I still don't feel ready. I don't even know when I'll be able to say I've got myself together. Time kept moving for my grandma as death came for her, and for the people losing their jobs at Canva. It keeps moving for me too. I wipe my face, rub my eyes and keep walking.
Maybe pain is relative. The worst of it sets the scale and drowns out the smaller hurts. Anyone who's been hurt is cradling a freshly cut-out heart, trying to press cotton to the wound with shaking hands.
The world played a hell of a joke on me last month.
On 1 October, I officially lost my job.
On 22 October, I lost my maternal grandmother, my A-má.
On the evening of 31 October, I lost a relationship that had lasted almost a year.
On the afternoon of 5 November, I went to see a therapist. It was the first time I'd walked into a clinic since my second year of university.
My therapist said most people take about six months to adjust to a layoff, a year or two to come through the death of someone close, and about a year to adjust to a breakup. But I didn't have time. Watching my savings shrink made me panic. Feeling like I wasn't useful scared me. Knowing my life was spinning in place made me anxious.
Andy Warhol said everyone would get fifteen minutes of fame. All I wanted was one whole, empty hour to rest, and I couldn't make room for it. Or rather, my head was a mess. I couldn't settle down. I couldn't sleep. I decided to be honest with myself, to talk to myself and dig up whatever I was holding on to at the root.
Write, my therapist said. Give yourself different roles and look at what happened through each one's eyes.
On pain and suffering
Do we hurt because we suffer, or suffer because we hurt?
The second arrow
The two arrows come from the Buddhist Sallasutta (“An Arrow”, SN 36.6). The first is the pain life brings, often suddenly and without warning. The second is the suffering our thoughts and reactions add after the first arrow hits.
Two close friends of mine went on a fourteen-day silent vipassanā meditation retreat. They spent those days sitting and learning what equanimity feels like in the body. We'd usually do anything to get away from pain, stiffness or an itch. But when you let pleasant and unpleasant sensations come and go, you can see that the sensation is one thing and the judgement you attach to it is another. You learn to watch them come and go.
That's how you come to understand impermanence. Nothing stays the same forever.
After I left my old company, I kept thinking, “What if I'd brought that up at the start of the year?” Sometimes it was, “Do I bear some responsibility for how things turned out?” Then A-má died, and the doubts I'd already had about myself turned into another kind of blame. “What if I hadn't spent so much time working at the start of the year?”
It piled up. I'm already good at getting stuck on a thought, and for several nights I let myself go round and round. Then one day, while I was chanting, my mind went quiet for a moment. I started looking into what meditation was for.
The opening of the 60th Golden Bell Awards stayed with me too. Kevin Tsai spoke about growing up as the ongoing work of learning to face one loss after another. Sitting with Dee Hsu, he spoke of how irreplaceable she was to him, and how even she had to learn to live with a profound loss.
Before I can face any of it, I have to accept it. Flowers bloom and fall in their own time. I'm small and ordinary.
You: You're hurting because there are things you care about and things you want. You can't have them, and you don't know what to do with how powerless you feel. You'd been questioning your life and work since the start of the year. You buried the questions under more work, until all the things you hadn't dealt with blew up.
It happened when you least expected it, in ways you hadn't imagined. It was the world's way of telling you something was off about your priorities.
You haven't been honest with yourself. You haven't been good to yourself. You don't love yourself enough.
I: But what does it mean to love myself? I've learned the different ways I can love family, friends and partners.
You: Right. You've learned how to love other people. Why not try doing some of that for yourself?
I: I don't know how. I only seem to know how to treat myself like a piece of shit and grind myself into the dust.
You: Do you have low self-esteem?
He: Yes. He struggles to feel his own worth and tends to turn external achievements into a measure of it.
I: Yeah, you're both right. But I've lived this way for twenty-six years. I don't know what to do about it. I only recently realised I could love other people at all. I'm confused.
You: It's normal to feel confused, lost and distressed. This is something Asian kids and queer people spend a lifetime dealing with.
He: He has a habit of looking at a problem structurally, trying to account for the whole thing. That's just how he thinks. He needs to remember what he can still do about it.
Guilt
Grief is the price we pay for love.
Guilt is what sustains me, so courage forges me ahead.
Queen Elizabeth II used the first line in a message of condolence after 9/11. Colin Murray Parkes wrote about grief and love in similar terms in Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life.
The second line is my own. In many Asian families, love goes largely unspoken. It comes out in other ways, tangled up with guilt and gratitude. The guilt that comes with losing someone close can turn into the courage it takes to keep living.
