When our classmates came over from France, I, along with all my Singapore classmates, felt like my world had turned upside down. This safe space we had created together over four months, this special culture we had collectively forged through trial and error, laughter and tears - was now being raided by strangers, pirates from a different school halfway around the world that only nominally shared our namesake and brand.
These invaders brought their own culture, relationships, and travel plans, outnumbered us three-to-two and out-spoke us ten-to-two, and took over our home sonically, physically, and energetically. On the first day of the school period, I walked around the entire campus, slowly panicking as I saw a hundred familiar green lanyards but zero familiar faces, until I finally saw a friendly complexion in the crowd and my soul burst into a smile as I ran to give my friend V a hug.
At first, I didn’t like it. I really didn’t like it. But I also recognized that this cleverly designed campus exchange was INSEAD’s best-kept secret. I was getting bored back in December. But now I was on the edge of my seat again.
Change can be difficult. I was tormented the first week of this year. I felt like a nobody. I felt unpopular. Everyone else seemed to know everybody.
For the first time, I became consciously aware of an unanswered question: Why am I so obsessed with being popular?
I felt this unquenchable thirst to meet students from France. If I didn’t meet one during lunch, or during a class break, or at an event, I felt like I was wasting my time. I craved novelty.
Phuket
I couldn’t be with my friends as we were coming up together. I left into the crowd alone and took laps. I sat in a corner by myself, feeling anxious and uneasy, unable to communicate with anyone. I had been feeling anxious all evening, actually, for many hours and many reasons.
But I forced myself to return to my friends, who were now all standing up and dancing. The hippie-flip came up too strongly. I couldn’t stand up and had to sit on the grass. K and G came over to sit with me, saying they weren’t feeling great either. That made me feel validated and comforted.
So much energy started flowing through me that my fingertips went stiff and numb. I forced myself to open and close my fists, gently but firmly, lest my fingers become paralyzed. Amazingly, G felt the same; her fingers, too, were becoming stiff and paralyzed.
“What’s happening?” we said as we looked at each other, eyes wide open. “We’ll get through this. Just let the energy flow through.” I remembered what L had taught me at Wonderfruit a month earlier.
I was really confused. K and G went to get water.
I took slow, deep breaths, the ones I had learned while in the throes of ayahuasca. K and G came back. They were smiling and resumed dancing, but I wasn’t ready yet. I tried standing up and nearly fell over backwards. “Can I get a cigarette?” I asked K. He handed me one and I smoked it down in 30 seconds. I did that five times. They felt strangely healing.
And then - the suppressed memory came up. That memory, so absurdly dark, that I had only discovered it about myself four months ago under hypnotherapy and then promptly dismissed it because it was so ridiculous, there was no way it could have been true. I had continued denying it up until that night when the environment forced it to bubble up from my bodily depths. That’s when I realized that it was, in fact, real.
And I had to face it. Luckily, the MDMA softened the blow. That was by design.
An hour later, I was feeling better, and I realized that K and G probably weren’t having a bad time at all when I came over initially. Nope, there was just so much painful energy coming out of me that they had to sit down with me and co-suffer through the same paralysis - my spillover trauma. Like copper wire in an electrical system, they helped conduct and bear a load I couldn’t handle alone in that moment.
Thank you ❤️
I felt compelled to tell her that thing about myself and the fucked up side effects it had inflicted on me for years. These were dark truths I had never told anyone before. In fact, I hadn’t even told myself; I was processing these revelations in real time as I was telling her.
She had asked me my favorite question: “What are you thinking about?” I hadn’t been asked that in a long time.
She would turn towards me as we spoke, her eyes lit up, gazing and glittering, mouth smiling. Her kindness was beautiful in the half darkness. I didn’t feel judged; I felt safe.
I became aware of a simple, innocent love, the kind that I hadn’t felt in my body for so many years. It was a genuine appreciation for another human who was kind to me and seemed to share a compatible worldview.
And afterwards in our texts back and forth, she became a vehicle for universal lessons, and in doing so, taught me how to better love myself. That subtle change in thinking manifested noticeably in my daily life: I started seeing the world differently; a little more love here, more compassion there.
