Journal
On Building a Life That Doesn't Fit the Template
Three degrees. Two careers. One question: what do you do when you don't fit the mold?
I was raised inside a story that wasn't mine.
A loving home, yes—warm meals, proud parents, safe walls. But underneath the love, I kept tasting something strange: possession dressed as protection, expectation wrapped in sacrifice, and the quiet violence of people who said this is for your own good while binding my wings tighter. I learned early that love could feel like a cage with silk curtains. And I couldn't name it then—but I felt it: I had no capacity to receive love, because every offering came with a receipt, a debt to be paid back in obedience.
So I ran.
Not from them. From the template they handed me—the one that said: graduate, marry, settle, belong. I ran from Beijing to Shanghai, from Shanghai to America, from America to Europe. Each city a new skin. Each degree a new passport. I told myself: maybe at the next stop, I will finally meet the person I'm supposed to be.
The degrees:
Three diplomas, three languages, three ways of framing the world. On paper, a beautiful staircase. In reality, a spiral—each step taking me further from the question I was too afraid to ask: Who am I without a syllabus?
The careers:
Two threads, braided into one messy rope, stretched across a dozen titles and countless pivots.
Thread one: Marketing & Communication
I started as a volunteer at the Beijing 2008 Olympics and Shanghai 2010 Expo, watching the world parade past me, learning that stories are the currency of human connection. My undergraduate degree in journalism gave me the foundation: how to find a story, how to tell it with clarity and truth. But over time, I realized I was less interested in reporting events and more drawn to shaping how people experience a brand, a message, a movement. That's when marketing became my language.
From there, the corporate world: big machines, bigger expectations, the thrill of crafting narratives at scale. I was a sole communication manager, owning every message, every crisis, every win. Then I traded the fortress for the frontier—startup marketing, where build and grow aren't buzzwords but daily survival. Zero to one. Chaos to clarity. Each role a different dialect of the same native tongue: translation—turning complexity into meaning, whether for a global brand or a scrappy team finding its voice.
Thread two: Healing
This one didn't begin as a career. It began as survival. Growing up, I was surrounded by coated love—half free, half jailed. I never felt like I fit the environment I was born into. I saw the dark side of humans early: the masks, the manipulations, the quiet trades behind every gesture. Even when people praised me, I didn't see the praise—I saw what they wanted behind the praise. I could never be naive. And so I chased the purest thing I could imagine—a love, a truth, a self that was untouched by transaction—only to find it didn't exist. And I felt failed and betrayed, again and again, all the way.
That chasing became its own kind of education. Along the way, I found tools—or rather, they found me. Astrology, tarot, Reiki, and more became my mirrors. Not answers, but reflections. They didn't tell me who I was—they showed me what was already there: the patterns, the wounds, the gifts, the way my inner world projects onto the outer.
In private circles, across candles and living rooms, I learned to sit with one soul and hear their ghosts. This thread never had a job title. It was always the underground river beneath the corporate résumé.
They looked like opposites. But I now see them as sisters: both are about presence. One amplifies voices to millions through marketing and brand storytelling. The other listens to one. Both are my way of saying: I see you, and I see the invisible things between us. From stadiums to boardrooms to intimate rooms, from campaigns to breath—every role, every volunteer shift, every solo mission was a different instrument playing the same song: connection.
The chart:
I don't need astrology to explain me—but I find comfort in its poetry.
Pluto in Scorpio in the 9th house, conjunct my Midheaven (MC).
That's the planet of death-and-rebirth, sitting at the highest point of my public life, in the house of philosophy and foreign lands. Translation: my identity is meant to be destroyed and rebuilt—again, again, again—through travel, through study, through crossing borders that aren't just geographic but epistemic.
And that MC semi-sextile Neptune in Capricorn in the 12th?
A quiet whisper: your career is also your shadow work. Your public face is a veil for your deepest, most formless longing.
And the 2nd-house stellium?
This isn't about having many jobs. It's about values that refuse to be boxed into one currency. My second house is crowded—not with titles, but with what I value: truth, autonomy, beauty, impact, freedom, depth. And because my values are plural, my income follows suit—fragmented, cross-pollinated, coming from marketing work here, healing sessions there, writing, consulting, teaching, creating. On the outside, it looks scattered. On the inside, it's integrity—refusing to sell all of myself to one master, one definition of success, one narrow lane. My worth isn't in one paycheck or one title. My worth is in the range of what I can hold.
Astrology, tarot, Reiki—they don't give me answers. They give me language for what I already know but couldn't say. They show me the reflections of my inner world, how it works internally and externally, so I can stop fighting myself and start understanding myself.
So who am I?
Still not sure.
But I've stopped asking the question like it has a final answer.
I've started asking it like a meditation: who am I, right now, in this breath?
Some days I'm a marketer shaping how the world sees a brand. Some days a healer sitting with one soul in silence. Some days a sole communicator steering a company through stormy waters. Some days a startup builder creating from nothing. Some days a confused woman staring at her own reflection in a European train window, wondering if the face looking back has ever truly landed anywhere.
What I've learned about the template:
It's not evil. It's just old. It was built for stability, not aliveness. For belonging, not truth. For reproduction, not generation. A template gives you a path. But a path is not a home. A path is just a line someone drew before you arrived.
What I've learned about running:
Running is not cowardice. It's orientation. You run until you find the place where the air tastes like your own lungs. And sometimes that place isn't a city—it's a practice. Mine is writing. Another is sitting with strangers and hearing their ghosts. Another is cooking alone at midnight, dancing to no music, letting my body remember it belongs to me.
What I've learned about healing:
It doesn't mean I'll ever be innocent again. The hypervigilance doesn't disappear—it refines. I still see the strings behind the puppets. I still taste the hidden agendas in sweet words. But I've stopped trying to unsee. Instead, I've learned to hold two truths at once: people are flawed, and I am still worthy of their love. The purest thing I chased doesn't exist out there—it exists in the moments I choose to stay, to witness, to breathe through the betrayal and stay open anyway. That's not naivety. That's the hardest courage I know.
What I've learned about love:
I wasn't incapable of love. I was incapable of love without conditions—because I'd never been shown that. So I became hypervigilant. Every gesture scanned for a hook. But slowly, I'm learning a different grammar: love that doesn't ask for payment. Love that stays even when I fail. Love that says you can be fully yourself, and I will not flee. I'm not good at it yet. But I'm practicing.
What I've learned about myself:
I am not one thing. I am the distance between Beijing and Rome. I am the silence between a marketing campaign and a healing breath. I am the question mark at the end of every achievement. And I am learning to hold that question mark like a jewel, not a wound. I've survived sudden life changes, loss, drama, trauma, and solitude—not by fighting them, but by finding my center in the middle of the storm. Again and again. That staying put is my superpower.
To you, reading this:
If you also don't fit—if your life looks like a shuffled deck, if your resume makes no linear sense, if your heart speaks in dialects no one around you understands—
You are not lost.
You are cartographing.
Mapping a territory that didn't exist before you walked it.
That's not failure. That's pioneering.
The template will always be there—for those who want it. But for us? We build our own architecture. Messy. Multi-hyphenate. Unfinished. And somehow, impossibly, whole.
— A woman still in translation, still in transit, still becoming.
Personal Essay & IP Notice
This essay is original intellectual property rooted in lived personal experience — bright chapters and dark ones alike. It reflects my independent perspective only and is not intended as professional advice of any kind. No part of this work may be reproduced, forwarded, adapted, or used in any form without explicit written authorisation. If something here resonates and you wish to share or reference it, please reach out first.