Last week, I talked about how I spent the first half of my life as a Human Doing. Today, I’ll talk about the realizations that motivated me to transform into a Human Being. The five steps I outline below summarize the birth of my awareness as I curiously embarked on a journey to the depth of my true self.
I also assumed very similar roles in my childhood and ended up being depressed and miserable in my adult life, which led me to therapy. It is difficult to heal from all the childhood traumas that we experience and it may be a never-ending process. In fact, I don't think there is a definite "endpoint." But I guess it is better to embark on that journey than to be stuck in the past.
Doga, I appreciate your sharing. Every time I receive a comment telling me the person resonates with my experience, I feel less alone. And that's what I wish for my readers as well, that they feel less alone in this very arduous journey of healing from childhood wounds. I agree that this journey is super difficult and may be a never-ending process. But it can also ironically make us feel more alive in that we can finally start living from what's real in our core rather than being a "doing machine" or walking zombie operating out of the unconscious. If that's what the second half of our life is meant to be--to live in our truth and to feel the world with deeper appreciation and a more open heart, it would be worth all the effort.
I agree. I started my own Substack page in an effort to communicate my own experience and maybe get in touch with people with similar experiences as mine. The thing is, though, it was never something I thought I would do, even one or two years ago. I think telling and retelling our own stories and narrating our past can be a part of the emotional journey that we embark upon as human beings. It doesn't really matter how many people read it. The important thing is to tell.
I'm totally with you on this. I love this quote by Joan Didion: "I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means. What I want and what I fear." To me, writing helps me make sense of who I am and all the puzzles in my life (not necessarily with answers, but still!). Being able to witness ourselves, including our past, is a unique gift we human beings have. Let's cherish this gift and continue to tell stories based on our own truth.
I wholeheartedly agree with both you and Joan Didion. Writing is also a process of thinking for me. It is almost circular. The more I write, the better I think, and the better I can write in the end. ( I haven't read any of her works, by the way, but will definitely do it at some point). Before I started on my Substack page, I have been writing a journal for a little more than a year, and I think that also contributed to my desire to share what I think and feel with a wider audience.
So much of this post hit home. Our parallel journey in much of it. I really appreciate your ability to articulate your discoveries as I found pockets in my journey that this letter helped fill. Thank you for that. And btw: I did miss you on social media, your energy and belief system in healing the body was rare to find. Finding other wayward souls helps fill the loneliness that taking your own path has at times.
Hope you enjoy your break. Listening to our body definitely shifts how we do things in a good way 👍❤️
Grace, I'm very grateful to have you as a companion on our parallel journey. Thank you for your appreciation of what I'm sharing here, as well as how you feel toward my presence in social media in my former "role" as a health coach. I've never heard anyone describe my work this way, so I'm really thankful that you reflected that back to me. Perhaps one day, in the future, I'll find a way to integrate that kind of work with my writing and community building. The important thing is to align what I do with what my soul desires and feels right.
Please take good care of yourself in these challenging times of your life. My best wishes to you ❤️.
My life has been riddled with needing to feel safe and needing to be accepted. Both cause one to live a life of craziness, so far removed from our true essence. I fit in nowhere so finding others who allow aspects of your self to feel safe were jewels in my life. Thank you for that. I think looking back that healing from cptsd/childhood trauma and finding me was being attuned to the bread crumbs others dropped along the way. Being brave enough to be different when everything within you screams “fit in” to feel safe.
Finding me and attending to my inner parts works fabulously when I stay on my path, unfortunately life is filled with stressful reminders of danger and triggers still astonish me with their intricacies. Childhood was hell and my inner child is amazing for surviving it.
Thanks for your kindness. We got “remission” at last pet scan so now just getting thru chemo treatments and allowing our bodies to heal after the massive stress. Finding the joy around every corner❤️
I completely understand the need for safety. People with a traumatized childhood have a nervous system that requires a great deal of calming down and assurance of safety. This happens within a safe and supportive environment, plenty of time, and large doses of compassion from others and from the Self. I see that both of us have taken the risks to step into our respective healing journey, with great bravery that the outside world hardly sees or understands. It is important to do this in community to alleviate the frightening loneliness of it all. And we should all thank our brave inner children for helping us survive those tough years of growing up.
