Sangha of Auspicious Companions

How My Life Changed While Waiting Out Traffic

Claudia Chee spent her early twenties waiting out the heavy Bay Area traffic in the unassuming aisles of Costco — eating samples, occasionally buying chips, feeling something she didn’t yet have words for. Her journey is one lined with the exhausting arithmetic of high achievement: parental love encoded as pressure, two stints at Google that didn’t bring happiness, a sexual assault carried silently for years, and a decade of therapy doing its slow, necessary work. Only later did she understand she wasn’t just killing time at a wholesale store; she was finding the one place that asked nothing of her. The unexpected turn came when a Costco manager’s offhand comment — “You’re always here, why don’t you do something?” — sparked a social media hobby that drew thousands of strangers into her orbit. Disarmingly, the warmth of the community began to heal something intangible inside: “they were reaching all the way back, gently, to a part of me that had been alone for a very long time.” She calls them the ten thousand moms she never had — people who showed up not because they had to, but because they wanted to. Her strength today carries the hard-won clarity of someone who has learned, slowly and imperfectly, that being enough was never something anyone could take — only something she had to learn to give herself.

Be The Change

Think of one place where you have felt unexpectedly safe or seen. Send a message today to one person in that space, however briefly, letting them know what their presence has meant to you.