities, or even countries. Dragons who have long struggled to determine a direction in life will gain a clearer understanding of what the most important goals are. Education, skill upgrades, and exploring and unlocking new talents are all highly encouraged.

In terms of love and romance, 2024 will be the onset of a period filled with passion and strong emotions for the Dragon. Dragons who are in a committed relationship can count on harmony in relationships and the onset of a mostly stable period throughout 2024. Although it is this “boring” stability that can create a feeling of routine, in which case a Dragon who is craving excitement, sharp sensations, and adrenaline may go looking for them elsewhere. To prevent relationships from ending due to the infidelity of a passionate spouse, the Dragon should work on diversifying the relationship and keep being engaged with their partner. They can introduce something new and try out sensual practices together with their partner. Problems can also arise if the Dragon is too consumed with their work. It is important to clearly distinguish between professional and personal life, devoting sufficient time and attention to the latter to avoid subsequent problems and disappointments in the relationship as a result of neglecting the relationship.

To implement any serious project, the Dragon will need like-minded people. It will be extremely hard, if not impossible, to succeed alone with larger projects. Such partners must fully share their views and have the same goal. One can take risks in 2024, but everything still needs to be carefully planned and calculated.

With regard to health, 2024 promises an active year filled with opportunities to improve and strengthen their health throughout the year by engaging in various activities, which should be plenty to choose from. Despite the overall favorable forecast, the Dragon should not neglect their physical and mental condition. Overall strengthening of the body will be beneficial, whether incidentally by participating in physical activities or by quite deliberately establishing a steady gym routine. It is as important to adhere to a balanced diet, get enough sleep, and not forget to rest. With a flurry of activity, it will be easy for the busy Dragon to push the necessary rest to the back of their mind. This would, however, be a mistake. The year 2024 is full of various events, which means that their nervous system will be in overdrive, and without the necessary rest, the Dragon will have no time to recuperate and recover. It is recommended to regularly stay in the fresh air, participate in active sports and, most importantly, do something for relaxation like yoga, meditation, breathing exercises, etc. The more physically active the Dragon is, the fewer health problems they will have. To maintain a positive attitude, it is recommended to participate in fun activities as often as possible. These can be both team sports and individual ones. The main thing is regularity. Chronic diseases may worsen, so it is desirable to visit specialists for routine examinations before the period when the symptoms usually appear. The Dragon should avoid engaging in self-medication, as this can lead to a sharp deterioration in their health. It is best to trust professionals with any serious condition.

The year 2024 will be an extremely positive one for Dragons, as their own sign's energy will enhance and uplift them. Significant yet favorable changes are in store across all aspects of life. The first half of 2024 brings increasing sociability, new acquaintances, and the potential for changing careers or occupations successfully. Travel, moves, and important decisions about life direction are best made in the latter half of the year. Romantic relationships will be passionate, though possibly short-lived. For committed partnerships, maintaining engagement and novelty will be important to avoid restlessness and other complications.

Professionally, Dragons should focus on skill-building and qualifications in the first six months to take advantage of lucrative opportunities that will open up thereafter. Taking on side jobs can also be greatly beneficial financially and for experience. While luck will be on their side, relying solely on it would be unwise. Dragons would do well to invest in 2024. Health-wise, active participation in sports and recreation will enhance well-being, but rest and moderation will be essential to avoid burnout from the hectic pace. Overall, it will be an extremely lively and prosperous year for Dragons if they tap into the available support of the positive energy of 2024 while exercising wisdom and balance at every turn.

Dragons are confident, resolute, strong, and proud. Most people born in the year of the dragon are full of fighting spirit and strength. They are charismatic, attracting a lot of followers and their talented leadership skills naturally convince every subordinate. Dragons may look indifferent, however, they actually are chivalrous and always think of others.

Strengths: Determined, ambitious, independent, energetic, sincere, and enjoy great popularity among friends.

Weaknesses: Easily give up, little willpower, and unwilling to admit mistakes.

Dragon Men: Dragon men have high self-esteem and always forge ahead. As one of the best leaders ever, Dragon men prone to be energetic, motivated, and skillful at work and they love to set dramatic and ambitious goals and then lead the team to complete them. They are also faithful and generous to friends and lovers, seldom flirting with others. However, they need more courage to face failures and challenges.