To live, facing death.
Feeling indebted and blaming yourself feel different. I think they both come from some form of guilt.
The guilt of feeling indebted comes from a hollow place inside you, filled with the kindness of someone who loved you and asked for nothing back. In Asian families, we often grow up feeling we owe something deep, something we have to repay. But what we can give back never quite matches what we were given.
Self-blame comes from realising you missed something you should have noticed, and that by the time you see it, there's nothing you can do to put it right. You can see what you ought to have changed and didn't. It hurts in a quiet way, and you're left sitting with the frustration.
I blame myself after losing A-má. The last time I went back to Zhongli was sometime in July, and I can barely remember what her voice sounded like the last time she spoke to me. It's hard to talk about death because you have to talk about life at the same time. When we talk about life, though, we usually steer clear of death.
Courage
Kevin Tsai asked Dee Hsu whether she wanted people to think she'd pulled herself together. If you've lost someone close, you probably know how much of those first few days disappears when you look back. You were there. There are just these holes in your memory, with a few moments still sharp. How they looked when they died. A detail in the room.
Dee said she still felt empty and didn't know what counted as pulling herself together. When she felt helpless she still wanted to call her sister, Barbie. Her family and friends had given her the strength to stand there that night.
Her answer meant a lot to me. There were moments in the last few weeks when I thought I might as well rot here. Find a dark corner and stay there. The thought passed quickly. I'm still the sort of workaholic who can be pretty cruel to himself. I scheduled two interviews in the two weeks I was in mourning.
They went about as badly as you'd expect. In one of them, in person, I spent most of the time feeling like my mind had left and only my body was still in the chair. I often feel I've lost the courage to face my life. Or maybe I just don't know how to face the world again. I've been finding my way back to it, slowly, and I still catch my mind leaving the moment I'm in.
At A-má’s thâu-chhit, the seventh-day memorial rite, it hit me that my mum was facing the death of her own mother for the first time too. She was hurting too. In that moment I felt like I'd graduated from being a beginner adult. I needed to be someone my family could draw strength from. I still feel all the things I felt before. As soon as my mind goes blank, the thoughts rush in and remind me what a mess my life is right now.
I need to bring myself back.
Pull myself together.
You: Are you still sad?
I: Yeah, on and off. I keep feeling like my mind's been split into pieces, like the Horcruxes in Harry Potter. Sometimes I'm just dragging my body around. More often I know I'm there, then out of nowhere I remember how it felt the day A-má died.
You: Of course you feel that way. You've had a hard month, moving between all these feelings. Going back and forth between yourself and the world must be exhausting.
He: He lost his job, a family member and a partner in quick succession. Those are three big losses. He's also someone who keeps trying, and he's resilient.
I: Yeah, you're right. I am. Even taking that compliment from myself makes me uncomfortable.
On attachment
I first noticed what letting go of the ego might feel like while practising ikebana. I was bending a branch. The more I wanted it to take the shape I had in mind, the harder it was for my hands to feel the texture of the stem itself. I haven't learned how to let go of what I'm attached to. I can just about notice it.
In the two weeks after A-má died, I wanted to go see her body every day at first. I kept panicking that soon I wouldn't get to see her again. Then I saw her at the funeral, looking well, and later, after the cremation, we collected her bone fragments. Something I'd been holding on to seemed to ease.
The fear of being ordinary
In Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu argues that taste goes beyond what an individual freely chooses or happens to like. Taste draws a line between us. We often mark that line through our distastes, and the ability to make those distinctions is itself part of taste.
A long time ago I wrote about the left and the right, and about what National Taiwan University and private schooling did to me. The pursuit of excellence and the aversion to mediocrity were dispositions I picked up early. Part of my habitus.
The pursuit of greatness. Becoming somebody. The change maker.
I heard some version of that at every stage growing up.
Three weeks ago, after my usual Wednesday run, I met a friend from high school. We were in a class for students aiming for medical school at Dong Shan High School in Taipei, and he was one of the most diligent people in the class. Practice questions, cram school, all of it. Always in the top three. He studied materials science and engineering at National Taiwan University (NTU), then went to Taipei National University of the Arts for a master's in performing arts. After a year he took time out from the degree. Now he's back at NTU as a research assistant.
We talked for over two hours. At some point I thought of Zhuangzi’s idea of “the usefulness of uselessness”.
