In 2022 I want to write towards a more uncomfortable place.

Back in my religious days, I used to be entranced by the concept of holiness: this idea of a white, scarring heat holding absolute sway. I'm no longer religious, but I want to move towards that same feeling as I write this year. Getting there involves a lot of discomfort for me - letting the words push me into a place beyond my own mind, so that a bright, bitter wind can blow right through me and tell me the whole truth about myself.  It's scary but important to go there - I feel - in writing this memoir. If I can tap into that feeling often enough, I'll have a finished manuscript.

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Feeling a bit curt overall because of the work that I'm in the midst of doing. I've reached the abyss stage of the hero's journey, in this memoir that I'm working on... and reliving this portion of my own life in writing has been such a massive drain on my energy. Anyway, I mostly started this post to share that I read an incredible story on Catapult today, which moved me beyond words. I literally had to lie down after reading it so that my thoughts could reboot.  It's about genius and creation and friendship and the devil... also about the enormous lengths that some people have to travel, in order to assert themselves in the world. I felt it in my bones (and now want to read everything else that this author has written).

I moved back to London yesterday, after almost two years away. It's cold beyond belief here, and gets dark at an astonishingly early hour. I'm writing this while jetlagging and waiting for the melatonin to kick in.

It feels surreal to be back in this city again, especially because so much has happened to, and within, me since I was last in this particular physical space. Yesterday, someone at work asked me for three words that I would use to describe my 2021, and I gave them "transformational", "expressive" and "authentic". I feel more like myself than I've ever felt before. And perhaps part of the challenge is keeping that feeling close to me, even when I have a chance to scratch it all out and reinvent my personality again - like I did very the first time I moved to the UK, from Singapore, ten years ago. This time, I packed some of my old concert pianist scores and written criticism from childhood with me, to bring back to our flat. It feels important to have the physical proof of who I once was here with me now - just in case I'm tempted to forget about the past again. I want to hold on.

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Book-writing is going slowly at the moment! I've hit a section of the narrative that is difficult for me - that involves rereading some essays that reveal parts of my self I wish didn't exist, and being honest about them. At a lecture I attended some time ago, the speaker, Minal Hajratwala, talked about how finishing a book involves this interior process of "becoming the person who I need to become, in order to finish the book I need to write". That's exactly what it feels like for me. When I feel discouraged about the speed at which I'm progressing, I try to remember that it's not only about getting words down on paper; it's also about becoming the type of person who would be capable of writing these words in the first place, and situating herself comfortably within their truth.

Some days, I write three lines of dialogue and then I'm out for the day. So I do more paid projects; I go for walks; I lie around on the couch watching the sky, and letting my subconscious thoughts slowly rise to the level of utterance. I want to give myself the permission to be this way, even though it can make me feel like less of a success than I'd like to be.

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Last week, the editor of a magazine asked me how my name ought to appear in its pages. They noticed that I styled my name three different ways in the content pages, the proof, and the notes. So I've decided that from now on, when I publish, I want to move my first name around - like "Shze-Hui Tjoa" - to avoid confusion for readers in other countries. Two years ago, something like this would have bothered me immensely - it would probably have made me rant on about politics and power. But I feel that as I gain more of a sense of self with the writing, little things like this have started to bother me much less. I know who I am, because my identity is there in my story, and alive in my body. What I want, these days, is to make it easy for other people to perceive me - even if that gaze can only come through a thin veil of fantasy or compromise.

My new essay about being a teenager and running away to Israel, and making new friends and eventually losing my religion, is out now at Southeast Review! You can find it by following the link here, or in the "Work" section of this website. I love this essay deeply, and have waited a long time for it to come into the world... I'm so happy that it's finally ready!

I spent yesterday reading the new issue, and it's full of brilliant pieces. One of my other favourites is this amazing piece by Toni Mirosevich about competitive ladies showing off new fur coats at church (which lol, opened up a whole drawer of squashed memories in my mind). Grateful to be keeping this company, and really recommend the whole issue if you're looking for a good lit mag to pass the time with.

