I never knew how much I was holding until I was given permission to let go.

In my breath. Bent over in a child’s pose my teacher’s palm on my stomach saying breathe.

Jacky relax. You’re holding. Let go.

And how does it feel to be light?

I dance. I sing freely. I look more deeply into people’s eyes.

I find the smallest things - a flower, a swallow, an orange - might move me.

They contain infinites, and if I listen with my whole self, I might hear them.

You are not so scary with your face in the light. You were so scared yourself. How could you have known it was ok to be seen? You had not had witnesses before to show you so.

It is evidentiary. You did not have precedent. Until you did.

It is not mere ground to stand on. It is the field, the soil, the very fertilizer you’ve held on for.

Let go.

Breathe.

You are safe now.

Let yourself sink in. There is life in these roots, yet. For you to grow into.

When I feel lonely, I find myself gravitating towards places where I am anonymous or where I am known deeply. I find safety in the invisibility. It is a fantasy. To be discovered and have salvation come to you when you think yourself hidden.

Maybe I’m just a performative man disguised so well that I have forgotten the performance.

Leaving New York three months ago meant leaving behind a home of the past three years.

I moved to New York, superficially, for a new job.

The kind that I was promised would be the end game, where Elysian comes calling, manifested into a comfortable 9-5 with the fabled ring of good WLB and good pay.

But one can find work anywhere if one really tries. No. I moved because I was lonely.

Boston was a time of intensity muffled. Late consulting hours underneath both metaphorical and literal storms. A pandemic raged on. Snow beat down on the windows of our 500 sq-foot apartment. We would take bong hits on Friday and play Call of Duty until our attention or our eyes gave in and the final round rang.

I gained 30 pounds. I lost myself in work. It was a desperate, visceral attempt to fill the Deficiency. In what. Worth maybe. Money perhaps.

But really, I worked because what else was there to do?

I didn’t have many friends in Boston. 5 maybe. The holidays would come and go. I would stay. I would bemoan my fortune, yes. But I was grateful also for what I had. The company we carry in hard times is that we find most easily to look fondly back on.

It was hard. But I endured.

I had hoped for New York to be different. An opening up of the world meant an opening up of possibility. It was like the first spring, the world awakening. The escape I had been planning finally made manifest. Yes. I would thrive in my new home.

The first year was a cliche. I made friends. I went to lots of parties. Some I hosted like my first housewarming in Greenpoint where we got kicked off the roof and had security called on us. We poured into hallways, neighborly consideration be damned. Most others I was invited to.

It’s a strange place. New York. Strangers invite you into their homes if they like the way you dress. If they realize you’re from the same state. We exchange social handles like cigarettes among addicts. We seek, don’t we all, even in places novel and foreign, for something familiar.

If I was lonely then, it was not for lack of company.

My first friends were my oldest friends. Those I knew from college. It was, truthfully the entire reason I had moved to Greenpoint to begin. It is an irony, perhaps even a tragic one, that proximity bred greater distance. Being close seemed to preclude intimacy, and what we could not make up for in frequency we failed to do so in depth. My best friends did not remain so. It is hard to see the loss of something that stays physically present. But it is one of the most enduring losses. What becomes of branches that grow apart from the same root?

My second year was a depressive one. One, many of those who know me are not privy to. We moved apartments into the city. Leaving behind Sundays watching The Last of Us for a 2-bedroom flex in Gramercy. We lost the in-building gym and rooftop. We gained a few subway lines and walking distance to the office. The things we sacrifice on the altar of convenience.

When we speak of that time now, we can see more clearly how deeply it affected us. It is an an impossible trade-off. Did I pay rent to live here or to be here? If I was home, I felt I should be out. When I was out, I felt I should be home. I was restless, but I wanted to rest.

I was surrounded. Buildings. People. Coffee shops within walking distance and the world at my doorstep. It was what I thought I had wanted. I even got promoted. But I felt poor. I worried constantly about money. I would step into my building, the harsh overhead lighting, the rusty doors, the elevator that jolted violently when it announced itself, and wonder to myself, was this what I really wanted?

That’s when it began. The seed of a deep dissatisfaction planted that I would not allow myself to feel for a long time after.

It is easy to see in retrospect that I was never meant to stay. I moved 4 apartments in 3 years, 3 cities in 5. And for all I wanted to, desperately hoped to, find, I did not ever arrive at a place of lasting ease.