Dragon Women: Dragon women are typical feminists. They think women can perform as well as men, and even do better. Besides. They have a clear plan about their future and will be determined to fight for it. In life, dragon women prefer simple and comfortable clothing to fashionable styles. At work, they tend to be career-oriented and creative.

I originally wanted to spent this year’s tet in either Vietnam for the dragon year or in California. Unfortunately, finances did not align the stars for me so it was a no go. Hopefully the next time the dragon year comes around, I’ll get the chance. In the meantime, I wanted to make the most of it so I spent the last 3 weekends I had off in Chinatown and celebrating with friends and family in the regular traditional way I did growing up NY with good food and street festivals/lion dances. The only thing I didn’t get to see was the CNY parade since I couldn’t ask for a 4th weekend off in a row. Maybe next year! The lion dances were a sight to see and so fun! It’s chaotic but a good chaos in the city watching all the streets line up with performances on every corner going door to door. I love seeing all the color and as an adult, now I appreciate how beautiful Chinatown is and understand the importance of supporting all these small businesses that I grew up with, watching my mother buy our groceries on our monthly trip to the city to stock up on Asian goods we couldn’t find on Long Island.

Personally, I have no idea where I want this year to take me. I’m a little lost when it comes to what goals I want to set and work on next, but I still want to manifest some big dragon energy for the year. It’s my year so I really should take chances and bet on myself more instead of being cautious and worrying about everything all the time. Let’s see where this dragon year takes me!

Anxiety

January 9, 2023

I'm a bad bitch, and I got bad anxiety
People call me rude 'cause I ain't lettin' 'em try me
Sayin' I'm a ho 'cause I'm in love with my body
Issues, but nobody I could talk to about it
They keep sayin' I should get help
But I don't even know what I need
They keep sayin' speak your truth
And at the same time say they don't believe, man
Excuse me while I get into my feelings for a second
Usually I keep it down, but today I gotta tell it
Not that anybody gives a fuck anyway
But everybody talkin' shit probably sucks anyway
Y'all don't even know how I feel
I don't even know how I deal
Today I really hate everybody
And that's just me bein' real, yeah
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday
Bad bitches have bad days too
Friday, Saturday, Sunday, bounce back
How a bad bitch always do
All I really wanna hear is, "It'll be okay"
Bounce back 'cause a bad bitch can have bad days

Sometimes I feel like my own worst enemy. It’s been quite the week and it’s only the first week of the year. Is this what my 2023 is going to be like? To be fair, I was feeling apprehensive walking into it, whereas past years, I ran into it like BRING IT ON. Is this what growing up is like? You develop irrational fears and anxiety that didn’t use to be there? Like how I used to ride Six Flags rollercoasters back in high school fearlessly, but nowadays, I have a real fear of death if made to ride Tower of Terror. I hate that drop feeling in my stomach. I also developed bad anxiety on planes when experiencing turbulence. My last trip home from California, I started looking up Jetblue’s crash statistics when turbulence hit and went on a downward spiral on the internet. Let’s just say, I’m seriously considering getting Xanax prescribed for the next plane ride. Sadly, I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

But it’s like Meghan’s song says. I do feel like I need help a lot of the times. I do feel like I want to talk to someone, but at the same time, I don’t know who to turn to, where to go, how to ask. I don’t know how to heal from trauma. I feel like I’ve played this strong, independent, bad bitch person for so long, everyone sees me as someone who can handle it. So I don’t know how to translate my pain into asking for help and be vulnerable. I smile a lot and I’m okay for the most part, but there are days where I feel low. And sometimes, overwhelmingly, severely low. And when I feel drained from feeling this way, it’s like I’m running on E. It’s either I’m all the way up, or all the way down. Why does it feel like a rollercoaster? Why can’t I have just medium moments where I feel like okay, this is manageable? Le sigh. I didn’t use to feel this deeply about my anxiety in the past but as I get older, it feels harder to cope sometimes. Is it because of getting older or is it because of everything piling and adding up?