I'm elated to hear about the remission! I can imagine what an extremely stressful time you both went through, and hope you can now find calmness and joy in your life together.
This thoughtful, deeply searching and wise essay is full of so many well-researched ideas and concepts on Internal Family Systems, Complex PTSD and so much more that I know you have intimately worked with yourself, along with probing questions that I know will lead me to answers that will help me live more authentically in my own skin. Thank you Louisa for all this knowledge. I will return to this essay time and time again. You may even inspire me to toss out my to-do list! Now wouldn't that be something?
Amy, thank you so very much for taking the time out of your very busy day to read my essay. I'm glad the questions I posed to myself and shared here inspired you to live a more authentic life--you already are on this path, and it's a delight to continue walking with you on this meaningful second-half-of-life journey. It would really be something if you tossed out your to-do list! Don't forget to let me know when you do, so we can celebrate!
Louisa, this was such a great read that I truly resonated with. I’m the oldest daughter in an immigrant family as well, and I really felt your descriptions of how that’s shaped your mindset and interactions!
Unlike you, however, I was more unwillingly forced into confronting a lot of this went I lost my job (read: my entire sense of identity) this past March and have been on a sabbatical ever since. You’re certainly far ahead of me -- particularly with mindfulness and social media usage, which are on my list of things to tackle -- and so your reflections were incredibly helpful.
Hi Zefan, thanks so much for leaving me a comment and letting me know that you resonate! It means a lot to me to hear from other people with an immigrant background who share similar experiences, even though our ethnicities and geographical locations vary.
It sounds to me that you have wrestled with your own sense of identity since you were laid off, and that you have goen on to a great adventure (I took a peek at your page). Self awareness and curiosity can help us make use of the setbacks and challenges in life and turn them into something useful for our personal growth. I wish you all the best in your search for meaning and in connecting with yourself.
Wow! I have been thinking of these topics over the last few months and it’s sooo refreshing to read them!
It’s been interesting seeing our kids grow up and not people pleasing as much or conforming as much. It’s incredibly triggering (“hold on, what do you mean you aren’t going to an extended family gathering because you don’t want to”)
At the same time as it is triggering, it is also so so good! They aren’t going to spend their mid-years unraveling and tuning into their self and understand “what do I want” “how do I feel”. Simple things that somehow elude me sometimes.
Thanks so much for this. I’m so glad I found your writing and I’m off to subscribe!
Thank you so much for your comment and for subscribing, Mika!
Welcome to my community 🤗❤
How wonderful it is that you are raising children in a different way so that they can be more in tune with their soul and exercise their agency! It's so true that those of us who come from traditional collectivist cultures find it challenging in midlife as we become conscious of our own individuation. It can be painful with this midlife reckoning but also exhilarating!
I absolutely believe that whatever work we do on ourselves, shortcuts the work our kids have to do. I’ve seen this play out in our kids lives, as I talk openly about my struggles and what I’m doing (and still doing) to overcome them. I used to push all those feeling down deep, so to see the kids excavate them and UNDERSTAND how they feel, is so so rewarding!! ✨
I woke up this morning with a strange, yet familiar feeling. It was that feeling of “I need to check [fill in the blank]”. In the past it was Instagram, but I took the app off my phone last month, and it’s been so freeing! So I would love to get your thoughts on how you have made sure that substack doesn’t become that place where you end up seeking for and chasing “validation highs”.
Hi Mika, that's a really good question. I have actually realized Substack had become an obsession just like other social media sites. Right now I'm on vacation so I naturally don't have much time to check Substack as frequently as I did before my vacation. I think if we imagine our daily life as a vacation where we want to fill our days with adventures, we may be less inclined to spend a lot of time online. This way we get to live in the NOW. Shall we try it?
Louisa, thank you so much for sharing this honest and thought-provoking piece, which really resonates. I'm the eldest daughter and a first-generation immigrant from a country of origin where many people (from my own country and outside of it) have questioned me about why I chose to uproot myself from "a place where I should be grateful to have been born" and go through the challenges of creating my own life from ground up in a different country (first the US, then the UK and now Portugal).
