12 years ago this time I was deciding where I should go, what I should study, at university. I was also four months away from deciding I would try to be happy in spite of my newfound queerness.
11 years ago this time I was in Kolkata, volunteering with an organization, not knowing I would go on to do that in the future. I was awful at painting walls, and not much better now.
10 to 8 years ago this time on the road learning Southeast Asia out of backpacks I still carried, before my back went bad.
7 years ago this time I got back to Dubai from Istanbul to find beetles had infested everything that I owned in the world. It was the first time I learned you could be truly alone in the world.
6 years ago on the Syria/Turkey border with no money and no clothes. Auto-rickshaws. My first businesses. An annoyingly debilitating illness. Recovery.
Three years ago I was back in Singapore feeling lost and forlorn when I left someone and a city that had spanned half a decade. Two years ago my life of endless pitching had just begun.
Today, 30 and in Indonesia on the cusp of everything. Bring it on!
I do quite a few things. Run a startup. Run two non-profits. Mentor queer kids. Spend a lot of time with my family, partner and our dog. Play video games. Paint the house. Cook for friends. Take my dog on long walks. Even, gasp, sleep!
A lifetime ago on my first entrepreneurial rodeo, I did not know many of the things that I know now.
I know now, that:
Sleep is the most important, ‘sleep for the weak, no sleep till I’m dead’ is just pointless and unhealthy bravado – because I got so close to the edge
Health is important. Many of my peers have now had a few attempts at entrepreneurship, and many of us have worked ourselves to the bone and back
Focus is everything, and time management is better. There’s no value to working insane long hours when you’re not focused. I have better awareness of my attention span and focus patterns now (short bursts, varied, always have to be doing something insanely fun or difficult, preferably both)
Neglecting friends and family isn’t ideal, they’re worth a lot more than most business. You also get better at navigating friendships vs acquaintances
Saying no is okay
Saying yes to things that matter is also
Getting something done imperfectly is better than waiting for perfection
Being busy is a state of mind
Some people are perpetually busy. Maybe some people really are genuinely busy. I try to be un-busy, which is not the same as being unproductive. Even if I’m really busy, I want to never say I am. I will always have time to chat with a suicidal friend who calls me at 4am. I will always have time for anyone. I will always have time for my dad, mum, girlfriend, siblings, nieces. I want to always have the head space to be actively learning new things, instead of blocking anything being of a mistakenly diagnosed case of busy.
There’s a difference between being consciously un-busy and being frivolous. I suspect I might have some kind of attention deficiency disorder, so I need to be juggling three things at a time. I did not know that before – so felt unproductive, sad, and bored most of my life when shoved into the do-one-thing religion, which never fit. I also got very, very ill when I was busy, in a previous life.
Now I do lots of things, but I am not busy. I am occupied, but I’ll always have time for sleep, health, and happiness.
I am awful at calendaring, so I’ve hired a PA to help me do that. Calendaring makes me busy and sad, so I need to outsource that.
Today, there are a ton of things I’d like to do. There are always things to do. But I would rather focus on the meaningfulness of the things I have to do, rather than on the having to do in and of its own.
My to-do list might be massive, but I want to never close off my heart.
If I have to be insanely busy, which is a state I am getting to very rapidly, I want to be purposefully occupied, not and never too busy for anyone.
It seemed like a good idea to quad-bike around parts of Turkey, 2009.
The difference between travelling alone, which I’ve done plenty of, and exploring possibilities alone, which I’ve done less of (but gotten more from), lies in how much of a sucker punch those decisions give me, specifically in my gut. I don’t follow my gut as much as let my gut punch out a path for me in the metaphorical jungle of life’s decision trees.
Sometimes, they are very bad ideas. Most times they are good ideas — after a while. With these things, you really never know until you are knee-deep in the slush.
I was 19 when I set off to explore the world for the first time on my own. I had a one way ticket and 60 days in India. I had nothing other than the promise of 3 large freelance (and then lucrative) writing gigs from Northeast India to Bangladesh. I knew exactly what the next 60 days would be: take a 36 hour train to Calcutta. Locate my contact. Procure a ticket to Dhaka. Follow certain contacts into the far north. Live in a leprosy hospital. Be denied entry into India at its border with Bangladesh; circle back to Calcutta, take a 18 hour train to Guwahati, find a jeep, go to Shillong, find another jeep to take me to Cherrapunjee.
I remember what it was like to be sitting in the waiting room just before getting on the plane. I looked at my shoes a lot and thought about failure. I got on the plane.
Those lessons lasted me all through college (which I somehow completed).
On the eve of my 23rd birthday, I moved alone to the Middle East. No plan, no money, just a crazy idea that I had to be in this part of the world for a year. I wanted to have it all, you see: I wanted to be closer to my then girlfriend, who had just moved to London. Dubai was closer to London than Singapore, and we could meet in Istanbul. All I needed was my backpack, camera and passport.
