ANNELISA PHUONG NGUYEN
Be the change you wish to see in others
What to Do When Someone Makes Noise About You
Dear my future kids / November 11, 2026Dear my future kiddos, There are things I would love to protect you from and can’t, and one of them is the day somebody tells a story about you that isn’t true. It might be a classmate or a coworker or a friend of a friend, or even someone you thought of as your own…
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Kindness Doesn’t Mean Silence
Annilusa, Dear my future kids / October 2, 2026My grandpa taught me about kindness, long before I knew that was what he was teaching. I was little when one of my teachers told my family I wasn't particularly outstanding, that I only did well because I prepared my lessons in advance. I still remember how much that stung. I had always had good…
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Does Love Make Us Irrational – Or More Rational?
Dear my future kids / June 29, 2026Kids, Sorry for the late letter. I stopped writing for a little while because I wanted to step away and simply experience life for a moment. Now I'm back, and I have so much to share with you. And the first letter after a while is about love... "Love is blind." You'll hear that sentence…
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Do you wait, or do you begin?
Dear my future kids / November 18, 2025Dear my future kids, It’s been a while since I’ve written to you. Life has been moving so fast lately that some days I feel like I’m running just to keep up, and even then things still slip through my fingers. In the middle of all that, there’s a question I want you to try…
Read moreOn the toughest times in life
Dear my future kids / September 1, 2025Dear my future kids, There will be times when life just feels impossible. When nothing works out, when everything seems to fall apart all at once. You might feel so uncomfortable in your own skin, like you just want to scream, like the whole world is collapsing and you can’t stop it. It’s as if…
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On Aging, Dignity, and the Ones We Love
Dear my future kids / June 17, 2025Dear buddies, I spend the quiet Hanoi mornings playing chess with your great-grandfather. It started as something simple: a way to keep him company, to slow down my own racing thoughts. When you're young, aging feels like a distant concept - something that mostly means slowing down, forgetting things, losing sharpness. But sitting across from…
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Marriage Isn’t the Milestone
Annilusa / June 13, 2025Lately I’ve been traveling a lot, for work, for projects, and sometimes just to breathe. It has been a season of constant motion, and I’ve grown a great deal from it, but I can see that to my parents it looks like something else. I’m about to turn what they call “almost thirty,” there’s no…
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Just Try Anyway
Dear my future kids / June 4, 2025Dear kids, A few things happened last week that made me sit down and write this for you. I was in New York, carrying three bags, one iced americano, and absolutely zero dignity. I tripped over someone’s suitcase on the subway stairs, and dropped my phone screen-first onto the sidewalk. It lit up just in…
Read moreNew York #1
Random thoughts / May 27, 2025This morning in New York, the city was unusually kind - quiet corners, warm light bouncing off windows, a breeze that didn’t demand anything from me. I was sitting outside a tiny cafe in the East Village, sipping my almost-too-milky iced coffee, when I found myself deep in conversation with Professor Ron McClure (whose career…
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my kind of love
Annilusa / May 20, 2025love is such a strange, sacred thing. my little self was the kind of girl who believed in “i want it, i got it.” i thought effort and desire were enough to get anything. i thought feelings would work the same way - simple, predictable, earnable. but growing up taught me otherwise. feelings - especially…
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About love. Self-love.
Annilusa / April 26, 2025People say self-love is the foundation of everything, that you can’t love anyone until you love yourself. But when the first love you ever knew was cracked and conditional, you start to suspect that you were the problem. Too loud, too sensitive, too needy, and maybe if you’d done something differently they would have stayed.…
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Love Isn’t Late – It Comes When You’re Ready
Random thoughts / April 26, 2025A reflection on becoming whole before becoming one... I’m 26. If you grew up in Asia, you already know the math. Married by 27. Kids by 30. Happily ever after somewhere in between. The clock has been running for a while now. It gets louder at every family dinner, every time a friend sends a…
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