I’m feeling unwell right now and it’s interesting for me to pay attention to my headspace. It’s a kind of altered consciousness. Once again I experience a sort of deja vu- I remember writing once that illness is an opportunity to look at things from a different perspective. It forces you to prioritize things a lot more, things that seemed to matter before now become a lot more trivial. Like… you stop caring about superficial arguments. In a way, falling terribly sick is like experiencing micro-dying or micro-aging. Unfortunately it seems like the insights come and go with the territory. Writing is a hopeful attempt to preserve insights across domains. Might be a foolish idea, but hey. I gotta write SOMETHING.
In Zen in The Art Of Writing, Ray Bradbury wrote about how he got skittish if he didn’t write every day. “You must stay drunk on writing,” he wrote, “so that reality cannot destroy you.” He also said, “…what would happen is that the world would catch up with and try to sicken you. If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy, or both.”
I’m examining my own life now and I’m starting to wonder if it’s true for me, too. It seems like I’m happier and more well-adjusted when I’ve been writing, and that I maybe get cranky and edgy when I haven’t been writing. This very blog is a pretty good indicator of how much writing I’ve been doing, but I haven’t really been measuring my own moods and emotions with such rigor. Perhaps I should, so I can see if there’s any correlation. Would that make me write more?
That feels like too much thinking, and I’m a pathalogical thinker. There’s a simpler way to tell if I’m happier when I write– to write! And I do know that I always enjoy having written, just as I always enjoy having run. There’s something about covering the space untravelled in the mind, no different from climbing a mountain or going on a trek or getting on a plane and going somewhere new. Watching my fingers fly without even really having an inkling of where they’re going– yet knowing it won’t be ABSOLUTE gibberish. That there’s a glimmer of something in there.
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I’m thinking now about alienation and how I have never really felt truly comfortable, truly at ease anywhere for an extended period of time.
I’ve written about this a lot, but I think never with the right lens. When I was younger, I wrote about this as though it was something cool, something that made me special and unique. Or I wrote about it in a way to explain away my weaknesses and failings. There was always some sort of agenda.
Having written about it over and over again, I’ve grown tired of the agendas– and now I’m just curious to make sense of the phenomenon for what it is, if that’s possible.
I never truly belonged in my family. My parents and siblings are lovely, and they spoiled me silly and treated me too well. But I’m the alien. We don’t speak the same language. We don’t exactly care about the same things. I vibrate at a different frequency from the rest of them, concern myself with different things. I’m the only one who’d probably be happy to go wandering off for days in a library– I’m not sure if anybody else would stay in it as long as I would.
I didn’t truly belong in the GEP or in school. I didn’t have the work ethic, the focus, the drive. I was a Disruptive Student who was supposed to Pay More Attention In Class, etc.
I liked my secondary school, I kinda liked the neighbourhood I grew up in- but I’ve never truly felt like I belonged anywhere. I didn’t do my homework, I wasn’t really a proper part of any typical CCA. I was a little too restless to be completely at home with the enlightened bums that I hung out with– smokers, critics, philsophers. Really smart people who didn’t care for school. I liked the company for a while but I felt edgy. We’d talk a lot about eventually doing things, and I think eventually some of us went our separate ways and started doing things. Which is cool.
I never really had a core group of friends that I felt completely comfortable with. I was always a semi-outsider. To remedy this at some point I literally created my own group on Facebook- carefully curating Invites and discussions. A lot of those folks are now friends with each other, some dating, some travelling together, etc.
Facebook itself. Singapore music scene. Theater, arts. All of those were things that I felt strongly about at some point, but ultimately felt rather uncomfortable with. I’d fixate on whatever made me uncomfortable.
Too tall for the buses and trains. Too skinny to look good naked. Can’t swim, wobbly on a bicycle. I don’t actually speak very clearly– something I’d like to practice and get better at. I tend to speak in starts and spurts, like
I’m not exactly entirely comfortable out in the wilderness. I like beaches to some degree but I can’t swim. Temples are somewhat calming but I start paying attention to how people get carried away with the rituals and the symbolism and it bothers me. I hate rush hour commutes, but I couldn’t survive in a countryside. Clearly I have some goddamn work to do to make myself a little more comfortable in this world.
Internet child. I try to curate feeds but everything is dissatisfying in some way. Every subreddit has its clueless noobs, and while I like to support and encourage them I’m feeling kinda weary.
Quora was home for a while but ultimately it got overrun and it had a lot more drama than I was comfortable with.
I am an Indian man in a Chinese majority country, and I’m not particularly comfortable in Tamil or Malay. I don’t like how some people take things too seriously and get all bombastic with their vocabulary. I don’t want to rant on any particular subreddit because that’s always performance- and in this postmodern overlapping of world
For a time I thought I was interested in philosophy, then complex systems. Self improvement, life hacking. But all of that got really tiring after a while.
I feel like I wanted to go somewhere with this but I lost steam so I’ll end it here.
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A– I paused to play Candy Crush for a while while writing this post- indulging in the very mindlessness that I used to make a big show of criticising. But hey, I was a smoker then. Are cigarettes worse than mindless video games? I don’t know. I guess I’ll uninstall CC now so I don’t have to deal with that.
B– I also wrote a bit on Evernote on mobile before writing more at home. It’s startling how much mental clarity I lose when I’m sick. I’m glad I don’t fall sick as often as I used to.