Chapter 0: New born
Chapter 1: Learn to stand on the feet
Chapter 2: Fulfil social expectations
Chapter 3: Live my own life
Walking into middle age is both scary and exciting.
In my previous line of work, I had to keep pace with ever-changing technologies, stay familiar with vast amounts of client data, and constantly solve new problems. Long hours in front of a computer, handling complex tasks day after day, often left me feeling drained. It wasn’t because I didn’t like my work—I truly did. But I began to wonder: did I really want to continue this lifestyle for another twenty years? I wasn’t so sure.
I started asking myself a simple but unsettling question: what else could I do? The honest answer was that I didn’t know. Yet compared to earlier chapters of my life, I now stand on much steadier ground. I have more experience, more confidence, and more resources to explore new possibilities. If there is ever a time to make a change, it is now.
So I decided to try.
My first experiment was to experience life as a full-time potter. In mid-January 2026, I sketched a design for a window display and shared it with the studio owner. It was an ambitious idea, made up of many individual pieces. From the initial design to building prototypes, learning through failures, reworking details, and finally producing the finished pieces, the process took about a month and a half.
On March 1st, the display finally went live.
Seeing it there in the window felt surreal. It looked exactly as I had imagined. I was proud—not only because the display turned out beautifully, but because the moment itself meant something deeper. I had designed and made the products with my own hands, arranged them in a storefront display, and placed them out into the world for others to see and buy.
For the first time, I felt the quiet but powerful satisfaction of saying: I did it.
After two months of living this new life, here are some of my reflections:
Waking up in the morning without the rush to get to work feels incredible. There is a calmness to the start of the day that I never experienced before.
Having no steady income is unsettling. Still, I hold on to the hope that sales will come eventually and that the work will find its audience.
The artist’s lifestyle can also be surprisingly lonely. Most of the time I am working alone—developing my own ideas and producing my own pieces. There is very little collaboration.
And despite everything, I do miss my old work sometimes.