twenty three

It's the time of the year where everyone is taking stock of 2022. I had a call with some old friends the other day where we did presentations on what we've been up to (mine consisted of the BTS photos I have saved and the ways they represent my state of mind), and Sallie and Mel recently came out with their 2022 Year End Review on their newsletter. These were lovely things to experience and after my pretty limp attempt at recapping 2022 during our call, I thought maybe I should try again.

I'm basing this recap off of some questions by @anime.astrology, a lovely HK-based astrology instagram I've been following lately. Astrology has taken off so much since I started referencing my moon and rising signs in Edinburgh house parties, but I like that accounts like @anime.astrology reinstate a sense of ritual in thinking and sharing our emotional journeys, especially since the pandemic has made the passing of time feel so strange in recent years. Here's my year in review:

Looking back...

Write a list of things, people, and events that you're grateful for.

The four months I spent learning to run at midnight, and then learning to love running. My father's love for Cantopop and how we've been spending time listening to new music on car rides, and then revisiting all of our old favourites. Late night chats with my mother and brother over crisps. Hearing the phrase "you're never alone in a sandwich" on unbearably sad days, wrapped up in a hug with some of my favourite people. Crocheting for friends, and having them wear the things I make. Interviewing some amazing artists and being able to document their thoughts and ambitions at the time being. Singing karaoke loudly with classmates I barely know anymore and feeling connected to them despite conversation being difficult. The steps behind HKMOA where I always get dinner with Sallie. The turtles in Hollywood Road Park. BTS. Finding freedom in divorcing my writing practice from career ambitions, and having that somehow unfold into one of the most prolific years of writing I've had so far. Dancing on a boat fully sober with my colleagues, and being laughed at for choosing ABBA because it is so unbearably UWC. Developing a creating writing retreat for domestic workers in Hong Kong with friends, and learning how to trust and work with people through the process. Grieving together through texts, through calls, and being able to laugh and cry through the sadness. Watching seventeen in a cinema at 11am with Hazel, and hearing CARATs scream 靚仔 every time a member came up on screen. Bringing friends together at a picnic and hearing them chat about everything and nothing. Going to exhibitions and slowly, slowly developing the context needed to understand some of the things I'm seeing. A day trip with an artist where I then interviewed them under a bus shelter in pouring rain.

What shadow aspects of yourself are coming to the surface for integration right now? How can you learn to love and accept them?

My tendency to be melancholic. I have spent a time trying to phase through my melancholia, or to try and forget it, or otherwise trying to outpace my own life so I don't have to face myself in times where I am melancholic. And yet one of the favourite people in my life once described me as a "melancholic prince" in a tarot reading, which made me feel a little uncomfortable at the time. I think the grief I have witnessed in the past year has reshaped my understanding of melancholia lately; has made me understand that melancholia is not the same thing as depression, and that it won't destroy me. Now, I see melancholia as a sign that I need rest, that there are things in life that take more energy out of me than it does for others, and that it is okay to be in the blue as long as I understand it isn't a permanent state.

I said to a friend that my aim for 2023 is to learn how to carry on with things. I think earlier versions of myself saw life in starts and stops: I would have a period of rushing ahead with things, seeing everyone and doing everything, and then a period of utter stoppage in which I truly just hid in my room and didn't see people for weeks, months. I have found my melancholia here to be helpful in identifying when I am nearing the limit of my own energy and abilities, a signal that I need to slow down in order to continue to move.  It's like what they say about running – run slow to run fast. I'm trying to accept these melancholic tendencies by treating them as a sign that something is off, whether that's in the things I am doing, or the speed and volume at which I'm doing them. 

What events brought you energy, and what events depleted your energy?

Events that have brought me energy: Midnight running. Unexpected encounters with people which have flourished into friendships. Spending times on calls with friends, talking about easy and hard things all at once. Working with others on creative projects, and knowing a future exists in these projects. Finding things to be hopeful about with other people. Unexpected kindness from strangers, friends, family. Getting to know my mother and father and brother and all my relatives in familiar ways, but with a new light. Using "slay" in daily conversation. Being a fan. Accepting that feeling takes time, and allowing myself the space to feel. Teaching, and the moment when a student teaches themselves the skills I am trying to instill in them.

