August has always been a month of turning points for me. A kind of energy pulled too full, and not always the good kind, but full to the edge of bursting, of spilling over, until it finds some small opening and finally loosens. It stops feeling so tight, so uncomfortable. Sometimes it arrives as a shift in belief, sometimes as something that simply happens. Back in my student years, it felt like the tail end of a wild, relentless summer of output and collision, when the energy needed to gather itself, grow quiet, take in what the first half of the year had brought, and step properly into autumn.
August is also when Leo energy switches on, and Virgo energy begins to close things down. We long to be seen, and we are afraid of being seen, and that is exactly what I have been sitting with this past month. At its heart, it isn't about gaining. It's about receiving what has ripened, and admitting that some things have to be set down for the season to move on. And what I've wanted to receive and release this month has everything to do with being seen.
I want to share a little of what I've learned since I was laid off this February, from these months of focusing fully on my own work. After doing the math on where I stand financially, I know I still have time to simply make what I want. But these past two months, July especially, taught me how hard it is to gauge yourself when you are your own boss, your own manager, a team of one. Of course you believe in your work and your reasons for choosing this path, or you wouldn't have chosen it at all. But the moment you have to fold real responsibility into the picture, staying present becomes genuinely difficult. I'm still practicing it. And when there is no one to measure you, no one to tell you whether you're doing well, that inner voice toward yourself quietly grows louder.
Lately I've had another realization, about the ability to rein in wanting. Wanting can stretch and expand without end, so fast that you forget why you wanted it in the first place. We fix our eyes on the gap and forget we might already be enough, or that the energy and time we have to give ran out a while ago, and still we hold ourselves up against someone whose whole setup looks nothing like ours. These past few years I've stopped asking what if. We like to think that if we could rewind, we'd choose completely differently. But who you are now is exactly what grew out of every choice you once made. And slowly I'm seeing that whether I can accept who I am now also decides whether I dare to let anyone see that person.
Back to being seen. In my very first newsletter, I said I resisted a certain kind of performative sharing. But peeling it back layer by layer these past months, I realized it was really a protection mechanism, and a limiting one. That inner voice of self-demand is so sharp that some part of you believes it can't survive the criticism it imagines. What you dislike is sometimes just what you can't yet do. And yet, deep down, you long to be seen, to be acknowledged, so you hand it a label: I'm more introverted, or I'm more private, when really you've only made yourself invisible.
And invisibility, in creative work, is quietly terrifying. To make something is, on some level, to want to express. Yet I kept moving forward in the very way that keeps me invisible, only because I let my own fear hold me back. I'm always encouraging other people to express themselves, while holding myself to the same severity. And I think I'm ready to start loosening that belief.
Maybe the question I want to leave with myself, and with you, this August is this. That inner voice, so fixed and so seemingly useful, is it really keeping you accountable? Or is it just letting you stay where you are, comfortably, under the name of doing something?
"That inner voice, so fixed and so seemingly useful, is it really keeping you accountable? Or is it just letting you stay where you are, comfortably, under the name of doing something?"
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.
A quick update first. We're getting close to the sample stage now. What's left is mostly back-and-forth with the factory over cost, sizing, and the smaller details. It's taken two months, and so much of it has needed re-confirming and re-deciding. I've doubted more than once whether I know what I'm doing. But I do believe it's worth it, even on the days I can't quite see why.
What I've really been sitting with this month is smaller and stranger. I've realized how hard it is for me to tell someone, simply and quickly, what this deck actually is.
Part of why is that it was never built to be functional first. So much of what matters about it lives in the process, the shifts I went through while making it, the parts that don't fit on a product label. Every time I try to compress it into a sentence, I feel myself start to shrink, and the old doubt creeps back in. I've noticed I shape the answer differently depending on who's asking. With people who love art, I talk about where the series came from, a lost stretch of my life when an unplanned image appeared one night, and its arrival felt like drawing a card. With serious tarot readers, I'm honest that this isn't a divination tool, that what you get is an image to feel into and a question, and the rest is yours. With everyone else, I say it's an invitation, an art object carrying a story, and my hope is simply that it stirs something in the doubting part of you.
