Playing to live
reflections on turning 35
35 is a milestone age for Singaporeans. It is the age the government had decided that the probability of people getting married at 35 is exceedingly low, one becomes eligible to buy (or lease for 99 years) public housing. I had spent my 20s wishing I’ll turn 35 quicker, because for most Singaporeans getting a HDB flat represents a coming of age, for most other single people it means being able to move out of their parents’; for me the perennial rebel it means a significant savings on rent and a stop to all that moving.
I had paused all that anticipation upon moving to the US in 2012, thinking that’s where I wanted to spend the rest of my life — the country of liberation. History has taught me repeatedly that I don’t know myself very well.
The past half decade have been the most significant period of my life thus far. I have spent most of my childhood in sadness, most of my teens in anger, most of my 20s in a depressive rollercoaster. Turning 30 enabled me to start having some sense of autonomy — I didn’t have to let life just happen to me, if I tried hard enough I could choose my circumstances, that I didn’t have to please everybody. People assume I’ve never cared about pleasing people because I seem to be the perennial rebel, but I’d been trying to rebel and please people at the same time, resulting in a psyche in perpetual conflict, with resentment directed at both myself and the world.
The past five years have been about unlearning all that I’ve learned in the first three decades of my life.
Last year, I wished for more breaking apart:
The past year, I have been doing a lot of letting go, breaking apart and regenerating. I wish to be that person who is capable of looking forward to more of this, for that can only mean I will be creating space for myself to experience the richness of what life has to offer to me…
They say, be careful of what you wish for. Since then I’ve just been broken so much that I don’t even really recognize myself anymore. I thought I would die if I ever had to leave the US — the thought of returning to Singapore used to trigger so much anxiety in me it would cascade into suicidal tendencies. But I have learned that freedom is complex, that what seems free is not truly free, and it always comes at a cost. It is up to us to decide which are the costs we are willing to bear.
It took a lot of breakage to leave the place I once thought that would be my true home. I have lost people dear to me, my sense of identity, my career, my dreams. I have thought my life in SF was everything I could ever want, and it was traumatic to find out that I no longer wanted that. And if I no longer wanted to live in the city of dreams, to work at places other designers would kill to work at, to live without pinching dollars and cents — what the hell did I want?
30 gave me the strength to see that I could pursue my dreams, 31–33 about pursuing and realizing most of them, 34 is when I started to question those dreams, 35 is the year where I’ll learn to no longer have dreams.
Dreams indicate some sort of unfulfillment, that the present is not enough. I respect all of you out there building spaceships and saving the world, but 34 for me was all about learning to discern what my self truly wants versus what has been conditioned into me, and that if I continued to be in this state of perpetual unfulfillment and constant pursuit I would slowly die.
I want to just be. I want to do things because I love to, not because they represent some path to some possible reality. I don’t wish to live for a future I don’t even know if I would have. I want to be me, to remember my nature before all that conditioning. I wasn’t born to be fearful, to be in constant anxiety and distrust. I was a loving, trusting, playful, brave (reckless perhaps) child. Where the hell did she go?
I now realize why I spent my earlier years in sadness. Because I was constantly told to be the opposite of who I am. And slowly, I withered, I shrunk.
It still happens, till today. I am everything society doesn’t want me to be. Half of that is just my inner critic criticizing myself, because I am now so used to judging myself based on all that societal conditioning. I am too emotional, too idealistic, too naive, too selfish, too obscure, too [insert any descriptor here that the society disapproves of].
Hence I had been trying to kill myself. The suicidal tendencies are an obvious manifestation, but in reality I was killing myself in a multitude of ways, not just the obvious, visible. Every thought I have, I suppress. When I think of a audacious idea, I tell myself to stop being crazy. When I want to do something obscure or risky, I fear the alienation and rejection when nobody understands. When I try to love to people, to have empathy for anybody I come across — yes including Donald Trump (I mean, how much does the psyche have to take for a human being to turn out like that), I’m afraid to be judged.
It doesn’t make sense to continue living a life other people want for me, to be constantly moulded into some version of people’s ideal of me, to be a person who keeps wanting to kill or reduce herself — just to belong. It doesn’t benefit me or the people who love me, and even if I cared about contributing to the world, it would be getting some half-assed patchwork of me, not my fullest potential. I believe we have an inherent nature for a reason, I believe we all have gifts within, if we have the courage to remember them and live them.
This is a passage from The Artist’s Way, though the context is for artists, it is applicable to anyone who doesn’t fit into the mainstream:
Fear is the true name for what ails the blocked artist. It may be fear of failure or fear of success. Most frequently, it is fear of abandonment. This fear has roots in childhood reality. Most blocked artists tried to become artists against either their parents’ good wishes or their parents’ good judgment…Unfortunately, the view of an artist’s life as an adolescent rebellion often lingers, making any act of art entail the risk of separation and the loss of loved ones…This guilt demands that they set a goal for themselves right off the bat that they must be great artists in order to justify this rebellion. The need to be a great artist makes it hard to be an artist. The need to produce a great work of art makes it hard to produce any art at all.
And the antidote to this fear:
Full-blown artistic creativity takes place when a trained and skilled grown-up is able to tap the source of clear, unbroken play-consciousness of the small child within. This consciousness has a particular feel and flow we instinctively recognize.
In this light, psychiatrist Donald Winnicott came to clarify the aim of psychological healing as “bringing the patient from a state of not being able to play into a state of being able to play…. It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.”
— Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play
I have experienced this state in glimpses. The state where I do not have a sense of who I am, and that paradoxically gives me the strongest sense of who I am. A state where I didn’t care about the outcome or the reaction, because I have experienced the ultimate state of being, of being connected to a greater whole.
My best work didn’t come out of intense thought and problem solving. It came from unexpected moments of inspiration, of spontaneous discovery. When I experience flow, the total immersion of my work, I don’t feel like I am working. I feel like I am slowly falling in love.
Inevitably I came to a hypothesis. That if I learned to unlearn, to let go, to dig in deep to get in touch with my true nature, beyond all the layers of conditioning, it will be where I’ll find my equilibrium in life.
I want to stop living a life that is full of philosophical disconnect — living one way but believing the world can be another. I want to live in coherence to my philosophical values and beliefs.
I just want to be capable of being myself. To find and uphold my own value system, even if I’m the only person in the world who has it. I want to be a person capable of having empathy for anybody, to rediscover my childlike sense of curiosity and wonder, to learn how to play again, to see life as an unfolding canvas as opposed to something that is trying to kill me (oh the irony). I want to see trees and gasp in wonder, because I am aware of the magnificence of evolution, of how much randomness and coincidences they took to be trees, that somehow they are naturally willing to take in the waste we exhale and give us breaths of life. Trees don’t try to be trees, they just are.
I want to remember I am also the consequence of millions of cosmic coincidences, that I am only alive today to write this because my ancestors won the harsh game of life, not to mention what it took to make them the first place. How many generations of evolution and survival did it take for my body to exist? Sometimes I sit in wonder just thinking about things like this, tracing all the way back to my prehistoric ancestors, somehow amazed that they didn’t get eaten up by some wild animal or freeze in the cold.
That is the person I want to be. To be capable of that intense awareness and wonder. To be fully present in each moment. To have that capacity to love. That is to me, the best way of honoring that sacredness of life, not spending the rest of my life trying to be someone who I am clearly not.
I want to remember how to be a child again. Turning 35, this is what I now have the agency, strength, maturity and awareness to wish.
it can sometimes be a heartbreaking struggle for us to arrive at a place where we are no longer afraid of the child inside us. — Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play
I write one of these every year.
