The Chopsticks

I don't talk about this much. But I'm going to try.

A few years ago, the most important parts of my life began slipping away, gradually, quietly, until one day I woke up and realized how different everything had become.

We go through life almost as if there's a series of steps that will get us to where we think we belong. We follow them, we check the boxes, we build something. And then life happens, the kind of events that change everything, and we find ourselves not nearly as prepared as we thought we were.

I looked around and didn't recognize anything that used to define me. The identity I had spent decades building didn't feel like it was mine anymore.

My first instinct was to overwrite it. Start fresh. Become someone new. But that's not really how it works, is it?

I've been around woodshops since high school. A shop teacher pointed me toward an after-school job that changed how I saw what hands could do. Then came the Marine Corps, then a paralegal certification I never used, then a long career in tech and cybersecurity. Wood got set aside, for a long time.

When the difficult chapter hit, I needed something to do with my hands. Something real. Something that required me to focus on the thing in front of me and nothing else.

My son is a chef, he was living far away at the time and I missed him more than I could express, even now. I decided to make him a chopstick set, chopsticks and a box.

I didn't have a lathe and I didn't really know how to make chopsticks. I used my drill as a makeshift lathe and shaped them by hand. They weren't perfect but making them made me feel close to him in a way that a phone call couldn't.

He uses them at home in his kitchen. That's enough for me.

Around that time I went to Oaxaca. It was my first time there. I felt as though I needed to go somewhere that wasn't here, somewhere that might help me breathe differently.

While I was there I spent time with a curandero, a traditional healer. We talked and he suggested I do a limpia, a cleansing. A couple of days later I participated in a temascal, a traditional sweat ceremony, with him and a group of others. It was one of those experiences you can't fully explain to someone who wasn't there. I go back to those memories often.

He said something I've carried with me since. El que no suelta, no sana. He who doesn't let go, doesn't heal.

I came back carrying that with me. And I kept building.

The shop grew, a garage in Mountain View, listed as two-car though it doesn't feel like it. I added tools. A table saw. A CNC router. A laser engraver. Skills I thought I had lost have come back, and new ones have taken root alongside them.

I thought for a while that I was supposed to rebuild myself into someone completely different. But somewhere along the way I realized that wasn't right either. I carry a lot of the old me with me, the Marine, the engineer, the kid who learned to love wood in a high school shop class. I'm not replacing any of that. I'm just on a different path now.

And lately, for the first time in a while, I'm starting to see a new version of happy emerge.

Each piece I build goes into someone's home. Part of someone's life. A trivet on a kitchen counter. A guitar stand in a living room. A charcuterie board on a table where a family gathers.

I care about that more than I expected to. Because every time I finish a piece and it leaves the shop, I remember what it took to build the person who made it.

It's not the shop I envisioned. But it's mine, and it's my garage.

I'm just getting started.

— Angel