Estimated reading time: 5 min. (Rabbit hole included: 17 min)

When I was a little kid, grown-ups were often fighting inside the house. As a consequence, I would end up going outside to escape. Maybe it was because of the noise, maybe my own sense of guilt or the uneasy feelings that arise when you are in a place full of anger. Maybe a bit of all that.

I was living in a small town, with only one main street. I would open the door, cross the street, then take the small alley behind the church, walk until I reached the river, then take a steep street going up, climb an infinite number of wooden stairs, leading to a small path in the grass. That’s how I would end on the highest viewpoint to observe the village when there was a fight at home.

I used to sit under one big rock to protect myself, especially if it was raining. I remember being there, with the forest behind me, facing the cemetery. The wind on my face felt both like my only friend and my biggest ally. I felt at peace when it was raining while I was outside. I felt like I belonged. I felt more at home escaping it.

A bit later, when I was a teenager, I was often getting into trouble with my parents. I guess I had an issue with both illogical rules and authority. Bad combo.
So when we got into the usual arguments with my dad, I would slam the door and leave the house. My dad was living in the Parisian suburbs, which were known to be a bit dangerous, especially at night. And yet, I was out for hours. I was impulsive but not stupid, so… I was really just hiding in the garden. Waiting for someone to look after me. I would re-enter the home silently after a few hours of waiting, in vain.

As a young adult, going to students’ parties, when drunk enough I would feel out of place. That’s the moment you would find me disappearing. Running away to the nearest forest. I would sit in the grass, leaves hiding my face, my arms around my knees like a little kid. Wondering if people would notice the fact that I was gone.

I’ve always had this urge to run away when things get too intense.

This week (lol, from january 2026), as I am starting to settle in this new town, in this new life I recently chose, I guess, I started to realize people were starting to get to know me. I make friends quite easily. How lucky I am to easily find new friends. But I was not this passing stranger that could disappear in a split second anymore. People are getting closer, a bit too close. Learning about me. Getting to know me. Having people know me, relying on me to some extent, knowing details of my past, of my life… it felt uneasy. I felt seen, and it felt dangerous. I cannot let myself be in danger. So I had this urge to escape. I’d just settled, and yet, the only solution seemed to go elsewhere, where I could be a stranger again.

Once again, this stupid urge to run away. Am I an avoidant^[1] at heart?

I knew very well that moving to another country, or running in the forest, to sit on a trunk, waiting for someone to pick up on my absence would not work. I knew no one was coming to save me. Sadly, hiding in the forest is rarely the answer.

And yet, I wished to be invisible so badly at this moment. I wanted to vanish like a rogue in D&D, I wanted to be unseen and never have to interact with anyone ever again. I wanted to exist as a floating concept. The kind you stumble upon when you’re lucky. An apparition, more than a human being. I wanted to exist as something intangible, like a rainbow you’re lucky enough to see when the right conditions are met.

But that specific week, the weight of being a human character in this human world was too heavy to carry. ^[2]

One of my earliest memories of joy came up to mind. I was four, my parents just split up, and my mom's best friend was hosting us. I was spending time with two of her daughters. One evening, it started to rain. The older sister took us outside, saying it's the perfect weather to dance. And so were we, soaking wet, dancing under the rain falling. Existence was not heavy at all that day.

I guess nature is just never asking anything of you.

In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman explores how our social identity is a role we perform, and he describes the kind of exhaustion that comes from maintaining a “character".
Dancing under the rain, without logic, going against society’s rules on what’s convenient to do, what is safe to do, made me feel like myself. Nature asks nothing of us. Nothing matters aside from your breath justifying your existence.

I have this urge to disappear because I want to be known in the first place. I want to disappear because the price of getting misread or misunderstood, is too high. The thing is, real connection comes at the price of vulnerability^[3], and that’s exactly why I vanish when I fear I cannot be held as I am.

Expressions from Afar: This Issue’s Idiom

Mandarin idioms, with figurative meanings, convey centuries of Chinese wisdom, history, and philosophy, serving as a powerful tool for transmitting cultural values and concepts succinctly through language, literature, and daily communication.

若隐若现 (ruò yǐn ruò xiàn)
“Now hidden, now visible” used to describe something between visible and invisible, like a shape in mist.

How can you be seen if you’re only perceived intermittently? Playing hide and seek protects you from being misunderstood because no one ever gets close enough to know you. Allowing others to look into us, not the staged version is the only way to be seen. Vulnerability and authenticity are the only path through real connection. Anything else is a made up story, wearing masks and costumes, playing a character on front stage, that cannot be sustained forever.
Nothing is easy. But sometimes letting go of social expectations we put on others, of the social roles we feel we need to commit to, and allowing ourselves to just exist, dancing soaked wet under the rain, might be easier than maintaining a mask too heavy to carry.

^{[1] See Dive into the Rabbit hole section 1 on attachment theory
[2] See Dive into the Rabbit hole section 2, on Goffman
[3] See Section 3, on Brené Brown}

My writing practice keeps evolving. I’m writing longer pieces now, with more psychological and philosophical depth, which I love, but it also requires more research and time.

This monthly letter will continue to be free and complete in itself.

I added a “Dive into the rabbit hole” section where I explore the concepts, references, and ideas in more depth for those who want to think alongside me. This section is usually behind a paywall, but this specific one is completely free, as I’m explaining really important concepts that I want to share with you all.

If you enjoy this format, every issue includes a “rabbit hole” exploring the psychology, philosophy and ideas behind the story.

If you’d like to support Thoughts from Afar, you’re very welcome to subscribe. It’s like buying me a fancy coffee while I’m writing.

Subscribe now

Dive into the rabbit hole: the summary

I had a few months to think deeply about this piece, and why it was so hard for me to finish it. Here are the key concepts that resonated the most with me while I was metacognitioning (no, it’s not a thing) myself.

• 1. Attachment theory, John Bowlby
  This one is obvious, but important to mention nonetheless. Bowlby suggests that the way our caregivers acted with us can predict our behaviours for our adult relationships. It's one of the best-known theories to understand our dating patterns. Each individual could be in one of those four categories: secure, anxious, avoidant, fearful avoidant. And in this specific case, it would explain why proximity to others sometimes triggers this need to escape (for avoidants).

• 2. Identity as performance, Goffman
  this one is an echo to “the weight of being human” I mentioned in my issue. This theory speaks of a frontstage and a backstage for ourselves, always maintaining some kind of character, and why.

• 3. “Being seen is being evaluated”, Sartre
  This could explain why being seen feels like danger: another person’s gaze turns us into an object, and it takes authorship of ourselves away from us. This is the concept of Gaze in critical theory, sometimes called “the look”

  Described in the book Being and Nothingness (1943) by Jean-Paul Sartre.

• 4. The vulnerability paradox, Brené Brown

• … and my personal synthesis

I needed to explore and understand further what are the mechanisms at play with this escape coping-mechanism. I got many answers. Hope it will help.

Let’s dive into it.

1. Attachment theory, John Bowlby

Very popular nowadays, especially when it comes to understanding dating dynamics. Long-story short in the dating scene, anxiously attached people fear silence as rejection, and avoidant attached people fear their autonomy loss (and in my opinion, the latter can be an echo of Sartre theory mentioned in section 3 but you’ll tell me what you think).

But the attachment theory is something bigger than that. John Bowlby suggests that emotionally secure attachments are formed when caregivers are consistently available particularly between the ages of six months and two years. It always comes back to the way our parents take care of us.

As children grow, they are thought to use these attachment figures as a secure base from which to explore the world and to return to for comfort.

A bit later, in the 1970s, Mary Ainsworth expanded on Bowlby's work. She and her team created a laboratory procedure known as the Strange Situation Procedure, to identify and classify attachment styles. The strange situation’s role is to demonstrate how we react to life events according to what we learn is safe or insecure during our early childhood.

Here’s the experience: the child is observed playing for 21 minutes while caregivers and strangers enter and leave the room, recreating the flow of the familiar and unfamiliar presence in most children's lives.

The child experiences the following situations: being introduced to the room with his parents, being alone with his parent, the child exploring alone, then a stranger enters, converses with the parent, and the parent leaves. Then comes back, greet and comfort the infant, and leaves again. The stranger interacts with the kid. The parent comes back and picks up the child, the stranger then leaves.

The results would be organised into 4 categories (actually 3 at first, and the fourth one came later)

1. Secure
   The most common pattern. The child uses the caregiver as a “secure base,” exploring freely when they’re present, showing distress on separation but being easily comforted on reunion. This develops when caregivers are consistently responsive to the child’s needs. (the lucky ones)

2. Avoidant, insecure
   The child shows little visible distress on separation and largely ignores or avoids the caregiver on return. Researchers argue this isn’t true indifference but a masked, conditional strategy: the child suppresses attachment behavior to stay close enough for protection without risking rejection, since past bids for comfort were not provided.

3. Anxious-ambivalent/resistant, insecure
   The child is distressed even before separation and hard to soothe afterward, alternating between seeking contact and resisting it: either angrily or with helpless passivity. This is thought to result from inconsistent and/or unpredictable caregiving, with the child’s anger or helplessness functioning as a way to keep the caregiver engaged.

4. Disorganized/disoriented
   That is the one that was added later by Mary Main, to capture behavior that doesn’t fit neatly: the contradictory actions, freezing, fear, or dissociation-like responses, suggesting the attachment system has been overwhelmed. It’s linked to frightening or unresolved trauma in the caregiver (maybe unprocessed grief or loss), and researchers still debate whether it’s truly “disorganized” or a more extreme/mixed version of the other strategies.

While this experiment is not completely pristine and can be criticised (cultural differences of child caretaking standards, the premise of the strange situation itself, etc) it laid a foundation on how we can understand better our own sense of attachment, and what triggers us.

If you’re curious to read something more focused on love relationships, a very accessible (and practical) book can be an interesting read to understand yourself a bit better. Attached, the book

2. Identity as performance, Goffman

Goffman's big work is to treat everyday social life as theater.
Extremely interesting framing, as if we were “putting on a show” for an “audience” every time we interact with others.

Some useful vocabulary Goffman came up with:

• Front stage: this is where the performance happens, where we are aware of being observed and we manage our behavior accordingly (a waiter being polite to customers, being silly and funny around friends, serious and professional with an employer)

• Back stage: where we “drop the act”, where the performance is prepared or where we can be our “off-duty” self (the same waiter complaining about customers in the kitchen, being sad at home after a party night, or joking on Teams between two meetings)

• Personal front: this would be equipment we use for the performance. Think costume, appearance, but also manner, clothing, way of speaking

• Setting: the physical scenery and props that support a performance (an office, a classroom, a night out, a date)

  
  We are always curating the best version of “ourselves” matching the setting we’re in, and according to what we believe our audience expects us to be.

  This old but famous meme is something that comes to mind when I think about this theory: we are adapting our performance to the setting we’re into, and we are deeply aware of it.

  

The thing is, doing that, we are trying to control the impression that other people form about us, trying to avoid social embarrassment, and even more, being praised for our behavior.

That’s why we try to post pretty pictures on instagram. That’s why we prepare specific “tinder photoshoots”. That’s why we dress well for clients.

So when I articulate “the weight of being a human character”, I wasn't even aware of that yet, but it's really close to Goffman’s sociological framing.

The question that comes to mind, and it’s also one of the theory's criticisms, is that it might not take into account our genuine, non-performed emotion or intimacy. Are we crying during a breakup because of the scene we need to play? I doubt that. But is our “backstage self” just another “frontstage” with a different setting sometimes? Thinking about how my supposedly relaxed-self behaves with friends or family.. mmh could be.

3. Being seen is being evaluated, Sartre

We live in a society. Meaning, we’re surrounded by others since we’re just newborns. That fact itself is a limitation in the way we express ourselves.

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre is giving us a situation to reflect on. Imagine you’re peeping through a keyhole. You are completely absorbed in this activity, you’re watching the scene and it can be whatever that comes to your mind when you imagine yourself doing so. Maybe you’re feeling envy towards a pretty house, or curiosity, lust, it really doesn't matter. In that moment, you are not observing yourself, you are a pure activity, “pure looking”. Then you hear footsteps approaching behind you. You are now aware of being seen while peeping, and you might feel shame, or embarrassment.

For Sartre, feeling shame is the emotional proof that another’s look has turned you into a thing: a projected version of you matching this moment (a peeping-tom), not the unlimited possibilities you can be.

So, to be seen is to be evaluated. Through the eyes of others, we are looking for validation, as it would be proof that we are “good”. If we misbehave, it won’t look good. If our smell is unpleasant, it will be embarrassing. If our sense of humour is not matching our peers’, we might also feel shame.

Now, Lacan built on this the concept of gaze. For Sartre, “the look” is fundamentally an encounter with another person: a concrete other consciousness that objectifies you. For Lacan, the gaze isn't really about another person looking at you at all. It’s something more structural: a sense of being seen that doesn't require an actual pair of eyes.

To explain this further, he used this anecdote: there’s a young man on a fishing boat, and a local fisherman points to a floating sardine can, and he jokes,
- "You see that can? Do you see it? Well, it doesn't see you!"
You can feel looked-at by the world itself, by the fact that you are a visible thing existing among other things, not just by a person's eyes. The gaze exists because of the world around the object looked at. You don't just see; you are always-already seen, situated inside a field where you can be seen.

Hence the anxious feeling of existence itself. Now you might be more familiar with concepts of male gaze, female gaze, white gaze, imperial gaze, etc… (and if you’re not, you have a bit of extra reading to do, lucky you!)
We are creatures living in a world with context, and this precedes and structures our own seeing. Knowing we are observed, I believe, precedes and structures our behaviour. (really fun, right?)

