Less than a month after moving into my new flat, Marcus and I got locked inside.
Not locked out — inside. The double lock on our front door failed completely overnight, and by early morning, we couldn’t get out. Marcus missed school. I spent hours calling the landlord, then his agent, getting nothing back but silence. Eventually, I did what you do in an emergency: I found a locksmith, got us cut out, and paid for it myself.
The whole ordeal started at 6 am. A new lock wasn’t installed until 8 pm. For ten of those hours, I had no lock on my front door at all.
This is the flat I had just moved into. The one with the private rooftop where I’d hung a canopy and some lights, thinking: this is exactly the reset I was looking for.
Then came the landlord’s response.
The Fury
He refused to cover the cost. Said it was my responsibility as the tenant. Never mind that I’d lived there less than a month. Never mind that two independent technicians confirmed the lock had pre-existing structural failure. Never mind that the reason it cost so much was that we were trapped, which creates an immediate safety hazard, and I couldn’t reach anyone for hours.
I was furious.
I did what I do when I’m angry, and I know I’m right: I researched everything. Tenant rights in Hong Kong, complaint channels, mediation services, government departments, and small claims processes. I built my case carefully — receipts, timestamped messages, technical confirmations, the law. All of it. I was in constant contact with the agent, figuring out what to write, how to write it, how to be firm without torching a relationship I’d barely had time to build.
On top of the anger, that drained me completely. Emotionally, physically — I was scraped clean.
And through all of it, one thought kept me going: there is no way I am letting this go. I will fight for this until the end.
The Shift
It wasn’t one moment. It was a calculation — slow, uncomfortable, and completely clear once it landed.
In Hong Kong, landlords hold enormous power over their tenants. They can raise rent at renewal. They can choose not to renew a lease without giving a reason. And I had just moved into a home, Marcus, and I genuinely love, in one of the most expensive and exhausting cities in the world to move in and out of.
I ran the numbers. Not the financial ones — the real ones.
Fight, and I become a troubled tenant. He raises the rent. He ignores future requests. He doesn’t renew. I spend the next two years walking on eggshells in my own home, then face the brutal cost and chaos of moving again. Don’t fight, and I absorb the loss, keep the home, protect the stability we’d just barely started to build.
Fight or not, I lose either way.
So I let it go.
What It Actually Felt Like
I want to be honest about this — because I think there’s a version of this story where I wrap it up in a neat lesson about acceptance, non-attachment, and choosing peace, and that version would be incomplete.
The truth is, it felt like helplessness. It felt like smallness. Two thoughts I remember clearly, sitting in that flat with no lock on the door: I feel like nothing. I feel beneath.
Not because I made the wrong choice. I think I made the right one. But making the right choice and feeling good about it are not the same thing.
People talk about letting go like it’s a release. This didn’t feel like a release. It felt like putting something down because your arms gave out. Maybe that counts. I’m still deciding.
What I Keep Coming Back to
Not everything resolves into a lesson. Sometimes it just happens, and you carry it, and life moves on around you.
But I do think about where it goes — the thing you put down. Because it doesn’t disappear. Bessel van der Kolk writes about this in The Body Keeps the Score — the way unresolved experiences, especially ones involving powerlessness, don’t just live in the mind. They settle into the body. Into the nervous system. Into the places we don’t always think to look when something feels off.
I think that’s partly why I do the work I do — not from a place of having it all sorted, but because I know what it feels like when the body absorbs what the mind has no good place to put.
I’d Love to Hear from You
Have you ever been in a moment like this — where you knew exactly what was right, had everything you needed to prove it, and still had to let it go anyway? Where the smart choice and the just choice weren’t the same thing?
What did that feel like for you? And where did you put it?
Leave a comment below or write to me directly — I read everything.