Today, I wandered Chengdu the way I wander most cities –without a destination, letting my feet decide. Somehow, I ended up on the rooftop of a mall. Above the noise. Above the crowds.
There, in large letters, it read: “I Am Here.”
It stopped me. I’ve been wearing those words on my body for over twenty years.
Back then, I knew something my younger self couldn’t fully articulate that I would forget myself. That adulthood would blur things. So I etched a message into my skin:
I am NOW here. Alongside it, my core values: love, share, joy.
That tattoo has faded with time. And, in many ways, so did my relationship with what it stood for.
Standing on that rooftop, it all came rushing back. Not as nostalgia –but as recognition. I realized that what I had written on myself decades ago wasn’t aspirational. It was instructional. A reminder meant for a future version of me who would need to rediscover it.
Somewhere along the way –between responsibility and ambition, expectation and exhaustion– I lost those words. Or maybe I didn’t lose them. Maybe I buried them so deeply that only a burnout could excavate them.
It’s strange how identity works. How we can carry truth on our skin and still forget to live it.
And yet here I was –in Chengdu, of all places– reading the same message, reflected back to me by a city I had never been to before. As if the universe had decided it was time to tap me on the shoulder and say: You’ve arrived. Not geographically. Internally.
Love.
Share.
Joy.
I didn’t find them here. I remembered them.
The irony isn’t lost on me –that I had to unravel my adult life to return to something my younger self already understood. But maybe that s the point.
Some lessons aren’t learned once. They’re remembered.
And today, standing above the city, I could finally say it without ink, without effort, without urgency:
I am here.
