Writing & Self-Rebuilding
Essays on writing, procrastination, platform anxiety, self-understanding, emotional recovery, and how writing can become a way to rebuild one’s life from within.
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“Just Keep Writing”: I Never Expected Those Words to Come from My Mother
A long phone call with my mother gave me something I had never expected to hear from her: “Just keep writing.” It made me think differently about persistence—not as a promise of success, but as the choice to keep living,… Continue reading
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I Put Off Cutting a Pineapple for Days. In the End, It Took Me Three Minutes.
This essay begins with something very small: putting off cutting a pineapple for days, only to discover that the actual task took just a few minutes. From there, it reflects on how easily we can make things feel overwhelming before… Continue reading
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Where Does Pain Come From? Using Aristotle’s “Four Causes” to Make Sense of Myself
This essay uses Aristotle’s Four Causes as a simple framework for looking more closely at emotional pain—what it is made of, the patterns it forms, what triggers it, and what it may be trying to protect. Understanding the causes does… Continue reading
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The Things That Never Made It onto Life’s Report Card Will One Day Become Irreplaceable Parts of Your Story
This essay looks back on the detours, losses, unexpected encounters, and unusual experiences that never became conventional signs of success, yet quietly shaped a life. Sometimes it takes many years before we can understand what those experiences meant—and why the… Continue reading
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What Really Hooks Us Isn’t Short Videos, but the Illusion of Success
The internet rarely shows us the full reality of creative work. By constantly highlighting sudden success while hiding the far more common stories of slow growth, stagnation and failure, it can make us mistake possibility for probability—and leave us emotionally… Continue reading
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From Zero to One: At Last, Someone Followed the Scent
A reflection on what it means to move from zero to one as a writer. A few small signs—a like, a comment, a new subscriber—become proof that words can travel quietly through the dark and eventually reach someone far away. Continue reading
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July 27: An Ordinary Day That Wasn’t Quite Ordinary
On July 27, my independent website received its first like, and I finally began using Threads. That small moment helped me see more clearly how writing, daily life, and different platforms can support one another—not through sudden growth, but through… Continue reading
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I Went into Bìguān¹ for Five Months—and Unexpectedly Found the Path I Truly Wanted to Follow
For five months, I stepped away from social media and thought I had failed again. Instead, writing helped me untangle years of anxiety, understand what I truly wanted to create, and see my website not as another platform, but as… Continue reading
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When Desire Is Stronger Than Self-Control, Stop Fighting It Head-On
When desire, habit and immediate reward are stronger than willpower, forcing ourselves into a head-on battle often makes failure more likely. Drawing on Mao Zedong’s strategic thinking, this essay explores how understanding the real structure of a problem, changing the… Continue reading
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Theory Does Not Enter Life First; It Is Lit Up Again by Life
This essay was written after I finally built A Chinese Way of Seeing. Starting from the small but meaningful act of registering an independent website, it reflects on procrastination, writing, theory, and lived experience. For me, writing is not only… Continue reading
Jane Sonnenschein | A Chinese Way of Seeing 