Before My Gem Closet, There Was the Dream of Freedom — The Fool

Freedom was never a concept I admired from a distance.
It was something I kept reaching for, often before I understood the cost.

Long before My Gem Closet, my life was shaped by choices that did not fit the paths laid out for me — not because I wanted to rebel, but because staying often felt like a slow disappearance.

I grew up in China, in a working-class family that valued discipline, stability, and measurable achievement. My father was a police officer. My mother worked in a bank. Like many families of that generation, they believed deeply in education as the safest route through life — and in sacrifice as proof of love.

From early on, my health complicated that plan.

As a child, I spent long periods in hospitals. I was drawn to medicine, not as an abstract ambition, but because illness had turned the body into a mystery I wanted to understand. Yet the education system I grew up in did not bend easily. When I was hospitalised in the months leading up to the university entrance exams, my academic options narrowed overnight. I was forced to abandon the science track and move into humanities — not because my abilities had changed, but because the system could not accommodate interruption.

So I adapted. I always did.

I studied finance and investment analysis. On paper, it was a strong choice. I graduated, received offers, and stepped into environments that promised status, income, and security. Yet each time I moved closer to what looked like success, something inside me resisted — not loudly, but persistently.

I was tired in a way rest could not fix.
I felt confined by a future that required me to become smaller in order to survive inside it.

I explored other ideas. I wanted to build a restaurant — not for glamour, but for community, relationships, and real-world connection. I believed that social capital mattered as much as financial capital. That belief was not shared at home. It led to arguments, long silences, and a growing distance that could not be bridged by logic alone.

Eventually, I chose a different leap.

I entered the technology world and co-founded a startup, building a platform designed to connect students with real industry projects early — so they could learn by doing, discover what they were good at, and find work that genuinely suited them. It was a vision born from everything I had lacked: choice, exposure, and permission to explore.

Vision, however, is not the same as support.

I invested everything I had — not because there was nothing else, but because I wanted to know what I could build without being held, directed, or protected. I chose to stand on my own, in a country where no one knew my name, and where success or failure would be mine alone.

And then my father died.

Grief has a way of stripping stories down to their bones.

When he was gone, I realised how much of my momentum had been fuelled by one quiet desire: to make him proud. Without that anchor, the life I had been building lost its gravity.

So I let it fall.

Looking back, my career does not form a straight line. It looks more like a series of leaps — some necessary, some premature, many misunderstood. But each one was guided by the same instinct: when staying requires erasing yourself, leaving becomes an act of survival.

The Fool is often mistaken for someone reckless.
In truth, the Fool is someone who senses that the known world has nothing left to offer — and steps forward anyway.

This was not the beginning of clarity.
It was the beginning of motion.

And motion, once chosen, cannot be undone.

— Yanting