Maybe being seen is the beginning of our loss of freedom. And yet, without others, our existence would not be, for only through one another do we exist at all.

4. The vulnerability paradox, Brené Brown

And here we are. With our patterns mostly defined in the first two years of our existence, living being like performing an identity for a specific audience to please, friends, family, partners, colleagues, and aware of being evaluated at all times. Living in a society is exhausting. But we still need it. As we need connection.

Now let’s speak about the other half: “the being seen as we are” half.

Brené Brown is a shame/vulnerability researcher, and her core finding is that we treat vulnerability as a weakness, but her research shows it’s actually the birthplace of connection and belonging: you can’t have real intimacy without being seen.

She defines vulnerability as uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. It’s the state of not knowing the outcome and being seen anyway.

There’s something interesting with vulnerability: it feels like weakness when we’re the one exposing it, but looks like courage when we see it in someone else. So the same behavior is coded as brave in someone else and shameful in yourself. That asymmetry is the paradox.

We learned the hard way that we need to behave a certain way to please our peers, and that being seen is being evaluated, and now we are asked to be our authentic selves ? Risking rejection, shame, being seen as not good enough, unworthy of the cool friends? Huh-huh, not on my watch. Too risky. So we wear what Brené Brown calls “armor”: perfectionism, cynicism, numbing, control, always needing to be in charge of how we’re perceived. Curating. Controlling. And yet, this armor blocks the thing we are actually craving: connection, love, belonging. But all of those require exposure.

The other trick is that wearing an armor cannot selectively numb emotion. It would be too easy. If you armor against being seen to avoid sadness and pain, you also block joy, love and connection. A “floating concept” cannot be hurt, but it’s also not part of the group.

Where Sartre sees being-seen as a threat to freedom, Brown essentially argues the opposite direction: that refusing to be seen is what actually costs you connection.

Letting yourself be “seen” or "objectified" in that vulnerable sense is the price of intimacy. Maybe being seen is losing freedom, but maybe that’s worth it.

Personal synthesis

Looking back on all those experiences of fleeing, I don't think I really wanted to disappear. I guess I was testing the strength of attachment, and simultaneously interrupting the frontstage of my performed identity to retreat in my backstage.
When you’ve learned early that escape equals survival, feeling seen can feel like the beginning of a downfall. The burden of an unfit social identity can be too heavy to carry. You cannot explain that to someone who never felt like a misfit.

As to why escaping in the forest, I would say it's because there’s a suspension of identity. You retreat from social order, under the trees there’s no roles, no expectations, no performance. Just your existence.

I was never fleeing away from connection, I was only looking for safety. Trying to be seen without being evaluated.

I wanted to belong so much, and I repeatedly felt I was not, so it was safer to just disappear.

Estimated reading time: 5 min. (Rabbit hole included: 13min)

New beginnings happens before we decide it. Our identity shift always precedes the consequences that will unfold. For a second, I've witnessed my past life as if I was an external observant, New Year Eve was less about celebrating the upcoming year, and maybe more like throwing a farewell party to my old life.

Another life means a new self. Identity shifts: that’s something I have experience with. People tend to say I had a million lifes already. That's not entirely wrong.

What I’ve learned in all those life changes, is something I am now quite sure of:

Identity is a mean to an end. Nothing less, nothing more.
We tend to think our personality, our flaws, our taste, likes and dislikes are something fixed. It couldn't be more wrong. It's a story about ourselves we keep telling others, one we know well, so it feels comfortable to tell over and over again. (See Narrative psychology, Dan McAdams)

The reality is that we are constantly evolving and changing, but if we’re not intentional about it, we might end up becoming someone we don't recognise someday. Even if we keep telling ourselves the same story.

We are not made of fixed traits, it’s all very fluid. I hate hearing people saying “you won't change him now, at his/her age!” but there’s no age limit for evolution. We can always change. We can always shift, we can always decide to walk towards the version of ourselves we wish to become.

I used to drink until I passed out in clubs, and then I used to refuse to drink even just a drop of alcohol. I used to smoke cigarettes every day for several years, and now the idea of smoking is making me sick. I used to hate running and could not even run for 2km, then I became this person running every week and I can pull a 10k when I want. I used to be insomniac, and then I used to sleep 12h every night, I used to think I would never dye my hair, and now I’m blond full time, I used to think I would never live in France again, and now it seems I’m moving back in my country. It's an endless list. And it's not only about me, there’s thousands of examples online, people documenting their changes and sudden shifts.
You can change your mind on things, but even more, you can change yourself.

All the homes that I've known
Are made to be falling apart
Are the sheds and castles
Created to be made from the start?

We are what we do. If you change your routine, you’ll become someone else. If you change your surroundings, you’ll change your routine, you’ll become someone else. If you interact regularly with new people, you’ll become someone else. Your body reflects the life you have. Your face reflects your stress levels and fulfillment. Your behavior and emotional reactions reflects how you let others treats you.
I look younger than when I was 23, which is plain stupid, but true nonetheless.

I might have done a lot of 180 degres in my life and no one has to change that much, that many times, but just remember, you can.

You don't necessarily have to think about new goals, actually James Clear popularized the idea that lasting behavior change starts with identity shift, not goals. It’s harder to change towards new goals, and you can just change who you believe you are becoming.

You can think of the kind of person you’d like to be in a few years, not necessarily the job you’ll have, or the achievements under your belt… You can just think of how you would like to behave, to react to difficulties, how you would treat people, and how you would make hard decisions. That will already lead you towards a new life.

Expressions from Afar: This Issue’s Idiom

Mandarin idioms, with figurative meanings, convey centuries of Chinese wisdom, history, and philosophy, serving as a powerful tool for transmitting cultural values and concepts succinctly through language, literature, and daily communication.

物是人非 (wù shì rén fēi)
Things remain, the person has changed.
Originated from Song Dynasty poetry
”The things are the same, the people are no longer the same; all matters come to rest, before I can speak, tears fall”

It means even if the surroundings are the same, the person has changed.

New Year doesn’t have to be about new goals, new achievements, resolutions or new fancy things to chase. Those are pointless anyway, when you get them it’s always about “what’s next” and you forget about the dopamine it gave you as soon as you fall asleep. New Year can be a good momentum to think about the version of yourself you want to be in the future.

I sure am getting closer and closer every year.

My writing practice keeps evolving. I’m writing longer pieces now, with more psychological and philosophical depth, which I love, but it also require more research and time.

This monthly letter will continue to be free and complete in itself.

I’m simply adding a “Dive into the rabbit hole” section after the paywall, where I explore the concepts, references, and ideas in more depth for those who want to think alongside me.

If you’d like to support Thoughts from Afar and access this deeper layer, you can subscribe or try it through the free trial.

Dive into the Rabbit hole

• 1. “Our identity is a story we keep telling ourselves” or Narrative psychology (Dan McAdams)
  how mental health is less about what happened, but more about the story we tell about what happened.

• 2. “We are what we do”, or the Self-perception theory by Daryl Bem
  we infer who we are by observing ourselves

• 3. The Why, the How and the What - Identity based habits, James Clear
  The three layers of habits, and how to move towards our goal more easily

• 4. Why Goal chasing isn't the answer

• Personal Synthesis

Let’s scratch under the surface now.

Read more

This is experimental writing, where I aimed for every sentence to carry its maximal emotional charge. Stream of consciousness, phenomenology of memory, moments remembered not in order, but by intensity.

It’s a study in how grief, movement, uncertainty, danger, love, and aliveness coexist in the same nervous system.

I’m running on the riverside and I can feel the rain hitting my face, I’m soaked and yet still going—I’m in a cab in Taipei, my head against the window; outside, the lights blur through my tears—I’m sitting on a paddle board in the middle of a lake, it’s raining and I’ve never felt as peaceful in a while—I am walking back down the aisle after I gave my mom the last flower she’ll ever receive, on her coffin, my soul is burning and my eyes are full of resentment.

breathe in, breathe out.

I’m on a taxi scooter in Bangkok, it’s 10 am and the sun is already hitting too hard, I feel free and slightly endangered by the driver’s reckless speed—I’m coming back home from school and my dearest friend insists on taking my backpack for me, maybe my first memory of being taken care of—I’m on the car’s passenger seat, it’s the middle of the night, the lights are moving fast outside and I can feel myself entering a new arc while looking at you driving—I’m staring at a beautiful landscape, and I suddenly burst into tears because you might die tomorrow.

Read more

Estimated reading time: 8 min.

We always have examples in our surroundings: this friend who suddenly left her job to pursue a lifelong dream, or this couple imploding without us seeing it coming. It’s always the same story: everything is fine until nothing is anymore.

I was talking with a friend who made a series of what she described as “reckless choices”, sending her quiet, peaceful life to something belonging to the past. She said she was “in the middle of chaos" right now. But as absurd as it seemed, she recognized that everything happens for a reason. Maybe as a way to give meaning to the utter absurdity of our existence. Or maybe because deep down, she was craving a change.

There’s no growth coming from comfort, but sometimes we’re too reluctant to self-inflict instability. And that’s when life throws us curveballs. Whether you like it or not, we’re forced to face unpleasant things: hence the chaotic moments. I see those as opportunities to adjust. After all, life is an endless process of becoming.

I deeply love this word: Chaos.

1. noun: complete disorder and confusion.

Opposite to order, chaos allows us to reorder things differently. Chaos is nothing but pure untamed energy. Chaos gives birth. Nothing emerges from orderly stillness. But chaos itself is not completely random; it has order underneath. And this is where things become interesting. Maybe that’s how I learned how to thrive in chaos.

Physicist Mitchell Feigenbaum discovered that very different systems (like heart rhythms, population growth, and even dripping faucets) follow the same mathematical route to chaos. This universality suggested that chaos has order underneath. In his paper “Universal Behavior in Nonlinear Systems”, he shows that as you change a single control parameter in a system, these systems undergo a predictable sequence of bifurcations: a doubling of rhythms that repeats again and again until the system tips into chaos. It’s never a random collapse, it's a structured instability. We can’t predict the exact outcome, but we can predict the shape of the transition. Chaos, it turns out, has a blueprint.

So if chaos operates within a fixed set of rules, is it really that chaotic? If what feels unpredictable and out of control actually operates within a fixed set of rules, maybe it's not that chaotic after all.

James Gleick, in his book Chaos Theory, also mentions the order underneath, but even knowing this, we cannot predict the outcomes of any decision (of course, we can't). That made me think about free will and determinism. Do we have agency if we create chaos, or is the manifestation of our chaos, purely “planned” from the beginning? a sort of butterfly effect catching up with us?

It’s one thing to insert randomness into our lives, making a decision that brings a series of unpredictable events, but the opposite is also true. Even when a system is deterministic (meaning nothing random is involved), the result is still unpredictable in practice.

Life is full of tiny uncertainties, and the consequences of those small parameters can develop exponentially over time. Sometimes you’re doing absolutely everything perfectly right, according to the sets of rules you thought were the good ones, but the truth is, we still cannot control the outcome. Maybe things didn't go as planned because it was raining one afternoon 15 years ago. Maybe it's because of a sunburn when we were kids. Because we don't know all the ramifications implied by all the details in our lives. This is Chaos Theory. A fixed set of rules, with unpredictable outcomes.

What is beautiful with this, is that we do have agency, because we can influence any outcomes, but we still lack control, because we cannot predict the chain of consequences they’ll carry. Maybe Chaos works hand in hand with determinism; we don't know for sure. But the beauty of chaos is that it makes determinism indistinguishable from freedom. Determinism thus becomes the material of freedom, not its negation.

If we were to put chaos in essence, it would be that its laws are stable, but the unfolding is endlessly new.

Think of it as a game: for example, the rules of chess are fixed, deterministic, and perfectly knowable. Every move follows strict laws: pieces move in specific ways, and there’s absolutely no randomness involved. And yet, once the game begins, the unfolding becomes infinite in its complexity. A tiny variation, one pawn moved instead of another, can (and will) change the entire course of the game, leading to wildly different outcomes.

Maybe that’s what it is, a new parameter, something unexpected, giving birth to a completely new set of outcomes, something we never saw before. We don't know how to react; therefore, we call it chaos. Maybe that’s the reason behind our stupid decisions.

But for Nietzsche, chaos isn’t disorder: it’s potential energy. The unpredictability through which individuality and creation emerge.

I deeply love this way of seeing chaos, maybe because I encountered the concept of Amor Fati when I was a lost teenager, and it gave my life a new meaning when everything around me was terribly lacking logic. There’s something beautiful about loving our fate, embracing the unfolding of events that is our life, knowing we’re free to make decisions, but accepting that each decision might be shaped by a fixed set of rules: our education, the world we live in, and our current emotional state. All of those things being parameters we cannot even comprehend, but they will create the next set of events. Embracing determinism joyfully and loving the inevitability of this unfolding.

Maybe just being conscious of what is happening gives meaning to chaos.
Maybe true Freedom lies not in our ability to change the order of things, but in affirming our participation in them.

“My formula for greatness in a human being is Amor Fati:
that one wants nothing to be different,
not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.
Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it —
but love it.”
— Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “Why I Am So Clever,” §10

Expressions from Afar: This Issue’s Idiom

Mandarin idioms, with figurative meanings, convey centuries of Chinese wisdom, history, and philosophy, serving as a powerful tool for transmitting cultural values and concepts succinctly through language, literature, and daily communication.

