I did not start over because I was brave.
I started over because the life I had built no longer had a place for me inside it.
In the family I grew up in, “doing well” had a very practical meaning.
It meant grades that could be shown. Schools that could be named. Futures that looked secure. My father was a police officer; my mother worked in a bank. Stability was earned through discipline, and discipline was considered love in its most reliable form.
There was an unspoken rule in our home: what did not lead to results was treated as distraction.
I loved music. I loved art. I could sit alone in a practice room and teach myself an instrument by ear. Those parts of me were not forbidden, but they were tolerated only as decoration. When they competed with schoolwork, they were removed.
My MP3 player was taken away.
CDs disappeared.
Novels I cared about were labelled pointless.
The message was never cruel, but it was consistent: focus on what is useful.
So I learned to be useful.
I moved through better schools, stricter systems, and higher expectations. I became skilled at producing outcomes that could be measured, verified, and praised. I learned how to perform competence. What no one taught me was that you can succeed and still quietly disappear.
At thirteen, my body intervened.
An autoimmune illness entered my life and refused to negotiate. No matter how well I performed, pain would interrupt me — not symbolically, but physically. I treated endurance as maturity and discipline as virtue, believing that if I held myself together long enough, peace would eventually follow.
It didn’t.
Years later, after my father’s death, the structure I had been living inside lost its authority. I walked away from the technology company I had spent six years building. I let go of partnerships, plans, and the career my education was meant to support. I deleted my LinkedIn account as if removing a name tag from a body I no longer inhabited.
What followed was not clarity.
It was exposure.
I tried different jobs. I built and dismantled businesses. I trusted people I should not have trusted. I made decisions that cost me money, time, and certainty. Often, I carried the consequences alone.
Living in the UK for over a decade, I moved through long stretches of solitude. Relationships came and ended quickly — not from indifference, but from learning to leave when something was wrong. I wanted a sense of family. I searched for it. More often than not, I met the edge of disappointment instead.
At some point, “family” became a historical word — something that belonged more to memory than to daily life.
But underneath the instability, something else was forming.
I was becoming capable.
Not in a way a CV could capture, but in the way a person becomes capable when there is no longer anyone to hand them instructions. I learned how to stand up after a bad decision without collapsing into shame. How to begin again without waiting for approval. How to assemble with whatever I found was available.
I did not feel powerful.
I felt exposed.
Exposure, however, has a clarifying effect. It removes illusion. It forces honesty. And honesty, in turn, forces choice.
This is where the Magician lives — not in control or confidence, but in a moment of recognition: I have something in my hands. I can use it.
The Magician is not someone who guarantees outcomes.
The Magician is someone who stops waiting to be chosen.
When there is no plan left to follow and no one left to impress, creation ceases to be optional. You build because you must. You test what might work. You trust your own judgment, not because fear disappears, but because fear no longer gets to decide.
This is not romantic.
It is demanding.
But it is real.
My Gem Closet emerged from that reality — not as a polished strategy, but as an act of alignment. A decision to gather what I had learned, what I had endured, and what I could offer, and allow it to become something that could sustain me, materially and spiritually.
This is what I mean when I say creation became the only way forward.
Not because life became easy.
Not because failure stopped.
But because waiting was no longer an option.
— Yanting