The conflation of moulding myself to live up to (correction: to exceed) familial expectations and the desire to be "the good immigrant" led to me really losing myself in the process of doing all I could to make this happen - for almost all my life, my identity was dominated by who I believed I needed to be in order for approval and acceptance, and my desire to be a "good immigrant" also led to me trying to universalize my identity through erasing or concealing the aspects of me that made me different.
In the pursuit of doing all I could to be recognised as worthy, I forgot how to just be, because for most of my life, I'd never had the experience that it was ok to do that, to just be me. Looking back, I realize now that moving far away from home was my own quiet way of resistance, for me to seek out the discovery of who I could be, when I was not physically surrounded by the opinions and lived expressions of who I was expected to be.
In the past two years, I've walked away from all the biggest pillars of my identity, including my 10 year career path as a lawyer and over a decade of living in London with a life that "made sense" on paper. Moving to Portugal to start a new chapter of life and giving myself permission to fully immerse in my being, to explore being a writer again and building a creative business centred around the skills and qualities I actually value in myself (as opposed to those I happen to be good at, and easily get external validation for), have been the first choices I've made in life that are rooted in a desire to be fully me, rather than to do "the right thing".
I love all the conversations on this thread about self-discovery through writing, because that's exactly how it has been for me. In my writing process and my words, I learnt to become me, and I found belonging. I've really appreciated the community I've found here and on Substack who feel so passionately about these same themes. Thank you for such an honest and powerful share!
p.s. I also love your reference from Mark Nepo! I'm reading his book, The One Life We're Given
Hi Suyin, thank you so much for your thoughtful and heartfelt reflections. It's wonderful to have you here as part of the Lily Pond community! I've read your comment twice, very slowly, to savor every word you wrote. I resonate with almost everything you wrote, especially this:
"...my identity was dominated by who I believed I needed to be in order for approval and acceptance, and my desire to be a "good immigrant" also led to me trying to universalize my identity through erasing or concealing the aspects of me that made me different."
This has been my reality for most of my life, until that constantly erasure and concealment made my Self suffocated! Finally, through writing, I've let her out and created a world that I can finally call my own.
I also resonated so much with this: "In the pursuit of doing all I could to be recognised as worthy, I forgot how to just be, because for most of my life, I'd never had the experience that it was ok to do that, to just be me. Looking back, I realize now that moving far away from home was my own quiet way of resistance, for me to seek out the discovery of who I could be, when I was not physically surrounded by the opinions and lived expressions of who I was expected to be." Ah!!!! This has been my story too. I've found myself escaping from the familiar familial surrounding filled with expectations. Moving to countries as far away from my family as possible was my way to find and assert myself. Do you know the Taiwanese author Sanmao who wrote "Stories of the Sahara"? Well, she was the one who inspired my adventures out in the world.
Glad to hear you are inspired by Mark Nepo too. I'm going to check out the one you mentioned. I'm currently reading "The Book of Awakenings" for the second round, and am still getting so much inspiration from it.
Hi Louisa, thank you so much for your heartfelt response to my share too! I also read what you wrote a few times to soak it in, and I was so moved by the resonances you identified between our experiences, and also by what you said here, "Finally, through writing, I've let her out and created a world that I can finally call my own." That is so beautiful and is exactly how I feel by being here in the Lily Pond you've created - thank you for sharing the light in your soul with us here, and I'm so honoured to be able to witness the blossoming of your Self through your words.
I felt a little emotional earthquake when I read your mention of Sanmao and her book, Stories of the Sahara, and I have a sense it's going to change my life too. I've always felt a special connection with Taiwan as the Minnan dialect was the language I spoke with my maternal grandmother who was very dear to me, and one of our dreams was to travel to Taiwan together but sadly, she passed unexpectedly in the year I was planning to go there with her. I'm going to buy the book and read it right away. I'm so happy to hear how she shaped the journey of your life. Thank you so much for sharing about it! I'll definitely check out The Book of Awakenings too, based on what you've said and as I love the quote you mentioned from it as well.
