✨Gaozong Yang

This Is Me

My name is Gaozong.

I am a Hmoob woman who has spent her life learning — sometimes the tender way, sometimes through experiences that felt challenging — what it means to actually be herself.

I have grieved. Deeply. I’ve grieved romantic relationships and friendships. I’ve grieved the physical passing of my daddy — a man who was the thread that wove me into my Hmong community, and whose absence left me having to navigate grief and belonging at the same time. To figure out, on my own, what it means to be Hmong. What it means to be a Hmong woman — in my own eyes — in a world that already has a lot of opinions about who and what I should be.

I have been the girl who created a version of herself just to be liked, to fit in, to survive. I know what it’s like to live inside a self that you built for other people. I know how exhausting that is. I know how invisible it makes you feel — even in a crowd, even in a relationship, even surrounded by people who say they love you.

I have experienced what it feels like to show up and express yourself, only to be misunderstood by the exact people you most wanted to be understood by. Over and over again. And I have also experienced — later, beautifully, magically — being around people who barely need me to say anything. People who just see me. Naturally. Effortlessly. Like I was always supposed to be known.

That contrast changed everything for me.

What I've learned by living it:

I've learned what it feels like to use my voice — really use it — and to make boundaries and actually speak them out loud, not just feel them in my body and stay silent. I've learned to be more honest with myself about what I want, what I need, and what I genuinely don't like. That last one took the longest. I've learned to trust my own knowing — especially when someone else is trying to talk me out of it. I've learned that when people question your sense of reality, your intuition, your truth… they are usually just projecting their own fears, their own worries, their own unresolved stories onto you. And that is their work to do. Not yours to absorb. I've learned that my emotions are not a flaw. I spent so much of my life feeling shame around how much I felt — how deeply, how visibly, how completely I experienced things. And now? I see my emotions as a gift. A signal. A kind of intelligence that most people haven't been taught to trust in themselves. I've learned what it means to be authentically me — not a performance of me, not the me that survived, but the me that is free. The one who is playful and expressive and soft and powerful all at once.

Grace Bryant

Why I Loved the Villainess

You know those stories — the ones where the woman everyone called the villain turns out to be the one who was right all along?

I lived on those stories.

The villainess who was misunderstood. The outspoken female lead who faced adversity after adversity and won anyway. The woman who was cast as the bad guy, exiled, talked about, put down — and who, in the end, was seen. Was vindicated. Was loved by the people who actually mattered.

I watched those dramas because I was her. I knew what it felt like to be painted as the problem when I was just a person trying to be honest and alive. Those stories kept something in me believing — you will win, too. You will be seen. Hold on.

And that’s exactly what I want to be for you.

What I Believe

I believe magic is real.

I believe life is worth living — even the messy, confusing, grief-soaked, identity-questioning parts of it.

I believe you are beautiful exactly as you are, right now, before you fix anything or figure anything out.

I believe in ancestral connection, in intuition, in the kind of knowing that lives in your body before your mind has caught up. I believe that the little-kid version of you still remembers what you loved before the world told you to be practical. And I believe she’s been waiting for you to come back to her.

I believe the woman who feels too much, loves too big, belongs everywhere and nowhere — she is not broken. She is becoming.

Just like I was.

You Are Not Alone In This

This space is for the woman who loves deeply and widely. Who watches a C-drama at midnight and cries because finally, someone gets it. Who lights incense or pulls a card or sits in silence because she knows there’s something bigger holding her. Who is reconnecting with her softness. Who is learning to trust herself again. Who sometimes wonders if she should keep going.

She should.

You should.

And I am so glad you’re here.