What I did not know was how the whirlwind journey through Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and Turkey would touch me in ways I haven’t even begun to be able to fully articulate, 6 years on.
On the eve of my 29th birthday, I found myself wandering along a street in Jakarta as the sky set. The visual of a sunset in Jakarta made me feel terribly alone in a vast universe, on the cusp of the rest of my life. I had come to Indonesia to seek success and wealth, that was the first 10 hours of that journey and I forgot to pack a bath towel.
None of those stories are winning stories. They should not elicit any feelings of warmth or happiness. They are not tales of conquest meant to provide an origin story for any autobiographical data points. For me, as I lived it, all of those stories were stories of immense loneliness and fear.
You see, despite the happy reassurances of ‘it turned out okay’, I remember all of those three moments specifically as defining moments in which the dominant emotion was melancholy. Yes, I was happy to have had certain career and life opportunities. Yes, those were the things I had dreamed of since I was a little girl. Yes, I love adventure and wouldn’t trade it for anything else in the world. But I had never felt more alone in the universe than when I literally stood crying in a phone booth in the world’s wettest place, learning that maybe I cannot have it all, after all.
Or that I rocked up in Dubai knowing no one, with the love of my life five thousand miles away, spending my birthday nearly alone in a stupid tiki bar thinking maybe I should have thought about this a little bit more. (I celebrated my 23rd birthday with a beautiful Palestinian couple I’d known for two hours. Great people, but I missed home.)
That I have spent most of my adult life feeling very far away from the people I love, suspended between here and there, utterly incapable of keeping any real connections alive because I always had to be somewhere else at the wrong times.
I still let my gut punch me about: it rules me. I no longer have to listen to it or follow it — it is me. It has been automated. It keeps me alive! I am quite literally alive today because I did not board a bus or a train for certain locations, because my gut told me so. Suicide bombs (multiple) and the worst floods in history ensued. I was not in them, unlike some of my travel companions.
My gut is automated to tune in to natural disasters, terrorism and business decisions all at once. My heart structurally resembles cotton candy.
My gut is never wrong. My heart almost always is.
My gut keeps me alive. My heart appears to want the opposite.
On the eve of the third decade of life I will be surrounded by loved ones, friends and family. I am not on a plane this week, which is a welcome change. I am no longer the person who wanders around Gaziantep in the wee hours of the morning. But I am still the same person who could wing it to the moon and back with nothing more than the shirt on my back.
I was always shit scared. You just get better at turning fear into currency for a life well-lived.
I’ve been publishing on the web for the last 12 years. It was because I wanted to write and publish on the web that I learned to look under the hood and build things. Which is why I do what I do now.
For as long as I can remember, I have always wanted to be somewhere else. In all of my childhood day dreams, of which I had many, daily, and often, I imagined being an explorer out at sea. Being a pilot about to set off for yonder. Even the short stories I scribbled all had to do with stowing away, seeing new lands, discovering curious and wondrous foods.
Reading about Robinson Crusoe made me wonder what the natives ate, and why he never tried to just fit in (rescue seemed like a horrible ending, I hated it); Gulliver's Travels only made me wonder how the Lillputians lived with their neighbours before he came around. In my imagination, if I shipwrecked, stowed away, or was kidnapped to a foreign land, I would quite enjoy the adventure.
My parents travel in ways few other Asian parents do: cheaply and adventurously. The first time I ever left Singapore, we went to Sarawak. It wasn't a 'cool' story to tell your friends in primary school - no, you didn't go to Disneyland in Hong Kong, you didn't even live in a real hotel, you went to… Borneo.
Every day we walked for miles and miles. We never took taxis or cars, only buses, trains and boats. No matter how much you sweat, my parents don't care: they've got a backpack full of iced water so you have no reason to be sad! Just keep walking.
I don't remember much else about those times. Just that they were fun. That they made me. That when my parents wanted to take a bus four hours into the interiors, you learn to sleep anywhere. That when they want you to stop complaining about the hygiene of the food you're eating, even when insects of all kinds have landed on your food, you shut up and eat it and discover the best food in the world, or you go hungry.
There's a funny picture of me from this era, age 7. I had just showered. My mum had combed my hair in the way she always has: like a nerd. I'm sitting at the table of our 'hotel', looking straight at the camera like the little nerd that I was. I was writing. Writing about the blowpipe I just had the chance to blow! About the shaky tooth that fell out of my mouth on the four hour bus ride out from the interiors. About how my parents calmly put my tooth into their pocket, said nothing, alighted and fed me the most delicious noodles I'd ever had.
How much of my life is still exactly like that, and how lucky I am to be able to still have these adventures with the two people who taught me adventure and love.
