As the year comes to a close, I wanted to share the annual reflection prompts I’ve been returning to for several years now. They’ve helped me take stock of the past year, notice how I’ve grown, and gently orient myself toward what’s next. One unexpected bonus is revisiting old entries: seeing my reflections from 2022, 2023 remind me how much life can shift in a short time.

I often leave these reflections with a sense of gratitude. That felt especially true this year. Between a family emergency, a breakup, and moving back to Hong Kong— a city I hadn’t lived in since I was 14 — 2025 truly felt like the longest year for me yet. I staggered my way into the fall, just barely making it, and at times the shittier moments seemed to eclipse everything else.

This reflection practice helped me recognize and give myself credit for all the wins I had, both big or small: writing my book; publishing my book; founding an artist residency and running month-long programs in Berlin and Vietnam. It helped me see the full shape of the year: the highs and lows, the in-betweens, all the ways I’ve grown. More than anything, it gave me space to reflect on who I was this year, and who I want to be in 2026. I’d recommend this ritual to anyone looking to move into 2026 with a little more intention and care.

I’ve shared a copy of the reflection prompts here, along with a few excerpts below.

Sending lots of love and wishing everyone a beautiful New Year,
Kora

Prompts

I. Reflecting back on 2025

Describe the year in one sentence:

1. Review

Words to describe 2025:

Countries visited:

Number of books read:

Best book(s) I read this year:

Best movie(s):

Favourite country I visited:

Favourite new friend(s):

Coolest new experience(s):

Most intense week(s):

What am I most proud of creatively?

What am I most proud of professionally?

What am I most proud of personally:

What am I most proud of physically:

What do I regret?

2. Recap

Where did I achieve or succeed in my goals this year?

Where did I fall short?

Which goals became less important?

What experiments did I try? (e.g. no phone for 1 hour before bed)

What new skills did I develop? (e.g. saying no, cooking, etc.)

What new habits did I develop? (e.g. yoga, journaling, etc.)

What did I learn from this year?

What am I most grateful for?

What will I leave behind in 2025?

3. Reflect

What was the main theme of 2025?

Which moments left me feeling a sense of awe and wonder?

Which moments or situations did I embrace discomfort?

Which relationships nourished me this year? Who supported me?

II. Looking ahead to 2026

1. Goal setting + action

3 core desired feelings for 2026:

Which creative habits will you embrace?

What do you want to do for personal development?

Write down your 5 biggest goals for this year that you are GOING to achieve.

Where do you envision yourself at the end of this year? Write a specific scene - what are you doing, who are you with, how are you feeling? Be specific.

Write down 3 steps you can take for each of your 5 goals above that are actionable in the next few months.

2. Support system

Which principles are non-negotiable for next year?

With whom or where do you want to spend more time next year?

Which things will you cut from your daily habits? What will you no longer make time for? (e.g. social media, books you don’t enjoy, pleasing others)

What boundaries will you set with yourself and others?

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I wanted to write about a sunset.

It wasn’t just any sunset, though. It was a sunset in Lombok, Indonesia, orange-lacquered gold glittering against the Indian Ocean. and I wasn’t just sitting on the beach somewhere: I was in the water, my happy place, catching wave after wave as the sun rested her head against the jagged peaks of Gili Wayang behind us.

And I wasn’t there alone. Somewhere on the beach sat Taty, a friend I had met at my hostel the day before, a stranger at the breakfast table that had gradually — and still, quickly — turned into a friend as we crossed the island together on the back of my motorbike. As I paddled over each set, a part of me felt reassured by the knowledge of her presence, waiting for me on the shore. And a part of me wondered, too, at how you can get to know someone over the course of a day, sketch the outlines of a stranger, paint the color between the lines of that first impression from the moment their existence intertwines with yours.

I wanted to write about this sunset, and I rewrote the section over and over again, turning words like slipstreams and building paragraphs up only to deconstruct, rearrange, and destroy them again. I did this because for me the memory of that evening deserved more than just prose. It wasn’t just a memory: it was an atmosphere, an irreality, a dreamstate that wove together every thread of my senses and thought and mindscape. I wanted to capture it in all its rawness, beauty, and uncertainty. Words alone didn’t seem to suffice.

On my fifth rewrite I finally sat back and asked myself: what if I wasn’t just writing with words?

What if there were other ways I could capture, and convey, this moment?

2. Why my story needed more than prose

My year of backpacking was lived in colors, textures, and silences; my memories of it chronicled across photographs and journals alike. I traveled as a photographer: two cameras in my backpack at all times, one digital, one film. I traveled, too, as an archivist — an archivist of my mind. In the midst of one of the most introspective, transformative periods of my life, I filled notebook after notebook with loose thoughts, questions, and reflections from a 25-year-old boy who had left everything behind to chase a dream. Images and words: these were the languages I wielded to make sense of this odyssey of mine.

As I began writing the book that would become the sea, the sky, the sun, I realized I already had a treasure trove of archival memories I could weave into the memoir. I had hundreds and hundreds of images from the road, views and vignettes across five continents, burned into SD cards and rolls of 35mm film. I had my journals, too, which brought a direct look at the inner turbulence of my mind.

In writing, there’s a familiar rule-of-thumb: show, not tell. Instead of stating what’s happening — “it was sunset,” for example — writers try to evoke the scene through details: the way light glitters on the water, the golden wash of evening against the palms.

I wanted to take this idea further in my memoir. I didn’t want to simply explain, or even just show. I wanted my readers to feel. I could write paragraphs attempting to describe the vivid melancholy of staring out at the ocean in the middle of heartbreak, and how, in that very same moment, the evening sun carried a sense of hope and wonder about the world, a quiet reassurance that everything would be okay.

Or I could let other forms of storytelling bear some of that weight instead.

In my art practice, I’ve always been drawn to installation and sculpture — a concrete monolith built into the mountains of New Mexico, an immersive installation that sought to recreate the sight, sound, and smell of the sea. I’m drawn to these mediums because I believe their multi-dimensional, multi-sensory nature makes them incredibly effective vessels of meaning and emotion. It wasn’t until I began creating the sea, the sky, the sun that I finally understood what I had always felt through my art. Showing is better than telling, that we already know. But to immerse someone, to allow them to be, to feel, is a million times more powerful than that.

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3. What is a visual memoir?

A visual memoir is a personal story told through words and images. It strikes a fine balance between the two elements: it’s not a photobook or graphic novel; nor is it a traditional memoir with a few sparse images interspersed throughout. It’s a format where visuals and text share narrative authority — where visual images are as essential to meaning as words, and where the reader’s understanding of the story relies on the interplay of the two.

The visual memoir often requires the author to embody both the skills of a writer and visual artist. For this reason, it’s not a common medium, and mostly written by writer-photographers. The first example that comes to mind is Sally Mann’s Hold Sill (2015), which weaves the author’s photographs into a memoir on her life as an artist and mother. Another example is , who similarly weaves photography into Things Become Other Things (2023), a “walking memoir” through Japan and his past.

There’s a fine line between visual memoir and “memoir with some photos.” Patti Smith’s Just Kids sprinkles a polaroid across every few chapters, but does that make it a visual memoir? I would argue not: those images feel more like a supplement to the text, rather than a fellow narrative authority. The book could stand on Smith’s (incredible) prose alone.

If I had to put a number on it, I’d say a visual memoir is anywhere from 25-65% “visual.” the sea, the sky, the sun balances 80 pages of photography and journal fragments between 220 pages of prose. Craig Mod’s Things Become Other Things has 56 photographs in 220 pages of text. But it ultimately comes down to the feel of the book as a whole and not numbers alone.

4. Building a visual rhythm

the sea, the sky, the sun isn’t just a memoir interspersed with photographs and journal fragments. It’s a book where blank pages give readers space to breathe, where photographs speak what prose could not, and where journal fragments offer a glimpse into my mindscape and thoughts.

As I formed each chapter, I asked myself: were there any places where an image or journal entry could speak louder than prose? Where could I convey my story more effectively through other forms?

Visual languages are deeply intuitive, and it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly why I chose each image and its placement. But I can highlight a few recurring ways I used photographs throughout the memoir:

1. Capturing an atmosphere or emotion: a dash of sunflowers after a reflection on love. Stormwaters crashing against a cliff to illustrate an inner turbulence. A purple-red sunset in the midst of hurt.

2. Setting the mood through color tones: cooler, muted tones to show melancholy and introspection. Brightly lit, warm-toned photos in times of joy and exhilaration.

3. Supplementing themes discussed in text: in the Japan chapter, I discussed the country’s dueling natures of tradition and subversion, order and chaos — and paired the text with a series of side-by-side images illustrating these dualities.

4. Showcasing people and places: portraits of travelers and locals, landscapes that reflected the vistas I experienced.

5. Creating space and rhythm: full-bleed double-spreads where a single image captured the vastness and beauty of what I witnessed. Blank pages as a natural buffer that gave readers room to pause and breathe.

The journal fragments operated a little differently. They provided raw, unfiltered glimpses into my thoughts, often taking the shape of reflections that showed how I felt at that very moment in time. Other times, they allowed space for half-formed ideas or stories that didn’t quite fit into the book’s narrative, but still mattered: humorous moments from the road, or musings on life and happiness.

5. The visual memoir is a medium that demands to be experienced

Ultimately, the visual memoir is a medium that unfolds in multiple dimensions. It demands to be experienced. To write one requires a careful interplay of text, image, and space — and that, in turn, requires returning to the work again and again, reading every chapter and every sequence from start to finish. In doing so, the importance of visual rhythm becomes clear: the pacing created by images, fragments, and empty space working together to carry the story forward.

This is what I hope readers feel when they open the sea, the sky, the sun. It’s not just a story to be read, but a space to move through.

If this post intrigued you, the sea, the sky, the sun is available for purchase here. I’ll continue sharing more about my writing process and inspirations in upcoming posts.

👋 If you’d like to support my book journey, feel free to…

1. Like, share, and restack this post. Any engagement really does help :)

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3. Order your copy of the sea, the sky, the sun ♥

** SELECTED FOR NOC’S FIRST NOC.TURNAL FEATURE
** “A stunning reflection on travel, purpose, and the search for self. Kora’s story reminds us that the most important journey is always inward.” — Wong How Man

“The world is large, but in us it is deep as the sea.”

So begins this journey by Kora Kwok, as he sets off across five continents in search of meaning, purpose, and connection.

At twenty-five, Kora had everything he thought he wanted: a beautiful life in Hawaii, a 6-figure salary, a promising career. But beneath everything, he felt an ache—the burning realization that achievement and fulfillment aren’t the same thing. So he packed a backpack and left it all behind, setting off with no plan but to explore the question of his true path.

In this soul-stirring, unflinchingly honest memoir, Kora chronicles his one-year journey across five continents—capturing the people, places, and moments that changed him along the way. Through heartbreak, hedonism, solitude and connection, Kora grapples with the existential search for meaning in your twenties, the gentle fragility of human connection, and the beautiful mess of growing up.

Told through lyrical prose, photography, and journal fragments, the sea, the sky, the sun invites readers to look inward, question the paths they’ve inherited, and follow the dreams that make them feel most alive.

the sea, the sky, the sun

Two years ago, I left Hawaii to follow a dream.

My friends thought I was crazy for leaving everything I had behind: a slow-paced life surrounded by people I loved, a prestigious career with a six-figure salary, a home in one of the most gorgeous places on earth. But the truth was, I felt deeply unfulfilled with where my life was at the time, stuck on a path that no longer spoke to me. Leaving was the only way I knew to answer the questions of who I was, and who I was meant to become.

I spent the following year backpacking across five continents, trying to make sense of myself and the world around me. This book chronicles the beautiful chaos of that time, capturing the people, places, and moments that changed me along the way. It grapples with themes that I think many of us have faced: the existential search for meaning in your twenties, the gentle fragility of human connection, the beautiful mess of growing up.

the sea, the sky, the sun is a physical record of that transformative year — a visual memoir weaving together photography, handwritten journal pages, and stories from the road. It is unflinchingly honest, occasionally hilarious, and painfully vulnerable at times. It will make you pause, linger on the small moments, and maybe see your own story in unexpected ways.

I designed the sea, the sky, the sun as an art object, not only to be read, but to be seen and felt. It is a clothbound hardcover printed on premium art paper, with 60+ pages of full-color photography and over 200 pages of prose and handwritten journal fragments. Every design detail was chosen with intention, and I can’t wait for you to hold it in your hands.

👉 Order your copy here: book.korakwok.com

Why I wrote this book

On paper, traveling the world was a dream come true. But the journey was also filled with moments of overwhelming doubt, long stretches of uncertainty about who I was to become.

