A New Intro Post

Because my Substack can undergo a journey, too

If January me saw the September me spending her weekend making soy milk, crafting an art project, or doing pilates calmly on a Sunday afternoon instead of networking, replying to emails, or working on a gasp financial spreadsheet, she would freak out.

My Writing Revealed My Longing

You must have noticed the different theme since I started my Substack almost a year ago.

Distracting thought: should I create a one-year anniversary Substack post or continue the flow in whatever series I’ll be working on in November?

My early period of Substack (sigh, it’s like charting a timeline of different period dramas) kept mentioning the word “leadership”.

In real life, I was also busy building bridges, connecting people, and attending networking events. My calendar after work was almost always filled with online meetings to get to know people. If not on video, I spent hours crafting business ideas.

That was me thinking of giving my all to pursue a certain status, which eventually led to a financial goal.

I lived in dissonance in such a way that my writing was the purest form of my deep-seated yearning to heal but my real life activities were straight from the diary of a rushing woman. Words and phrases such as “slow living”, “gentle”, and “healing journey” did lend a flavour to my writing, but I felt what I was doing was still off.

I kept meeting people online and in-person at various events (this started in September last year after I finished my dissertation). I kept defining and redefining a business model which I thought I would be the founder of.

I was neck-deep into the networking lingo in tech and rubbed elbows with the blockchain industry leaders and emerging talents.

I was surrounded by the hustlers who most likely didn’t sleep enough as I do now as a mere mortal (sometimes I want to sleep even more).

One of them, a dear friend (and still a dear friend), even jokingly teased me that he would subcontract his sleep time. He was lovingly jealous of my working schedule: in the morning till early afternoon because of following Indonesian time, so that in the afternoon till evening I could attend events to network.

The truth is doing a double life like that exhausted me. I had to wake up at 4.30 am. On certain days I attended events which started at 5 pm at the earliest to accommodate those working normal hours, I had to stay until about 9 pm to have a decent conversation because it would be unsound if I left early, especially due to my position as someone who had to adjust to the big wigs’ availability, and not the other way around.

Even worse, the events were in other cities, accessible by trains or buses for about half an hour to an hour depending on which city. The wee town where I used to live lay in between the two big cities where the meet-ups were usually organised.

It meant I could hit the bed as late as 10.30 pm. And then the next day must carry on like normal, waking up at 4.30 am.

Although it wasn’t every day but only 2-3 days in a month, I felt battered.

Although I ensured to have enough sleep the day before and after and enough nutrition, I felt uneasy.

Even when I mapped out the 3 pillars I must track to keep my homeostasis, I still received autoimmune responses.

Environment Contributes to the Folly

My other friend is also of a competitive nature, a health coach no less, who’s so fit and gifted with so much energy. He kept time doing push-ups. A gym freak. I spent hours walking in nature with him. I also learned some biohacking techniques from him.

Needless to say, I felt my already less-than-ideal lifestyle could be improved with these biohacks.

I thought I couldn’t keep my pace walking with him because I was weak (which was true, given the different physiques between a man and a woman). But I wanted to be as fit as him.

Deep down, my body shook her proverbial head with a judging glare over her glasses, but I kept doing it.

Trying to be a superwoman . . . took its toll on my body

So, in summary, I tried being a superhuman and superwoman by:

Working early hours, networking afterwards, trying to build a business, writing more than one article and social media post per week, doing choir practice, doing biohacks like slapdashing a plaster, tracking my sleep and macros, sometimes on keto and often intermittent fasting.

No wonder my nervous system was a wreck and my autoimmune responses were through the roof.

My favourite, the worst, offender is about the cold shower habit.

Seriously, my lesson learned from that practice is “Asceticism allows us to gain pleasure in denying pleasure.”

I was trying to follow David Goggins’ footpath, and I failed miserably.