Whoever I'm talking to, the truth underneath is the same. I won't dress it up in spiritual promises to sell it, because that was never the point. If it speaks to you, take it home. If it doesn't, you don't owe yourself a reason.
People often ask what you actually get from this deck, and I've thought hard about how to answer honestly, without overpromising. You won't get a map. You won't get certainty. You won't get someone telling you what to do. What you might get is a little more courage to face the questions you've been avoiding, a moment where something clears, a new way of talking, or simply the feeling of being kept company inside the darkness you once believed no one could understand. It can be a private practice, just between you and yourself. It can also be a shared one, brought into a friendship or a relationship, because knowing yourself is what makes a truer connection with others possible too.
What did I learn last month?
Recap of July
This is where I look back at the 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 July, I noticed something I hadn't quite named while I was writing it. Each week was the same quiet move, only carried further than in June. There's the fear itself, and then there's the shape it takes so it can stay. And every week, it showed up wearing the face of something useful.
Week 1 · The worry. The pressure that arrives before a single line is built, running ahead to the version where it fails. It feels like being responsible, like getting ready. But it's just the sound of standing in the gap between imagining and doing, and the blueprint was rising the whole time.
Week 2 · The loneliness. That particular solitude on the road toward something, the sense of being the only one still holding it up. It arrives looking like a verdict, like proof you're on your own. More often it's a signal instead, a body grown tired, a balance that quietly tipped.
Week 3 · The gathering. Another save, another thing set aside for later, stored the way you'd put away food before a long winter. It feels like preparation, like something that will keep you safer. But the more you gather, the harder it gets to move, until you're held in place by everything you were supposed to be ready for.
The line I keep coming back to, the one that holds the whole month for me:
"You think you're preparing, when really you're held in place by everything you were supposed to be ready for."
Looking back at July, what I noticed is how each of these fears wears the face of something helpful. Worry dresses up as responsibility, loneliness as a verdict, gathering as preparation, and that disguise is exactly why they're so hard to catch. This is where June led, only closer to the bone. In June I saw that the mind lays a layer over what's real. In July I saw that the layer is often made of fear, and that it always insists it's only trying to help. What I'm hoping to carry forward is this kind of awareness, held gently. Not to fight any of it down. Just to ask, quietly, whether the thing calling itself useful is really keeping me still.
A note from my own life. Since I was laid off this February, I've been focusing fully on my own work, and after doing the math on where I stand, I know I still have time to simply make what I want to make. But these past two months, July especially, taught me how hard it is to gauge yourself when you're your own boss, your own manager, a team of one. Of course you believe in your work, or you wouldn't have chosen this path at all. But once real responsibility comes into the picture, staying present gets genuinely hard. And when there's no one to tell you whether you're doing well, that inner voice toward yourself quietly grows louder. I'm still practicing catching it before I believe it.
The other place this showed up was A Soft Reminder itself. It's been half a year of writing it without my quite noticing. What started it was wanting to pair my everyday noticing with a card, as a reminder to myself, and hoping that noticing might land with someone who happened to need it. So many of these questions grow out of my own life, but I think the most beautiful thing about being human is that we can always take what we need from someone else's experience and turn it inward, into something of our own.
These were July's versions of the same quiet move. The fear arriving first, dressed as something reasonable, and the slow practice of noticing the disguise before believing it.
Did any of July'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 finds its way to you.
Before reading anything I write below, take a moment with the image itself.
Notice the colors first. 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:
Is there a voice from the past that stays with you? What does it carry?
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.
See you next month. ✨
Yian
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Your journey milestone!
A little something from this month.
It begins with the longing to be seen. It ends with the courage to release, so the season can move on.
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✨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 announced on my Instagram! Stay tuned.)
The question I get asked most: do you sell prints of your work?
For a long time, the answer was not yet. After all this time, my online shop is finally open, so some of these works can find a place on your wall.
To start, there are six works available: five from A Soft Reminder, and one from The Quiet Signal newsletter poster. Every two months, I will select a new batch for order, so if you find something that speaks to you, it is likely worth ordering sooner rather than later.
You will also find the A Journey Through Light waitlist and pre-order link waiting in the shop. If you have been curious about the deck, this is a good moment to look.
You can check the link below:
That's it for this month. Thank you for being here.
