Almost exactly 10 years ago, I was at the foot of the altar in the Aldersgate Methodist Church sanctuary after a combined Methodist schools camp sermon. I stayed there for a good hour or two, crying my guts out. I was, in Christian-speak, touched by the Holy Spirit.
It was the end of my traumatic four years in Fairfield and I was feeling helpless and useless knowing I screwed up my O levels. I did not even know what made me sign up for the camp after living most of the 1998 as an agnostic, but I guess I realized there is a longing deep down inside that only God can fill.
Fast forward to 2008. I realized that the whole cycle of things, which saw its first "run" come to a close 10 years ago today, has repeated itself many times - especially since I started college in 2004. The whole thing about starting the year being "cleansed" and determined, and then descending into spiritual and moral hell towards the end of the year. And it's always about the same issue.
Along the way, I have "wasted" so much time moping about in self-pity. Watching and re-watching films produced in the last 4-5 years in my spare time here, I wondered what I have done in my last time as an undergraduate. I am gripped by regret and fear of the years of my lost youth. What have I done other than everything I did that eventually got me to where I am now?
It's all a blur, as I grapple with my mortality and age. I thought I knew what I wanted before, but after over four months in New York City, I realized perhaps, I never knew after all. Or perhaps I only knew I wanted to get out of the country and come to Columbia, but I didn't know what I wanted after that.
Today in church, the pastor talked about life in the city, about how it has a certain way of forcing you to conform to its frenetic pace and rhythm. And how it eventually forces you out of your own groove. We find ourselves, he said, often not living up to the dreams of our youth. We had unwittingly left them on the table and gone about doing what we thought we needed to be doing.
Which means I have never resolved that issue and trying for the last 10 years has meant that I have allowed myself to live in a circular logic that repeats itself with an increasing intensity with each successive cycle. Instead of following what my head told me, not to beat myself up too much about this knot, because it will untie itself soon enough, I chose to take matters into my own hands. I want this knot untied, and I want it untied NOW.
And while I wallowed in self-pity, the world passed me by in the mean time. Relationships with people, fun things I should have gone out there and done like the guitar and singing, travelling for fun, doing more work with my love for films...you get the idea, living life to the fullest, not letting things encumber me too much, worrying about the things I can do something about, and not fret about the things that are beyond me.
Instead, I experienced a meltdown in my freshman year as a result of pushing hard in church ministry, seeing each "promotion" as a vindication of my spirituality. I used my faith to mask the problems I actually needed to face heads on. At the same time, I was ranting and ranting on about how repressed Singapore was and how much I needed to get out of the country as soon as possible. It is amazing how much it drove me to do the things I did. People saw that as my ambition, my guts, my drive and my quest and pursuit for the things I want in life.
Five months into New York City, I realized the basis of my motivation is flawed. Just like how my pursuit of athletics when I was in secondary school, when I wanted to prove a point to everybody by chasing the person in front of me down in a cross-country race. I was winning trophies in school not because I am a good runner, but because I was driven by a insatiable quest to be right and with it, acceptance. This was made abundantly clear when I moved on to high school and lost all desire to run competitively.
But it never went away. I guess I just placed my competitive streak in other areas of my life after that. It was getting to college in high school, getting to Officer Cadet School when I was in army, and getting the second-upper class honors that I was convinced was the required minimum for Columbia to consider my application. Not to mention a chronic focus on getting relevant professional experience. It all came to a grinding halt in my senior/honors year, when I was totally out of sorts and almost lost my class of honors.
After all of that, maybe it's not surprising that I am suffering from a motivational crisis right now. To know what I want out of my professional life, I need to know why I am doing all these things for - and I know of none at this point. There's even a fear deep down within me that after everything I have done and accomplished, that journalism is not what I would end up doing, especially after the money that has been spent.
Just like every other time in the last 10 years, I am finding myself crawling back to His feet once again. Gerry sms-ed me yesterday, telling me that God loves me. It felt so strange hearing that again after such a long time. I told him if this were Singapore, we would be due another meet-up session. There has got to be a reason why I dreamt I was back in Singapore the other day, at my favorite wantan noodle stall at my local hawker centre.
Maybe after 10 years, I am starting to realize that knots in life do not exist in isolation. They exist in exquisite prisms and combinations, that perhaps to untie a knot, we need to simultaneously work on untying other knots before the one offending knot that we are fixated on, can be unknotted for good, if at all. But even if it doesn't ever get unknotted, at least by working on other knots, the knot in question wouldn't be as tightly bounded up.
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