Soul Path Insights

I definitely felt out of place during the season I lived in San Jose, California. The city practically runs on circuits and algorithms. Everywhere you look, people are engineers, programmers, or some flavor of math-and-science genius. Conversations at coffee shops weren’t about movies, music, or books; they were about debugging code, server crashes, or who just got hired at the latest start-up. Meanwhile, I was sitting there with my notebook and pen, trying to figure out a good metaphor for a poem. Let’s just say, I wasn’t exactly their target audience.

Coming from a liberal arts background, I felt like the odd one out in a city that worships logic and precision. My degree didn’t come with equations or data sets; it came with essays, creative projects, and the ability to survive long nights in the library fueled by coffee and existential angst. People would ask me what I did, and when I said “writing,” I could almost hear the unspoken, “but what do you actually do?” Like, sorry to disappoint, but I don’t spend my weekends soldering microchips. My craft doesn’t exactly get featured at tech expos.

Los Angeles, on the other hand, feels like my natural habitat. In LA, being “artsy” isn’t a liability, it’s a lifestyle. You can sit in a café and overhear script ideas, poetry slams, or people debating which K-drama has the best character arc, and you feel instantly understood. That’s why I always say San Jose was like visiting a foreign country where I didn’t speak the binary language. But in LA? That’s my city. Here, art and storytelling are currency, and for someone like me, that makes all the difference.

Oh, while you’re here, check out my book 17 Syllables of Me on Amazon. I also write other stuff on my blog Soul Path Insights.

Thanks for reading! 🤗