Events that have depleted my energy: The pandemic and the capitalism's relentless drive to forget the present precarity of our health and the health of those around me. Social encounters with no points of connection. Being misconstrued. Damp weather. My sluggish digestion. Being expected to put work above everything else. Failed attempts at communication. Having to jump between many tasks at once.  

What are you willing to leave behind?

Sleep deprivation as a personality trait. I'm not great at managing my sleep; partially because I have always been a night owl, partially because of circumstances outside of my control, and sometimes because I want to push through to get something done or because I am too distracted by doom-scrolling on my phone at night. This year marked the resurgence of some of my worst sleep habits, but already at 23 I'm feeling the effects of it much more than when I was 14, or 17, or 19. My sleeping has recently evened out to something resembling what a normal adult needs, but I still find myself tired a lot, and I think it's my body holding onto sleep as much as possible because I am afraid that I will lose it again. Where possible, I want to cultivate healthier sleeping habits because everything just works so much better when I rest well. This last year I joked that I am a chronically sleep deprived person, and I'd like instead to become someone who occasionally experiences sleep deprivation instead.

There are other things I'd like to leave behind, but this is the one thing I'm truly ready (truly, truly) to let go of.

And then, say hello to 2023!

How can I bring more compassion and patience to myself?

I'd like to build more time to read, exercise, and be outdoors. These were the things that I really did not do in 2022, and I think not doing these things really took a hit on my quality of life and health. Some weeks I really felt like I was a human list of things to do, which was awful to my sense of compassion and patience. Achieving this means scheduling them into my life in a way which makes them necessities, and I think it will help to do these activities with or in relation to loved ones as much as possible.

Continuing to actively track time, the things that I have done, and things I need to do. One of the things I insist all of my students do is to try and plan: their essays, but also their time. I tell them that this is a way of managing chaos, because I feel the most frazzled when I have a sense that there are many things I need to do but don't write them down. When I do write things down I so often feel so much better, and I just need to remind myself that this, too, is a necessary part of the way I tick.

Going back to the 2022 list, write down a few things you can do to bring more events that bring you more energy.

Setting intentions in the mornings. Building free time into my days. Getting off twitter in the mornings and nights. Planning planning planning, but for short term things and not the vague life-planning I also like to do at 3am which just consists of despairing over the future. Continuing to be curious about people, and asking thoughtful questions as well as silly ones. Sharing the things I feel passionate and excited about, in the knowledge that they are probably things others would be interested and excited about instead. Flexibility, both in the literal sense and in my attitude towards what is possible. Hosting cosy get-togethers with friends and family. Knowing that the best futures with people are ones that emerge from a combination of intention and happenstance, and letting that guide me. Rest above all, for the sake of rest. 

Write down how you can eliminate people/events that suck out your time and energy.

Going into social events imagining what I want to get out of them, and having an exit plan when things go south. Taking a moment to pause when people make claims about what I am, and deciding whether that has to do with me, or with themselves. Trying not to doom-scroll on my phone so much. Staying off LinkedIn. Not worrying so much about having control over all situations, and telling people that is the case. Asking for help, or for guidance, or for thoughts from the people I trust when I'm unsure or confused about something or someone.

Leaving myself Alice Sparkly Kat's reading for Leos this year as well, which felt incredibly apt as I read it halfway through writing this post:

Most of the time, it is better to build slowly than to not build at all. I think that, and this is my opinion, that you tend to credit your will with far too much. Sometimes, rigidity in decision making is not overcome by attaching a life philosophy to the process. Sometimes, Leos tend to focus a lot on who is right for them and who is not.

Maybe there is no answer. What would happen if there wasn't one? What would happen to your defenses? Your openness?

