About Me

Hi! I’m Jessica..

Journalist turned copywriter turned SEO content marketer, and now, an aspiring blogger..

(Whew, that was a mouthful.)

This is a story about entrepreneurship, moving to Bali, grief and loss, and finding my way as a writer.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to be a writer.

I wrote my first story when I was 8, started a blog when I was 17, and published literary essays before I gradauted from Boston University, where I studied Literature and Journalism.

But instead of pursuing my dream of becoming a non-fiction writer, I ended up in the fast-paced, glamorous newsrooms of Hong Kong, covering food and wine, high society, and city gossip. It was intoxicating.
I left the food and wine world when I found out I was expecting, and for the next 8 years, I dedicated myself to raising my three children while working as a freelance writer. The most interesting thing I wrote was a speech for a leadership coach. And maaaaybe the book I created for Burberry. Mostly, I wrote a lot of advertorials promoting luxury property, watches, and bags. Yawn.

The World of B2B SaaS

Enter the pandemic. Our single-income from my then-husband dwindled, and I had to find another income, fast, even though I had barely recovered from my third kid. I upskilled rapidly in conversion copywriting and SEO and built my agency on steroids, and we closed six figures the first year.

The only problem?

I hated it.

The money-grabbing world of B2B SaaS sucked my soul. Have you ever worken up with dread and thought, God, not another day of this. I didn’t want to “hop on another call” and convince clients about “ROI and conversion rates” or work on yet another proposal for yet another meeting.

What I wanted more than anything else was to turn off my phone, hike through the morning forest alone, and then spend all afternoon with my kids. That longing was deep in my bones every single day, as I endured another call, edited another piece of copy, and wrote another Linkedin post.

By summer of 2023, I have been studying Human Design for two years. Most of us are Generators, meant to do work that we like and enjoy, work that is deeply satisfying…if we do the wrong type of work, life will be a horror show. My body, with its tremendous resistance, was telling me I loathed agency life.

Here’s me looking glamorous and enjoying the high life. Well, it’s a lie!

I saw then that I had built my agency out of sheer willpower, and no amount of money or even freedom could make me continue building something that I knew was never aligned with my true responses and values. I needed to discover the truth of who I am, and find work that feels right for me.

But I was stuck. By then, we had “lifestyle creep.” Two incomes? Great! Our lifestyle moved up with it. Bigger house, bigger car, more toys for the kids. I worked with a money coach and I recalled being appalled as I reviewed my financial data. How did our family become trapped in such a materialistic lifestyle? Is a simpler, “back to basics” life possible?

The Move to Bali

One morning, I woke up and “Green School” popped into my head.

I Googled it and was immediately smittened by the visuals: kids laughing and running through the forest, sitting on the floors creating eco-projects under stunning bamboo halls, farming together in the fields…

It spoke to the simpler life I longed for–commuinity, nature, open air, freedom. No iPhones, video games, frigid shopping malls, skyscrapers, and elbowing your way through the MTR in your designer heels, jam-packed like sardines amidst a crowd of heads stuck on their phones like zombies.

Uprooting my family and a life that I’ve known for a decade was radical, but maybe I needed radical to escape the capitalist construct we live in – where interesting dinner conversation was speculating on the property market, the hot stocks, and international school scandals.

Eight weeks later, my husband negotiated a remote-working deal, I withdrew the kids from school, and I sold most of everything we had and booked a one-way flight to Bali, Indonesia.

At first, life in Bali was everything I had dreamed of, but even better. Just moving to Bali almost halved our expenses compared to living in Hong Kong, one of the most expensive cities in the world.

With the immediate financial pressure off, we rented a gorgeous five-bedroom villa and spent our days swimming, doing pottery with other kids in bamboo huts, getting massages in the jungle, sampling healing food around Ubud, and lazing on the beaches. My husband and I worked on our laptops, sipping coconuts, while the nanny chased the kids around play structures in open-air playrooms.

Grief, and New Beginnings

Just six weeks after we moved to Bali, right before Christmas, my husband of 13 years told me he was in love with another woman and he was walking out.

Grief-stricken and alone in a new country, I suddenly had to navigate my new reality as a single mom of three kids and the uncharted territories of divorce lawyers, exhausting mediation, and asset distribution.

Amidst incredible pain, I sought healers all throughout Bali: from cleansing in the foothills of Kintamani to silent retreats in Bogo to bodywork in Ubud. I took long walks on the beach, drank wine with new friends, and cried on my nanny’s shoulder.

More than ever, the imperative to discover who I was before I was a mother, a wife, a lover loomed large. I had foolishly put all my social and emotional eggs in the basket of my family and marriage, and now there was work to do to reclaim my autonomy, find my tribe, and hopefully…reinvent my life.

I started doing The Artist Way, and slowly, fearfully, I started writing for myself again, beginning with the end of a 13-year marriage, and launched this blog. A content marketer at heart, writing what is useful for others motivates me – whether they are my experiences of healing in Bali or navigating life here with kids as a single mom, or even on building a new blog.

Thank you for making it to my story this far. If you’d like to follow these experiences, pop your email below, and I hope you will find my upcoming guides useful.