Talking with friends, I realized I wasn’t the only one wrestling with questions around purpose, identity, and direction. Many of us in our 20s and 30s were experiencing the same anxieties around our futures, questioning the kind of life we wanted to live.

the sea, the sky, the sun is a book for dreamers and travelers. But it is also for anyone navigating a time of transition or questioning the life they’ve built — especially those in their 20s and 30s seeking clarity, meaning, and a deeper sense of self. I wrote it for anyone doing the hard, hard work of looking inwards and listening to what their life has to say — about who they are, what they want, and the kind of future that calls to them.

There are plenty of memoirs written decades later, watered down with hindsight. I wanted to do something different: to share my story as I lived it, with all the raw uncertainty and exhilaration of the here and now.

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🇭🇰 Hong Kong book launch on November 27 🎉

Hong Kong friends: I’ll be hosting a book launch event @ NOC Sheung Wan on Thursday November 27! Social starts at 6pm, followed by reading + q&a at 7pm. Feel free to drop by, say hello, and pick up a copy of the book!

Many of you have watched this book grow from a loose idea into something real. From the bottom of my heart: thank you for walking this road with me. It means the world to me that you’re here, and I’m unbelievably excited to share this book with you.

Love always,
Kora

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1. Like, share, and restack this post. Any engagement really does help :)

2. Order the sea, the sky, the sun here ❤️

3. Share my Instagram announcement post (~engage the algorithm~) ↓

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i finished the final version of my book a few days ago. like finished finished – sent off to the printers, to be rendered on ink and paper over the next 4 weeks.

it’s been a milestone over a year (!!) in the making, but when i closed my laptop for the night, ready to pass out after another long day of poring over the 300-page manuscript, from top to bottom—

i couldn’t sleep.

i suppose this is what happens when you finish a project. your mind is still buzzing (i hadn’t been so stressed since high school) from being on for months. so i lay there, my mind racing a million miles per minute, reflecting on some of the ways i choose to live my life these days – 2 years after leaving everything behind in hawaii, 1 year after backpacking across the world.

and as with anything written on the notes app at 5am, it came out pretty good. and so here we go:

1. stop performing for other people. just do the shit you want to do

the paths before you – they are scripts, and the truth is that people only stick to them because they appear familiar.

but in reality, everyone – literally everyone – is just figuring it out as they go along. a “stable” path does not shield you from the tides and turns of life: a crappy economy, sickness, family emergencies, loss. in fact, it does not really guarantee you anything.

who knows where the world will be in ten years? anything could happen – another pandemic, global warming, war, ai taking over everything. so why spend your one life living someone else’s idea of what it should look like?

an australian nurse – who spent years caring for the dying – listed the most common regret people had on their deathbeds:

“i wish i’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

you only get one chance to live your life. don’t wait until it’s too late.

2. choosing positivity is free

the only difference between a horrible day and a day that “could have gone better but hey we’re still here” is how you choose to see it.

life is a series of fortunate and unfortunate events. in between the spells of beauty, there will be the bad: people you love will leave. shit will happen. things will fall apart.

you can’t control everything that happens, but you can control how you respond. you can live under constant anxiety, with a grey cloud constantly looming over the horizon – or you can live with hope. with positivity. with light.

3. gratitude is a constant wellspring of happiness

my gratitude practice helped me see that happiness isn’t something you chase: it’s something you slow down and notice. because most of the time, it’s already here.

gratitude allow you to see how much you have to be grateful for – and it’s more than you know. even the simplest things we take for granted: sleeping with a roof over our heads. having enough to eat. the time to be perusing some idiot’s substack article in the middle of the day.

here’s how to get started: every morning, write down 3 things you’re grateful for. at night, write down 3 nice things that happened that day. don’t overthink it; “nice” can mean your coffee, a stranger’s smile, the way sunlight hit your wall.

4. select for kindness

surround yourself with people who are truly kind – the ones who treat everyone with respect, who show up, who give you a shoulder to cry on without even asking.

when we’re young, we tend to pick friends for their coolness, their looks, their aura. but as i’ve grown older, i’ve realized that kindness is the quality that matters most. because when the shitstorm of life comes your way, these are the people in your corner, helping you back up. friends that aren’t just here for the good times, but the bad, too.

before you select for coolness, artsiness, athleticism, or whatever qualities are important to you – select first for kindness.

5. go deep in nature

there’s something almost holy about being somewhere without cell service, without buildings, without any of the modern day technologies that are supposed to make our lives easier.

a friend once told me hiking is “being hugged by the mountains”; i’ve never heard a better description. being in nature reconnects us to the earth in an age where asphalt streets and concrete have all but severed our connection to the wildness around us.

what immersion in nature looks like is completely up to you. i find a different kind of calm between the ocean and the mountains: the ocean is where i go to escape, to clear my mind. the mountains are where i go to think, reflect, and face myself.

both remind me that i belong to a world that is vast and alive.

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6. trust your gut

intuition is the wisdom of your lived experience – accumulated over the course of every minute you’ve spent in this body on earth. when something is wrong, or going very right, your body senses the pattern and makes a instinctual judgement that precedes the beginnings of any rational thought.

your brain will attempt to rationalize your intuition, to fight against it. but learn to trust it: intuition is the most ancient language you know. and it is almost always right.

7. read books. travel. talk to strangers

to catch a glimpse of another person’s world – that is one of the great joys in life. read people who lived before you. walk in places that rearrange your perspective. ask questions that open windows into another human being’s soul.

in the dolomites i spent an afternoon listening to a physicist talk of particle colliders and detectors and atoms and other things i know nothing about – and from that encounter was born a kind of kindred love.

there are eight billion people on this planet. each one of us contains an entire universe.

8. empathy is recognizing that everyone is human instead of getting pissed off

as i’ve grown older, i’ve realized that no one does things without reason. there’s always a reason behind any behavior: that reason just isn’t immediately apparent to you.

the cashier who didn’t smile at you is tired from working all the time. your friend snapped at you because he has family stuff going on at home. the guy honking at you on the highway might have just had the worst day of his life.

it’s easy to write someone’s actions off as that of a crazy person. but actually, everyone’s behavior is driven by some reason that makes sense in their head. recognizing this is empathy: you have your good and bad days too. everyone else is just as human as you are.

9. give without expected outcomes

in the age of capitalism and hustle culture, we often precede every action with “what’s in it for me?” before we even ask “what can i offer?” it seems easier, safer to take rather than give.

but i’ve learned that giving – freely, without expectation – always finds its way back to you. give in ways that lift others, creating shared momentum rather than competition. through my work with , i’ve seen how curating spaces for others to grow has a way of circling back in time: people show up, support you, open doors you didn’t even know existed. not because you asked, but because generosity ripples outward.

love isn’t a zero-sum game. the more we give, the more there is for everyone.

10. touch grass. touch a wall. touch something, anything.

take off your shoes run in the water touch a leaf
walk through the city streets run your fingers along the concrete
listen to the sound of kids laughing, the flutter of swallows overhead, the rustling of pine trees
the world is here, you are here. what surrounds us is vast and oceanic and unimaginably beautiful.

and amidst all this, against all odds, you are here.

i repeat: you are here.

(a scene from nomadland that reminds me how vast and beautiful the world can is)

love always,
kora

book update: i can’t believe i’m saying this but my book will be published at the end of november. next post is the announcement post. stay tuned :))

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this week, i submitted my first manuscript to a publisher for consideration!! holy crap!

55,000 words, 185 pages, a table of contents, chapter titles, and a visual sample of photographs i plan to include in the book – all wrapped in one tidy pdf.

until now, the book lived in a chaotic google doc, with chapters and subchapters spread across a total of 98 tabs. pulling it all together was a huge milestone.

the manuscript feels like something i can hand to the stranger who asks what i’ve been working on (…or my parents, who support me deeply but still rue the day i left my job). it’s not perfect, and it’s certainly not the final evolution of the book – but it feels complete. it’s something i feel good about. something i’m proud of.

a little recap on how we got here…

in february, after a year of writing, i finished the first draft of my book.

in march, i nervously sent it out to a group of beta readers – friends from my life, online friends i met through writing, and a few newsletter readers (now friends!) who reached out from my last post.1

slowly, the feedback trickled in – and, to my relief, the feedback was good. it was phenomenal. encouraging. the book clearly resonated deeply with people – stirring questions around identity, purpose, wanderlust, and love. readers left comments like “i kept wanting to read more,” “this resonated with so many of the existential questions i’ve grappled with in my mid-twenties,” and – in one case – “i cried twice.”

after grinding away on the book for a year, not knowing whether it would mean anything to other people, i can’t express how happy i was to find that it did.

since then, i’ve been heads down revising the draft based on the beta feedback. i deleted and rewrote entire sections, rearranged a lot of things, added a few new parts, and corrected a number of spelling/grammar mistakes…

then i turned the messy 55,000 word, 98-tabbed google doc into a 185-page manuscript, the standard format for publisher submissions (example here).

creating the manuscript felt a bit like turning in a college essay – double-spaced, numbered pages, indented paragraph starts – but with higher stakes and even less sleep. i’m pretty sure i screamed a little when i hit “submit.”

then, true to my college self, i redownloaded the already-submitted file and went over everything three more times. some things truly never change.

so who did i send it to for consideration? a publisher called autofocus – an american press that specializes in “artful autobiographical writing.” they’ve published writing in the form of memoir-in-journals, text-image works, essays, even letters – and they feel like a perfect home for my book. if you’re looking for a recommendation from their catalog, i loved Emily Costa’s Until It Feels Right!

i don’t expect much – i know that with publishing, it can feel like launching something into the void, especially as a debut author. but i’m happy to shoot my shot and see what happens. maybe, just maybe, the void will bounce something back my way 😊

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looking ahead

i’ll be honest, i felt pretty exhausted going into this month. the process of writing a book has been long, exhausting at times. actualizing that written thing into a physical book will take even longer. there’s so much that remains to be done.

but reaching this milestone has given me a lot more energy. i feel rejuvenated, excited – and all the more determined to bring my story to life.

i’ve decided to pause paid subscriptions for this leg of the book process. to everyone who has supported me with a paid subscription so far: you guys are the freaking best, and your names will be acknowledged in the book. i will also be mailing you a free signed copy of the book when it comes out.

for those interested in supporting me now or in the future: please pre-order a copy of the book when the time comes!! ☺️

lastly, if you made it this far, i wanted to say thank you all for being with me on this journey. this newsletter can sometimes feel like a mini void of its own, but it means a lot to know you’re here, reading.

lots of love,
kora ♡

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if you’re interested in beta-reading my book, leave me a message below :)

🌅 the year is over

in may, i wrapped up my year of travel in peru.

in june, i found myself staring out the window in the surf town of tofino, british columbia. a friend i met in el salvador had graciously invited me to stay at his pad while he was away. from his house on the water i could watch the seaplanes come and go.

tofino is a small town: the downtown area is just a few blocks wide, a few blocks deep. it has a couple restaurants: fish fry, burgers, poke bowls. i surf, go on long bike rides, write my book. three weeks of restful, quiet solitude.

towards the end of my time in tofino, i join a local boat tour on a whim. there are a few others on the tour: a pair of swedish women in their 60s, a young couple from toronto. a mother, paula, and her 9-year-old son merle. when we arrive at the hot springs destination, i find myself sharing one of the pools with paula and merle.

we fall into a conversation, as one does, about percy jackson, hero of my childhood dreams – apparently still popular with kids these days. if you could choose, which greek god would you want to be? merle asks me. poseidon for sure, i tell him. i could swim wherever i want, talk to all the animals of the sea.

but what about hades! merle says excitedly. what about hades? i raise an eyebrow.

you could have skeletons carry you around, he says, splashing his hands in the water. you wouldn’t have to walk anywhere!

okay… that would be pretty cool, i admit.

and, he adds, you could talk to dead people. at this i notice paula look away.

when merle gets bored of us he clambers off to another pool, nimbly picking his way over the rocks. he’s a great kid, i say to paula. and i mean it. merle was only 9, yes, but i could tell he had heart. he is, paula smiles. he takes after his brother.

what’s his brother like? i ask.

he was kind, paula says, and for a few moments she says nothing. and – well, he passed away a few years ago, when he was eight.

i pause before i respond. i’m so sorry to hear that, i say gently. that must have been really hard.

yeah, she says. it was.

what was his name? i ask.

lorne, she replies. his name was lorne.

for the next little while we talk of lorne, his kindness, his sickness. paula tells me about how his passing affected the family, how it affected merle. we muse on grief and loss as the springwater melts our fingertips into paper. the pain never really goes away, she says. but it does get better.

when we arrive back at the tofino dock i give merle a high-five and a hug. come visit us in colorado sometime! he says. i can show you all my percy jackson books. i give his hair a ruffle and he runs off into the gift shop.

then i turn to paula. it was so nice meeting you guys, i say, and she pulls me in for a big hug. thank you, she says quietly, her small arms wrapped around my neck. thank you. when we finally pull away we both find ourselves with a little blur in our eyes.