Hi Suyin, I'm feeling so warm and fuzzy reading your comment now the second time! Thank you for your witness, and I look forward to witnessing you on your journey of inner and outer explorations, too.
What you told me about your Grandma touched me so much. I'm sad to hear your dream was dashed. But I encourage you to make that trip to Taiwan, bringing your Grandma's spirit with you. So wonderful you spoke Minnan with her. I believe the dialect is a living part of her that you get to experience whenever you speak or hear it spoken. I recently started watching "Shanghai Blossoms" - a TV series directed by Wong Kar-Wai (my favorite Hong Kong director). The Shanghaiese dialect spoken in the show reminds me so much of my own maternal grandmother. She, mom and I used to speak Hangzhouese, a dialect very similar to Shanghaiese. Hearing it spoken on TV brought back so many fond memories.
I hope Sanmao's book will bring you a lot of pleasures and inspirations.
Hi Louisa, thank you so much for your kind and uplifting words, especially on my Grandma and travelling to Taiwan. It means so much. I did end up going to Taiwan four years after she passed, and it was very special. I am looking forward to going back there again on an extended trip to explore other parts of the country and feel connected to my roots. And what you said about the dialect resonates so much too... I definitely felt that way in Taiwan, that she was with me and I was living life with her in me. Especially now with Sanmao's book - I feel it will do the same for me in an even more profound way - thank you again for the recommendation! And I'm so happy to hear that you felt this same connection with your maternal grandmother and mum through watching Shanghai Blossoms. I love Wong Kar-Wai's films too, and will be interested to look up this show. Wishing you many warm and loving memories too as you continue to watch the show!
Awww, it's so heartwarming to learn that you did visit Taiwan and felt connected to your roots, and that your grandma's dialect has become a living part of her inherence for you. Glad that the Sanmao book will become your own literary heritage now :-) I'm thrilled to know you are also a Wong Kar-Wai fan!!! Do you understand Mandarin? Here the link to watch the Mandarin version: https://tv.gboku.com/vodplay/4184-1-1.html
This definitely resonated.
I also assumed very similar roles in my childhood and ended up being depressed and miserable in my adult life, which led me to therapy. It is difficult to heal from all the childhood traumas that we experience and it may be a never-ending process. In fact, I don't think there is a definite "endpoint." But I guess it is better to embark on that journey than to be stuck in the past.
Doga, I appreciate your sharing. Every time I receive a comment telling me the person resonates with my experience, I feel less alone. And that's what I wish for my readers as well, that they feel less alone in this very arduous journey of healing from childhood wounds. I agree that this journey is super difficult and may be a never-ending process. But it can also ironically make us feel more alive in that we can finally start living from what's real in our core rather than being a "doing machine" or walking zombie operating out of the unconscious. If that's what the second half of our life is meant to be--to live in our truth and to feel the world with deeper appreciation and a more open heart, it would be worth all the effort.
I agree. I started my own Substack page in an effort to communicate my own experience and maybe get in touch with people with similar experiences as mine. The thing is, though, it was never something I thought I would do, even one or two years ago. I think telling and retelling our own stories and narrating our past can be a part of the emotional journey that we embark upon as human beings. It doesn't really matter how many people read it. The important thing is to tell.
I'm totally with you on this. I love this quote by Joan Didion: "I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means. What I want and what I fear." To me, writing helps me make sense of who I am and all the puzzles in my life (not necessarily with answers, but still!). Being able to witness ourselves, including our past, is a unique gift we human beings have. Let's cherish this gift and continue to tell stories based on our own truth.
I wholeheartedly agree with both you and Joan Didion. Writing is also a process of thinking for me. It is almost circular. The more I write, the better I think, and the better I can write in the end. ( I haven't read any of her works, by the way, but will definitely do it at some point). Before I started on my Substack page, I have been writing a journal for a little more than a year, and I think that also contributed to my desire to share what I think and feel with a wider audience.
That is my favorite Joan Didion quote, too. I have it in big letters above my desk!
