31st July
a quick diary entry -- what separates a diary entry from an article from a note? a personal whim.
Need some time to write to myself. I think I haven’t put down my thoughts in a while, or used the time to focus on myself — use it for writing tasks. I don’t even know if I can write anymore, since I’ve mostly used my abilities to communicate politically, allowed it to spill out of me as a kind of unrestrained record. Looking at this text I can feel, hmm, wow — that’s what the inside of my mind looks like pulled out into strings of sentences.
Since the launch of the Youth Plan, I’ve been thinking about what’s next. There are plenty of optimisation tasks to do, marginal improvements… There is the sound of rain in my earphones. It surprises me, since typically the music I choose leans right into the clarity of its melody. Why do some musicians accompany their song with the weather, the seasons? What does it mean, rainy August, muggy August, late summer early autumn. The beginning of promise, of fruit — though hard, small still. Not yet ripe, but biding. Waiting to soften, ripen, welt and fall. Seeds.
I’m growing old and my wants are becoming more and more irrelevant. I feel like I am on freshly cleared ground. It was so difficult, yanking out all the sharp stones, toiling at the soil, but now the ground is entirely even. I feel that faint ache in my arms, but even that injury from mild strain is lifting. I don’t know what to think about it. The flatness of this ground, its colour. I don’t know if I ought to start. I suppose I ought to. Is this what people feel after ground breaking ceremonies? Is this why people immediately begin planting trees? Because that ambiguity of a beginning is so intolerable? As — for the longest time — you had been working to begin at all. Now that the ribbon’s been snipped apart in ceremony, people are standing about awkwardly. Should we begin? In the 4pm sun. There will be a day tomorrow to work, but should we start now? Or should we break to have a meal, to contemplate the late afternoon, and all that transpired to create this time?
I’ve convened us all. Originally it had been a fantasy, but now the ladder has burnt into the sky for that celestial minute, our mortal lives were joined to heaven. But that’s it. Our mortal lives have to go on, and I suppose I am a little lost.
Are there things I’m still excited about? Let me enumerate the things since I have some time now.
I suppose I am still excited for Playces to grow. We’re still not at our goal of 10k people following us. And there are ways to get there but that’s where we’re headed if we keep on doing what we do. Of course I want fame — I wanted it since I was five and a cruel act of replacement marked me with a feeling of being perpetually erased. but as Playces becomes more and more real, I feel that I’m losing touch with that desire. But I have to guard against that too — because it is this fame that allowed us to have all we have. There’s a practical need to continuously grow its stock.
We just moved into our new place, so there are all of these quests of domesticity to ‘settle in’. I can already feel the memories we’ll create in this space. It’s the first time I get to walk comfortably in a place. It’s not entirely my place, but it’s a place where what I say matters. That it’s my space, and it’s my rules too. I don’t have to worry about someone else. A and I have been able to walk around Hong Lim Complex and imagine how we’d like to engage our neighbours, the sort of things we’re looking forward to do, with very little hesitation. I feel complicated about this. Something simple I wanted so much, I’ve suddenly accomplished with very little fanfare. It’s almost a feeling of loss — for the amount of space that wanting had taken up has suddenly expired in relevance, and the pressure from that desire is slowly abating too, deflating in a way.
I suppose I’m excited to set off on a journey to make real money? All this time I had just been screaming and screaming until I got support. But now, I’m laying down pipes and trying to build real capability in searching for resources. Becoming a treasure hunter — I’ve always wanted that identity, so I’m excited to truly become a treasure hunter. Because as a treasure hunter, I can make so many things real! I can feel that this will become my next two years.
(An aside: I feel that so many of the things I was excited for were already things that I was planning for.. So now, what I’m excited for has become as fixed as the planned doing, such that I’m so much less excited than I was maybe a month ago when things were still tentative. They’ve become as certain as the blue in the sky, like a solid material. I don’t know what I feel about it. I feel a little bit disappointed maybe that it is all this work, and as someone who is chronically attached to that feeling of searching, I almost feel as though I need to do something else — have something else more monumental to desire. I don’t know what to do with this satiation. Can I create from a full bowl? I almost feel like emptying out some of the rice so that I can want again — since I’ve only ever created from wanting).
So let’s talk a little bit about the new things I feel like I think I might want?
I want to express myself more as a human being, as a sentient creature who is actively learning to be human in public. A creature who thought she had to be inhuman in order to be public. How can I safely extend my tendrils outwards again, make myself porous again, as I pursue this work? Because this life of burying myself is probably not sustainable. I’m wondering what that looks like, and I want to follow the call of those rhythms too. Even if it means that I will look callous and irresponsible, I want to let myself be abandoned into my whims. Because who knows where they could lead?
I want to work on my curiosity. I feel that I’ve become stuck in this executive mode where everything is important in so far as it produces results. And we’ve gotten a few answers now but I’m thinking that there is no company that gets to greatness without constantly renewing its engine of creativity. If I’m to continue this work for a long time, then it has to continuously transform me, otherwise I will inevitably desire to flee from it. Then my question is — how can I convert this work into a receptacle large enough to contain all of me?
And a corollary of this curiosity is — how can I be a learner again? Recently I’ve become somewhat of a ‘specialist’. A specialist who gets to have her voice considered in new research impacting the nation. I get to speak with some level of authority about what works or doesn’t work in the context of community life. But what about all the other fields that has contributed to this ability to see differently? I want to always see differently; I’m frightened of getting caught up in the things I already understand. Because it means that sooner or later, the world I’m living in will feel claustrophobic because I’m growing larger everyday. An open question: How can I get the world to feel larger and larger every year for me, by expanding my world such that I am always small in relative terms?
