2016: the year I learned to be
I write a pair of these every year. I get amused and embarrassed reading my past selves, yet they serve as markers of my progress (or lack of). Last year I put together an insane 20,000 word document of my 2015, this year I wanted to work on an interactive story of my 2016 but I couldn’t find the space to — which is a constant theme in my year and I’ll elaborate more in this post — so this will have to do.
On the New Year of 2016, I wrote:
In 2016, I don’t wish to avoid being broken. I don’t wish to be happier, nor will I wish for better. I only wish to strengthen the capacity to endure whatever comes — the fleeting joy of happiness, the weight of my light and darkness, the love I can have and cannot have, the work I can do and cannot do. I want to appreciate all of them in entirety, to be capable of living these moments for what they are: beautiful, precious fragments, strung together in an expressive, unbridled force called life.
“…the work I can do and cannot do”
I started 2016 feeling ambitious. There was so much I wanted to do. From the beginning of the year till May I accomplished a considerable amount:
- conquered my fear of showing work-in-progress
- created a prototype of the self-directed learning network that has been on my mind for years and a landing page to hold my experiments
- registered Lucent Space as a business entity
- helped a couple of social enterprises with their digital efforts
- learned to interact with various APIS
- wrote some emo poetry
- co-created a Slack group to share work-in-progress
- even conquered my fear of speaking in public:
From May till Oct
I stumbled into a part-time contract to design prototypes for public good, which was something I couldn’t have said no to, but it meant that I didn’t have the space to work on my personal experiments. I told myself that experimenting with my life meant being open to different types of experiments, not just the ones I planned to have.
Towards the end of the year
I tried to recharge my creative energy by focusing more on non-cerebral activities like cooking:
…and painting:
In the middle of everything through a serendipitous string of events, some of us (huge thanks to them) decided to collaborate on a civic-mindedness workshop almost on a whim and it turned out to be one of the most satisfying things I have ever done. It is also significantly representative of how far I have come along, because there is so much of me that had to transform, so many events that had to occur and be in confluence — I used to be socially anxious omg so many people and all I cared about was designing things for startups — in order for me to actually do something like this and actually thrive on it:
I am in wonder at the serendipitous quality of it all, and also with the thought that perhaps the best outcomes in life come without trying too hard, and simply done with the best intentions + friends + camaraderie + fun + an experimental mindset. — facebook
“…the weight of my light and darkness”
My friend Chew Lin invited me to be a human library for her weekly event to share my story on how I designed my own way of work while being socially anxious and chronically depressed. Being at that event inspired me to write this post, which has 800 over recommends and 100+ responses so far:
and this was my favourite response to it:
You could be my daughter and I cannot thank you enough for helping me see who she really is and what she is feeling. She has tried over the years. She sent me your post and I get it, I finally get it. Thank you. — Leslie Greer
Advocacy for mental health is an integral part of my life’s work. It means so much to be able to shift the narrative and people’s perception just a tiny bit. Apart from creating a mini-site on mental health, I decided to have my first tattoo inked by one of my favourite people:
Health
My eyes are still borked — both tear ducts and oil glands are not working, so they tend to get painful and dry whenever I exert my eyes, which means I can no longer work the hours I used to. I try not to get too depressed about it and instead think of it as an opportunity to be creative about how I work versus my old ways of simply using brute force. It has been interesting to observe how working in smaller spurts have been more productive for me and on a meta level, observe how I’m unconditioning the workaholic in me.
The anxiety I have been experiencing last year has mostly receded, though I still experience residues of it under stress or when I am unable to sleep. It made me conscious about how anxiety can exist because our brain is so efficient that it keeps on firing the same loops even when the original trigger or stimuli no longer exists.
“Winnicott says somewhere that health is much more difficult to deal with than disease. And he’s right, I think, in the sense that everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.” — Adam Phillips
“…to be capable of living these moments”
I rock climbed for the first time (and the only time) — a good friend from my past would have laughed, because she tried to get me to climb for years and I refused to:
…and went on a Herp walk which prompted me to write this essay on the importance of conservation and it is probably one of my most-shared posts on Facebook:
A huge part of living for me is also being able to appreciate the artefacts of people’s imaginations. I had that sense of awe watching Fantastic Beasts, pondering the expanse of JK Rowling’s mind. Perhaps life could be worth living just to experience the diverse expressions of people, such as watching April and the Extraordinary World and reading Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
Books have shaped me more than anything else and I am glad to finish my goal of reading 60 books in 2016.
Gifts
I am the most awkward person when it comes to receiving things (because I think I don’t deserve them) but the past year I have realised the significance of these mean so much more than most of my other accomplishments I can ever have:
“…the love I can have and cannot have”
Inevitably, we face some of our deepest, most hidden reflections through the people we love. 2016 was the year I wanted to re-learn how to love. A good friend recommended me A General Theory of Love and it made me rethink my perception of love:
A relationship that strays from one’s prototype is limbically equivalent to isolation. Loneliness outweighs most pain. These two facts collude to produce one of love’s common and initially baffling quirks: most people will choose misery with a partner their limbic brain recognizes over the stagnant pleasure of a “nice” relationship with someone their attachment mechanisms cannot detect. Consider the young man described in the last chapter wrestling with the present-day reenactment of the long-ago love with his fiery, critical mother. As an adult, he faces a binary universe. If he connects with a woman, she turns out to be his mother’s younger clone. But a supportive woman leaves him exasperatingly empty of feeling — no spark, no chemistry, no fireworks…You can’t tell someone with faulty Attractors to go out and find a loving partner — from his point of view, there are none. Those who could love him well are invisible. Even if the clouds parted and a perfectly compassionate and understanding lover descended from heaven on a sunbeam to land at his feet, his mind would still be tuned to another sort of relationship; he still wouldn’t know what to do.