So much of this post hit home. Our parallel journey in much of it. I really appreciate your ability to articulate your discoveries as I found pockets in my journey that this letter helped fill. Thank you for that. And btw: I did miss you on social media, your energy and belief system in healing the body was rare to find. Finding other wayward souls helps fill the loneliness that taking your own path has at times.
Hope you enjoy your break. Listening to our body definitely shifts how we do things in a good way 👍❤️
Grace, I'm very grateful to have you as a companion on our parallel journey. Thank you for your appreciation of what I'm sharing here, as well as how you feel toward my presence in social media in my former "role" as a health coach. I've never heard anyone describe my work this way, so I'm really thankful that you reflected that back to me. Perhaps one day, in the future, I'll find a way to integrate that kind of work with my writing and community building. The important thing is to align what I do with what my soul desires and feels right.
Please take good care of yourself in these challenging times of your life. My best wishes to you ❤️.
My life has been riddled with needing to feel safe and needing to be accepted. Both cause one to live a life of craziness, so far removed from our true essence. I fit in nowhere so finding others who allow aspects of your self to feel safe were jewels in my life. Thank you for that. I think looking back that healing from cptsd/childhood trauma and finding me was being attuned to the bread crumbs others dropped along the way. Being brave enough to be different when everything within you screams “fit in” to feel safe.
Finding me and attending to my inner parts works fabulously when I stay on my path, unfortunately life is filled with stressful reminders of danger and triggers still astonish me with their intricacies. Childhood was hell and my inner child is amazing for surviving it.
Thanks for your kindness. We got “remission” at last pet scan so now just getting thru chemo treatments and allowing our bodies to heal after the massive stress. Finding the joy around every corner❤️
I completely understand the need for safety. People with a traumatized childhood have a nervous system that requires a great deal of calming down and assurance of safety. This happens within a safe and supportive environment, plenty of time, and large doses of compassion from others and from the Self. I see that both of us have taken the risks to step into our respective healing journey, with great bravery that the outside world hardly sees or understands. It is important to do this in community to alleviate the frightening loneliness of it all. And we should all thank our brave inner children for helping us survive those tough years of growing up.
I'm elated to hear about the remission! I can imagine what an extremely stressful time you both went through, and hope you can now find calmness and joy in your life together.
This thoughtful, deeply searching and wise essay is full of so many well-researched ideas and concepts on Internal Family Systems, Complex PTSD and so much more that I know you have intimately worked with yourself, along with probing questions that I know will lead me to answers that will help me live more authentically in my own skin. Thank you Louisa for all this knowledge. I will return to this essay time and time again. You may even inspire me to toss out my to-do list! Now wouldn't that be something?
Amy, thank you so very much for taking the time out of your very busy day to read my essay. I'm glad the questions I posed to myself and shared here inspired you to live a more authentic life--you already are on this path, and it's a delight to continue walking with you on this meaningful second-half-of-life journey. It would really be something if you tossed out your to-do list! Don't forget to let me know when you do, so we can celebrate!
Louisa, this was such a great read that I truly resonated with. I’m the oldest daughter in an immigrant family as well, and I really felt your descriptions of how that’s shaped your mindset and interactions!
Unlike you, however, I was more unwillingly forced into confronting a lot of this went I lost my job (read: my entire sense of identity) this past March and have been on a sabbatical ever since. You’re certainly far ahead of me -- particularly with mindfulness and social media usage, which are on my list of things to tackle -- and so your reflections were incredibly helpful.
Hi Zefan, thanks so much for leaving me a comment and letting me know that you resonate! It means a lot to me to hear from other people with an immigrant background who share similar experiences, even though our ethnicities and geographical locations vary.
It sounds to me that you have wrestled with your own sense of identity since you were laid off, and that you have goen on to a great adventure (I took a peek at your page). Self awareness and curiosity can help us make use of the setbacks and challenges in life and turn them into something useful for our personal growth. I wish you all the best in your search for meaning and in connecting with yourself.
Wow! I have been thinking of these topics over the last few months and it’s sooo refreshing to read them!
