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Writing again

In 2018, I stopped writing.

I studied economics in China, and for as long as I can remember I was drawn to reading, writing, and language. I dreamed about becoming a writer. Eight years later, I still remember the decision to stop clearly. It didn't just happen. It was a choice I made.

That was also the year I started my software engineering career. I graduated, took my first offer, and moved to Santa Clara, without ever having properly learned to code. My coworkers spent their undergrad, their grad school, even their high school years learning it. I didn't want to tell them I studied economics in China, or that the information systems master's degree I earned in the States never really taught me to code either. Every day, I performed as an engineer while secretly still becoming one, in a fiercely competitive industry, under the constant weight of immigration.

Back then, I really had no choice. A work visa left me almost no options, and the immigration process was long and uncertain. I couldn't afford to fall. So I gave it everything, and I decided to stop writing so that I could make it work.

I learned to fit in. I stopped bringing up philosophy or social justice, and learned to talk about the weather, the weekend. I started to resent my own sensitivity, watching coworkers turn detachment into an advantage while mine was only ever a blade turned inward. I spent months in therapy, learning the CBT techniques that were supposed to "reduce" it. And to catch up, I stopped reading novels, stopped reading anything, so I could save the time for learning to code.

It worked. Over the next seven years, I grew from someone who felt like an impostor into a senior machine learning engineer at a big tech company. There was a quiet pride in writing it on my resume, a top company's name, and under it, built infrastructure serving millions of users. From the outside, the life looked good: top companies, good money, the promotions that came along the way.

For a long time, I thought that was just the new life. I hid the person who was sensitive to the world, who spent hours shaping thoughts into pieces, who was always amazed by the beauty of language, so carefully that almost none of the friends and coworkers I made since then knew that side existed.

And yet I felt intensely disconnected from myself.

In 2025, I felt like a stranger in my own life. I decided to take a chance and let the old life go. I stepped away from my engineering career and went into the wild: new country, new experiences, new ways of being.

So much happened in those nine months, as my identity as a big tech employee dissolved. I drove across the continent alone, moved to Toronto, and found myself curious about every person I met. I had a quiet intuition that I wanted to create again. I didn't realize then that the urge was tied to the writing I'd given up. I just started finding my way back to the artist in me, the one I had hidden so well for so long. I went back to reading literature, posted pieces on social media, made YouTube videos, and even tried standup comedy.

In 2026, I went back to software engineering. But I changed. I stopped hiding the other part of me and started showing up as myself, sensitive and whole. Then something shifted. I started to see the beauty in my engineering career again, the quiet magic that pressure and expectation had buried. Underneath all the fear of those early years, there had always been wonder. Even now, after building some of that magic myself, it still amazes me the way it did at the start.

Since then, I've started to imagine a version of myself who is neither only a software engineer nor only a writer, but someone who lives somewhere between technology and art.

If there's one thing my experiences and the important people in my life have taught me, it's less a plan than something spiritual: to listen to what Life is telling me, and let it guide me.

I'm calling the series "Writing again." This is where it starts.