Who am I?

That’s a question I’ve been asking for the past several years.

It depends on the context. I am an adaptive shapeshifting, mirroring what the person in front of me needs me to be, at the cost of my own self.

So who are you?

If it’s a “professional” context, then I am a seasoned change management consultant with experience across many industries including tech, retail, healthcare, and government. My specialty is graphic facilitation, where I sketch out visual ideas and concepts to help teams align on a common vision. Today, I am a co-founder at a Seattle-based life-sciences startup that developed an FDA-cleared mask that kills 99.9% of tested viruses.

Then who are you really?

If you pause the conversation long enough, and the context is safe enough, then you’ll start to see a crack, and a light emerge from my armor. Deep down inside, at the soul level, my primal wound centers around the Vietnam War. I am a child of Vietnamese Boat People refugees. My parents lived in a war, where between 1965 and 1975, the United States and its allies dropped more than 7.5 million tons of bombs on SE Asia (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) – double the amount dropped during World War II. After the war ended, my dad was sent to communist re-education camp.

They fled by riverboat, out to the open South China Sea, traveling more than 700 miles to Ga Lang refugee camp in Indonesia. My mom was pregnant with me during that trip, and she gave me birth to me at the camp.

Immigrants come to the US to realize their personal dreams. We came to the US because we were displaced, uprooted from our home, and planted in a foreign land. I grew up in the United States of America in the 80s, assimulating to the melting pot of America.

I’m not sure what to do with this.

For the past five years, I’ve been doing my deep inner work, peeling the layers back one-by-one. I’m healing my core wounds, and in doing that work, I’ve learned to get away from point A to point B, but to be in the here and now, where the pain is the greatest.

I am an Alchemist.

I don’t choose sides, I bridge opposite poles, integrating it into my life, and the lives of those around me. My survival adaptation led to unchecked superman-level skills in many trades, and in reclaiming myself, I’ve learned to dial back my hypervigilance, and be more present, with you, and with myself.

So the question is, who do you need me to be?