Behind the Scenes of My Magazine Feature
A behind-the-scenes look at my first magazine feature, the leap from corporate leadership to entrepreneurship, and the unexpected lessons I learned while building a course on attachment healing and breathwork.
LuLu Song
6/11/20264 min read
A few weeks ago, the June issue of Woodbury Magazine arrived, and there I was. My first magazine feature!
Which felt surreal for a lot of reasons. Not just because I'd never been featured in a magazine before, or because this is my first year as a full-time solopreneur after leaving my full-time role as a Senior Clinical Project Director. It felt surreal because I know exactly what was happening behind the scenes when that article was being written.
And trust me, it was NOT glamorous. 😂
At the beginning of this year, I made a decision that felt equal parts exciting and terrifying: I was going all in on the breathwork business. Up until then, most of my work had been in-person group experiences and virtual private sessions. I loved the work, but I also knew there was something bigger I wanted to create.
For the last six years, I've been deeply immersed in understanding attachment, not just academically, but personally. I've spent years working through my own attachment wounds, studying relationships, working with therapists specializing in different areas, and reading what has somehow become 137 books on the topic. What kept becoming clearer was this: Breathwork is one of the fastest ways I've found to help people move out of survival mode and into the present moment. When the nervous system feels safer, the grip of old patterns and unresolved trauma begins to loosen. And attachment wounds? They often live in those patterns, especially in romantic relationships. So I knew I wanted to build something that combined the two: a course focused on healing attachment wounds in romantic relationships, with breath as the anchor. I also knew creating it would require an enormous amount of time, energy, and focus. Because if you know me, you know I won't put my name on something unless I genuinely believe it can help people. Creating this wasn't going to be a weekend project… Which is why I decided to do something I'd been postponing for nearly two decades: I went back to China for Chinese New Year.
For most people, that sentence probably doesn't sound like a big deal, but for me, it was. Since moving to the U.S. as a kid, I had never been able to go home during Chinese New Year. First, I was the student trying to earn a full-ride scholarship and felt like being the valedictorian was the way to do it. Then I was the pre-med student spending every spare hour volunteering, working, or doing internships. Then medical school happened. Then student loans happened. Then career-building happened. There was always another reason to postpone the trip. I need to work harder. I need to earn the promotion. I need to pay off the loans faster. And before I knew it, years had passed. This year, I finally stopped waiting for the perfect time. And so, my mom and I finally took a trip to China together!
Somewhere during that trip, another realization hit me. If I was going to spend months creating this course, I also needed help getting the word out. One of the realities of being a solopreneur is that there isn't a marketing department hiding somewhere behind the curtain. If I don't figure it out, it doesn't happen. So after seeing my favorite gym, Sila Wellness, featured in Woodbury Magazine, I decided to do something completely outside my comfort zone. I reached out. No connections. No PR experience. No journalist friends. Just a simple email saying I'd love to be considered for a feature. To my surprise, the team was incredibly kind from the beginning.
The interview was scheduled while I was still in China, at midnight local time, two days after I landed. I was just grateful that we found a time that works with such a big time difference! But by that point, our trip schedule had been packed with activities organized by my mom's friends. I was already wildly jet-lagged and surviving on whatever sleep you can accumulate from random naps in cars. By the time the interview started, I had probably been awake for close to 28 hours. And because I had packed for the wrong weather and never found time to go shopping, I was conducting this interview wearing the only thing that's business casual appropriate, a black wool turtleneck sweater in 80 degree weather, at midnight.
The interview lasted about an hour. By the end, I had completely sweated through the sweater, was it the nerves or the weather or the sweather? Who knows! Ashley, the writer, was gracious enough not to mention any of this in the article. Probably because "slightly delirious woman melting inside a turtleneck" wasn't the story she was assigned to write.
That interview happened in January. The magazine came out in June. And holding it in my hands made me reflect on something bigger than the feature itself.
Most meaningful things in life look polished from the outside. The finished course. The business launch. The magazine article. The career change. But behind almost every meaningful milestone is a version nobody sees. The uncertainty. The awkward emails (yes, I sent an email with 2 glaring typos just a couple of weeks ago). The late nights. The giant pimples. And the moments where you're making it up as you go because you've never done any of this before.
And if there's one thing I'm learning, it's that you don't need certainty before taking the next step. You just need enough courage to do the next thing. Even if you're doing it from halfway around the world. Wearing a wool turtleneck. At midnight. With your mom silently fact-checking your life story from the other side of the hotel room.