I’m getting married.
I’ve sat with that sentence for a while now, turning it over quietly, not quite ready to say it out loud.
And I should be floating. Instead, I drove home from my parents’ place last week with the conversation looping the entire way. Every silence, every loaded word, every moment where I felt the gap between the life I’m building and the life they imagined for me widen just a little more.
Because here’s the thing nobody warns you about when you grow up in an Asian family: the biggest moments of your life don’t always feel like yours. They feel like a vote. And the people whose approval you’ve spent years quietly trying to earn sometimes vote against the most important decisions you’ll ever make.
So I want to talk about that today. Not the wedding part. The trusting-yourself-when-it-costs-you part.
Today in 5 minutes or less, you’ll learn:
✔️ A small practice for the days your own voice gets drowned out
✔️ One question to sit with when you’re stuck between your heart and someone else’s expectations
✔️ Why self-belief isn’t a feeling you wait for — it’s a receipt you collect
Doable ideas 💭
This week, write down three decisions you’ve made in your life that felt scary at the time — and that you’d make again today.
Not the easy ones. The ones where someone important didn’t approve. The ones where you went quiet on the phone afterwards. The ones where you cried in the shower and then did it anyway.
Mine: leaving accounting. Moving countries. Building a music therapy practice from scratch in a city where nobody knew my name.
Write your three down. Read them back.
That list is evidence. And when the next big decision arrives — and it always does — evidence beats opinion. Even when the opinion belongs to people you love.
Reflections 🪞
If you weren’t trying to earn anyone’s approval right now, what would you already know was right?
Mindfulness 🧘🏻♀️
Here’s something that took me a long time to understand.
The people who love you the most can also be the loudest source of your self-doubt. Not because they want to hurt you. Because they love you through the lens of their own fears, their own era, their own unlived lives.
My parents aren’t villains in this story. They’re scared. They want me safe in the way safety was defined for them — stable job, familiar world, a partner who looks like the plan they had in their heads.
And every time I leave their place, a small voice starts up.
“What if they’re right? What if you’re making a mistake? What if the version of you that broke the script gets it catastrophically wrong this time?”
For a few days after that drive home, I let that voice run the show.
Then I caught myself. And I did something I want to share with you.
I looked at my receipts.
Self-belief isn’t a feeling. It’s a receipt. Every time you followed your gut and it worked out — that’s a receipt. Every time you trusted your read on a situation and you were right — that’s a receipt. Every time you walked away from something that looked good on paper but felt wrong in your body, and your future self thanked you — that’s a receipt.
I started reading mine.
The person I’ve chosen shows up. Not in the grand-gesture way. In the boring, beautiful way. The way that actually matters. Makes me feel safe in a body that spent years not feeling safe. The first person I want to tell things to and the last person I want to fall asleep next to.
And every other decision where I followed my heart instead of the script — the accounting exit, the degree nobody understood, moving countries — led me here. To work that feels like mine. To a life I used to write about in journals like it belonged to someone else.
So why would I outsource this one?
Here’s what I want you to take with you.
Your gut has a track record. Read it before you doubt it. You’re not a beginner at being you. You have decades of data on what your instinct gets right. Stop treating yourself like a stranger every time things get hard.
Love and approval are not the same currency. The people who love you can still disapprove of your choices. That doesn’t make their love conditional. It doesn’t make your choice wrong. Both things can be true. And you can keep moving anyway.
You can honour where you came from without living the life they planned for you. Respect isn’t obedience. You can love your parents deeply and still build a life they don’t fully understand. That’s not a betrayal. That’s the whole point of them raising you to think for yourself.
I’m getting married. To a person who shows up in the boring, beautiful way, every single day.
And I’m trusting the woman who got me this far to know what she’s doing.
If you’re in your own version of this right now — the job, the move, the relationship, the leaving, the staying — read your receipts this week. They’re already there. You just have to look.
Ideas Worth Pondering 🧠
Great public speaking comes from great private thinking.
– Derek Sivers
Video This Week 🎥
If you keep waking up tired, dragging yourself through the day, and wondering why rest doesn’t actually restore you — this one is for you.
In this video, I’m breaking down what it really means to be an Energy Drainer: why your body can feel exhausted even when your life looks “fine” on paper, and what actually helps you stop the leak.
Not more productivity hacks. Not “just sleep more.”
A gentler, more honest way to understand your energy — and start getting it back.
Did you love this article?
If so, please let me know by either:
- #1: Forwarding this to a friend whom you think would benefit from actionable well-being tips
- #2: Hitting reply. Send me a sentence or two about what you enjoyed. I meant it when I say I’d love to hear from you. Typing into the void isn’t nearly as fun as interacting with real humans 🙂