亂中有序 (luàn zhōng yǒu xù)
“Within chaos, there is order”

Even when things look messy, complex, or unstable on the surface, deeper patterns or a coherent structure still exist. Chinese culture also recognizes this.

Conclusion

I’ve been told recently that there are two ways to react to life uncertainties, two opposite ends of the same spectrum: the first one is a total surrender to randomness, where people embrace unpredictability with even more unpredictability: no organization and no planning. The second one is an attempt at control, trying to shape and give meaning to everything in our life, letting nothing to randomness’ mercy. I learned the hard way that even with the most organized schedule, a clear life agenda can be wiped out in weeks. Fate doesn't care about your plan, and your whole life can be put upside down in a split second. That being said, if nothing is ever planned out, nothing gets done, so embracing unpredictability is not the answer, but control is an illusion. So, I am learning to let go of it.

My calligraphy teacher told me something very important this month: “True stability is unstable stability.” To thrive on a peaceful road is easy. To have your whole world shaken again and again, seeing your sense of home shattered several times in a row, and when you’re just getting up, thinking you can breathe for a while, something puts you down on your knees again, such is the field I’ve been training in those last years.

I’ve been meditating in the middle of a storm, feeling the rain pouring down my cheeks, being soaked wet, and letting my mind be at peace, knowing that, as everything else, this too shall pass. True stability is unstable. I know how to be steady in the middle of a storm, I know how to stand still on a shaky boat. What kind of gift is this? The passive power of thriving in chaos is always earned the hard way. I’m grateful for my calligraphy teacher, who showed me how far I’ve come.

I wish you well, take care, all. Merry Christmas.

I want to live a million lives
Before I can’t breathe anymore
But what if the value of life
Comes only with the choices you made?

Life feels abundant
Until it vanishes.
I want to lie in the sea of endless opportunities

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Today is a sunny day in the south of France. I used to live here, fifteen years ago, when I was still a student. If only I had known then the kind of life I’d have today, it would have spared me many anxious thoughts. I have to admit, being here is giving me nostalgia. As a consequence, I’ve been thinking about the past, especially of all the things that happened in this formative place. I suddenly wanted to call my mom, to tell her about some realizations. “Oh, yeah, right. I can’t do that anymore”.

Reading time : 11min

Having this impulse of wanting to share something with my now–passed-away mom is actually quite funny. Our relationship over the last ten years before her death was anything but good. After her death, I started to romanticize our link. For a second, in my mind, we were so close that I could call her every week and share glimpses of my life. Then I remember: even if she were still alive, I probably wouldn’t call her. I wish I could, though.

All those years I’ve been yearning for a version of what could have been, and now that she’s not with us anymore, now that there’s this huge gap to fill, I finally have it: the perfect relationship with my mom.

It’s easier to love ghosts.

It's easier to romanticize what we can't fully reach. What can’t be reached can exist in our mind in the most perfect state. And then, it hit me: my romantic life has also been shaped by ghosts.

The first time I fell in love, it was a slow burn.

I was sixteen, and I had a few boyfriends already, but nothing we could call love, really. Only short teenage romances lasting for a few weeks, at most.

At that time, reality felt boring to me. I was spending most of my time online, on video games and internet chatrooms, speaking with many people, in many different spaces. I was curious about people in Mexico and New Zealand. The life offered by my surroundings felt too small, too limited. I was craving something else.

So I found many refuges online, and one of them was a specific IRC server. I met this guy, and he was very annoying at first. Smart but arrogant. Not really kind to anyone. I felt challenged by his standards, as if no one would ever be good enough to deserve his attention.
We started to get to know each other, as I took him as a challenge (I guess), and maybe I was intriguing enough for him to hold the thread. A few conversations at night, shared interests in music and video games, and soon enough, we were two teenagers speaking 10 hours every day, online and on the phone. He was the something else I was craving. I felt his soul was an echo of mine. A feeling of recognition. I didn't know him, but I already knew him better than himself, in a way. We had a very intense and important relationship for years. At some point, this person disappeared on me. He vanished.

Maybe it was just a typical online romance, and the details of this relationship could make an entire story. But he cut contact several times. I learned that I knew nothing about him, not his name, not his face, as I never saw pictures. I was in love with a voice on the phone, I was in love with a character. A personality. With a soul. I was deeply in love, that's the only thing I knew for sure. The reality is that I was in love with a ghost. Someone who doesn’t exist outside of the perfect fantasy of the “what ifs” I created in my mind.

It’s easier to love ghosts.

The ghost of someone we don’t know yet, this neighbor we idealize, this girl in the subway who seems to fit the fantasy of our dreams. We spend time day-dreaming about the potential, our mind becoming the movie theater of our dreams, forgetting to look at the actual situation.

It can also be the ghosts from our past, the people we’ve actually been with. We recall only the good moments shared, forgetting all the hurdles and frustrations. It’s the idealization of an ex-partner, or a past friend we would have loved to have some fling with, or, like in my case, my passed-away mom, who I suddenly wanted to call, forgetting that she was actually not able to just be kind on the phone.

I fall into this trap way too easily. I like being in my head and daydreaming about everything, the future or the past, the what-ifs and what could have been.
I’m a romantic at heart, I always want to see the good in people, so much that I create the perfect version of them in my head. Curating the sentences they said or could say one day. Forgetting everything about the bad moments. Forgetting everything about reality.

The issue with creating relationships with versions of people in our minds is that we tend to overlook their real actions. Imagining sweetness where there is just a void. Or worse than delusion, excusing behaviors that actually cannot be excused. The issue with nurturing relationships with versions of people in our minds is that we’re emotionally feeding on an illusion. The version of this person that in the future might do x or y, the version of this person that will most likely act like we hope to at some point.

But if we remove this layer, anchoring our reminiscence in truth rather than nostalgia, or using our heart instead of our mind when it comes to people in front of us, the signs are here.

It’s about how we feel during an ongoing communication with them. Good or weirdly disrespected? Is this anxious attachment the kind of love we want to feel? Do we really want to continue engaging with this unsatisfactory situation because of the belief that if we succeed, then we’ll feel we earned the right to be loved? Our ego is laying traps we jump into, so we feel falsely protected from being hurt.

I’m learning to enjoy the loving thoughts my brain creates about people in my life, while I cautiously observe their actions anchored in reality, and the actual feelings I get from any of those actions. I’m letting the ghosts wander freely, with all the what-ifs they carry, what could have been. I let those fantasies soothe me when needed, but I won’t let them derail me from the feelings I get with the people showing up in reality.

Maybe I used to love to idealize people, as it could be a way to fix past relationships: if I could understand the mistakes that were made, the situation wouldn’t repeat itself. But no mistake was ever made.

The right people will go through hell with you.

We tend to forgive people we love for all their imperfections. So why consider one not ideal interaction the cause of an emotional disaster? There’s no such thing. Only people lying to themselves, entertaining in their mind a version of you that never existed.

We rarely see what is: we try to possess, control, curate, model as we wish. We never see someone fully, as no one is presenting all the aspects of themselves in one go. We curate for others, the right jokes, behaviors, and we become the person we wish to be when exposed to new people. Change school, change work, change city or even country, and reinvent yourself. Our habits change, our beliefs change. We’re never exactly the same. Are we truly in love with someone, or with the version of themselves they chose to show us? Years later, I hear people saying about their partner, “who is this person? I realize maybe I never really knew them” but maybe those people didn’t know themselves. Maybe the paradigm of their life will suddenly shift strongly, leaving them in the same state of not knowing who they are anymore.

We’re not fixed beings; we’re universes constantly collapsing. Mirroring each other, influencing our surroundings. Every second spent with other people shapes us as well.

Maybe we always fall in love with an illusion, a reflection of what we consider a beautiful soul to be. But I prefer an illusion, as it could be a Polaroid, an impression of what this person was at this specific moment in time, rather than a ghost, living in the past or in a future that won’t exist. An illusion can fade, but a ghost might haunt you forever. A ghost is a memory with no future. An illusion is just a trick of the light.

Life is funny, and often unfolds ironically.
My first love, the online romance ghost, came back into my life while I was writing this story. Fifteen years of silence and a sudden truth. He was not a ghost anymore, and I was right about him all along. I think he saw who I would become as much as I knew who he was deep inside, before we were aware of that ourselves. He was a ghost, and a thousand versions of him were living simultaneously in my mind, especially during those enduring years of silence. But now I have something tangible to grab, not as a romantic fantasy, but an actual person who suddenly entered my life for real. How precious it is to have someone who has witnessed all those versions of you during twenty years. Romance or not, that kind of link is rare and transcendental.

We tend to treat our relationships as a given, even with family and friends. We wrongfully assume we know people, anticipating what they want, what they can or cannot do. But we have no clue. We’re all changing so fast every day. The thing is, we’re often misled by our assumptions about people; we project on them what we think they are, and we observe less.

Like in chess, there’s something sacred about focusing on the actual situation with objectivity. What is on the board right now, and what would be the best move. We can anticipate and plan ahead, it is important for sure, and we can look behind us, regret the losses we had, the mistakes we could avoid, for sure. But getting stuck on the past or the future won’t help us with the current move we have to make. Only cold observation of the facts gives us relevant data. One piece moving on the board changes the whole paradigm. Rediscovering people every day, their behavior, their needs, how we can co-create a reality together, this is taking care of our relationships. Living with them, listening to them. Listening to even hurtful words and understanding that it’s not necessarily a reflection of tomorrow’s reality. Not assuming, not projecting. Not hanging onto a past concept of what they could have become. Not holding onto the potential they actually never want to reach. Just looking at them, at their weaknesses, their needs, and being there. Adjusting together. Choosing to be here for others. That’s the reality of healthy relationships.

I still let my mind wander into the what-ifs, and the what was, we can't change the heart of a romantic. But right now, I keep my eyes open to what’s right in front of me. I observe situations and what they trigger. I love brutal honesty and imperfections. I love to know the flaws of my peers, as those are the things I love most in others. I love embarrassed confessions about past behaviors, as it’s the best proof of personal growth. Everything is always more complicated than we think, and that’s what makes it beautiful.

I let reality surprise me, and seeing the magic coming from unexpected places makes it even more poetic. Not perfect, but it is real. And what’s real is precious.

Estimated reading time: 8min.

Clarity isn’t found by thinking harder.

When caught in indecision for too long, life taught me that changing the battlefield is a good idea. The battlefield of indecision is the mind. If a solution cannot be found there, it may require experimenting with the heart.
Trying instead of planning. Trying for real, to see what it feels like. If logic cannot help us make sense of something, despite being rational, it's no use staying there.

Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am”, but I don’t know who I am anymore when I’m caught in an endless cycle of overthinking. Sometimes I feel I’m the only one getting stuck for years in overthinking a heavy decision. Merleau-Ponty challenged Descartes directly on his sentence. He rejected this view and replaced it with “I perceive, therefore I exist.”

Each time I was faced with a hard choice, something that did not completely make sense in my mind, I tried something. Experimenting with a small step to see how it would feel. There’s nothing like intuition as a compass. Maybe that's what Merleau-Ponty wanted to say. That staying in the mind never brings peace because the truth of our experience can only be touched through the body, through movement, through trying.

I learned to trust myself more and more with those “gut feelings", knowing I am not impulsive nor reckless (and it might take me 650 days to make a real decision anyway). Clarity comes after action. We try something and it doesn’t feel how we thought it would. We try something and it resonates deeply. We try something we thought we would hate, and we find ourselves loving it. Our minds are not the best predictors of what we need. What we fear the most might be what we need the most. I hate this statement.

I’m writing this because right now, I’m in the process of experimenting, something. Many things. As a result, a clearer picture is slowly shaping in the blurriness that was my overthinking state. And as I’m observing myself trying, I discovered something equally important: the way we see will shape the experiment itself.

When our inner world is chaotic, our perception of reality warps. Our mind projects confusion onto the world, and what feels external might actually just be internal. When our inner world is peaceful and grounded, our mind witnesses positive results, of luck, of love, of unbelievable opportunities and suspended moments of grace.

You see what you want to see.
The way you see the world will give you a lens, and only through this lens you’ll unconsciously look for validation of what you believe is true.
We are never passive in our lives; we don't just see, we interpret the world through our lens. Which is cultural, but also based on our mood, our exhaustion levels, and our experiences.

Last week, I saw a reel on Instagram speaking about the Coffer Illusion. What do you see in this picture?

Probably a grey wall of rectangles.
It’s an optical illusion; there are circles hidden between the squares, made of vertical lines only. The actual reason why we see circles or not is debated, but I find it astonishing how our brain can hide so easily what is here, in plain sight.

“How things seem is not how they are.”

When we act (such as changing our environment), we gather new experiences, and those experiences reshape our lens. So acting and experimenting is not just to “get unstuck”, it’s a tool to help us recalibrate our perception: trying something new gives our mind fresh evidence that not all fears are true. Like suddenly seeing circles in a picture that was depicting only squares a second before.

If we’ve had many experiences with people trying to hurt us, we’ll look at strangers with defiance. But if most of our encounters have been kind and well-intentioned, we’ll see the world, and its people, through that same lens of trust.

If we believe the world is lacking opportunities, that the market is terrible, or that people are selfish, our brain starts hunting for proof. It finds evidence that confirms the story we already tell ourselves, about the world, about others, about who we are.

That’s why it's important not to get stuck in a toxic environment, job, or relationship. We easily end up thinking we don't deserve better, but it's just because this situation has made us feel about ourselves this way.

