I arrived at 30 at a peculiar juncture of time: global pandemic, nationwide lockdown, being pregnant and confined at home for over 6 weeks. On my 30th birthday, I woke up in an ordinary morning and carried out my ordinary routine of sun salutation sequence followed by meditation. There was a little thing that I…
It is an interesting time to be a witness of history, to observe how a virus outbreak that happened thousands of miles away erupted into a global pandemic, and to feel the weight of shock when it burned my neighbourhood. From reading news on the sideline, suddenly, I became an active participant in the arena…
When I first discovered that I was pregnant, I was worried about my mental health. After going through what felt like a tremendous transition in life from marriage to adjusting to new family life to setting up our new home in a new part of the city — there were a lot of emotional fluctuations…
Have you ever imagined how it feels to find out that you (or your partner) are pregnant? I thought it is the most beautiful thing in the world — until it caught me off guard. When I was holding the pregnancy test kit that turned positive in seconds instead of 5 minutes I thought I…
In the past 3 months, I’ve written more than ever even though I haven’t put anything out in public. While I feel like an imposter as a writer, somehow, I knew that I wasn’t in the right place to create anything meaningful. In the midst of a transition of lifestyle, identity and priority, everything inside…
I recently encountered a distressed fresh graduate who wanted to pursue something entirely different from her college degree but she wasn’t sure if that’s her purpose. At that time of our encounter, while I was navigating my post-wedding ‘lostness’, I saw my younger self in her anxiety. Purpose…?!?! I wanted to tell her to do…
(Chaos) This is so frustrating. Coming back from honeymoon, my life dissolved into a puzzle that I had to piece together. Getting married is not just ticking off a yearlong (or half-year, in my case) to-do list and ended with a massive glamorous endeavour. What nobody talked about, and what I didn’t foresee, are the…
The older I get, the more I understand that I am a creator, the more I am at peace with who I am. This understanding is of utmost importance because it liberated me to create whatever I want to, without feeling the need to fulfil a certain image. Whenever I look back, I was always…
In Septemeber 2018, I left my first Vipassana meditation course with a glorious feeling of accomplishing 100 hours of cross-legged meditation, reaching a state where I felt my body dissolved into a mass of energy. In the span of a year, from the ‘gungho-ness’ to wake up and meditate at 5 am daily, my dedication…
In the weeks leading to the mark of Own Your Story’s (OYS) first anniversary in August, I found myself lost… again. Instead of mesmerising the wonderment in our journey, I was troubled by the urge of monetizing it and turning it into a business, showered in many well-intentioned advices and couldn’t hear my own voice. During the…
I felt stuck… in a perfectly fine life. People would tell me that I was doing a good job building community, touching lives, and getting hitched; but deep down I was lost in the narratives the felt more and more like a cage — what I am supposed to do, who I am supposed to…
When I was able to breath smoothly, it dawned on me how close I was to death. It started with a post-run walk where I suddenly felt uneasy and rested on a bench. Thing got worse when I had difficulty breathing, literally fighting for air. It gradually slowed down to light, long breath, that was…