Book Launch | A Year of Becoming

I am writing this to you from a completely different corner of the world. The faded tiles and Atlantic breeze of Lisbon are thousands of miles behind me now. Today, I’m watching the neon lights and relentless, hyper-speed energy of China hum outside my window.

But my mind keeps drifting back to that rusted Portuguese balcony where this all began.

Six years ago, I did what a lot of people dream of doing when they are suffocating. I walked away from my well-established corporate career. I stripped off the armour of my titles, deleted the predictable calendar invites, and abandoned the exhausting performance of playing the version of “Camellia” everyone else expected.

I thought I was running toward freedom. I packed a suitcase, bought a one-way ticket, and went searching for clarity.

Instead, I just found more pavement.

I wandered from city to city, continent to continent, from the relentless grid of London to the quiet streets of Manchester, and eventually to Portugal. But everywhere I landed, the same heavy, aching sense of incompleteness sat down right next to me at the table.

That is the terrifying truth they don’t tell you about radical changes: Geography isn’t medicine. You can cross an ocean, but you still bring the same fractured static inside your own head.

It wasn’t until I ran out of new cities to fly to, until I finally stopped running right there in Lisbon, that the dust settled. I gathered the raw, scattered thoughts I’d scribbled down in those Portuguese cafés, carried them with me here to China, and finally turned them into a mirror.

There is a specific kind of loneliness that hits you when you are sitting in a foreign apartment, watching the light change over a city that doesn’t know your name.

In those heavy Lisbon nights, the silence was deafening. Without a corporate structure to hide behind, without a packed schedule to numb me, I was forced to look at my own consciousness.

I started reading Fernando Pessoa, a man who lived and died in t…