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how has my year of travel changed me most?

when my friends ask me the perennial question, this is the story i tell.

a year ago, i wouldn’t have been able to have a conversation like that. i wouldn’t have been able to connect so deeply with a stranger i had just met, to talk of a grief i didn’t know, been open and true enough for them to share their pain with me.

what’s changed is hard for me to pin down, even now. there’s maturity, yes. but there’s also a deeper sense of gratitude. the ability to hold space for others. the capacity for love.

📖 book update

my book, which seems like it’s about travel, is really about love.

i started writing this book in february. in the months since i’ve devoured books on storytelling, combed through stacks of memoirs and travelogues and novels for inspiration. i’ve learned as much as i can in order to properly tell my story – the story behind a year of backpacking, and all the internal shifts that took place during that time.

the writing process has been full of starts and stops – countless revisions, full-length cuts, and the hardest part: figuring out what i’m trying to say. but i am proud to say that the first full-length draft is done, and that i finished it in about than a year. *pats myself on the back*

as i wrote, i realized that my year on the road was not so much about the traveling itself, but the changes in the way i understood and saw the world around me. and all of these changes pointed towards an opening of the heart, a gradual blossoming of love inside me. love for the world in all its beauty; love for the people in it – family, friends, strangers that remained strangers, strangers that became friends. love for the messy, interwoven web of connections that make this life worth living.

for those of you who have read my recent writing, this may not come as a surprise. yes, the book will still have wild travel stories, profound moments of reckoning, and serious musings – not to mention photographs and journal entries to illustrate the journey from different angles. but the overarching theme – the one thing i want readers to take away from it all – is love.

if you’re interested in being a dedicated beta reader for my book, feel free to message me – i’d love to hear from you.

🏗️ projects

a few months ago, i founded a creative residency with a friend; tomorrow, ’s first 4-week cohort begins in vietnam. we’re a group of ten creatives working across a variety of disciplines, and i could not be more excited. if you’re interested, you can sign up for our mailing list here or follow along on instagram here. we plan to host 2-3 more residencies this year, including a summer session in berlin.

in the meantime, i’ve been chugging along on my other projects when i have the free time. legal meetings have taken place, business plans are being made, etc.; progress is being made, slowly but surely. i really hope to share more about these soon.

it’s the new year, and i’ve been reflecting on how each of the past few years have marked a different phase of my life.

2023 was a year of exploration and uncovering.

2024 marked the end of that exploration, and a shift into projects that called my name.

2025 will be the year of progress. i’m going full-steam on these projects. big things will happen – you heard it here first.

sending love,
kora ♥

thank you for reading an earlier version of this post.

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i’m sitting in a small mountain hut in the italian alps, just a stone’s throw across the austrian border.

the hut is called munt de sennes, and it is a rifugio – a mountain hut – for travelers through-hiking the dolomites, with hot showers and hot meals and a friendly hutkeeper who helps me hang my clothes to dry by the fire inside.

i had arrived earlier in the afternoon after a 5 hour trek from lago di braes, through rolling green hills and the gray, white-flecked dolomite rocks that gifted this mountain range its name. it is my first day on the alta via 1 trail, where i’ll be hiking fifty-some kilometers over the next few days.

in the rifugio kitchen i take a seat next to a middle-aged german lady. andrea is a physicist from a small town just outside of dresden, and over the span of two hours, three hot chocolates and a salami sandwich i listen to andrea talk about particle colliders and detectors and atoms and other things i know nothing about. when i ask her about the collider at her university, andrea’s back straightens and her stutter all but disappears. as she talks i feel as if i am truly seeing her, her true self, that had perhaps initially hidden away in the presence of this stranger from hong kong, but is now rising into the fold. 

though i barely passed physics in high school and don’t understand half of the words she is using, andrea’s passion for the subject filters through to me, a hand reaching out across the abyss. i wonder at all the things i don’t know about our universe, will never know. a world of particle colliders, of fantastic measuring machines, of bits of energy too small for the mind to comprehend.

does it really matter if i don’t fully understand? what does matter, i think, is the sharing – her passion, my curiosity. to hear the heartbeat of someone’s inner world: what a privilege. a boy from halfway across the world sits down next to a german physicist and from this encounter is born a kind of kindred love.

perhaps that is the wonder of nature, the long multi-day treks through mountains with no service and no wifi. nothing to pay attention to at the end of the day except the grass and the people around me, the hutkeeper’s husband walking by with a chicken in his hands, the german physicist telling me about how colliders can simulate the original big bang.

the presence of focus, of spending a day by myself, in nature, and then coming into the rifugio in the afternoons rejuvenated, richer, the edges of my solitude softened by a day amongst trees and lakes and mountains. ready for a beer, ready to talk and examine and discover other people’s lives. 

andrea retires to her room for a nap, and i continue sitting alone in the kitchen area as other hikers and travelers make their way into the hut for the evening. i have my journal and a book of poems with me, perhaps all i could want on a trek like this. when letters and alphabet become meaningless forms in my head, i rest my cheek in one hand and admire the mountain views painted across the windows along the rifugio walls.

small storms arrive, here and there. a spanish man maybe a few years older than me blows through the heavy wooden door, speaking in a smatter of broken german and even worse english. he is picking up a package for his friend; the hutkeeper tells him to sit down and brings him a plate of cheese while she checks the back room.

looking around the room bewilderedly as if not expecting to spend more than a few seconds inside, the man spots me and excitedly puts his pack down across from my table. he speaks spanish to me, and though yo no hablo espanol i see the friendliness radiating in his face – and when the hutkeeper arrives with the cheese he wants me to try some of it, and it is delicious. for the next 15 minutes we attempt a conversation over this cheese, spanish from one side, english on the other, about the cheese, how it’s so good, rico!, double thumbs-up – and it is fun and rewarding for us to attempt this communication.

when the hutkeeper comes back with a cardboard box in her hands i am slightly sad that the spaniard has to go. we give each other a warm hug of farewell. adios, amigo, i salute. bye, bro! he says, smiling, waving out the door with one hand and the box in the other until he almost trips on a loose flagstone. i know i will never see him again, and i wish him all the happiness in the world, and more. 

it’s dinnertime, now, the dusk fading into midnight blue, and i am still sitting at the same light-wooden table in one corner of the kitchen. i watch a beautiful austrian couple play cards at the next table over.

the two stare mischievously at one another, smiles like wildflowers by a mountain stream, and i look up as she suddenly exclaims and there he sits with his hand of cards spread out in front of him. a victorious grin on his face: cocky but gentle. she cusses in german and pinches him on the cheeks.

then i watch as they tilt their heads and look at one another the way two flowers angle towards one another under the sun. there is so much love in their eyes that i can feel it, easy and tender, pushing through my bones from five feet away. their love balloons across the room as it envelops me, around the other guests sitting at their tables, through the wooden walls of the hut, and to the cows and goats and chickens tutting away outside, under the stars.

i wonder if andrea would see the couple and think of two particles, colliding, sparks flying across the rifugio – and whether she would attempt to explain their love with physics or science. maybe she would say something about how things can become larger than the sum of their parts. or, perhaps, she would refer to the second law of thermodynamics: entropy always increases, and perhaps that is not such a bad thing after all. 

love… it blooms, i whisper softly to myself. it is blooming in the laughter of strangers, in the quiet conversations, in the rhythm of my trailworn steps through these mountains. love is alive, here, growing, unfolding, constantly. i had thought i only witnessed a moment of spring, but i think it is always here, an eternal, endless season.

love: it is always here. all i need to do is open my eyes to see it, spread my arms to receive it.

🇵🇭 life updates:

• 🌊 i’m two months into a three-month stay in the philippines, where i’ve entered full-hermit-mode to focus on writing my book + surfing.

• ✍️ i’m at 120+ pages and counting. the goal is to finish the book before i leave.

• 🧪 i recently launched , a 4-week creative residency in vietnam. come spend 4 weeks in da nang with us this winter.

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“it takes a day to walk to tokyo tower. i tried it once.

it looks beautiful from here, but as i got closer it was run-down. it was a deserted and lonely place.”

– hiromi kawakami for the new yorker

i remember the first time i saw tokyo tower, years and years ago. it was at the tail end of twilight, when the skies were fading into a violet blue and the streetlights just beginning to blink into existence. from the balcony where i stood, tokyo tower glittered bewitchingly in the twilight, its orange-and-white hues rising like an amaryllis flower against the purple skies, hovering above the nighttime cityscape that was slowly rumbling to life. 

from a distance, tokyo tower looked stunningly beautiful. 

if faraway things are always beautiful, then conversely, are they always uglier up close?

i never ended up visiting tokyo tower, so i don’t know. but lately i’ve been feeling this – this turmoil of no longer being far away. 

for the longest time, the end of my travels was a distant point on the horizon, the magical one-year mark that symbolized a kind of turning point for me. it represented the end of one phase of my life and the beginning of another, the day i would put my travels aside and dedicate my time to other endeavors. 

from a distance, this inflection point looked beautiful: i had, after a year of soul-searching, arrived at three projects i wanted to commit to post-travel. the end of my adventures would be bittersweet, yes, but i couldn’t wait to stop moving around and finally kickstart my projects. the end of my travels didn’t feel like the end of something, necessarily, but rather the birth of something new and exciting. it was my tokyo tower.

but as i buried myself in the deep and gritty work the past few weeks, i found myself slowly losing sight of that initial view of the tower. in the process of calculating costs, navigating logistics, and all the nitty gritty of setting up something up for the first time, i’ve started second-guessing myself at every turn, doubting my projects, and questioning whether i should spend my time working on them at all.

at times, i even entertained – however briefly – the thought of returning to my old profession as an engineer, something i swore i would never do. why take a gamble on these projects that probably won’t work out, i thought to myself, when you could just go back to your old job and make a safe, guaranteed amount of money?

what makes it worse, perhaps, is confronting not only my doubts, but those of my peers as well. when every other person tells me, “wait, are you sure this is a good idea? it’s going to be a lot of work” – at what point am i supposed to start listening?

ironically, i had faced these same feelings of doubt and fear a little over a year ago, when i first decided to leave my career behind to travel the world. i knew these feelings like a second skin – had lived with them, for months, on and off – and yet my familiarity did little to assuage these renewed fears. self-doubt doesn’t suffocate you immediately the way a panic attack does; it’s a slow-rising anxiety, a delayed chokehold that creeps in like an oil spill across the gulf of your mind. it circles the nape of your neck like a boa constrictor, squeezing out your confidence, self-worth, and ambitions until you finally decide to give up.

but then i read the new yorker piece, and i remembered tokyo tower.

faraway things are always beautiful, we all know this. 

but as we move closer, it’s easy to lose sight of that shimmering view that had once enraptured us. i got so bogged down in the grind of work that i forgot why i started the projects in the first place.

in these moments of disquiet, i have to remind myself of the why. kora, you are trying to create a life where you can live freely and mostly work from anywhere, i tell myself. a life where the things you pursue are deeply aligned with who you are as a person.

that’s what your projects are about. and it will take time to get there.

beautiful things take time to reach. our goals and dreams will not happen in an instant; and in the time that it takes to get there, the journey will feel anything but pretty.

when the going gets rough and doubt starts creeping in, the only thing we can do is to remind ourselves of why we are here in the first place – to remember the tokyo tower we sought, and to re-conjure that once-infinite image in our minds once more.

