The Moment Her Life Truly Turned Around, Nothing About Her Situation Had Changed
A failed startup, failed investments, failed research, failed PhD applications. Yue says her world felt like a black swamp dragging her down. Yet the moment her life truly turned around, nothing about her situation had changed: the fracture hadn’t healed, the offer hadn’t come, New York’s summer was as muggy as ever. I asked her how she did it. She smiled and said: “Maybe because I have failed too many times.”
Yue says that at the moment her life truly turned around, nothing about her situation had changed.
The fracture hadn’t healed. The offer hadn’t come. New York’s summer was as damp and stifling as ever. Her kitten was still curled up on the sofa with a fever, there were no messages on WeChat, and the future stretched out with no end in sight.
But from that day on, she decided to stop waiting.
She picked up the mop and cleaned the apartment; she opened her laptop and typed the first line of her paper. Everything in front of her was still a mess, the black vortex still swallowed her world, but she no longer treated this stretch of life as something that just had to be endured.
Yue calls it her own Longchang enlightenment, after the moment when the exiled philosopher Wang Yangming, stranded in a remote outpost, suddenly understood that everything he had been searching for was already within him.
Ever since she was little, Yue had explored the world with a burning curiosity, always asking why. Why is Mom Mom? Why does a Ferris wheel have to be round to turn? Why does 1+1=2? Why is why “why”?
Sunny and outgoing, Yue had plenty of friends. Even when she got into trouble, which was often, everyone adored and forgave her. Perhaps she could have simply grown up safe and happy like that.
But fate, it turns out, had its own opinions.
More and more dark words tied to failure began to appear in Yue’s world: exams, grades, rankings, medals.
In high school, Yue woke up in a hospital bed. She had just survived a severe internal hemorrhage from a ruptured organ, and she would be unable to return to competitive cycling for a year. She missed her shot at the provincial team she had dreamed of, and she poured all her anger, along with the restlessness of adolescence, into railing against the unfairness of fate.
In college, Yue grew more and more desperate for one great victory to redeem all those years of obsession. She pinned that hope on a first-author paper at a top AI conference. Once again she gave it everything she had, daydreaming every day about acceptance. And once again fate played a joke on her: her paper made it through the rebuttal, but the reviewer forgot to review it. Yue had failed again.
A failed startup, failed investments, failed exams, failed relationships, failed judgment of people, failed card games, failed height, failed looks, failed personality, failed research, failed certification exams, failed PhD applications, failed jobs, failed studies.
Yue felt her world had become a black swamp, dragging her down and down.
Until that one day. Fresh from a shattering fracture, she was told by her doctor to go outside every day for sunlight and calcium. Yue looked out at the Hudson River. Sunlight spilled over the bridge, cars streamed past, and willow leaves brushed against her face.
In that moment, it felt as if nothing had changed, and yet everything had.
From then on, the question she asked herself changed. She used to ask: when will I finally succeed?
Now she began to ask: if I never succeed, how should I live today? For more than a decade, she had been looking outward for answers.
She asked the classics how to achieve her dreams; she asked fortune-tellers when she would finally make it; she asked the people around her whether she had any worth at all.
The wind cut off every echo.
“The way of the sages is already complete within me.”
She finally lifted her head out of that black swamp.
Every direction is forward.
Still full of passion and curiosity about the world, Yue now calls herself a super player. Besides pursuing a fully funded AI PhD at Imperial College London, she curates art exhibitions, organizes AI communities, does fortune-telling on the side, and takes photographs. She brings technology, art, and cross-cultural dialogue together to show her world, becoming part of the first Asian team to exhibit at the Louvre in Paris and the British Museum, and co-authoring multiple top-conference papers with leading labs.
Fate never gives back what it took. But it gives you something new.
Stop waiting for an echo from the distance. Follow your own heart.