I Open Myself

I'm in Japan for a class called Personality Cultivation (人格培育). I came in thinking it would be a personality framework, a way to understand people, including myself. It's turning out to be something much bigger than that.

The teacher, Wang Teng, put it simply. Most courses install a new app on your phone. This one replaces the operating system. By the second day it had already moved me in a way I wasn't expecting, so I made a song to hold it. It's called 我打开自己, I Open Myself.

The framework is four colors: red, blue, yellow, green. The part that stayed with me is that they aren't labels. They're more like four directions, and each of us holds all four. So the question isn't which one am I. I think it's which parts of me I haven't been living yet.

By the third day, that question got very personal.

He used an image I keep coming back to. Your personality is a seed. Plant a pear seed and it wants to become a pear tree. But sometimes our upbringing grafts an apple branch onto it, and we spend years growing apples we were never meant to grow. They're never our best fruit.

I know exactly when my apple branch got grafted on. I still remember the first time I got hit for getting my math homework wrong. I was five, maybe six, not even in school yet. What I took from that moment ran my life for decades: being a happy kid wasn't enough, I had to perform to be loved. So I learned to perform. I got good at staying near the top, top five percent, top three, in school and then at work. I think I was rewarded for it because I worked hard at it. But it's what I'm good at, not what I'm best at.

When I moved to the US at eleven, I didn't really speak English. What carried me was my energy. I made friends with my body language and the way I showed up in a room, long before I had the words. I didn't know back then that it was a gift, so I mostly used it to act out and get into trouble.

What I didn't expect was to feel like a foreigner all over again at forty-one. I speak English now, but the language of this room is Chinese, and I don't understand it. And the same thing that carried me at eleven is carrying me here. My energy. The ease of being happy, and of motivating the people around me.

That, I'm realizing, is my real gift. Not the performing. The energy. In the four colors it's the red in me, and it's the part I never cultivated, because for most of my life I quietly believed it was the part of me that was wrong. Now that I can see it, I think I have a responsibility to cultivate it, not just spend it.

I'm also learning not to regret the years I gave to the yellow and blue in me, the achieving and the getting it right. Those aren't wasted. I think they're part of how I understand and connect with people. But they were never the point. The point is meeting myself, who I really am, so I can keep going, and help other people see where they are so they can keep going too.

He said something else that reframed all of it. It's true that life is always happening for you, but only if you can see it with a helpful insight. Getting hit at five could have just imprisoned me. It only became useful because, years later, I finally drew the insight out of it. The event gives you the energy. What you do with it is the cultivation.

There's a longer frame underneath all of this. Our nature can run at three hundred miles an hour, but it's only sustainable if we know where it's going. In a world changing this fast, I think the way to move through a transition that actually feels like ours, and to keep building ourselves instead of just reacting, is to remember the longer journey. The one that was already ours before this lifetime, and maybe beyond it. I believe we're here to remember it, and to continue it.

That's the turn for me. I didn't come to Japan to become someone else. I came to come home to who I already am, and now I want to carry that back into my life with the door left open.

我打开自己 (I open myself),
世界也为我打开 (and the world opens for me too),
我看见自己 (I see myself),
才看见你走来 (and only then do I see you, coming toward me).

If you want to hear the whole thing, the song is here on Suno.