Good morning, dear readers. Happy Monday!
Yesterday, I had my second expressive writing group, and 3 people attended! How delightful! I was deeply humbled that people showed up to my group to join me for an hour of catharsis, healing, and self-reflection. I think they really enjoyed the meeting. One of the best feelings in life is serving others, with purity and no expectation of material or monetary reward. I left the group on a high– not a manic high, mind you, but a quiet, steady one, filled with gratitude and fulfillment.
Yesterday’s writing prompt was:
Unveiling Your Core Essence
We spend so much of our lives defined by labels and roles: parent, engineer, friend, artist, spouse, student. These are all vital parts of your experience, but they are not the whole of who you are.
Think of yourself like an onion. Start with the outer layers—your job, your hobbies, your achievements, the roles you play every day. Acknowledge them, write them down, and then begin to peel them back.
Your task is to journey to the center of yourself.
- When all the titles are stripped away, who remains?
- What is the purest form of your being?
- What is the unshakeable truth that defines you? Is it a feeling, a belief, a singular quality, a memory, or an internal landscape?
- Describe your essence in a way that is removed from what you do and focused on who you are.
Go deep. Be honest. Welcome the mystery.
We spent 20 minutes answering the prompt. I’d like to share with you what I wrote.
…
I am… a lot of things. Lots of labels have been attached to me in my 27 years of life, many of them self-imposed.
I was a competitive rhythmic gymnast for 10 years. I competed at the Junior Olympic level.
I suffered a knee injury that ended my gymnastics career at age 15. I suffered from depression and anxiety as a result of that experience, and that was my first experience with mental health challenges. I saw a therapist, Zoe, who remains my therapist to this day, and through Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, she helped me heal from anxiety and depression, and also opened the space for me to discover my new passion, my new identity, apart from gymnastics. That exploration led me to Latin Ballroom dancing, and little did I know that that would become my career.
I now work as a professional dancer, instructor, choreographer, yoga and pilates teacher, and personal trainer. Movement has been a defining trait and lifelong passion of mine, and I love sharing my passion for movement with my community.
I am a UCLA graduate. I graduated in 2019 with a degree in psychology. I was a Regent’s Scholar at UCLA, started off on the pre-med track (I was good at school, my dad was a doctor, it felt like the logical, safe path). But I quickly realized that I hated pre-med, in spite of doing well in my classes. I almost dropped out of college to pursue dancing full-time. I’m glad I stayed in school, graduated, and then… what came next?
I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at age 20, the summer in between my freshman and sophomore year of college. This diagnosis upended my life and identity as I knew it. The first thing I did was ignore it, as best I could. I thought I could achieve my way out of illness– do something big, like graduate from UCLA in 3 years, and that would negate the fact that I was crazy. I rejected the label like the plague, I denied it with fury, I spurned it and hated it and willed it out of my existence.
But then, I graduated college, and my mental health was in shambles. I needed to address it, I could no longer deny the fact that I had a serious mental illness that needed to be treated.
The past 7 years have been dedicated to recovery. I am a survivor of mental illness– I did the hard work, just like I was trained to do as an athlete and student. I like to think I’ve accomplished a lot in my 27 years. Junior Olympic gymnastics. World Vice-Champion in Latin dancing. Founder of a dance club at UCLA. Graduated in 3 years with honors. Achievement, achievement, achievement. So many gilded titles to attach my identity to. But my greatest achievement of all was healing from bipolar disorder. I now embrace it as an emblem of my humanity, which is my strength and superpower. I own the bipolar now– I used to overidentify with it, and that was all I could see. I am bipolar, I am Belicia. I am crazy and unlovable and damaged. No one will want me, because of this.
Now I see I am so much more than my diagnosis. I am Belicia Tang. I am a Renaissance Woman with depth, wisdom, creativity, and intelligence, and I have a passion for serving others and guiding them in their own healing journeys. I have chosen a career in wellness because self-care and wellness is not a luxury, but a sheer necessity, in my own life as a bipolar forever in healing.
I prioritize my stability over everything else. Everything I do must be in alignment with that value. I am selective with the people in my life I surround myself with. I am intentional with the jobs and roles I take on. I make sure to get 9 hours of sleep a night. I am currently in the process of quitting drinking and substances, which is another battle I have faced to cope with demons.
And at the core, I love to write. Writing is my way out of madness, it healed me in my darkest hour, when I was at UCLA and losing my mind and grasping at air to cling on to a semblance of sanity. When my mind betrayed me, writing was the lifeline that helped me stay connected to my essence. I wrote the length of novels to make sense of my bipolar disorder, especially in the early years of recovery. I am currently writing a memoir about my healing journey. In recent years, I have found joy in writing poetry– the most direct line to the soul. Ernest Hemingway said, “Writing is easy. You sit at a typewriting and bleed.” Poetry is bleeding your angst, pain, sadness, and trauma onto the page. When normal language cannot do justice to how I feel in the moment, I turn to art as a way out of pain. I like to think I can also write from a place of joy and happiness and stability, just as I am doing, now.
Moving forward, I want to focus more on my role in my community. Not just the things I do or achieve, but the person I am, and how I show up for others. I want to be a better daughter– less resentful towards my parents, more grateful for all the ways they’ve supported me, in spite of their imperfections. I want to spend more time with my 90 year-old grandmother. I want to make time for the people I care about… which is sometimes hard to do, when you’re founding a couple different companies while juggling a day job and taking on a myriad creative projects.
I hunger to be everything I’ve ever wanted to be. I can’t just be one thing. I want to live large, and live fully. But we only have so much time on this Earth– you can do anything, but you can’t do everything. So what do I want to prioritize, moving forward? And more importantly, why am I so focused on doing and achieving and moving, like a shark, when I can just sit here, in this moment, without a task to be pursued, or a place to be, and just be happy with where I’m at? Presence, mindfulness, gratitude, stillness. Those are qualities I want to embody, moving forward. Spoken like an aspiring yogi.
…
And that was what I wrote in response to the prompt! For the last 15 minutes of the group, we had the opportunity to share what we had written. Most people were shy about sharing, so I decided to go first. I shared excerpts of my response, and it was great way for members to get to know me and my motives for starting the writing group. My friend Antonio also shared, and I appreciated his vulnerability about embracing his softness and humanity, and I marveled at his writing chops (didn’t know that he had that talent!) But you know what? You don’t need any sort of God-given writing talent or technical skill to reap the benefits of expressive writing. You write to make sense of your own madness. You write to temper the chaos, find peace, and heal from inner wounds. You write for yourself, and there is no pressure to share your work with others, though sharing stories is what breeds deep-seated connection.
Moving forward, I would like to feature some of my writing group members’ work on this blog, if they’re comfortable with their work being published. Thus far, I have been the sole contributor to this blog, but I want to shine the spotlight on other people’s thoughts and perspectives.
Click on this link to sign up for Venture True Wellness free community events! I’ll talk to you guys soon!
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