✨Gaozong Yang
This Is Me
My name is Gaozong.
I am a Hmong/Hmoob woman who has spent a long time in her life being the person everyone could count on. I said yes fast. I smiled before I checked whether I meant it. I read the room so well that I could tell you what everyone else needed before I could tell you one thing I wanted. And I did it so consistently that eventually I couldn’t hear my own voice underneath everyone else’s anymore. I was told who to be, what was “best” for me, which path to take. And I followed it, because that felt safer than being the one who disappoints people.
What I didn’t know then is how lonely it is to be surrounded by people and still not be known by any of them. To be liked for a version of you that you’re performing. To go home after a good day with good people and feel like something is still missing, and not be able to name it.
I know what it’s like to be misunderstood. To be judged before anyone bothered to ask. To be treated like the difficult one, the too-much one, the villain in someone else’s story, when all I was doing was standing up for something that mattered to me. I know what it costs to keep the peace by making yourself smaller. And I know the specific kind of tired that comes from doing that for years.
Learning to trust myself again has been the most meaningful part of my life. It didn’t happen all at once, and it wasn’t always graceful. It looked like saying one honest thing and then shaking afterward. It looked like disappointing someone and surviving it. It looked like noticing my hand reach out, or my mouth say “sure,” before I’d checked in with myself, and learning that I was allowed to pause right there. It was frustrating and it was hard and it was also, honestly, fun. It felt so good to finally hear myself.
If any of that sounds like your life, I want you to know you’re not the only one. You’re not broken, and you’re not behind. So many of us are walking around thinking we’re the only one who feels this way.
I have a background in social work. That taught me how systems work. How a family actually operates. How a person fits into the people around them. It taught me to see patterns people can’t see in their own lives because they’re too close to them. And it taught me that sometimes what someone needs isn’t advice, it’s someone to see them accurately and hold space while they find their own way. That’s what you get in a session with me.
The other thing I bring is this: I know how to enjoy being here, and I can help you find your way back to that too.
Most of us are moving fast. We’re hustling, we’re producing, and we carry that home with us at night, still in our heads, still adding things up, still quietly wondering if what we did today was enough. I know that place. I lived in it. And what I’ve found on the other side of it is that right here is where everything already is. The people, the food, the music, the ordinary Tuesday that turns out to be good. It’s all right here, and it’s been waiting.
So a lot of what we do together is making room. Room to rest. Room to slow down. Room to be here without having to earn it first.
And fun doesn’t look just one way. People tell me all the time that they don’t know how to have fun, or that they can’t remember what fun even means for them anymore. I never think that’s silly, because I’ve been there. Yours might be dancing badly in your kitchen. It might be a K-drama you’ve already seen four times. It might be doing absolutely nothing and not feeling guilty about it. We’ll find out what yours actually is, and then we’ll make sure you get to have it.
When you sit with me, you’re not getting a worksheet or a five-step plan. You’re getting the same presence I needed someone to give me and didn’t have: someone who listens past the words, who doesn’t rush you, who doesn’t need you to be further along than you are. Your desires aren’t something to manage or explain away here. They’re something to know, and something to enjoy.
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 instead of staying 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. Such as: how deeply, how I expressed what I felt out in the open and how 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.
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 parts where you’re questioning who you are.
I believe you are beautiful exactly as you are, right now.
I believe in ancestral connection, in intuition, in the kind of knowing that lives in your body before your mind has caught up. I grew up around real shamans. My grandparents are shamans, and in the Hmong community that means they’re who people come to when something is off and talking about it isn’t going to reach it. Ancestors weren’t an idea in my house, they were spoken to. I don’t do ua neeb. That’s not mine to do, and I’m not going to say otherwise. What I grew up inside of is that a person can sit with you, pick up what you’re not saying, and that’s normal, and it helps. So when something comes through in our time together, I’m not startled by it. I just tell you.
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.
There is nothing wrong with you. There is nothing that makes you less amazing, less wanted, less desired, less valued, less important. Less.
You Are Not Alone In This
This space is for the women who feel deeply and widely. Who watches a C-drama or anime at midnight and cries because the moment in the scene hits so good. Who lights incense 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.
