The People Who Change Your Life

Call it a love letter of sorts.

Sundaze Book Café is the home of everyday magic, joyful living and conversations likely to be had over a hot drink with a friend in your favourite café, capturing the syrup-slow feel and glow of a Sunday. I’m Michelle, and I’ll be your host this Sunday.

The other evening, hazy with nostalgia, I rifled through my archived journals. Notebooks filled with thoughts, emotions and experiences that I deemed worthy to immortalise on paper, each cover design a miniature time capsule in its own right. I can distinctly remember choosing each one, and how I felt, why I selected it, the incomparable way it felt to adorn the very first page with its very first words. Among my notebooks was a common theme: friendship and relationships. I’ve filled over 20 journals with stories about the people in my life, those that’ve come and gone, others that remain, core characters in the thirties chapter of my life. It struck me, all of a sudden, how some people do come and go from your life, yet they’ll still leave an indelible impact.

My best friend from primary school and I used to collect gel pens and trade them with one another. As a child of immigrants, a first-generation British-born Chinese girl, I didn’t quite ‘get’ how things operated in a white-dominant world. I mean, I was four, give me a chance! I arrived at primary school completely overwhelmed and underprepared, with my minimal English speaking skills¹. I was shy and timid, until my best friend-to-be sidled up to me and said she liked my Hello Kitty coat. She was the first person to ever invite me ‘round after school for ‘tea’ and she was the only person to ask me to play in the playground. We’d spend hours doodling and writing stories and pretending to be in a girl group and, above all, she taught me what it meant to have a friend and to be a friend. Without either of us realising, she changed my life.

Before that, my parents enrolled me at nursery, where I was unbelievably shy, largely because I couldn’t communicate with anybody. But I will always remember the kind nursery worker that stayed with me while I was too shy to move from room to room or garden on my own. She read books with me, showed me the matching dress-up costumes, steered me towards making friends with another girl. It’s been thirty years, and her kindness continues to steer me forwards.

Then, there’s the fragments of every person you’ve shared meaningful time with, who’ve permeated your being in some small way. I stir wasabi into my soy sauce for sushi because of my fabulous older cousin, who I’m still in awe of today. I found my favourite anime because of my best friend from 17. I can’t adopt the dead bug position in Pilates without thinking of my school friends and our disastrous P.E. classes at school. I always walk through Covent Garden using the same route because of my friend that I’d unfailingly meet for lunch once a week when we worked just seven minutes away from each other. I still order the same dishes on the menu at Nando’s that I did when an ex-boyfriend and I discovered the ultimate combination together. C’mon, I even drop everything (now) to clap when Fearless comes on. I’m the person I am because of the endless mini steers from the people who’ve changed my life.

---

This post is inspired by Evie’s magical essay here on Substack.

the people who change your life

1. My parents spoke to me in Cantonese at home, with the thought that I’d pick up English from native-speaking teachers at school. They were correct! I’m fluent in both languages now!