In the meantime, I guess I’ll write about what I know. An emotional dump, if you will, to work through my feelings and anxiety. Especially since therapy is expensive and time-consuming to even search for the right person to talk to. I’m going to try and do more of this in 2023 to try and crack down on the heaviness I feel in my life. Maybe this is the year I work through my trauma. A cathartic release. I wonder if I should get a small journal to keep with me to write down my thoughts when they come. It’s funny because this is what I use my long distance runs for. Therapy to work out my thoughts. But maybe I need to place to jot it all down instead of letting it bounce in my head.

This week, part of my anxiety is from all the different emotions I feel from my grandpa passing. I feel guilt, I feel regret, I feel like a bad person, I feel sad, I feel angry, I feel…lost.

My grief from Rocco’s death is different from my grandpa’s death in many ways, which probably doesn’t make coping any better. The depressive state and feelings of sadness are familiar, but the circumstances with each death, I’ve learned, I have to learn to grieve, cope and heal in a different way. With Rocco’s death, it was sudden and unexpected; I had just seen and spoken to him a day before and everything seemed fine. With my grandpa’s death, it was expected due to his old age and known declining health and condition, so it was more a natural course of life, but still devastating and heartbreaking nonetheless. Both still hurt.

My grandpa’s death, hit me in a depressive wave. I’ve spent the last few years purposely avoiding my dad’s side of the family due to the toxicity I experienced growing up. I never felt like I belonged or welcomed much. This can also be attributed to the toxic nature of Vietnamese culture growing up as well. The stereotype or rather the shared experience amongst my peers is that our families are not directly encouraging or supportive of our desires, our personalities, our dreams, our expressive nature, our career choices - especially if they’re outside the realm of traditional jobs our parents want us to follow. They tease us, they bully us, they discourage, they can be very mean and harsh growing up. And all any of us ever want is to feel accepted and “enough” as we navigate our way through life and figure out who we are meant to be. My relatives were definitely very judgmental, snarky, snobby, and rude. I grew up with them because my parents would send me to stay with them every summer vacation. When I reached college, I was finally old enough to make my own decisions and stopped going, opting to stay home and find a summer job instead. So my visits started becoming more limited and then after I got married, life and my full time job got in the way and I used that an excuse that I was just too busy to attend. So if I’m being honest, I haven’t had the greatest relationship with them.

But again, if I’m being honest, it’s not fair to talk about the bad parts only, and not give credit for the good parts. Growing up, they called me too skinny, too fat, ugly, told me I was wasting my time in fashion school when I took summer classes at FIT, they insulted my mother calling me mất dạy because I didn’t dress conservative and was more outspoken and loud than most children and brazen enough to talk back to defend myself. But like how I’ve given my parents some grace and forgiven them for our past relationship growing up, I too should reflect on my relationship with my relatives and give them credit. They were there for me to provide for me when my parents couldn’t afford everything I needed - especially in a family with 4 other siblings who had needs too - and also a lot of times would buy me things I wanted as well. I say this because wants and needs are obviously different. My aunt provided me with an expensive TI-84+ calculator when my parents could not afford it, but my aunts and uncles also bought me fashionable new school clothes and shoes for the fall school year so I would feel less than the other kids. They may have been snobby but sometimes it worked in my advantage, lol. And they did a lot of times, provide me with spending money so I could buy snacks and fun things at school when my parents could only give enough for lunch when we no longer qualified for free lunch. They provided me with a lot of experiences my parents simply couldn’t due to time and limited funds trying to raise 5 kids. They took me to see the latest popular movies. They took me to Coney Island. They took me to see Santa Claus at the mall. They searched for hard to find Sailor Moon merchandise at a time when it wasn’t popular yet like how it is now. They let me stay up late and watch as much tv as I want since I didn’t have cable back at home. They took me to see the 4th of July fireworks. They took me to beaches and they always bought me my own Happy Meal that I didn’t have to share with anyone. They helped raise me in the best way they knew how, even if I didn’t feel the love I wanted to feel, growing up. I’m not making excuses for their toxicity, I’m just trying to make an understanding of it and balance out the good and the bad. I don’t believe my relatives have bad intentions, but were rather a product of their own upbringing and experiences. I do believe, they care for me in their own and different ways. How do I know this? I haven’t seen them in years, like I said, but at my grandfather’s wake when we all spoke our piece to make our peace with each other and with grandpa, the way they talked about each other, and about me, revealed themselves, even if it was under sad circumstances. It’s when people are honest sometimes, when looking at life and death in the face and seeing how precious life is and how little time we truly have with another. My dad revealed to me at the wake that I truly was my grandpa’s favorite, despite not being a boy. And my aunt when I first walked into the funeral home, hugged me tightly and sobbed into my arms, severely disappointed at herself for not making it on time racing back to the state and hospital, but also how happy she was that we were with him in his final moments because of how much he loved his grandkids above everything else. We are his legacy and she was so very proud of all of us. It’s very rare to hear these words from Asian culture. It’s very eye-opening to us kids after spending so long bitter at the adults in our lives.

