never waste a crisis. about 6 months ago I had a painful personal reckoning where i came to see that i have had patterns of avoidance and denial that run far deeper into my being than i had ever previously admitted to myself. i’ve come to believe that these patterns are likely the reason why my life has always felt a little strange, like i’m not quite there, i’m not quite in control of myself. in a sense it’s literally true: i wasn’t there. I was disassociating, living some distance away from myself. there are a lot of strange details which i’m not sure i want to get into right away– things about how I would deny physical sensations like hunger and tiredness, and how that had all sorts of second-order effects… I would even take pride in things like how late I could stay up, which in hindsight maybe was a form of sour grapes.
but i’m not really interested in doing a lot of tedious introspection at this very moment. rather, i want to really sit with a mantra that came to me: what you do is what you do. when I google it, I see a only couple of other search results that don’t seem particularly emphatic. there’s a much more common saying in the form of “what you do is who you are”, which I’ve encountered before, which never really resonated with me. I’ve always intuitively felt that a person is more than just what they do. but I can see how it applies in a particular sense. a sense that I was avoiding.
the tautology here, on the other hand, hits me particularly hard in a specific way that I’d like to try and articulate. what you do is what you do. what you talk about is not what you do. what you intend to do is not (necessarily) what you do. and when you put off doing things, that is what you’re doing. a few weeks earlier a related idea revealed itself to me, which was that “every act of avoidance reinforces avoidance as a strategy, and consecrates the thing avoided as A Thing To Be Avoided”. I feel like I had never fully internalized this before, at least not to the degree that I’m currently in the process of internalizing. basically… it never really occurred to me– I didnt want to see it– that my acts of avoidance were not inconsequential. every act of avoidance is an act, like any other act. and repetition legitimizes. repetition reinforces. repetition encourages more of the thing to reoccur. repetition becomes habit. habit becomes identity. (that’s how “what you do is who you are” works, but I didn’t want to see it. you could say, then, that “refusing to see it is who Visa was”, and I would now agree.)
All of this feels a bit abstract so it would probably help to talk in specifics. And I’ll focus for now on very recent events, partially because they’re ripe in the mind, and partially because they’re less complicated because they’re not part of much longer patterns, histories, etc. I moved from my old neighborhood Yishun to my new neighborhood Pasir Ris in August 2025. My son was born in October 2023. So moving felt like a transition from an old life to a new one. A new environment, a new life configuration (I’m a father now), a new opportunity to shake off old patterns and start new ones. Since I was a teenager, I had a habit of sleeping really late at night and waking up really late in the day, as much as possible, and this habit continued throughout my twenties. From time to time I’d make overtures about wanting to change this, but I never quite managed to do it, or stick to it for very long, and it often left me feeling disheartened, and over time I came to believe that maybe I was just fated to be a late riser– though I did think that if anything could change that, it would have to be parenthood. There’s that joke about how “parenthood turns you into a morning person the way being chased by a bear turns you into a runner.” I do think that applies to some degree. My son tends to wake up at around 8am, and he needs to be fed and changed etc and so we have to wake up too. But the quality of that wakefulness is of course directly informed by how we spent the previous night…
Since moving, and since my personal crisis, I’ve spent a lot of time just sitting around, staring out of the window, going on walks, cycling with my wife, and just… not doing much work. I used to spend hours on twitter every day, and for a few months I stopped entirely. I now check in on it a little bit, but I post maybe a couple of tweets a day when I used to post 100+ a day quite regularly. I came to see that I had a very unhealthy and unproductive relationship with my work/writing/productivity. I would agonize about wanting to do work, and yet not actually get very much done, and then feel bad about it, and fall into all manner of shitty coping mechanisms about it, which would make my life worse, which I would be in denial about, because I refused to believe that my life could be getting worse in any way, and worse still, that I might be responsible for it. All of this took up an immense amount of ‘psychic energy’- emotional, mental, spiritual, however you want to think about it– even if outwardly there was nothing to see or say or show about it all. It was like I was slamming the gas and brakes at the same time, going nowhere fast, wearing myself out, burning myself out, and yet feeling always like I couldn’t afford to take a break. Until my crisis forced me to take one. And so here I am, still reflecting on everything. And after a few months of loosening my grip on myself, I can see that the grip kept me from doing anything at all. I was so tense and anxious and frustrated and upset and in denial about all of that. I was really anxious to “be done” with all of that, to put that behind me, but it was very much bubbling in front of me and around me, and I see more clearly now that it’s not something that goes away, it’s something you have to deal with regularly, just as you have to eat and sleep and brush your teeth.
