“Life can only be understood backwards,” wrote existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, “but it must be lived forward.” At the end of life, all of us will look back at the defining chapters in our lives. The crossroads. The epiphanies. The watershed moments. Through reflection we will find there were certain points that clearly marked a before and an after. After speaking with Val Saksornchai, her before and after was like a scene from a movie. It was a certain noise – bang! — the door slamming shut behind her after she was unknowingly admitted to a government psych ward. She was picked up in a van by a group of men, taken to a random building, and tranquilized. When she came to, she was strapped to a metal bed in a communal room — clinically diagnosed with Bipolar I disorder. As she reflects now years later, she remarks it was in that watershed moment, she had an epiphany — something was clearly out of balance and she found herself at a crossroads. However, before moving forward, we must first go backwards to understand how she got there and what kind of life she has chosen to live forward.
Throughout Val’s childhood growing up just outside of Bangkok, her identity was tightly wrapped, sealed, and predicated on being a good student. And she was. At 17 she earned a scholarship to study at University College London (UCL). There she experienced what I imagine many collegiate athletes do. In your hometown, you’re a top prospect, maybe even #1, but once you go to the next level, a globally-renowned top 5 ranked school then like UCL no less, it’s a whole new game and you’re just a regular. Plus, if it just so happens that your entire being up to that point has been based on excelling in academics, to the point you’ve forgone developing healthy relationships around you, it won’t be long before the center no longer holds.
The year is 2007. Val is 17 years old. Smart. Accomplished. Confident. Yet, as she puts it, suffering from a severe lack of self-awareness. She arrives in the UK first to study two years of A-Levels (UK’s version of high school) and then later begins studying at UCL in 2009. She arrives at the university to find banners everywhere signifying the prestige of her brave new world. It’s not long before the prestige gets to her and she’s not doing well. Her new environment lacks the structure and validation she’s grown accustomed to and it all hits her one day in her dorm.
She was taking a shower when she said everything changed. Like the flip of a light switch, everything turned bleak. Confidence, gone. Focus, impossible. Absences from class started stacking up. At first she admitted she had a misconceived idea that she didn’t need help, but that changed when she reached out to her old high school economics teacher, who recommended journaling. She followed his advice, went and bought one and called it her “Depression Book.” Writing in it helped pull her through her first year at university. The following summer Val went back to Thailand. The change in environment was just what she needed. The center recentered. Confidence, back. I was depressed and then I beat it — or so she thought.
Year Two in university was the same as Year One. Depressed. Struggling. Barely holding on. The summer following Year Two, she saw a psychiatrist who diagnosed her with depression and recommended anti-depressants. She didn’t take to that. Year Three led to another whole new environment: Paris. Amazing. Hemingway called Paris “a moveable feast” when he lived there in his 20s. Even for someone as depressed as Hemingway was, I imagine it’s a difficult place to stay down. Then Val returned to UCL for Year Four. So did her depression.
Not only were the absences from class stacking up this time, so were the boxes of pizza, apple pie, and hours of watching the show Friends on rerun. She remembered being happy in a weird way, but her friends were worried. They took her in for a little bit and had her request an interruption from university. In that Year Off, she moved into her boyfriend’s apartment who she credits as the reason why she consumed any sort of nutritious meals at that time. From that point on, there was still another swing of the pendulum. Back in Thailand, better again. Back in university for her final exams, depressed, again. Surprisingly, even after all of that, she still got a first-class degree from one of the top universities in the world. However, it was when she returned to Thailand after graduation that the pendulum swung in the other direction like never before. She became manic.
What does it feel like to experience a manic episode? You’re not just feeling up, you are way up. Val was going out a lot. Partying. Drinking. Smoking. Thinking everybody was in love with her and wanted to get married. Rage-quitting her job. Buying a condo. Believing she's the next Whitney Houston. Creating a social media page and paying to promote what she believed was a blossoming singing career. Spiralling. Spiralling. Spiralling out of control to the point that her dad decided to hospitalize her. A decision he feared would scar her for life.