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thank you for reading an earlier version of this post.

p.s. i know i’m being vague about the “three projects” – i promise to share more as they develop. but i will share now that one project is to finish writing my book, which i’m prioritizing for the rest of the year. it’s coming :)

for those who have asked, in one way or the other: why did i leave everything behind in hawaii to travel? why have i been traveling for so long? why travel, specifically, over anything and everything else?

we’re driving down an empty forest road in blue mountains national park, two hours outside of sydney. e’s at the wheel, her brows knitted into a tight knot as she attempts to navigate the potholed dirt road like a trucker with a bad case of cramps. i try not to wince at every bump that shakes me off my seat, or think about the fact that the handlebar-mustached campervan rental guy had made it very clear: your insurance doesn’t cover anything that happens on non-paved roads as he handed us the keys.

the campervan is quiet, save for the sound of some local radio we’ve turned down low. outside, a woollen fog hangs off the forest canopy like an overgrown moss; flashes of dark branches pierce the misty veil, slender monsters looming with their claws. from the safety of our van i watch the rain fall like snowflakes onto the windshield.

earlier this morning, e had asked me over breakfast: why is traveling so important to you?

what do you mean? i respond between bites of pie. who doesn’t love traveling?

you know that’s not what i mean, she grumbles. e has a very good way of furrowing her eyebrows and glaring at me when she suspects i’m not being serious. you left everything behind in hawaii for – she waves one hand in the air, gesturing to the empty town corner we sat at – this.

all so you could “travel the world,” she wags her fingers.

why does it mean so much to you?

hmm, i murmur as i wipe my fingers on a paper napkin. that’s a good question.

she raises her eyebrows expectantly as i chew my way through the rest of the pie.

…let me get back to you on that.

e groans and rolls her eyes. i laugh and flick a crumb at her face.

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the year is 1970. through the cracked windows of a crowded fifth-floor tenement, a figure carefully rises from a thin pallet on the floor. with weary eyes, my grandmother moves slowly between the sleeping bodies strewn across the room; squatting down in one dim corner, she begins preparing a meager breakfast for her husband and five children.

when my grandparents first arrived in hong kong, the city was little more than a glorified fishing village. they had escaped war, violence and famine for a new chance at life in the tiny british colony on the southern coast of china. and for that chance, they had to rebuild their lives from the ground up: both my parents grew up dirt-poor, crammed into a single, one-roomed apartment with their siblings and family. to lift their families from poverty, my parents doggedly pursued careers that would guarantee them the financial stability they had lacked in their childhood. my father went into medicine, my mother into finance.

of course, they expected their children to do the same: the last thing they wanted was for us to end up in the same conditions they were raised. growing up, my friends and i expected – and were expected – to become financiers, doctors, and lawyers, spend our lives working a stable career.

there was no fog in the crystal ball of our young lives: our futures may not have been written yet, but the paths before them were as well-trodden and established as horsetracks in the winter snow. these paths were all our parents knew, and like folklore passed from one generation to the other, they became all we knew, could ever know.

but then i took my first backpacking trip at the age of 18. i had always been curious to travel on my own, and begged my parents’ permission to take a trip after high school. after months and months of cajoling, they finally gave their blessing; a few weeks later i set off for eastern europe with my best friend.

for the first time in my life, i saw the real world as it was – winding and unruly, unpredictable and so full of life. the path to stability and happiness, i found, took many forms; it certainly did not always look like what my parents had prescribed. nor did it look like it followed any particular set of patterns. as my journey continued, the crystal ball began to crackle and stir.

leaned against the stained wooden counter at a ruin bar in budapest, an artist told me that he had once studied to become a doctor, dropping out of medical school in his final year to pursue his passion for painting. under the stars of the siberian night sky, a girl told me of her father – a man who had left a lucrative banking career in the russian capital to start a small bakery in his remote hometown. i remember these conversations distinctly, the way the artist rapped his knuckles against the bartop, the slow burn of the cigarette in the girl’s hand as she spoke. for it was truly unfathomable to me at the time, to learn that people could seemingly possess the world at their fingertips, and still risk everything to heed a different call.

i met people, too, whose lives revolved around travel rather than work. europeans who worked seasonal jobs for short stints, in national parks as trail-setters and cruise ships as deckhands, saving just enough each time to travel freely for a few months. young people my age that had rainchecked college – something i had always considered a given – and traversed the continents in their first years of adulthood instead, volunteering in hostels and farms and wineries in exchange for food and accommodation. they had traded college classes and frat parties for a truer understanding of the world, and i could see it in their eyes, this wisdom that burned like quiet flame. i’ve since forgotten half of everything i learned in college, but somehow i believe that the wisdom they carried only grew stronger with time.

at every encounter the bounds of what was possible expanded in my mind. the crystal ball of my life, once so clear and defined, began to swirl with a blizzard of options as i began to dream of other lives i could lead. the future suddenly seemed much less certain… and yet that uncertainty invigorated me as i recognized that the world held so much more than i could have ever imagined.

in italo calvino’s invisible cities, there’s a scene where the protagonist sees a stranger in the square of some distant town. in the flash of a moment, he sees himself as that very man, in another, not-so-distant life. he realizes that, with only a few decisions differently-chosen, a few paths walked the other direction – “if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if long ago at a crossroads, instead of taking one road he had taken the opposite one” – he would be that man sitting in the square at that very second.

why does this travel journey mean so much to me? e had asked.

to travel is to discover all the lives we might have led, the lives we might still lead; the what-if’s of our past and future; all the possible ways our lives could have turned out, can still turn out.

i travel to see all the versions of myself i could have been – and all the versions of myself i can still be.

for the longest time i had expected to become an engineer, build a career in tech, eventually start my own company. but i knew, 3 months into my first job, that it would neither fulfill me nor call to me the way it did others. i saw how some of my colleagues and managers truly loved the work, breathed it, gave themselves to it. i saw their joy and i knew they had found their calling... and that it wasn’t mine.

but if i’m not an engineer, then what am i? who am i?

what was i brought onto this earth to do?

i left everything behind in hawaii to travel because i wanted – no, needed to attempt to answer these questions.

i needed to give myself a chance to see what else is possible for me. to hear stories of other lives, to try new things, to experiment. to discover what i like, what i don’t like, and what i love. to live in new surroundings, new locales, new communities. to explore the other lives i can lead.

and i gave myself a tentative year – not one month, or three, or six – because i knew this journey demanded the proper time it required.

i needed time to strip away the expectations i’ve carried since i was a child, to wash away the layer of stigma and societal pressure that suffocated me like a second skin.

time to remember childhood interests abandoned on the campaign to adulthood, resurface hidden talents, and coax out the parts of me that had tucked themselves away over years of pressure and schooling.

time to uncover new parts of myself that have yet to be unlocked, unearthed, brought to life.

only then, i knew, could i discover who i truly am and attempt to emerge again, anew.

this is why i travel.

thank you for making it this far.

this is an excerpt from a draft of my upcoming book, and the first i’ve shared in public.

if you enjoyed the read and are interested in supporting my book journey, consider upgrading to a paid subscription for the price of a cup of coffee ☕

paid subscribers receive a variety of yummy perks, including:

• regular, behind-the-scenes updates on my book,

• early chapter previews,

• acknowledgments in the book,

• and access to the secret and potentially darker corners of my mind…

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somewhere on that tree, i know, a branch leads to these same mountains in northern peru, two hundred years into the past, when my people first arrived on the broken shores of this fiery land.

5:00am, tinco, northern peru. 
i feel the familiar catch of breath as i sit up in bed, covers gathered around my chest. even after three weeks, the altitude still works its strange effects on me.

altitude: it is a hand hidden behind your chest, grabbing your lungs in its fist when you least expect it. i can hike a long distance just fine but lose my breath when i lean down to tie my bootlaces. 

it’s still dark as we move towards the campo, a pack of wolves gathered in collective silence, each lost in our own thoughts as we rub the sleep out of our eyes. the temperature veers close to freezing at this hour, especially with the wind; every breath draws a shimmer against the darkness. beneath my windbreaker is a down jacket, hood up, my chin pressed tightly into the zip.

it’s not sunrise yet, officially. but as we walk, the slow creep of dawn begins to color the sky. a faint glow washes against the sandy beaches of brazil, climbs over the morning birdchatter of the amazon rainforest, and leaps over the towering peruvian andes before blowing a muted purple above our heads.

in that mysterious time of dawn between night and daybreak, when the stars begin to share their stories with the sun, we early risers lay witness to the whispered secrets of the universe.

i’ve never been a sunrise person, let alone a pre-sunrise person, but on mornings like this, i feel part of a nocturnal heritage that only a few can claim. like a leaf on a towering tree, a yggdrasil of sorts, i can reach my hand through the wooden grey and weave my fingers through all the twilight dawns humans have ever known. somewhere on that tree, i know, a branch leads to these same mountains in northern peru, two hundred years into the past, when my people first arrived on the broken shores of this fiery land.

time passes. the walk to the fields is only a few miles, but when you walk in darkness everything feels infinite. 

e turns around and mouths to me, look. her face glows gently with a wonder that warms my heart like a loaf of freshly baked bread. a new layer of snow had fallen over the mountains overnight, covering the peaks with a silver, translucent glow; the eponymous cordillera blanca. in the waning dark, the cordilleras loom as slumbering silhouettes, giants dreaming under the weight of a violet sky.  

eventually, the dirt beneath our feet turns to honeydewed grass and then the gushing tread of mud. stalks of maize stand tall, silently, judging us for interrupting their sleep.

today we will weed, plucking and grooming the soil to protect the crops from the suffocating hands of lesser grasses. i plant my feet into the ground and stretch backwards: my lower back, i know, is going to burn with the fire of a thousand suns tomorrow. 

two hundred years ago the first chinese laborers arrived on the shores of this distant sea, a little-known continent south of the americas, even as their brethren were sent in droves to mine the gold rush a continent above. they came from the southern provinces of guangdong and hong kong to work the fields and raise sugar and cotton from the land; almost all of them arrived as indentured laborers, locked into exploitative contracts and as mistreated as the slavor labor they were intended to replace.1 in time, these brave arrivals escaped the chains of indentured labor and began to grow roots in this mysterious land of forest, desert, mountains and sea. they learned the local language and forgot their own.

today, lima’s barrio chino (chinatown) is thriving, and chifa restaurants  – a peruvian flair of chinese food  – have spread even as far as the tiny mountain town where i’m living. i cooked for my host family the other day, and was pleasantly surprised to learn that the flavors were both novel and familiar to their mouths.

it’s a strange privilege, to follow in the footsteps of my people centuries later. they came with little other option, to trade the poverty of home for another, more hopeful kind of poverty; they came out of necessity. meanwhile, i show up with a backpack, volunteering my time and labor for a taste of the farmer’s life. there’s a bit of irony in this, isn’t there? 

in chinese philosophy, they say that time moves in cycles. i’ve always liked the phrase. there’s something comforting to the idea that we move in familiar patterns, weaving a spiraled glaze through the cosmos.

people often misunderstand the concept of cyclical time as something that is rigid, predetermined. but what they don’t realize is that something changes with every cycle. our feet may dance to a similar rhythm, but we do not walk the exact same steps. over time, these missteps and variations result in a completely different dance of their own.

i wonder how many cycles have passed in the two hundred years that lead me here today.

a stray dog’s bark perforates my thoughts: we’ve arrived at the fields. slowly, gingerly, as if unwilling to shake ourselves from this waning dream, we unhook the shovels from our backs and give ourselves to the earth.

🌄 what’s happening in my life:

• i’ve spent the last few weeks in the andean mountains of northern peru, hiking and volunteering on a local farm in exchange for food and accommodation. the farmwork is tough, but wwoofing is something i’ve always wanted to try. so many stories to tell here – excited to share more :)

• i’m an editor for write of passage this month. it’s been a beautiful (and hectic) time helping students develop their writing craft. also my first source of income since leaving my job over a year ago (woohoo).

• steadily chugging along on my book. finishing up the japan chapter and entering the 2-month indonesia saga… a lot happens here, and i’m both excited and nervous to put it all to paper.

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📚 what i’ve been reading:

• memoirs by pablo neruda. if you’ve ever wondered how a poet writes memoir, look no further – this is some of the most poetic prose i’ve ever read.

there was a creek far down the slope, and the sound of its waters came up to me. it was my childhood saying goodbye. i grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests. and now, on the road to freedom, i was pausing for a moment near temuco and could hear the voice of the water that had taught me to sing.

🎵 what i’ve been listening to:

adriatique has been getting me through the farm days; home is their best. allllll this time…

and of course, i’ve had some latin american songs in the mix…

thank you for reading an earlier draft of this piece.

👋 if you enjoyed this post,

1. leave a like. clicking the ♥ below really does help :)

2. follow my journey on instagram. this is where i post stories, vlog updates, and photography from wherever i am in the world.