Year 3 was the closest I would come. In proximity, there was closeness. I loved my friends. Those I could see without much planning and, yes, those cross-borough ones too. Yes, I would transfer trains for you. Yes, even local.

I became a Knicks fan. I would work-out every week with friends. We would cook for each other. There was turbulence at home, our relationship tugged at the corners, but in the moments of peace, we tried to make of our time, a time worth remembering. It is not the adventure I miss. But the mundanity of habit I find myself nostalgic for. Morning walks along Prospect, our imaginary dog frolicking around those who actually roamed. Coffee. So much coffee. That we brewed at home. That we tried and experimented with outside.

It is no small grief to no longer be on Washington Ave.

I think that if we allow ourselves to, what we need will find us. I’ve been reading more lately. Losing myself less in my work and more in art and in words. I came across a poem lately. It plays in my mind often. It feels as if it were written for me. Isn’t that strange?

“Every year we have been witness to it:
how the world descends
into a rich mash, in order that it may resume.
And therefore, who would cry out
to the petals on the ground to stay,
knowing as we must,
how the vivacity of what was is married
to the vitality of what will be?”

The last few lines speak to me so.

Who would cry out to the petals on the ground to stay, knowing as we must, how the vivacity of what was is married to the vitality of what will be.

I did not know when I left New York where I would be. There’d be a place for me somewhere. And maybe that somewhere was far off, Chiang Mai, Barcelona.

I have surprised myself by staying in LA. It was meant as intermission. Curtain drawn up as I wrote the next act. But it is here that I’ve found something I have not felt in a long while. I don’t have the urge to leave. I feel doubt, yes. Some days I am filled with it. But when I get into my car, put on my favorite song, the song that feels so strangely written, as if it just for me in this precise moment of my life, I am struck in place. I forget the traffic. The noise in my head quiets. And in that space before the light turns green, I am in awe.

The beauty, and loss, of this world is overwhelming.

No longer is there a return back East. I’m heading West, and at least for the foreseeable future, staying there.

Some Life Reflections:

In Europe, I feel I’ve lived several lives. I left New York on September 3 with a one way ticket to Sevilla and a return ticket from Paris. In between, I had little planned. Segments. Themes maybe. But nothing that felt like a proper itinerary.

Over the past few months, I’ve thought a lot about what comes after New York. It’s been home for the last three years and rounds out my decade on the East Coast. It actually has been a decade. I ventured out to college in Swarthmore in 2015 and here we are 10 years later.

Then, my family had been shepherding me off to orientation. I couldn’t have known that I would’ve stayed for that long. That I’d live in 4 cities and 6 apartments, move every few years, in what felt like an endless endeavor to find the next place I would call home.

But in the back of my mind, home - that place that I had actually grown up in - beckoned to me. First like faraway idea - the place that someday I’d go to. Maybe in a few years. Maybe after I turn 30. A moving timeline that kept receding. Then, more concretely like a oncoming train that I could actually board. It hasn’t struck me yet that that day is today. That someday has come calling.

I’ve always been discomforted by liminal spaces. Airports. Train stations. Somewhere between departure and arrival, and not being able to fully inhabit either. Most of my last few months have felt this way. An expiring lease with tickets to places that I could try to romanticize about but did not truly see myself being in. I’ve already done that once. With a year in Taipei when I was 22. Then, it was easy to romanticize my life. The adventure of learning a language abroad, of living in a new continent. The call of adventure felt compelling. The call of home feels inevitable.

It is not lost to me that the main reason I’m going back now, when I am, is to take my parents back. We left for Europe to attend my sister’s graduation in London, and made a trip of it. She took them there. I take them back.

I had grown up dreaming about being able to take my parents on vacation. It’s the kind of thing that when you grow up poor, is a milestone, much like graduating from college or getting a job. Let me treat my parents. Show them the world. Make their sacrifices seem worthwhile. We had taken two vacations by the time I was 18 - once to the East Coast, and once to China. Travel was a luxury - still is - but one that only happened ever few years.

A diploma, two jobs and a few wrinkles later, I can now travel whenever I want to. Socioeconomic mobility has brought be geographical mobility.

And that brings me here. At an airport in Paris, 5 cities removed from where I first started on September 3 in New York.

