"Life feels like I'm just going through the motions. What if I actually went for what I truly want?"

"If I really were to be who I truly am, without hiding parts of myself, what would happen?"

"Why do I feel stuck while everyone else around me is hitting their career goals, raising their families? Why can't I move forward too?"

If you've ever found yourself thinking any of the above, keep reading.

This is for the unconventional thinkers, the questioners, and seekers.

_{(This is NOT for you if you love the rat race of achievement, and live and thrive by following the "traditional" rules. Keep playing the game that works for you.)}

Maybe you've traveled the world and caught a glimpse of what true freedom feels like. Maybe you've been touched by the natural beauty and abundance of Mother Nature. Maybe you've lived in places with people who grew up completely differently from you, spoke a different language, and still created lasting friendships. Maybe you know the depth of connection that comes from honing a craft or discipline with the utmost dedication. Maybe you've loved really hard, and been broken before. Maybe you're just fiercely curious.

Whatever your experience, you know what it feels like to be different, to be free, and to be passionate. And sometimes, it can feel like that's a terrible thing. The world around you seems to always be screaming at you to stop dreaming, fall in line, and do what you're "supposed" to do. And so being, and thinking, differently, can feel like a real threat.

But what if these unique experiences were actually the key to living a life that you truly love? What if you actually leaned in, instead of away, to your uniqueness? And to these experiences and quirks life has gifted you to navigate...and grow from?

Not all of us were meant to live the safe, secure life protected by white picket fences and white-collar jobs. Not all of us want that...and I'm here to tell you, that is more than okay.

It's okay to want more. It's also okay to want less. And it's okay to want something completely different out of life.

The Cost of the Double Life: The Good Girl vs. the Rebel Dreamer

I learned early what earned me love and safety. Being quiet. Being obedient. Getting good grades, never causing trouble, making life easy for the people around me. In a traditional Chinese-American household built on the promise of the white-picket-fence dream, this wasn't just a personality trait. It was the unspoken deal. I was good at it. Good enough to feel safe. Good enough to slip by unnoticed.

But there's a particular kind of pain that lives inside being good, quiet, and obedient, especially when you're not meant for that life. Somewhere around age nine, another voice in me started stirring. One that wanted to be seen, not just approved of. She wanted friends to laugh with. She wanted to dance. Groove to a rhythm. Express something the Good Girl had no language for. And finally in my college years, I found that language in hip hop and street dance.

For years, I lived caught between the two of them. The Good Girl kept me safe, achieving, respected. She's the one who got me into top universities and a resume that looked impressive on paper. The Rebel Dreamer kept me alive, curious, expressive. She's the one who got me onto stages, into unfamiliar cities, into rooms I wasn't supposed to be in. For a long time, I thought I'd found a way to have both. But I slowly started to realize that I was actually at war with myself, and that everything the Good Girl did...it was a front, and I knew it.

It caught up with me on a misty afternoon in the mountains of Miyazaki, Japan. I was soaking in a volcanic hot spring, in the middle of a life that from the outside looked like the dream. Hip-hop performances. World travel. A career I'd built from nothing that looked cooler and more "different" than anyone I grew up with. And I was sobbing. Because none of it was touching what was actually happening underneath. My relationships kept falling apart. I couldn't get paid what I needed to build the life I wanted. My body was breaking down in ways I could no longer explain away.

I thought it was burnout.

I called it burnout for a long time. It wasn't. It was a full-on crisis, and no amount of rest was going to fix it.

What actually moved it was years of work, not a weekend retreat or a long vacation. Spiritual inquiry. Meditation. Ayurveda...Plus, a lot of mistakes, and slowly learning how to sit with conflict instead of running from it, how to recognize the people who didn't actually align with me even when they looked good on paper. I learned to let go of relationships, not only with friends but with teachers and mentors I respected deeply, because as impressive as they were, I started to see that not everyone I worked with had my best interests in mind. The excavation was painful.

But staying stuck was worse. It cost me years of vibrancy I can't get back. My late twenties into my thirties, a stretch of life I could have spent thriving, standing fully in my own power. Instead I spent it surviving, picking up broken pieces of myself over and over, and that took everything I had. My whole existence became about healing, when honestly, I would have rather just been happy...going to the gym, or immersed deep in creative projects. Instead, healing was the project, for the better part of a decade.

The Courage to Become Unacceptable

This kind of work is uncovering lifelong patterns, and patterns don't dissolve the moment you finally see them. You spend years getting familiar with them. Acknowledging them. Learning who you actually are, the good, the bad, and the parts you'd rather not look at, and embracing the whole of it. Because underneath all those layers are the parts of you that actually make you powerful. The very parts you once deemed too different to be safe.

It was only when I started asking for help that any of those layers began to lift. Not before that.

So here's the real question: if you actually want to let this go, not manage it, not just intellectually understand it, but actually release what you were conditioned to be, how do you do that?

The entirety of my approach to working with people is built around that exact question. I work with people not because they need fixing, but because somewhere along the way, they learned to be acceptable instead of whole. And if this resonates, perhaps it's because you know this better than anyone else: At some point, if you want to truly be happy with yourself and your life, you're going to have to stand up for yourself and let go of trying to be acceptable and palatable. 

Embracing True You

These days, I've arrived somewhere I couldn't have promised myself back in that hot spring. A version of me that actually accepts all of who I am. The Good Girl and the Rebel Dreamer. The ambition and the softness. The parts that used to feel like a threat to being loved, and the parts that make me who I am.

That doesn't mean any of it got easy. Building a business rooted in your actual values instead of what looks impressive is hard. Being an artist and still figuring out how to support yourself is hard. Working part-time jobs to fund the thing you actually believe in, while people you know are collecting a full salary from a cushy corporate job, is hard. There were years I genuinely wondered if I'd made the wrong call.

But if you've read this far, some part of you already knows. Easy was never actually what you wanted. Easy was just the thing you were told to want to distract you from what matters.

Let's dig deeper together.

If what I wrote here resonated, I'd like to invite you to explore that with me. Let me know what part of this spoke to you, and what you recognized in yourself. Email me at [email protected].  And if it feels aligned, we can also set up a time to chat!

Thanks for reading. 

_{Photo credit: P-Jay Wyche}