BEFORE
I KNEW.

BEFORE I KNEW

I didn’t start writing this because I wanted to write a memoir.

Actually, for most of my life I’ve been pretty good at doing the opposite.

Forgetting.

Compartmentalizing.

Moving on.

Putting things into little boxes in my head and deciding whether or not I wanted to open them again.

I became very good at surviving things by not constantly thinking about them.

Maybe too good.

There are entire periods of my life that feel blurry now. Some memories are incredibly clear. Others are almost completely gone unless something triggers them.

For a long time, I preferred it that way.

Why would I want to sit around remembering every terrible decision I’ve ever made?

But eventually I started realizing that forgetting everything also meant forgetting how I became who I am.

And more importantly, I started realizing that other people could tell stories about my past whether I told mine or not.

So here we are.

I’m not writing this to prove that I’m a good person.

I’m not.

At least not all the time.

I’ve made terrible decisions. I’ve hurt people. I’ve stayed places I shouldn’t have stayed.

I’ve cared about things that didn’t fucking matter. I’ve cared too much about money. I’ve trusted people I shouldn’t have trusted.

I’ve avoided things. I’ve been wrong.

Probably a lot.

And I’m almost definitely wrong about something right now that I’ll understand completely differently five years from now.

That’s being human.

I don’t need to be an angel for my story to matter.

Blame isn’t a very useful explanation for why somebody became who they became.

That doesn’t mean nobody is responsible for anything. People are responsible for what they choose to do. I am responsible for what I’ve done. Other people are responsible for what they’ve done to me.

But once you’ve figured out who did what, blame doesn’t necessarily tell you very much.

I want to know why.

Why did I make that decision? Why did I stay? Why did I leave? What was I looking for? What did money mean to me? What did family mean to me?

And at what point did I become someone I didn’t recognize anymore?

That’s what Part One is about.

Because before I tell you what happened later, you need to understand the person it happened to.

And apparently that means I have to introduce you to all the different versions of Sua first.

Except there’s one problem with that.

For a lot of this story, Sua didn’t exist yet.

BEFORE SUA

My name was Ena.

Sometime after my marriage ended, I changed my first name.

I became Sua.

At the time, it didn’t feel particularly significant.

Looking back now, I’m not sure that’s true.

Ena is me.

Everything she did belongs to me. Every stupid decision. Every good one. Every person she loved. Every mistake she made.

Changing my name didn’t erase any of that.

But looking back now, I don’t think the timing was meaningless either.

My marriage had ended. My life had changed. I had become a mother. I was trying to rebuild financially.

I was trying to understand who I was outside of relationships, outside of survival, outside of the life I’d been living.

And somewhere inside all of that, I chose a different name.

Maybe I didn’t understand exactly what I was doing at the time. Maybe I just liked the name. Maybe some part of me wanted a line between what had been and whatever came next.

Probably all of it.

But there’s something strange about writing this now and realizing that when I keep talking about trying to “find myself,” I was doing it during a period when I had literally renamed myself.

So when I ask: Who was I before all of this?

Sometimes the answer is technically: Ena.

And when I ask who I became afterward?

That’s a much longer story.

That’s Sua.

FAMILY

For a long time, I thought a lot of what went wrong in my life could be traced back to my parents.

I still believe they were responsible for things they should’ve done differently.

I’m not going to rewrite that just because I’ve gotten older and more reflective.

There are things children need from their parents. There are periods where showing up matters.

And I think there is a very real difference between moving through life knowing you have people behind you and moving through life knowing that if something goes wrong, you better figure it the fuck out yourself.

That affects you. It affects the choices you make. It affects the people you tolerate. It affects what security means to you. It affects money.

But I’ve also had to accept that parents aren’t the entire equation.

I learned that partly because the person I eventually married had something I thought would’ve changed everything for me: a close family.

His family reminded me a lot of my childhood growing up.

And that mattered more than I understood at the time.

Growing up, family was a big part of my life. I saw my grandparents constantly. Family gathered. Birthdays mattered. Holidays mattered. People actually participated in one another’s lives.

There was a feeling of belonging.

My grandmother passed away, and my parents divorced not long after.

I couldn’t tell you exactly when it happened.

I just know that the family I remembered from my childhood didn’t feel the same anymore.

People became more distant.

The title of “family” remained, but the experience of it had changed.

So when I found myself around a family that still gathered, celebrated things together and genuinely participated in each other’s lives, it felt familiar.

It reminded me of something I grew up with and didn’t realize how much I’d missed.

Family wasn’t just people you’re related to.
Family was people who showed up.

And I wanted that.