My trip was split into two parts - a Spanish segment on my own and then a Western European tour with my family.

• Sevilla with a friend. A celebration of his birthday. A graduation of sorts for me into the next chapter of life. We spent time with his friends, his family. A borrowed home for my first 10 days.

• Barcelona by myself. Digital nomading for a week. Going to meet-ups, meeting new friends and scratching the itch of being a DM. I worked at coffee shops, walked around and met people. Played beach volleyball. But I felt off.. Despite the generosity and kindness I felt from the people I met, I could not see myself there. Or really, anywhere where my primary identity was nomadic. Chiang Mai. Tokyo. Taipei. I had been telling people for months that that’s what I’d do next. But a week alone was enough to know that I crave grounding more than adventure. A familiar place to return to sounds nicer than a novel place to explore. That was a big unraveling for me.

• With family, we sightsaw. London Eye. Venice canals. Eifel tower. It can be painfully frustrating to travel with parents - there’s so much self-regulation and restraint involved. Things that remind me I am both child and adult. Caretaker and, still, deeply, needing care too. But there is joy too. Warmth. Love. Determining the relationship I want with my parents and learning to coexist with them on agreeable - if ever imperfect terms - will be work. I am not sure of their capacity to change, nor am I of mine. But to learn how seems like work worth doing.

• It will likely be some time before we travel together again. Kim is staying in London. I in LA. And both of us, I think, need time to settle and find shape to this next length of life.

Some Work Reflections:

• Despite leaving my full-time job 6 months ago, I don’t think I’ve ever really turned off. It’s a cliche, and one I am struggling to break away from, for the anxious overachiever to feel like they can’t stop chasing productivity. This for me, has been painfully true. But it’s not been so bad. I do like working. I crave the satisfaction of something clicking after you’ve spent some time thinking it through. I love the feeling of nailing a scene and really feeling connected with your scene partner. I love love love how much I learn when I’m fixated on something that feels real and purposeful. I’m always learning. It’s my default. I may as well spend my time learning things I naturally am drawn towards instead of fighting against it.

• The challenge though, is disentangling what comes from anxiety and what comes from curiosity. The should vs. could problem. Am I doing this because I feel I should do it or because I could do it? If there’s a single sentence to encapsulate this chapter of my life, that’s it. And the more I ask it, the more I actually listen to the answer, the more secure I’ll feel, I hope, in where my feet are set and where my time is spent.

• I think I’m scared of actually succeeding. This is a new realization for me. With school and steady jobs, success was well defined with grades, promotions, and annual reviews. With my own work now, it’s much harder. I am wary of chasing conventional metrics and calling that success - things like # of followers, how much money I make. But more accurately, I think I’m scared of actually trying and, possibly, failing. To put my best effort forward and still have that not be enough. I keep tip toeing. With acting. With content. With coaching. I have enough data to know that I could keep going. But I’m afraid to commit. With coaching this is especially obvious. I charge by the hour. It’s as explicit as it gets. And I ask myself - am I actually worth that much? The math is undeniable - I literally 200X’d my first client’s investment on me - yet I doubt myself.

• I remind myself, that action despite doubt is no small thing. It is the cost of attempting something meaningful and hard. And I think I know what my next really hard thing to face is.

Some Stuff I’ve Really Enjoyed Lately:

• Stranger Things Season 1 + 2 (I’m very late)

• Culinary Class Wars (rewatched, and hot take, I actually think Napoli Mafia deserved to win. His final dish was holistically, less creative yes, but more complete. He specializes in pasta. It was a finale about his life and his name. He made pasta. I don’t blame him.)

• ’s essay on travel and feeling and what that brings out in him. It’s a great reflection on what happens when you release the need to solve for forever and enjoy what emerges in each destination, place, and moment.

• ’s essay on affinity and what it means to actually love something. My favorite part, “The idea that affinity can free you is simple. But people have complicated relationships with knowing what they actually like. Yesterday at dinner J used a metaphor for having the wrong job that went, Sometimes people think they should play basketball because they like dribbling. Which I interpret as, It’s very easy to think something is right for you because parts of it are pretty awesome. But what about the other parts? And what’s the main part, the crux of it all? Do you like that? You can like dribbling and shooting and passing and not actually like basketball.”

