journal/

on-going mostly unedited stream of thoughts
October 26, 2013

Distance and darkness

It has been almost a year since I was last back in Singapore, or any part of Asia. If left to my own devices, I might have never consciously chosen to leave San Francisco. As much as I love San Francisco, I have to honestly admit, any type of comfort is poisonous.

The more we love something, the tighter we hold on to it, the easier it becomes to lose it. Ironically, being in love with San Francisco has made me gradually lose touch with the adventurous risk-taker spirit which has brought me there in the first place.

How do I learn to love something only in the now, understanding in order for love to truly flourish I will need to love it as an independent entity myself, that if I start to lose myself in anything, I will lose my capacity to love? The best love I can give to any place or anyone, is to love fully as my true self, that I will seek to add to it rather than to merge into it.

They say a whole is greater than a sum of its parts, I am slowly learning to see this statement holds true when the parts are unique pieces with their own strengths and weaknesses, not when they are all made to be the same. When we never leave places or people we lose the ability to look in from the outside. To gain other perspectives from another viewpoint, another vantage.

Being away from things that I love allows me to understand the true quality of my love for these things. Do I love something out of habit, out of some subconscious need, or out of some psychological blackhole? Do I want to be part of something because I need to feel a sense of belonging, or do I believe I have something to contribute?

Am I your friend because I am lonely and need company, or because I truly value our connection for the combined dynamic it brings to both of us?

The world is full of blurred lines and it is exceedingly easy to live in auto-pilot mode, never to question our own true motives or agenda for pursuing certain things. I find myself in a true state of joy when I deeply understand why I do what I do, why I love what I love, and why I am who I am.

These moments are rare. Most of the time I get confused with the person I think people expect me to be and the person I really want to be. Then it gets more confusing when I really want to be my own person and yet be malleable enough to evolve.

These are times when I need to remember to quieten down, tap into my inner-reserves and ask myself, is whatever I am doing, in line with my inner purpose and values?

–

Being back brings out a shadow side of me that makes me extremely uncomfortable. For too much of a long while I had been used to living in a space only full of unbridled positivity and light. Over here, it is difficult for me to retain such a state of mind when I can’t be blinded to what I observe and feel.

The natural instinct is to disown that shadow side, to be in denial of everything that represents the dark, to be overwhelmingly positive despite my true feelings. I have grown to a point where I find it extremely hypocritical to display a positive attitude when I simply do not feel that way. As I age I am slowly understanding that there has to be a natural balance between the yin and the yang, the dark and the light.

This trip home has given me the time and space to reflect. To truly miss what I have had, to understand what is important to me, to have an even higher sense of urgency than before. Yet I do not wish to mistake urgency with relentless, mindless acts of doing, that sometimes there needs to be nothing in order to have something, that we forget our minds need time to do background processing.

I am slowly learning, I take one step forward and three steps backwards, but I hope what will make a difference is my willingness to introspect and to be painfully aware of my own mortality, that true beauty exists in the transience of everything.

Trying to prolong a moment that only wants to pass, trying to outlive an expiry date, not embracing the natural evolution of life, will only bring unneccessary pain and disappointment; but if we can embrace the transient quality of life, perhaps one day we can finally experience the pure, undiluted joy of what it means to be alive.

October 13, 2013

The courage to let go of something precious, to truly live

I have a one post per weekend writing habit going on, and for the past 3 weeks I’ve written on Medium. For a long while I thought I was never going to be back here writing again, till I somewhat realized that there is just some attraction to writing in an environment where I really do not have to care how I write, if I had anything specific to say, if anybody cared to read. This space still acts like a public journal and it should always be, a place where I can simply write organically about my thoughts without stopping for form and structure.

It seems pretty evident to me that I wrote on Medium basically still unfiltered and mostly unedited, but I usually had something really specific I wanted to write about. A topic that had probably brewed long enough in my head for it to be more or less a semi-permanent (semi, because I will always want my thoughts to evolve) thought, whereas over here, I seem to be documenting transient, ephemeral thoughts and memories.

There is something comforting about chronology that I love, from time to time I visit my old blogs and rediscover my journey all over again, truly reliving how much I have grown, how far I have travelled.

On the other hand, there is also tremendous value in recording ideas which have no obvious time-stamp attached to it – I think they should both co-exist and they are not mutually exclusive. There is some long-form writing that I write on Medium which I know will never get mass-appreciation, those are mostly stories, not ideas, and I really like them having a place to live.

Essays, stories, ideas on Medium; journal-like time-specific entries over here.

–

The main purpose of writing here is to capture a slice of my psyche in time, I suppose.

I am learning to question my own assumptions about myself a lot. Or some pre-conceived notions based on my old self which are no longer serving me, but I forget to let go of them. I have begun to question my own perception of something which I have perceived to be “the best”. I am slowly learning that there is no such thing as “the best”, only perhaps “the best in any given time perceived by the observer”. I question if I am too attached to certain parts of my own identity, potentially neglecting the possibilities I may grow into someone else. Or it could be having a old dream realized, only to discover I may not want that dream anymore.

