Category: Uncategorized

Firstly, I do not hate Christmas. But I need to concisely break my silence about what I have been putting up with over the years.

I am not thrilled about acting thrilled about every gift I receive. I am extremely grateful, but not ecstatic. I am not sure how many more times I can keep faking this metaphorical orgasm. I am not sure if I can feel joy anymore. I understand happiness as an intellectual concept but it touches nothing in my heart. My heart exists as an organ, a pump that persists and insists on distributing oxygenated blood around my body to keep the cells alive. I am tired.

Also, I particularly miss someone at this time of the year. He used to send me (and many others) a card every year. He has now passed on but I still think about him. His name is Kheng Meng.

I promised I would be concise. That is all.

I sparked a mini drama on a chat forum yesterday. Why did I take more than 24 hours to respond to a three word question — how are you?

Offline, I sighed. Why couldn’t they understand the complexities of giving a response to “how are you?”

I took another deep breath before I wrote a reply.

My answer to the question involves three considerations:

• The point in time I am asked.
• Who’s doing the asking.
• The consequences of my reply.

I have an annoying habit of trying to give an honest reply every time I am asked. This often puts me in a conundrum. In extreme cases, I need to sleep on it before I can give a considered response.

But… but most of the time, people don’t care about how well you are truly faring, you say. For these people, it is of course easy to give a smiling, immediate response. They don’t give a shit about me, I don’t give a fuck about them.

Outside of a hi, bye context, my scope of considerations becomes a lot broader. This is where the person asking the question may want to confer with their head and heart. Silence and hesitation are loaded with communicative possibilities.

First and foremost, reflect on why that person was unable to utter a simple “I’m fine.”

The body is like an electronic gadget. Its battery is rechargeable, up to a point. There will come a time when energy gets depleted more rapidly than the daily, twice daily, or even more frequent charging. And then the speed of depletion accelerates. You start to think about replacing and disposing of the battery or the gadget. What if the weakening battery is one that powers your body?

It was a difficult time for me. It still is. Initially, I did not know if it was a tired mind trapped in a functioning body, or it was an exhausted body unable to cope with the demands of an unrelenting mind. It began with the latter. I berated myself for being lazy and useless, just to get myself moving. Then fatigue, like a cancer, spread to my brain. I found myself unable to cope with the chores of daily life. I wanted to quit this meta-game called life.

Like my smartphone, I tried to deal with it by functioning in the energy conservation mode. For an introvert, one of the biggest causes of energy haemorrhage is human interaction, especially in a crowd. In the Maslow hierarchy of needs, socialising is not exactly critical for survival. It seemed like the ideal candidate for slaughter in a cost cutting exercise.

I was wrong. In the animal kingdom I operated in, the loner gets singled out by the predators. To survive, I needed to be part of the herd. But I no longer had the energy to try to blend in. As a result, the herd no longer regarded me as one of them.

But I digress. The quick deterioration of your battery does not happen overnight. It takes perhaps, years of continuous heavy usage. How can you prevent it from happening? Some people advocate doing things that energise you every day, some swear by exercise and/or meditation, some encourage drawing boundaries, some advise closely monitoring oneself for early warning signs and carry out self-care accordingly.

The thing about burnout is, I have yet to come across people or stories of people who have fully replenished their store of energy. It seems to be all about making changes to lifestyles and adjusting expectations. To me, it is not recovery if you can no longer live at the pace of life you used to, and can no longer function with the full mental acuity for the duration you used to have.

This brings me back to the point that your energy, be it physical or mental, is limited and may even be non-renewable. You only have one body, and one brain. Use your energy store judiciously to avoid burnout, for it is a point of no return.

I have not written for more than a year. Did something happen? Yes. I can’t write about it (yet). But it dominates my consciousness. As a result, my mind can’t think of something else I can write about.

In the opening scene of one of my favourite plays, The Invention of Love by Tom Stoppard, the deceased main character (A E Housman) was asked to be silent by Charon, the boatman sending him to the netherworld. “My life was marked by long silences,” he replied.

So was mine. There were certainly occasions where I should have said something but remained silent. These memories are too painful to dredge up. Perhaps one day I will overcome.

For now, break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.