Cambiare

"All change is not growth; all movement is not forward."

- Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

A Life of Fatigue

You know you have not had a good night sleep when you wake up first thing in the morning, only to curse at the fact that you are so freaking tired still, even after having slept for supposedly-healthy 8 hours. Well, I know why that is, I don't stop thinking even when I sleep. If there is anything that I learn from Inception, it is that the mind doesn't stop working even when we are asleep, and that it works extra hard when we dream. Guess what, I dream every single night, not in the Romanticist sense, like literally. Before I fall to sleep, there's always something, some thought, that I latch onto to keep myself company in the quietude of the night, something to keep me entertained as all my senses shut down. Slowly, this thought, or I guess it's more proper to call it, the incepted thought, develops into an entire world, an entire experience of a dream. I don't necessarily remember what I dream about, but I always know have I dreamt of something the night before.

Unfortunately, most of the stuff that keep hanging over my head are things related to dance, something which I have been trying to stay away from, even though it seems like I've been trying in vain. I have no idea why now I'm shying away from dance, something that I once loved so much. I mean, someone told me that I portrayed myself as someone who put dance over everything else in life. It's a proposition that I'm not entirely mad about, but somehow things don't seem to pan out in my favour these past few weeks, no, months. I just feel encumbered, long gone are the days where I can just dance with ease. I would like to think that this is a way of my body telling me that I should have a break, that I have had too much of a good thing and now I'm simply burnt out. To be honest, I'm not even sure whether I hit the nail in the head on this point because well, I really really don't know, and I don't know how I can know. This is one plausible option, a plausible answer to my problem, but I don't know whether it is the right one. Perhaps it's the worry about living up to expectations, those of others and of myself.

I think the most annoying or exasperating aspect of it all is that I know I can do it, that I'm well-equipped with whatever is necessary to be the person who I want to be and the person who I should be. Don't get me wrong, I still need to learn a heck lot of things. My point is that there's no question, and I can say this with confidence, that I can do it. Nevertheless, I can't seem to focus, or to calm the nerves down, or to just hit that potential that I know I have. I don't know whether the problem lies underneath it all, that it's a problem with my psyche, something which I can't exactly put into words. Sometimes I just wished I could cry, let loose, and go crazy-- have a real cathartic experience. But I can't, and I don't know how to fix this. It's like my body has erased from its system every single venting-out mechanism. So I've this bottled-up and unresolved issues in my mind, and they're gnawing at me from the inside. I wished I could just hurt myself so badly, so harshly that I could knock that stopper off and let the tide out. But I can't.

I also am not sure whether my problem lies in the fatigue that has been accumulating since ages ago, that the body has used its mechanism to tell me that I should take a break. I need to know whether even when the aching is gone and the tiredness is gone, your body can still be not ready for another go. I need to know the signals, the signs because nowadays it feels like I do not have ownership over my own body. During rehearsals or classes, a part of me would tell me 'Come on, Calvin, just half a hour more!', but there's another voice playing that says 'This is such a drain!', and my body just cannot-- or doesn't-- want to listen to the former. It's so frustrating. It just shuts down, and it all goes down the drain. I know my body has not been feeling well these past few weeks, but I don't know whether it falls ill because it wants me to stop, or because my mind is telling my body to shut down, or simply because I just caught a bug somewhere somehow.

I think, in all earnestness, the main reason why my body doesn't listen to the trying-to-persist-through-the-storm voice is because deep down, I don't want to try to persist through the storm. Deep down, I don't want to dance. To be honest, I don't really want to go for rehearsals or classes at times. I could hear me cursing and complaining in my head when I had to wait for the bus, when I stood on the MRT, when I peeled myself off my bed to get ready and put on my dance attire.

But, isn't so sad? Dance was once something that I "put over everything else in life", but now has turned into something that I honestly do not want to do. I don't know whether I should even quit. I mean look at it this way: I grumbled to myself when I peeled myself off my bed, when I waited for the bus, when I stood on the MRT. By the time I reached the studio or the whatever dance venue there was, I was already not in the mood. Then I psyched myself to get excited over the rehearsal or class, that it would be fun, that it would ok, that it would be over in one, two, or three hours. Halfway through my mind shut down, my body followed. I didn't do well for the rehearsal or class, disappointed myself, and felt like shit over it. The cycle repeated itself for the next rehearsal or class.

Why would I want to do that to myself? Because I love dance so much.

Perhaps, I should love me more.

I don't even know how to reconcile these feelings. Worse still, I don't know how to fix the problem. I do not know what is the root of it all. It comes to a point where I hate the way I dance. People said before that I had some talent, that it would be a waste should I quit. They too said before that I should do whatever I want, do whatever makes me happy, conform to nothing, eff everything else. Everything else shouldn't matter.