When we have come so far to attain something we think we have always wanted, there is this danger of holding on too much to it, over-protecting it, putting it on a undeserved pedestal. Sometimes that particular thing, idea or situation may no longer serve us, but because it was so hard to get there, it seems absurd to contemplate letting go.

I have found myself in these situations a few times in the past, because I am truly sentimental and I form attachments to things which I worked really hard for. To be fair, that’s a normal human behavior. The issue here is, I am not afraid of change at all, in fact, I really like change. Each time there is a drastic change in my life, I have only grown from strength to strength. If I could persuade or even remind myself to review my own life situation once in a while, I would probably be a lot more inclined to shake things up a lot more.

I do have a side of me that really likes comfort. I am really wary of this side of me. I try to be aware of it as much as I can, but comfort is well….comfortable and addicting. When we get used to something, we seem to lose our capacity to stretch ourselves. Have you seen shoes that doesn’t get worn anymore? They self disintegrate.

Sometimes there is a disconnect between my lizard-brain and my aspirational self. I feel upset when I feel uncomfortable, because there is a primal desire to be in comfort. But do not mistake being primal for being natural. I would say (for now) that it is a primal state to seek survival, but it is human nature to reach for potential. Some say because of the Maslow hierarchy of needs, we need to survive before we can reach our potential. I am not entirely sure of that, even though I have been through times when I have been so caught up with trying to survive, that I have absolutely no energy to think about aspirations.

But does that mean it is true? I will question it, because I do think there are some extraordinary human beings who can put aside their primal desires to survive and instead focus on their aspirations no matter how dire their circumstances are. I truly believe some of us skip the entire Maslow hierarchy and go straight to the top of self-actualization.

–

I try to ask myself on a consistent basis if where I am, who I am, what I do, whom I am with, is in line with my purpose. If it no longer the case, then I need to find the courage to let go. If I am still in a scenario whereby I think I am still in line with my purpose, am I maximizing it?

Sometimes I hold on too much to something precious to me, forgetting that it is like trying to grab hold of sand. I need to learn to enjoy the ebb and flow of the natural order of things, and remember that if I artificially try to constrain a space and time, I am not truly living the experience.

I have done so much to be here in San Francisco, and I am loving it so much, that the mere thought of returning to Singapore for 2 weeks is scaring me. Thinking of losing that 2 weeks when I am on a 3-year time limit doesn’t seem very appealing to me. I love this city so much that each time I think of traveling to other parts of the US, I really hesitate. I have never felt like this before, that I actually feel reluctant to travel.

I used to love traveling so much, that the above paragraph sounds entirely ridiculous.

This morning, for some unknown reason (which happens all the time), I was inspired to fill up my sayhi moments. Going through my iPhoto library was a nostalgic trip back in time. I slowly started to remember my thoughts and feelings during those moments, how much I’ve seen, how much I’ve experienced, which is reminding me of how much I have not seen, how much I have not experienced.

I had this idea that I could do all my traveling after my love affair with San Francisco.

But what if there is no “after”? Or what if, one day it is no longer in line with my purpose to be in San Francisco? Will I have the courage to leave her?

 

October 5, 2013

The beauty of being human

Imagine for a moment, if you had super powers, an eternal life, and you lived in paradise. Everything is perfect.

Sounds beautiful?

Try to imagine that vision for a while much longer, imagine all you have wanted to do in your life is to make art for a living and eat caviar everyday.

Oh wait, you can make art all the time now because you do not have to make a living, and you could eat caviar everyday even if you may not need food for sustenance in a perfect world.

You will have no dreams to chase, because all your dreams are already true, you will have no food to crave, because you can eat whatever you want, you will not experience hunger, will not know what is like to taste something divine because everything is divine.There is nothing to fix, nobody to help.

Multiply that moment eternally. Tell me if you see joy in your existence if you had everything in this perfect world, forever.

We are horribly mistaken. We think, “oh if only I can do anything I wanted in my life”. We are mistaken that we seek the power to do anything, but what we really want is, to escape doing what we don’t like doing now.

Or perhaps we just like the idea of being able to do anything when the rest of the world has to do something. Is it self-empowerment that we seek, or power over the weak?

If there is a perfect world and a perfect you, you wouldn’t know how it feels like to sweat blood, drop tears and still realize that despite all the challenges you are facing, you are still totally invested in making your life worthwhile living.

The challenges we face, the pain we feel, is almost the only chance of us peeking into our inner-reserves, finding out who we really are.

The joy of living comes from our lives being imperfect. We know the strength of our love for our loved ones when we know we unconditionally accept their flaws. We know we are loved when our loved ones accept us for who we really are. People who are extremely rich and beautiful, we think they have it all, but how would they ever know if they are being appreciated for who they are? It is a curse they would have to live with, a burden they have to carry.