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The other thing I want to do with today's blog post is share a resource that has been helping me.

I've come to realise that overall, there are a ton of books and classes out there on how to skill-up your actual sentences, as a writer. There are also countless resources that help you to create space and discipline in your life, to maintain a regular practice (e.g. writing groups).

But I've not found many resources that pertain to the part of the writing life I struggle with most: the inner feelings of safety, confidence, and security that matter alongside these other things, and in fact, form a necessary precondition for them to flourish. ​I've heard some people refer to this part of the creative life, a bit cheesily, as "Sanctuary"... at any rate, it seems to be something that's more difficult to talk about candidly, because it's so intensely personal and requires many years of sustained emotional (as opposed to intellectual) effort to build up.

So periodically, on this blog, I would like to share some resources that have been helping me in this area of creative life! Today's piece is this conversation on self-doubt between the writers Sarah Painter and Joanna Penn, which I came across on Youtube some weeks ago.

I really empathise with what Sarah Painter describes here - about how self-doubt is a feeling that comes from within and, in its essence, cannot ever be quelled by any form of outside achievement. She talks here about how the bar will keep rising, no matter how much glory you achieve - unless you turn inwards, and fight that feeling of "I'm not good enough" from within you. I laughed out loud when she described how she told herself that she would finally qualify as a "real writer" once she got an agent... and then once she got a book deal... and then once her book was on the front table at Waterstones... and so on and so forth, chasing the ever-receding horizon line into madness. She talks about the many tricks that she's learned since then, to overcome that horrible feeling of "I'm not good enough"- and the whole conversation is really lively, vulnerable, and relatable. I enjoyed it, and I hope that you might too.

One of the reasons why I made this blog is because I'm trying to learn to sit with the discomfort of saying: I'm in the middle of something. I don't know how it ends. I don't have a smooth, finished story about my journey to give you.

​But I want to be present anyway. I want to talk to you.

One of the cardinal rules of memoir-writing is "give it time". I was in a class recently with Natalie Lima - who wrote this essay, one of my favourites of the last few years. And she was talking about how it would have been impossible to write this essay a few years - or even a few months - before she did. When you're standing too close to something, she said, it's hard to see the shape of the story that it ought to take.

She's totally right, of course. But I wonder, from my own experiences, if there isn't also a flip side to this rule. One about what happens when you give life too much space - when you're always waiting and waiting for that perfect accomplishment or anecdote, that can tie your efforts up in a neat little bow, and make them seem meaningful to other people. When you're always waiting for the story to end before opening your mouth, so that you can guard against the vulnerability of potential embarrassment.

Maybe something gets lost too, in a life lived that way. When you're living "a life by publishable essay", so to speak. I don't know why other people write blogs - but increasingly, I'm realising that I made this one to outrun (and outwrite) this particular tendency in myself. I don't want to be that person who waits until the big book deal, to write a major precis of every success-oriented step they took over the past five years. That kind of writing is so, so important, obviously, and really beneficial for the writing community - I'm grateful that it exists! But it's not what I came here to do.

I came here to be messy. And a person who's trying - and potentially, failing - in a semi-public space. It's a different kind of emotional muscle - and not one that I have much experience flexing. I hope that it brings other people (and most importantly, myself) something, to see me use it like this.

I've just received the galleys for my new essay at Southeast Review! This piece is one that's close to my heart. It's about the time when I came back home on the last day of my A-levels, and used a bunch of money that I'd secretly been saving to buy a plane ticket to Israel... to live in a convent with some nuns that I'd met on the internet. Teenaged me, as you can tell, was going through A LOT. I'm glad that she didn't fall apart, while ping-ponging through her life. And that she managed to pull this one off.