3. share this piece with a friend ❤️

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this book is a raw, unfiltered look at what it’s like to leave everything behind at 25 to find yourself.

it’s my travelogue and coming-of-age story, written in a new, untraditional format. photographs from each destination exist side-by-side with my observations and encounters, as well as reflections on purpose, identity, and the deeper meaning of life.

kora! kora! kora! 

i bolt up in bed and throw the covers off. did someone outside just call my name? 

silence; a few beats of frozen stillness at dawn. i'm about to lay back down when i hear my name again – a high-pitched woman’s voice, shouting: kora! kora! kora!

what the…? i throw a shirt on and run outside. my heart is pounding: my host family recently had a newborn, and i fear the worst. uhh... guys? i shout into the black void of the yard below. everything okay? 

my words fall like droplets on the surface of a pond, reverberating slightly then stilled into silence again. no response.

suddenly, i hear a rustling in the trees next door. squinting my eyes through the first rays of morning light, i spy a bright green shape perched on top of the branches. i scratch my head. is that… a parrot?

as if to respond, the bird spreads his wings, cocks his head and squawks: hola! hola! hola!

for the past 3 weeks, i’ve been living in a tiny beach town on the coast of el salvador.

the days are simple, simpler than anything i have ever experienced. every day is beautifully, monotonously the same: i wake up at 7am, surf, work on my book for a few hours. then i go to spanish class and surf again at sunset; after dinner i write some more. i’m exhausted by 8pm, can barely keep my eyes open at 9, and am almost always asleep by 10. now rinse and repeat for the 30-some days i’m here. 

on tuesdays and thursdays i teach a local boy english. he is 16, bleach-blonde haired, and (of course) an excellent surfer. to teach, i think, is to learn, too; this week’s chapter was on non-western literature, and we read a nigerian novel together. i’ll admit: i was a bit worried i wasn’t cool enough for him when we first started; what do high schoolers even like these days? still, i think i’ve gradually gained his respect as laidback but firm teacher – who lets him raincheck class when the surf is pumping (a reasonable excuse, by my book…) but also makes sure he turns in his assignments on time.

i live above a surf shack on the main street, two minutes walk from the beach. we call it the main street, but really it’s the only street that runs through town. it’s a bit of a sound tunnel, this street; i hear everything – and i mean everything – from my little nook above the shop. i hear, without fail, the grocery truck that comes into town every morning, jolting me out of sleep with its loudspeakers blaring: frutas! leche! huevos!; i hum along to the choral hymns from the church next door, starting with the service at 4pm on the dot every day; i dream hazily through the street dogs yapping and raising a general ruckus in the dust outside at night. 

when i first arrived, i slept with earplugs to block the noise out. how can i sleep with all this noise? i thought to myself. but i stopped wearing them after a few days. it felt almost wrong to replace the natural soundtrack of the town with a stuffed, artificial silence. instead i've learned to sleep with, and perhaps love, the symphony of life here: the sound of tiny feet tapping across the roof as squirrels run overhead; the chirp of geckos up in the rafters; the rooster that starts crowing at 3am (no, not at dawn like a normal chicken). i slumber through the joyous whoops of teenagers biking past after dinner, through the intimate laughter wafting from the pupuseria1 across the street, through even the incessant chattering of that damn parrot next door…

sometimes i’m typing away on my laptop in the afternoon with the blinds drawn when a baby’s cry floats in from my host family’s house, followed by his mother’s gentle coos. and it pierces my reverie, temporarily, to remind me that there is life outside, beyond my little studio, up and down the street in the dust and old houses and pupuserias all around me – a world of babies crying, passing conversations, couples making love, chickens screeching their heads off. and it pushes me to keep writing.

because isn’t that the responsibility of a writer, after all? to breathe stories into the mosaic of the mundane… to give life where others think there is none.

ok, ok. let’s talk about the book.

i’ve crossed 5 continents in the past 10 months in pursuit of a lifelong dream of mine: to travel the world in my 20s. 

the journey has been full of ups and downs. yes – i'm traveling the world, and it’s been so, so beautiful. the other day i saw a humpback whale breaching the waves from the patio of my spanish class. i pinch myself sometimes to remind myself how lucky i am to be here. 

but it’s also been hard – so much harder than i could have ever imagined. i have never lived amongst so much uncertainty and doubt, been so entrenched in it it’s almost become a second skin. i walked away from a life i loved, left behind a lucrative career because i wanted to explore what truly fulfills me, discover what else is possible for this life of mine. who am i if not an engineer? what is my calling? does such a thing even exist? how can i be happy?

my book chronicles this crazy, transformative journey of mine, starting with leaving hawaii 10 months ago. it’s both a travelogue and a coming-of-age story. most importantly, it’s written in real-time as my journey progresses – not by some successfully guy who eventually “made it” and looks back on his life decades later. the book is a raw, unfiltered look at what it’s like to leave everything behind to find yourself as a 25-year-old who – like everyone else – is trying to figure it out as i go along.

i’m writing in a new, untraditional format: the book comprises of 50% text and 50% photography. photographs from each destination exist side-by-side with my personal observations, travel stories, and reflections on purpose, identity, and more. it is vulnerable, introspective, and (i hope) insightful. and it will be unlike anything written before.

some of you already know this has been on my radar for quite some time; it’s the reason i started this substack in the first place. in the past month, i’ve finally started putting the book together, outlining the chapters, looking at what i’ve written already and filling in the rest of the story to weave my story through each destination. the writing process has been going well – great, even. i feel recharged and recalibrated; i wake up every day excited to keep chipping away. i haven’t felt this excited about anything in a long time.

that’s not to say it isn’t hard. because it is. how completely, obviously self-evident that i’m typing this: yes, kora, writing a book is fucking hard. nothing feels worse than days when inspiration runs as dry as an old well in the saharan desert, when i’m so so tired of reading and re-reading the same words over and over again to no avail. i feel extremely lucky to have a few writing friends ( , ) lending their time to my first drafts.2

i’ll take this opportunity, too, to finally talk about my paid subscription: for the cost of a cup of coffee every month ($5!), you can support me on my journey to get this book to bookstores, bathrooms, and backpacks all over the world.

in return, paid subscribers will receive:

• regular, behind-the-scenes updates on my book

• early chapter previews

• exclusive access to ama’s (ask-me-anything)

• acknowledgements in the book

• and, of course, my undying love for all of time.

if you’re unable to support with a paid subscription, don’t worry. i appreciate your being here all the same.

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el salvador, el salvador. we lost power the other night: my room got so hot i went to sleep on the beach. as i lay there on a towel and a makeshift sand-pillow, i felt something move against my foot. it was a hermit crab, trekking his way uphill under the half-moon. i thought back to that one sunrise on the beach in sri lanka, only a few months ago.

i came to this town because i wanted be somewhere distraction-free, somewhere far from the crowds and small enough to feel like a village. i wanted to surf every day, live a simple life by the sea, pick up a little spanish along the way. and above all, i wanted space to write, space to be alone, far from the reaches of social calls and city life, in place where i knew nobody, wasn’t beholden to anyone.

it’s a bit hermitic of me to come here, i know. walden-esque. but i think of georgia o’keeffe, who produced some of her best work in isolation at her ranch in new mexico, and george orwell, who wrote 1984 from a remote island off the coast of scotland. art needs space to thrive; just let me breathe in this salt-weathered air a little longer.

love always,
kora ♥

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thank you & for proofreading earlier versions of this post.

i guess when you're young, you just believe there'll be many people with whom you'll connect with. 

and later in life, you realize it only happens a few times. (before sunset, 2004)

i think one of my closest friends in college was a soulmate. 

she was quiet, and thoughtful, the kind of person who actually thought before they spoke. she asked good questions; she was curious, she was sensitive, she was shy. she once asked me how i found it so easy to exude my presence, to radiate the breadth of a room when instinct drew her towards the shadows. we were different in so many ways – my unfiltered opinions and arrogance juxtaposed like a river to the calm waters of her quiet sureties and inquisitiveness. and yet we cherished what we saw in the other, admired those very qualities we sought in ourselves. 

it was the kind of friendship that always hinted at something more – the meaningful glances at an inside joke that held for a second too long, the casual shoulder touches that lingered beyond mere affection. when we finally slept together, on a drunken night out that fall, we came together naturally, as if we had always known this would happen – this dance of attraction that had started as two atoms in the arms of covalence, bound together in the liminal space of two bodies become one. 

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and yet we never became anything. 

i didn’t allow it – never even entertained the idea or acknowledged the possibility, assumed she felt the same. sure, we slept together another handful of times, never quite intentionally, always a little drunk. but for all the time we spent together, the notion of Us, singular, never made it onto the table for discussion. 

i know, now, that we had something special. i think i knew it then, too: i remember telling my roommates that if we ever dated, we would probably get married. 

so why didn’t i try?

the single, most defining feature of youth: we see possibility in everything. i was 20 at the time, already dreaming of traveling, already thinking of life after college and all the possibilities it held. 

i never considered dating my friend because i assumed that, for the rest of my life, i would naturally and inevitably meet other people like her as a function of time. 

and i was right, to some degree. you don’t need to watch twilight or the notebook to know that you will meet people throughout your life that fit into your soul like hands to a glove, people that – for reasons you can never quite capture with words – you’re drawn to inexplicably, irresistibly, and inescapably. 

but the reality is that things rarely work out the way you want them to.

it’s a bit like murphy’s law: anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. maybe they have a significant other already. or you mess up, act too aloof, push them away. maybe it’s the right person but the wrong time; have you seen all 128 minutes of la la land? or maybe it’s the right time but the wrong place: you’re only here on vacation, and leave barcelona in a week. life happens. 

i don’t begrudge my younger self for his decision. regret is a language for situations where alternative outcomes were possible; 20-year-old kora hardly knew better. the only thing he could have done at the time was treat the relationship like any other college fling: low-commitment, low-expectation, and definitely not worth getting serious about. even if it was with a best friend. 

but five years later, i still find myself wondering sometimes: what if we had given it a try? what if i had cherished our relationship enough to let it grow? what if i hadn’t allowed my fear of commitment – of “limiting myself” – overwhelm everything else?

and i just want to give my younger self a good ol’ knock on the head for thinking that this kind of thing happened all the time.

i’ve spent the past few years moving from place to place – purposely untethered, letting go at every turn. i ended a relationship when i left california for hawaii; two years later, i did the same thing again when i left hawaii to travel. always, i chased the idea of “all the possibilities,” purposely leaving myself unfettered to explore new opportunities, people, and experiences.

and i’ve explored – and learned, and grown. i’ve met people i otherwise would have never gotten to know; spent days and weeks with travel flings from far-flung corners of the world who grew up so differently than i did; shared meals, sunset surfs, wine-filled nights with people who deigned to share a piece of themselves – their language, their traditions, their food – with me. i’ll tell you now that human connection is always possible, no matter how different we may seem.

but i’ll also tell you this: the type of human connection at the soul level – those profound, soulmate-esque bonds – are fucking rare. 

our soulmates in this life aren’t an ever-increasing function of time. they don’t magically appear in our lives every time we’ve lived a certain number of years, traveled to x number of countries, or met enough people to fill a small room. they’re few and far between. and they come into our lives unpredictably, spontaneously, often in situations completely beyond our control.

soulmates are like stars in the sky, a friend once told me.

sometimes, a speck of light enters our orbit but we’re not sure what exactly it is. maybe it’s a star. or maybe it’s just an asteroid, a satellite; a trace of dust in the twilight breeze or a subtle trick of the eye. 

i’m not saying you have to pay attention to every flicker of light that catches your eye. but don’t hesitate to get on your feet and take a closer look for yourself. it’s worth exploring, believe me.

because if it really is a star, know this: it only happens a few times.

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inspired by the friends who, after reading my last piece, texted me – kora! a girlfriend, long-distance, now of all times?! why?

if you enjoyed reading this post, it would make my day if you shared it with a friend. you can find my other essays here, or access my full archive here.

and a big, big thank you to the people who gave their time to read earlier drafts of this essay:







you guys rock.

dear kora,

i’m writing to you from mirissa – a tiny beach town on the southern coast of sri lanka. the days are hot – like really hot, and sticky, especially in the afternoons, when the heat hangs off your skin like honey and all you want to do is melt into a puddle and die. but no matter: you’re back in the ocean after a 4-month surf hiatus, and you’re surfing, twice a day, at sunrise and sunset, in uncrowded lineups, rain or shine. you walk home with sand between your toes. life is good.

the past few months have been full of ups and downs, eh? on days like this i think, often, of who you are now and who you were half a year ago, before the big leap into the unknown. from the outside, you wouldn’t have guessed: you look pretty much the same, except for that scar on your arm from falling down the stairs in tokyo, though one friend did recently say that you look a little bit wiser, as if life has forced you to grow up a little. and they’re right: it’s still you on the outside, but everything inside has been completely realigned. you’ve been uncovering, replacing; rearranging, transforming, rebirthing.

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7 months ago you questioned whether you even wanted to travel because it all felt so pointless. and you were angry at yourself for even feeling that way. you felt stupid, and shitty, and guilty, because traveling the world was supposed to be a dream come true, until it wasn’t.

