Dear Michelle:

I read your recent threads and I am sorry about the pain you are going through. I wish life was better for you.

You shared that you are 38, living in a small apartment in New York City, unemployed, still burdened by that four year lawsuit, with no end in sight to it, and your long distance boyfriend changed his plans to leave Hong Kong and join you in NYC, or in Canada.

In 2019, he hated his job and life in Hong Kong, so he travelled to New York to study for an MBA so to change his career. It was a summer program, and that’s when you met him: the pre-pandemic summer of 2019. You had the best two months with him. After the program he returned to Hong Kong. A month later, he was back for a couple of weeks to see you, and to network, hoping to find a job. You saw him a third and  last time in December 2019.

Covid-19 happened in that same month. He was back in Hong Kong, and you were in NYC. The two of you kept regular, wonderful contact all through the pandemic. But he was living off his  savings, couldn’t find a job, the borders were closed, policies changed, and the plans to study in NY or move to Canada became impractical, or too difficult for him.

“He broke up with me because he feels every route is exhausted because of the virus”, you wrote.

Today, you were feeling angry, upset that he didn’t do more to be with you, that not only did he give up  on you, but he also gave up on his ambitions to get out of Hong Kong and make a career change. “Now he will stay there and do the same things that he was doing before while the future of Hong Kong is questionable and he is not Chinese”, you wrote.

You feel “disappointed, angry, and abandoned”, and very pessimistic: “I feel like nothing ever goes right for me in my life, and when it finally does, it is taken away like some big joke. My life is just one dark tragedy after another and it’s not fair”.

No, it’s not fair. It would have been wonderful if he was back in NYC, or if the two of you moved to Canada and proceeded to have a healthy, loving relationship.

You asked for tips on how to get through this:

1. “We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us”, E. M. Forster- what this quote means to me is that the best we can do, when our plans and hopes do not come to fruition, is live the life that is available to us; make the best of what we have, instead of sinking in regret about what we don’t have.

Dreams and hopes make us happy for as long as it is possible to make them come true, but when they are no longer possible, or when they are highly unlikely to happen, these unactualized dreams and hopes bring us misery.

2. Post here anytime you want to, express yourself, vent, and if you want more of my input, let me know, and I will offer you more.

anita