Welcome to Thoughtful Wanders!

what IS thoughtful wanders? what am i trying to do? where am i headed? & quick life update

A big part of Thoughtful Wanders is about honoring my younger self & inner child

Hi there! It’s me, Lydia. If you’re receiving this, you may have subscribed a few months ago when I tried to market my yet-to-be-released newsletter when I quit my job, moved out of San Francisco, and wanted to eagerly share with everyone my next moves.

At the time I had told a lot of people the generic “I am quitting my job to travel the world” because that was the easy quick answer. It also failed to convey just how scared and excited I was about this huge decision to leave my stable life behind as well as how long I had actually been planning for a move like this. But the real answer to "why I quit my job” or “why I am pursuing Thoughtful Wanders” is longer, and more substantial. Yes, it’s about travel, but that’s maybe like 10% of it. Little did I communicate at the time, how personal and important this project (Thoughtful Wanders) is to me, how much mental and emotional effort has gone into this project (or rather, the vision of this project), so that’s what today’s post is about. 

What exactly is Thoughtful Wanders? How did it come to be? Where do I hope to go with it? How long have I been envisioning this? And I’ll include updates too including what I’ve been up to since moving out of the U.S. mid-September.

I have a lot to say and I’ve been thinking a long time about what to say and how to say it, but alas, I did not get possessed by a creative spirit that completed the essay in my head and now I get to effortlessly regurgitate it here. If only that were the case. Instead, I’m writing and revising, and overthinking every step of the way as I write this post with excitement and fear. Excitement because writing on Substack means I can finally write in my true voice, and not have to self-censor for the purpose of advertising products or trying to market myself as a copywriter or write anything formal, “client-facing”, or academic (which is the writing I have most experience with). Fear, because I haven’t actually shown my “true voice” writing with many people before, and now it’s going to be public. Ahh! Well, here we go!

What Exactly is Thoughtful Wanders?

In short, Thoughtful Wanders is my baby. 

This is me as a baby. “I…just a baby” has been a recent viral audio on TikTok.

That doesn’t say very much, hmm.

But it does tell you that it is something very personal and close to me. Okay, let me try to be clearer. One day, I hope for Thoughtful Wanders to be a platform that cultivates creativity, critical thinking, curiosity, and connection (to others, and to self). Currently, Thoughtful Wanders is my individual project focused on (un)learning about the world, society, and self. I know, it’s kind of vague. But actually, that’s the whole point. It’s an open-ended, kind of meta, project of mine that I am diving into as fully as I can handle to cultivate my own creativity, critical thinking, curiosity…etc. 

Before it becomes a platform for other people, it is a platform for me. To be me, to find me, to create me. It is literally what the name suggests - thoughts and wanders. I’ve been a wanderer all my life, both tangibly (physically) and intangibly (mind & emotions) and through it all, I have many observations, thoughts, and questions. Very human ones. But not necessarily well-represented ones out there. This meant I have often felt alone in my thoughts and questions about life, but the few times I expressed it, I found that there were others who could relate. And yet, why are so many of the common experiences and questions we share, left unspoken and hidden? The comforting homes I find (as I am sure is the case for others) lie in books, essays, illustrations, videos, comics, art, podcasts, film. While I am an avid consumer of content about the human experience, I’ve also had a huge pull to be a creator of this content too. Thoughtful Wanders is therefore, a platform for me to express the very many thoughts and questions my hyper-curious-and-overthinking mind tends to produce. I am curious about humanity and life at its essence, and my one urge is to create about it, whether that be in art, writing, video, or who knows what medium. (You can find me @thoughtfulwanders on most social media platforms).

A bigger part of Thoughtful Wanders is for me to explore my interests in the realms of personal growth, mental health, spirituality, travel, society & culture, critical thinking, social justice, creativity, learning, and life. Usually when I see content about these various topics, they exist solely in their own realm. Generally, I can find content focused on personal growth OR travel OR social justice OR spirituality, but rarely do I find work that intersects all of these topics together. Topics that, to me, have a lot of overlapping elements and are inseparable in many ways. And as Toni Morrison said it best, “If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.” And that goes for all art.

A huge part of this project is…getting to my vision. I know my craft and creative skills currently don’t align with what’s in my head. But that’s part of the journey of Thoughtful Wanders. To document and track my journey as I lean into my creativity and personal growth. Making work as I go, growing as I make, and eventually getting to a place where this can all flow more easily (or maybe that never happens, but it’s worth trying). To keep creating and eventually with a good quantity of work to look at, the obvious patterns and style start to pop out. You can see how this project is all kinds of meta, right?

