Helplessness Blues
This is Part 1 of 3 of my summer reflection series, as a member of The Cansbridge Fellowship’s 2020 cohort. Pandemic circumstances have foiled our original programming, so I’ve taken up the exciting opportunity to participate in a fellow-run remote startup incubator. If you’re interested, Part 2 of my reflection comes out in July.
You know what they say: When life gives you pandemics, make lemonade (and lots of banana bread). During one of my Cansbridge interviews, I was asked, despite the unlikelihood of it happening, what I would do if I found out my internship fell through right before it was about to begin. My confident answer: make myself an internship by starting a startup wherever I was! At the time, I laughed and prayed that I wouldn’t be thrown such a curveball, but of course, this scenario laughed back and presented itself to me in the form of the global lockdown in March. The first half of 2020 was unprecedentedly tough for me. However, true to my interview, I was certain I wanted to do summer the ‘Cansbridge way’ — they had named our cohort The Trailblazers after all — so I set out with two other 2020 fellows to guinea-pig the inaugural CF Incubator.
Sure enough, Avkash and Evan were suddenly, inorganically, the closest friends I’d never met. Though we’ve now shared virtual escape room adventures and deep chats about silly ideas, passions, fears, histories, I can still only imagine how tall they’d look standing next to me. My dining table transformed into an office desk, and my laptop, the office itself. This whole process, however exciting, has been truly exhausting. I’ve had to confront isolation malaise and the anguish of plans that never came into motion, powerlessness being away from struggling family and friends I hadn’t seen in years, and the heartbreak in witnessing the vanishing act of a place I used to call home. Acceptance took me longer than I’d like to admit, but time never waited for anyone, and new challenges continued to emerge over the horizon. Many of them morphed into formative experiences, as I pushed myself to guide lengthy user interviews with Instagram strangers, delved into what accessibility really means, reconciled with my own relationship with mobility, as well as started to learn all I could about business from ground zero. Though I was not in Asia — my heart did visit Hong Kong very often these past few months — I had certainly travelled far from my comfort zone this May.
Just as ‘May’ literally meant ‘Potential’, May also reminded me of the importance of community, of rhythm, of process. Beyond the natural constraints of ageing and economics, I held a responsibility to go make my own experience. I hear often that ‘you get out what you put in’, and my chemical engineering brain wanders immediately to the magical phenomena called the laws of mass and energy balance. In an working system, we ourselves are systems, intertwined, depending on others as they depend on us. I had to learn who I was really quickly, and how I was going to give myself to it all. Surely, I joke to myself, even an incubator could use a beating heart.
"It isnt for want
of something to say--
something to tell you--
something you should know--
but to detain you--
keep you from going--
feeling myself here
as long as you are--
as long as you are."
- Cid Corman, It isn't for wantThrough all this giving and taking, sharing and receiving, and investment into others, the sole self fades, replaced by something greater than the sum of you. In this way, relationships are like one big sloppy French kiss. A kiss can only exist when it is shared or stolen. The writer is immortalised only because of the reader, the sound happens but only matters with significance when someone is around to hear it, and the entrepreneur without her customers is just someone with an idea. Because of this, I frequently find myself toeing a fuzzy line between wanting to be respectful of my user’s time, and feeling as if I need to be probing them more to make a better product that is ultimately, for them. It’s been difficult navigating my mind through not only asking for their money, but their time and personal space, which I know to be some of the most valuable things someone could give to you. I often wonder if a determined effort and the promise of a fantastic product will be incentive enough. How must I, an intruder, provide something useful to this community? Furthermore, can my team (however much I love us together) actually deliver on what we’re confident will be worthwhile?
This summer has been hot. Montréal just broke the all-time record for most consecutive number of days in June with a maximum temperature above 30 degrees Celsius. In this moment, I think about how heat is used to describe many things, always to denote an intensity of emotion — the heat of passion, the heat of embarrassment, the heat of anger, or the heat of anxiety. I’m thinking of the weather back home, and how the heat is infinitely worse here because I’m not with my parents, who would have been reassuring me right now that 心靜自然涼 (“heart calm, naturally cool”). Likewise, my boyfriend reminds me that coolness is not an invitation of the cold, but rather the heat abandoning you.
Recently, an increasing number of people’s hearts are not calm. They cannot be. Coolness is not affordable to many, when governments are largely failing us. Though we are finally seeing more of the cracks in the machine come to light in mainstream media, I inevitably feel helplessness regarding these large, systemic problems. Additionally, I question how my identity as a student and the narrative I grew up believing about the student’s role in society (rather, the lack of a role) prevents me from recognising my full potential to be a change-maker to the system. Teetering just on the edge of the workforce, students are seen to take and consume much more than they give and produce. Yet, it is socially acceptable to be selfish for now, because I am supposedly preparing myself to be a productive instrument for the rest of my life. In this sense, I feed this system exactly as it was designed. Every day I am not rebelling, I am perpetuating a status quo.
Cansbridge is about leaning into discomfort. I believe that it entails not only the discomfort of embarking on a foreign adventure, but of bluntly recognising our world’s collective suffering, and deciding how we will wield the privilege upon which we stand. At the beginning of all this, I admired those with the courage to refuse being a cog in the machine. This is what drew me to starting my own business, and I feel lucky every day that I get to make this choice at all. But, it was a quick realisation how silly it’d be to think that I’m no longer a part of this machine. I imagine I may be a cog for as long as the idea of me exists. These days, I find myself suspecting whether it is even more courageous to assemble and to build a better, kinder machine that values every cog it depends on. Though Fleet Foxes wrote their best song a decade ago, I would like to report that their whole repertoire continues to rock both my socks.
That’s all for now. Thank you, thank you for sharing your time with me.