It takes a lot of self-honesty to acknowledge that I had an unhealthy view of relationships and truly attempt to rewire it instead of letting myself fall back into the same patterns again.
Strangely, shortly after I met her.
It would take several posts to even begin to articulate the profound changes I had within since meeting her and being in a committed partnership for the first time in five years. Singlehood was very rewarding, so when I first met her I struggled against the tension of being in love and yet protecting my preciously-earned independence.
One month in, she went away for work for three weeks, and it triggered my fear of abandonment like hell hath no fury. We talk about being in relationships like it is the best thing ever, but not many people is willing to admit that it is truly one of the hardest things to be part of in life. I had to learn to overcome all my primal instincts to flee and go back into my safety of being alone and hence never risking the vulnerability of being destroyed.
She stayed, despite me. I let her love me, and she did, in the most generous way possible. I had lost count of all the ones who had broken me because they too, were trying to escape from love. Her love was whole and it threatened me more, because I was used to trying to find light in the darkest corners, instead of dealing with unadulterated bright light. —Listserve, I dare you to love me
But there is always a reward that comes with taking risks. Being in this relationship is like having a permanent mirror that reflects the harshest ugliness and the most transcendent beauty I possess. I have to keep on choosing grace over insecurity, and in order to do that I have to work on myself tremendously. It is still a long work in progress, but I have been utterly transformed, in order to love and be loved.
With her, time seems to freeze. I am more being and less doing.
time feels akin to
eternity rushing past
in seconds with you
— May 19 2016, haiku
Friends
I was blessed enough to develop new friendships and deepen existing ones. I would be much less of a person without my friends:
Friendship is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness. Friendship not only helps us see ourselves through another’s eyes, but can be sustained over the years only with someone who has repeatedly forgiven us for our trespasses as we must find it in ourselves to forgive them in turn. A friend knows our difficulties and shadows and remains in sight, a companion to our vulnerabilities more than our triumphs, when we are under the strange illusion we do not need them. An undercurrent of real friendship is a blessing exactly because its elemental form is rediscovered again and again through understanding and mercy. All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy all friendships die. — David Whyte
“…the capacity to endure whatever comes”
There were some periods this year when I felt that familiar darkness overwhelm me. I do feel like I am better equipped to come out of these phases, but they are challenging nonetheless. The year has chosen to end on a sombre mood with Trump winning the elections. Suddenly I feel like I have to rethink my plans.
Even without Trump we have an impending climate crisis, debt crisis and a host of many inter-related issues such as rising inequality, or that it is 2016 and there are still many parts of the world without access to clean water, or nobody has any idea what to do with refugees. Before the elections I thought we had more time, despite my own cynicism there was a fleeting chance we could all pull our socks together in time. — Defying Powerlessness
Yet it was also this year I started to learn the lessons of letting go, acceptance and finding some equilibrium between all the tensions I feel, like the Serenity Prayer (I omitted God on purpose because I am agnostic):
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
I feel like I didn’t accomplish a lot of things I wished to, but in return I had a lot of unexpected experiences come my way. If I was too stubborn and hung on too tightly on what I set out to do, I might have missed out on the opportunities and lessons that were waiting for me. I couldn’t work on my experiments for most of the second half of the year, but instead I learned to love, experienced how it feels like to work in public service, made new connections— most importantly, I discovered more about myself with a wider range of stimuli and interactions.
But I forgot the original point of this year was to focus on my self, not my work — no matter how much I love my work, how important I think it is, how much an extension it is of me.
— Lessons & takeaways from 6 months of experimenting with my life
Overall: 2016 was a year I learned (and would still be learning)
- that sometimes it is simply better to accept what I am not good at so I can focus on what I am actually good at instead of trying to be someone else I am not
- to accept responsibility for my past, and yet I know that I couldn’t have done better anyway — to have compassion for my former self, that she has made her decisions with the capacity she had at that point in time
- to give up control, allow life to unfold
- to love, play, be and be unafraid of happiness
- to value confluence
- to live in alignment with my beliefs and navigate the tension between surrender and agency, to uncondition myself from systemic influences I no longer believe in or want to participate in
- to not confuse the means with the ends
- to appreciate aging. I have come such a long way, and I have experienced so much that I have never would in my younger days, and perhaps I am on my way to finding out the answer to my own question:
“Is life worth living solely because of life? The detached observer in me tells me I don’t have the whole picture yet. As long as I am still alive, I am ignorant of the whole picture, and I cannot let what I feel now rob me of the finality I will one day face, that at the very least, I owe it to myself and those who love me, to at least sit it out for myself to truly answer my own question.” —11 Apr 2016, journal, The Whole Picture
In 2016, I am learning to be, and I am just at the very beginning of it.