The rest of my feelings about my time in Israel reside in this essay. I'll put up a link to it, whenever the issue drops... the Southeast Review is an amazing publication and, honestly, one of my favourite literary journals ever. I'm happy that I'm going to be in it! If you're curious, you can read their last issue - with pieces by Victoria Chang, Taylor Byas, Brandon Taylor - here... I personally think it's wonderful.

The last few weeks have been mad, exhausting writing weeks for me. So I'm walking through life a little more dishevelled and unfocused than usual, with that supercharged feeling of something more interesting happening in another room, just out of sight. Right now, it feels like all my creative energy and focus is going into one place - i.e. into my memoir, and into regenerating the thought processes/emotions that powered me through its constitutive experiences. This is kind of a new feeling for me - and I don't want to scare it away by trying to over-explain its mechanics. Let's just see where it leads.

I've recently become a creative non-fiction & fiction reader for Exposition Review, a journal based out of LA. We had our first reading meeting for the upcoming issue, Flux, last week - and I loved it. We sat quietly on Zoom and read through the slush pile together. And then we talked about our favourite books. I feel lucky to be a part of this team. 

There was a time (not too long ago) when seeing other people's creative work made me feel fearful and anxious. But nowadays, it mostly fills me with joy. I suspect that this change has something to do with me realising, deep down inside, what kind of art I want to make, and why. Knowing who I am - and feeling secure in the shape of the work that will, naturally, result from my own life experiences and personality - means that I don't have to feel threatened by other people's expressiveness anymore. Nowadays, I feel energised when I can witness the things that other people are writing, drawing, building, and making. And for the first time in my life, I've also started seeking out friends & groups who can give me this feeling - of power and connection. I'm trying to work around my pride, and ask people who I admire out for coffee. I ask, What are you making? and genuinely want to know the answer. I try to find out if there are things that I can learn from their journeys, and their relationships with creativity. I've also (and this is far harder for me, for personal reasons) started saying no when I can sense that the dynamic of a relationship is twisted in some way, and actively inhibits my access to the thing I want most - i.e. to receive what I need and want for my own life and practice, not only provide implicit psychological service to others.

It took me a lot to get here! And it feels good to be in this space - as both a writer and, more generally, as a human being who feels empowered enough to choose their own community.

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Beyond all that - if you write at all, then I encourage you: consider submitting to Exposition Review! I applied to be a reader for them because I read this essay ('How to Survive a Genocide', by Lori Yeghiayan Friedman) from one of their previous issues, and felt an immediate pull. The work that comes into this journal gets treated with so much respect and care - and I feel that it shows. I'm excited to be helping to put the new issue together.

... is an extremely important part of my creative process. A long time ago - before the defining events of my childhood transpired - music was my truest, and best-loved, medium of expression. And even though I have a tenuous relationship with it today, I still often turn to it in my most vulnerable moments - using it to process sub- or unconscious thoughts, which might feel too strange or complex or fleeting for language.

Recently, I've been listening to this song by Samantha Crain on loop, while writing. Or, to be more precise: I've been watching a video recording that I took of myself, singing and playing this song on the guitar. Watching this video, over and over again, is slowly helping me to feel something new: a desire to look for beauty, and not potential for correction, at the forefront of my past creative actions. It's helping me to feel strengthened for the task that lies ahead - of re-looking at old work (and the old selves who produced it) again, without my inner voice of self-criticism firing up.

I could say more about this, but I don't feel like it. Here are the lyrics for the song instead - the song is in Choctaw, so these lyrics are a translation:

When we remain, we will not be like the beautiful bones of a forgotten city. When we remain, we will be the flowers and the trees and the vines that overcome the forgotten city. We have woven ourselves into the cloth of the earth. We have mixed our breath into the expanding sky.

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When I was a teenager and not playing competitive piano anymore, I spent almost all my waking hours either:

a) Running around with a smile on my face, desperately trying to please everyone and preserve my own psyche in the process.

or

b) Crying in my bedroom alone while reading many, many poems about sex and death.

