Being home

I’ve been home in California for a week now. The jet lag cleared faster than last time, I’ve been eating lots of good food (and lots of leftovers) with my family, my sister baked chocolate chip cookies (they were heavenly), and I met her boyfriend. I also saw my friend and her now two-year-old daughter — I was supposed to meet them earlier this year in Sài Gòn but our plan unfortunately fell through. My family and I were supposed to drive to Santa Barbara for Christmas, but the storm shut that idea down. So we stayed put, had dinner with extended family on Christmas Eve, and woke up to sunshine on Christmas Day despite the forecast saying it would rain for two days straight.

It’s been good. Quiet. Easy.

“Home” is an interesting word for me now. I have a home in Sài Gòn — my life with my fiancée, my routines, my work, the rhythm I’ve built over the last several years. But all my family is here in California. When I say I’m going home, it depends entirely on context. Sometimes it means going back to Sài Gòn. Sometimes it means coming here. Perhaps I don’t need to pick one definition. Maybe home is just wherever the people I care about are, or wherever I feel like I can be fully myself. Right now, that’s here.

What’s different this trip home is how natural the rhythm has been. I’m not fighting the lack of structure or feeling guilty about not “getting anything done.” I’m just here, spending time with people I care about. I used to feel torn between my routines in Sài Gòn and being present with my family when I came home. This time, I’m not. A few days in, I caught myself mid-journal: “Maybe I gotta realize that it’s the whole point of being home, I’m supposed to disconnect and be with my family. No productivity.”

So I haven’t been doing much of anything that resembles my routines in Sài Gòn. I had my first outdoor run yesterday — tougher than I thought on concrete instead of a treadmill. I got tired after 2 km and walked the rest. I’m not beating myself up about it. That’s the shift. I’m also halfway through a couple of books, but I’m not rushing to finish them by the end of the year just to count them for 2025. They’ll be there in January. I started thinking about goals for 2026 — maybe switching to a quarterly system instead of one big annual list — but I haven’t finished. I’ll do that on my flight back. Instead, I’ve just been watching movies with my sister, eating meals my mom cooked that are honestly better than any restaurant, and talking to them for hours without worrying about what time it is or what’s on my to-do list. I’ve been getting my family gifts — tech upgrades, things for the kitchen, whatever might make their lives a little better. I just want the best for them.

I’ve spent the last couple of years building systems that work for me — tracking my work and life, reading, running regularly, and writing. Those routines are meaningful. They’ve shaped who I am and how I work. But being home isn’t the place for them. Being home is a different mode entirely, and I’m finally okay with that.

Time moves fast when you’re in this kind of rhythm. One week down, one week left. I guess that’s always how it goes when you’re with people you care about. As I write this, I’m trying to hold onto it a little longer.

I think this is what an annual reset looks like for me. Not a vacation where I’m still checking Slack or squeezing in work between activities. A real break. Two weeks at the end of every year where I’m not trying to optimize anything or prove I can stay productive in a different timezone. Just time with my family, eating good food, being present.

Some years I’ll come here, some years they’ll come to me. But I’m going to formalize this now — two weeks at the end of the year, every year, no exceptions. The function stays the same: disconnect, be with loved ones, let the routines drop. I used to think I had to bring my systems with me everywhere. Now I know that deliberately not touching them for two weeks is what makes the other fifty sustainable.