I’m going in circles laying out context but before I go to bed I’d like to really hit something with “what you do is what you do”. Oh, right. So lately I’ve been saying that I want to bring my son to the playground first thing in the morning, I want to get out and get that bright morning sunlight, go for a walk, go to the gym more often, go cycling, etc. But more often than not, I find myself making excuses. I’m too tired. I need to vegetate for a while. I need to drink my coffee. And if I’m up at 8, I linger and delay until 9, and next thing I know it’s too warm to do much of anything. The life I believe I really want is one where I wake up at 6am, maybe even 5am, and get out and see the sunrise, and have breakfast, and enjoy the cool morning air, and then maybe get home and do some work until lunch, something like that. But the current equilibrium was not leading me there. It was only leading me to more of the same equilibrium. And for the first time in my life– well, it seems that way to me, and actually I’m pretty sure it’s likely that I’ve had some form of this insight in the past, and then subsequently buried it in a box because it made me uncomfortable and I did not want to see it…… seemingly for the first time in my life, I suddenly saw with vicious clarity that I was creating the circumstances. I was deciding how my mornings were supposed to go. I kept trying to convince myself that I haven’t decided yet, but that in itself is a decision. I refused to accept or believe that. I wanted my acts of avoidance to be non-acts, non-things, non-doings, non-events, things that don’t exist, don’t matter, aren’t real, have no consequences. But there are always consequences to everything. In the past maybe I could avoid this by refusing to see it, but it’s harder than ever now that I have a son, and the quality of each day of his childhood is largely determined by the energy and resources and attention that his parents bring to the table. I want my son to have a better childhood and a better home environment and a better life that I did. Most of that boils down to, I want him to have a dad that he can trust, that he can respect, that he can count on. And… all my life, I have been this flakey, avoidant person that you can’t really count on in the “he does what he says he’ll do” sense. I used to just say shit, and sometimes I’d do some of the things, but for the most part I said shit just to… get people off my back, make problems go away, and even just to say shit for the sake of it. To be rewarded for the utterance about the act, rather than the act itself.
One way of looking at all of this is that I had gotten swept up in this hyperverbal game of rationalizations and explanations and narrativization. I can be really good at saying shit. It has its uses, and it’s… how I make a living, even, and I do genuinely try to be helpful to others at least along some dimensions. I might be flakey, late, etc but if I do show up I try to give it my best. I’m just so tired of being inconsistent, but I also know from past experience that an expression of tiredness does not actually change anything. What you DO is what you do. Which is to say, the only way to stop being inconsistent is to start being consistent. The only way to be a writer is to write. The only way to wake up earlier is to wake up earlier. Nike’s slogan suddenly has more resonance for me now, when I add the preceding tautology: “What you do is what you do. So, JUST DO IT.” Without the first half, I generally used to find the slogan distasteful, like you’re forcing yourself to do something you might not necessarily want to do… but now I find myself wondering, how many people really use Nike’s slogan as a way of bullying and coercing themselves into action, and how many of them got anywhere with it? I’m sure the number isn’t 0, but is it much larger than that? I don’t know, and actually it doesn’t even really matter to me. What matters to me is that I wake up early and take my son to the playground. What matters to me is that I go cycling with my wife. And I do whatever I can to make life better for my family. There are real performance goals involved in this pursuit. I do want to make more money for this. But even more important and upstream of that, I want to be able to ACT. To figure out what needs doing and DO IT. And so today, for the first time in 83 days, I sat down and banged out a wordvomit, because I am a writer and I want to write. Am I happy with this piece of writing? Not very much. There’s a lot I didn’t get into, and I spent a lot of time and space articulating things that maybe wasn’t necessary to mention. If I look at this wordvomit again tomorrow, I might remind myself to get into the specifics of how I got out of the house this morning– by reminding myself that WHAT YOU DO IS WHAT YOU DO. Actually that’s all the specifics that matter. I just reminded myself that I could either be the dad that gets us out, or the dad that makes excuses. (Funnily I’m reminded of a little obscure Steve Jobs quote here, about a logistics partner– basically, if you have your shit together well enough that it’s easy, good, if you don’t, that’s too bad… but you gotta do what you gotta do, no? Well, you don’t necessarily. But what you do is what you do. What do you want to be doing? Who do you want to be?)