- photo taken in Coron, Philippines, October 2023
人生如夢。
Life is but a dream.
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I’ve been thinking how to put my 2023 into words. A crazy year, been all over the Great Pacific, taking planes as if they were MRTs. So many things happened, yet they somehow felt so far away from me right away.
Life just keeps rolling in. One moment I’m still working in the boonieland, the next I’m spending my weekend in Taiwan with my parents. One moment I’m diving around Beqa to see sharks in Fiji, the next I’m doing the Nevis Bungy and freefalling for 134m in New Zealand. One moment I’m experiencing an unprecedented euphoria on Koh Phangan, the next I’m swimming peacefully alongside a dugong in Coron, Palawan. One moment I’m trying to figure out visa for our move-in plan, the next I’m told we shouldn’t be seeing each other again.
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This was also my last year before entering my thirties. “How was your 29?” I like to ask people this. So how was mine? It started off amazingly but had a bizarre, almost surreal turn towards the end. Someone wrote me, “You are like heroin and I’m an addict and I have no sense of self control,” which can almost be the best caption for my 29, too. So really, I believe it’s the universe helping me detox, may it be the tumor found in my right breast or the major source of emotional drainage, aligning with the theme I set for myself over the last new years: 
Perhaps this year is finally putting an end to my naïvety, my “teenage” state of mind. Looking back to this decade, a lot of things seemed to have lagged on my timeline. I might have enjoyed too long of a “fortune advance” in my early twenties, smooth and free from heartbreaks. Life then took a major plunge in my 26, which surprisingly led me into a dream life that I was almost going to sabotage for whom I thought was everything. That was also when I started to live most freely ever; got piercings and tattoos, learned how to smoke and whatnots, things I’d label as what people do in their teens or early adulthood. That year, I learned about blessing in disguise.
Then this wide-eyed girl got to see the world on her own. Found a version of herself that she likes the most, and a “home” that she’d miss on the road. In fact, everything in life has been perfect, nothing much to complain about regarding work (let’s just not go into workplace politics), a lot of love wherever I go (and really, I’m grateful for the luxury I have to go wherever I want to go). But I’ve also learned it the hard way: how malicious the world can be to fail your sincerity, how destiny can bring you to something seemingly beautiful but you’re in fact only here to pay the debt you owed from previous lives, and how nightmares can be simply dressed like daydreams. But again, I hardly regret a thing. If I could choose, I would just do it all over again. After all, never try never know, it is what it is (bread bread cheese cheese), and I never for a moment fail my own heart. I’ve also learned a whole lot about myself, what past trauma has caused me and what I want and need in all sorts of relationships.
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So of course I would say, that was yet another happiest year of my life. But Sharky Tammy may have had some very exciting plans for her landmark year already 
I guess we’ll all just stay tuned! Because I don’t know either where life is going to take me 
I’ve already started to feel a new level of confidence and empowerment that people told me belongs to the big 30. And I aim to break the myth that everything will suddenly go downhill upon the entry of the club 
So now, cheers to my new decade first 
(spoiler alert? tihi)
Tammy Yu-Ting Chiang 