I love my friends, all of them, I really do.

But it’s become more apparent over the years that there’s just this last barrier I can’t really seem to get across. I can’t connect with my friends on a different level because, well, they’re mostly all guys.

There’s just this thing about not understanding exactly where they come from because the experience we have living life as women or men are completely different. As much as I love my boys, there are just some things I will never understand about them because I was born with different body parts and as a result, a different narrative. For example, I don’t really understand the pressures and needs to be masculine because that was never something that I had to deal with. At the same time, they wouldn’t understand the unspoken rules society imposed on me to be feminine.

I mentioned this a couple of months ago.. I complain occasionally about the racist shit I have to deal with when I get hit on, but it never crossed my mind that being an Asian female could actually make romantics easier than if I was an Asian male. Life isn’t easy for the average Asian male, especially one that is short, in this world dominated by the alpha, white man. It’s much easier for me as an Asian female, to cross racial, cultural, and social barriers when it comes to dating. Asian males have to work that much harder to do the same. I feel for them, but I couldn’t ever completely empathize with them. So while I love my friends to the moon and back, there’s big parts of their stories I can’t and never will be able to understand.

They say that women and men can never be friends - that it always becomes something else or blows up in their face.

I don’t think that’s true.

I genuinely believe that I can love these people as much as I love a significant other and yet, never think of them in that way or have them think of me as anything more.

I do also think that I need more girlfriends. And it’s exactly because I want to share and relate the experiences I have walking through life as a woman. As an Asian millennial. I need more girlfriends to talk about sexism, feminism, racism, glass ceilings, bamboo ceilings, politics, rape, empowerment, conscious fashion, health, children with. I need inspiring women in my life.

That’s why the two big resolutions I have this year are: realize where people are coming from and put myself in their shoes to try to understand their stories (like my guy friends) and to connect and invest in empowered women in my life.

I want to surround myself with amazing, independent women who will love and support me as much as my boys have. In turn, I want to be able to do the same for all of them because there is no greater friendship than the ones where you push each other to grow.

And maybe, just maybe… if I can find and connect a bunch of wonderful women, they’ll be able to fall in love with all my guy friends as well.

That would literally be the best social circle of my life.

I love you, guys.
(Even though you forgot to tell me about BROTLAND.)

And to the girls, I can’t wait to meet you and for you all to meet each other.