Eliseus Lean
Nov 1 · 2 min read

I used to have a livejournal.

Does anyone even recall what that is? I started it when I was 13 and it served me well. It was there when I realised I was gay. It was there when I left Singapore and went to the UK for medical school. It was there when my mother attempted suicide. It was there when I fell in love. It was there when that love fell apart. It was there when I encountered depression. It was there when I rediscovered happiness. It was largely self indulgent and occasionally obnoxious but eventually that simmered into occasional rumination and proved to provide much needed catharsis.

I stopped writing in it a few years ago when I realised I started pandering to an audience. This came at the expense of sincerity and it felt like yet another social media platform I was manipulating to curate a persona I have long abandoned. Which is not to say that it didn’t have its advantages. Rather encouragingly it forged a minuscule but nonetheless supportive community of anonymous readers. The comments tended to be reassuring and sympathetic. There were naturally exceptions to this but as the wise Taylor Swift once lamented: haters gonna hate. (Hate, hate, hate, hate, hate – apologies, I simply had to.)

I hark back to a couple that were particularly memorable. I recall with some pride one Indonesian reader who wrote to me about his struggles with his homosexuality in his home country. I look back fondly upon this exchange not because I offered particularly illuminating advice but because he saw my online journal as an avenue to be open and honest about whom he was when he otherwise couldn’t. I don’t recall him ever asking for much, but it made me feel a sense of adamance in the open and honest way I wanted to write about and live my life. This was in stark contrast to a Korean girl who sent me her entire personal statement from her application to medical school. On hindsight this was the equivalent of the ubiquitous unsolicited dick pic one receives on Grindr – what does one do with it? She asked that I edited it for her – I recall politely declining but mustering some modicum of anecdotal advice from my experience applying in my response. Come to think of it, the world might now be a doctor short due to my ineptitude and for this I will be eternally culpable.

So you see, writing was always there in the background. It was a Socratic way of making sense of the world and also a medium through which I engaged with it. I’d quite like this back thank you very much, albeit with a conscious effort (ironically) to ensure my writing is unfettered by self consciousness. I want to share my experiences as honestly as I can because there is so much strength to be gleaned from this endeavour.

So here goes, after all, what’s the worst that could happen?