It’s been interesting seeing our kids grow up and not people pleasing as much or conforming as much. It’s incredibly triggering (“hold on, what do you mean you aren’t going to an extended family gathering because you don’t want to”)
At the same time as it is triggering, it is also so so good! They aren’t going to spend their mid-years unraveling and tuning into their self and understand “what do I want” “how do I feel”. Simple things that somehow elude me sometimes.
Thanks so much for this. I’m so glad I found your writing and I’m off to subscribe!
Thank you so much for your comment and for subscribing, Mika!
Welcome to my community 🤗❤
How wonderful it is that you are raising children in a different way so that they can be more in tune with their soul and exercise their agency! It's so true that those of us who come from traditional collectivist cultures find it challenging in midlife as we become conscious of our own individuation. It can be painful with this midlife reckoning but also exhilarating!
I absolutely believe that whatever work we do on ourselves, shortcuts the work our kids have to do. I’ve seen this play out in our kids lives, as I talk openly about my struggles and what I’m doing (and still doing) to overcome them. I used to push all those feeling down deep, so to see the kids excavate them and UNDERSTAND how they feel, is so so rewarding!! ✨
I woke up this morning with a strange, yet familiar feeling. It was that feeling of “I need to check [fill in the blank]”. In the past it was Instagram, but I took the app off my phone last month, and it’s been so freeing! So I would love to get your thoughts on how you have made sure that substack doesn’t become that place where you end up seeking for and chasing “validation highs”.
Hi Mika, that's a really good question. I have actually realized Substack had become an obsession just like other social media sites. Right now I'm on vacation so I naturally don't have much time to check Substack as frequently as I did before my vacation. I think if we imagine our daily life as a vacation where we want to fill our days with adventures, we may be less inclined to spend a lot of time online. This way we get to live in the NOW. Shall we try it?
Yes to living in the NOW! Yes to making sure that our interests don’t become obsessions and yes to experience life like it’s a vacation. ✨
Louisa, thank you so much for sharing this honest and thought-provoking piece, which really resonates. I'm the eldest daughter and a first-generation immigrant from a country of origin where many people (from my own country and outside of it) have questioned me about why I chose to uproot myself from "a place where I should be grateful to have been born" and go through the challenges of creating my own life from ground up in a different country (first the US, then the UK and now Portugal).
The conflation of moulding myself to live up to (correction: to exceed) familial expectations and the desire to be "the good immigrant" led to me really losing myself in the process of doing all I could to make this happen - for almost all my life, my identity was dominated by who I believed I needed to be in order for approval and acceptance, and my desire to be a "good immigrant" also led to me trying to universalize my identity through erasing or concealing the aspects of me that made me different.
In the pursuit of doing all I could to be recognised as worthy, I forgot how to just be, because for most of my life, I'd never had the experience that it was ok to do that, to just be me. Looking back, I realize now that moving far away from home was my own quiet way of resistance, for me to seek out the discovery of who I could be, when I was not physically surrounded by the opinions and lived expressions of who I was expected to be.
In the past two years, I've walked away from all the biggest pillars of my identity, including my 10 year career path as a lawyer and over a decade of living in London with a life that "made sense" on paper. Moving to Portugal to start a new chapter of life and giving myself permission to fully immerse in my being, to explore being a writer again and building a creative business centred around the skills and qualities I actually value in myself (as opposed to those I happen to be good at, and easily get external validation for), have been the first choices I've made in life that are rooted in a desire to be fully me, rather than to do "the right thing".
I love all the conversations on this thread about self-discovery through writing, because that's exactly how it has been for me. In my writing process and my words, I learnt to become me, and I found belonging. I've really appreciated the community I've found here and on Substack who feel so passionately about these same themes. Thank you for such an honest and powerful share!
p.s. I also love your reference from Mark Nepo! I'm reading his book, The One Life We're Given
Hi Suyin, thank you so much for your thoughtful and heartfelt reflections. It's wonderful to have you here as part of the Lily Pond community! I've read your comment twice, very slowly, to savor every word you wrote. I resonate with almost everything you wrote, especially this:
"...my identity was dominated by who I believed I needed to be in order for approval and acceptance, and my desire to be a "good immigrant" also led to me trying to universalize my identity through erasing or concealing the aspects of me that made me different."