As I described earlier, it was like a scene from a movie. One day a van shows up with a bunch of guys inside. They put her in the back before speeding off to the psych ward. Once there, she was told she’d be getting a vitamin shot when in reality they jabbed her with a tranquilizer. She couldn’t remember everything, but what she does remember was her hunger. Oddly enough Val says the psych ward has some of the most delicious food and they feed you around the clock.
Listening to Val describe her life inside a psych ward for six weeks made me feel a different kind of queasy. The building is locked. You can hear other people screaming from a different room, but the people in front of you sharing the corridor seem normal. Other than your eyeglasses, you have no belongings. If you need female sanitary pads, you must request them from the nurses. There’s no books, only magazines which, being a voracious reader, Val devoured. Besides those, a lot of Thai soapbox dramas air on the TV. Everything is regimented. You get up at the same time. You eat at the same time. You do the same exercise at the same time while listening to the same song. And then there’s the really unsettling part — you have no way to communicate with the outside world. Her mom would visit every day with a book and some peeled oranges for her, but that was it.
When Val was admitted she was put on medication. Not long after, she realized she wasn’t manic or depressed anymore. She started to feel normal. Despite that, she had no idea how to demonstrate that to the doctors and it wasn’t like the doctors were doing checkups all the time. She said it was big news if a doctor showed up because you started thinking it might be time for you to leave. As the days and weeks went by she started seeing people who came after her leave before her, leaving her to feel even more puzzled about her situation. It wasn’t until a month and a half passed that her dad lobbied to get her back out. After some back-and-forth she was finally free to go home only to find her jeans didn’t quite fit thanks to the psych ward’s surprising meal plan. In retrospect, Val says still to this day that experience was the best thing to ever happen to her. Having all of her freedom taken away really left a mark. As Viktor Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” From that day forth, Val vowed to live a life that would never put her back in a mental hospital ever again.
On to the next chapter, Val spent some time trying to put things back together. She moved in with her parents and tried a few different jobs: Wall Street English, a role in HR, and then a job at Agoda. Along the way, one of her bosses bought her and her team a book for everyone: a screaming orange cover with big bold black letters that reads, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson. Like millions of other readers, including myself, she was hooked. She read The Subtle Art, plus Mark’s other book, Everything Is F*cked, as well as all of his articles. She said it was like discovering her life philosophy being read back to her. One quote she loves in particular is in the acknowledgments of Mark’s book. He wrote to his wife, “If I’m ever able to hope for nothing, it will be for the simple reason that I’m already with you.” The phrase “hope for nothing” is the thesis of his second book and his version of Nietzsche's “Amor fati” which is Latin for “love of fate.” In short, love of fate and hope for nothing mean to desire reality in its entirety, no matter which way the pendulum swings. As fate would have it, later on, right after she quit her job around the time of Covid and decided she was going to move to Saigon to be with her partner, she saw an ad for her dream remote job — Research and Content Assistant for #1 New York Times Bestselling Author Mark Manson.
She looked at the job requirements and realized she didn’t have what they were looking for exactly. She didn’t have a psychology degree. She didn’t have years of experience in the right fields. She wasn’t a typical candidate. But she had a story, a rare one. One that she could tell honestly. So, in her job application, she poured all of herself into it. Former straight A student from Thailand. Up and down journey at UCL. Her depression. Her manic episode. Her trip to the psych ward. All of her different job experiences. And of course, a deep appreciation for Mark’s work. Out of hundreds of applications and after multiple rounds of selection, she earned the job.