When I started writing on Substack, I thought I’d write regularly. My commitment was optimistic. I had bigger plans lying in wait and over the past 6 weeks, they took over.

My secret’s out. Or maybe it was never a secret. I’ve been taking acting classes for the last 6 weeks. Not my first time - I’ve been taking classes since I moved to New York 3 years ago, and I loved performing in high school. But this was different. This was 6 weeks of full-on, everyday immersion. They call it an “intensive”, and they really mean it. Five days a week. Five hours a day. Rehearsals. Warm-ups. People traveled across the world to be here. I crossed a borough. But maybe it’s more accurate to say it’s taken me a lifetime to get here.

There are days I don’t feel like I fit in. Days I feel timid and misunderstood. My classmates have BFAs and resumes that span the length of their childhoods. They name plays like I name basketball players, list playwrights the way one names streets in their neighborhoods. “I love Annie Baker! That’s so Chekhovian.”

There are other days where I feel so alive, so certain, like there’s nothing else I’d rather be doing. When the craft seems to crack me open and the space it opens feels like an expanse where life can seep in and feel possible.

It’s mysterious.

In one of our first weeks of class, we did this exercise where we got in pairs and simply looked at each other. One person sits in a chair. The other sits in another facing them. They look at you, you look at them.

And for a couple of minutes you just take each other in.

Then you rotate and sit with someone else and repeat until you’ve gone around the class. When you’re disobligated from needing to do anything - you don’t need to smile or entertain or reassure - who’s the you that comes through?

Afterwards, I wrote in my journal that it felt like falling in love with everyone. That it was overwhelming, my heart overspilling with raw feeling that I didn’t know what to do with, and the realization that maybe there was nothing to be done, but to feel. To let go, I’ve realized, does not mean to let out. It just means to not hold back.

I couldn’t focus in class after that. I left my hand on my heart and let it settle. Maybe to remind myself that it would stay intact. It was learning to trust its own capacity to be. And I’m not sure yet how to articulate the profundity of that moment but the nudity of it feels imprinted on me, in the way that a weight being lifted off your chest leaves an indentation. And the imprint it leaves - that small ache - is both the reminder of the weight you were carrying and the proof that it’s been lifted. Something can simultaneously exist and be gone.

It’s mysterious.

I’m living my best life. And to my surprise, that’s a life where I’m still so confused. When I was burnt out in my corporate job, I had this feeling of life passing me by, especially when I was I was sitting alone in the office and working by myself. I was in stasis, and life, like a caravan of happier times, seemed to parade by outside my window. I’d quit and then travel the world, I told myself. I’d live in Asia. I’d do more acting. I’d be so free. Quitting would be my salvation and the beginning of the perfect next chapter.

It’s hyperbolic to say I was a different person 6 weeks ago. I was a different person yesterday. But transformations don’t always feel transformative. Sometime it strikes like epiphany, lightning on a bright day. And other times it creeps in like walking through a fog and emerging to find yourself wet. I’m still in the fog. I’m not sure what comes next. But I do know this.

Life - that old adventurer that I used to watch outside my window - doesn’t feel like it’s passing me by anymore.

I’m flirting with life, and life, it seems, is flirting back.

What does it feel like to quit?

To walk away from a steady paycheck? From money?

I usually say that it’s scary. But not as scary as you think.

That it’s liberating to have your time back.

That New York is a terrible place to be unemployed, but a wonderful place to be free.

And I mean all of that.

But that’s not the whole story.

You can’t understand what it feels like to walk away from something, until you know what it meant to finally have it.

What does it feel like to reach everything you’d been working toward - and still not know how to slow down?

It feels like surfacing after nearly drowning - lungs burning, body panicked, gulping down air in greedy, shallow swallows.

Money was my oxygen.

I’d learned to breathe in survival - quick, desperate, never enough.

So even after I reached land, secured a salary and a safety net, I couldn’t slow down.

My body didn’t trust that I was safe.

Because when all you’ve known is scarcity, rest doesn’t feel like rest.

It feels like drowning slower.

It feels like spending your life digging - striking gold, seeing it glitter, wanting more, and wondering if it’ll ever feel like enough.

Because money doesn’t just keep you alive, it keeps you chasing.

It tugs at your time, your energy, your imagination. It turns choices into calculations. Leisure into luxury.

It’s not just a handcuff. It’s gravity.

