“When I see something that will help me grow, I just go for it. Why not?”
At Julie Hsieh's milestone birthday, a friend stood up the way a best man does at a wedding and tried to summarize a life that refuses to be summarized. What she landed on was perfect.
"She said Julie is someone who collects careers and hobbies the way other people collect refrigerator magnets."
It got a laugh, because if you count the hats, it really is a lot. Family physician. Abstract artist. Gallery owner. City councilmember. Trained vocalist. Mother. But spend an hour with her and you notice the magnets aren't trophies. She doesn't recite the list to impress you; she almost waves it off. They're all stuck to the same fridge, and the fridge is a single, quiet idea — that a person is allowed to keep becoming, and that nearly everything worth doing comes back to the same place: serving community.
Her first love wasn't medicine. It was her singing voice.
"Singing helped me get out of my shell. I was really shy growing up, and being on stage in front of all those people made me more self-confident."
She sang in the school choir, took voice lessons, spent summers studying vocal performance at Oberlin Conservatory, and dreamed of being an opera singer. Her mother was sure that was a hobby, and that her daughter should be a doctor or a lawyer. Julie listened. She didn't rebel and she didn't resent it; she followed the path laid out for her — pre-med, then medical school, then residency, then her own family-medicine practice in Bellevue, where she cared for patients for seven years. What she lingers on isn't the schools. It's the smallness of how it started.
"I built my practice from zero patients. I was going in to water the plants and feed the fish, and then slowly building it up."
That detail says more about her than any diploma. She's someone who shows up to an empty room and tends it until people come. And still, after seven years, something was off.
"I felt like there was something missing. The artistic side of me felt suppressed. My right brain was just ignored and starved."
Family-medicine boards come due every seven years, and as she approached the deadline to recommit to another seven, she couldn't do it.
"I kept thinking, there's something else out there for me, and I really need to find it. It got to the point where I felt like I just had to make the change."
The change took the whole family across an ocean, to relatives in Taiwan. Julie was hungry for something big enough to shift her mindset and give her clarity, so she convinced her husband, and they went — Julie, her husband, and their two children, then only two and four. She hadn't crossed the world for a job. She'd done it for a change. With no practice to run and no patients to see, she stumbled into the thing that had been waiting in her the whole time, buying supplies at a DIY store and painting a piece in reds and black and gold that looked, to her, like a flame.
"My heart was pounding, I was so excited. It was like there was this visual artist inside me waiting to be discovered. I was forty at the time."
True to form, she didn't treat it as a hobby. She went all in — but what stays with her isn't the art world she entered. It's a moment of being seen by strangers.
"They'd tell me, I see you in your artwork. They didn't know me, but they knew something about me just by looking at my art. That's the power of art — it connects people so directly."
It was COVID that brought her home. The family came back to Mercer Island in 2021, ostensibly just to get vaccinated, and then delays and quarantines overseas stretched on until a temporary trip quietly became a homecoming. Once back and no longer practicing medicine, she knew she needed art in her life. So she built a place for it — and, true to the pattern, she built it as a place for community to gather.
The Yuan Ru Art Center began as an ordinary office unit and took months of work to become what it is now — white walls, tall ceilings, concrete floors, a view of the wetlands, a hidden gem tucked inside an office building that first-timers reliably drive past before doubling back.
"People walk in and feel transported to another world. It feels like a museum, but it's accessible."
Four years in, it draws local artists and the particular tribe she keeps meeting: doctors, dentists, engineers, lawyers who all, at some point, turned to art. She's just as quick to hand the space to a cause as to a canvas. When a Mercer Island couple lost their young daughter, Kyra, to pediatric cancer and turned their grief into the Kyra's Hope Foundation, Julie didn't hesitate. She became a strategic advisor and hosted fundraising events at the gallery within months, because the room she built was never just about the art on the walls.
She has theories about why we gravitate toward art at any point in our lives, and they double as her own diagnosis. Art and science, she insists, are complements, not opposites — the rational left brain and the creative right one, each starved without the other. She likes to cite the research: that medicine's stress can shorten the telomeres that mark our aging, while engaging with art appears to slow that process down.
"You need both to be a balanced person."
If art restored her, community rooted her. It started with an elementary school musical. That first year back, she volunteered to chair a production of The Lion King, not knowing a soul on the island yet. People showed up to help, the musical was a hit, and one yes led to the next, until the path arrived at a door she never expected: a city council seat opened, and plenty of people asked to run had said no. Too vulnerable. Not the right time. Thick skin required.
"Someone told me, you've got to have thick skin. And I'm thinking, do I have that? But I decided I'd put myself out there, because I care so much about this community."
It was the first time her own name was on the ballot. She leaned on a team of mothers she'd organized with on an earlier school bond measure, and won the seat. What she remembers isn't the result. It's the feeling of being seen by the place she'd chosen.
"I was so humbled. So grateful that our community saw me."
The campaign taught the relentless self-starter something she had to learn the hard way: she could not do it alone.
"I definitely knew I couldn't do it by myself. I just had to rely on my team and supporters and let them help me. Learning to look for the people who will support you and letting them — that was the lesson."
It also transformed a woman once terrified of public speaking.
"As a family doctor, you don't really speak publicly. I'd have to write everything out and just stare at my piece of paper. But through practice you learn to speak off the cuff. Sometimes I don't even know exactly what I'm going to say, and it just comes out. It's almost like creating art. The art of public speaking."
She frames it the way she frames everything, by reaching back to the stage — getting up to speak is like slipping into performance mode, the same one she learned as a girl singing in front of strangers. All the seemingly unrelated chapters were preparing for the next.
There are some hats she refuses to set down no matter how crowded the rack gets. When she joined the council, she let go of several commitments, but kept chairing the district's fine arts showcase, a two-night celebration of student art, because some things aren't negotiable.
"I just need to have that in my life. It's part of my soul. It's who I am."
So what would be left, if you took it all away?
"I'd still have my voice. My singing voice. I've been singing since the sixth grade. As a singer, I am the instrument. It's really a core part of me."
That's the thread under all the reinvention. She still sings the arias she loved in high school, and still says yes the way she always does.
"When I see something that will help me grow, something that gives me a real wow, a fulfilling experience, I just go for it. Why not?"
Every choice traces back to the same pull — serving her community, staying close to the people in it. Women, the statistics say, often launch their biggest ventures in their forties and fifties.
"You're not starting over. You're just getting started. This is prime time."
The opera singer who became a doctor who became an artist who became a councilmember never actually abandoned any of those identities. She just kept following the same thread — the pull toward people, toward connection, toward a room where everyone feels they belong — until the life finally held all of her at once.
She Means Business Seattle is a community and magazine for Seattle-area women making moves, entrepreneurs and executives alike. Founder Jaimie Birtel skips the resume and gets to the real story with the WHY behind the business. The result is a growing collection of honest profiles (plus a companion podcast) proving that if you're doing something interesting, your story belongs here too. Find out more at jaimiebirtelphotography.com.