Exploring My Own Path
The Beginning of The Search Within
"It is easier, swearing ourselves to someone else's cause than to sit with who we are without one."1
It summarises how I felt when I decided to quit my job and start my year of experimentation from September 2025. I want to spend the upcoming year dedicated to myself, creating space for me. Not only for my final year of training in Gestalt therapy, continuing course work and starting therapeutic clinical placement. More importantly, creating space for me to explore my own path. This decision filled me with a complex web of feelings — excitement, fear and, frankly speaking, I was lost. Now I have gained a bit more clarity, in this first essay for my blog The Search Within, I want to share the start of this journey, how I got here, the mindset changes and the initial map I drew. This is me writing to me, but it's also me writing to you. Because somewhere out there, you're walking your own path, and maybe our stories intersect in ways we don't even realise.
How did I get here?
I have been achieving high scores academically, cultivating all kinds of side talents from Chinese calligraphy, singing, table tennis, public speaking to Guqin. I believed that as long as I follow the good path to be a good student, getting into a top university, then a top company, I will be rewarded — trust the process, so they say. A decade has passed since I started working at one of the top consulting companies in the world, and 3 Fintech startups later, I am still lost. I can't shake off the feeling of hollowness in my chest, and have existential dread every 2-3 years which usually leads to the answer of a next job in a different company. I can't help but feel stuck. Whenever I am thinking of having an open-ended break, I feel fearful. The thought of not being able to have a good pay check coming in at the end of the month feels terrifying. What's even scarier is the loss of identity — what will others see me as? How would I see myself if I can't figure things out?
It took me at least 5 years to finally take the leap of faith. There is a huge gap between cognitively understanding something to really feeling it in my body. It was when I finally felt it, I moved to action. What changed? Short answer: my relationship with fear and cultivation of self-attunement.
My relationship with Fear has changed. One sentence from Dune has always been in my head whenever I think of fear — "Fear is the mind killer". Rationally understanding it doesn't help me to conquer it. Fears are my thoughts that come and go; when I grab them firmly, they root deeply within me. I gave them power, they dominate me. When I let them go, set them free, they leave me with a reminiscing thread that tugs me forward. It reminds me of how I learned skiing. I was crying in my helmet on the bus back to UCPA after a disastrous hard blue run on my first ski trip. Fear dominated me, my body and my thoughts. I kept repeating "fear is the mind killer", it didn't help. It didn't quiet my mind, because I didn't accept my fear. In the years to come, I started to befriend my fear, accepting that it will always be with me when I stared right into the crevasse, a hard drop of a cliff. My body started to soften, I gained better balance, it showed me I can befriend my fear. When I hit the icy patch, instead of hearing "I am gonna fall" in my head, I hear "I will manage". That's when I started to glide and enjoy the feeling of flying on snow waves. It is like my body has felt the fear, yet welcomed it. Fear is definitely in me as we speak, together with the voice of my inner critic and self-doubt. Practical concerns such as income, ego-concerns such as status and respect. I am not going to relinquish it or try to get rid of it. I will live with it. I am living with it.
The feeling that something is missing is definitely a big theme for me. I enjoy intellectual problem solving, belonging to a community, and a comfortable life. I have had all of it in my past decade of professional work, and still I am feeling misaligned. I heard this voice in me keep asking me, "is this the path you are going?" Until one day, it grew so loud that I couldn't ignore it anymore. After many years of therapy and therapeutic training, I finally recognised that it speaks of lack of self-attunement and connection within me. To me, attunement is understanding and responding to a person's being in an embodied way, emotionally, energetically, with our whole senses. I have been living in my head, relying on my "brain mother" for too long, that I lost touch with other parts of me. When I am truly in touch with all of me, often times, there are no words for it — yet it is like my inner truth that I can't deny its existence. Starting to be aware of all my senses, being present, and most importantly staying with my less positive feelings prove to be crucial for my own self-attunement. It allows me to follow my intuition to make a big decision like this in my life with conviction, because not just my brain agrees with it, my whole being says yes. I will say more of my journey of self-integration later in this essay.
Quit playing other's game
Should is such a powerful word. I should only treat Chinese calligraphy as a hobby, as it's hard to survive as an artist. I should work in finance as it provides the high and stable income. I should strive to climb the ladder as that's how I can achieve success and earn respect. The list goes on. And those are the "shoulds" that I am aware of. What about those that I am blind to? I am confident that they are still affecting how I behave, what I feel and what decisions I make.
Where do all these "shoulds" come from? As they don't belong to me when I really chew it over. Some of them come from my parents, some of them come from my friends, almost all of them are from others and the so-called social expectations and wisdom. If everyone has the same formula, and follows the exact formula, how can I expect a drastically different outcome from others? But do I want the same things as others? No! Then why do I want to play other's game?
