Growing Up, Doing Stuff
28 Jun
Somewhere inside a dusty local bar near Park Guell, Barcelona, I’m sitting at the counter with a fork hanging out of the left side of my mouth and the rest of my body utterly fixated on page 39 of Things Fall Apart. I don’t know where I am, and I mean it literally and otherwise. Deeply immersed in Chinua Achebe’s village of Umuofia somewhere in Niger, I don’t know where I am anymore. Singapore, reading a book in an Arab Street cafe like I usually do? At Leopold’s, reading my book, eavesdropping on the firang going crazy about being offered 500 rupees (USD 11) to sip cocktails and dance around in the background of a Bollywood movie; hoping to see Mr Shantaram again? But no. Spain. Europe. An improbable nation, in an improbable continent — improbable, at least, for me. I don’t know how I got here: I got into the wrong bus somewhere in Fontana, forgot to get off, became hungry, and decided reading a serious book in a random location would be the best thing in the world. I don’t even know what I’m putting into my mouth. Anchoa del norte, the “English” menu tells me, is “anchovies of the north”, but then two lines down it informs me that calamarcitos plancha translates to “HE IRONS LITTLE SQUIDS” (yes, in caps). I get into a bus and hope it brings me home, wherever home is this week.
Two weeks from now I’ll go on a stage praying I don’t stumble over my gown or forget to shake the hands of whoever will be handing me my scroll, hoping I remember to stop at the right place and smile at the right time with my scroll at the correct angle. I won’t be receiving any prizes, or giving any speeches, my academic career ended when I sat for my A levels without owning any textbooks or notes for any of my subjects, didn’t flunk out, and thought, not bad, let’s move on to something else. For most of my life I thought writing was going to get me out of anything.
Some people seem to think the answer to all their problems will be found when they figure out what they want to do, if they suddenly and unexpectedly fell into some passion they were unaware of, or unwilling to acknowledge from fear. I’m here to tell you even if you know what you want to do it’s no guarantee you will know how to do it, when you actually have to do it — even if that thing is the single enduring passion of your life. Because passion won’t feed you, they say. The other camp says, don’t let money cloud your dreams. But if you think both sides are rubbish, where do you go?
It’s hard enough to be the only person believing you know what you’re doing, that there’s method in the madness, that soon enough this will make sense. I’ve lived most of my young life ignoring what people think of me (if I listened to all of it I’d probably lose my mind) but it gets harder. Suddenly you’re this adult and you have responsibilities. Suddenly the weekly incantations coming from well-meaning relations in my living room are getting harder and harder to ignore: “Why don’t you have a real job? Have you thought about teaching? (HELL NO!) What about CPF? How are you going to buy a flat?” And the worst: “You wrote that? But writing is so easy. I could do that. It’s just putting a bunch of words together and adding dots at the right places.” (True story.) It’s harder to ignore these things when they come from people you can’t just say fuck off to.
I think I’m doing okay. I’ve been out of school for six months but I’ve been writing seriously for half my life. When kids were going out on dates with the rugby boys next door, I was having the elements of rhythm and rhyme knocked into my thick skull by various poet laureates and Sanskrit scholars (why? I don’t know) for years — in between going out on dates with the rugby/ canoeing/ soccer boys next door (my heterosexual phase!). They didn’t do anything for the contents of my writing (you can’t really, at age 15) but I know they tried their best to beat and drag my writing voice out of the brash, hotheaded but still ultimately painful adolescent writing, for which I will be eternally grateful. But I don’t just want to do okay. Whatever your poison, striving for greatness is always hard but usually the only thing worth doing.
I came on this trip because I needed to find out there’s nothing else I’d rather do. Sometimes that isn’t enough, but I think I want to be one of the crazy ones to find out if living off that rumbling feeling in your gut is going to work. As the realities of adulthood and the shit that comes with it sets in, even the things that have been clear for more than a decade tend to start fogging up. So I spend a lot of time pretending I know what I’m doing. Sometimes, I even give talks pretending I know what I’m doing. It’s an automatic self-defense mechanism that turns on just so I can tune out from the naysayers, but it’s become hard to switch that off. I pretend I know what I’m doing so that every time I’m told I should get a real job I put on a smile that says fuck you, the one that hides the desire to say you’ll regret ever saying this when I make it. Like I even know what making it means. I pretend I know what I’m doing so that every time someone tells me I’m their inspiration, especially someone older than me, I don’t have to get into the details of how actually, I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s never cool to say you don’t know what you’re doing, but I write this here because I now think it’s perfectly normal to be anxious, and so that if I ever stop writing because it’s easier to do something else, all three thousand of you will remember to slap me. Please.
(I met a very old friend in London, someone I have immense respect for — plenty of you reading this probably know him and feel the same way too. He’d tattooed the title of the book he spent some time writing, on his chest, Memento-style. To remind him to finish his book. Maybe that’s what I’m lacking — as if I have a title for mine, the work in progress for the past 2 years. But. I’m almost. There.)
