Right Back At You

"Mistakes happen. You’ll lose money, but it’s part of the learning process."

I'm here at Corp Comms to learn and make mistakes while doing it. Why didn't I bring my camera, gel my hair, get some rest, or give a decent excuse to overly/extremely confident Mr Koh? Why isn't my facilities shoot going smoothly?  Today, I learned about the reasons for these things. I learned about my lack of professionalism - how unprofessional I really still was.

After talking to Andrew on the phone, I felt really good about myself. At first I thought it was because I'd bothered to honor a promise to a friend, but eventually I realized there was something more to it. I was feeling so good because I'd explained my understanding of his policy well. I had understood something complex and adult almost entirely on my own. I had worked at it and gained an understanding of it. That felt good. Being exposed to something new and intimidating was ultimately good.

God blessed me again today. By honoring my friend's time and commitment, I too was blessed :)

Existential Anxiety

The past few months have been painful and confusing. Not knowing who I was going to be, not knowing where I could go in my life-- all of it left me feeling hopeless. What made things worse was that, most of the time, my pride and my shame prevented me from really voicing out my worries to my friends. Every meeting since I came back was stressful; I was afraid others would ask me questions that I had no answers to.

The shame and worry were so bad at times, it felt like my head would split from the stress. At the time, I was too ashamed to face anyone. I was scared to be seen as a good-for-nothing without any direction or any future. I was scared that I was a good-for-nothing without any future.

Living in fear and paranoia wasn't healthy, but it got me down to doing some serious thinking about the future. It made me open my eyes and acknowledge the options that I had (and didn't have).

It made me think about the gifts that God gave me, and what it would mean for me to be unable to make a living on them... I didn't want to have a life without fiction at its center. I thought it would mean that I had failed. I didn't think there was anything else that made me valuable.

It took a run to clear my head, and make me realize that I'd stopped thinking about how God saw me. Every day I was thinking about how others viewed my worth, about what kinds of things I could say about myself in open society... Without knowing it, all my thoughts about stories had turned to what would be most effective, most convincing, most easy to monetize... The ideas I thought about gave me no joy. All of it was cold. Be practical. That thought spun in my mind over and over during those weeks.

I didn't know it at the time, but it hurt to live in that way. I was always numb; my mind was jammed with thoughts of everything that I needed to be, which was everything that I wasn't. Worst of all, the only ideas left to me were desperate ones, breathless, shallow visions engineered to pander. It was only after my run that it truly struck me how pitiful such an existence was.

In that moment, I realized that, even though having no success made me feel bad about myself, there was something worse: the possibility of spending an entire life lying to yourself and others, just to get by.

At the end of the day, writers have to choose to write what they truly believe in. They have to spend their lives developing every vision that makes them feel, makes them truly think. Anything less, and you smother the fire inside you.

Every writer has a different vision for their work... For me, it's the belief that as long as a person's life is made better by something I write, then it doesn't matter whether or not I'm earning anything from it. As much as I'd love to earn money from writing, I know that, even if only one person's heart or eyes are opened by my stories, that would be enough to please God who gave me these gifts. I live up to my God-given nature when I capture truths through writing that bring encouragement, companionship, or understanding to others.

If it is God's will, I would like to be able to write pop fiction for young adults... I've always felt that, while high literature is most commendable for its capturing of often overlooked truths, it never does enough to engage people in the way that popular literature can. More importantly, high literature, with all its questions and reflections and conjectures, can never fill that hole that so many Singaporeans wish to fill with a shared culture. Kids don't spend their childhoods reading postmodern analyses of urban alienation... They read about dragons and detectives, wizards and pirates and assassins... These are the joys that will fill their childhood dreams. One day, these will become the memories that make their lips crease into smiles.

NOTE TO SELF: PITCH THR AT ALL COSTS

NOTE TO SELF: TAKE NOTE OF IN9008