Hello World.

Hi. This is my first blog post. Thank you so much for being here, for clicking onto my first ever website.

I wanted a digital space where I can just be. No Instagram. No TikTok. No Substack. Just me. Long-form. Unfiltered. Honest.

Three weeks ago, I took a 22-hour journey from Jakarta, Indonesia back to San Francisco. Just days before that, I was in Karnataka, India earning my RYC 200-hour yoga teacher certification in Hatha Vinyasa. Exactly one year ago, I left the United States not knowing who I would be when I returned.

Now I am sitting at one of my favorite cafés in my hometown, La Promenade, chai to the left of my computer, fog rolling down the street. I grew up here, but I feel like a stranger. Culture shock in your own city is a strange thing. But I have changed. I feel it in my body.

There is a Laufey song I think about when I walk through San Francisco on foggy afternoons. “Street by Street.”

Street by street, breath by breath
From the Back Bay to the sky
I’m taking back my city
I’m taking back my life.

I was born on Geary and Divisadero and grew up in the Fillmore. A real city kid. At 18, I packed up two suitcases and moved to Minnesota to attend Macalester College on a full ride. I hugged my family goodbye at the security gate and flew over two thousand miles away from the only home I had ever known.

I was naive. I did not know what college would ask of me.

My first year, a friend passed away on a snowy night. The winters were dark in more ways than one. Pop Smoke died. Kobe Bryant died. During the second semester of my first year, I was sent home because of COVID. When I returned, the world felt fractured.

That summer, George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis. The city was angry. Curfews. Sirens. Protests. Grief in the air. Then Daunte Wright. More anger. More pain.

I met a boy. I fell in love. We were young and trying to survive the same storm.

As a full-time working student, I had no language for what I was holding. I raised money for mutual aid efforts on the ground, but inside, I was unraveling. I did not know how to process grief, rage, and fear all at once. So I smoked. I drank. I numbed. I told myself I was coping.

In college, I surrounded myself with music, art, and film. I took Modern and Ballet. I took my first yoga class. I fell in love with movement. But slowly, the art got quieter. The grief got louder. I struggled to create. Instead of making something from my pain, I chose to suppress it. Smoking became easier than feeling. Avoidance became easier than vulnerability. It affected my friendships. It affected how I loved. It affected how I showed up.

For my degree, I was required to study abroad. Indonesia was my first choice, but restrictions made that impossible at the time. So I left for Tunisia and Italy to study Immigration, Politics, and Identity. I thought distance might heal me. It did not. No matter how many miles I traveled, I was still carrying myself.

The last two years of college felt different. Heavier. I felt like I had swallowed reality whole and it was lodged in my throat.

After graduation, I broke up with my college partner. We had been bonded by grief and trauma. When the storm settled, we realized we did not know who we were without it.

I stayed in Minnesota another year. I was not ready to leave. The city had shaped me. I loved the sharpness of winter on my skin, the punk energy, the accessibility of the film and art scene. I had built community there. People knew me.

I got my first apartment on Lyndale Avenue in Minneapolis. I worked as a server at the restaurant inside the Walker Art Center. I got my first office job as a sex educator at Family Tree Clinic. On paper, everything looked aligned. Work. Money. Independence.

Inside, I felt alone. I was still numbing my way through life.

I knew something had to change.

At the end of 2024, my two childhood best friends from the Bay and I finally took the post-graduation trip we never had. We packed small backpacks and traveled for nearly two months, starting in Thailand and ending in Indonesia.

On a hostel rooftop in Bangkok Thailand, I made a quiet decision. I would follow my heart. I accepted admission to Universitas Gadjah Mada in Yogyakarta.

Living in Jogja changed me.

I stopped smoking. I deepened my meditation and yoga practice. In the backyard of a woman from Mumbai named Vika, who has built a life in Indonesia teaching yoga for health I returned to the body. In exchange for tutoring her son, she shared the lineage she was taught.

Later in Indonesia, I completed a 10-day Vipassana silent retreat in Bogor.

Ten days. No phone. No speaking. No eye contact. Just breath and sensation.

It broke me open.

For the first time, I could not run. I could not distract. I could not perform. I sat with the grief. The anger. The loneliness. The versions of myself I had been avoiding. I watched how craving and aversion moved through my body. I watched how pain rises and passes. I watched how I had been feeding my own suffering.

In Indonesia, I put it all down. The cigarettes. The noise. The constant stimulation. I turned inward.

The truth was not dramatic. It was quiet. It was steady. It was already there.

When I returned to the United States a few weeks ago, I had just completed a year of studying Indonesian language, culture, and history. I had also just come from India, where I completed my yoga teacher training in Hatha Vinyasa.

Now I am home.

Reintegrating slowly. Taking weekly meditation classes. Continuing my yoga practice. Studying philosophy with my institute, Samyak. Sorting through the hundreds of photos and videos I took but have not yet had the courage to rewatch.

I do not have everything figured out. I am still learning how to create again. How to feel without numbing. How to stay.

But I know this: life feels different when you choose to look within.

This digital space is where I will tell the truth about that journey. Street by street. Breath by breath.

I am taking back my life.