Hi there. I’m Mila Han. This blog chronicles my life as a new immigrant and a divorcee in the U.S., and my struggle with self-diagnosed mental illness.

In the not too distant past, the person I was then was a far departure from the strong, uninhibited and liberated woman that stands before you today. I left my deadbeat husband and “fled” to San Francisco from stuffy Singapore 10 years ago and this blog was a big part of my liberation.

Enter my previous life: lost, aimless and pained by a looming sense of isolation, a hankering sense for more nagged at me; I took it as a sign. I was living in  Singapore at the time and I found myself in an unhappy, stagnant marriage alongside friends that I didn’t particularly identify with. 

From the outside, my marriage may have looked like the perfect union but it was far from it. I had begging questions beyond just the sacrament of marriage; questions surrounding eroticism, sensuality and an overall sense of female sexual empowerment, all of this stemming from my own identity as a woman. 

I found myself being anything but empowered in my marriage. I suddenly realized that I had succumbed to the social pressures of marrying and settling into the notion of family life and looking at that for happiness and completion but in that moment, I realized that I had been living for others. Because none of that was really what I wanted. 

Suddenly the life I had signed up for began to look foreign to me. Nagging existential questions littered my daily life; was I living for me or for everyone else? Is the life I signed up for what I really want or some checkmark on the societal benchmark of happiness and completion? 

I created a sense of community online that wasn’t very present in my waking life. Feeling fed up with the state of my life in Singapore, I stopped brooding about it and did something about it. I boarded a plane to San Francisco with only one suitcase and never returned.

These days I call San Francisco home and it’s where I’ve made a life for myself. I’m always going to be a bit heartbroken, a bit of a lost soul and looking for love in all the wrong places.