Rainbows

August 8, 2026

Without fanfare I turn 30 this month. The 3 on that number feels like a label with too much dust on the adhesive — it will not stick. You can press and smooth out the edges until your thumbs go raw, but each time the corners will still roll back to reveal a 2 underneath.

As a 1, and certainly before that, I never thought I would reach 3. It was unimaginable to me, gap-toothed and clothed in oversized hand-me-down rugby shirts from my older cousins. I raced after an older sister who had already marked life's next milestones (braces, high school, a driver's license) without realizing that each of those milestones was advancing 1 towards 2 and eventually 3. But the number of stops until 3 was still uncountably infinite, and so it was an impossibility, or something only grown-ups had to worry about.

Those early 0s and 1s are imbued with a vibrating energy, an inherent acceleration. For me the vibrating years were in Colorado. I rode horses, caught grasshoppers, and went to summer camp with my friend Sam to make our own video game. I loved those summers. They brought a heat that thawed me from the cold, snow-filled spring. They also brought wonderfully aromatic afternoon thunderstorms. Clouds would gather on the Rockies to absorb energy at high altitude, then turn and unleash it on the Front Range, showering the prairie grass with lightning and rain. This left behind a perfume of damp earth that infused the early evenings of my boyhood.

The aftermath of one such downpour washed up a rainbow outside my window, closer than I'd ever imagined possible. Normally rainbows float between two imaginary lines: the last tree in one's line of sight and the horizon line. But this one was so nearby that it was beaming directly through the roof of my neighbor's barn. I jammed my feet into some sneakers, crushing the heel like a makeshift slipper, and rushed out the door to grab the leprechaun's treasure from that dusty old shack. But, like most experiences in my 1s, something turned me back and said, "maybe when you're older." In this case it was the neighbor's fence, a barking dog, and thoughts of what my mother might say if she found out I went careening into the neighbor's barn looking for gold.

My tendency to rush, after an older sister, after fool's gold, inevitably turned 1 into 2. Overnight I was limitless, invincible, forever young. 2 was still all about chasing rainbows, but the chase was faster, I was more sure-footed, and after marking the drinking age there was no one to say, "when you're older." In this way it was more reckless for me, both physically and spiritually. I rode a second-hand bicycle on the sunbaked streets of Tucson, but my schoolmates rode signing bonuses and big paychecks to New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. I felt the pull of what I thought was prestige. I just had to ride one of those too. What influenced me the most was the way the 4s and 5s talked about those successful students. Theirs was a sense of respect bordering on awe. Acne-pockmarked, socially uncool, and always the youngest in my class — at least I had to have awe.

Before awe I interned at a financial advisor's office off Broadway Boulevard on the east side of Tucson. It was on the top floor with windows looking north towards the Santa Catalinas. Monsoons would convene there, measuring up their descent before flooding down the slopes and filling the streets with rain. It was in that office that someone in a suit said to me, "a year of experience in Manhattan is worth two anywhere else." Faster was better. More was better. I didn't need to consider anything else. Soon I was riding my own signing bonus and filling onlooking students with that same sense of misplaced prestige.

The next five years were a blur. I remember a few things. First, there was a sleeping bag in one of the conference rooms where at 4 a.m. I could get a few hours of sleep before the mid-level managers came in cradling cups of overpriced coffee. Second, I was lonely, and only spending money made me feel better. I wasted months' worth of rent on jackets and shoes, concert tickets and ecstasy. One strung-out morning after clubbing in Los Angeles, I raced a friend on the beach. My Apple Watch told me my heart rate crossed 200. I stopped wearing it after that. The following week I had to lie on the cold cement of my apartment under Potrero Hill to calm the panic attacks associated with coming down. Third, my recklessness was waning. This calming down was not yet the product of conscious effort, but more likely due to my biology struggling to keep up. Something was shifting beneath my flesh, something subconsciously preparing me for change.

The catalyst of that change was my dad passing away. It came completely without warning. I was a late 2, and he was a mid 6, running laps in the muggy North Carolina heat when he got jumped by the worst kind of criminal: a heart attack. I was crushed. I clung to my bedsheets and called my sister, daring to cry in front of her for the first time since we were 1s.

It was a blessing. The brevity of his life and his obsessive devotion to work, colored in the post-mortem light by which I read his journals, laid bare that the trajectory of my life was beginning to echo his. I was immediately and abundantly aware of the rainbows I had been chasing, of how I had thundered past moments and places of beauty in lieu of a leprechaun's pot of gold. I got promoted and quit. Weeks after I told my girlfriend I thought I loved her, I left her. She had met the broken need to be desired that plagued my early adulthood, a need born from a chronically single romantic life and a dearth of self-love. But she hadn't met my childhood qualifications for capital-L Love, qualifications copied down from the lyrics of the country pop music that accompanied my daily drive to AP Chemistry. I sold everything I could, put the rest in my mother's house in Berkeley, and bought a one-way ticket to meet a friend in Malta. I would start there and slowly make my way towards the Pacific.

That was the start of the last three years before 3. Despite a bank account brimming with five years of sleepless labor, I was spiritually destitute. No love, no father, no work, no home. Certainly no rainbows. The storm clouds were still gaining strength, running me down, nipping at my heels with lightning. There were a few things that saved me from being sucked into the maelstrom that autumn.

Music. Specifically, Porter Robinson's Nurture. I listened to the album dozens of times during those first few months in Europe. It played on park benches, in train cars, and under the covers before I fell asleep at night. Strong0toLight1 wrote on Reddit's r/porterrobinson, "with no exaggeration, probably saved my life." Same, internet stranger.

Poetry. It wasn't good, and I'm sure my mother winced as she read it, but it helped me cope. I finished a book of poetry in the hours and kilometers between Portugal and Singapore, only to throw it away after writing the last word. The writing group I later joined at the Red Room in Taipei made me realize that everyone was using their poetry project as a form of trauma-dumping. It wasn't until after I left the group that I recognized I had been doing that too, and I had stopped writing stanzas because my trauma bin was empty.

Exercise. In Prague was a calisthenics coach named Will. He was a 2 and junior to me, but had wisdom far into the 6s and 7s. He had a willingness to be vulnerable I had rarely seen in men — one I studied and benefited from greatly. There was also Teddy, a 3 who had defeated his own demons on the beaches of Los Angeles. We did acroyoga together at Da'an Forest Park, shamelessly admitting later that we had joined the group for the opportunity to meet girls. Although we both did, we also found each other. He showed me many tools of spiritual self-treatment and would always pick up the phone when I called.

The sky cleared after that. I healed, or at least covered the wound with enough scar tissue. I found Daoism, or Zen, or whatever it is that reminds me to appreciate this moment and not chase the next. I met someone who my inner child could mark with the sign of capital-L Love. The recklessness was finally and entirely gone, replaced by a willingness to relinquish control and just accept. The 1 who favored hot summers had become a 3 who cherished crisp autumns.

At 4 and 5 and eventually 8, I'll revisit this and see how much momentum I still had at 3. From the perspective of those decades, I haven't slowed down at all. It's relative, of course. I'm just glad not to be chasing rainbows anymore.