BEFORE I KNEW BETTER

Before marriage, before motherhood, before everything got complicated, I was independent.

Looking back now, I can recognize that I was doing a lot for someone my age.

At the time, it didn’t feel remarkable.

For the most part, it felt exhausting.

I wanted to be normal.

Whatever “normal” meant at that age.

I wanted to have time to figure myself out. To do the stupid things people do when they’re young without every decision having some larger consequence attached to it.

A lot of my friends were still living with their parents. They could work, go out, spend their money, come home and still know there was a roof over their head.

I was focused on making sure I had the roof.

That’s different.

I was making money. My schedule was flexible. I could go out with my friends, spend money on things I wanted and still enjoy being young.

I had fun.

A lot of fun, actually.

And that’s why this period is strange to explain.

Because from the outside—and even looking back now—parts of my life were genuinely good.

I had freedom. I had money. I had friends. I could do things I wanted to do.

But underneath that freedom was responsibility I didn’t necessarily want yet.

I didn’t have the feeling that somebody else was holding the foundation while I figured out who I wanted to become.

I was the foundation.
And I was tired.

That’s probably why I can look back now and think: You had a pretty fucking good life. Why didn’t you appreciate it more?

Because I didn’t experience it with the perspective I have now. I experienced it while I was responsible for maintaining it.

There’s a difference.

And even while I was having fun, some part of me still felt empty. Maybe lonely. Maybe tired of being responsible for myself all the time. Maybe wanting something that felt more stable.

I don’t know if I understood any of that consciously.

Then somebody came along.

I found him attractive.

I liked him.

His family felt familiar.

Looking back, I can find all kinds of deeper reasons why that might have mattered to me.

But at the time, I wasn’t analyzing any of that.

I was young.

I met somebody I liked, and being around his family felt good.

And that was enough.

Sometimes humans love rewriting their past like every major decision was part of some grand plan.

Mine wasn’t.

And then suddenly I was 21, married and becoming a mother.

THE MIRROR

I’m deliberately not going into the details of what happened inside my marriage.

He’s my son’s father.

There are things that belong to that period of my life that don’t need to become public just because I decided to write.

Privacy isn’t shame.

The relationship became abusive.

That’s enough said.

What matters to this story is what happened to me inside it.

At first, I became quieter. More careful. More aware of myself.

I learned to monitor how I behaved and eventually became very good at controlling my reactions.

For a long time, I think I was more shocked than anything else.

Then eventually something in me changed.

I started reacting differently.

I started fighting back.

And at some point I realized I was becoming someone I didn’t recognize either.

That realization stayed with me.

Because I learned something about myself that I’ve carried into every relationship since:

People are mirrors.

Not perfectly. Not scientifically.

But spend enough time around someone and they affect you.

Their behaviour can change your behaviour. Their normal can start becoming your normal. Their anger can create anger in you. Their chaos can make you chaotic.

And eventually you can look at yourself and think: When the fuck did I become like this?

That scared me.

Not only because of what was happening around me.

Because I saw what could happen inside me too.

I saw how far I could go when I stayed somewhere long enough.

And I never wanted to meet that version of myself again.

Eventually I realized something even bigger:

I don’t want to lose myself in a relationship again.

Present-day me understands something else now too.

Keeping a home together and keeping a healthy home together are not the same thing.

I didn’t understand that yet.

WHY I STAYED

People always want to know why somebody stayed.

There wasn’t one reason.

There rarely is.

My son was probably the biggest one.

I didn’t want to split up his home.

I’d also given up a lot of the independence I’d built before.

Money.

Lifestyle.

Parts of my identity.

I became a mother and tried my best to fill the role of being a wife.

At 21.

Which I used to think wasn’t that young.

Now?

Yeah.

It’s pretty young.

I wanted the family to work.

So I stayed.

THE FIRST EXIT

The first time I separated, I had a job that started at 6 a.m.

I had a baby.

And suddenly independence wasn’t as simple as deciding I wanted it.

I needed childcare.

I needed help.

I needed money.

So I begged my mom to come help me.

And I mean begged.

I cried.

I asked her to quit her job and come live with us because I genuinely didn’t know how I was going to make everything work without help.

Eventually, she did.

And I want to be fair to her about that.

My mom has tried in ways my father hasn’t.

Not always successfully.

Not always in the way I needed.

But she tried.

We hadn’t lived together since I was 15, and suddenly we were trying to live together again while I was leaving a marriage and raising a baby.

We fought.

A lot.

Eventually, after about six months, she left and essentially told me I should go back to my son’s father.

So I did.

Not because I’d suddenly decided the marriage was healthy.

Sometimes choices aren’t really between a good option and a bad option.