When we’re afraid, we don’t try. When we don’t try, fear wins again by proving the world unsafe.

To fight this, the first thing is to acknowledge that behind every desire, there’s a fear. To remove the fear, action must be taken. Once we act, we realize our perception itself is the next terrain to examine. So we learn to see ourselves differently, with more kindness, maybe. Maybe that’s why we’re addicted to being loved. Only then can we see how kind the world can be.

Expressions from Afar: This Issue's Idiom

Mandarin idioms, with figurative meanings, convey centuries of Chinese wisdom, history, and philosophy, serving as a powerful tool for transmitting cultural values and concepts succinctly through language, literature, and daily communication.

摸着石頭過河 (mō zhe shí tou guò hé)
“Crossing the river by feeling the stones.”

To move forward carefully without a clear plan, learning by doing, step by step, testing the ground as you go. It’s not about already walking a visible path; it’s about feeling your way through the unknown, one careful, embodied step at a time.

Conclusion

I am witnessing how my internal state dictates the quality of my days, and I realize how important it is to protect our inner peace above everything.
This Fall, I rest and trust myself. That’s the only conclusion I can provide for now, so I leave you with a poem by Mary Oliver. Take care, all.

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Mary Oliver

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Estimated reading time: 7 min.

I enjoyed every moment of this hectic summer, but I was also suffering time to time from a lack of quietness. I didn't read, write, or draw as much as I would have liked to. It’s been a while since the last time I experienced minor tension from sharing a space with others.

I found this feeling extremely useful. Yes, we do have less quiet time but more exchanges. We merge a little bit with people around us: what they say, their jokes, and how they eat. What they think. How they live.
But what happens when you’ve learned what you need to be happy with yourself, and the habits of those around you are in complete mismatch with it? If serenity comes at a price, sometimes it might be social isolation.

When you share the same set of values with the people around you, it's easier. Even more when there's a shared sense of culture: what we find funny, what time we go to bed, what kind of activities we like doing, what kind of food we eat… what kind of decisions we make. It's all tied down ultimately to what kind of life we are living.

If there’s comfort and relief in this tacit understanding with some people, there’s an obvious tension in tacit disagreement. It’s like debating with someone not from our political side: It's not pleasant, not fluid, but important nonetheless. I love to disagree with my loved ones, as sharing opinions is a way to get a glimpse of what matters to their hearts. Even if we cannot fully agree, at least we understand them a little bit more than before.

However, for some, this feeling of disagreement is unsettling: it makes them nervous or causes them to remain silent. Anger can show up in sudden bursts or a complete retreat, avoiding any discussion altogether. That makes me wonder, if we cannot face disagreement with our loved ones, limiting us to discussing only the weather and weekend plans, how can we be really close? Serving tough love to your best friend is a testament to the strength of your bond. If we cannot face a healthy dose of conflict or disagreement while keeping our relationship intact, what does this say about us? I guess that’s why I’ve always preferred intense conversations with depth to small talk: not because I cannot handle it, I am good at both, it's just the first one creates a stronger thread between souls.

I remember when I used to live in a dorm; we had minor disagreements all the time in the shared bedroom. But nothing that would erode our friendships. I can assume the same for big houses with siblings fighting all the time. But at that time, we couldn't block our friendships on Instagram. We couldn't just leave the group chat when something was annoying. We had to live together and find a way to make it work.

This made me think about how technology has given us new ways to avoid such frictions entirely. We can now easily remove almost any discomfort coming from social situations. Are we ignoring more, tolerating less, when others are not an echo to our own way of thinking? Is our phone itself the easy way out for any social inconvenience? I know I tend to retreat into my notifications to disconnect from reality when a situation becomes uncomfortable.

Technology (and Instagram stories, really) has turned us all into modern Goldilocks (people who prefer having the “just right” amount of something to having too much or too little of it), keeping people at bay while staying superficially connected. In her book “Alone Together”, Sherry Turkle argues that such control over our relationships also reduces our exposure to unavoidable human imperfections, all the things that make us practice empathy, patience, and forgiveness. Instead of enduring our messy but meaningful interactions, we opt for curated, conflict-free relationships.

We are used to this now. Having an easy way out, blocking or ghosting people when the social inconveniences are too much to carry. That’s also true when it comes to seeing only the content we like; consuming from a media bubble has come to seem so natural, we tend to forget other ways to see things can exist.

I guess that’s the risk when you only interact with like-minded individuals; even mild views amplify into extreme convictions. This phenomenon is described by Cass Sunstein in her book “Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media.”

“It’s group polarization, which means that if you listen to people like you, you’ll probably get more extreme and more confident too.”

Source (This quote is from an excellent interview that I recommend reading.)

We not only avoid disagreements, but we also benefit from not having them at all, amplifying our beliefs (even if sometimes they are utter nonsense), and doing so we feel validated. By our peers, by some tweets, and the content we see every day. The result is that we tolerate disagreement less and less. We may even be heading toward a future where we are no longer wired to handle this level of discomfort, unable to discuss with those we disagree with.

It’s easy to stay in the comfort of your social circle that thinks exactly like you, consumes the same content as you do, but is this truly living together? Or is it another social bubble, refined like our algorithms? What if this were the collective version of our chosen isolation? It all comes down to the level of discomfort you can bear; maximizing comfort can shrink our exposure to difference, which is how we used to learn how to live together.

Hannah Arendt saw political life as necessarily uncomfortable, because the plurality of opinions is what keeps a society alive. I wonder how our democracies are going to evolve, with those bubbles we live and interact in. There’s so much disbelief in public institutions nowadays, when information is publicly displayed and transparent, some people think it's ”too good to be true", therefore, staged, untrusthworthy. If we can no longer distinguish facts from opinions, or agree to disagree peacefully, exchanging ideas while considering the many needs a society carries, how can we still build a world together?

GAZETTE: What are some of the “preconditions for maintaining a republic?”

SUNSTEIN: A capacity to listen, a commitment to reason, a belief in the good faith of (most) people who disagree with you, a desire to participate, love of country, a concern for the direction in which your country is moving. (Also, a sense of humor, and probably an appreciation of music too.)

Source

Expressions from Afar: This Issue's Idiom

Mandarin idioms, with figurative meanings, convey centuries of Chinese wisdom, history, and philosophy, serving as a powerful tool for transmitting cultural values and concepts succinctly through language, literature, and daily communication.

同舟共濟 (tóng zhōu gòng jì)
”To cross the river in the same boat, helping each other row.”

This idiom paints the picture of people caught in the same river, being life itself: unpredictable, sometimes calm, sometimes dangerous. Alone, no one can row across. It reminds us that in moments of difficulty or disagreement, to cross the river, everyone has to contribute, even if reluctantly. The idiom suggests a kind of solidarity born not out of choice, but out of necessity. If one person stops rowing, the current pulls everyone off course. To share the boat is to share responsibility. Disagreement does not excuse us from the effort: it makes the effort even more essential.

Conclusion

I often think about Asimov's Solarians: each living alone on vast estates, relying almost entirely on telepresence to communicate. Physical contact became not just unnecessary but intolerable for them. It was Asimov's extreme vision of chosen tranquility, a society where technology dissolved the discomfort of living together.

Maybe an easy connection with someone we can keep at bay is slowly redefining as being enough for intimacy. But maybe those cyberintimacies are sliding into cybersolitudes: we feel connected, yet in reality, we are more alone. The more control we gain over our relationships, the less we practice vulnerability and risk, essential ingredients of real human connection.

Some AI companions are promising relationships where we are in full control, but if there is no unpredictability, no friction, and no willingness to understand the other to make it work despite the discomfort, can we say there's a relationship at all? Perhaps we're facing the same threat as the Solarians. If we keep chasing only the easy and the perfect, we might end up with intimacy that is neither intimate nor human.

That’s why I welcome every disagreement with gratitude: it proves a willingness to risk discomfort in the pursuit of getting closer to each other.

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Estimated reading time: 6min.

Being in France highlights all the versions of me that I’m usually not. I feel safe and in control in Taipei, whereas in France I am raw and almost fragile. I’m supposed to know how things work here better than anywhere, as it's my country, and yet I feel like a teenager, unsure of how to behave in the public space, what is considered polite or weird, and even what to buy to cook. It’s like being eighteen again, when I moved to this very same city in the south of France, had my first flat, and tried to behave like an adult, having absolutely no idea what I was doing. However, what is pleasant and reassuring is the social aspect of some kind of common ground, culturally. That's what I miss sometimes, living abroad.

It's hard to define what culture is, to people who never went far enough to realise it. Culture is the way you drink your coffee, as every coffee shop will have the same tacit understanding of what a good coffee is in this country. What’s considered “burnt” for some will be the standard for others. It's the level of sweetness that's expected in your daily life. It's what everyone eats for breakfast, as if it were some kind of worldwide evidence, when it's actually not. It's whether shops are open or not during the weekend, or at night, and sometimes being stuck without finding food on a Sunday evening. Culture is the way everyone enters a train, it's how we behave in the public space, at what time we all expect to eat our meals.

Culture is everything that surrounds us without us even noticing it, leaving people who have never travelled dumbfounded at how things can be drastically different elsewhere.

The word “culture” comes from the Latin cultura, which derives from the verb colere, meaning: to inhabit, to cultivate (the land), to honor, to respect, to care for, to maintain.

Maybe we can see it in the land that carries our growth.

We use the nutrients from the earth we’re put in to grow up, to expand. It feels as if there’s nothing else in the whole world than where we’re placed, and we tend to take this as foundational knowledge in the way we think, interact, behave, and expect things from life. An arranged marriage can feel foundational for people expecting a family life granted by their society, whereas it will feel like a cursed destiny for others. Ending every meal with sweets feels like nonsense for people who were raised eating only savory meals. These are not just habits, it's obvious to me now, it's invisible coded behaviors, only visible to my eyes now, because I left.

What’s the norm for me now, as someone who feels estranged in their home country, but also very aware of being a stranger in the country I live in? I hate the taste of burnt coffee, and it feels weird to eat after 9 pm. All those small details that make me different from French culture. It seems I replaced my identity crisis with a culture crisis.

This idea of culture crisis took me back in high school, when reading a piece of Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture” (well, I guess you saw that coming). This feeling of not quite belonging anymore reminded me of Arendt’s warning: what happens to culture when everything is consumed, and nothing is allowed to endure? Did I consume too much of different cultures in my life, having as a result nothing solid enough anymore to endure in my conception of things?

In 1961, Arendt wrote that our culture was in peril because of mass consumption. For her, cultural objects were identified as what stays and endures time, in opposition to production or entertainment. Today, in 2025, Instagram and TikTok are at our fingertips every day, let's say in a capitalistic world dominated by consumption, the cultural objects we most often create have become perishables for entertainment purposes.

But culture is supposed to endure; we can think of historical buildings, art pieces, literature, and those monuments we still look up to. Trends are consumed and forgotten almost right away. Maybe the abundance of options available makes everything less valuable? We know there’s always gonna be another video, another YouTuber, another trend, another thing. Maybe we’re losing touch with our sense of recognition of what isn't just an easy consumption. Our brains are fed with a 24h/7 content-feeding buffet, and we indulge in it. But if everything is immediately forgotten and replaced, our habitual gluttony for content growing ever stronger, what truly remains? As someone who advocates intermittent fasting for health, I wonder if we also need fasting windows for content consumption: deliberately limiting when we engage with online content, rather than filling every free second with endless scrolling and reels. That's something I should consider more seriously. If you have only 1 hour to spend every day on watching or reading something, will it be spent on an app?

Our environment impacts us, as our culture, the content we consume, but it's also true for the people we often meet with. “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with,” said Jim Rohn, but Epictetus said this in the 1st to 2nd century CE (Anno Domini): “The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you.”

I’ve been thinking about how we should be mindful of everything in our environment, and an analogy became very clear: maybe we’re all in a washing machine. If we’re all white-shirts getting soaked with a red shirt, we’re gonna become pink without even noticing. Only when you extract yourself from this environment are you in a position to notice you’re not the same as before.

Going even further, we’re all changing roles throughout our lives: sometimes a gullible white shirt, or a very confident red shirt, or a black one, but we’re all bleeding our colors onto others at some point. Surrounded by the right people, it's a pleasure to see how we changed color, as it's a manifestation of how we were positively altered. But it must be done mindfully. What if alteration was transmission? Maybe that's the core idea behind culture going beyond mere utility or material necessity. It belongs to a purely human realm: culture is giving meaning, it's art, symbolism, and transmission.

Expressions from Afar: This Issue's Idiom

Mandarin idioms, with figurative meanings, convey centuries of Chinese wisdom, history, and philosophy, serving as a powerful tool for transmitting cultural values and concepts succinctly through language, literature, and daily communication.

耳濡目染 (ěr rú mù rǎn)
”ears moistened, eyes dyed.”

“Being subtly and unconsciously influenced by what one constantly hears and sees.”
This idiom refers to the passive cultural absorption we face being in this world. It suggests that simply being around something, hearing it often, seeing it often, is enough to let it sink in. The phrase evokes the image of a person being gently steeped in their surroundings; soaked by words, stained by images. Over time, we begin to reflect what we've absorbed without realizing it.

It’s often used to describe how habits, mannerisms, values, or beliefs are picked up unconsciously through constant exposure. Not by teaching, but by proximity: Culture, family, media. Sometimes who we become is not about what we choose to believe, but what we’ve been quietly marinated in.