We run marathons because we know how it feels to be able to endure and reach that finishing line. We start businesses because we want to know if we are capable of growing an idea or if our expertise is worth something to people. We participate in social causes because there is a joy in wanting to make the world better.

What we truly want is to realize potential, be it in ourselves, in others or in the world at large. There can no be such realization if the world is perfect.

The idea that the world can get better only exists if the world is flawed.

There is something intrinsically beautiful about being human which no amount of words can describe in human language. That we are all deeply flawed creatures with dark desires and yet some of us is trying so darn hard to put aside our flaws, our weaknesses, our egos, to try make something out of it.

Artists may instinctively understand that the best art is created during chaos and disarray. Try making art in a minimalist, sterile room (you will probably be distracted by trying desperately to keep the room clean). We need provocation to display our potential. We love having hard problems to fix. For solving hard problems allows us to know our capacity. Even those of us who have found joy in simple contentment, it is precisely the choice of feeling contentment in the midst of all the madness that is going on, that brings that inner peace.

The beauty of being human, is that we are both strong and weak at the same time. There is a paradox of being able to be weak that ultimately displays our strength; that sometimes trying to be strong all the time makes us weak.

It is how we choose to navigate the paradoxes, the dualities, the contradictions, the understanding that we cannot choose the cards we are dealt with, but we can choose how we play them.

That free will, the will to make that choice to either accept the status quo, or to consistently stretch our own potential despite all of us being flawed human beings living in a imperfect world, is inherently what makes being human so beautiful.

Would you contemplate for a while that what you truly want is not paradise, but rather a sandbox where you can be creative in?

And that the sandbox contains sand that takes on a somewhat organic form, that you can mould with your hands but it will never take on a permanent, unchanging form. You know you will be able to either shape your creations to be even better, or knock it down, so another kid can have the space to make a potentially better replacement — and all the kids in that sandbox can be amazed, with the cycle of disruption and creation going on in that sandbox.

This post is written as part of an ongoing writing experiment to write on Medium the same way I tweet, mostly unedited, unfiltered, unscheduled, and the stubborn refusal to self-censor my idealism for this world.

Originally published on Medium.

September 29, 2013

Finding a reason to exist

Somehow in the formation of my birth, I must have missed a step. My brain was not programmed to survive on auto-pilot like the rest of human race.

As soon as I was capable of reasonable thought and questioning, I was wondering why I had to exist.

I was 5, looking out of a 10th floor window, wondering how it felt like to jump. That was my first memory of a suicide ideation.

There were no apparent triggers, no obvious unfortunate events which led me to think that way. My survival instinct was simply missing right from the start. Most people don’t question why they live — they would survive at all odds, they would go on with their lives because they are afraid of death.

I was born, unafraid of death.

Death felt like liberation to me. At age 5. Waking up everyday was tedious, going through the motions of what we call life, felt robotic. I started a virtual time-machine in my head, propelling myself ahead a few decades and tried to envision my life:

School -> some 9-5 job -> marriage & kids -> work really hard for retirement -> retirement or working at MacDonalds because of inflation-> old age & sickness -> death.

I don’t know about you, but that wasn’t appealing to me at all. It wasn’t enough incentive for me to contemplate repeating that robotic routine of living for the next 7-8 decades of my life.

Skipping to the end was incredibly tempting.

The thought of ending my own life would plague me for the next 2-3 decades as I believed ending it prematurely was better than being forced to live a meaningless existence.

But somehow, I hung on. Despite all my darkness and endless frustrations about the human race, even though I thought a lot about it, I was severely tempted to do it, exacerbated by countless painful events in my childhood, but I didn’t choose to act on it.

I didn’t know it back then, but on hindsight, I always had this very little, tiny shadow of knowing, an unexplained intuition that life could be more.

I found my own reasons to live when I turned 30. It seemed like an overnight transformation which took place the first time I stepped into San Francisco, but in truth it was probably a cumulation of a long, gradual self-discovery process in my 20s.

It is a myriad of complex reasons, but it could be summed up simply:

I had found my true self, not whom I was conditioned to believe I was, and I started to have hope in humanity.

I started to believe we could be better. That I could be better. That because I was really getting better at being a better human, perhaps humanity would too.

If I had been so jaded, so disillusioned, so numb and so broken, and I could change my mind about how life can be, if I could somehow make more people see that their lives could be different too, would we all make that leap into a better humanity together?

I read this Medium post wrote by someone who calls himself a existentially depressed idealist high-schooler.

I did a double take at the first second, I was like, how could you be existentially depressed and an idealist at the same time?

Then I remembered. I was depressed and suicidal, because I was hopelessly idealistic about the world. I couldn’t understand why humanity seemed to be so unabashedly selfish when it was obvious to me that being compassionate and generous was the only selfish way to survive — that humanity can only be sustainable through sharing and amplifying each other’s resources.

It was really depressing for me, to live in a world I believed wasn’t capable of change. Why would I choose to live in a world like this? Ending my life seemed more efficient. I don’t have to put myself through an existence I didn’t love, and people don’t have to put up with my negative presence. Win-win.