*now is the perfect timing to insert the quote about “The Gap” most creatives are familiar with by Ira Glass*

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

― Ira Glass

How did Thoughtful Wanders come to be?

That expression on my face? That’s how I feel about this “following my dream” thing most of the time. Photo is of me being a “twinkle twinkle little star” in a play. That is, if memory is serving me right.

I will write a longer post about this one day. I actually have attempted writing a post about the same topic along the lines of “my journey as a writer/blogger/creative” and each time the draft goes on for pages and pages. It ends up being a cathartic writing exercise for me to better understand myself more than something “publish-able”. 

Thoughtful Wanders came to be because I’ve wanted to be a writer and artist for as long as I can remember. On a more precise note, I remember wanting to blog since I was in 5th grade, but I didn’t have the guts for it. I would write for my own eyes and was too self conscious to share it publicly. I don’t regret that. I did not enjoy drama and didn’t particularly want people I know in real life to read my work. And also couldn’t get around to sharing anonymously either. This “self consciousness” around sharing my thoughts and writing continued all the way through college and after. But despite the fear around sharing my writing and hence my personal thoughts, I still enjoyed writing and art, but only got to do it with the little free time I had. Though over the years, that free time did increase (thanks I guess, pandemic). Still, I struggled with sharing my work because being vulnerable in public scared me. It still does, but I’m committed to pursuing this dream anyway.

Besides art and writing, I’ve wanted to be an entrepreneur and self-employed since my high school days. Primarily, I’ve wanted to be location independent for a long time, and consumed a lot of content about this lifestyle when it first became trendy (AKA the #digitalnomad life).  Though my reason wasn’t to travel and work on a beach, but so I could make time for my family and friends spread far and wide around the world. And I also fantasized about being my own boss because I didn’t want to answer to anyone else and knew I’d enjoy a flexible lifestyle. I’ve been studying and following artists, writers, and online communities of all sorts diligently since my high school years. I admired the people who were able to generate an income by doing something they created on their own, especially those who thought out of the box to earn a living. Following these various artists and creators inspired me to desire to earn a living in my very own “think out of the box” style.

Lastly, and most importantly for the build up of Thoughtful Wanders, was the continuous strong inner calling (best word I can think of…) to create at the intersections of personal growth, society & culture, and art. It’s hard to explain. But I’ve known for a long time that some of my strengths and talents include the ability to concisely communicate the complex and nuanced, to get very real very quickly, to sit with emotions and existential questions, to connect with strangers about difficult topics, to write or make relatable work, and most of all, to be keenly aware of my observations of the world from my particular life experience where I have been an outsider in a lot of ways. To describe this in another way would be that I have felt very strongly about a lot of things in the world and the things I’ve noticed and seen, but had no real outlet* to communicate it, but I knew in my gut that it had to be communicated and shared in some way because I know I am not alone in feeling or thinking this way. This continued experience of almost bursting with “feelings” or “ideas” or “thoughts” made it hard to manage living everyday life and not working towards this “calling”. I felt like I was rejecting myself over and over again. Throughout the years I’ve had a lot of blogs, websites, domain names, experiments, creative periods and attempts at making this *thing* — now Thoughtful Wanders — happen. But as I discussed earlier, it’s still a meta-work-in-progress kind of project.

*For the longest time my friends were my outlet. I had a lot of things to say about life and the bigger picture, to the point that I realized I was monopolizing conversations in the direction of my curiosity about the world. This took my focus away from my relationships and my friends as people, and selfishly towards my interests. I also started to expect certain excitement or responses from my friends, which set me up for disappointment and is ultimately not fair because your friends =/= your audience. It became clear to me that I needed a bigger outlet than my friends.

Where do I hope to go with Thoughtful Wanders?

I want to tell you don’t stop dreaming! Follow your dreams! But don’t listen to me because I am just starting this journey and who knows how it will go, ha.

I hope this project and the many sub-project ideas I have affiliated with it will take me to all parts of the world, and I don’t mean just physically. Yes, travel is part of the picture, mostly because I am a curious person and I am very curious about the world, experiencing it, and learning about it, as well as thinking about how we learn about the world. More than travel though, I hope Thoughtful Wanders will be how I learn to consistently show up for my craft, and for myself. I want to write more freely and comfortably, and share it with the world unabashedly. I want to feel comfortable showing my face and art online and on video, and discuss some of the bigger questions of life and society. I want to be able to make the art I dream up in my head in that moment and not “I’ll save this idea for a day far in the future”. I want to be able to create and take that leap of faith that I will not run out of ideas, or if I did in the short term, more ideas will come. I want to be able to overcome my personal fears and repeatedly conquer the little voice that says “you have nothing worthy to say so don’t say it” because that’s not true. I want to use creativity to find a way back to myself and unlearn a lot of society’s conditioning that has made me small and scared.

