The Quiet Signal

From Yian

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A monthly letter for those who feel things deeply but don't always have the words for it. A monthly letter for those who feel things deeply but don't always have the words for it. A monthly letter for those who feel things deeply but don't always have the words for it.

Before anything else, I want to thank everyone who subscribed to The Quiet Signal. I've been postponing this letter for a long time.

For years, a question kept circling in my head. Are my thoughts actually worth sharing? Will any of this resonate with anyone, or am I just being self-important? The voice of self-doubt and imposter syndrome has a way of staying loud, even when you think you've made peace with it.

If you asked me what specific moment made me ready to set those voices down and share anyway, I honestly couldn't tell you. There wasn't one. It was slower than that. A kind of courage that grew quietly through years of paying attention to myself, and being willing to sit with what I found.

Writing is still, in some way, my comfort zone. I can stay behind the screen, share what I've been thinking and feeling through my images and my words. So much of what I notice in myself feels raw, and I've also realized I don't want to become someone who performs vulnerability on camera. Even if that kind of openness can give other people courage and healing, I want to be honest with myself about who I actually am and what I actually want to do.

Something I've come to believe over the past few years: you never need to force yourself into a role you think you should be playing. And if there is a "should," it's only worth following when it comes from somewhere deep in yourself, after you've actually listened.

So this newsletter will feel more like pages from my journal. Questions I'm asking about my own life. Things I'm still in the middle of learning. There are no right answers here. I'm hoping that some of what I'm sitting with might quietly meet you where you are.

June is here. Winter stayed unusually long in New York this year, and spring kept shifting its mind. But lately, I can feel something moving in people again, an energy that seems ready to be let out. June feels like the opening curtain of summer. The color of it, to me, is warm orange-yellow with a thread of something cooler running through it.

Happy birthday to the Geminis and the Cancers reading this.

"You never need to force yourself into a role you think you should be playing.

And if there is a 'should,' it's only worth following when it comes from somewhere deep in yourself, after you've actually listened."​
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(Above is a small sneak peek of the design.)​
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If you're new here, let me quickly introduce you to A Journey Through Light.

In short, it's an oracle deck I've been making, currently in design and production, and I plan to release it later this year or in early 2027. You can find a quick overview on my Instagram here. But I'll be sharing the slower, behind-the-scenes version with you here.

I started AJTL around March of last year. It took me until the end of the year for the full system and logic of the deck to come into focus. Some of the images in the deck are pieces from my original painting series, because AJTL is really an extension of the way I already work. The act of drawing a card and reading what surfaces in the image is the same relationship I have with my paintings. I let something from my unconscious move through me onto the canvas, stroke by stroke, and once the piece is finished, it reads my present state back to me. It has always been a ritual of self-dialogue.

Beyond the images themselves, I've been collaborating with Manru, a close friend and graphic designer, to shape the overall feel of the work. I wanted this piece to have texture and warmth. Not ornamental, not loud. Something that can sit quietly with you, and keep you company without asking for attention.

We're currently working through the outer packaging design. I'll share more of the internal design details with you slowly, as they come together. Designing and producing this set has been new territory for me in many ways, and I've been learning the production side as I go. Plenty of challenges, plenty of unfamiliar steps. Until the deck is out in the world, I'll keep sharing pieces of the process here.

What did I learn last month?

Recap of May

This is where I look back at the four A Soft Reminder posts from the past month, notice what they were quietly pointing to when read together, and let that shape what we might sit with as we go into the next one.

Looking back at May, I noticed something I hadn't seen while I was writing it. Each week was a small unmasking. A different version of the things we think are helping us grow turns out to be the thing keeping us stuck.

Week 1 · Output mode. The kind of busyness that feels responsible, that quietly stops letting anything new in. Inspiration doesn't arrive through effort. It slips in through enjoyment.

Week 2 · Friction. Growth doesn't always look like expansion. Sometimes the discomfort isn't a signal to stop, but the trace that something real is happening.

