Last week, I interviewed with an AI marketing startup and didn't get the offer.
I expected to spend the next few days replaying the interview in my head, wondering what I should have said differently. Instead, I found myself getting irrationally angry.
While making lunch that afternoon, I was practically arguing with the company in my head. I kept thinking that their vision of AI marketing felt strangely reductionist. Underneath all the AI language, it still looked like a marketing agency with a more sophisticated workflow.
Later that day, I brought the whole thing into therapy.
What surprised me wasn't anything about the interview itself. It was realizing that the company had simply touched a place inside me that had been there for a very long time.
For most of my life, I've been waiting to be chosen.
As a child, I waited for my parents' approval. Then I waited for schools to accept me. Later it became job offers, promotions, immigration status, and recognition at work. Looking back, so much of my life quietly revolved around waiting for someone else to tell me, You're enough now.
For years, I thought the solution was obvious. Become better. Work harder. Learn more. Heal more.
Eventually I started recognizing structural realities too. It's being a woman in tech, being an immigrant, timing or luck. Those things are real, and pretending they don't exist would be naïve.
But therapy pointed me toward something else.
Somewhere along the way, I had outsourced my sense of worth. When people chose me, I felt valuable. When they didn't, I questioned myself. Without realizing it, I had built my life around a simple equation: if I do A, life should give me B. The A
kept changing. At first, it was working harder. Then it became spirituality. Later it became healing. More recently, it became personal growth.
Different pursuits. Exactly the same bargain.
Something unexpected happened after that interview. Instead of obsessing over rejection, I couldn't stop thinking about entirely different questions.
Why is marketing both science and art? Why does human judgment still matter even in AI-assisted systems? Why does automation require standardization before it can truly scale?
Those questions eventually became outlines for several essays.
At first I thought I had simply become more inspired. Then I noticed a pattern. Over the past several months, almost every meaningful breakthrough in therapy has been followed by a burst of new ideas. Not immediately, but often a few days later. That felt too consistent to be a coincidence.
For a long time, I believed creativity came from learning more, such as reading another book, listening to another podcast, building another framework or collecting more knowledge.
Lately, I've started wondering if it's almost the opposite. Maybe creativity isn't primarily about accumulation. Maybe it's about integration.
Looking back, I don't think those ideas suddenly appeared. They had probably been there all along. What changed wasn't the ideas. It was the amount of mental space available to connect them.
For years, so much of my attention had been consumed by proving myself, protecting myself, anticipating rejection, and trying to earn my place in the world that there simply wasn't much room left for curiosity.
As those old survival patterns slowly softened, something else began to emerge. Not because I became more intelligent. Not because I learned a new framework. But because my mind finally had room to wander.
I used to think healing would make me less ambitious. Instead, it gave my ideas room to breathe. The ambition didn't disappear. It simply stopped being consumed by survival. For the first time in years, it had somewhere else to go. Into curiosity. Into writing. Into creating.
Looking back, I think that's why so many of my recent essays seemed to arrive all at once. They weren't created overnight. They had probably been waiting much longer than I realized.
I first became interested in spirituality in 2023. I dug deeper into ideas like surrender, awareness, letting go, trusting life, Let the script unfold.
, Everything is exactly as it should be.
At the time, I thought I understood them. Looking back, I think only my mind understood them. My body didn't. I approached spirituality the same way I had approached everything else. As another project of self-improvement. I wanted to become more awakened, more detached, more peaceful. Even letting go became something I was trying very hard to achieve.
It took me much longer to realize that perhaps I had misunderstood the direction entirely. Healing doesn't simply remove pain. It creates space. As old fears, old beliefs, and old survival strategies slowly loosen their grip, something else begins to emerge on its own. Sometimes it's clarity. Sometimes it's creativity. Sometimes it's simply a quieter relationship with yourself. None of these feel like achievements. They feel strangely familiar.
Recently, I've found myself thinking about an old Chinese expression:
大道至简，殊途同归。
The Great Way is simple. Different paths eventually lead to the same destination.
The more I reflect on the past two years, the more I feel that growth, healing, creativity, and even spiritual practice are all pointing toward the same movement. It's not adding, not optimizing, not becoming someone else. But gently removing everything that was never really you in the first place.
For most of my life, I thought growth meant becoming. Becoming smarter, more successful, more healed. Lately, I've started wondering if growth moves in the opposite direction. Maybe it isn't about becoming. Maybe it's about remembering. It's not remembering facts.
Instead, healing is remembering yourself.
The version of you that existed before fear taught you who you had to become, before survival became your personality, before achievement became your identity.
Maybe that's why healing doesn't usually feel like meeting someone new. It feels like recognizing someone you've always known.
She was never missing. She was simply waiting.