Constant. Invisible. Omnipresent.

And the closer I got, the harder it was to let go.

My grandparents grew up in famine.

My parents grew up in poverty.

I grew up poor, but hopeful.

And this - the security, the status, the ‘success’ - was the pinnacle of what three generations had been hoping for.

I reached it.

And when I did, I told myself this is what it was all for.

I should feel lucky. Be grateful.

But gratitude doesn’t always quiet the guilt.

Especially when my parents are still working six days a week.

My dad wakes up at 8. Puts on his polo and khakis.

Steeps his tea. Watches NBA highlights with the sound low.

Drives his twenty-year-old Toyota to the restaurant. Parks in the same spot he has for years.

Ten hours on his feet. Every weekend. Every holiday.

They don’t complain. They don’t slow down.

I offer my mom a monthly allowance. Tell her she doesn’t have to work so hard anymore.

She refuses - first with a laugh, then with pride.

She tells me to not worry.

To take care of myself.

To rest.

I tell her I’m trying.

And that she should, too.

But part of me wonders if either of us knows how.

When you’ve spent your whole life swimming against the current, what does it feel like to finally breathe?

People still ask me what it feels like to quit.

I say that it’s scary. But not as scary as you think.

That it’s liberating to have your mind back.

But I’ve come to realize that quitting was never the hard part.

It took one call, one email, and less than 30 minutes.

The hard part was believing I could.

Believing I was allowed to.

Because it’s never the leap.

It’s the permission.

Further reading:

• For resonance: Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams by Alfred Lubrano

• For inspiration: The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life by

• For poetry on loop: Word is Bond by Khantrast
  

And a month later, I quit my job.

It’s been five years since I was last here, when I took a gap year after graduating to study Mandarin.

I remember how weird it felt to explain to my parents.

They were supportive, but also deeply confused. And honestly, I kind of was too.

When you grow up poor, money is everything. Stability isn’t just nice to have — it’s the whole point. And I had it lined up: a well-paying consulting job, a path that made sense.

And now I was like, surprise! I’m moving to Taiwan to study Chinese.

I didn’t really have a plan, just this vague feeling that if I didn’t go now, then I might never get another chance to.

But once I got here, something clicked. Not in a magical, I-found-my-purpose way. More like... I felt alive. I was waking up every day to learn something I cared about. Getting lost on the MRT. Screwing up tones in Mandarin. Drinking too much 7-Eleven coffee.

It was messy and lonely and really good.

Since then, a lot’s happened.

I did the consulting thing for a few years, then jumped to tech to do strategy.

I learned how to seem confident even when I wasn’t.

I learned how to do late nights, and pretend they didn’t get to me.

I learned how to show up without actually being there.

It was messy and lonely and really hard.

But I kept going.

Got promoted a few years later. Better title, better pay.

It was supposed to be validating — the whole reason I had been working so hard.

And I was grateful.

But instead of excitement, what I mostly felt was relief.

And I started to wonder if I’d been so focused on building the right life on paper that I’d drifted away from the version of me that actually enjoyed being in it.

I thought about how I’d spent the last five years doing everything I thought I was supposed to do, that would make me feel secure, important, like I’d made it.

And I did “make it,” I guess.

But I also kind of left myself behind.

And the weird thing was, all I could think about was Taiwan.

I came back here in January. I was on a leave of absence from work, trying to make sense of what was going on in my head and whether I had anything left in the tank.

And somehow, Taiwan felt like the right place to be.

Not for reinvention or some dramatic reset. Just … to be here again.

To see what it felt like.

To show my girlfriend the places I used to go.

To remember who I was before I got so good at optimizing.

I quit my job officially in March.

No dramatic exit. No big plan.

Just a truth that I finally stopped avoiding.

I didn’t want to keep pushing forward on a path that didn’t really feel like mine.

And now I'm here. Figuring it out.

Some days, it feels like a reset. Other days, like a very expensive identity crisis.

But for the first time in a while, I feel like I’m actually paying attention to myself.

A week after I quit, I came across a sentence that struck me.

          “Leap, and the net will appear.” 

I don’t know if it’s true.

But that’s what this feels like.

Maybe it’s reckless.

          But I leapt. 

Maybe it’s brave.

          But I leapt. 

Maybe it’s both.

          Will the net appear?

I guess we’ll find out.