We live in an age that wants everything to be useful. We squeeze whatever efficiency we can from our tools and value them by how much they get done. I always took pride in being useful. When the system I relied on to feel valuable collapsed, my deepest fear of being ordinary was suddenly out in the open. Nowhere to hide.
I need to accept that I might just be ordinary.
It hit me last week when I started looking at jobs in big companies and consulting. After all those turns, there I was looking at the same kinds of jobs I'd considered in my second year at business school. A little ironic. This time my reasons are different. I think the problems I want to work on have led me back inside the system. Going back means accepting that I may no longer be special there.
I think I need to see myself as a person first. I happen to have things I want to do. I want to be excellent at them, and I can live with being ordinary. Maybe the whole binary is something elitism lodged in me, and I've been looking at the world through it ever since.
In The Moon and Sixpence, did Charles get away from the ordinary so he could make something great? Or did he accept a new kind of ordinary in order to do it?
The desire for greatness
Everyone working in the startup bubble is after some kind of greatness. It might come from the problem you want to take on, the product you want to build or the place you want to earn in the field.
Every team you join and every product you build gives you somewhere to put your own idea of greatness. You project it onto what the company wants to achieve, pour yourself into the product and call what you get back growth. That's how I understand startup grinding culture.
The way you see the world comes through in how you solve a problem. The problem and your way of solving it shape the product in turn. Every era has a form most people immediately understand. Five years ago it was the conventional B2B product. Pick a business use case that can scale, find a few customers, then turn the solution into a product. Now we use models to speed up each step, automate some of the work and put another layer around it. A wrapper.
I don't think you're a good fit for agency work.
My manager said that about six weeks into my internship at AHA, a fashion ad agency, in my third year of university. Another part of the company managed talent like Molly. I was on the production side.
It was the first time I felt I was wasting my time. I was taking cabs around Roosevelt Road in the downpour before a typhoon, buying pineapple buns for a shoot. I found out the string lights I'd bought were the wrong ones and went back out to IKEA in Xinzhuang to get the battery-powered kind from the brief. On set I had to follow the AD, carry things, hand people water and hold umbrellas.
I couldn't see why any of it mattered. The size of two strings of lights. Whether the crosshatching on twenty-five pineapple buns was intact. All that work would change some tiny detail in the photo, and who was going to zoom in on Instagram?
It took years and a few jobs where I had interns of my own before I understood.
They cared about a different kind of excellence than I did.
It came down to what each of us chose to care about. Both choices made sense. If I'd felt the way Emily did in The Devil Wears Prada, I'd have sat at my desk and said “I love my job” three times and meant it. I left when the two-month internship ended. Later I went to a brand design company, then a social design consultancy. I kept crossing options off a list. The answer would come into view for a moment, and I'd still feel I hadn't earned the right to say out loud what I believed in.
I often say I'm no designer, that I've never done hands-on design, and then count myself among design people anyway. I went to the Royal College of Art and still felt like an impostor. I kept arranging myself into whatever shape might fit the room. The better I got at passing, the easier it was to avoid whatever I felt called to do.
The pursuit of efficiency
I've had a low hum of anxiety since the start of the year. “Do you still use AI on weekends?” came up several times with former colleagues. My answer was always no. In tech and startups, you're always trying to catch the next wave. Working in Growth means I get hit by that flood of information early.
I feel like I've spent the last six months taking in garbage. Rubbish AI text with rubbish graphics nobody checked. The AI mini-dramas that followed a leap in video models over the previous two months. Before that, the disposable websites that came with the wave of vibe coding.
I cut way back on social media in July. Opening Instagram or Threads made me panic. Then I started feeling numb to what I saw on LinkedIn. It's pretty scary when making content is part of your job.
I started questioning the choices I'd made. After my master's, had I turned away from the value I saw in people and toward the efficiency of tools? Around then I started reading Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. My reading was that mechanical reproduction makes the aura of a work of art wither and changes how we encounter art. I keep thinking that, looking back, this makes sense.
But what was it like to live through the argument between painting and photography? How did ordinary people get through a change like that? Were they anxious too? Did they also feel lost about what came next?
New tools often remind me of the fire Prometheus brought us. You can keep yourself warm with it, or do harm with it. Most of the time you're somewhere in between, watching everybody else start using it too, feeling powerless. Honestly, I don't know what to make of living in a time that puts efficiency above everything.
The state of this essay is pretty much the state I've been in for the past month. Most of the time I didn't know what I was doing. I was just dragging my body through the day. I've decided to make my way back to the world, slowly. I'm even hosting an event later today.
I still don't know if I'm ready. But it'll be okay.