It made me feel bad for the years I spent angry and resentful at my relatives and stayed away. My aunts insisted I come to their house this past weekend on the 7th day after my grandpa’s passing, to practice đám giỗ. We do this on the 7th, 49th and 100th day of our loved one’s passing in the first year, and then annually thereafter. I’ve been doing this since I was little (up until college when I started going less and less and then not at all), but this time, it took a different meaning. As a child, the đám giỗ were always for ancestors I never knew/met. Now it was for someone I knew and played a role in my life. It was personal. So I went. And now, it felt much less toxic than before when I was younger. I don’t know if it’s because I grew up, or my relatives grew up and have become warmer and more understanding as people and less toxic. But they want me to start visiting more again. They live far though so I don’t know if I will continue these trips as often as they would like me to, but I would like to be able to try and make my grandfather’s đám giỗ a priority in my life to pay my respects and honor him since I didn’t visit as much as I should in his final years.

What is đám giỗ, though? Plainly put, it is the death anniversary of a passed loved one. In Vietnamese culture, the family gets together to share a meal. Many dishes are cooked and eaten family style, a lot of the times, the dishes can be the ancestor’s favorite dishes. One relative will host and the family members are expected to make their best efforts to make the trip. There is usually a family altar where a photo of the deceased are placed, sometimes along with other ancestors. The eldest family member will light 3 incense first and pray, placing the incense into a bowl of rice, inviting the ancestor into the home. The rest of the family will follow and light their own incense and pray as well. After all the incense has burned, then the family can share a meal since the ancestor has “finished eating” all the food placed on the altar. These events are not meant to be sorrowful, but a time of celebration and joy. You are celebrating their past life and cherished past memories you have of them. It is meant to be a time of togetherness and bonding. If you have ever watched Disney’s Coco, it is similar to Día de los Muertos.

As a kid, I honestly didn’t think much of these celebrations. I thought they were annoying sometimes because it meant my parents would take us on a trip to my relatives house which took forever to get to and back and it would cut into my homework and school time and I wouldn’t get home til late and be tired for school the next day. As an adult now and with my grandpa’s passing, my first direct relative connection to a đám giỗ, I see how important they are. You should make time for it, because how much time do any of us really have left. We should spend it with family. And of course, good food.

I want to be better. I’m going to work on being better about making time for my dad’s extended family, as well as continue making memories with my siblings and my parents. I’ve been learning to embrace more of my culture in recent years and wear it proudly. Maybe my return to dark hair was symbolic of returning to my roots, in more ways than one. I am Vietnamese and I am American. I don’t fit the stereotypical obedient daughter mold because I’ve always wanted to do things my way. I have never wanted to make myself smaller to fit what I’m ‘expected’ to be. I am loud and colorful. And I have never been one to apologize for it. But I am still proud of both my culture and who I am as an individual. I have a different sense of style but I want to bring my personality into the fold and marry it with my culture. This past summer when my mom had new ao dai made for me, I wanted to give my mom nice wholesome photos of me but also something I would love for my own portfolio. I’ve been wanting to do more shoots representing both me and my culture. Maybe this is how I find my place and fit in, after years of feeling stuck between two worlds. Maybe this is how I find peace.