And I think maybe that’s the thing right: I wonder if I can find a way to deal with this discomfort with equilibrium. I think deal is a little bit too hard a word. Maybe manage? Or come to terms with… Accept? Even appreciate? Equilibrium? A steady state? Where nothing is exactly dangerously in flux. Things are moving ahead, there are some winds in my sail, but can I come to appreciate these sometimes serene paces, as opposed to imagining my life is empty as long as I’m not caught up in some tremendous tumult, haha. Or skin-shedding pursuit, running myself into circles, into the ground. I don’t have an answer to this.
And then, are there still new ways to be human? Recently (and with much bemusement) I’ve been considering becoming a mother. I’m in a pretty stable relationship right now — even if not necessarily financially — and I’m also worried that I’m playing with this idea because I’m craving some serious challenge and change. Or I’m craving to acquire a totally different dimension of human experience. Because I hope that it will… Re-imbue meaning, curiosity, thrill, bewilderment, instability into my life. Lol. But if I were to look at that desire beyond myself, I also strangely feel my body clock. Could be TMI, but recently I’ve been feeling a lot more like a woman. My body has matured in the last year, grown more shapely. I feel like Mitski in Liquid Smooth — only that I’m not 23 and instead am actually turning 29, and am aware of the fertility cliff that would make it a lot more difficult to both conceive and give birth without risks. I’ve also become pretty alarmed by the TFR statistics. I don’t think I’m actually attached to ethnic nationality, but I am attached to a shared context of upbringing — and it makes me sad that there are less people being brought up “Singaporeanly” — even if that just mostly means… shaped by social engineering to have Singaporean type problems. And of course my saviour complex emerges in the sense that — Oh yes, I Can Contribute Here. With My Womb And Your Sperm. Of Course.
And an aside from that is that yes, lol. I am surprised and sometimes astonished by the sort of choices I feel I can make now. What do you mean I feel like I’m in a place in my life where I can choose to create a child? What do you mean that I can discuss things like — where’s the next place we’ll rent out, who are the people we’ll collaborate with next, what’s the next policy that should become our personality to oppose, embody, augment, create? When did I become someone able to do that? Over the course of the 8 months, I’ve grown up so much into this seat of authority. I feel shocked by that loss of old limitations which had governed my life for so long. I’m at a loss about how I should regard myself.
I think I want to find myself again. I began with wanting to express myself as a human being, but I’m also thinking — I want to know who I am. What kind of new music this girl — already a woman — needs. I wanna dive right back into that world of defining myself again, who am I? I want to spend time looking into the water without vouchsafing that answer. Can I look clearly at all I’ve done and allow myself to claim new labels of identity? Can I view myself as unreasonably productive, generous, fair even in the shadow of those years of fear, loneliness, branded with a sentence of self-imposed exile? Can I allow myself to be beautiful, find something glowing and spiritual about being in this position? Some position for myself to sit within that isn’t compulsively trying to minimise myself, but taking pride in what I’ve been able to do, commit myself to continuing to do? I realise that I’ve been pushing away praise and also recognition (though it arrives by my doorstep and I feel a soaring and insuppressible feeling of joy in the moment it arrives) because I feel the need to stay vigilant about my happiness evaporating, or needing to be humble — focus on the negatives as a way of protecting my new trove of gold, and also believing somewhat that it was an emotional state of unhappiness which created my present. And if I intend on creating my future, I ought to maintain my unhappiness.. But I suppose I’m trying to figure out — how can I release myself from that control again? Let myself discover myself again, and then allow another future to arise from that new discovery? Who will I be if I let myself do that? Because hasn’t it been incredibly meaningful — this journey of creating all that I have? And am I not incredibly proud? Of this child I chose over a life of fleeing into other people’s destinies.
So many questions, so little answers!
I cried two days ago to A about this ending. “It’s over now the music of the night,” and I saw Phantom yowling out into that empty cavern of desire which lit the entire opera house on fire. It’s not over forever, rose on the counter — that much I know — but the new music of day has not yet begun. I’m walking down that long hallway behind the mirror into some unknown, away from that silk bed of suffering I had grown comfortable building in. It is dark, and I am tremulous with anticipation, each footstep tentative — equal parts leaning into that impulse to harden, assume all has already been mapped out, and also chiding myself to soften, open myself up to possibility that I will come across something truly remarkable, that will rewrite all I know now into some version of the world I never imagined possible. I don’t think I’m past that point yet, I will never think that the world will never surprise me. In my next year, when I enter my thirties, I want to let some of my guard down.
Last Tuesday, Natacia and I watched Mitski. For me, it was my very first time, and the amazement I felt when tears rose to my eyes and that glass dome which separated my feelings and I from the world shattered. I was human again, I realised — I didn’t know I had it in me to feel something so overwhelming for a stranger, for a singer, and I didn’t know I had it in me to experience something so common with everyone in that room. I looked over at Natacia, and she was smiling in a way I only ever see her when she is deeply relaxed. I thought to myself — I wish that for us, all the time. Not that false relaxation of ease in everyday life, but something about trust. Something about trust in life, and human beings, and that end of internal surveillance which has governed our lives subconsciously, and a conveyance of trust to impulse, intimacy again.
The world is a blur — recently a poem reminded me of that — an unbearable compression of meaning within the meaninglessness of an instant. I’ve wrung myself out there into the long exposure of movement and have found my features streaky with that imperative to move, to define myself in the tracts of soil. But somewhere behind me, still, are these reins. But one day I will let them go, let myself run free again. I too am a horse who deserves to be free, free to flee deep into the wind.