6 months ago you cried for the first time in years. i still remember exactly where you were sitting at the time: on an empty staircase, above an overpass, somewhere in the japanese town of uno, tuning out to the faint wash of the ocean in the distance, waiting for the call to be over. you had, at 25, finally learned why loyalty is something people explicitly value – loyalty, something you’ve taken for granted your entire life, you poor naive bastard. when it’s finally over, you call mom on the phone, almost as a kind of gut reaction, something you haven’t done since you were just a kid in boarding school, and her voice makes you cry even more.

i can tell you now that the pain has dulled to a faint, nearly forgotten ache. but i will also tell you that the part that broke you the most – the realization that a sense of sadness will pervade every memory you had with these 2 people you spent so much time with, and the place that you spent it in – hasn’t gone away after all this time, and that i started writing this today because a song came on shuffle singing “don't you dare let our best memories bring you sorrow” and that ache flared up again. and it hurts me to tell you that this sorrow, because that really is the best way to describe it, is probably something you will feel for the rest of your life.

when you tell people that the journey has had its highs and lows, these were the lowest of lows. you will stumble more times than you care to count. sometimes you will wonder if it wasn’t a stumble but a hand that had pushed you to the ground, and you will wonder too if you had in some way invited that hand to do so, as a consequence of your ego, fragile chaos, and what an ex once called “bouts of unconscious self-centeredness”. but you’ve been learning, too, to forgive yourself, your many flaws, and moreover, that maybe you can acknowledge these flaws without also making yourself feel like crap.

i’m proud of you, by the way. for getting back up. every time. doing whatever you could to keep moving. this tenacity, this thing where you keep pushing through, that mom once said she admired most about you (you always remembered this), to move the mountains and heaven and earth. because you carried yourself to the highs, too.

5 months ago, you stepped out of a reef break in lombok, indonesia and for a few minutes you couldn’t even speak. it was the most beautiful wave you had ever surfed in your life, in perfect conditions, six feet of glass over a barreling right and a peeling left, and you surfed it at sunset, with an orange shimmer hovering above the crest of each wave. surrounded by the ocean and the mountains and distant islands, you feel as if the world is carrying you in her arms. you can’t speak because it’s impossible to put that sense of wonderment into words, that feeling of vast infinity, of awe at everything the world embodies, and the fullness of life and majesty within it.

you write five words in your journal that night: the world is so big.

4 months ago, you sat in the kitchen of a mountain hut in italy as an old couple played cards at the table next to you. the fireplace crackled by the door; the smell of potatoes and bacon drenched the air, and the couple’s laughter filled the room. suddenly you felt their love unfurl like a sail on the main mast – watching the way she smiled at him, the way he always kept one hand on top of hers – and it embraced, enveloped and covered you like a warm blanket over your own heart.

it’s a memory you will think about often. how does a scene, a moment that was not quite your own, still bring you so much joy?

3 months ago, you met someone. and when you think of her you think of soft grass, of nights spent dancing the hours away in berlin, of chickpea on toast, and of the sunlit forests on the western edge of the city. you surprise yourself because for the first time in years, you think not just This Is Good, but more importantly, This Is Worth Holding On To. i can hear you holding in a gasp already, because although you have always sworn – passionately – against distance relationships, you will, unbelievably, try long-distance to make it work.

and in less than a month, you will see her. and you will spend december, your favorite month of the year, with her, and with your sister, your family, and your cousins as you forge a new season together in the beautiful, beautiful time that is winter in hong kong.

and now, today, this morning. you step out of the waters at madiha as the rising sun glitters behind you, and you stop to watch the surf as your friends take their last waves in.

walking down the beach a hermit crab catches your eye. he’s battling a tiny sand hill, which to him must have seemed like a mountain; ever-so-cautiously, he begins a halting, adorable scurry up the grains. when you shift the weight on your feet (squatting is, after 2 weeks of surf, quite painful for you) the crab ducks back into his shell, and the momentum sends him on a floundering tumble all the way back down.

you can’t help but chuckle. sometimes, you are that hermit crab, you think. and you’re reminded of the story of sisyphos, who spent his life rolling a stone up a mountain only for it to roll back down to the bottom every time.

but then you look at the hermit crab again.

a set of spindly legs slowly emerge from the shell; two small eyes peek out furtively. brushing off the tragic fall, the amber-patterned mobile home whirs into motion once more.

and you watch as he tries again.

with love,
kora ♥

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i haven’t written a vignette-style piece in a while, but for me these are the easiest to write; when the inspiration comes it flows. you can read my other vignette pieces here :)

today i took a bus to nowhere.

the station was unusually quiet for a sunny weekend afternoon; silence hung over the october heat like a heavy fog. as i waited for my bus home, i noticed another double-decker sitting off to the side. presumably, it had arrived ahead of schedule. 

curious, i moved a little closer. “bus 28, lok wah” blinked in neon-green letters on its side. lok wah? despite spending half my life in hong kong, i had no idea where that was. never even heard of it. but i was intrigued.

scrrrt. the doors of bus 28 groaned and clanged open as passengers began to board. 

i had a decision to make. i could wait a few more minutes and take my usual bus home. or… i could go on a little adventure to lok wah. 

fuck it, i thought. i put on my headphones and hopped on.

i won’t tell you about the bus ride, about how i got off halfway because i spotted a hopeful blur of green amongst the sea of grey: the verdant canopy of a garden park peeking out between apartment buildings.

i won’t tell you about how i walked through hong kong’s little thailand neighborhood for the first time in my life. how the curving strokes of thai script greeted me in between the tapestry of chinese and english characters dotting the street. how the smells of basil fried rice seeped from the restaurants and danced into the streets. 

and i won’t tell you about how i spent 2 hours wandering inside the garden itself. meandering in no particular direction between the rows of shrubs and trees, admiring the way leaves swayed in the wind. smiling at the the kitschiness of the signs explaining the different flower types, replete with illustrations like the pages of an old children’s book. watching turtles lounging on the surface of the pond, like seniors in the pool of a florida retirement home. 

but what i will tell you is that it was beautiful, letting myself be surprised by everything i saw. to experience a part of my home city i’d never explored before. to be wide-eyed and wondering like a child once more.

when was the last time you saw something for the first time, something that stole your breath away? wonder colors your world a little brighter; it lifts your head above the clouds – and then some more. for a few precious seconds, minutes, even hours, you forget… everything. what you’ve been seeing on the news. the thesis paper that’s always lurking in the back of your mind. the world is good, you think. it’s fresh, it’s new, it surprises you at every turn. and it is beautiful.

when i think of wonder, i think of the italian alps. sunsets in bali. paragliding in colombia. why do we only expect it from big, grandiose adventures? 

but today i learned that wonder can be found anywhere – even in a city i know so well. wonder isn’t just a feeling. it doesn’t have to be something we stumble into by chance. it’s something we can create ourselves, if we choose to. wonder is a frame of mind. 

so all i can say is this: embrace your spontaneity. wander with no expectations, no destination in mind. take a bus to nowhere. 

create your own magic.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower 
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 
And Eternity in an hour

– excerpt from auguries of Innocence by william blake

many, many thanks to , & for talking through + reviewing an earlier draft of this piece.

NESCAFFIER: i'm a foreigner, you know.
ROEBUCK WRIGHT: this city is full of us, isn't it? i’m one, myself.
NESCAFFIER: seeking something missing. missing something left behind.
ROEBUCK WRIGHT: maybe, with good luck, we'll find what eluded us in the places we once called home.

– wes anderson’s the french dispatch

seeking something missing

people often ask how i ended up, at 14, halfway across the world at an american boarding school in new jersey. my default response is that my parents shipped me off from hong kong because i kept getting into trouble at school. the joke is partly true: middle school kora ended up at the principal’s office more times than i care to admit. but the reality is that my parents never forced me to go to boarding school. i chose to go.

the ones who choose to leave home: we all leave in search of something. something missing from our current lives. adventure. opportunities. people with the potential to change our lives.1

this sense of something missing, and the yearning to seek it out – it’s a feeling that courses through every fiber of our being. it’s a sense of disconnect that feels like debility and mental languor at the same time.

try as we might, this feeling cannot be suppressed or ignored; over time, it becomes a force of nature that lets us move the earth. in my case, it led a 14-year-old boy to move across the world to america on his own. me – a momma’s boy who had never lived away from his parents before, never even been to a summer camp.

don’t get me wrong – i loved hong kong. and yet at times i felt stifled, boxed in like a bird in a cage. my life felt stagnant: school took up so much of my time but taught me so little. even at 14, i knew i needed to explore another way forward. however far away, boarding school represented an opportunity for a life and education i couldn’t find back home.

missing something left behind

as my high school years flew by, i grew accustomed to the familiarities of my life in america. the freedoms of living away from home. the looser, distinctly american way of doing things that emphasized creativity and independence. i missed my family (and, of course, the food) but i never felt truly homesick – not even once.

it soon became impossible for me to see myself living in hong kong ever again. i enjoyed my visits home, but at the same time these visits always felt like a regressive step into the past. each time i boarded the plane back to the states, i told myself the same thing: i could never live here. it’s too different. the pace of life is too fast. none of my close friends are here.

and so i stayed. 4 years of high school turned into college. 4 years of college turned into work. the next thing i knew, 11 years had passed since i first stepped foot into new jersey.

and yet, something changed as i matured. gradually, bit by bit, i came to realize: wherever i moved, i sought out the places that reminded me of home.

growing up, i spent the sweltering hong kong summers playing in the ocean, and the cooler winters hiking up in the mountains. unsurprisingly, the first places i moved to after college emerged at similar convergences of the mountains and sea. santa cruz, off the pacific coast highway with its beautiful coastline and misty redwood forests. oahu, an island surrounded by pristine beaches and bifurcated by the towering koʻolau mountains. although i never explicitly drew the connection at the time, i had chosen to live in these places because they felt like hong kong.

even now, one of the very first things i do in any new city is to find a restaurant that serves hong kong-style food. i don’t care if it’s a hole in the wall or a 45-minute drive away – my soul demands it as a requisite for surviving in a foreign land.

in hawaii, i spent a month trying out various restaurants around chinatown until i found the one place that served char siu rice and hk-style milk tea just the way i liked it (shoutout sandy’s cafe!). sitting in my usual spot in the corner booth, surrounded by people speaking my language, i could close my eyes and pretend that i was back home and not in a small restaurant off the canal in honolulu, hawaii. and that always seemed to make everything a little more okay.

it’s funny: i never felt homesick at boarding school, despite moving across the world by myself. but once i acknowledged the fact that i tried to make every new place feel like hong kong, i began to miss it more and more. it’s now as an adult in my twenties that i miss home the most.

maybe we'll find what eluded us in the places we once called home

i began the piece with this scene from the french dispatch because **it captured something those of us who choose to leave home can never quite put into words: a sense of longing for the future, juxtaposed with a desperate yearning for the past.

our search for something missing is a constant motion, a tension, a struggle between opposites. we leave home to find the missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. but as exciting and novel as that journey is, we also inevitably miss the things we left behind.

i used to judge people for spending their entire lives in the same place they grew up. but these days, i often think that they’re the lucky ones. their first home was all they ever needed: they never felt the craving or urge to see what else is out there, or the kernel of dissatisfaction with their home – a constant, nagging sense of restlessness – that i wouldn’t wish on anybody. more than that, these people never had to know the experience of leaving.

but it’s only when we leave home that we see the beauty in everything we left behind. we realize, over time, that the things we left behind are just as important – maybe even more so – than the things we thought were missing. this realization alone justifies that journey of leaving for us. it makes it necessary and important.

we tend to fixate on the negative and only think about home in terms of the things we didn’t like. i couldn’t stand the hong kong education system and the relative rigidity of the culture – but i let those things overwhelm everything i did love about it. in the process of seeking, i forgot how much i loved being in the city with my family and childhood friends, surrounded by the mountains and ocean and people who spoke my language every day.

have i reached an end to my journey? i don’t know. i’m still traveling a lot, and the free-spirited part of me thinks i may never settle down permanently, anywhere.

but this year, i moved my homebase back to hong kong after 11 years away.

yesterday, i flew back to hong kong after 2 months in berlin.

today, i’m writing this piece from a cafe overlooking the water. steam rises from the bowl of char siu rice in front of me. a light ocean breeze tickles my hair.

i’m home. and i feel… whole.

i feel complete.

many thanks to , , and for reading earlier drafts of this piece.