Conclusion

I’ve been lucky enough to see so many different ways of living, of speaking, of giving meaning to life, that I might feel estranged everywhere now, having as a safety haven the following knowledge: that, as long as I’m surrounded by the right people, doing the things I like, giving a little bit of meaning every day, I guess I’ll feel okay.

Maybe culture serves no purpose but gives meaning to everything.

“We shall not cease from exploration,
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
— T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets: Little Gidding

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Estimated reading time: 6min.

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Comfort does not equal laziness. We can be hard-working, disciplined and dedicated in a very familiar way. We can pursue goals diligently every day of our lives, without stepping out of our comfort zone once. It can be countless hours spent at work, practicing our hobbies in the same way, just repeating our tasks over and over, our games, our aims. Never taking the time to look at things from another lens. It can look like a Sisyphean task, pushing the boulder to the top, again and again, repeating the same task endlessly. Going through our days as repetitive labor, carrying the futility and absurdity of human existence. It's known. It's familiar. We more or less know what’s going to happen, it's comfortable. Therefore, we’re not pushing ourselves to the edge of something that could change us.

When I start a new discipline, be it athletic or intellectual, the first month is the most painful, it’s also the one that brings the most impactful changes. My body adapts fast, my brain creates new connections, I can almost feel myself evolving through this feeling of discomfort, of not knowing what I’m doing, of feeling afraid of not being “good enough”. When new routines are established, when we adapt, it becomes familiar again. It's not as scary anymore. It becomes part of us, the new us. We reached it.

Our comfort zone expands when we step out of it.

It's one thing for learning, but this concept also applies for the way we choose to live. I find it puzzling how most people are adventurous when young, and settle more and more into comfort during midlife. I can't help but ask myself: Is it maturity, or cowardice and fear dressed up as stability?

Settling, in many cases, is not about choosing comfort, it might be, unconsciously, self-abandonment. It’s not always a crisis. Sometimes it’s a 9-to-5, a quiet dinner, and no dreams left to pursue. It's hard to avoid, since the entire world is built to make us follow the same path. Embracing the same rhythm, the same kind of job, worldviews and family models. If there’s no one with us on the road, we feel lost. But what if all those people on the highway are the ones who are lost, in a life with no meaning?

Martin Heidegger spoke of “inauthenticity”, where individuals conform to the expectations of the “they” (the others, society) losing touch with their genuine desires and possibilities. The result of conforming is a life that isn't truly one’s own. But conforming is nothing less than social comfort. When we conform, we avoid friction. We feel like we’re accepted, which seems safer and more predictable… but at what cost? Because when we’re too comfortable for too long, it becomes easier to get trapped in a life that is not meant for us.

We convince ourselves that stability equals security, that if we just hold on tight enough, to someone, to a paycheck, to a routine, then we’ll be okay. But control is an illusion. Life will shake your ground anyway. I believe the real danger isn’t uncertainty, it’s shrinking our world to avoid it.

Sartre is ruthless with the weight of freedom we all carry. If we are entirely responsible for the meaning in our lives, it can feel overwhelming. And it's understandable that most people live their lives on some kind of automatic mode, with routines, and familiarity everywhere. But following societal norms, conforming to roles that don't align with what we expect from life, deep down, means settling. Letting go of the “what ifs”.

Each of our decisions can shape a future version of us. This is at least how I understand this quote: the realm of possibilities we all carry within us. L’infini champ des possibles. Expanding our comfort zone means stepping in the unknown. There’s no way to predict what will result from this decision. It’s scary, and fear often leads to paralysis. But what is safe is not necessarily right. It's just familiar. That concept alone explains why so many people stay in bad situations, which from the outside seems like utter nonsense. It's because of fear. Fear of what will be, fear of how this decision will impact us, of what we will become.

As I was working on this draft, I stumbled upon this fantastic essay resonating with my own thinking:

“To choose an erotic life is not simply to chase pleasure or gratification; […] it is to say “yes” to the kind of friction that transforms. It is the decision to let yourself be undone by what draws you in. […] These are not logical paths. They are not chosen for stability or acclaim. They are chosen because something inexplicable stirs… a vibration, a recognition, a hunger that refuses to be ignored. The erotic decision is the one that defies linearity and invites metamorphosis.”

Extract of “Erotic Decisions”

Expanding our comfort zone means accepting the need to shed skin. We cannot become someone new without removing some parts of the old one. This is the cost of things. Your new life is going to cost you your old one. This idea is both freeing and daunting.

Expressions from Afar: This Issue's Idiom

Mandarin idioms, with figurative meanings, convey centuries of Chinese wisdom, history, and philosophy, serving as a powerful tool for transmitting cultural values and concepts succinctly through language, literature, and daily communication.

画地为牢（huà dì wéi láo）
”Draw a prison on the ground and stay inside it.”

This idiom is for when we’re choosing limitation while thinking it's safety. I particularly like it because the limitations we put on ourselves are more than often complete nonsense, like a circle on the ground that we see as a real prison.
It is as long as we believe in it. But if you see it for what it is, a chalk-drawn line on the ground, you can step away. Maybe the limitations we put on ourselves, what we can or cannot do, are also completely made up, by a past experience, how others perceive us, or how we’re trying to protect ourselves from becoming a new version of who we could be.

Conclusion

I find this ironic, how it's always a matter of balance. If we’re too comfortable with every aspect of our life, stillness takes over us. But having no comfort whatsoever will bring emotional exhaustion, and surely the path will be painful and not sustainable. That's why I like the idea of shedding skin. Once in a while, removing parts of ourselves that no longer serves us. It can be a habit, clothing that does not fit, things we outgrew, beliefs on ourselves that turned out to be wrong.

It's necessary to have comfort, but I don't think it should be the end goal to pursue. In my perspective, it should be an intentional comfort, an anchor point to return to after we stepped out in the wild. A safety net before we jump, a milestone during an expedition, a relationship that feels like home when the outside world is too scary. When everything is too comfortable, there’s no need for change, so there’s no evolution, no progression, only stagnation. Stillness disguised as safety. Maybe comfort is the path towards the slow death of who we could have been.

And yes, having crazy dreams is scary. “What if I can't, what if I fail, it's even better to not risk it, why even try, at least I’m not going to face disappointment.” As scary as it is, what if it was the only way forward, towards becoming the person we want to be?

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March 2023.
Seoul always has a weird effect on me.
The first time I went there, I was working as a model and had been committed to not drinking any alcohol for a few years already. But then, I landed in Seoul for my birthday, and my principles regarding alcohol disappeared instantly. I acted out of character. I saw something new emerging from within. Some cities awaken something in us: I was suddenly chaotic and carefree. It was three years ago, and yet, this time, the feeling was the same.

I went abroad 
alone once again
and this time 
in all the madness of this hectic life.
it felt like I discovered a new me

I am not suited for nightlife:
I handle it too well.

First night in Seoul.
It's Thursday, midnight. The club is empty.
Lights reflecting on the disco ball, me obsessing over the red lights behind the door. I’m dancing aimlessly.

I’m getting to know a new friend. I feel like we’ve known each other for a long time, maybe from a past life. Since I moved abroad, this “deja-vu” effect happens a lot when meeting new people. Leaving the club, we ran into a friend of this very new friend, at 1 a.m. somewhere on the street. We entered a 24/7 open restaurant, meeting three Frenchies and a model. I could tell before she said it. She had this aura, a kind of overbearing yet uncertain confidence about them. Trying to look for signs in our gaze. A performance only exists if someone's watching. They always do that, unconsciously. I always see it.

We’re not ordering anything. leaving the place. entering another club. going downstairs. red lights again. darkness. loud music. someone staring at us at the bar. At that exact moment, I thought I was surrounded by vampires, and maybe I was. What hadn't occurred to me was the fact that I could actually be one of them. I just didn't know it yet.

4:30 am. Going home.
”when in Rome, do as Romans do.”
I see. This is how it’s gonna be then.

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Estimated reading time: 6min.

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It's 2010, I was working in a Starbucks with a friend, preparing our design portfolio to find our first serious internship. I was doing mine on Flash, at the time. Taking a break, I browsed a design award platform, showcasing the best talents and coolest websites. And one portfolio caught my attention. Something resonated deeply in this full screen self portrait video with black navigation entries on top of it. I could not say why, but I loved it. It was so cool.

Two years later, during another job-hunting period, I applied to work in a cool design agency, and for some reason somehow involving the fact that I had Street Fighter in my resume…I got an interview. And I got the job. One of my bosses was now the person who did the website that was one of my anchor reference points of coolness. I thought life was a bit crazy.

2025, I’m in Taipei and I’m taking the same former boss on a Taoist Temple trip for his birthday. Maybe there's no such thing as random. Maybe the feeling of echo I felt looking at this website was for a reason.

It happened several times, finding a piece of art done by my contemporary peers that was resonating deeply. Some of them became extremely good friends years later. A stroke of insolent luck. Life is crazy.

I was watching a French interview of Boris Cyrulnik, on his last book about love and attachment. While he was in Japan, a Japanese scholar told him: “The concept of individuality is an illusion of the West”. Food for thoughts, huh.

As mentioned in a past issue, what we hate in others, we often despise in ourselves. Something unsettling or attractive for no apparent reason might actually hide a very important reason. The beauty we saw in others, we often possess it. We project and mirror, more often than we’d like. This is my personal understanding of “individuality is an illusion”. That being said, some people leave stronger echoes inside us. I believe we tend to think we’re all a bit “unique” and although that's not entirely wrong, we’re also extremely similar. Some patterns, we recognize. The fears we share. The traumatizing or happy experiences.
Carl Jung implies we might be all connected through the collective unconscious, a reservoir of memories and archetypes shared by us all. Maybe when we recognize people on a soul level, it's because the role they have to play in our life is archetypal. Fated, even.

This idea of collectiveness is nothing new. The quote above is simply Spinoza saying individuality is an illusion. Like this Japanese scholar. Buddhists tend to think there’s no “self” too. Maybe the "self" exists but not as a truly independent thing, and can only be understood as part of the full, interconnected world we live in. Meaning, there’s no separation between 'you' and 'the other'. We persist in each other at all times.

If our presence in the world changes the world, and if the world around us shapes us, and if we’re the sum of the five people closest to us (meaning we impact each other so much that we slowly merge, even without noticing), then indeed, we might just be a very small part of a huge ecosystem. We change everything around us, and everything around us changes us.

Plato is a big romantic, and in Symposium he introduced the idea that we might be looking for our “other half”. I don't think it's that simple. I don't buy this soulmate concept. But it is true that some people do feel familiar enough to wonder if some bonds are indeed pre-destined.

The idea that time cannot erase what was once deeply shared resonates strongly in me. What else could explain this feeling of immediate peace and safety felt with someone we barely know, friend or lover? Maybe our relationships are echoes of past connections. It could simply echo our relationships with our parents, with the attachment systems principles, or encountering archetypes… or maybe Plato was right with his idea of connections made in previous lives. How could I know. Some people feel instantly familiar. It's not affection, it's not attraction. It's a level of similarity that shouts “recognition”. We already know each other, to a level that cannot be explained rationally.

Maybe some people are destined to meet again and again, across time and lifetimes, because the bond already exists beyond memory.
I told you, Plato was a romantic.

Expressions from Afar: This Issue's Idiom

Mandarin idioms, with figurative meanings, convey centuries of Chinese wisdom, history, and philosophy, serving as a powerful tool for transmitting cultural values and concepts succinctly through language, literature, and daily communication.

重逢有期（chóng féng yǒu qī）
”Reunion is only a matter of time.”

Can literally be translated as “To meet again — there is a time.”
This idiom is about faith in the unseen workings of time. It suggests inevitability. This idiom expresses the belief that reunion is not random. Even if people part ways — for years, decades, or following Plato even lifetimes — if they are meant to cross paths again, that moment already exists. It does not mean “maybe we’ll meet again." but "We will meet again. The time just hasn't arrived yet."

It's often used when speaking about bonds that feel inevitable or recurring. Sometimes reunion isn’t a question — only a matter of time.

Conclusion

I have no idea what the future holds. I don't even want to know how things will unfold, it would remove all the fun. I just know I’m lucky enough to have recognized the echoes of many souls in my own, even faceless ones, in every field of my life, including work and friends.
I love this suspended moment in time when we feel like saying, 'It's like, I already know you somehow' — and it's not an emotional trap, but a feeling of recognition. I felt this a few times, in front of artworks, people, or even landscapes. Maybe it's a mirror being held, or maybe we really have met in a past life. The only thing I know for sure, this familiar feeling is a rare and precious one, signaling we’ll learn many things through this path.

The soul doesn’t forget what once shaped it.

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Reading time : 10min

I’ve been praying for a new start for a few years. I was trying to make it happen, I attempted several times, starting new things, taking a new leap, diving into something new with the passion of a teenager, even a bit recklessly sometimes.

But the more I’ve been focusing on this new start that was not coming yet, the more dissatisfied with life I’ve been feeling. And I started to doubt myself. Endlessly gauging a decision I was about to make. “Should I, should I not?” I was having second thoughts on my ability to make the right decisions, should I stay, should I go, should I leave everything I’ve worked so hard to build to “brute force” this new beginning? Luckily, after last year’s sad events, a very good friend told me: "Don’t throw everything away.” So I armed myself with patience, acknowledging the longing, the desire for a proper new chapter but also at the same time, letting go the need of it. And life started to shift anyway, as it always does.

Last month, a thousand things happened, as if everything was moving into place, and it reminded me of the strength of my intuition. I know I was doubting myself for a reason: it was not the right moment, yet. That's why today I want to write on certainty. I want to express clearly what it feels like to know. I want to write about evidences.

