I have had enough of their terrible user interface, narrow writing experience, and the empty platitudes of ‘recs' and comments from people looking to improve their lives by reading inspiring content from people they don't care about. Worst of all? I hate people whining about Millennials more than Millennials themselves.
I started this site precisely so that I could tinker around under the hood, and that's what I've missed — tinkering. Writing. Slapping together bits of random code you find on the internet (now forking random folks' code on Github) and hoping it would work. I know a lot more about code and development processes now, but I still gain a huge amount of happiness from tinkering with things I don't know.
My archives are in a mess. I stopped writing here some time circa 2010. I don't know why. Life took over. I got lazy. I got fed up trying to do everything at once.
It might take some time to gather the things I posted on different parts of the web. But it should be worth it 🙂
When I came home (to Singapore) a couple of days ago, I instructed the taxi driver to go to the Caltex station at East Coast. Most cabbies know this place, but he didn't. He's 74 years old, so he only knew this spot as "Tan Boon Chye & Co" (brain GPS never update firmware). Tan Boon Chye & Co was the 3rd Caltex station in Singapore, and that was its original name — in 1961.
Growing up in Singapore and spending most of my childhood (and teen-hood) around grandparents who spoke mostly Teochew (and more Malay than Mandarin, really), I'd always felt intimately connected to their brain GPS. If I was to tell them where I had spent all my time (and money — they can't believe anything costs more than 50 cents in Singapore), I'd have to cross-reference the 1940s street directory that exists only in our minds, among the people of a certain stripe.
If I went to the jazz club at SouthBridge (way back when there was a jazz club), I'd have to tell them I was in 大坡大马路 in Teochew, dua pou dua beh lou (or tua po tua beh lou depending on your romanization preference, or if you said it with a Hokkien inflection). If I had to change money for my travels, I'd have gone to "ang teng" reminiscent of the red lights that once lit up Collyer Quay from Johnston's lighthouse. My fave — instead of going to Cecil Street to work in the CBD, I've have gone to the "opium company", where opium dens once stood instead of buttoned up, stuffy suits. Because corporate life is a different kind of opiate of the masses.
Years after the passing of the two people I'd spent so much time with, existing in a different language and setting, I find myself grasping at anything that lets me learn a little bit more about the lives of people I loved but did not know fully. In part because I never had the language of their lives in full — I could order food, talk to them, talk to old people, even give speeches in this language they bestowed on me, but I could never have had the tools to create legends for their maps, their history, their worlds filled with poverty, civil war and world war.
I'm learning as much of their language as I can. Instead of being merely conversational, wet market level conversant, I've started to learn how to write it, read it, romanize it, and exist in this other plane of my life I've always inhabited but never occupied.
The taxi driver took me to Tan Boon Chye. From the way he pronounced the Tan, the same one that is present in my own name (pretty much like a surprised sound effect), I switched to it for the rest of the ride.
"Where did you return from?"
I don't say Jakarta, as in 雅加达 (ya jia da).
I say I've just returned from 巴斜, pah sia, and he knew it. I wonder what destinations my grand dad saw at the port. 巴斜 (Jakarta), 金塔 (ghim tahp, Phnom Penh), or 坤甸 (khun diang, Pontianak)? Yet somehow he ended up here, the land of red lights and big horse carriage roads and small ones, so that when I go off into the world I feel I'm merely following the same sense of adventure (and need) from more than 80 years ago.
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.