But I would like to write this in response to that post. That it does get better. And it will if you can take the first step in convincing yourself to believe it will get better. That if you try reading beautiful stories that exist on Medium and elsewhere, you would discover that being human is tremendously beautiful.

It is us human beings, who are capable of making conscious choices to better this world. It is us human beings, who would give up our own lives for each other when the time calls for it.

Yes, the world is in a mess. The mess has been bigger or smaller compared to history, depending on your own perspective. There are tons of selfish, greedy people in this world.

But you cannot deny that there are the ones who makes us proud. Proud of being human. There are the ones who spend their entire lives dedicating to our cause.

The cause of making us a better humanity.

For the longest time I hesitated to write about my previous existential crisis, because it could be framed negatively in a million ways possible.

But once in a while, I come across someone like the boy above, who has to cope with his existential crisis precisely because he is so fucking serious about life. And it breaks my heart. Every single time. Or every time I read about Aaron Swartz or David Foster Wallace, or the thousands of unknown people pondering over their own existence, trying to find a reason to keep on living.

I write, because I want to stand for an example to the ones after me, that it is possible to lead a meaningful existence, if only you have the courage to give meaning to it, yourself.

We care so much, and that gives us the cruel irony of not wanting to be part of this mess. But perhaps if you see beyond the mess and into the horizon, therein lies a set of unimaginable possibilities.

What we need are not reasons to exist, what we truly need are reasons to keep on believing.

That we are all truly capable of more.

This post is written as part of a continuing experiment to use Medium like how I use Twitter, which means not consciously self-censoring my thoughts and publishing whenever I want to.

September 23, 2013

Being the change you want to see

In the middle of a conversation, my friend remarked, “I am really impressed with what Adrianna is doing with the food thing.” His remark threw me off the moment he said it, because he doesn’t know Adrianna personally, except by virtue of my excessive Facebook shares. Also, I thought nobody paid attention to that ‘food thing’ I shared on Facebook, a couple of days ago.

That ‘food thing’, is one of the many initiatives spearheaded by a dear friend of mine, Adrianna Tan. Somehow between all her caffeine-induced adrenalin and alcohol-induced stupor, she hatches schemes like “Culture Kitchen”, which aims to bring immigrant communities closer to the local culture through food and art.

When Adrianna comes up with ideas like that, I only take her half seriously, because she tries to do a thousand things at one time in between her career and frequent travels. Then, one day a photo like this creeps up on my Facebook feed:

The success of the first Culture Kitchen, with a mixed array of cultures bonding over food. Photo by Kevin Lee.

And there I am, falling in intellectual love with Adrianna all over again. I am incredibly proud of her as a fellow Singaporean, as a friend, as a partner-in-crime with all the other initiatives we try to spearhead.

She explains why with her own writing:

I can, however, build communities and movements. This is one of the things I know I can do well, and I want to lend my technological and organisational skills to building a movement which will stand up for a Singapore which includes. The Singapore we want to see. While I will continue to call out the xenophobes every time they emerge from the hills, I will also spend twice as much time on helping to create a counter movement which is positive in nature. I don’t have an ROI, I don’t have an end goal, I just want to bring people together. – Why I’m Hosting Culture Kitchen

When I first made connections.sg, I was asked for my ‘real agenda’ or ‘how are you going to monetize’. People find it hard to believe when I say I don’t have an agenda, except I think and believe a simple step forward can make things better.

I am growing incredibly serious and passionate about wanting to realize my ideals and beliefs and yet plenty of times I question my own motivations myself. Why am I doing this? Why is it important that I go around trying to explain my thoughts to anybody who would listen to me?

I look at what Adrianna is doing, eight thousand miles across the world and I am reminded why.

It does not matter what people think or if they would understand. If they question or if they are skeptical. In this game called life, we can only do our very own individual best and hope that we have the blessing to find other partners-in-crime for the things we care about. Even if we don’t, we have to forge this lonely path ourselves anyway.

If we think humanity can be better, then let’s try to be better humans. If I want people to write more, then I will attempt to write more myself. If I think small efforts are paramount to a ripple of positive effects, then let me reflect that in my own little actions. If I wish for people to make better choices in the grand scheme of trying to forward humanity, I need to be exceptionally conscious of those choices myself.

Human beings are fundamentally social creatures. Modern society has proven that we could make other people emulate materialistic behavior by priding material success.

My sincere question is, could we make people emulate compassionate and empathetic behavior by showing how much good and joy we can all personally derive from it?

It makes people around you think if you demonstrate an unexpected behavior. It makes me sad to even type this that showing kindness, grace and generosity is considered to be unexpected. You no longer question when your friend buys a beautiful expensive car, but you question someone’s agenda when they try to do good.

Why?

I exchanged a few texts with Adrianna right after the event, she tells me she’s exhausted but she ‘loves people and the world’.

I felt her joy eight thousand miles across the world, I felt my own joy because I understood how much it meant to her and I am made to feel sane for wanting to love people and the world. For all the potentially crazy things I may attempt to do later on in my own life, in order to show how much I can love people and the world.