Val started as a Research and Content Assistant for Mark in September 2020. Her role has slowly evolved over time until eventually becoming what it is today: Newsletter Manager. Mark’s newsletter that Val manages is called Your Next Breakthrough. It hits the inboxes of over a million readers every week. Among various tasks, Val will comb through Mark’s work, identify a few good quotes to open the email with, add a couple of related journaling questions, and then one homework assignment to do for the week. Afterward she’ll sift through all of the readers who write about their experiences and then pull out a few stories to potentially feature in the following week’s issue. Once she’s done her part, Mark reviews everything, adds his own finishing touches, and gives his final approval before it goes out. It’s practical, sustainable, and all about building an active community by giving people tangible exercises to work on. Val says she feels incredibly grateful to work with Mark and the rest of the team on a consistent basis. Mark has also helped with Val’s weekly Substack newsletter, Val Thinks, which she started in May 2021.
Every single Friday Val emails her readers on a topic to stop and think about. Some of her personal favorites include: “Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time” (her first piece), “It’s the journey, never the destination,” (her most-read piece), “This is Vietnam” (her describing scenes in Saigon) and “My dad says I’m weak” — (a daughter’s love letter to her Dad and in her words, probably the most moving essay she’s ever written). Similar to writing in her journal she had back in university, her newsletter serves as a vehicle for self-discovery, self-awareness, and self-growth. It allows her to pursue her interests through the art of writing well — a key part of what actually makes a writer, a writer in her view. It allows her to provide value at scale by letting go of perfectionism, staying accountable to her deadline, and delivering on her promise to the reader. Most importantly, writing her newsletter allows her to process her emotions like the unexplainable grief at the recent passing of her father. He had been battling prostate cancer for years.
When her family first got the news, she was hoping for him to get better, but later she rebelled against that hope because during that time, Mark’s philosophy of “hope for nothing” returned. As she explains, when you’re hoping for something, what that really means is there’s something you can do now. However, in a situation where hope is futile, when it feels like there’s nothing you can do to change the situation, it wakes you up to the things you can change about yourself. She could spend time with him, reflect on memories together, and, of course, write about it all. And she did. A lot. Instead of hiding behind facts in her writing, one of the biggest points of feedback she received from Mark, she shedded the fear of being vulnerable and allowed herself to feel all that was inside her.
In listening to Val’s story, what I gathered ended up coinciding with a lot of what Mark’s already written. How we identify ourselves matters. In her earlier years, Val identified herself as a good student, often rejecting opportunities for socializing in favor of a fragile identity sealed and wrapped in academic accomplishments.The inability to let go of a shallow identity like that has the potential to drag you down to places you’d never want to go. As Mark writes, “The narrower and rarer the identity you choose for yourself, the more everything will seem to threaten you. For that reason, define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary ways possible.” Or, in even more Mansonian terms: kill yourself—and by self he means the arbitrary mental construct you cling to, the story about yourself you tell yourself. Let go. Stop giving so many fucks. Be free.
Nowadays, it appears Val does identify herself in more simple and ordinary terms: friend, partner, writer, someone who aims to invest in relationships and provide value to those around her. In doing so, she frees herself up to learn and fail and grow as a human being. If there’s anything to take with you from reading Val’s story, it’s this: many people see opportunities around them all the time and completely write themselves off before even giving something a chance. I don’t have the right degree. I don’t have the right experience. I don’t know the right people. Val’s story is one big screaming book cover that reads: Fuck That! Whatever it is, go for it. Apply to that job. Move to that city. Start that business. What’s the worst that can happen? Whatever that is, whatever watershed moment you’ll experience, whatever situation you’ll find yourself in that you are no longer able to change, you will always have the opportunity, the challenge, the chance to change yourself, write your own story, and emerge from your tunnel of darkness.
Looking back it seems like it was all planned, like the script of a movie, but Val assures me nothing is ever planned. Looking forward, she has so much more left to strive for — her work with Mark, her own writing, her relationships, and one day her very own published memoir to tell all her story. A story I have no doubt she’ll tell honestly. And one day when she looks back on it all, she’ll know all she could ever do was keep living forward into the light.
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