Life is just lived with whomever you stumble upon. Sometimes you bond with someone and sometimes you do not. Sometimes you hurt someone and sometimes someone hurts you. Sometimes you have to burn a bridge. Sometimes you have to build one, as painful as that might be.

The only thing that I am certain of is that the chances of you developing close and resilient attachments increases when you actually choose your relationships. There is no morality with relationships, you see. There are no right types or wrong types. There is only the certainty of your choice. If you want stability, then go move slowly. If you go too fast, then you are not building at all.

Questions to ask yourself in 2023:
What makes you stay?
What makes you choose something when you’re not sure of its rightness?
What if life is an accident?

kim namjoon: vulnerable king

I am not one much for lyric tattoos, but as soon as Namjoon said I wanna be a human before I make some art in Indigo, I felt like I really needed that on ink somewhere. 

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The tagline of Kim Namjoon’s Indigo is that it is the last archive of his twenties.

Namjoon says that calling it an archive partially explains why the album holds such a range of genres and collaborations – city pop, boom bap, RnB, folk, amongst others – while being understood as a cohesive piece. But he also he thinks of his creative work as an act of continuous self-documentation, comparing his use of colour in album titles (mono. and Indigo) to the way that Adele titles each of her albums after her age at the time. This means that we are asked to see these songs as confessional; that we can see this album as representational of Namjoon in some shape or form.

There is a wealth of evidence for evidence for Namjoon’s interest in self-representation and self-documentation. The most obvious example is the fact that he spearheaded a BTS comeback trilogy dedicated to Jungian psychology, which no idol company would ever imagine to be a commercially viable project. Namjoon’s who the hell am I? in Persona is so fucking memorable, so emphatically performed, that you know he was eaten up by this question and just had to make music about it.

But the interest in the archive? That feels newer. I first began to associate Namjoon with archives when the BTS boys got their independent, publicly available Instagrams, and Namjoon named himself @rkive. Just an archive, his bio said, implying something more curated than Jin’s habit of posting whatever the feels like anytime ever, yet not quite curated as whatever Hoseok had going on, which involved scanned polaroids and an insistence on posting photos in sets of three that made feel like we were back in the 2010s. It also happens that he calls his studio the Rkive.

When you characterise your own work and as an archive, it suggests that you understand that your work has historical significance, that it will be perceived again in the future under widely different contexts. I imagine that it became necessary for Namjoon to understand all his content as forming an archive, and also allows him to firmly place certain things in the past. Perhaps that also allows him to share his life without burning under the scrutinising gaze of millions on millions of people.

Lately, Namjoon’s been speaking publicly about his interest in art. He says that he enjoys being a fan of art, likes how when he looks at a work he can feel the legacies of those that came before him, likes how they created something so specific to their circumstances and yet is capable of transforming him and others because of the universal feelings they produce. It's interesting, then, that Namjoon calls his latest body of work an archive, and in doing so readily attaches it to a specific moment in time over an appeal to universality. I would like to hear what he has to say about the relationship between archiving and ideas of creating art which endures.

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I've been having conversations with people about creative work over the past few months, namely the way that art seems to demand vulnerability, and whether sometimes the demands on vulnerability are too much for artists to bear, whether they shouldn't be asked to give so much of themselves. I think this came about after seeing really young writers in the indie-lit scene give up incredible amounts of information about themselves in their work, and noticing that it was often the writings that said the most about their pain that got published. Would you choose to publish this in an industry that demanded less of your pain, I wondered. 

The conversations are ongoing and inconclusive, but what they have brought to attention are the extreme lengths I go to avoid being vulnerable in my public work. I write almost exclusively through personas. I take the things I care about and displace it into another situation, so the essence of it is there but there appears to be no relationship with my own life. As a student of literature I know that this is futile, because often the most revealing details about someone's writing are the elements which are unconscious. Knowing this fact will not change anything about my writing habits in the near future.

When Namjoon says I wanna be a human before I make some art, it is less that he has given me a new piece of wisdom to live be, and more that he has taken something I viscerally feel and put words to it. 

