Joash Zheng’s Experience (Participant) [they/them]

As obvious as it was in the name, I didn't expect to learn as much about myself in this WOTS programme as I ultimately did.

I figured I would simply be amplifying the skills I possessed, the traits and abilities that I identified with being my strengths. The process, I soon realized, was far more holistic.

The ten weeks became a refuge. A place to seek asylum from the weekly stresses and conflicts between the informed and the inconsiderate. The juggling act between the paralyzing dread that may come with self-knowledge and the unabashed willingness to make impositions of the people around us.

I saw myself as a refugee from my past, willing to walk,  talk, and think differently, in order to escape all the shame and guilt of the choices I have made to survive. But in the past ten weeks I have also seen more value in all the parts of me I have failed to obliterate. I am more than the idea I have of what I want to be. I am bigger than the narrow-minded pursuit of better if I simply let myself sit with all the worst and best parts of myself.

These are the things I wouldn't have seen, perhaps, without the WOTS programme.