I called my grandma for the first time. I reconnected with old friends and new friends. I communicated pent up emotions, I saw new perspectives, I said I love yous. Along the way, I repaired wounds old and new and strengthened relationships, including the one I have with myself.
I felt that I had leveled up to a higher vibrational frequency. I can’t stop smiling.
On peacocking
Be a peacock, my friend and 姐姐 mentor had told me. If you don’t show off your own feathers, no one will do it for you, and no one will know who you are.
“Have you ever been to Japan?” she asked me in her normal rapid-fire tone, although I felt accused as I had just told her that Maido in Peru was some of the best Japanese food I had ever eaten.
Have I ever been to Japan? My relationship to Japan flashed in front of my eyes. 25 years ago, I visited for the first time. 8 years ago, I fell in love with my best friend under the cherry blossoms. 4 years ago, I lived there for a blissful winter and spring and when I moved away to London afterwards, returned for a weekend just to visit. I had built up a personal life and considered accepting McKinsey Tokyo’s offer of a permanent transfer.
Have I ever been to Japan?
“Uhh….. yes,” was all I could utter.
“Wait really? So you didn’t eat any good sushi while you were there? Well next time you go…” man, she was intimidating. She talked so fast.
I need to get better at peacocking myself. This year I learned that I really don’t like feeling misunderstood.
The guys who got away
After Wonderfruit, I noticed the way I express passion has changed. My vocabulary is more crude now: so good! fuck!
That first night in Phuket, we were tripping balls. We had eaten double the seller’s recommendation and came up together into something wild.
Some sober guys visited our villa, and I somehow managed to not only hold down a conversation with two of these strangers at once, but an engaging and interesting one at that.
We talked about techno. Like me, these guys liked dark techno. That daaark shit. “I’ve been dying to see Tale Of Us for years,” I told them.
“Oh yeah you like Afterlife?” one of them, a former McKinsey Chile and Schwarzman Scholar replied. “We were in Ibiza last year. We saw Tale Of Us b2b Solomun. 5 hour set.”
Bro. Tale Of Us b2b Solomun? For 5 hours? Fuck. If I saw that set, I might literally just die the next day. Nothing more worth living for. My spiritual purpose accomplished.
So good.
On raising a family
Somehow I feel like now I’m the only person my age who wants to get married and raise a family. My peers are telling me they’re so happy being single, or focused on their career, or that we’re always alone even with a partner, or that life partners don’t exist, only temporary lovers who flit into our lives for a moment and then out when we change, like strands of DNA on an unraveling helix.
Advice from my childhood violin teacher rang in my ears: “You need to marry someone who loves music as much as you do.” There were times in my life when I dismissed that. Now, I see how critically important it is. Perhaps in due time, too, I’ll heed my mother’s advice: “marry a woman who loves you more than you love her. See the marriage of 林老师, my violin teacher?”
When I worked in Indonesia, I hired and managed multiple teams. My biggest professional success at that company wasn’t what I accomplished business-wise, but rather raising my team and watching them learn, grow, and blossom.
That was deeply fulfilling.
On objects
Last year in April, I was in the San Francisco Bay Area running a complex family errand involving identities across three countries. I visited a family friend’s home to collect documents out of a safe she had been holding for us.
The safe was out of power. I had anticipated precisely this scenario, so had purchased 4 AA batteries just before coming. I pulled them out of my pocket.
“咦?我们家有电池啊,” she said. We have batteries! You didn’t need to buy them. She ruffled in a nearby drawer and pulled out a Costco-sized pack of batteries. My eyes bulged. She must have been holding 10 million batteries. Power for days. Charge a Tesla.
I looked around the garage we were standing in and suddenly noticed there was clutter everywhere: unused furniture, rusting bicycles, an old TV. There were countless drawers stuffed full of stuff - CRAP! - that Chinese parents hoard when they’re on sale at Costco, because they’ve been multi-generationally conditioned to engorge themselves before the next famine.
I used to be like that when I was young and lived in America. I threw out so much crap, physically and emotionally, when I left New York and relocated abroad for the first time. Subsequently, I lived for years out of just a carry-on suitcase and a backpack. That’s all I needed. Limited space forced me to prioritize my favorite objects.
