Author: ChihSang

The curtain has been drawn on this chapter.

Eight performances.
Months of writing.
Countless rehearsals.
Moments of doubt, excitement, exhaustion, and joy.

And just like that, it’s over.

For so long, every day revolved around one goal: the Fringe Festival. Every decision, every rehearsal, every social media post, every forgotten line, every late-night rewrite pointed toward opening night and the performances that followed.

Now the calendar is suddenly quiet.
It’s a strange feeling.

When you’ve been climbing a mountain for months, you don’t spend much time thinking about what happens after you reach the summit. You’re so focused on the next step that you rarely imagine what life looks like once the climb is over.

I think many of us experience this after finishing something meaningful. We graduate. We retire. We complete a marathon. We finish writing a book. We finally reach the destination we’ve been working toward.

And then a new question quietly appears.

What’s next?

A younger version of me would have rushed to find the answer. I would have started another project almost immediately, afraid that standing still meant falling behind.

Today, I’m approaching that question differently.

For the first time in a long time, I don’t feel the need to have everything figured out.

This Fringe journey taught me something unexpected. It reminded me that the joy wasn’t only in performing the show. It was in creating it. It was in meeting people afterward and hearing their stories. It was in discovering that my own experiences could help someone else make sense of their own.

That realization feels bigger than the show itself.
So perhaps “what’s next” isn’t really the right question.
Maybe the better question is, “What do I want to keep carrying forward?”

I want to keep telling stories.
I want to keep encouraging conversations about mental health, burnout, identity, and rediscovering ourselves.
I want to keep creating moments of joy, whether that’s through writing, theatre, bubbles, or simply taking the time to really listen to another person.

The Fringe Festival may be over, but those things don’t end when the curtain closes.

If anything, they’ve only just begun.

Every ending creates space for a new beginning. We don’t always know what that beginning looks like, and maybe we’re not supposed to. Sometimes the most exciting chapters are the ones we haven’t planned yet.

So today, I’m allowing myself to sit in the in-between.
Not rushing.
Not forcing the next step.

Simply feeling grateful for this one.

The curtain has closed on this chapter.

Now it’s time to discover what the next one wants to become.