Not just David Goggins and Andrew Huberman, Codie Sanchez and Jordan Peterson as well — throw Eckhart Tolle and Napoleon Hill into the mix

That means I:

• engaged in a rigorous, tight-ship physical routine ranging from X number of steps, cold shower, weightlifting or callisthenics, grounding, and biohacking my sleep

• networked and built the embryo of a small business DAO, inserting myself in the blockchain and web3-space, giving talks and listening to the webinars

• gaslit myself amid the various signals that my body wanted to take a break by saying that “asceticism is the way to go”

• must belong to the hungry entrepreneurship world

• must talk shop in big money

• spoke to myself daily to “DEFINE YOUR WEALTH” a la Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich affirmative practice. How much? Write it down! Memorise!

It must be nice living in a filter bubble which stroked my ego.

Indeed, it’s far easier to remove the splinter in your eye but not a log in mine

I wrote posts like the fact that our thoughts make us sick but in real life, I kept making myself sick by favouring my ego to reach a specific status that I must achieve before the end of this year.

I was even frustrated at my situation and exasperatedly told my mother in a video call that I had tried my best to ensure I had 7-8 hours of sleep and ate enough. So what was with all these bruises and pain and my cracking skin . . . and low-grade fever sometimes.

In hindsight, I was the textbook copy of that woman interviewed by Dr Gabor Maté who said that she had done everything “right”.

Yeah, ignoring the mindset and psychological issues.

“I think you’re pushing too hard”

A good friend, a coach, Shuang-Min, who was featured in this post had a call with me in March before I flew to my home country and basically hid myself from the world to embark on a healing journey with my parents.

Before our call, I had shared with her my project, which sucked my energy in that era, which was the Berdaya DAO.

Do you know what her comment was?

This was only based on her senses (she’s an empath, an intuitive person). Despite not having heard the background of the project, she could draw a hypothesis like that.

If you think she exaggerated, I had that call with her in London, on the same day as having a job interview call with a shady blockchain entity, and before going to a blockchain networking event, during the days I had my worst autoimmune flare-ups: broken skin, sore fingers and toes due to chilblain, dry coughs every night, feeling almost dying on a plane.

I no longer call myself a solopreneur. I’m a writer. A storyteller. Like how I’ve always been.

“To realise one’s destiny is a person’s only obligation.” The Alchemist.

John Henry Newman (1801-1890) wrote: "God has created me to do him some definite service; he has committed some work to me which he has not committed to another. I have my mission - I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for nothing. Therefore, I will trust him. Whatever, wherever I am. I cannot be thrown away.”

Slow living and gentleness always attract me. I practise essentialism because I can’t afford to have my energy bleed into many things.

I love my uninterrupted breakfasts and casual browse at charity shops on the weekends. Not everything has to be bought. Romanticising life does not always have to come at our savings expense.

I used to feel hopeless and helpless as I kept trying to figure out my coaching business model or the DAO, albeit my writing stared at me with the stark things that I needed, not what my ego wanted.

But during the April - May downtime, I found out I was not cut out for that busy life.

You know when you descend on an airplane, you have to pass the cloud. It’s thick and you can’t see much. The cloud is like confusion we must go through before we can reach clarity. It feels like we can’t see beyond the difficulties but rest assured, repose is near. Once the clouds open, you can see the clear sky again.

My writing today

If you noticed, I don’t mention coaching anymore in my welcome email, About page, and welcome page. Some other pages I can’t think of yet might still contain it. That’s going to be my job these weeks, to cull the salesy proposition across my pages and accounts.

Also, I refrain from writing about habits and thoughts that can aggravate a tense nervous system. No more cold showers in writing and in practice. Even if I want to take a cold shower, it’s because I want it, that my cells call for it, not because I had to but dreaded every shower time.

So, here I am. Sekar.

Consider this as my new intro post. I was inspired to do this as many writers, old and new, made an intro on the Notes. When I revisited my welcome post, I realised what I wrote there no longer represented my life.

So, here I am, Sekar, the lass behind The Gentle Roadmap.

I’m a storyteller. I don’t promise anything to help you with. But I know if you’re attracted to my writing, to the gentleness and sustainable habits, or even curious to have a call with me, we can go somewhere new. I’m just a fellow wanderer living my path. But wisdom shared is worth more than being kept to oneself.

Let’s keep in touch!