Hi Friend,

If you feel like your story is too hard to tell, you're not alone. I'm with you.

I've often felt that I'm too many things at once, that the stories I carry are too tender, that my story doesn't sound the same as those that I see in mainstream spaces…

In the past, trying to tell my story has felt like cutting off truths and parts of me just so that I can fit into a box safe enough to exist in this world.

So many things within me required compressing & shrinking to feel like safety for most of my life … my neuro-divergence, my multi-racial identity, my third-culture experience, my people's diasporic history, my experiences of language loss, and the aftermath of complex, acute, and generational traumas carried in my cells.

Just having to exist in my racially-ambiguous skin and at-least-weekly answer the instantly-othering question,

"So what are you?"

with: "I'm Hakka"

- a response my proud Hakka dad had drilled into me and siblings from birth -

...only to be met with blank stares and the occasional, "The dance that the rugby players do?"...

...made self-knowing and self-expression an exhausting campaign for me.

So if you, too, have ever felt like your story is hard to tell, hard to carry, hard to make sense of … I wanted to let you know: you're not alone. And you're not crazy. And you're definitely not the problem.

The problem is that colonization has eroded safe story spaces and intentionally tried to flatten our stories, flatten our very existences and our truths and the rich lineage that we carry in our cells.

And this is by design, because the people whose stories don't fit into the dominant narrative are the people that capitalism and colonization benefit off of erasing, subjugating, reducing into labor and resources to be used up and cast away.

In other words, capitalism and colonization benefit from eroding our humanity and stories and community keep us human.

So to do your story work is to insist on not being reducible, to tap into power that contests the powers of oppression.

It starts by telling truer deeper richer more layered stories to ourselves about ourselves. It starts by remembering. It starts by sharing our wisdom our histories our cultures our languages our versions of love of relationship of survival of joy of making it of hope.

And these stories don't always fit the formulas, the word limits, and the character counts. These stories spiral. These stories are constellations and networks and root systems.

And I invite you into this very sacred work. This is how we heal.

This is how I've healed and am still healing and reclaiming my fullest existence today.

Story work is a process of becoming, a process of "unfinishedness" that critical pedagogue Paolo Freire so often talks about.

But unfinishedness isn't a warning that we will never be healed or whole.

Rather, the more we story our way into wholeness through our self-inquiry and self-determination, the more we shift the world with us, and the more the world changes with us, the more beautiful meaning-making work we get to do with our narrative lenses, voices, and artistry.

And no matter where you are in your process of reclaiming your stories and expanding your humanity into fuller truths, we get to walk this journey together, in communion.

So if you are being called to do this work, I invite you to join me and my beautiful community.

This work begins with gentle, practical steps that honor your pace and your sovereignty.

Ready to begin? You can dive into this work with Find Yourself Here – a story workbook designed to meet you exactly where you are, with 25 layered prompts, spacious examples, and gentle frameworks for reclaiming your narrative sovereignty. The digital kit includes both PDF and interactive Google Doc versions, plus access to our community space where stories can breathe and grow together.

And tomorrow, I'm hosting our first Write & Wonder session – a live gathering where we'll explore prompts from the workbook, practice story crafting with community support, and create space to wonder and talk story together. Join us September 9th at 9:00am Taipei time (September 8th at 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific, or September 9th at 11:00am Sydney time). Link given once you've purchased Find Yourself Here.

Whether you start with the workbook today or join us live tomorrow (or both!), know that your stories – in all their spiraling, constellation, root-system beauty – are welcome here. Your unfinishedness is not a flaw; it's your invitation to keep becoming, together.