The Heart’s Wish

The C-Drama, Hidden Love, hit me in the feels. The two main characters are so sweet, and you fall in love with both of them. You root for their kind, tender love the entire way through the series.

When Sang Zhi, our female lead, is only 16 years old, she writes her heart’s secret on a strip of paper (spoiler: she has fallen in love with our male lead, Duan Jiaxu! ????). She then folds the paper into an origami star and drops it into a bottle that Duan Jiaxu had given her. As time passes, she writes more of her heart’s secrets and wishes onto more strips of paper, folding them into stars and adding them to the bottle one by one

I felt this small act of faith in my heart! With each strip of paper, she quietly whispered her love, her dreams, and her deepest desires to the universe. She let each wish rise quietly into the starlit sky to float to the heavens, carried on the wings of hope and love.

Even after I finished the show, her ritual stayed with me. And then… I posted my Heartspring one-shot to YouTube. It did well for such a young channel: 100 views and three new subscribers. However, I create for others. Everything I do—writing, building the website, the audioplays—they are not mine and they never were. They belong to the people who find them and enjoy them. The people who, from the very beginning, I created them for. So I try to live and create by that guiding principal and not the numbers.

However, the low numbers felt like a small ripple in the vast ocean of lost hope; they did begin to drag me down. But I didn’t want to get sad by the low numbers! It felt like a dishonor to my work, as well as being a road to ultimate defeat. I’m building an immersive world: I must play the long game, and sadness makes playing the long game very difficult.

Then, like a ray of sunshine peaking through the gray clouds, I remembered Sang Zhi and her jar of hope. I found a way to step past the sadness and back into hope and trust.

This is my jar of hope. This is my jar of wishes and dreams that, over time, I will fill with tiny hope-charged origami stars brimming with the passionate love I have for my work. I love Starfall Rest so much. It beats in my heart, filling me with happiness every day that I get to work on it, bringing it to life.

And that is my Valentine’s wish for you, too: I hope you love your work as much as I love mine. And, if you haven’t found that love yet, I hope you do because it is as deep and passionate as the love you feel for your life partner. Steve Jobs said it much more eloquently than I, so I will leave you with his words.

Happy Valentine’s Day, friends. ❤️

You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

— Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford Commencement Address