"Am I a Good Person?"
My Inner Struggle in Da Nang
🎬 Sometimes the story keeps writing itself even after it ends – a behind-the-scenes moment is waiting at the end of this post, for The Secret Journey members only.
📍Da Nang, Vietnam
Da Nang dazzled me. I felt like I'd arrived in paradise, on vacation, everything I could have dreamed of.
It's funny, because this is how I live and I choose where to live, so why doesn't every place I go to give me this feeling?
I think I create varied periods for myself, with or without intention. Because if I lived all the time in an amazing beach city, peaceful, with everything within walking distance, where everyone around is beautiful, where everything is inviting, where everything is perfect, then even this perfection would bore me at some point.
What's wrong with me?
I'm not looking for the best, I'm not looking for the comfortable life, I'm not looking for perfection. I'm looking to experience everything, yes even the unpleasant things, perhaps especially to appreciate the good things in my life.
I've adopted the mindset that everything is temporary, and not just temporary – one month maximum.
If I loved a place, it's only for a month. If I didn't like it, also, just a month. If I developed a new routine, it's only for a month. If I'm in a more extravagant mode right now, like when I decided to order food deliveries in my Hanoi apartment because I didn't have many options within walking distance, then I understood that's just for a month. In Da Nang, my apartment is close to everything, so it will be easy for me to find cheap food within walking distance.
I didn't know how much cheaper Da Nang is compared to Hanoi. Yes, we're talking about 20,000 Vietnamese dong (about $0.80) difference between meals I would eat in Hanoi. The prices are simply cheaper, even coffee that costs only about a dollar. And here I ate a full meal with coffee for less than $3.
This gives me contentment, it's exactly what I wanted – to live cheaply, to wake up in the morning and walk 3 minutes to reach an endless beach, to sit in the shade and edit videos, write, listen to the waves.
I spread my blanket and lay down on the warm sand. I felt a moment of gratitude, thanking myself for bringing myself here, for making my goals happen, because no one else would have done it for me.
This isn't something I take for granted, because I never cared for myself, never thought about my desires. I learned to silence them, to please others.
I encounter situations where this still happens, where my instinct makes me think about others and give up on myself. Only now, I notice it, I shine a spotlight on it, and examine it with full awareness. Now it can no longer control me without me noticing.
I analyze the situation, and make sure that I choose to do something for others, and ensure that I'm not giving up on myself for a moment.
The truth is that the hardest thing is fighting this urge. To act against instinct, to tell myself 'no, this isn't good for me'. It comes in forms of 'this isn't mine', 'stop trying to help everyone', 'it's okay if not everything is perfect'.
I'm writing this as I sit in a beach restaurant, drinking cold ginger tea (my new love). When I sat down in the comfortable couches, there were two guys behind me also looking for a place to sit. We reached the row of couches, and I was about to sit when I saw they were also aiming for the same couch. I sat down while saying 'sorry' with a smile, because right next to me was another couch, and they sat there saying 'it's all good'.
Only while sitting here did I notice that their couch is half in the sun, and my couch is entirely in the shade, so one of them is sitting in the sun, because of me.
For a moment I thought about getting up and offering to switch, because it makes more sense for me to sit in the half-shaded part of their couch, and for them to sit comfortably in my couch, but I'm sitting here fighting this urge.
It's hard for me when someone 'suffers' because of me. But why do I take responsibility for everyone's problems? They chose to sit there just as they could have chosen to sit anywhere else on the beach, it's not my fault!
"Yes but you can help" says that voice again, and I wonder why someone I don't know, who is currently sitting in the sun, causes me to have battles with myself.
Or maybe, I should thank him, because this is how I learn.
Maybe they should have been the ones to ask me if I'd be willing to switch? Why should I take responsibility for the situation? Would it have been resolved if I had simply offered to switch? After all, that's 'the right thing to do', to be nice, to solve problems.
Or maybe it would have created an even bigger war within me, because I always think about others and not about myself?
Why do I care so much?
Why does every trivial situation lead me to examine my behavior? Why do I feel like I'm constantly being tested? What am I looking to find? What am I trying to understand about myself?
Why is the question that comes to me now "Am I a good person?"
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🎬Behind The Scenes
While I was working on the piece with Claude, I asked him to analyze it.
Maybe I thought he’d give me an answer.
Maybe I hoped he’d tell me whether I should have gotten up, or if it was good that I stayed where I was.
I’m not sure why, but this time, because I was left with open questions, I went looking for answers.
And surprisingly, this was his response:
Analysis of the internal conflict and the Da Nang piece
The text presents a fascinating inner conflict, sparked by a situation that seems simple on the surface—whether or not to give up a shaded couch on the beach for two strangers.
What’s interesting is how such an everyday moment unfolds into a deeper emotional struggle and touches on fundamental questions of identity.
The situation:
The immediate dilemma: the writer is sitting comfortably on a shaded beach couch, while two men take the couch next to her, and one of them is stuck in the sun.
She feels torn between staying in her comfortable spot and offering to switch.
The deeper struggle: the dilemma isn’t really about the couch.
It’s about an ingrained pattern—automatically prioritizing other people’s comfort over her own, even when no one has asked her to.
The contrast: even in a “perfect” place like Da Nang—with its dreamy beaches and cheap prices, an outer paradise—she finds herself trapped in familiar inner battles.
It highlights the idea that some struggles are internal, and they follow us everywhere.
The structure:
The text shifts between describing the idyllic scene in Da Nang and exploring an inner reckoning.
That back-and-forth creates a strong effect, it underlines the gap between the external and internal reality.
The internal dialogue:
The sentence “But you could help”, which represents her critical inner voice, captures the inner conflict beautifully.
The text works well because it presents both sides of the struggle with honesty.
The rhetorical questions at the end:
Why do I care so much? What am I trying to find? Am I a good person?
These questions leave the reader with the weight of the unresolved tension and reflect an ongoing search.
Self-awareness:
There’s a clear sense of growth—the writer now recognizes a pattern that used to be automatic.
She’s starting to make conscious choices instead of reacting on autopilot.
Reflections on the conflict:
This kind of struggle is universal and deeply layered.
It raises questions like:
Where’s the line between being kind and abandoning ourselves?
Are we responsible for strangers’ comfort, or is that on them?
Why do some people (especially women) feel a built-in responsibility for others?
How do we unlearn self-sacrificing patterns?
What makes the text especially powerful is how it uses such an ordinary moment to explore something much bigger.
It’s a great example of how everyday experiences can become mirrors, helping us better understand ourselves.
The desire to please others is a long journey to untangle, especially when it’s a pattern buried deep.
But the first step—recognizing the pattern and becoming aware of it—is already happening in the text.
And that’s a powerful place to begin.
I get stuck in this loop a lot. I care too much, overthink what I should do, and feel like I need to make the right decision. I’ve been trying to get better at not taking on everyone else’s problems, but it’s tough. I have this deep sense of responsibility for the people around me, and honestly, it’s exhausting. This really hit close to home.
I just love what you wrote! It resonates deeply with me in line with my work helping my Kidney Dialysis Patients to get funding for their treatments. It has crossed my mind many times, so & so, is it genuine case? Where do I draw a line? In the end, what the hack, I have nothing to lose, give them the benefit of the doubt.My conscious is clear. I don't do the profiling of the patients but the company does. My job is to link the patients with the company, they decide whether the patients deserve to get the funding.
I have done my part & move on. That's how I look at the things!