I once read that the best stories are the ones you find yourself telling over and over again. Here’s a story I’ve been repeating recently:

The Story of the Zen Garden

In May my friends and I visited a Zen temple in Kyoto. Daisen-in has one of the most famous rock gardens in all of Japan. All around us, millions of small stones formed beautiful, swirling lines on the temple grounds.

As we looked out at the large main garden, our guide began to tell a story.

The main garden, she explained, represents nirvana – the ultimate enlightenment.

The various stone pathways leading to the main garden, she continued, represent the different paths to nirvana.

She then pointed at two large rocks sitting atop the pathway beside us. Can you guess what these two rocks represent?

We shook our heads.

This one is a turtle, our guide said, patiently pointing out the “head” and “legs” on the first rock. The other is a resting cow.

They’re stuck here because they haven’t reached nirvana yet. Can you guess why?

We shook our heads again.

Look at the turtle, she pointed. His “head” is facing the wrong direction! He’s swimming against the current.

Then she turned to the cow rock. The cow is facing the right direction… but she’s sitting down. She’s not moving.

See why they haven’t reached the main garden?

Without saying another word, our guide turned on her heels and strolled into the next room.

It took me a few moments to gather myself before catching up with the rest of the group. I was shocked. In one simple story, the guide had illustrated a concept I had been struggling to verbalize myself: how to find balance in your life.

Your life is an ebb and flow

Life is a series of ups and downs. We have these beautiful highs: falling in love. Holding a newborn in your arms for the first time. Summiting a peak. Completing a marathon you’d spent months preparing for.

And then we have the inevitable lows: the end of a relationship. The loss of a loved one. An injury that keeps you out of the water for months. Times when it feels like for every step forward, something pushes you two steps back.

Some people call life a rollercoaster; I think a better comparison would be a river. Life ebbs and flows; it consists of steps forward and steps back. But above all, it keeps moving. Your life has a current – a flow that carries you through it all.

Our guide’s story resonated so strongly with me because it illustrated the importance of going with the flow of your life. Instead of fighting the current, like the turtle, we should roll with the ups and downs of our journey as they come.

In many ways, this echoes the single biggest lesson I’ve learned from surfing. As a beginner, we instinctively panic and tense up when a wave throws us into the dreaded “laundry machine cycle”. I’d recommend watching all 20 seconds of that video: it’s terrifying to be tossed around underwater, and instinctive to fight against it. But struggling against the water actually wastes your energy and oxygen. The (somewhat counterintuitive) key is to relax, let the ocean have its way with you, and wait for it to inevitably spit you back out. In order to progress as a surfer and surf bigger waves, we need to learn to move with the flow.

At the same time, however, we can’t just flow all the time and expect life to take us exactly where we need to go. The resting cow failed to reach nirvana because she wasn’t taking any action. My other takeaway from the story is that it’s also important to take actionable steps that bring us closer to our goals.

I’ve put these lessons into practice as I navigate this strange, transitional period of my life. I prioritize flexibility and flow in my travels, opting to “figure things out when I get there” rather than plan everything out beforehand. However, I’m not just free-flowing my way across the globe: I proactively structure my travels in a way that supports my interests and fosters self-discovery. I’m here in Berlin right now because I want to surround myself with fellow creative-minded people and explore ways to further my artistic career. I’m going with the flow, yes. But I’ve also taken the time to reach out to galleries, take art classes, show up at events and meet other artists.

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Finding balance

The story of the Zen garden boils down to this: life is about finding a balance between flow and action.

Your life is a river, and it’s important to take the ebbs and flows in stride. At the same time, rather than simply drifting with the current, it’s also important to take steps to orient yourself on your journey.

Are you aiming for a promotion at work? Great – don’t drive yourself crazy and spend all your time stressing over it, but consider making a list of concrete steps that you can take to bring you closer to promotion-level. Thinking about leaving your job but don’t feel fully ready to make that leap yet? Go with the flow and see how things evolve in your life and at work, but start doing a little research to explore other options that may be a better fit for you.

We’ve all known people on either end of the spectrum: the overstressed, overworked achiever who gets so much done but always seem to be on the verge of a panic attack. The “lazy” friend who chills all day without a care in the world, but also doesn’t seem to have anything they can care about.

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There isn’t a single, right way to live your life. At Daisen-in, each of the stone pathways leading to the main garden represented a different path to nirvana. Some people’s paths may be 99% flow and 1% action. Other’s may look closer to 50% flow and 50% action.

The goal, I think, is to find the balance that allows you to move through life with joy and grace. 

They say the best stories are the ones you find yourself telling over and over again. 

I hope you’ll find yourself telling this one, too :)

I’ve been in the habit, lately, of driving out of Canggu in the evenings and into the rice paddies west of town, where the traffic is nonexistent and the sweltering Bali sun reflects off the paddy waters to my left and right. I drive for miles and miles, with no destination in mind, no real sense of where I am, weaving in and out of old farmhouses and empty fields and household temples, until the sun and her reflected counterpart kiss like lovers and become one in the earth-shattering event that is sundown. 

I never used to understand why motorcyclists wear earphones on the road. The thought of anyone in a two-wheeled vehicle zooming in between cars and lanes while plugged into a playlist always seemed incredibly foolish to me, mildly suicidal even. 

Well, that’s changed. It’s been a month in Indonesia and I can’t imagine driving anywhere on my scooter without my AirPods. I usually put on something fast-paced and intense for these rides, hip-hop or R&B, but lately on these sunset drives it’s been songs that make me feel some type of way, songs that make me feel like a pair of wings might sprout from my back at any moment and lift me into the sky, songs that make me think sentimental (corny) things about how grateful I am to be alive and how everything is going to be okay. There’s no better feeling than flying 60, 70 down an empty country road as the wind buffets your hair, pressing your shirt against your chest, raising a small dust cloud behind you, the roar of the engine muted behind a thumping beat. In these moments, I have my own Perks of Being a Wallflower tunnel moment: I feel fucking infinite. 

I’ve always loved driving at night, and I keep going even when the sunset fades into dusk. Indo feels more primal, untamed in the dark; it’s pitch black except for the rare streetlamp and the faint lights of other drivers in the distance. There’s a subtle threat beneath all this, a faint acknowledgement of the risk but I think it’s beautiful and it makes my heart beat a little faster. I think about how Bali now is unrecognizable from 10 years ago, completely different from 5, and will be unrecognizable once again in 5. Time moves slowly now, I think to myself, but it feels fast once it’s in the rearview. 

Waxing poetry aside, wearing earphones on the bike actually has a functional purpose(!): Bali traffic is intensely loud. The thrust of the throttle, the relentless honking, the clamor of tourists and vendors all around you… sometimes the din is so overwhelming I can barely hear my own thoughts. So yes, not only am I listening to music on a scooter, but I also have noise cancellation on…

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But the thing is, I’ve realized that the music makes me a better driver. I find myself way more relaxed, way more.. locked in. Music brings me into a flow state when I’m on the road, similar to how I feel when I’m surfing; my mind is relaxed yet alert, and everything I do – every little motion – is part of a single fluid movement that neither interrupts nor riles my sense of calm. Even as I weave between cars, pass other bikes, check my mirrors, or honk at the occasional transgressor, my mind is at ease and I’m simply flowing. Traffic implies a struggle, a fight against time and stillness and the torrential onslaught of other drivers, but in these moments traffic is not an opponent for me to beat down but more like a maze with translucent, spongelike walls that I gently pass through like water. I become a part of the traffic itself – a stitch in the fabric, a cell in the sprawling, living ecosystem that is driving in Indonesia.

The irony is that prior to this trip, I’ve had a lifelong aversion to mopeds, scooters, and motorbikes. I didn’t even like go-karting – even on a contained track, wearing a helmet, the fear of being so physically exposed to whatever might come hurtling at me (or me at it) made me deeply uncomfortable. In college, my friend drove me to class on his motorbike and I remember screaming at him to slow down every ten seconds, swearing to never do it again as I got off and wobbled into the classroom on shaky legs.

But that’s the thing about fear, isn’t it? It’s not some unconquerable impasse that can and will always stand in our way. Fear is more like a steep mountain that we can get over if we really put our mind to it. Pete, one of my best friends, used to be terrified of heights – it prevented him from passing certain steeper sections on hikes, and he’d wait until the rest of us finished the hike and came back. But Pete kept hiking, and gradually he climbed higher and higher until finally this fear of heights was whittled down from an impassable wall into a smaller, scalable rock. In less than a year, we were hiking Kauai’s Kalalau trail together, one of the top backpacking trails in the world with a terrifying “crawler’s ledge” section; he barely paused at that part. Fear had become an uncomfortable but familiar friend.

I think – I know – Bali traffic would be infinitely more terrifying if it weren’t a maze I could pass through but one that I had to navigate, shivering in fear at every corner. To pass through it I had to flow with it; to flow I first had to step out of my comfort zone and practice driving a scooter in Indonesia. Like Pete, I had to put in my reps and force myself onto the roads so I could learn to be comfortable on a two-wheeled vehicle (and, more importantly, get to the beaches I wanted to surf).

Flow dissolves fear. Flow comes with practice; practice requires nothing but time and effort. Fear, I think, boils down to a willingness to try (or the lack thereof).

But yes, the music helped, too :)

written in canggu, indonesia on june 24th, 2023.
polished and edited in berlin on august 28.

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I moved to Berlin exactly one week ago.

I’m living in the Neukölln neighborhood, a large and sprawling district in the southeastern side of the city. One friend describes Neukölln as “the part of town rich people think is sketchy”. Another describes it as “somewhere you could choose to never leave if you really wanted to” – simply because everything you may possibly want can be found in this borough: parks, restaurants, bars, grocery stores and flea markets. Neukölln is big, and my little corner of it is a particularly interesting mix of dichotomies: it’s an incredibly gay neighborhood, and yet also very Muslim. Walk a few blocks south and you hit Sonnenallee, the start of a predominantly Arabic area, filled with halal restaurants and of course doner kebab shops. I think it’s lovely.

A few days ago we passed a young couple sitting outside a cafe. They were hunched over in serious conversation: the book Polysecure lay on the table in front of them, and they held what looked like their respective notes on the book in their hands.

This, my friend joked, was the quintessential picture of Berlin, boiled down into one scene. Polyamory (or at least, ethical non-monogamy) seems to be the norm here. I realized recently that a city’s bookstore mainstays can offer a good glimpse into its culture, and I have never seen more books on sex/non-monogamy than in Berlin. “There’s just so many distractions,” one friend pined. “Everyone’s young… and hot.” 

I mean, I could see where she was coming from. But I wondered – why was the non-monogamous culture so much more prevalent than, say, New York City – a similarly free-spirited city that also draws young people from all around the world? 

“It’s the culture of Berlin,” she explained. “All that free love shit – there’s no stigma against non-monogamy and being what society would call ‘slutty’”. 

“Berlin,” she added, “is the city where you can be anything you want to be.”

I can’t help but wonder if the non-monogamous culture of Berlin is human nature at its base, unrestrained form. We know from history it was only when Christianity swept across the world in the post-Roman Empire era that ideas such as marriage and monogamy became core tenets of (Western) society. The non-religiousness of Berlin, I think, has to play a major factor in all this – over 60% of Berlin residents have no religious affiliation, compared to a mere 24% in New York City. This is a drastic difference in numbers.  

So does polyamory really ‘work’? Marriage, monogamy – I’ve always been skeptical of these institutions, but I’ve never been completely sold on polygamy as an alternative either. All I can say is I’m curious to learn more.

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Why are Germans so good at ordering Chinese food?

One of the very first things I do whenever I move to a new city is to find a Cantonese restaurant I like. I can’t help it – I’m a Hong Kong boy at heart, and I need my 叉燒燒肉飯 (char siu & grilled pork over rice) to give me a little slice of home.

Anyway, I found a spot over in West Berlin and of course I was hungrily checking out what everyone else had ordered while I waited for my food.

I quickly realized that Germans actually know how to order Chinese food. These people were eating dishes that I would actually order for myself – 咕噜肉 (sweet and sour pork), Chinese spinach, even 酥炸鮮魷 (fried squid). Keep in mind that 1) the majority of the restaurant clientele were non-Asian Germans, and 2) Chinese culture isn’t very prevalent in Berlin – we don’t have a Chinatown here, and the main Asian immigrant population is Vietnamese. 

To imagine white people ordering this stuff in America is pretty unfathomable. So why do Germans have better taste in Chinese food? It wasn’t because the menus had pictures of each dish, or additional descriptions: the dish names were the classic Chinese-to-English, somewhat vague translations. If anything, the translations were pretty subpar: 乾炒牛河 was translated as rice paste with beef (paste?? what?) rather than the expected beef chow fun.