I did not have much of a writing habit until a few years ago, because I spent many years believing that I needed to do some more living before I had anything worth writing about. Part of me thinks that belief was a waste of time. The more empathetic part of myself appreciates that I gave myself time to exist, and to learn to discern what I wanted to share before learning to write. Now I will be forever playing catch-up, but this is okay with me, given that I am always also playing catch-up with my own emotions. My daily experience of existing has a lot more to do with the relationships I have, anyways. Writing is be a kind of attentiveness, but it is important to me that I pick carefully the things I allow others' attention to be drawn to in my own work.

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It's been two weeks since Indigo came out and it has consumed my life. I listen to it on the way to work. I listen to it in the shower. I listen to it while writing. I tried to listen to it while I was at work, until I realised it was making me an emotional mess and then had to stop. I'm listening to it again, and again, and again, and I feel close to where Namjoon was when he made this album, which really means that I am reflecting on where I am at the moment and where I have been emotionally these last few years, because this is an album about feeling lost and unsure about what you're doing in life but trying to make something out of it regardless.

I'm fucking lonely, Namjoon says, and I think about how my last few years have been marked by such radical transformations there was a point I felt unrecognisable, even to myself. If I can just find a reason/To keep this endless chasing, he says, and I'm confronted by the fact that I have been busy, by all means, but that it is often unclear why I am doing all manner of things without quite knowing what it is I'm hoping to achieve.

Enjoying music has a lot to do with timing. There's so much good music out there that it is hard to explain why I simply must listen to Indigo on repeat to those who aren't in the same headspace. I've had friends who can't get into the melodrama of the album. Others who think it's technically good, but have been able to move on after a few listens. Even in the last two weeks my listening habits have changed: at first it was the deep disappointment of lost love in Change pt. 2 that got to me, and now I can't listen to Wild Flower without having to tamp down a deep wave of feelings that spreads through me.

So what about Indigo gets me now? I'm sure my attachment is contextual. It feels like an explanation for why Namjoon literally cried in front of the cameras while gently breaking the news of BTS's pivot to solo work in this year's festa, which is BTS's annual catchup video where the members discuss what they've been up to and where they are at emotional. But it also feels cathartic, having someone share their own feelings of uncertainty and unsettledness as they move through adulthood, as they move through the clusterfuck of life and what these few years have been. 

There was a time when the music I was interested in was almost intellectual, a matter of sampling what the possible spectrum of sounds could be and what range of emotions could possibly be communicated. Now I want to be seen by the music I hear. Namjoon's music is really good at making me feel that if we were to sit down and have a conversation together, he could understand where I've been at.

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Still, it would be an oversimplification to say that Indigo is very good because Namjoon is vulnerable in it.  Vulnerability is nonetheless expressed through style, and there are many different ways to grant truth to someone.

Let me explain what I mean via a conflict I had with an artist this summer in Hong Kong. I was visiting a gallery with a few friends when we stumbled across an artist who was working on a durational piece, a massive work on this never-ending scroll of paper where he was very slowly drawing minute lines across in the shapes of waves, while listening to the stories of visitors like myself who happened to drop by. 

We sat down and got to chatting, and after a while, I asked him what he was looking for in this process of making this work. Truth, he said. And what if someone isn't ready to offer you their truth? I asked. 

He seemed deeply disturbed by this question, and the energy in the room quickly shifted to something combative. I think he took my question to mean that the things that I had said were untruthful. Actually, I wanted to hear what his stakes were in the project, because I was trying to figure out what kinds of truths I could offer him. Call it an unfortunate hangover from studying philosophy, but I find the idea of truth in-itself deeply unhelpful. Truth is just a value that you can assign a statement; the potency of a truth comes from the premises from which it arises, and that means the person asking for truth has to offer something first.