In this era of cynicism and skepticism, I am most grateful for the Adrianna Tans in this world. The ones who will make things happen despite all the questions and impossibilities.

She knows she needs to do these things because she wouldn’t be able to live with herself otherwise. In other words, she is doing it because she ‘loves people and the world’, but fundamentally she needs to do it for herself.

It is very much the same for me. Perhaps on my deathbed my attempts to better this world the way I envision it can be, would be ultimately futile. Would it matter though?

For I would be able to take my last breath in peace, knowing that I have exhausted and gave my entire self to this world, rather than wondering if I could have done more, if miracles would happen if I had tried doing them.

And this is what it means to be the change you want to see.

You simply be.

P.S. I am starting a writing experiment to write on Medium like how I tweet — whenever I feel like it. There will probably be still articles that I will birth through numerous iterations and edits, but there will be more like this one which is mainly written in the spur of a moment, driven by current emotions and bubbled thoughts, which I may argue, could have a higher net positive effect for me. I don’t want to be driven by stats and well, Fred Wilson writes every single day:

It forces me to think, articulate, and question. And I get feedback from it. When I hit publish, I get a rush. Every time. Just like the first time. It is incredibly powerful. – Writing It Down

Originally published on Medium.

September 14, 2013

The power of 8 minutes

I have begun to instill a new habit for myself – which is to bring my kindle on my very short commute to work everyday. The BART ride is 8 minutes and initially I thought that is too short to get any proper reading done.

I proved myself wrong.

I wanted to make myself read even more, keeping in mind Warren Buffett’s statement that reading is like compound interest for knowledge, in addition to the strict daily 30m of reading I do before I go to bed. I was trying to think of ways to make reading more an actual sustainable habit that would automatically be part of my routine, so reading during my commute made a lot of sense, at least in theory.

Anyway, my newish mantra is that, there is no harm in trying, so I started to see how it feels like to read for 8m every single morning.

I was pleasantly surprised by the results, mostly the way I felt. First of all, I speed read, so within 8m I could read an average of 10 pages. Which could be an entire chapter for a lot of books.

Secondly, which is the more significant for me, choosing to read a book helps to block out all the distractions I could potentially have on the BART. I tend to either have very scattered, noisy thoughts or check my phone a lot. The implicit effect is, I tend to become immersed in what I was reading, even if it is just for a short 8m, my mind goes into a state very similar to what people experience in meditation.

The choice of book is really important. It ensures that the contemplation which will result for that 8m of reading is conducive for the rest of my day. I am put in this state almost the first thing in the morning, and it sets the tone for the rest of my day.

For example, this past week I have been reading a memoir of Iris Chang – yesterday I came across this quote in the book:

PLEASE believe in THE POWER OF ONE. One person can make an enormous difference in the world. One person—actually, one IDEA—can start a war, or end one, or subvert an entire power structure. One discovery can cure a disease or spawn new technology to benefit or annihilate the human race. You are ONE individual and can change millions of lives. Think big. Do not limit your vision and do not EVER compromise your dreams or ideals.

If you have read my writing on Medium, this is exactly what I have been passionate about advocating. Choosing to read on the BART first thing in the morning, being selective about the book I am reading, empowers me to use my mind to think deeply about the issues I care about, instead of thinking aimlessly about some random thought or some random tweet. The choice of thought is very specific and very conscious.

So when I came across that quote on my 8m commute yesterday, I felt a tingle down my spine and I am being reminded by the books I read, how much there is still to do in this world, how much has already been accomplished by some very determined individuals, how little time I have to waste, how much time I can actually maximize.

I still love checking twitter and watching tv of course, but that very deliberate 8m of choosing to frame my day in a certain way feels very empowering to me.

It is incredible to me how the way I choose to spend my 8 minutes of commute can alter my consciousness and the rest of the choices I make throughout the rest of the day, if not week.

I implore you to try doing the same, perhaps it may not even be reading, but it could be something you care about.

September 8, 2013

Focus and starting my own snowball

I finished reading Snowball a few days ago, one of the quotes that struck me was,

“What factor did people feel was the most important in getting to where they’d gotten in life? And I said, ‘Focus,’ And Bill said the same thing.”

I thought to myself, if I am to narrow my focus in pursuing my goals, what defines the focus? What are the boundaries for that focus? I have an interest and curiousity in a wide variety of areas, but if I have to pick my battles, what would be the battles I want to pick?

I give myself a rough timeline of twenty years to try accomplish what I want. Between now and two decades later, I could get a whole lot done, or nothing much, if I were to be too careful or not careful enough. I don’t believe in making grand plans because in life nothing works out according to plan, at least for mine. I want to have some sort of an outline, a grounding basis, a mission or an objective, then live life organically according to that.