Sometimes they’re between a bad option and the option you can actually survive right now.

I went back.

The cycle continued.

Eventually I left again.

THE GIRL FROM INSTAGRAM

Around that time, I connected with a girl on Instagram.

I didn’t actually know her.

I knew of her through a good friend of mine, but even to my friend she was really only an acquaintance.

What made me curious was that she clearly had money, and nobody seemed to understand what she actually did.

Eventually we connected.

She happened to be in town and asked if I wanted to meet her at her hotel.

So I went.

Eventually she offered me work.

It gave me a way to get back on my feet while holding onto some of the independence I’d worked hard to build.

And for a while, that mattered more to me than whether I actually felt good about what I was doing.

I was supporting myself.

I was taking care of my son.

I wasn’t depending on anybody.

At that point in my life, that felt like enough.

It wouldn’t always.

For a short period, I lived with her.

And strangely enough, I did learn things from her.

I learned how to voice my opinions.

I learned how to stop taking shit from people.

But I also knew pretty quickly that this wasn’t somewhere I wanted to stay.

I gave myself two months.

Learn what I needed to learn.

Get out.

So I did.

Leaving didn’t go particularly well.

Parts of my private life eventually ended up being posted publicly.

Things that weren’t hers to tell.

And that was enough for me.

I disappeared.

Not metaphorically.

I basically removed myself from the social world I’d been part of.

Looking back, I think that’s when disappearing became one of my favourite solutions.

Something hurts enough?

Leave.

Stop talking.

Detach.

Eventually stop caring.

Effective?

Absolutely.

Healthy every single time?

Probably fucking not.

But it worked.

Until it didn’t.

MONEY

I rebuilt.

And this time I wasn’t only responsible for myself.

I had my son.

For the next few years, money became extremely important to me.

Some of that was survival.

But money also became something else.

Protection.

If I had money, I didn’t have to ask.

I didn’t have to depend.

I could leave.

I could choose.

I could take care of my son.

Money gave me options.

And for a long time, that was enough to justify a lot.

But eventually I started wanting more from my life than independence.

I wanted to be proud of what I was building.

I wanted to make money doing something I could actually talk about.

Something I could grow.

Something that felt like mine.

I didn’t necessarily know what that was yet.

I just knew I wanted something different.

THEN THE WORLD SHUT DOWN

And then COVID happened.

Of course it did.

The way I had been making money stopped working the way it had before.

And if I’d known the entire fucking planet was going to shut down?

I probably would’ve saved a lot more money.

Lesson learned.

Apparently even civilization can temporarily close.

But I still had bills.

I still had my son.

And I still needed to figure out what came next.

So somehow my next venture became a cleaning company.

I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

I made mistakes left, right and centre.

There were times I paid my workers more than I paid myself.

Fantastic business strategy.

But somehow, for the time being, it worked.

And something about it felt different.

There were customers.

Workers.

Scheduling.

Problems.

Actual services being provided.

It was harder in different ways, but I could point to something and say:

I built this.

And I was proud of that.

Maybe that was the first time I started understanding that I didn’t only want to make money.

I wanted to feel good about how I made it.

RESET

After COVID, things were messy.

There were friendships ending.

Back-and-forth with my son’s father.

Attempts to go back to school.

Attempts to figure out what I was doing.

School didn’t work.

Honestly, not much felt like it was working.

I was miserable.

And somewhere in all of that, I started realizing how detached I had become.

I could cut people off.

I could compartmentalize.

I could decide something wasn’t worth feeling and keep moving.

Those things had helped me survive.

But I didn’t want them to become everything I was.

So I spent a lot of time alone.

And I mean alone.

I needed to know what I thought when nobody else was telling me what to think.

I started running.

Sauna.

Cold plunges.

Pilates.

Yoga.

Meditation.

Breathwork.

Yes.

I became that bitch.

And honestly?

It helped.

Cold plunges taught me something simple.

Discomfort doesn’t always mean danger.

Sometimes you need to leave.

Sometimes you need to breathe and stay.

Learning the difference mattered.

For a long time, I kept saying I wanted the old me back.

I don’t anymore.

I don’t want to become the person I was before everything happened.

She didn’t know what I know now.

What I wanted back were pieces of her.

Her heart.

Her willingness to care.

Maybe her ability to have fun without analyzing everything.

But I want those things inside the person I am now.

I don’t want to go backward.

I want to keep becoming someone I actually want to be.

I was changing.

But one problem hadn’t magically disappeared.

I still needed money.

And despite everything I’d learned about it, financial independence still mattered to me for one simple reason:

Options.

I wanted choices.

But more than that, I think I wanted out.