Week 3 · The lesson returned in a new shape. Old fears are wearing new outfits. What once looked like not daring to speak now looks like over-explaining. The appearance changes, but the root stays the same.

Week 4 · Planning as avoidance. The future we imagine isn't where life actually happens. The present is.

The line I keep coming back to, the one that holds the whole month for me:

"Most of the time, it's just anxiety wearing a productive face."

Looking back at May, what I noticed is that we often use effort to cover anxiety. And even once we can see this clearly, that doesn't mean we get to step out of it right away. Whatever scarcity we carried in earlier seasons of our lives tends to return, in new shapes, pulling us back into over-effort, into spinning, into the slow burn of using ourselves up. What I'm hoping to bring into June is this kind of awareness, used gently. Not to fix anything. Just to let something inside soften a little more.

A note from my own life. May was when I first started to notice that my own over-output was edging toward something. The signs that energy was about to run out. And as I noticed it in myself, I started seeing it everywhere. The economy hasn't been kind. The job market is heavy. AI is reshaping things faster than people can keep up. I've been watching people around me respond by working harder, trying to fill in the parts of the future we were never going to control. I see anxiety quietly attaching itself to all kinds of things right now. I suspect this is going to be with us for a while. But the part of us that can recognize the pattern, even while we're still inside it, that part matters.

Did any of May's reminders find you? In what part of your life did you meet a similar version of this? I'd love to hear if you feel like writing back.

Once a month, I'll pull a card from A Journey Through Light and send it your way. The idea isn't to read it as a forecast. It's to use the image and the question as a soft prompt. Something to sit with, journal through, or just let stay open at the back of your mind for the week.

This card find it's way to you.

Before reading anything I write below, take a moment with the image itself.

Notice the colors first. The deep blue, the dark winding lines, the small lights gathering at the center, the water falling toward the ground. Don't reach for meaning yet. Just notice what the image stirs in your body. Maybe it tightens something, maybe it softens something, maybe nothing happens at all. All of those are honest responses.

Then, when you're ready, sit with the question:

In your quietest moments, what truths tend to surface?

You can carry this into a journal entry. You can hold it during a quiet walk. You can read it once and let it work on you without trying to answer it. There's no correct way to use it.

The story behind this card.

This image is the digital version of the third painting in my original series. It came into being at the very end of summer 2024, somewhere around late August or early September. That summer, I went through a kind of clearing. I finally saw that some of my patterns in love and connection weren't really about the other person at all. They were projections of a quieter scarcity I'd been carrying for a long time. I realized that for years, I hadn't actually been tending to my own inner needs. I had been outsourcing them, often without knowing.

I remember the night I saw it clearly. There was no dramatic scene around it. Just a quiet recognition, and a decision to begin doing something different.

That's my story with this card. I wonder what yours might be.

See you next month. ✨

Yian

Your journey milestone! A little something from this month.​ ​For the long winter that finally let go, and the summer quietly walking in

✨Each month, a new badge is designed to carry the feeling of that month. Mail Club subscribers receive it as a physical sticker, sent with the monthly letter. One small piece at a time, your collection grows alongside the journey. （More info about the mail club will be announce on my Instagram! Stay tune.)

A couple of things, in no particular order.

✨On the Mail Club. To those of you who've already shared your addresses for Journey Checkpoint — thank you, truly. I want to be upfront with you. I'm still in the middle of setting everything up, and the current list is smaller than the minimum batch I need to print well. So I'm going to hold the first physical mailing for one more month and send it out in the next round. You will get it, I promise. I just want to make sure that when it arrives, it actually looks and feels the way I imagined it. Thank you for trusting me with the wait.

✨On the group show. At the end of May I was part of a group show at FLOHAUS Gallery, which turned out to be one of the more energizing weeks I've had in a while. Being in a room with artists working across different mediums, and noticing how the same questions keep surfacing in completely different visual languages, did something to me. It reminded me that the work is never as solitary as it feels from inside the studio.

(By the way, my original paintings are available, if any of them have caught your eye. DM or email me, I'd love to talk.)

That's it for this month. Thank you for being here.