My initial conclusion, for now, is that it’s because bastardized (Americanized) Chinese food isn’t really offered here. How can you order General Tso’s chicken and kung pao chicken when it isn’t even on the menu? If Berliners want Chinese food, they have to deal with a normal, traditional Chinese menu, and they’ve figured out over time what they like and what they don’t. Adapt and survive – Chinese Darwin would have been proud.

Note: these are first impressions.

There’s this scene I love from the movie Soul:

The protagonist, a pianist, leaves the concert hall breathless and excited. He’s finally achieved his dream of playing with a professional jazz quartet: at that moment, he feels on top of the world. 

But once the high of the performance fades, his face falls. When his bandmate asks him what’s wrong, the pianist says dejectedly, I've been waiting on this day for my entire life.

I just thought I'd feel different.

The illusion of happiness

Earlier I wrote about how I dreamed for years of traveling the world – and how, once that came true, I lost my desire to travel. 

As I spent the next few days in Japan struggling to understand what had happened, I gradually realized that I had built up this fantasy in my head. I had led myself into thinking that once I achieved my dream of traveling the world, it would be a fountain of fulfillment that would forever fill my happy-ever-after cup. All I needed was to make it a reality, and the rest will follow! Like the protagonist in Soul, I thought that the act of simply accomplishing my dream would change everything for me – that once it happened, I would automatically become happy, fulfilled. 

Psychologists call this the arrival fallacy. “Arrival fallacy is this illusion that once we make it, once we attain our goal or reach our destination, we will reach lasting happiness,” said Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar, a positive psychology expert. “[It’s] the false belief that reaching a valued destination can sustain happiness.”

Dr. Ben-Shahar calls it an illusion because that’s exactly what it is. As soon as the novelty of traveling wore off, I found that seeing new places can actually get… old. In the past, traveling served as a reprieve of sorts between other stages of my life – college semesters, starting work, etc. But now that I was traveling indefinitely, and purely for the sake of traveling, I discovered that the joy and excitement of exploring new places inevitably wears off. 

Without a larger driving force behind my travels, all I was doing was wandering aimlessly. Window-shopping in perpetuity, adrift like a log in the river. I had assumed that the mere act of traveling the world would be a purpose in and of itself. But it turns out that it isn’t as easy as saying I’m going to travel the world! The sense of purposelessness that permeated my travels told me I needed something more.

Rediscovering purpose

We’ve all heard the story: a professional soccer player grows tired of the game. Turning his favorite thing in the world into a career killed his passion for the sport: the pressure, press conferences, and fan expectations have all turned soccer into something that gives him more pain than pleasure. It’s not until he steps into a game of pickup on the street – surrounded by the concentrated, excited faces of kids who lived for this every day – that he rediscovers the pure joy and fun of the game. 

As I struggled to deal with my sudden lack of interest in travel, the first thing I did was go back to the roots of why I fell in love with traveling in the first place. What did my younger self enjoy about it? What about it excited me? What did I gain from it that made me so keen to jet off any chance I could get? 

When I framed travel in these terms, the answer came easily. I loved traveling because it changed the way I saw the world. I loved meeting people from all walks of life, who were so different from me, who showed me new ways of living, new ways of perceiving the world, new ways of moving through life. I loved experiencing other cultures, learning their history and beliefs and customs. I loved those moments of pure awe and astonishment when my mind simply struggled to comprehend the beauty before me, and the only thought I could muster into my head is my god, the world is so big. 

OK, I thought to myself. I’m not going crazy – I still love traveling. But why did it feel so purposeless? Was there any way I could give it some more meaning?

I started looking through my old journals for the notes I had jotted down wistfully as I grinded away in college and at work, dreaming of all the things I would do once I freed myself from the shackles of the workforce. Forgotten goals, half-baked aspirations, would-love-to-do’s-if-only-I-had-the-time.

I found a long list of things I wanted to learn: Spanish. Salsa. DJing. How to properly use my camera. On another page: a fully fleshed-out note on writing a coffee table book. Christ, how had I forgotten about all this? I still marvel, now, at how much we let ourselves forget by way of life. It’s these little musings, I think – these half-whispered daydreams – that slip through the cracks of our everyday routines that truly reveal our innate dreams and desires.

I kept coming back to one note in particular from January 2023. I’d written it a few weeks after I’d left my job: 

What’s my ideal life during this time?? 
• Traveling / new experiences - expansion and growth
• Meeting lots of new people - new ways of seeing
• Writing / photography - see and express the world from my perspective
• Creating Art - creating something beautiful

Was there a way I could put all this together?

A few days later, it hit me: this coffee table book idea – why not start it now? I’d be traveling all over this year, meeting all sorts of new people; I knew the journey would have its ups and downs, and I’d be learning and growing so much. I’d always loved writing, and wanted to put more time into it. I could shoot photos as I traveled, really shoot proper photos, and fill the book partly with photos and partly with prose, essays and poetry about my journey. And maybe, just maybe, this book could become something that other people might actually want to read.

And thus – after a long week of panic, doubt, introspection, and reflection – one dream filled the shoes of another, and künstlerroaming was born.

A new dream

And so, here I am. I’m excited to travel again: I have a new dream that gives me a renewed sense of purpose. But I know this dream isn’t going to fulfill all my hopes and dreams in life. I’m focused on the journey of getting there – the beautiful, crazy process – and not the destination.

I travel with a loose set of intentions for every place I visit, and I keep it all in a pinned note that I remind myself to check every once in a while. Right now I’m sitting in a cafe in Berlin, where I’ve just moved into an apartment the night before; Berlin is a place I’ve wanted to live in since visiting in college (yes – this, too, was in my journal). In this pinned note, it says Berlin – art, creative community, nightlife, DJing(??); I’ll use these as a starting point for my time here.

Above all, I’ve let go of these preconceived notions of what it means to “travel the world”. Over time, travel becomes just life, except in a different place. My globetrotting isn’t the end goal, and I’m learning to better appreciate this lesson every day. It really is about the journey after all.1

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The Big Lessons

1: Set your intentions
In retrospect, this seems obvious: be intentional about how you do things. It will give a sense of structure and purpose to everything you do.

But it’s important to remember to set your intentions before you start something new. As I learned the hard way, once things get going it’s hard to escape the tunnel-vision and take a step back to see the bigger picture.

2: Chase your dreams. But don’t expect them to be the end-all-be-all!
I believe unequivocally that having dreams is a net positive for you. They motivate you to soar higher and strive for things beyond your comfort zone. 

But don’t expect dreams to give you an additional sense of purpose. In fact, don’t expect anything from them at all. They will not solve all your problems or grant you forever happiness.

3: Renewing purpose: go back to the r o o t s
If you feel like you’ve lost your passion for something, look back to the start. Why did you do this in the first place? What did you originally love about it? What did you hope to get out of it? Whether it’s a passion, athletic hobby, endeavor or even a relationship, it can help to look back on the things that drew you to it in the first place. 

Skim through your old journals, your old notes. Talk to your friends and ask them how you used to talk about this thing. All this will remind you of your original why.

4: Finding purpose: orienting around your values
Another way of finding purpose is to look at your personal values and orient your actions around them. I value creativity and self-expression; working on künstlerroaming feels natural for me because it aligns with these values. How can you live your life in a way that supports and emphasizes your values?

5: LOOK UP!
Don’t become so focused on the ground beneath your feet – look up! Lift your head to the sky every once in a while and see the bigger picture.

to be followed by the final part of this 3-piece essay: part iii – an ode to dreams (chase them!).

There was once a boy who dreamt of catching the wind. 

He spent his days running around the fields of his village, arms outstretched; he chased every gust that tousled his hair, every gale that brushed his cheeks. He ran until the wind faded to stillness and his lungs burned for air. Do you really think you can catch the wind? The other kids laughed. Even his parents, who always entertained his ideas and fantasies, begged him to find better things to do with his time. 

But the boy was as hardheaded as a bull, and he kept chasing the wind. His quest took him deep into the wintery forests, and down the moss-covered riverbanks; it led him beyond the lines of his village, along forgotten roads and up the highest peaks. Months, years passed this way, and still the boy came no closer to grasping the wind in his hands.

One day a wise man passed through the town and saw the boy running through the fields. Boy! the man called out. What are you doing? 

I’m trying to catch the wind, the boy responded. He braced himself for the incredulous questioning that always followed. 

But the wise man acted as if he had said something perfectly mundane, as if he simply wanted to catch a butterfly or a fish. I see, the man said. He sat down on a nearby rock to watch. 

And so the boy took off running again. This time, for the first time, he felt the breeze curl around his fingers as he reached out his hand. And when he closed his hand into a fist, he felt something like a soft fluttering silk between his fingers, pressed furtively into his palm. At that moment, he knew he had finally succeeded: he had caught the wind. 

The boy ran back to the wise man, eyes wide with tears. I did it! he shouted, beaming. Look! He stretched his hand out to the wise man and opened it. 

But when they looked down, the boy’s palm was empty. 

The boy looked horrified. I swear I had it! I promise!

Of course you did, the wise man calmly replied. But have you forgotten? 

The wind is just air.  

Dreams, I learned recently, are a bit like the wind. 

Dreams give you substance. They fill you up, like air rushing into your lungs; they round out the edges of your personality like creases in a sleeping pad. In a time of uncertainty and fear, dreams can make you a little bigger, a little more ready to take on the world.

Dreams, too, push you to be better. They’re the air beneath your wings, lifting your feet off the ground. They encourage you to strive for more, to follow your ambitions, to reach for the stars and make the impossible a reality. 

But dreams are also really, really hard to grasp. After all, who can capture the wind? Dreams sometimes feel like they’ll always be a little out of reach, a breeze gently evading every graze of your fingertips.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve dreamt of traveling the world. There was never an epiphany moment, a turning point when this became a dream. But it’s something I’ve known since I was a tousle-haired kid, a fact of life as irrefutable as the fact that I love the ocean or that the sight of other people crying makes me want to do the same. Even then I had this unshakable conviction that the world has so much to offer, and that I wanted to experience it for myself. 

Here’s the difference between dreams and goals, in my mind: goals are made with the expectation that they can, with some effort, be achieved. They’re plausible, realistic – within reach. 

But dreams feel... loftier. Near-impossible, by some interpretations. Even the word dream itself exudes an aura of myth and fantasy. Dreams feel like something that can only be achieved with the utmost dedication and intention – and, even then, requires some divine intervention and a healthy serving of luck. An artist may aim to put on a gallery show, but they dream of exhibiting their work within the hallowed grounds of the Louvre. 

And so when you do achieve your dreams, it’s the most incredible feeling in the world. My younger self never imagined that he would one day have the time and money to travel across the globe; it was always too far in the future for him to even begin to picture. But as I grew older I took small but intentional steps to make my dream a little more real, to sketch the beginnings of an outline I could one day fill with color. I took off on my first backpacking trip the second I turned 18, backpacking across Eastern Europe and Russia with my best friend over 2 months; in college, I started solo traveling in between semesters. I learned to organize and budget my travels; I learned to socialize in hostels and open up to strangers. And I oriented myself towards a career that would give me the financial freedom and flexibility to make my dream come true.    

When I finally parted ways with my job this year and started traveling the world, I felt a pure elation, an unrestrained sense of satisfaction I had never felt before. I felt freer than I had ever felt in my life.

But less than 2 months into my travels, I realized that I didn’t particularly enjoy traveling anymore. If that sounds insane to you – trust me, I felt the same way. I was utterly shocked to discover that I had somehow lost my desire to travel during this time – and, moreover, that I actively dreaded the 6 months I had loosely planned out ahead of me. In Portugal, I caught myself zoning out at random moments throughout the day; even as I basked in the sights and sounds of a completely new country – a fun and exciting experience by any measure – I felt disconnected from everything around me. At times I even wondered to myself: what am I doing here?

This realization completely devastated me. How was it possible to dream about something for years and years, I asked myself, only for it to fall flat like this? I felt lost, numb, disoriented – shellshocked. I had given up a stable career, financial security, and my entire life in Hawaii to pursue this dream. Moreover, it had become a part of my identity over the years, something that gave me purpose and direction in life. Where the dream used to fill a space in my heart with something – a mixture of hope, purpose, and selfhood perhaps – it now left behind a gaping hole that sucked the very breath out of my lungs. The wind was just air.

And so, on a sunny May afternoon in Japan, I found myself spiraling into a panicked daze on the train, quietly trying to hold it together as my friends slumbered next to me. I knew I needed to figure out what exactly had happened to my dream, why the spark for travel had disappeared in me – and if there was a way I could bring it back. 

Read the second part of the series here:

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