This has been my reality for most of my life, until that constantly erasure and concealment made my Self suffocated! Finally, through writing, I've let her out and created a world that I can finally call my own.
I also resonated so much with this: "In the pursuit of doing all I could to be recognised as worthy, I forgot how to just be, because for most of my life, I'd never had the experience that it was ok to do that, to just be me. Looking back, I realize now that moving far away from home was my own quiet way of resistance, for me to seek out the discovery of who I could be, when I was not physically surrounded by the opinions and lived expressions of who I was expected to be." Ah!!!! This has been my story too. I've found myself escaping from the familiar familial surrounding filled with expectations. Moving to countries as far away from my family as possible was my way to find and assert myself. Do you know the Taiwanese author Sanmao who wrote "Stories of the Sahara"? Well, she was the one who inspired my adventures out in the world.
Glad to hear you are inspired by Mark Nepo too. I'm going to check out the one you mentioned. I'm currently reading "The Book of Awakenings" for the second round, and am still getting so much inspiration from it.
Hi Louisa, thank you so much for your heartfelt response to my share too! I also read what you wrote a few times to soak it in, and I was so moved by the resonances you identified between our experiences, and also by what you said here, "Finally, through writing, I've let her out and created a world that I can finally call my own." That is so beautiful and is exactly how I feel by being here in the Lily Pond you've created - thank you for sharing the light in your soul with us here, and I'm so honoured to be able to witness the blossoming of your Self through your words.
I felt a little emotional earthquake when I read your mention of Sanmao and her book, Stories of the Sahara, and I have a sense it's going to change my life too. I've always felt a special connection with Taiwan as the Minnan dialect was the language I spoke with my maternal grandmother who was very dear to me, and one of our dreams was to travel to Taiwan together but sadly, she passed unexpectedly in the year I was planning to go there with her. I'm going to buy the book and read it right away. I'm so happy to hear how she shaped the journey of your life. Thank you so much for sharing about it! I'll definitely check out The Book of Awakenings too, based on what you've said and as I love the quote you mentioned from it as well.
Hi Suyin, I'm feeling so warm and fuzzy reading your comment now the second time! Thank you for your witness, and I look forward to witnessing you on your journey of inner and outer explorations, too.
What you told me about your Grandma touched me so much. I'm sad to hear your dream was dashed. But I encourage you to make that trip to Taiwan, bringing your Grandma's spirit with you. So wonderful you spoke Minnan with her. I believe the dialect is a living part of her that you get to experience whenever you speak or hear it spoken. I recently started watching "Shanghai Blossoms" - a TV series directed by Wong Kar-Wai (my favorite Hong Kong director). The Shanghaiese dialect spoken in the show reminds me so much of my own maternal grandmother. She, mom and I used to speak Hangzhouese, a dialect very similar to Shanghaiese. Hearing it spoken on TV brought back so many fond memories.
I hope Sanmao's book will bring you a lot of pleasures and inspirations.
Hi Louisa, thank you so much for your kind and uplifting words, especially on my Grandma and travelling to Taiwan. It means so much. I did end up going to Taiwan four years after she passed, and it was very special. I am looking forward to going back there again on an extended trip to explore other parts of the country and feel connected to my roots. And what you said about the dialect resonates so much too... I definitely felt that way in Taiwan, that she was with me and I was living life with her in me. Especially now with Sanmao's book - I feel it will do the same for me in an even more profound way - thank you again for the recommendation! And I'm so happy to hear that you felt this same connection with your maternal grandmother and mum through watching Shanghai Blossoms. I love Wong Kar-Wai's films too, and will be interested to look up this show. Wishing you many warm and loving memories too as you continue to watch the show!
Awww, it's so heartwarming to learn that you did visit Taiwan and felt connected to your roots, and that your grandma's dialect has become a living part of her inherence for you. Glad that the Sanmao book will become your own literary heritage now :-) I'm thrilled to know you are also a Wong Kar-Wai fan!!! Do you understand Mandarin? Here the link to watch the Mandarin version: https://tv.gboku.com/vodplay/4184-1-1.html
Enjoy!