To be fair, I phrased my question poorly. What I meant was what if someone wasn't ready to offer you the truth in the way you wanted them to? I was thinking about how since 2020, talking to my friends about what has happened to Hong Kong and their relationship to the city is rarely expressed in direct terms. For me, that is not being untruthful. That is being truthful in ways you can afford, and finding paths to vulnerability in spite of the linguistic and lived barriers we encounter. I got the sense that he was interested in something similar, but that he was hoping that there was some core grain of truth he could arrive at if only he worked on the project long enough.

The artist didn't reveal any of his thoughts to me, though, and so I was left cold by his project, and he was left cold by our misunderstanding. 

What this has to do with Indigo: Namjoon understands the kinds of truths he needs to offer. He's confessional, yes, but you get the contours of his experience rather than literal descriptions of what he has been through, and frankly that is for the best. What he does offer is an exploration of what it means to try to live well and to do your best, with the understanding that these things are neither intuitive nor easy. The vulnerability he offers is one which understands that trying to live well is a matter of often failing to live up to expectations of yourself, of being disgruntled by life despite knowing we should be grateful and not to let it simply pass us by. The fact that I can articulate these ideas clearly tells me that he has done well in telling me his truth, and in turn allows me to be candid with myself and others about how I, too, am trying to live well.

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I was, and remain, intimidated by the fact that BTS have such a hold on me. When I think about it abstractly I understand how I got here; that this intense and extremely attractive found family would be exactly what I needed to latch onto in 2020. And I am no stranger to obsession, having existing in and out of fandoms for as long as I have been able to use the internet. Fandom has always been more of an idle habit for me, a way of escaping reality. What startles me is how much I genuinely care about this group, how much I buy into identifying with its members despite the constant reminders that the versions of them I get are being carefully marketed to me.

No one is better at reminding me of this split vision than Namjoon. No one is better at making me identify with them than Namjoon.  This is because he is clumsy but also likes reading and art, and I am also clumsy and theoretically like reading and art. Perhaps this is why I am most intimidated by him, out of all the members.

Although it is part of the mechanism of idol groups to make you identify with one member over another, I think being the one a fan feels most similar to is pretty tough going in terms of parasocial relationships. Identifying with Namjoon makes me hyperconscious of the ways in which he is flawed, like his penchant to be a bit petty, to say too much when he is not careful, his tendencies towards jealousy despite his attempts to temper this part of himself. He is perfect, of course, but I find his shame difficult to witness because it reminds me of my own shame. I find myself thinking that I can read his facial expressions in the same way I can read the expressions of the ones I love most, and then embarrassed by this presumption of familiarity. 

The best and worst part is that Namjoon is smart enough to know all this is happening, and both bothered and motivated by it. Namjoon knows enough about the strange reflective quality of the idol-fan relationship to tell a stadium of his fans to please use me, please use BTS to love yourself. Because you taught me how to love myself.

This is part of what intimidates me about Namjoon, these feelings of emotional proximity coupled with the sharp clarity about how these feelings are manufactured, and yet again the knowledge that these feelings are nonetheless real. The desire to make something out of that connection, however fragmented and uncomfortable that tether can be.

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I asked the poet Yanyi about vulnerability lately, and whether it was possible to write and be vulnerable while protecting yourself and the ones you love. This is what he had to say about the matter:

Vulnerability must be chosen from within, not pressured from without. Also, not all vulnerability makes great art. It can often be performative rather than profound. In my experience, the majority of one's healing need not occur in public. In fact, privacy makes space for complications, cliches, and ugly truths—the real stuff of vulnerability that doesn't do well in public forums. 

My litmus test: is it more empowering for me to say this in public or private? If the former, then it's more likely I still have work to do on my own, work that shouldn't be available yet to anyone else. It's only after you've done that internal work that public vulnerability—which requires strength and consideration as well as honesty—is possible. 

There is so much I want to create, and yet I know that if I ever want to share these creations there is so much internal work to be done.

Indigo makes me feel like it is possible to want my work to be seen by others in the future. It reminds me that making work visible isn't just about subjecting myself to the horrific gaze of the Other, but also a matter of bridging a connection to others in ways that would otherwise be impossible, which is what really moves me about art.