By Jane Sonnenschein · July 19, 2026

Einstein’s words about never ceasing to question remind me that perhaps what matters is not finding every answer immediately, but never stopping our search for understanding.

A few days ago, a follower sent me a private message: “Why did you suddenly disappear for so long? Why haven’t you updated TikTok?”

I smiled and replied, “I went into bìguān.”

Even I paused when I said it. Looking back, those five months really did resemble the kind of secluded retreat described in Chinese martial arts stories. From the outside, people saw silence, absence and months without new content. But I knew that I had not stopped moving forward. Somewhere beyond public view, I had been taking out the questions that had troubled me for years and slowly working through them one by one.

A few months earlier, if someone had asked, “You stopped updating for so long. Did you give up again?” I probably would have nodded without hesitation.

Throughout more than forty years of life, I had experienced this pattern too many times. I would begin something with enormous enthusiasm, only to stop halfway for one reason or another. Once I stopped, the project usually ended for good. Strangely, after the initial disappointment, I would sometimes even feel a quiet sense of relief, as though I had finally been given permission not to keep going.

When I thought about it more carefully, I realized that this pattern had followed me through most of my life.

Once, I exercised consistently for six months. For people who have maintained a fitness routine for years, half a year may not sound remarkable. But for someone who had always struggled to continue anything beyond the first burst of enthusiasm, it was the longest I had ever kept going.

During those six months, I exercised at home for thirty minutes to an hour almost every day, often finishing drenched in sweat. My weight did not change as much as I had imagined it would. It may even have stayed the same because I was gaining muscle. Still, I continued.

Then, for reasons I can no longer clearly remember, the routine was interrupted.

Looking back, what made me give up was not the interruption itself. It was the familiar explanation I immediately gave myself: “See? You really cannot stick with anything. Since you have already broken the routine, you might as well forget it.”

Many things in my life ended that way.

I can now see that what trapped me was not a lack of ability. It was my habit of treating every pause as proof of total failure, and then turning that failure into a brutal judgment of my entire character.

Last May, I began experimenting with my first KDP book. It was a simple recipe notebook inspired by Mother’s Day, and I completed it almost entirely on impulse. The project into which I later poured all my enthusiasm, however, was a series of trilingual colouring books.

I spent an enormous amount of time developing that series.

I created a unified logo, designed the characters and covers, and even mapped out how the entire series might grow. I did not want it to be merely an ordinary colouring book. I imagined combining it with audio, videos, picture cards and vocabulary cards, so that children could encounter different languages while they coloured.

I still believe it was a meaningful idea.

At the time, I was almost painfully devoted to it. I revised a single cover dozens of times. I could sit at the computer for more than ten hours trying to perfect one detail. I did not want to make an ordinary product. I wanted to create something with genuine value.

But the market later taught me a harsh lesson.

I spent a considerable amount on advertising, yet after a book was sold, my actual profit might be less than two euros. Gradually, I realised that most parents had very simple expectations when they bought a colouring book. They wanted their children to sit quietly and draw for a while. They were not necessarily looking for additional audio, videos or structured learning activities.

I found that difficult to accept. I had worked so carefully and invested so much time and thought. Why had the market not recognised it?

Only later did I understand that the question was not whether the product had value. The problem was that I had confused my own expectations with what the market genuinely wanted.

To promote the trilingual colouring books, I began working seriously on TikTok, Facebook and Instagram. I was starting almost entirely from scratch, because I had barely used overseas social-media platforms before. Every day, I studied videos, editing, cover images and platform rules. I tried to post consistently, hoping that content would help more people discover my work.

Around November 11 last year, my TikTok account suddenly experienced a major surge.

In little more than ten days, I gained over seven thousand followers.

To be honest, I was thrilled. I felt that I had finally been seen and that all my previous effort was beginning to lead somewhere. I even started to believe that, as long as I continued, my trilingual colouring books would gradually begin to sell.

Reality soon delivered another blow.

Many of the videos I made afterwards seemed better to me than the one that had gone viral. I had spent more time on them and paid greater attention to every detail, yet the numbers kept declining. I checked the analytics every day, refreshed the view counts and tried to understand why someone else’s simple video could receive hundreds of thousands of views while something I had spent several days making was barely watched.

I became increasingly anxious. What tormented me was not only the numbers themselves, but the fact that I had gradually tied my sense of worth to them.

Later, the pressure of an intensive training programme became too much, and I had to stop posting. At the time, I was trying to study, make videos and continue developing the colouring books. I was close to breaking point. In February, I finally decided to stop updating all my platforms.

I thought I had failed again.

What happened afterwards, however, was completely unexpected. Although I stopped making videos, I did not stop writing.

Since last December, I have written almost every day. Around that time, I opened a WeChat Official Account², one of China’s major platforms for publishing written content. It is somewhat comparable to Medium, although it exists within the WeChat ecosystem, where writers can publish long-form essays and readers can subscribe, read and share them.