But this I know for sure, if I try to take on everything I care about, it will be goal suicide, because there is really a whole lot of issues I care about. Plenty of people take on one single cause for their entire lives to achieve very little visible progress (because a lot of invisible work needs to be done before visible progress can be made), much less multiple causes.

I don’t have an answer for myself yet, but at the very least I have started to think about it. Snowball tries to convey Buffett’s the concept of compounding interest, not really for money, but for whatever we choose to take on in life. We have to start rolling a small little ball right now, and hope that in years to come it will gather enough momentum.

What is my little snowball like?

Well, I could share my list here for a start, and see where I stand after some time. This list has not changed over the past few years actually:

One

I want people to understand more the co-relation between mental illnesses and creativity. I started to look at my mind very differently especially since I have read Lincoln’s  Melancholy. Exploring the idea that having a melancholic mind may actually be a powerful driver for achieving our goals in life was key to my own transformation. I wonder if there could be an effective way of bringing this exploration to people who suffer from chronic mood disorders.

How do I make more people see and understand that everything is a double-edged sword. Once we understand this basic concept, it is tremendously self-empowering to come to a realization that it is our very own choice on how we choose to weld that sword.

Two

Closely related to the above, I really want to do everything I can to make education more progressive. I am not sure how exactly I am going to go about doing it, but I know for sure that the education systems right now are considerably broken. I know of countless people whose natural curiosity and enthusiasm for learning as a child was gradually smothered as they went through school (at least in Asia), especially if you learn differently from other people. I have also known people who have had the blessing to go through either home-schooling or amazing progressive schools, and it was very much reflected in their personalities, confidence and polymathic knowledge.

I often wonder how different would I have been, if I have been encouraged to learn what I am truly interested in. Instead of spending years of my life going through the pain of feeling less because I have issues with memory retention. I do not learn by trying to memorize facts, instead I learn by either doing through trial and error, or simply organically sponging information I am curious about.

Also on my mind is providing access to quality education and giving everybody in this world a right to educate themselves. Yes, there are people in this world who are not allowed to educate themselves.

Three

I would like for more weird people to embrace their weirdness. I have seen so many talented people drown their own gifts in sorrow and substances, because they have been made to feel less because they are just not like anyone else, which is the irony. If you are not like anyone else, it is a strength, not a weakness. Why do we marginalize people who stick out, perhaps like a sore thumb, but with careful nurturing, who knows who they could become?

I believe people who are not comfortable with their own individuality develop chronic illnesses, if not chronic mental illnesses, because it is just so self-destructive to not love yourself. So it self-perpetuates issue number 1 above. It could be triggered or exacerbated by issue number 2.

Looking at my little snowball

Now that I have tried to explicit write about it, it becomes clear to me that what I thought were disparate issues are basically one vicious cycle I am trying to break. I care about a lot more, like animal welfare, minority discrimination, equal rights for all, stopping war, which you could argue would benefit from the ripple effects of the above. If we bring more young ones up to critically think, understand their place and privilege in this world, accept and love themselves for who they are, wouldn’t we develop a more compassionate and empathetic humanity?

Starting small

I have this untested thought that it is the most effective and efficient to effect change from where we are. I am writing and curating a collection on Medium titled, “Change the world with lines of code”. I haven’t fully thought about how to narrow my focus down to the root issues I care about, but right now I am relentless about nudging people, especially those of us who work in tech, that we have incredible power to make a difference:

“It used to be that in order to reach more people than you could talk to in a day, you had to be rich and famous and powerful, be a celebrity, a politician, a CEO, but that’s not true today. Now ordinary people have voice, not just those of us lucky to go to HBS, but anyone with access to Facebook, Twitter, a mobile phone. This is disrupting traditional power structures and leveling traditional hierarchy. Voice and power are shifting from institutions to individuals, from the historically powerful to the historically powerless, and all of this is happening so much faster than I could have imagined when I was sitting where you are today and Mark Zuckerberg was 11 years old.” – Sheryl Sandberg, HBS

Eventually I hope to distill these ideas into some comprehensible deck and speak about it. I think when we belong to the tech community, we already have more privilege and gifts than a lot of people in this world. Most of us have already won the Ovarian Lottery.

Could we do more to elevate the less privileged? Could we at least try to consider that the only selfish way to make a livable, sustainable world to live in, is to make everyone’s lives better?

I want more people to understand their individual power to be the change they want to see. Be it writing, engineering or design.

August 31, 2013

Rhythm of my heart

I listened to her heart beat against my ears, it was consistently thudding slowly. She had casually wrapped her right arm around me as we watched a movie and I slipped into her arms as though we have rehearsed this a thousand times in prior lifetimes.

In a few moments I would let my head rest on her lap. I did not know why then, but instinctively I took her hand and placed it on my heart. The simple significance of that moment was deceptive.

That moment would haunt me through the recesses of my memories.

The first time I had met her, I came away feeling an unfamiliar ball of confusion. I had felt a sense of loss when we walked to her doorstep, and I could not understand why. She was not one of those who would quicken my heart beat, she did not make me feel like time had stopped while I looked into her eyes, I did not feel the inexplicable urge to run away from her.

