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…
In the midst of the wedding planning, I found myself in a lot of resistance that often leads to negative emotions. A close friend told me that the root of my resistance laid in the false expectation that I could have things my way. I agreed, and a lot of ‘but’ immediately popped into my…
When we organized a community dialogue about personal transformation and career transition, I didn’t expect ‘parents’ to be a major challenge that many participants resonate with. One of our panellists has an extreme case of hiding her career change from her parents for 6 months; when her parents found out about it, it led to…
From a movie based on the life of a 20 something female who built the most exclusive high-stakes, underground poker game in the world and a book written by a shame researcher on her life work, I learned a common life lesson in these 2 vastly different life stories — the power of owning our story. In…