32 🕊 (of becoming and serving)

My birthday always arrives around the same time as two markers of history I grew up with: Vietnam’s Independence Day and Labor Day in the US—the legacy of my homeland’s fight for freedom, and my second home’s tribute to the dignity of work.

In their expansion of meaning, I see that if freedom is earned through hard choices, risks, and the courage to build the life we want to live, then labor isn’t just what we do for a living—it’s also the inner work that shapes us, the unseen effort behind collective progress, and the harmony where ambition and rest meet.

Each year, they remind me that life is both a call to find freedom within, and a call to serve. Not separately, but together—where one sustains the other.

For most of my 32 years, I wrestled with the question of what I am here for. Not because I didn’t know myself enough, but because I felt ashamed of fully embracing who I already knew myself to be.

As a kid, and even through my twenties, it never felt cool to be deep, wise to live a life of service, or practical to embrace the present moment. It felt embarrassing—almost like a taboo—to admit how much I care, how much I love, how much I feel. “Just be yourself” often sounded like “be the version of yourself that helps you belong.” So I silenced my soul’s true calling as I walked the thin line between polarities, not knowing that effort would always return me to where I started. It’s taught me the discipline to trust my intuition and integrate everything into one whole.

“How sad is it if others feel this way too?” I often wondered, “How sad for the world if the noise convinces us that we only gain by being selfish, and survive only by assimilating?”

Despite the smiles I wore, my inner world once felt like a hell of darkness. But now, now that I’ve learned to let go of what isn’t real and let myself just be—in happiness or sorrow, in confidence or doubt—the light inside me has never gone out.

I realized the little kid who always felt so intensely has never really left. She’s grown stronger with age. More empowered. More loved. More tuned in.

And she brings me so much joy,

transcendent and pure.

I’ve become a 'birthday person.' Each year, I retreat inward to check in with myself, to see how far I’ve come in the journey of becoming more myself. Truer. Lighter. Freer.

But these holidays also remind me that the seemingly restless quest of becoming and serving can’t be fulfilled without rest and self-care. Because every action has a consequence, and how we show up each day shapes the world we take part in. Not good or bad—it simply is.

And perhaps, our lifetime job is to make a series of conscious choices, again and again, about who we want to be.