I keenly felt that sense of loss through all the temporary partings we would have.

I never had a chance to have her hand over my heart again. In the occurrence of that moment I would never have realized it would be the one and only time it would happen. It was so simple yet it exposed such vulnerability.

That vulnerability when you let someone know she is able to dictate the way your heart beats, and for the dictator it is equally vulnerable for her to know the terrifying power she welds over you.

In between the beginning and the end, there was a fragile existence of an Us. An Us that could only exist on the unspoken rule that we cannot be. That if we were not careful enough, if we walked too closely, if our hearts started to tune into the same rhythm, we would end up breaking each other.

For we understood each other across a thin telepathic thread, that we were both akin to a glass sculpture that was freshly mended after having broken into a million pieces – its hairline fissures are virtually invisible until you come really, really close to it.

The song of our heartbeats merging into the same rhythm was beckoning to me. I failed to erase how it felt like to have her hand over my heart. How could I?

For my entire life I floundered upon those who accelerated my heart beat and I almost dismissed her presence because she was the one who could slow it down. That among the chaos of my mind, she made me feel peace.

I wanted to write that song, to me it was like opening pandora’s box. The moment I try to write it, I knew the spell would be broken.

So here I write, these string of words put together for somebody. By publishing these words into existence, I am writing her into my history. I acknowledge the meaning, I try to translate the beauty with words and finally, when something is birthed into this world, it will no longer take up space in the writer’s subconscious.

It will no longer be a persistent siren, wanting to be written, to be brought to life. When you breathe life into a creation, you bestow death upon the thought.

Originally published on Medium.

August 25, 2013

There is no time for me to be less than serious

Being serious can be a lonely experience. I will not lie, at times I wish I could be less serious in order to feel less alone.

But there is no time for me to be less serious.

When we realize there is so much that we can do and should do in this world, coupled with the fragility of life itself, the understanding that 50 years of human life is not short and not yet that long, there is really no time to be less serious.

I have no idea when my mental faculties or physical abilities will be taken away from me. I live with a conscious awareness that they can be taken away from me anytime. I have been there before. Not too long ago, I lost the ability to function, to think, to appreciate beauty.

I was given a gift, a gift of life, made possible by the gift of an artificial death.

Death itself does not scare me. It is the idea of being physically alive but feeling no sense of life in any cell of my body, that scares me. I am serious about my sleeping patterns, because I was not able to sleep for a long, long time before. I am serious about what I eat, because messing up my diet could mean unwanted implications on my physical energy. I am serious about what I think, because I understand that mental energy is finite, so why waste it on meaningless thoughts? I am serious about protecting my alone time, because I have experienced what happens when I am over-exposed to people.

So to many people, I may seem like a kill-joy, awkwardly excusing myself out of parties and social gatherings. I need to be home before 9pm because I need to sleep at 10pm. There’s no room for negotiation because you have no idea how terrifying can insomnia be to someone who has coped with it for all her life.

–

I am scared and I have anxiety like anyone else. The curse that comes with being serious with relentless idealism, is the feeling of being misunderstood all the time. I am serious, but I am not cynical. I am brimming with an incurable passion for how humanity can be. I cannot be cynical, because it was the love given to me by humanity which lifted me out of my artificial death. I am only alive because I am convinced that we can be better. I understand one simple thing:

How the world functions is very disconnected from what the world truly wants. 

I don’t buy into cynicism. I believe we can continue to make history and not repeat it. I believe in order to solve the world’s problems we need to have faith in the basic premise of humanity. It is not that the problems are difficult to solve, it is that we are just too jaded to believe human beings are capable of living up to their promise.

–

I feel out of place, because I believe in the promise of humanity. Isn’t that ridiculous? Because I am not as jaded, cynical, negative, numb? Because I believe that we all have a responsibility to contribute to the greater good, that I have strong opinions towards time-wasters like social gaming, that I believe in the idea of a good government to forward human progress, that I truly believe that all of us think we want mass approval but what we truly need are authentic connections?

–

I keep telling people morbid stories like the one about the two AI pioneers who killed themselves because they believe nobody would ever understand their ideas enough in their lifetimes in order for them to work on them. What good is a life when you are unable to work on the ideas you believe in?

–

In order to keep working on ideas I believe in so that I can keep myself alive, I have to find the strength within myself to be able to be truly authentic. I have to stand fearlessly with both my feet planted on the ground even if the world thinks I am naive. If being naive means having the courage and faith to believe in the promise of humanity, so be it.

–

There needs to be a discernment between being swayed because someone is making a convincing argument and being swayed because we don’t want to upset the status quo.

I check and re-check my personal motivations when I act on something. Am I doing it because I really believe in it, or because I am doing it for the fear of losing status quo?

Will I have the strength to push something forward knowing it is the right thing to do, even if it means I may risk losing everything that is important to me?

For having that strength is the difference between the person I am now, and the person I want to become.

