ep 08 / if you don't enjoy it, it's not alignment, even if it works - with Qiu Ting

I met Qiu Ting way back when we were students at university together. We went to Hainan Island for an overseas community project, did group projects together, and then life happened. We lost touch for a while, stayed loosely in the know thanks to Facebook (haha), and reconnected about two years ago when we started collaborating on something that's still unfolding (more on that at the end of this podcast!! something we are so excited about).Qiu Ting is an educator, and outside of that, she is the creative soul behind Onigiri and Toast, a stationery and lifestyle brand born out of grief, memory keeping, and her years living between Singapore and Japan. In this conversation we talk about how a period of quiet grief after she left her teaching post in Japan became a name, then a brand, then a whole practice of memory keeping through journaling and zines.We talk about the year of tiny experiments that got her here, most of which didn't land (a podcast among them), and the handful that did. She talks about what alignment means to her, your heart jumping with joy while you're making something, whether or not it succeeds by any other measure. We get into what it took to unlearn perfectionism and imposter syndrome enough to make things in the first place, and what she calls slow blooming, a life that keeps branching instead of climbing one straight path toward a fixed goal.IN THIS EPISODEThe grief QT didn't recognise at the time after she left JapanUnlearning imposter syndrome as a "non-arts" creative, and giving herself permission to make things anywayWhy QT journals on paper instead of digitally, and her fear of losing memoryQT’s book Field Work Journal Companion, born out of that grief, launching officially in SeptemberWhat a zine actually is, how she makes them entirely by hand, and why she won't sell a digital copyThe workshop with zero sign-ups she refused to cancel, and who showed up anywayHer philosophy on monetising creative work: not for profit, but so people treasure what they're givenBringing her hobbies into her work as a teacher, and what work-life harmony looks like for herCalling herself a "slow bloomer" instead of a late one, and her advice to anyone still figuring out what they wantCONNECT WITH QIU TINGInstagram: @onigiriandtoastCONNECT WITH JASMINEInstagram: @jasmineteo.jiaminWebsite: texturedlifewellness.comMailing List: texturedlifewellness.kit.com/email (sign up for this if you’d like to receive news once our book is out!)