In the last month I’ve moved more into the world of counselling, both through preparations to study at UBC — and I’ll post more about some of the challenges I’ve faced later — and through my growing involvement in Peer Counselling at West End Senior’s Network. I’ve also had to make a choice about writing, and what forms of writing matter to me in my life. Come September, I won’t have the space in my life I have now. What should I keep, and what should I give up?
Academic research still seems central to what I do, and the way I am in the world. I’m researching and writing something now about stories of mental health and difference in Singapore, and especially people who have chosen to tell complicated stories without easy resolutions, such as Chan Lishan’s A Philosopher’s Madness and Danielle Lim’s The Sound of Sch. I can see my way forward with this, eventually, in bringing many of the things I will learn in the next few years together with what I already know. And research keeps you honest, if you work hard on it — it makes you actively go out and learn new things. So I won’t give this kind of writing up.
But there’s also form of writing that I’ve done over the years, creative writing, mostly short stories. After I published Heaven Has Eyes in 2016 I thought for a time that I’d develop this aspect of my life further. There’s something deeply satisfying about the process of writing stories, drawing on affect as well as rationality, something very affirmative and meditative about the process of flow that is also self-discovery. I’ve still been writing in the last two years – two stories, a non-fiction piece, and many exploratory efforts at a novel. But I’ve also felt there’s something missing: perhaps a sense of audience, or perhaps a suspicion about processes of self-making increasingly associated with writing, prizes, competitions, festivals, in which the construction of a writer’s persona seems more important than reading. I’ve written about this before, and I won’t say too much more about it here.
Thinking more about this, I realise that I’ve been driven by a notion of productivity, the idea that all writing should be published, and that its primary worth is in its impact it makes in the world, on a world of readers. This isn’t necessarily wrong: in Canada, I do feel a frustration about not being able to act in the world through writing, either here, or in Singapore, to attempt to enter public conversations and contribute to change. But there are three types of writing that I have been doing over the past year that are not for publication, and not to be shared, and yet which have been very useful for me and others.
The first of these is journalling. Last year I resolved to write a thousand words every day in a journal. Predictably, I didn’t manage it, but I did write over a hundred small pieces in the year as part of a process of reflection on my place in the world and the direction I’m aging in. This year, I’ve found the habit has become ingrained enough for me to return to this kind of writing as a kind of personal and social exploration, a shaping of experiences that enables reflection, a couple of times a week.
A second form of writing that I’ve been part of has been writing letters. I began this with a friend in Singapore: we made a commitment to write to each other every couple of weeks or so, sending a word document via WhatsApp, and then taking our time to reply. I’m away from facebook and I still do some WhatsApp messaging. But I’ve also found the experience of letter writing is now filtering into longer emails to friends, which I compose carefully, and to which friends wait before responding. There’s a slowing down here, a process of communication that is reflective, and that doesn’t involve an instant response.
Finally, there is counselling. As a client, I rework my own stories of my life. As a counsellor, I’m more like a sympathetic editor. My client tells me about their life. I listen, paraphrase so that I am sure that I have understood, wait for a correction if necessary. At times we search for connections: I aid this by returning to parts of the story that might seem disconnected. When were you most happy? What was the source of this happiness? What futures can we imagine? This isn’t my story, but I can help the client tell it. And it’s a form of writing bound by confidentiality, only possible because it is ephemeral, fully confidential, and will never be shared with an audience.
None of three forms of writing is productive in the sense that I’d internalized in an academic career increasingly marked by performance metrics and citation counts. Nor are they productive in terms of the need to perform a persona for an audience that increasingly marks creative writing. And yet I do treasure them. I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t say that somewhere there is the hope that I will begin to write for a larger audience again. But if I do, it will be because this fallow period has been productive, has given me a new way of working in the world. And if I don’t, it will be because I’ve discovered something else, another way of being in the world and acting for social change.