I have no time to be less serious, because I am doing a disservice to the gift of life if I take it less seriously.

August 18, 2013

Why I wrote “The power of your writing” & other afterthoughts

Writing is my first love. But that was not the reason why I wrote “The power of your writing”. I wrote that post because throughout my life I have been significantly touched by people’s stories, I have witnessed how other people’s lives are impacted by stories, I have felt and touched the power of words. More significantly, I have experienced the power of my own writing through all those times I channeled my pain, joy, healing, anger into these words and saw how they in turn, transformed me.

I live, because I wrote.

I feel a lot more comfortable writing my fragmented thoughts and jumbled emotions in this personal journal, fully vulnerable and unedited, than to write a post that I so very much want to craft for more people, simply because to me it was one of the most important messages I ever had to carry. You could choose to identify with my writing here or not, it is very personal and I understand it is not everyone’s cup of tea. But I truly believed in the power of your writing – it is really important to me that I was writing something that would be able to equal my belief in you. I needed to write something that spoke to you, that would make some of you bring up a writing screen, empowered by nobody but yourself.

It was such a difficult post to write, because of the weight I pinned on it myself. The idea to write that post didn’t come to me recently, it was something that has been sitting at the back of my mind for years. I never had the courage nor the platform to write it.

Certain things have to be set in place before there is a tipping point for any decision. I fell in love with Medium (yes this was before I even saw the possibility of working there) and at the same time, there was a small but growing community at helpmewrite. I signed up for helpmewrite only recently, because I was too, guilty of the idea that I write mostly because my words have to come spontaneously to me, I was not sure if being compelled to write by people voting on ideas was even my thing.

Truth be told, it is still not my thing. I still choose to write because I need to, that most of the time I have a subject matter so important to me that I will start disintegrating if I didn’t write it. I still do not care whether people think it is worth publishing or not. The fact that I care about something myself is enough for me to write.

However, because people were voting on the idea, I received notifications through my email that people wanted to read “The power of writing”. It was not the number of notifications I received per se, it was that these dripping notifications served as a persistent reminder that I should give life to this post.

So one Sunday morning, I sat down to write “The power of writing”, though I altered the title to, “The power of your writing”. One additional word, such an incredible difference to me. I do not want to end up writing a post that speaks about the benefits of writing, everyone knows writing is a good thing to do. But not enough people know that writing is an amazing thing to do, for yourself.

I didn’t have an outline, I would be honest. I had no idea what I was going to write except that I very much believed in what I was going to write with every single bit of my heart. I closed my eyes, told myself I would trust the process, that all that really mattered was that I wrote with nothing but my heart.

I came up with the main body of the post in that same afternoon, feeling really uncertain whether something I wrote in one sitting without much edits (I typically write and publish everything in one sitting) would be accessible enough. I sent the unfinished post to two people I felt would understand why it meant so much to me. The post came back with some suggested edits and that I should publish it.

I sent it to the “supporters” at helpmewrite, some of them left me wonderful notes on my Medium draft post, which helped tip me further. I let the post sit in my drafts for another full week, before I sat down on another Sunday afternoon to give it an once-over edit.

It was the second Sunday afternoon that truly birthed the post. The first Sunday I wrote the essence of it with what came to me, the second Sunday I slowly gave it life by touching every single word I wrote with my heart. The final draft that went out really wasn’t much different from the first, but it was that I re-read and re-wrote certain parts of it with such intent and love – when I finally hit publish, it was not a post I was uncertain of, it was a post I knew I wrote with all of me.

At that point, it didn’t matter anymore if anyone would read it or resonate with it. I gave it all of me that I could possibly summon and that was the best I could do for something I loved so much. I gave it my all, if that wasn’t enough, it was enough for me to answer to myself that I did everything I could.

So I don’t have Google Analytics or anything else on this site. I have a very serendipitous attitude towards my writing. If people would read what I write, that would be nice. If they don’t, well, I can’t force a connection that was not meant to happen.

But “The power of your writing” was different for me. It was not so much the validation to my writing that I was seeking, but the validation to my belief in the idea that I was seeking. I believe that everyone has something to write, wants to write, and will feel the power of their own writing if they would even start. That if everyone share what they wrote, the world would be a much better place, for we will get to know each other as human beings with stories to tell, with all that makes us worthy of being human.

We are human not because we’re the most intelligent species, we are human because we are capable of writing our own stories, in every manner of what this means.

The post did really well statistics wise, way beyond my wildest expectations, but it was not the numbers that gave me so much heart in what I do.

It was reactions like these:

https://twitter.com/kateheming/status/366977714655199232

I told myself that if the post could encourage just 5 people to start writing – the keyword is “start”, I would gladly die in the next second as a very happy soul. If you would read the notes people left on the post & the tweets in reaction to it, perhaps you may get an inkling why this means so much to me.

I write to live, I live to write; I write because I love the highest ideal of what humanity can be.

p.s. yes, over here you get the unedited emo me writing about myself, over at Medium you get the edited version of me who writes primarily about you.