Did you ever had this sensation in your body, a distinguishable warmth into your guts flowing to your hands, the seed of a feeling expanding and growing from your belly to your heart, an inner light becoming brighter and brighter, as when you put your hand on a lightbulb, this very comforting red orange-ish invading your whole body, you find yourself having a huge smile, you cannot stop yourself and you’re almost bursting out of laughs, for absolutely no clear reason yet, just this certitude that something amazing will happen?

I’m enough in touch with my inner feelings to have recognized this sensation several times. Usually, the incredible thing takes a few months, if not years, to happen. But it happens. I’m gonna share some of those life moments.

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Estimated reading time: 8:30 min.

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After graduation, I needed to make a pragmatic choice: to study something that will give me job opportunities. So I made my decision based on logic and personal interests: I liked to sit in front of a computer, and I was drawing and painting all the time. So I picked Design, as I saw it as a combination of both. I believe it's been so long since I’ve been in this field, that I always thought of myself as a Design person. Someone who likes to solve problems, and who likes to think they’re pretty good at it. But maybe it was out of ego. Maybe I was “bullshitting myself” out of fear of not being good enough as an Art person. I had opportunities to jump into the Art field, with drawing, painting, even contemporary art, or performing, but I always dismissed it as something “I do on the side”, not something I would commit to. Like a fancy hobby more than anything. Maybe it was all a way to protect myself from facing what I wanted to do, out of fear of failure. Out of fear of not being good at it. Not being good enough, how many times do I need to go through that topic in my life? It all felt like remnants of my insecurities.

For a very long time, I have been afraid of self-confidence. In my representation of things, being confident would be similar to being arrogant, and having an inflated ego. I could not bear the idea of being pretentious. In the past, I did everything in my power to diminish my self-confidence, having just enough of it to keep moving, but never to the point where I truly got to trust myself. I used to think that trusting myself would be the beginning of my downfall. Needless to say, I was extremely wrong with all this. Today, I want to present a theory of my new understanding of self-confidence.

What if, our ego was our armor, and self-confidence a weapon, or a tool we’re using? Maybe ego protects us, and confidence helps us move forward.
I believe having some ego is vital to keeping boundaries and a sense of self, but too much of it will limit us; carrying more weight makes it harder to move or adapt. Self-confidence could be both the oil and the engine we can jump in, pushing us forward, and going beyond our current limits. The more self-confidence, the more walls you can break. Having some ego will protect you when you hit a wall, so you can hop on the engine again. But more ego itself won't make you move forward.

Ego, on the other hand, tends to reject criticism outright because it feels like an attack on one’s identity. We can recognize ego easily because it needs to be fed with recognition. It's not about the idea you had, it's about others knowing it was *your* idea. It's about reminding people that *you were right*. How we *always* do this, and *never* do that. It's not about our actions, our adaptability itself, our evolutions, it's about whether we have value or not in others’ eyes. It's about what you are, and what you’re not, maybe out of fear of trying and failing. Ego will tell you stories about yourself, what you can do, and what you can't, because “you’re not that kind of person". What if an inflated ego was a projection of a lack of self-confidence? But having enough self-confidence can trigger people who are lacking in it. Making you appear as arrogant in the beginning in their eyes. There are no shortcuts, you cannot control how people see you. We’re all projecting our own fears and hopes onto others at any time.

The thing is, the stories we tell ourselves are preventing us from moving forward.
Because the more recognition you have in other’s eyes, the more weight their approval carries. And you cannot change, nor evolve from that. Because if you change a bit of who you are, people might disapprove. So the ego is trying to protect you from any evolution of any kind because the current situation is known. Safe. Trying something new, becoming a new version of yourself might push you into failure, changing haircut might push you into physical rejection, embracing a new hobby might make you look clumsy or dumb, and you’ll not be able to display a perfectly curated version of your perfect self. And I know what I’m talking about with self-curation.

This is where we’re doing what I call “bullshitting ourselves”. We’re constantly lying to our own faces to preserve our sense of identity and what kind of person we are, or are not. Preventing us to do what we need to do the most, which we’re afraid to do. Preventing us from crossing the bridge, forcing ourselves to stay in this little narrative we’ve carefully crafted as a hibernation nest. Because this is what ego does, making it so comfortable in this current version of us that we cannot move anymore towards what we’re craving to become. Because we’re too afraid. But the only thing that is removing fear is taking action. There’s no shortcut.

Sartre meant that our sense of self and identity is not in control of, or the source of our overall consciousness or awareness. Instead, the ego is something that consciousness observes and interacts with. To put it simply, it means that if we can observe ourselves from the outside, notice differences in state, evolutions, we are not our ego. This is an empowering realization because we can then make conscious choices about how to adjust or modify our behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes. But because ego rejects criticism, it's hard to evolve when we’re deeply entangled with it. That's why we need to trust ourselves even more. Bear with me for a second. If you trust yourself enough, you don't need validation from others. You don't need to be praised or recognized to feel more stable in your own identity.

Buddhism is talking a lot about ego, as they see it as a mental construction, not as something that exists itself. It's not in the body, it's not in the mind. It's only a creation process that you can witness throughout time, constantly dying and being born again. That's the secret to evolution, I believe: to be willing to kill your current self for the benefit of the new version of you. Killing your current self is painful. Our current self is a comfortable thing, we know it. It's not perfect but we like it enough. Killing our current self should not be done out of shame, because we need to be grateful to them, they took us where we are now. But things around us always change, requiring us to adapt, and evolve. Evolving, for our ego, means to kill its current version a bit. bit by bit.

I was scrolling down my IG feed lately, and I witnessed all the past versions of myself. Some that I was proud of, some that made me cringe, and the whole journey was extremely interesting to witness. I was never the same. Self-confidence for me is knowing I can shift my life, I can see my whole world be shattered in one week and stand still. Self-confidence is knowing I can start a new journey, a new country, a new language, a new job, anything new, and build myself again from here. You’re not afraid of killing your ego, your current self, when you trust yourself enough to go on a journey again.

And if you think about it, it’s a lot like the Ship of Theseus. It's a thought experiment that explores the nature of identity and change. The paradox arises when all the wooden parts of the ship, originally belonging to the hero Theseus, are gradually replaced over time. The question then becomes: Is the ship that has had all of its components replaced still the same ship? What makes the object what it is, is it the matter from what it's made, or is it the purpose behind it?

If you see yourself with no real ego, meaning there’s nothing to save as “we” are not created nor destroyed, we’re only the result of current conditions, current parameters, we can detach from it and stop seeing ourselves as an “empiric self". Buddhists think this is how we reach nirvana. Not an easy task.

Ego and self-confidence are complicated things. But something I’m sure of, is someone with a big ego in reality lacks self-confidence. It's an armor. Someone extremely self-confident can be intimidating and driven, but if you scratch the surface, you’ll see there’s mostly an inspiring movement in life, and the armor can be penetrated easily if you want to get in.

Expressions from Afar: This Issue's Idiom

Mandarin idioms, with figurative meanings, convey centuries of Chinese wisdom, history, and philosophy, serving as a powerful tool for transmitting cultural values and concepts succinctly through language, literature, and daily communication.

破釜沉舟（pò fǔ chén zhōu）
”Break the pots and sink the boats."

This idiom symbolizes a commitment to go forward without any possibility of retreat. It's about taking control of one’s fate by making a decisive, irreversible commitment to change. In the context of personal growth, it reflects the idea that you must drive the change actively rather than passively experiencing it or suffering from it. It emphasizes a kind of 'burning the bridges' mentality where there's no turning back, pushing oneself to move forward and embrace new challenges with no safety net.

Conclusion

I used to deeply hate when people would not see me as I see myself. I wanted to make a point in everyone’s mind, being sure the image I carefully crafted and curated was well received, and taking it as a personal failure when it didn't land the way I wanted. But I realized we cannot control how others perceive us, as we’re all mirrors to each other, constantly projecting.
This week we played a game with people I just met, where we would name three adjectives representing our vision of the others. One of the people was feeling uneasy with this exercise, as feeling seen would be a limitation, a fixed state. I know in the past I would have tried to convince people otherwise if they picked the wrong words about me. I took this game with a lot of detachment, knowing myself is never fixed, always a reflection of my surroundings, the city I’m in, the people I’m with, their internal struggles reflected in me, and tomorrow will all be different. I like to think it might be that my ego is a bit lighter than before.

I am curious to hear your thoughts regarding how you view ego and self-confidence, and how this theory is resonating with you. Please share in the comments! Take care, everyone, and speak soon.

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From Afar Club~

If you’re not a paid subscriber, here’s what you missed lately:

• I published a longer, more personal piece on the origin story behind how I became a fashion model, the how, the why, and the whole journey in the middle.

• Our first community event to push ourselves out of our comfort zone and achieve goals together, Daruma Session! All I can say is that we’re going to have Twitch livestreams soon on music, live coding, and circus performing. (not even joking)

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I’m trying something new with today’s email. Along with our regular monthly articles, I’m introducing another kind of content centered on selected life experiences, more personal—those that shaped my monthly reflections. These articles are closer to my heart and longer in length, which is why they'll be part of the paid subscription. You can read this one entirely for free by activating a 7-day trial.

Reading time : 10min

Trigger Warning: This article contains references physical injuries as well as mental health issues, such as panic attacks and eating disorders. If you’re not in the right headspace, feel free to skip this one~

I’m eating in an Italian restaurant in the middle of Paris, with a friend I haven't seen in a while. As I twirled another forkful of delicious cacio e pepe taglioni, my friend suddenly asked:
- ”How did you find yourself doing modeling, by the way?”
- ”I just decided to… I guess?” I answered, smirking and shrugging.

And although it’s partially true, it’s not the full story. I couldn't help but think how that decision was hardly a casual one.

At the time, it was 2013 and I was finishing my master’s degree while working around 50 hours a week. I loved my work deeply, but I was emotionally drained by it: I felt out of place, like a misfit. Not doing well enough, not being good enough, not being social enough… I ended up constantly on the verge. Obviously, at some point, everything collapsed. I remember vividly when it all started to fall apart.

It was in a fancy Asian restaurant, a mix of Thaï and fusion. We had been eyeing this place for a while, and tonight was the night we were trying it. It was dark inside; the walls were black, the floor was dark too, and the tables made from a glossy black material. The waiters were a bit cold (as it's often the case in Paris) and the overall atmosphere made me uneasy. Just after ordering, I found myself unable to eat anything. Not only did I have no appetite, but I suddenly wanted to throw up even before starting to eat. I thought I was sick. I went to the bathroom, but nothing would come out, except for my tears. I was suddenly crying in this fancy bathroom out of nowhere, for absolutely no reason; suddenly, everything felt out of control. This feeling was panic. I was having a panic attack.
I looked at myself in the mirror, crying. Is this what a life crisis looks like?

I came back to the table where my boyfriend was anxiously waiting for me because it had been a little while, and I told him I needed to go. I could not stay here. I needed to go out. Out of this restaurant. Out of my body or out of my current life, maybe. So we both went out. In hindsight, I think this exact moment led me to the modeling industry.

Sadly, this crisis was just the beginning.

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I hope you're doing well. If you’re receiving this email, it means you’re now part of the Club. You either upgraded your account (thank you!), expressed interest in joining a creative community to move your projects forward, or you’re one of my earliest subscribers—someone I believe might be curious about this.

Something I’ve been think…

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Estimated reading time: 6 min.

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I have a thing with full moons. Over the past three years, on the few nights I felt a sudden urge to go out, have some drinks (I seldom drink alcohol), and act a bit more recklessly, it was always on a full moon. Maybe I’m a bit of a werewolf. I believe we were afraid of them in the past, not as a mythological animal, but perhaps because it might have been a metaphor for the fear of our primal selves—what we might become if we were stripped of the constraints of society and its rules. All fearing the moment we’ll involuntarily answer this animalistic urge that lies dormant within us. What if the real fear was always about losing control?

In Chinese culture, there are similar tales with fox spirits, “Huli Jing” (狐狸精). Those foxes also have the ability to transform themselves, and they evoke the fear of losing control. They are often depicted as a seductive woman, creating stories warning us of the dangers of excess desire and the importance of maintaining social order, not succumbing to our primal desires, maybe.

One of my dearest friends told me I was disconnected from my animality. Probably because I maintain my social order very strictly. While I disagree with his statement, I’ve accepted that I might appear that way. We had this discussion after I said “dogs don't like me very much usually”. I used to like dogs. But that was before. A few years ago, something shifted and dogs would act weird around me. Wild cats always approach me in the streets, but dogs either avoid me at best or bite me at worst. Naturally, I’m not a big fan of dogs anymore. I started to resent them, probably, and I saw many upsetting traits in them: always eager for attention, too spontaneous, lack of control, jealousy. Dogs need to be trained to be socially acceptable, otherwise they climb on people, or can be dangerous. They also cannot go on one hour peacefully without their master, and they thrive on rewarded obedience, being “a good boy”. Even more when you know dogs are descendants of… wolves. That we domesticated. Breed. Modifying their features to create new toys or tools, depending on our needs. Puppets and puppies sound alike.

I hate how dogs are jealous of other people in their owner’s life, the arrival of a newborn, or simply a romantic partner can be a triggering event for them. I feel deeply irritated by their need for constant attention and affection. I hate how they cannot just be with themselves, especially when you have in mind the lone wolf's image. I don't like the human-dog dynamic because it's rooted in hierarchy, obedience, and dependency. Perhaps this is the worst trait: I hate that dogs are not wolves anymore.