And once I’ve reached a place where I am living my truth and making work that resonates with me, I want to help others do the same. Perhaps it’ll be in the personal growth and mental health realm, or in the creative and art realm, or connecting with others who have felt like “outsiders” all their life. Perhaps it’ll be to help others travel or learn better, or with more self-awareness. I don’t know, I just know that I am intrigued by the possibility of creating something that feeds our souls in a nurturing and awe-inspiring way, especially when the reality of living in this world is bleak and depressing. 

The bigger picture of it all is that I want to follow my dreams and what my gut desires. Because why not? I happen to have the privilege and resources currently (though this is certainly finite & I also worked very hard for this), but can I challenge myself to make it last? Can I challenge myself to generate more resources to make this all a lifelong self-sustainable endeavor? That’s part of the journey. I’ve come to decide that I owe it to myself, my younger self and my future self, to give myself this chance at pursuing what my inner gut has been pushing for all these years. And as is evident by the photos paired with this post…I take “owing it to my younger self / inner child" very seriously.

Life Update: What I’ve been up to since I left San Francisco (& the U.S.)

On one of our day hikes in Yasin Valley in Northern Pakistan (Gilgit Baltistan region) which is where we spent most of our trip. We were lucky to be there when fall colors hit, so the trees were especially beautiful.

I’ve been both traveling and in hibernation. Some big shifts have happened in my personal life that have taken a lot of time to adjust to and I had decided it best to spend some time focused on taking a break after working non-stop for 5 years post-college, and just…do nothing. After a chaotic couple of weeks wrapping up work and either getting rid or packing up my things, I embarked on a 3 week women’s tour to Pakistan. The trip was both incredible and challenging in many ways I both did anticipate and also didn’t? It was a good experience and I’ll be writing about it in the coming newsletters. After 3 weeks in Pakistan, I spent 2 weeks decompressing on an island in Thailand. It was a spur of a moment decision to land there. I did a lot of slow solo adventuring there, including snorkeling and scuba diving. I then headed back to Taipei, Taiwan where I’ve been since. These days have been a lot of reading, exercising, doing nothing, reconnecting with family and myself, and working on my projects. I have about a month left before my travels continue onwards. 

It has been good and challenging to “hibernate”. With no job or boss to answer to, I’ve enjoyed the freedom of having unstructured time to myself. But the challenging part is also, after so many years of school and work, it’s kind of hard to let yourself enjoy this much unstructured time. It’s been even more challenging to find the motivation to learn to structure my own time and get started on the many ideas and projects I’ve been planning for a long time. I’m both excited to start creating on a regular basis, and sad, because it is nice to do nothing but lay around and do whatever you feel like doing (usually leisurely activities). But if I keep doing that, I’d never make my dreams come true.

That’s it for my #001 post. Writing this was really fun. I haven’t written besides journaling in a long time, and it was fun to get into the rhythm of conveying my thoughts to an “audience” again. 

Ending with a quote from the book I’m currently reading (and really enjoying), Maybe You Should Talk to Someone –

(I read this chapter and section today. The author was writing about the four ultimate concerns in life, theorized by Irvin Yalom, and they are death, isolation, freedom, and meaninglessness. This section on freedom stuck with me. It got me thinking to embrace this stage of my life as it is now, despite all the uncertainties and *scary what ifs*, there is an element of freedom I have access to now that I am lucky to have and want to continue cultivating in life.)

“But there’s also the reality that as people get older, they face more limitations. It becomes harder to change careers or move to a different city or marry a different person. Their lives are more defined, and sometimes they crave the freedom of youth. But children, bound by parental rules, are really free only in one respect—emotionally. For a while, at least, they can cry or laugh or have tantrums unselfconsciously; they can have big dreams and unedited desires. Like many people my age, I don’t feel free because I’ve lost touch with that emotional freedom. And that’s what I’m doing here in therapy—trying to free myself emotionally again.” - Lori Gottlieb

(In line with the theme of “inner child” in today’s post, I hope to specifically cultivate having big dreams and unedited desires. That is a beautiful freedom we tend to lose as we get older)