I discovered the poet Alison Townsend while doing b). A poetry Livejournal site that I followed would periodically reblog her work - probably not realising that halfway across the world, a Singaporean teenager was growing increasingly emotionally dependent on each new update. I read Alison Townsend poems about divorce, and bodies, and depression, and the many things that a person might be capable of living through, in order to later write about. Her writing gave me hope that there was another side to whatever this thing was - this thing that I was still in the midst of, and didn't yet have the words for. I remember looking her up on the internet one time, and learning that she was a professional poet, and thinking: How do you get to be like that? The distance between where I was and where she stood seemed truly staggering - especially for someone like me, who felt pretty much denuded of a story to tell.

Yesterday night, I found out that because of our adjacent surnames, Alison Townsend and I are sitting next to each other on the Notables list for this year's Best American Essays:

​Even though the placement is a total coincidence, this feels like such a huge moment for me! I'm so happy, and teenaged me is totally flipping out. This essay isn't one that I feel a ton of resonance with, at this particular point. In fact, I think I may want to revise it somewhat in the coming months - or at least write around it - because so much has changed in my feelings around race, and my husband Thomas, and myself, over the last two years. But I never thought that I'd someday be on a list of writers with this person - and also, it makes me happy to know that the essay in its current form continues to bring people something valuable. It's been a wild fucking ride to get here, from my days crying and reading Livejournals in my bedroom, to knowing my life story well enough to write about it - just like the artists I admired from afar. I hope that this path will go on. :-) 

"The Story of Body", an essay that I wrote about my ex-life as a child concert pianist, has just been accepted for publication! Because of the speed at which these things operate, it's coming out in the Spring 2022 issue of Colorado Review - which feels way too slow for me, since this is an essay that I can't wait to share.

Because this is a piece that deals with childhood trauma (and the ways that it recurs in adult life), it was really difficult to write. But putting it out in the world has massively changed things for me, both personally, and as a writer. When I shared it with people and observed their responses, I started to gain a clear sense of who was, and wasn't, invested in my journey towards self-recovery. Articulating the parts of myself contained in this essay helped me to pause some relationships that were hurting me, resuscitate once-dead ones, and restructure the dynamics of others that had been around for a long time, but without actually serving me. I got new tattoos; I made new friends (or got to see new sides of my existing ones surface in response to a more forthcoming me); I bought my dream wardrobe; I danced to folk-pop bands from my teenage years while making dinner in my flat. I began to feel that every version of my past self - terrified child me, religious teenaged me, messy young-adult me - were all part of the same person, and all on my side, spurring me on to tell the story of how things came to be. With this essay, my life has slowly begun to look a lot more on the outside like what it has always felt like on the inside - time in its totality rising to the surface of my body, and staying there to make a home.

On the writing front, this essay has made me reconsider what I'm doing with my whole book project. Once "The Story of Body" arrived on the page, I knew with 100% certainty that this was what I wanted to be writing about - this topic, this part of myself. Which made me wonder if the other essays - which I had previously thought might be coming together to make a book - were really nothing more than practice pieces... rote exercises in shoring up history in language. This isn't a question that I've fully resolved yet! I wonder if there isn't some value, after all, in sharing practice pieces with the world - something in it that has to do with being real and vulnerable and human. When I was a child in the piano conservatory, I was often forced to play practice Czerny pieces at public recitals and masterclasses, as a form of intentional humiliation - to show that I wasn't ready for the "real thing" yet. But now that I'm an adult trying for authenticity, and not impressiveness, I'm beginning to think that these metrics of shame don't apply to me in the same way anymore. I don't have to be ashamed of my behind-the-scenes learning, since all that I've ever done, and all that I've ever been, can matter to the journey. Can be worthy of being seen.

So right now, the question of whether there will be a book or not remains an open one for me. I want to see where the work takes me, and what it wants to become... I'm proud of "The Story of Body", and of all the changes that it's brought into my life! And I feel excited for when I'll be able to put a link to it up on my website.