And then, thinking about all that, I remembered the Jungian concept of projection. It's a defense mechanism whereby individuals unconsciously externalize their own undesirable feelings, impulses, or traits by attributing them to others. Essentially, this means that the qualities we might strongly dislike or hate in others could be elements of our own personalities that we've failed to acknowledge or accept.

“We hate most in others what we dislike in ourselves.”
What if I hated dogs—the obedient version of a wolf transformed by humans, craving endless attention and dependency—because those are traits I’ve failed to acknowledge in myself?

I’ve been thinking about this piece for a few months now, and I have to admit, it has not been a pleasant introspection. I’m a cat person, in contrast to being a dog person. Perhaps dog people just know how to accept unconditional love or understand how to be needed. In short, maybe they are more emotionally available. Or perhaps what’s unsettling is the fear of losing my wilderness, fearing that my free-spirited wolf could become as obedient, weak, and dependent as a Chihuahua.

I’ve understood the concept of Jungian projection for a while now, and it has been enlightening in human interactions. Whenever something irritates me, I see it as a mirror, which has helped me become more understanding and caring towards others and myself. But I’ve never thought about it through the lens of animals. I try to be more accepting and open-minded with dogs. But I still cannot find a “Pug” cute, and when dogs bark at me while I’m running outside, I instinctively shout back. It's annoying. But I try to be more compassionate towards the traits they embody, as I might share them myself.

Expressions from Afar: This Issue's Idiom

Mandarin idioms, with figurative meanings, convey centuries of Chinese wisdom, history, and philosophy, serving as a powerful tool for transmitting cultural values and concepts succinctly through language, literature, and daily communication.

水至清則無魚（shuǐ zhì qīng zé wú yú）
”If the water is too clear, there are no fish”

It could also be said that “one who is too severe has no friends”.
This idiom might touch on the importance of spontaneity and imperfection, suggesting that being overly pure or clear can lead to a lack of substance or life. Taoist philosophy emphasizes the importance of balance in everything. This idiom carries the idea that excessive purity or perfection—akin to water that is so clear it supports no life—can be detrimental. The essence here is that a certain amount of murkiness or imperfection is necessary for life and growth. Chaos is beneficial.

Equally important, in personal dynamics, it implies that if one were to demand absolute clarity and purity in intentions or behaviors, it might push away genuine, albeit imperfect, relationships. This idiom advocates for acceptance and understanding over judgment. Annoying, but wise.

Conclusion

I haven't fully settled on what to do with these thoughts yet. However, I've decided to take a first step: allowing myself to be more feral. Instead of being in a constant state of control, allowing chaos to dictate my next move. Instead of carefully considering my every move, learning how to be spontaneous. I used to disregard my intuition as it was an illogical feeling, but now that I trust it more, I see how it's benefiting me. Maybe more spontaneity is about instinctive action.
Yet, there's more to the primal instincts I once despised in dogs: the need for care and companionship. Maybe it's about security within a herd, or a feeling of mutual protection. I think it could also be called vulnerability. Learning how to trust both my spontaneous instincts and others' intentions towards me. Maybe the fox can be domesticated without losing its wilderness.

I welcome your reflections on these thoughts—please share your perspectives in the comments. How do you relate to the idea of projection, and can you identify something that unsettles you in others?
Remember to look at the sky, witnessing a full moon is always a special moment. Take care everyone.

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From Afar~

Thank you all for the incredible support for my first printed zine, which has now sold out due to your enthusiasm. In response to your feedback, I am excited to announce that preparation for the second issue is underway, to be released probably around this summer.

Many of you have asked how you can further support my writing. I've given this considerable thought. While "Thoughts from Afar" will always remain freely accessible, you now have the option of upgrading your account. You can think of it as buying me a coffee—a small gesture that means a lot.

By upgrading, you'll gain access to exclusive privileges:

• Preorder printed books in priority with a friendly discount

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• Be part of the “From Afar club. A communal space where we can share and discuss our current projects, provide and receive feedback in a supportive and creative environment. I am starting a monthly group call, a space to share our current idea or project and plan the next one together, make sure the ball keeps rolling.

  Whether your interests lie in art, writing, technology, or even building a house, the club is designed to foster collaboration and growth. The first meeting is scheduled for March 9—mark your calendars!

  If you’re interested, simply reply to this email, the goal is to try it out and see for yourself if it helps :)

  
  I’m looking forward to start this all with you. New Lunar Year feels like a new chapter.

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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

“The Bookworm” - Carl Spitzweg (1850)

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Something became really clear at this point in my life: we tend to take things for granted. We are used to a level of comfort and happiness in our daily life that it became a new “normal”, and we forget about it.

I remember falling during a bouldering session, resulting in a quite impressive injury—four ligaments injured, one almost completely torn. It took me six months of rehabilitation. I couldn’t walk for two of those months. I realized then how much I had taken the ability to walk for granted. We all have countless examples of this in our lives: one day, something we do every day is suddenly something we can no longer do. Maybe it’s temporary, maybe it’s forever. But the bitterness is here.

Instead of focusing on what we’ve lost, and the grief that comes with it, I try to appreciate what I still have. Because life doesn’t owe us anything. I used to think that life was like building a castle, brick by brick—intangible and steady. But life flows, and there’s no stillness in the river. The only constant is change.

They all say we need to learn to let go. But it’s hard. Clinging to things won’t make them stay. Protecting your heart, and being guarded, won’t prevent you from being hurt. Every effort to control feels ultimately vain.

Of course, discipline and structure are important, but so is surrender while expecting for the best. When things go left, when the world shatters beneath your feet. Because holding on only hurts us more. But I know this shift is hard.

Something that helped me tremendously in learning to let go is seeing life experiences as a library. Every person we meet, every opportunity we encounter, everything we experience is like a book we’re borrowing. Being alive is like having an amazing library card. We can borrow a few books at a time, but we’re not allowed to keep them indefinitely. We’re not here to grow a personal collection; we’re here to experience shared knowledge.

Sometimes we borrow a huge book, and it takes us years to digest it. Sometimes, we borrow a very short one, or we’ll skip through a few pages while browsing the library, never fully reading it. Some books are dreadful and transformative. Others looked like bestsellers but turned out to be boring. We cannot know in advance. And we cannot read them all.

But I keep in mind that these books don’t belong to me. Life doesn’t owe me anything. I’m lucky to experience it right now, and I should enjoy it for as long as I can. When you see everything coming your way in life as something that might disappear the next day, you begin to feel grateful for the silly details.

I realized how often I had acted like an entitled brat over the years, expecting many things to simply exist without appreciating them. We take so many things for granted—receiving gifts at Christmas, walking in the streets, receiving New Year’s phone calls, and having friends by our side during a crisis. A warm bed to slip into when tired. These are things we assume will always be there, but really, they shouldn’t be taken for granted.

Imagine a Christmas spent alone, with no gifts in your mailbox. An empty, cold flat. Picture feeling sad, trying to call people, but no one answers—or seems to care. Imagine not being able to get up and breathe the fresh air outside, look at the sky, or hear the birds. Let’s face it: we take these things for granted when really, they are not. That’s why I take the act of being consciously grateful seriously, every day. I am grateful for the people in my life. I am grateful for my body, which I spent many years hating for no reason. I am grateful for my health, for my legs and my heart that allow me to run, and for my eyes that can witness the bright sun and the soothing moonlight. I am grateful for the friends who enjoy receiving my silly text messages. I am grateful for the challenges because, without them, there’s no growth. There are so many reasons to be happy, even when our goals are not reached yet. One thing I try to remember is that, even if my new drive hasn’t been achieved yet, my current self is living something I once wished for many years ago. We can be grateful for what we currently have while still planning for what’s next.

We need to take care of this library card. Maybe it’s a mix of our body, mind, spirit, health, and soul—call it whatever you’d like—but take care of it. Without the card, we can’t experience anything anymore. We might feel sad initially about a book we used to love that is now back in the library, but there are countless stories waiting for us, and many songs to hear, flavors to taste. In the unknown lies a thousand reasons to be eager for tomorrow.

Expressions from Afar: This Issue's Idiom

Mandarin idioms, with figurative meanings, convey centuries of Chinese wisdom, history, and philosophy, serving as a powerful tool for transmitting cultural values and concepts succinctly through language, literature, and daily communication.

順其自然（shùn qí zì rán）
"Let nature take its course"

This idiom reflects trust in the natural unfolding of events, even when we cannot fully understand them. It encourages us to release the illusion of control and embrace life’s flow. Letting nature take its course is not about passive resignation but about trusting that what’s next could be even better.

Conclusion

I wrote this article looking at the full moon in the plane, and watched the most beautiful sunrise with a red sun welcoming me in Paris. I reflected on how blessed I was once again to witness the sun and the moon, to fly to my home country, and to make friends along the way.

I wish you all a very happy new year, filled with growth (which means challenges), letting go of what no longer serves us (which means sadness), bursts of energy and laughter (many joys), motivation to get started, and the discipline to see things through. May you also find a clear mind (through time alone) and a peaceful heart.

Take care, everyone. Be healthy, be happy. And remember, in Mandarin, one way to say happiness is through a verb that means “open your heart.” So, keep your heart open. 開心

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As I type, I notice the date on my screen and realize it’s already December. This year passed in the blink of an eye. When I was a child, older people used to say, “Time flies, and it goes faster and faster every year—you’ll see.” Back then, I thought they were exaggerating, but they were right. Time truly does speed up as we grow older, and it would be so convenient if our time management skills progressed in sync with it—but they don’t seem to improve naturally. Each time I look back over the last five years—and I’ve done this more than once—it strikes me how much free time I used to have (and I don’t even have children). Five years ago, then five years before that, and five years before that... the pattern is undeniable. As the years go by, life feels fuller, more packed with responsibilities, ambitions, and moments I don’t want to miss. It's like playing a kind of Tetris with my schedule, trying to fit in all the things I must do while making space for what matters the most to me.

If life was a management game, and the resources we have to manage were our health, our money, and our time, the latter might be the trickiest to get right. It feels like the most out-of-our-control resource, yet ironically, it’s the opposite: how we spend our days is entirely in our hands. It can be easy to let our days pass by, one after the other, busy enough to convince ourselves that what we’re doing is what we should be pursuing. We let ourselves “go with the flow”—the flow being what others want us to do for them, or us simply following the momentum of past decisions, even if they no longer reflect what we are looking for now. Whatever those things are—work, family, parents, children, even our partners, it often becomes about pleasing others. Being what society expects us to be. Doing what everyone expects us to do.

I have infinite respect for people who relentlessly say no to the things that don’t fit their agenda. Funny how the word agenda is used both for a list of personal priorities and for scheduling time, as if the two are always deeply connected.

The word agenda has its origins in Latin. It comes from the neuter plural form of the Latin verb agere, which means "to do" or "to drive." Agenda in Latin means "things to be done" or "things that ought to be done." It originally referred to a list or a collection of tasks or matters requiring action.

Maybe we just need to figure out our own agenda, and then make time for it—but also allow Time to do its work. There’s wisdom in being patient. But patience isn’t about standing still while waiting; it’s about holding on to what we believe in while going on with our daily life. Because what matters often takes (way) more time than anticipated.

Summer 2022. I’m in a transparent bathtub in the middle of a photo studio. My head is underwater and my eyes are wide open. It hurts with the water, but I know it will look better that way. A camera is recording everything. I’m posing for a shooting as I still do regularly, but this one feels important. It's a personal project. I feel I’m recording an important moment in my life.

At the time, I couldn’t fully understand the importance of this moment. What I thought was a photoshoot planned to document my current state became an anchoring point in my life—just before everything started to shift.

It’s not the first time this has happened. In 2015, I started a series of pictures, re-enacting scenes from movies that had impacted me, culminating in shaving my head for the final set of characters. That project led to an exhibition two years later in Santa Monica, and, unexpectedly, to a modeling career sparked by the shaved head thing. I had no idea this would guide me toward the path I wanted to follow so badly. I attended my first casting at 14 years old, and I eventually walked during Paris Fashion Week at 28. Each of these moments seemed isolated at the time, but in hindsight, I can see how they were all interconnected, leading me to where I am now. As I embark on this new project, I find myself wondering: will it ripple outward, creating unexpected opportunities? Or will it quietly mark a moment of transition, the significance of which I will only understand years from now?

Patience isn’t about waiting a few months. Real, raw patience is about trusting that things will happen, one way or another. And sometimes, it can take twenty years to get there. Luckily, as we age, time seems to move faster. What is one year in a lifetime if it means achieving the dream you’ve been chasing?

Expressions from Afar: This Issue's Idiom

Mandarin idioms, with figurative meanings, convey centuries of Chinese wisdom, history, and philosophy, serving as a powerful tool for transmitting cultural values and concepts succinctly through language, literature, and daily communication.

静待花开（jìng dài huā kāi）
"Quietly waiting for the flowers to bloom."

This idiom encapsulates the concept of patience as a passive, yet hopeful, waiting for natural processes to unfold in their own time. It suggests a peaceful acceptance and the wisdom of allowing things to progress at their own pace, without interference. Spring will come again at some point. No amount of complaining or shouting would speed up the process.