I did not manage to publish something every day, but I was writing almost daily. Later, I also began sharing some of my essays on Xiaohongshu³. These gradually became the two main platforms on which I published my writing.

Writing did not immediately free me from my anxiety about numbers.

When an article received very few views, I still felt discouraged. It was as though I were standing alone in a dark, empty field, calling out without knowing whether my voice had reached anyone. Sometimes I had already finished several articles and had accumulated a large archive of unpublished work, yet because the previous pieces had performed poorly, I suddenly lost the desire to publish anything at all.

But writing differed from making videos in one important way.

When a video performed badly, I often stopped wanting to make videos altogether. A video required planning, finding images, editing, recording a voice-over and adding subtitles. Throughout the entire process, I was constantly reminded that the finished work would eventually be judged by platform metrics.

Writing was different. Even when I did not feel ready to publish, even when an essay remained inside a document on my computer, I still continued to write and think.

One of my essays, “I Thought, I Wrote, and What Happened Next Was No Longer Mine to Control,” came out of precisely that state of mind.

Platform data influenced whether I wanted to click “Publish,” but it did not make me stop writing itself.

Looking back, that distinction was extremely important.

In the past, once I encountered poor external feedback, I often abandoned the activity itself. This time, even though the numbers on WeChat and Xiaohongshu still affected me, the writing continued.

In May, I also went through a period that appeared almost completely out of control.

I had just completed six months of highly intensive training. It felt as though a tightly stretched string inside me had suddenly gone slack. Soon afterwards, I began watching short-form dramas obsessively. For two weeks, I watched them almost day and night. I even downloaded a specialised app and moved from one series to the next.

I no longer know how many I watched.

Many of them were produced using AI, yet their level of completion exceeded everything I had expected. Some were, in certain respects, more compelling than dramas made with real actors.

In the past, I would probably have condemned myself harshly for this. I would have said, “Look at you. You are wasting time again. You are someone who can never accomplish anything.” I would have taken two weeks of watching short dramas and turned them into a sweeping indictment of my personality and character.

But this time, something changed.

After watching those dramas, I wrote more than a dozen essays inspired by their plots and themes. I wrote about rebirth, choice, perception, relationships, why kind people are so easily drained by others, and why human beings so often fantasise about returning to the past and beginning again.

I had assumed that I was merely consuming mindless entertainment. Instead, I discovered that those repetitive, exaggerated and sometimes absurd stories were constantly prompting me to reconsider real life.

The dramas had not suddenly become profound works of philosophy. But writing meant that I was no longer consuming them passively.

I began asking why stories about rebirth had become so popular, why people were so eager to return to the past and correct their mistakes, and why viewers who knew perfectly well that the plots were exaggerated still felt unable to stop watching one episode after another.

It was then that I gradually realised that the greatest change writing had brought me was perhaps not that it had made me more disciplined or more perfect. It had taught me how to understand my own experiences.

In the past, I would have defined those two weeks as decline and wasted time. Now, I was able to extract questions from them, organise my responses and turn them into new ways of thinking.

This does not mean that every moment must be made “useful,” nor that watching short dramas becomes valuable only when it produces an essay. It means that when I stopped rushing to judge myself, I became able to see what an experience had actually given me.

From last December until now, I have been writing for eight months. I have never counted the exact number of essays, but there are already several hundred pieces stored in my documents.

More importantly, those eight months have shown me for the first time that writing changes more than a person’s prose. It changes the way a person understands herself and the world.

Many of the questions that once made me anxious were slowly clarified through one essay after another. Many concepts I once understood only in theory gradually became things I genuinely grasped through the act of writing.

One of them was long-termism.

I had known the term before. I understood that a person should not judge everything according to immediate results. But between knowing an idea and truly living by it lies the full weight of a person’s experience.

When platform numbers are poor, when effort receives no response and when you remain unable to see any result, it is easy to say, “I believe in the long term.” The difficult part is knowing why you should continue when no reward is visible.

Writing slowly helped me understand myself.

I began to recognise what I was genuinely good at, what I was willing to continue doing for a long time, which pursuits were driven mainly by anxiety, and which things I would still want to do even when no one was watching.

When a person has a clearer understanding of the road behind her and some idea of where she is capable of going, the constantly shifting numbers around her lose some of their power.

They still affect my emotions. I have not become someone who is entirely indifferent to data. But those numbers can no longer decide so easily whether I will continue doing something.

There was another change as well.

For several months, I had kept saying that I wanted to build an independent website, yet I never truly began. One day I thought I was not ready. The next day, I thought I should design the logo first. Then I decided I needed to plan the categories. Eventually, I even began wondering whether I should choose an auspicious day to start.