Playing other's game also means that I am using other's standards to judge myself. My self-acceptance is conditioned on other's standards. I feel the need to justify my gap year to others, limiting myself to a set of outcomes that are not necessarily determined by myself, but what are acceptable to others. That's when I become my inner critic, internalising other's voices. That really made me feel stuck in energy in the past few weeks, as I kept second-guessing what I should do or focus on next. What if my choices are wrong? What if I waste my time on wrong things again? But who is determining what is good or bad, right or wrong? Me or other's standards? It really reminds me of my favourite Gestalt theory "Paradoxical theory of change". "Change occurs when one becomes what he is, not when he tries to become what he is not." I think it is about acceptance, but it is also about awareness and integration of different parts of selves. Not just accepting part of me that is coherent to outside standards — conditional self-love, but the parts that I am ashamed of, that I reject. To me, acceptance is not about relinquishing control and passively receiving, it is more about empathy. It is to attend to my flaws (trust me, there are many) and embrace them with gentle touch. I found that when I accept that I have limits, that I am fearful, I can live with them in a much more harmonious way just like how I learned to ski.
Studying Mimetic theory from Johnathan Bi's lectures on Rene Girard really prompted my thinking on what I am chasing after when I am following other's game. Girard's key insight is that human desire is fundamentally "mimetic" — we don't desire things independently but learn to desire by imitating others. Often times, we desire things providing us metaphysical value rather than just physical value. When I watch a jewellery ad with a beautiful girl wearing a shiny pair of earrings, do I just want that pair of earrings? No, I want to be like her, beautiful, popular, at ease, and chic. Status and social respect are the major metaphysical values that I tend to feel the pull toward, but is it really what I want? Or am I just mimicking others? I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with wanting those values; what I don't want is to internalise those values and pursue them without being true to myself.
What is my game? How do I find it?
Exploring my own path to me now is a journey within. Hence my blog name The Search Within. I don't have an answer yet, and I am not in a hurry anymore. I want to enjoy the process of exploring and embracing the nature of change, which is uncertainty. I have some thoughts, or so to say, initial map to start the journey. I am sure I will update them as I go.
I want to choose my own criteria. Ultimately, I want to be able to accept every part of me, but I am not there yet. And if there are conditions to love myself, then I want to decide what the conditions are. I want to start with what gives me energy. I really enjoy intellectual exploration and new experiences led by my own curiosity. And I love deep connections with others — being seen deeply and seeing others deeply. It really gives me a sense of satisfaction that is hard to compete with. It is also part of the reason that I chose to start my therapist training. So my only criteria for this upcoming year is to be led by my curiosity, create deep connections and enjoy the process.
As I mentioned above, I am very much on a journey of self-integration, re-establishing the connection not just with the intellectual self, but the emotional self. I noticed that I feel isolated when I shield my feelings from others. I need intentional attention from myself to stay attuned within me. Being with the feelings rather than leaving them to interpret immediately. My lack of staying with difficult feelings is my way to avoid the discomfort. I noticed that if I pause when I start to doom-scroll, and feel my body, there was often a sense of loss and boredom that is uncomfortable. The internal alignment and integration will not be achieved in a day. I am glad I started the journey. Mindfulness certainly helped. You can also see my first 10-day Vipassana retreat experience here. I will explore more into Carl Jung's shadow work, Parts work (modalities such as IFS) and mind-body connection related research to aid my integration. I am looking forward to sharing more as I go.
A reminder to myself is to enjoy the process. I am so used to optimising everything so I can achieve the goal. My default way of looking at achieving goals is usually starting from looking at conventional ways to solve the problem. When I was trying to improve my math grades in secondary school, I learned from the traditional wisdom of evaluating my strengths and weaknesses, understanding my gaps, and finding target problem sets to practice specifically on my prioritised gaps. Looking back, it is an effective way to solve the problem, but it is probably not the only way. I often accept the wisdom of not to "reinvent the wheel" as a default. Is there any downside to that? This perhaps stems from the thought of optimisation, finding the most efficient way with lowest effort to solve the problem. It is very goal-oriented. But what about the enjoyment in the process? I wonder if I allow myself to start from scratch and reinvent the wheel, will I enjoy the process of solving that problem more?
I also want to keep my door open to others. I enjoy sparks and connections with others both intellectually and emotionally. Here is my calling for companionship as we explore our own paths. I will try my best to stay connected with my true self, and offer authentic presence to you if you let me co-create the connection with you.
This is just the beginning, and I'm honestly not sure where this path will lead. If you're curious to find out alongside me, hit subscribe. And if any of this strikes a chord with you, leave a comment—your perspective might be exactly what I need to hear.
Grateful to my amazing friends and family for their endless support, and to the brave bloggers and thinkers sharing their stories online—you've all inspired me to begin my own. I would not be able to take this step without you!
From the novel The Knight and the Moth