Conclusion

This underwater shooting project I’ve mentioned is something that has been on my plate for a while. I submitted this work for two years, trying to find exhibition spaces or even just a publication, all without success. My friends kept saying that doing a solo show without an extensive artistic background is impossible now. But I did it once, so I knew I could do it twice. My proposal finally landed in the right hands, and I’m now working on all the details to make this happen for real. I always felt it would happen, it had to. This not happening would not make any sense. What I want to say I guess, is many projects just fail because we believe we failed at doing them. But it's not the case. You only fail at it if you stop believing in it. There’s no reason to let go of something that must happen. What is important is takes time. Nothing is easy to achieve. overnight success is an illusion. It's okay to take a rest and put your work aside for a while, but never stop believing in it.

I wish for you all to gather your strengths during this winter, find the things that matter the most to you for this upcoming new year, and set up your agenda. Make the time to work on it, and if it’s something you set aside after a few disappointments, I wish you the bravery to pick it up again and keep at it. We never know what can happen if you never quit.

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Estimated reading time: 6 min.

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What kind of bravery does it take to move to the other side of the world and start afresh in every aspect of your life? Or is it just a deeply rooted need to escape?

When people comment on my immigration to Asia, I often don't know what to say, because it wasn’t about bravery for me. It was just a need to go far away, a feeling I've had for as long as I can remember (as mentioned in a previous issue).
And when you settle into your new life, there’s an indescribable feeling of pride in speaking the newly acquired language. However, this is a double-edged sword. It comes at the cost of profound humility, felt when struggling to articulate even simple ideas clearly or just ordering coffee properly in the beginning.

I’ve been thinking about how languages shape our personalities for a while now. I've seen it myself—I change when I switch between English, French, or Mandarin. In French, I'm more observant and reserved, trying to catch the subtext behind what people say. But with English, I’m more direct and assertive. And when I started to write a diary in Mandarin, it was surprising to discover it was easier for me to get in touch with my feelings than in French.
I've moved between countries and languages enough to see that each language brings out a different version of me. The 'me' that speaks Mandarin in Paris feels entirely different. I used to wonder if I was just overthinking, so I asked my bilingual friends. It turns out, they all feel the same way. We all came to the agreement that our personality changes with language.

I started to dig deeper into linguistics, thinking of another parameter: language register. We have a lot of that in French, as we don't speak the same way with family as with friends, as at work, as in a very uptight environment. And I could feel this was also linked with our personalities. I’ve also learned about code-switching. This happens when people mix languages to express things that can't be translated directly. I do this myself when I’m talking with other French people in Taiwan, using words and concepts in Mandarin that just don’t translate. It’s kind of like using generational slang.

“In linguistics, code-switching or language alternation occurs when a speaker alternates between two or more languages, or language varieties, in the context of a single conversation or situation […] There are many ways in which code-switching is employed, such as when speakers are unable to express themselves adequately in a single language or to signal an attitude towards something. Several theories have been developed to explain the reasoning behind code-switching from sociological and linguistic perspectives.” Source Wikipedia

At this point, I knew I needed another point of view that could relate to my exact experience, to have a new “thoughts sparring partner”. I started looking for someone who speaks at least three languages and has also immigrated to another country. I knew someone: Jacob. His insights challenged my initial thoughts.

It's impossible to separate our spoken language from its context — this includes the culture of the country, the specific setting, the people involved, and our stage in life. There are just too many factors to consider to come to a simple conclusion. Our personalities shift depending on the context — whether we're at work, with family, on vacation, or just in daily life. The way we express ourselves varies in absolutely every situation, influenced by our experiences. Not only we don't speak the same way, but we don't even dress the same way in all these contexts. A friend joked about how her voice turns unusually feminine and almost submissive when she makes a polite reservation call. I’ve noticed that my pitch is lower at work than when I’m on a date.

I asked Jacob whether he thought this was like ‘pretending, or lying’, or if it felt like it compromised our authenticity:

-“I wouldn’t really call it, like, you know, ‘pretending,’ because at the moment, if this situation requires you to behave in a certain way, is it really pretending? Or is it just: you’re just doing this—”
-“Adapting.”
-“Yeah, you’re adapting. I mean, you’re supposed to act that way, right? So I don't really feel like I’m pretending or anything. I would maybe feel a bit more stressed or exhausted after a conversation like this because, you know, I have to go out of my regular, relaxed self, and that's kind of what all of us are doing at work, so…”

Yes, our personalities change with the languages we use. But there’s more to it.
Our personalities also shift with everything around us, though we're often less aware of these changes. We’re always adapting—whether to new environments, different people, or unexpected events, using what's available to us. It might feel awkward at first to adjust to a new country, switch jobs, or adopt a new dress code for a more formal environment. Expanding our comfort zone always feels unnatural in the beginning. But after a while, these changes become a part of who we are.

Expressions from Afar: This Issue's Idiom

Mandarin idioms, with figurative meanings, convey centuries of Chinese wisdom, history, and philosophy, serving as a powerful tool for transmitting cultural values and concepts succinctly through language, literature, and daily communication.

旅居心態（lǚ jū xīn tài）
”The mindset of a traveler”

This idiom really captures the spirit of being open to change, often used to describe adaptability and the willingness to fit in, whether you’re halfway across the world or right at home. It’s about having that readiness to embrace new experiences and the curiosity to keep learning, much like a traveler who seeks to deeply understand the places they visit. It emphasizes being flexible and not getting too tied down to any one place or way of doing things.

Conclusion

People often ask me after learning I can speak Mandarin, 'Is it hard to learn?' Of course, it's hard. Learning to communicate in a whole new language isn't easy. Neither is moving abroad and starting over, opening a company overseas, nor building a business and finding your first clients. But there's a type of relief that often goes unnoticed: you free yourself from the weight of others’ expectations. I believe we’re often bound to follow the paths people expect of us. Moving away acts as a form of emancipation. It strips away the familiar context, the usual modes of communication, and the cultural knowledge.

You remove yourself from your context. Your life becomes a blank page.
You're free to discover all the new versions of yourself you wish to embrace. There's something deeply comforting about knowing someone who understands what it feels like to expand your comfort zone to such an extent, the same way you did. Some feelings of mutual understanding just need a gaze; words are not necessary.

How has changing your environment impacted your personality? I believe we don’t need to move abroad to experience this (though it certainly helps)—even simply changing cities, work fields, or immersing ourselves in a new culture can shift our identity. Have you felt this shift? Are there language registers that bring out a non-authentic version of yourself?
I’d love to read about your experiences in the comments. <3

Take care, speak soon.

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Estimated reading time: 7 min.

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Today, I want to share the story of a King, who had the arduous task to protect his kingdom over the expanding Roman Republic (right before it became an Empire). Our King prepared himself to avoid any mistakes, not the same as his father, who ended up assassinated, poisoned by unknown assailants (maybe his wife) at his banquet. At the time, his sons were too young to rule, leaving their mother, the queen, to act as regent. However, she began to favor the younger son over the legitimate heir, causing tensions within the family. Sensing the danger, our yet-to-be-crowned heir fled into hiding to strategize his return.

When he re-emerged and reclaimed the throne in a ‘coup d’état’, he was declared King. He took over the throne of Pontus, imprisoned both his mother and brother, eventually becoming the sole ruler. His mother died in prison, and the fate of his brother remains ambiguous—whether he died the same way or was executed.
Our paranoid King, fearing a fate similar to his father's, devised a plan to build up his resistance to poison by consuming small, non-lethal doses over time.
This practice is now known as mithridatism, and it's named after this ruler, King Mithridates VI of Pontus. The effectiveness of this practice is still up to debate, but Mithridates VI became legendary for this decision.

We’ll not tell the whole historical tale of his life, but what's important to highlight is that his capture by the Romans (led by Pompey the Great. at the time) became inevitable and imminent. That's how Mithridates VI decided to commit suicide before he could be taken as a prisoner. It is said that he tried to poison himself. However, having allegedly built up immunity to poison over many years —he was unable to end his life in this manner. He asked a loyal bodyguard to kill him with a sword. The irony of things, always. (read more about his story)

I am way too cautious to dare ingest poison, even in small doses, as Mithridates did. Fortunately and unlike him, I don't face the daily risk of assassination. However, I’ve discovered that introducing small doses of controlled stress into my life can yield substantial long-term benefits.

During Covid-19, like many, something shifted within me. Despite regular exercise, nothing seemed to alleviate my escalating anxiety. That's when I learned about the benefits of cold showers—they release endorphins, stimulate the nervous system, reduce cortisol levels, and strengthen immunity. Essentially, taking cold showers is a way of increasing your stress tolerance through voluntary exposure. I began taking them every morning and noticed changes: reduced stress, fewer illnesses, and increased energy.

When done properly, a bit of “self-induced pain” (I’m speaking of healthy habits, such as exercising, fasting, or cold exposure) can unlock a handful of benefits. This approach isn't just about physical health; it applies to every tough decision we face. Delayed gratification can feel like momentary pain or poison, as we deny our immediate pleasure for future benefits. This logic isn't just about maintaining fitness or a diet; it's almost a life strategy to enhance personal fulfillment.
Reflecting on this brings me to one of my earliest memories of making a decision where I sacrificed immediate comfort to pave the way for a better future.

When I was twelve, life was overwhelming—school was tough, home life was challenging, and I felt crushed by the weight of it all. What brought me relief was exercising. I started attending modern dance classes, and the following year, I added ballet. Soon, I realized these were the only times each week I felt genuinely good. It was only logical to want more of that feeling. I took more classes and even assisted my dance teacher on Saturdays, spending the entire day there, from morning to mid-afternoon, and using my lunch breaks to read. It was on one of those Saturdays in November that my dance teacher approached me with a life-changing proposal: 'There’s a school program a bit far away, but you can attend middle school and have your class schedule organized around a sports activity, and take dance classes all week. I am a teacher there, and many students like you thrive in this kind of day-sport school.'

This opportunity became an obsession.
At thirteen, I was offered a chance to start a new life that promised more, but it required leaving everything familiar behind. The following year, I enrolled in a boarding school far from home.

I was thirteen when I entered boarding school. It was a Catholic institution, overseen by a guardian who was as short on smiles as she was in stature. I cried when I dropped my luggage on the ground, cried as my mother arranged my sheets, cried when she left, cried at dinner, and cried all night until exhaustion overtook me. The entire first week, I cried myself to sleep each night.

And then, I adapted. Interactions at school and dance class were challenging, as I was the new kid in both environments. I've always loved a good challenge, though. But something magical happened each time I entered the dance studio and placed my hand on the barre—every worry was vanishing away. I focused on my body, the pain each exercise induced, the blood-stained feet, sore muscles, and the stretching pain. It was all physically painful, yet it brought peace to my mind.

What this decision gave me (aside from a deep respect for self-discipline and commitment), was an edge. By the time I entered high school the following year, my experience at boarding school had already equipped me with valuable life skills. Four years at boarding school gave me another advantage—self-sufficiency, which proved invaluable when I started living alone at university. I graduated at 17, moved into my first apartment at 18, and by then, I had already processed much of the sadness from leaving my home life behind at 13. Each time I chose to leave something familiar to pursue my true dreams, it was a form of self-induced pain, but ultimately, it was worth it.

Leaving my mom to pursue my dream was hard, but in hindsight, I believe it was one of the best decisions of my life.

Expressions from Afar: This Issue's Idiom

Mandarin idioms, with figurative meanings, convey centuries of Chinese wisdom, history, and philosophy, serving as a powerful tool for transmitting cultural values and concepts succinctly through language, literature, and daily communication.

浴火重生 （yù huǒ chóng shēng）
”Rebirth from the fire”

This idiom reflects the idea of emerging stronger after going through intense trials or suffering. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, it represents resilience, renewal, and the ability to thrive after enduring hardship.

I have this fervent belief that nothing is transformed through comfort. Because we have nothing to gain by leaving a comfortable state, I believe we’re forced to change through hardships. That’s why any challenge can be seen as a blessing in disguise, forcing us to rebirth in fire, as the phoenix. Maybe we’re all phoenixes, in the end.

Conclusion

Looking back, my decision to attend boarding school might have seemed minor at the time, almost a whim. Yet, it turned out to be a pivotal choice. It marked the first of many times I would leave everything behind to chase the vision of a dream. How many times have I stepped away from my current life for the chance of a better one? I must admit, I have a penchant for running away. There’s something liberating about shedding all social constraints and expectations, discovering new versions of myself; it’s not just liberating—maybe it’s the premise that allows the realization of a new dream. When I read this quote from Marcus Aurelius, I find his reflection challenging, even a bit unsettling. However, I believe he captures a core truth: we owe it to ourselves to pursue what we truly desire, even if it means stepping out of the warm sheets of our bed or a broader comfort zone.

“At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: ‘I have to go to work — as a human being. […] Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm? So you were born to feel ‘nice’? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? […] Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can?”

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Have you ever taken a leap of faith, leaving behind the familiar to pursue a dream? Or perhaps faced a challenge that resulted in a rebirth, much like a phoenix rising from the ashes? If you're inclined, I’d love to hear about your experiences and discuss them in the comments below.

I wish you a very good day. Take care and speak soon.

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A big “Thank You” from Afar

Our small community is growing and I am thrilled to connect with readers from 19 different countries (!). This achievement was beyond my imagination a few years ago when I started this newsletter.

To express my gratitude, I've designed and printed a homemade zine, which includes a curated selection of my past articles and excerpts on the theme of "suffering." This is my heartfelt way of thanking you and encouraging you to share this newsletter with friends who might enjoy it.

Starting today, in the footer of all new emails, you'll find a link to refer a friend. You can also visit the leaderboard to see all available rewards and find your special sharing link. You only have to achieve 3 referrals to get your free copy, but if you get more, you’ll receive additional gifts. :)

Thank you for your continued support, it means the world to me <3

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