Bending, Shattering, and Becoming: Welcome to the BambooM-ing Grove
Why I am building a hidden sanctuary to write about my journey through infertility, failed adoption, midlife, menopause, and the thresholds we cross in the dark.
There is a precise moment when the bamboo stalk must make a choice.
When the winds of life shift violently, it cannot remain completely rigid. If it refuses to move, it shatters. Instead, it does something miraculous: it bows. It bends. It leans deep into the dirt, weathering the storm in absolute silence, only to snap back toward the sky when the air clears—stronger, hollower, and more resilient than before.
Welcome to BambooM-ing.
If you have found your way here, chances are you are navigating a shitstorm of your own. Perhaps you are standing on the precipice of midlife, or newly crossed over to the other side of 50 (like me). Perhaps your body is shifting under the new weight of menopause (pun intended), or your mind is wrestling with the tumultuous waves of mental health.
You are not alone. This space is a sanctuary built for the process of becoMing.
The Woman Behind the Words
To understand why this space exists, you need to know a little bit about me.
Up until a couple of years ago, I operated in a highly structured, visible professional world in the Greater Toronto Area (Canada). To save myself, I had to step away from a toxic environment that bent and nearly broke me, to refocus my energies on healing, learning to take better care of myself, regrouping, taking exploratory footsteps in new directions. I am an educational leader, a strategist, a researcher, with an insatiable interest in the innovation of teaching and learning within our digital context. In that world, public identity is everything.
But beneath that professional armor, I am a woman who has grown up during second- and third-wave feminism, navigating the best I can through our current fourth wave.
I have walked through the fire of major life thresholds in a pluralistic Western society, carrying a complex web of intersectionalities and identities - I am:
she/her, cis-gendered
a second-generation Chinese-Canadian
an only child
the first member of father’s family to ever attend university
the first member of mother’s family to attain a PhD
a conflicted cradle Catholic
I have been dancing the identity code-switching dance all my life - linguistically, culturally, professionally - and I still stumble sometimes.
I am also the heiress of intergenerational trauma. My family and ancestors on both sides carry the experiential weight of the Japanese invasion of China (1931-1945), the Communist Civil War in China (1945-1949), and the Chinese Exclusion Act of Canada (1923-1947).
The latter greatly impacted my great-grandfather, a well-respected man in Toronto’s early Chinatown. In the early 1900s, China was unstable and people were starving. Great-grandfather managed to convince a relative to sell some of their farmland so that he could afford passage to Canada. He started out eking a difficult existence in Toronto, eventually co-founding one of the city’s very first Chinese grocery stores offering Chinese produce all year round. All the while, he sent his earnings back home to China because Canadian law legally forbade him from bringing his young family to join him. For the love of his homeland and a deep sense of patriotism, he sold what Canadian assets he had in the early years of the Communist Civil War and returned to China with hopes of building a stronger country. Only to have all of his hard-earned money confiscated by the Communist Party. The sacrifice of 2 generations gone in a violent instant.
I know what it feels like to navigate the tumultuous emotional rollercoaster of infertility and subfertility - the heavy guilt and shame that attach themselves to your innermost soul like unrelenting parasitic barnacles. I am currently in the midst of the profound isolation of watching one’s body change, newly post-menopause, rewriting the rules of my energy, my mood, and my sense of Self. I know the heavy, unspoken weight of managing precarious mental health while pretending everything is positive and solid for the outside world.
To balance the heavy, I invite as much play into my life as I can manage. I’m playing with words in the children’s storytelling space. I’m playing with crochet, which I find deeply relaxing and meditative. I’m playing pickleball - a recent injuring-inducing compulsion. And I’m playing with ideas about a possible entrepreneurial adventure in educational consulting.
I am a human being who needs a place to lay down the professional armor and speak my unapologetic truth as I work out what it means to me, to be a capital-W Woman in this time of my life, in the space that I occupy - socially, temporally, geographically, physically, metacognitively, emotionally, spiritually.
Why I Am Writing Anonymously
You will know me here simply as JiaHui (pronounced “Jee-ah Hway”).
It is the Mandarin pinyin of my Chinese name 家慧 meaning Family Wisdom, given to me at birth by my father. It doesn’t exist in any of my official English documentation. Nobody calls me by my Chinese name except my family in our home dialect.
I have deliberately chosen to step behind a pen name and write anonymously, not out of fear, but out of a profound need for freedom.
By stepping into the identity of JiaHui, I am removing the mask of the external professional to reveal something much more authentic - the bloody guts and starry whims of ME.
Anonymity is my shield, but it is also your mirror. By keeping my everyday identity hidden, this publication ceases to be about me as an individual. It becomes about us. It allows me to write with raw, radical honesty about the things women are explicitly told to suffer through in silence.
The Purpose of BambooM-ing
This Substack is not a self-help manual or a clinical guide. It is a literary sanctuary—a “hidden bridge” connecting the analytical world we have to live in with the deeply emotional, spiritual, and physical realities of being a woman in midlife - and maybe beyond (who knows how long I can keep this thing going? *eyeroll+snort*).
Moving forward, you can expect essays, reflections, and deep dives into:
The Menopause Transition: Navigating the physical and emotional shifts without losing our minds or our identities.
Mental Health in the Middle: Speaking openly about anxiety, depression, burnout, and the psychological restructuring of midlife.
Resilience (The “M-ing” Process): Creative and philosophical musings on how we bend without breaking, shatter our old expectations, and grow roots that run deeper than before.
This is a space to breathe. A space to reflect. A hidden BambooM-ing grove where we can sit together in the shade, drop our titles at the gate, and talk about what it actually means to survive and thrive through life’s greatest thresholds.
Thank you for stepping across the bridge with me.
With warmth, resilience and joy,
JiaHui
A Note to My Early Readers: If this first reflection resonated with you, please consider subscribing to receive future essays directly in your inbox. Let’s cultivate this grove together.