Not out of one relationship.

Not away from one person.

I wanted distance from the entire ecosystem of my life.

The people.

The memories.

The environments.

The versions of myself attached to all of it.

I had always talked about leaving.

Eventually, I actually did.

My son and I moved to Korea.

KOREA

Korea wasn’t a failure.

I need to say that clearly.

My son and I lived with my mom for around seven months.

And honestly?

It was good.

Really good.

It was completely different from the first time my mom had come to help me after my separation.

Back then, we were both stressed.

This time, something had changed.

My mom had a boyfriend, and the four of us had something that actually felt like a little family.

We made good memories there.

And looking back now, I think living with my mom that way healed something in me.

We started talking seriously about the future.

There was family property we hoped could eventually be sold, and we talked about using that money to build something together.

Create income.

Live together.

I could have help with my son.

I could build a career I was actually proud of.

And maybe we could have the kind of family structure I’d been missing for a long time.

The problem was that I couldn’t simply move to Korea and start working.

I wasn’t a Korean citizen, and we were trying to figure out a work visa.

Eventually, money became a problem again.

And I reached a breaking point.

Not because Korea was bad.

That’s important.

Looking back, I think I left too early.

Maybe if I’d given myself more time to adjust, things would’ve been different.

But I didn’t.

I told my mom:

I have to go back.

So my son and I returned to Canada.

Leaving was heartbreaking.

Because I wasn’t leaving something I hated.

I was leaving something I actually wanted to work.

For a long time, I thought maybe I’d just run again.

Now I’m not so sure.

Maybe part of me was running.

But mostly, I think I was still trying to figure out who I actually was.

And I don’t think that’s a question you answer once.

Maybe you’re supposed to keep discovering yourself.

I’m okay with that now.

ANOTHER TRY

Eventually, I started building again.

Apparently that’s one thing about me that never really stops.

Around that time, I met up with a friend in Toronto who I hadn’t seen in years.

Initially, we were just catching up.

We were both motivated.

We moved at a similar pace.

Eventually, we decided to start a small business together.

And for a while, I genuinely thought:

Maybe this is finally the thing.

It had potential, and I invested enough time and money into it that I started imagining a future around it.

Eventually, though, mixing friendship and business became more complicated than either of us expected.

It stopped working.

So I walked away.

Again.

And that hurt more than I probably admitted at the time.

Because I wasn’t only losing a business.

I was losing another future I’d started believing in.

So naturally, I went back into discovery mode.

What next?

What could I build?

And this time, could I find something that made money and actually meant something to me?

That question led me somewhere completely different.

WELLNESS

During RESET, sauna and cold plunges had become genuinely important to me.

And while I was in Toronto, I found a wellness concept that inspired me.

I started wondering whether I could build something of my own around the things that had genuinely helped me.

At this point, that was all it was.

An idea.

I hadn’t launched a business.

I hadn’t done some massive feasibility study.

I was exploring.

And one of the first things I needed to understand was whether I could actually afford to build what I was imagining.

Before I worried about locations, branding or everything else that comes with starting a business, I wanted to understand the approximate cost of the physical build.

So I started looking.

Very casually.

Very amateurishly.

Eventually, I found an ad.

And I clicked it.

That’s it.
That’s how this started.

I wasn’t looking for land.

I wasn’t looking for an investment.

I definitely wasn’t looking for a relationship.

I was researching a business idea.

The person behind the ad had ideas I found interesting.

So we started talking.

And what began as a conversation about a business idea slowly became something much bigger than I had intended.

THE IDEA GETS BIGGER

The more we talked, the bigger the idea became.

And eventually, so did the cost.

I started realizing that I wasn’t financially prepared—or maybe more accurately, financially willing—to fund the version of the business we were discussing.

I considered taking out a loan.

I looked into it.

But taking on significant debt for something I was still exploring didn’t feel right.

There was more happening around it too.

My mom and her boyfriend potentially coming to live with us.

Them helping with the business.

Them helping with my son.

Suddenly this wasn’t just a business idea anymore.

It was starting to reshape my entire life.

And eventually I thought:

No.

I wasn’t ready to carry all of that.

So I tried to stop.

He became defensive about the ideas we’d discussed and seemed to believe I was going to take them somewhere else and continue without him.

I wasn’t.

I was trying to stop.

I tried to stop the business.

But somehow, the connection didn’t end with it.

He stayed in touch with me.

And honestly, this is one of those parts that’s difficult to summarize neatly because it didn’t feel like there was some clear transition from one thing into another.

Somehow, what had started as a conversation about a business idea became what I believed was a romantic relationship.

And it happened fast.

Too fast, looking back.