I am 16.
Here is everything I have written. And everything that made me write it.

I started chess at twelve, not eight. That distinction matters more than most people realise. It means everything I learned, I had to learn faster, against players who had been studying openings since they were in primary school. It also means I know exactly what the inside of a late start looks like. And what it is possible to do from there.

By sixteen I had competed across seven countries, earned three FIDE Arena titles, and come within a measurable distance of a goal I had set myself in a hotel room in Istanbul the year I picked up a chess piece for the first time. I did not reach the Grandmaster title. The memoir I am writing, The Grandmaster I Never Became, releases on Amazon on 1 August 2026. It is about what actually happened in the space where that goal used to be.

While training for chess, I qualified as an EQF Level 4 Personal Trainer, became a fitness instructor for a national Paralympic athlete in Qatar, won the Oceanman 10KM open water championship in Kazakhstan, placed top ten in the Oceanman World Championship, and under the name KimDem released six original chess songs across three languages, two competitive pool swimming anthems, a triathlon anthem, and an open water anthem. In 2022, while I was thirteen, I submitted a paper on hunger and obesity in the Philippines to the World Food Prize Foundation. In 2023, they named me a Borlaug Scholar. In May 2026, I published the Pressure Decoder series, a set of three interactive tools for athletes and dreamers working under pressure.

I write because these things are connected and most writing about any one of them pretends the others do not exist. Chess teaches a way of thinking that shows up in the water, in the gym, in a research paper, and in a recording session. The writing here tries to show that. Not as an argument, but as evidence.