I had imagined building a website as something extraordinarily difficult, like a mountain standing in front of me with no visible path upwards.

Then, on July 1, I suddenly realised that half the year had already passed. If I did not begin that day, I might postpone it until the end of the year—or even until the next.

At half past ten that evening, I opened my computer and told myself that before midnight, I would at least register the website.

Less than two hours later, it was done.

The following day, I created the homepage and built the menus and pages. On the third day, I had already begun uploading my first article.

I suddenly understood that the thing I had postponed for months was not really the website itself. It was the enormous imagined version of “building a website” that had grown inside my mind.

In the past, I always wanted to prepare everything perfectly before beginning. But the longer I prepared, the larger the task became in my imagination, until eventually I no longer knew where to start.

Once I actually began, I discovered that many things were not nearly as difficult as I had feared.

After the website was built, I had an unexpectedly powerful feeling: it was as though I finally had a home that truly belonged to me.

Only later did I understand that what I had needed was never merely another platform for traffic. I needed a place capable of carrying my thoughts over time.

The greatest value of a website is not only that it belongs to me. It also allows an essay to continue growing.

If I gain a new understanding two months after writing something, I can revise it. If, half a year later, I discover that an argument needs to be expanded or corrected, I can return and improve it.

Thought itself is never fixed.

Real thinking does not mean possessing a complete answer from the beginning. It means moving gradually towards deeper understanding through observation, revision, doubt, rejection and reinterpretation.

I increasingly feel that writing resembles walking through a forest covered in mist.

You do not know what lies ahead, nor do you know where the path will end. Often, you take the wrong direction and have to turn back. Sometimes, something you believed deeply yesterday already appears different today.

You may think you are heading towards A, only to find yourself arriving at B. Or you may travel a long way from B and eventually return to A—but when you return, your understanding of A is no longer the same.

With every step, the mist clears a little. Gradually, the wrong turns, retreats, detours and renewed choices begin to connect into a road that belongs only to you.

That is why, now that I have begun posting again on TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, my state of mind is entirely different from what it was five months ago.

Before, I wanted platforms to help me sell books. I wanted traffic to prove my value, and I hoped that one viral post might transform my life.

Now, I finally understand that the website is my home. It records my thoughts, my growth and the mud I have struggled through along the way. The platforms are simply tools that allow more people to discover that these thoughts exist.

Creation and promotion have finally become separate things for me.

Essays, reflection and long-term accumulation are what I genuinely want to pursue. Editing, uploading, choosing cover images and distributing content across different platforms are merely procedures that help the work become visible.

Since they are procedures, every step does not need to be perfect. Nor do I need to create an entirely different version for every platform.

In the past, I spent enormous amounts of energy on form. I wanted every version to be complete and polished, yet often I was already exhausted before anything was published.

Now, I would rather reserve my energy for the work itself and turn repetitive, uninteresting tasks into a simple and sustainable routine.

If someone asked me today what happened during those five months, I think I would answer that I did not disappear, and I did not give up.

I simply stepped away for a while from the numbers that kept pulling at my emotions and gave more time to writing, thinking and putting my inner world in order.

Only now do I understand that true bìguān is not about hiding from the world. It is about using a period of quiet to return to the questions you have never fully understood and slowly think them through.

The greatest thing I gained from those five months was not that I began posting again, nor that I finally built a website.

It was that I finally understood why I wanted to write, what I truly hoped to leave behind, and which path I might continue walking from here.

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Notes

1. Bìguān (闭关)
Literally meaning “to close the gate,” bìguān originally refers to withdrawing from ordinary life for a period of secluded practice, meditation or concentrated study. In Chinese martial arts and fantasy stories, a person may enter bìguān to train in isolation, recover from an injury, deepen their abilities or reach a new level of understanding. In contemporary Chinese, the term is also used humorously or metaphorically for stepping away from public activity in order to focus intensely, think, study or rebuild oneself.

2. Gōngzhònghào (公众号)
A gōngzhònghào, commonly translated as a WeChat Official Account, is a publishing channel within WeChat. Writers, media organisations, businesses and institutions use these accounts to publish articles and send updates directly to subscribers. Unlike a conventional social-media feed, it is especially suited to long-form written content and functions partly like a newsletter, blog and subscription platform combined.

3. Xiǎohóngshū (小红书)
Xiǎohóngshū, whose name literally means “Little Red Book,” is a Chinese social-media and lifestyle platform. Internationally, it is also known as RedNote. It combines short posts, images, videos, product recommendations and increasingly long-form personal writing. Its recommendation system is strongly driven by engagement data, which can make visibility highly unpredictable for creators.

This essay is also available in other languages:

Chinese version: 我去“闭关”了五个月，却意外找到了自己真正要走的路

German version: Ich zog mich fünf Monate lang ins Bìguān zurück – und fand unerwartet den Weg, den ich wirklich gehen möchte