The chapter that begins in the middle of the book
On a gloomy October morning, in a neighborhood café near King’s Cross Station, I decided to quit my 9-5 job and move to Europe to study art. Timeline: within one year. Destination: unknown. PR strategy for concerned parents: anxiously pending.
London was my last stop on a long-awaited solo trip. That morning, I was scheduled to fly back home to Vancouver, Canada, where I worked as a product designer at a health-tech startup in a hospital. I liked my job—it was meaningful work—but it was my first job out of college and always meant to be a springboard to the next opportunity. Most of my adulthood, so far, had been shaped by the pandemic. I graduated with an Honors degree in International Relations during its peak. What was meant to be a celebration of my achievements after four years of sleepless nights was reduced to watching my name scroll across a TV screen at home. Shortly after, I found a flexible remote job, which gave me the freedom to take this solo trip. It was the first time I spent in solitude post-graduation.
I had a few hours to spare before my flight. A missed bus stop and a wrong turn led me to this café, where I found myself sitting across from an older woman engrossed in a newspaper. We struck up a conversation over my sketchbook, and I was star-struck to discover she was Cynthia Enloe—an American political theorist, feminist writer, and professor whose work I had studied. Though not widely known outside academia, her writings had left a profound impression on me. For the next hour, we talked about everything from politics to working in academia. Her eyes sparkled with passion as she spoke about her 40-year teaching career.
Cynthia was the first soul on earth who confided in about my idea of returning to art school. She listened to me with such warmth and encouragement. “You have to do what you love,” she said, “everything else is just too hard.” It was the final push I needed. I had decided right then and there that I was going to give my dream a real chance, in a place with beauty and antiquity, where I felt inspired.
I will never forget the honeyed sunlight streaming through the window on the plane as I landed in Florence, Italy, on the first day of the following October.
Fasting forward…
Now, I am six months away from finishing my studies at the Florence Classical Arts Academy, planning to stay in this city as long as I can and work independently in my own studio after graduation. Moving across the world alone has been simultaneously the most challenging and rewarding experience of my life. I still spend summers and Christmas in Vancouver, and each time I return, I’m reminded of how much I’ve grown and evolved. This has been an incredible journey, and it’s only just beginning.
The ethos behind this page
I record my life religiously—in journals, sketchbooks, and occasionally my Notes app (like a good citizen of the iPhone age). If you know me, you know I have a fear of forgetting and being forgotten. Retrospectives of life often center around milestones: birth, graduation, migration, marriage, death—you name it. Indeed, how else can a life well-lived be summed up in a few sentences except by referencing these conventional achievements?
Yet most of our lives unfold in the transient moments in between: small decisions that grow into bigger life changes, relationships we form and leave behind, the abyss between strangeness and familiarity, and the quiet days spent in motion or stillness. These are the moments that rarely find their way into neatly curated timelines.
And so, this is one reason I record them. Other times, writing to everybody and nobody in particular, with pen and ink, is the only thing that soothes my overstimulated caveman brain. The challenge with analog, however, is that it’s particularly difficult to search. Over the past month, I’ve begun, rather chaotically, to browse through my mountain of journals to digitally catalog excerpts I thought were worth revisiting. In this process of recording and editing, I rediscovered my love for writing. So, I decided to share them here in the hope that you, too, might find value in the space between my somewhat scattered thoughts and our shared human experience.