@patriciamou_ tweets:
In the new year ask yourself - does every object in your home feel like art? Art defined as the material manifestation of what you feel to be good, beautiful, and true deep down.
If it gives you neutral or negative energy, throw it away. You may not notice, but the presence of those objects compounded over months and years is creating an energy deficit...
Our outer should reflect our inner to create a sense of continued wholeness with our environment. Bc every misalignment in our lives splinters off energy that could otherwise be subsuming into the whole. Into our hearts.
5th anniversary
As I lay in my bed that morning staring at the cavernous ceiling of my villa bedroom, sunlight seeping in through the lush, verdant bushes planted around the balcony for privacy, I held a simple smile on my face, closed lips crimped slightly upwards, eyes wide open staring pleasantly upwards into nothingness.
It was the same smile my mother held on her face on rare occasions as her body lay paralyzed in that hospital bed, every orifice plugged into by heartless tubes, surrounded by beeping monitors under garish white fluorescent lights.
In those moments, I wondered what she was smiling about. What happiness had she found amidst the suffering? Surely they were her own thoughts, since nothing in her physical environment had changed. Or perhaps it was a wave of benevolent energy, passing through the hospital ward, blessing fortunate souls in its path with respite from the universal maw.
It’s amazing that five and a half years later, I’m still uncovering memories of my mother’s passing and processing those emotions.
Career update
“Were you even at McKinsey?” she taunted me, and I laughed. But what she said next made me realize she was actually unhappy with me. Pissed, was the word she used. Pissed about my Powerpoint slides, where I colored a bar chart in blue and orange instead of our brand guidelines red and gray.
I found our whole conversation to be somewhat farcical. I let the corners of my lips curl upwards bemusedly as she continued: “We expect more of you, you know. You carry all these brand names.”
I understood her point. I did feel some shame. The boss of the office, deeply trained by his stint at Bain, likes his slides perfectly formatted and colored. I come from that world, so I get it - I really do. I understand the value of professionalism.
But this incident made me think. What’s important to me in my career? I like good design. I value aesthetics. Nothing makes me happier than the perfect Powerpoint slide. But I want to create beautiful slides for myself, not for someone else. Or if I’m going to grovel, at least get paid well doing so.
Every time I’m in the office at my internship and we talk about Indonesia, which is often, I get excited about the opportunities there again. I loved my time living and working in Indonesia. I worked with my hands, literally. I got down and dirty in the pasars, the wet markets. I felt like I was doing real business with real people. And being in Singapore has made me realize that I know a lot, lot more about Indonesia than people who have never lived there.
But Jakarta… man… I don’t feel excited in my body to move back there. I loved my time there, and I grew to find my place in the city, but Singapore’s creature comforts are too damn good. I also have many more global friends living in and passing through Singapore, which is important to me.
There’s a lot of energy trying to pull me out of Asia. Everyone around me seems to want to move to Europe.
@camiinthisthang writes on Twitter:
Exactly one year ago I packed my life into suitcases and moved back to Colombia. Essentially started a new life. No friends. Knew literally 1 person from crypto.
Best decision I’ve ever made in my adult life. Being with my people, in my country has healed something in me that I didn’t know needed healing!
People think I’m a high-powered career guy. My CV certainly suggests so. But I’m not sure that’s how I see myself anymore. I want to make money, for sure, but that’s because I want to use that money to meet my nonprofessional needs that have grown unchecked over the past few years when I was learning, learning, learning, and unable to digest, digest, digest.
New professional ideas that entered my brain recently:
Boring job in insurance that pays well
Bring a Mexican business over to Southeast Asia (numerous precedents for this)
“Organizing the unorganized”
Fin
What I’m obsessed with this week:
La Roux - In For The Kill (Skream’s Let’s Get Ravey Remix)
Solomun - The Center Will Not Hold
Jay-Z & Mr. Hudson - Young Forever
Flume
SM, one of the bosses at my internship, is an INSEAD alum. Over lunch, he shared with me a singular piece of advice: have as much fun as possible, and don’t worry about the money. This hit me hard because I look up to SM, and have been guilty of precisely what he warned me against.