Sometimes I wonder why does it have to be so hard? Why am I feeling it way to much? This is not just about me feeling it. This is also about me thinking about it. All the time I think about it, but I can't seem to find the answer. It's the last thing that lingers on my mind before I doze off at night, and it's the first thing that comes to mind when I wake up in the morning. Even in the in-between, I can't stop this incepted thought from flourishing into an entire reality in my head. Ok, I don't always dream about dance, but my point is that my mind doesn't stop thinking, and I do not know how to go about it. Most of my friends are in dance. When I talk to them, think with them, or think about them, it inevitably turns into something dance-related. By right, I should be having a break now, but physically and I guess, cerebrally, I have failed.

I want help. I can't make this stop.

J'aime Écouter de la Musique

This awesomeness belongs to Mike Tompkins, if not to those who have acquired the copyrights from him. I do not own it. I am merely "passing it on". Enjoy!

So You Think You Kent Dance?

"Uhm.. No, it's... I mean, you just get to that point where it doesn't, you know, it doesn't matter what other people say, or it doesn't matter whatever you... you know. In my life, you just— I just wanna dance, and... that's all."

Why Then, Can One Desire Too Much Of A Good Thing?

(Props to Julian for the photo.)

Today Was A Fairy Tale

The title was taken from a song that was playing on someone's iTunes as it was flashed on the screen-- a song by Taylor Swift which I didn't particularly adore, but I thought it best expressed how I was feeling as I was standing there in the auditorium, half alive at 5.30 am in the morning, looking at the raggers getting their make-up done. Today was going to be fairy tale.

So was the rag experience, and funny story, it had a bittersweet beginning and a bittersweet ending. The bitter part spurred up from the things once said by a friend of mine (not in law rag 2010): 'There's nothing in it for me.' I guess this thought kept playing in my head every time I hit rock bottom, that I was squandering my time and effort on something that was, well, ultimately futile. Thankfully, he was, or more accurately, I was proven wrong. Rag turned out to be an experience I would never trade for anything.

Ever so often in my hollow existence I felt hapless, tumbling into the pith of depression for all the wrong and sometimes illogical reasons (oxymoronic much?)-- pretty much a strangled old man.

Like this!

(Kudos to Julian for capturing this photographic masterpiece.)

More often than not, this is how I feel about me: an decrepit, wizened old man with beads of responsibilities hanging around my neck tugged in every direction... except that I would probably cover my nipples, but that's beside the point. As an aged soul I lived my life, with no apparent reason why I felt so, with no tangible reason why I couldn't snap out of it.

However, every once in a while, a glitter of hope would make its teasing appearance before me, too fleeting for my hand to grasp, too fleeting for my eyes to catch-- but there it was. It put this soggy feeling around your heart, and you tried to replicate it as closely as possible, although sadly, often to no avail.

Nevertheless, with rag the feeling stayed there for a tad longer. It stemmed from the earnestness that was shared amongst the raggers. For me, there and then, there was no expectations, no nothing, just me doing what I truthfully feel was best for everybody. I'm not talking about choreography, I'm talking about the then-felt-so-interminable practices as a whole. It captured me as a person when such earnestness, which I unwittingly put up out there in the moot court and auditorium, was reciprocated-- or to say the least, shared by others.

It reminded me that dancers were human too; that there was beauty in imperfections, beauty in hard work, beauty in pain and suffering; that souls-- even cold, aged and dried-up one like mine-- can be touched by imperfections, hard work, pain and suffering. This was the sweetness of it all: the cliched 'warm and fuzzy' feeling that crawled inside whenever 'Take Your Shirt Off', or 'I Am Not A Whore', or 'This Time (Klaas Remix)', or 'A Drop In The Ocean', or 'I Am', or 'Come On Get Up', or other five to six songs played on my iPod during practices.

I truly felt bad because at times it felt like I was being a bad father who always left his kids half way, leaving them in arms of an overworked mother who (as she put it in her own words) 'always came late because she couldn't wake up in the morning'. Haha.

And I missed the run that made everybody cried-- one thing I would always regret.

Anyhoo, ten minutes prior to the performance, it really felt surreal. Never in a very, very long have I had such an overwhelming feeling sweeping right through me like that. Funny enough, I couldn't-- no can't-- really pinpoint what that feeling was. Was I proud, just like when I saw them doing their own company warm-up in the morning earlier on their own? Was I sad, knowing that I was turning the last page of the fairy tale? Was I nervous, because there were people whom I knew watching the item for the first time? Was I worried for the dancers?

I don't know. Perhaps I shouldn't know.

I guess at the end of the day I just want to thank every single ragger-- seniors, juniors, heads, freshies, rag committee members and ad hoc OTOT helpers. Really, you're the best (a la Nicolette)! You guys made learn more about myself. You reintroduced me to a world I once left. On top of all, you did all of us proud. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Thank you. Today was a fairy tale.