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Self-complexity: to allow yourself to be defined by any single thing, is to allow fragility.

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/ Honest Magic /

My pen will not be held hostage to a blank page, because it knows there's more than one way to capture a portrait.

Portraiture is sketched in conversation. Between graphite and paper, words and heart, teeth and jugular; between opposing truths that wear each other out, down the telephone line.

The hardest of all are self portraits.

Those necessitate staring unflinchingly into the wars in your eyes, and wondering, what if I am my own enemy who must be loved?

To draw your self is to stand in a room with a view, gazing inward. In its deepest shadowed recesses, you might meet eyes with honest magic.

---

Heard, on freedom: "Simplifying doesn't lead to more choices; handling complexity does."

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Hello. It's been a hot minute.

Since we last spoke, I've straddled mountains, drowned in rivers, made a marriage, carried a child, broken a marriage, submitted to therapy for PTSD, grown out my hair. I still fight dragonwurms.

In lessons, I count these:

One, the heaviest decisions can leave you the most lightened.

Two, strength is also the ability to ask for help.

Three, it is dangerous to allow your inner stories to harden into convictions. Curiosity is a doorway; Certainty shuts it.

--

Life is hard, and it is a great relief to be sure of anything. But the more immutable my belief, the greater the gulf of delusion that yawns between my world and the truth.

I am beginning to let go of a few things.

One of them is the notion that the only good way to raise a child is with two married partners living in the same household. Going solo has allowed me to be more present and intentional with parenthood, where before I was drained and distracted by the emotional maelstrom of struggles with her father. I only have childosaur for half the week, and during this brief exhale of shared time, I focus on maintaining a sheltered harbour for her little big feelings, and a model for healthy adult interactions. Against this backdrop, I negotiate my own craggy healing journey.

I still grieve, with crushing intensity, for the ghost of family holidays and other romanticised could-have-beens, but in time, I will get to the other side of pain. On the meanings of family, and home, I will shape my own narrative, as I always have. Importantly, this one is now defined by the absence of poisonous rage and petty power struggles - familiar thorns from my own childhood.

Side note: childosaur has this week acquired three new pets - fish, which on account of a definitive lack of witnesses, might be of the invisible and imagined variety. She tells me she has named them ZOMBIE, BUNTOT and MA PI GU. The last one translates from Mandarin to, "Wipe Backside".

--

Here's another thing I used to believe - that the most fulfilling relationships could only be seeded on shared, defining passions. Motorcycling is my most formidable adult obsession, and ever since that first set of wheels, I have only ever dated moto-people. I looked up to moto-couple friends who grew grey over shared adventures; I clung to the fancy of saddling up with my own little wolf pack.

It is now woefully clear, after a succession of assholes and one failed marriage, that sameness is no protection from the erosive toxicity that humans are capable of spewing on each other - friends, lovers, kin, or otherwise. Eschewing sameness then, I am instead curious about the unexplored magic of being met on equal footing; exceeded even, in the vast plains of intellectual, physical, and emotional discovery.

--

Re-homing, re-wilding, and re-inquiry. My own sisyphyean ribbon that winds both predator and prey animals of the inner world in tight step.

Onward.

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Gotta love those pocket sized hondas.

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What's scarier than riding your motorcycle into the unknown?

Hint: It starts with saying, “I Do”.

I've always dreamed in colour, waking or asleep, but in 2011 I dreamt the most brightly. It was my subconscious, throwing up fireworks in response to a bristly year. My parents had set their feet firmly and separately down an ugly warpath called divorce, one that they had begun walking more than a decade ago, setting off landmines and decorating a few walking wounded in the process. I myself was white-knuckling through a succession of tempestuous relationships, collecting assholes like other girls collect handbags - which wasn't all that bad because anger keeps you alive way better than sadness can. In any case, 2011 launched me some 3000km out of Singapore on my first motorcycle adventure into northern Thailand, and I discovered that the perfect answer to life's shitbags is: ride, and keep riding. The moto-travel bug had bitten; the itch was incurable.

Fast-forward half a decade, and I'd turned my back on the career ladder to hobo across Europe, Russia and Central Asia in the saddle of an old DR650. Nearly six months on the road, and I was deliriously content. My persistent health issues seemed to have vanished, along with the insomnia that had plagued my city nights. The only blight on the horizon was a vague worry about what to do with my life when I got home, and a big part of that was other people. The Expectations of Other People: those things really hit with a heavy right hand. 

As a 30-something year-old Asian female who's been seeing the same guy long enough to know too much about his toilet habits, my fate is pretty much sealed - HDB mortgage, 2.5 children, shelf-space in Mandai columbarium. 

Honestly, I have no big quarrel with those milestones, as long as there's plenty of wiggle room with the timeline and the actual specifics (could rent out that HDB and get a caravan; instead of Mandai, I wouldn't object to being canon-blasted over the Pacific ocean). No, the big problem is having to get married.

Marriage is a particularly problematic social institution. If you ask me, it's little more than a legal way to impose state-approved morality on the mating process, and put an individual's physical, emotional, social and financial vulnerability into the hands of another. Maybe you'll insist that marriage is the bedrock of healthy society, but have you seen how deep and dark its fault lines run? Don't ask who's keeping tabs, but about a quarter of all married Singaporean couples will probably divorce - that worked out to over 7,500 couples in the last year alone.  

What's marriage good for? I've little interest in pomp and ceremony, and wouldn't balk at single-parenthood. I have no use for contractual loyalty. I'd prefer that we both stay together out of constantly renewed personal choice. Also, I don't need the government's endorsement to validate my personal commitments. 

This was true then, and it's still true now: I scoff at traditional romanticism; I tell other people that I am only sentimental for motorcycles and dogs. I've always been a terrible commitment-phobe, but only in matters of human relationships, because I'm clearly an impulsive adopter of other permanent things like tattoos and animals. Those things generally behave predictably, unlike human beings. The last two persons who nudged me towards the altar... well, those relationships didn't work out.   But this is also true: I AM a disgusting romantic, and a practicing pragmatist. I'm an idealistic nutcase who believes in long-term partnership and providing a safe space to raise children. I just don't believe in ceremony, and am mortally terrified of being let down. So, I've already said to those who matter, "Nope, and please don't even ask."

The irony is, I was rationalising all this while committing irrationalities at 90km/h (a helmet is the perfect thought-incubator on long road trips). If you think about it, motorcycling for fun is pretty absurd. It's a dangerous, relatively expensive way to get around, and definitely involves more logistical fuss than taking the bus. Motorcycling does little to improve my life expectancy. In fact, it's already accounted for a few hospital bills. But damn, isn't it the magic elixir for quality of life! 

On that road trip, there were times when I, mechanical idiot, had to shake a wrench or two at my misbehaving motorcycle. Thank the adventure gods for a travelling buddy who had enough garage know-how to save an entire village of cranky motorcycles. Can you resolve a dirty carburetor with a toothbrush and plastic bag? Uncle Chris can. So I learned that you don't need "proper" tools to get a job done. "Stop seeing a thing for what it IS. Look at what it DOES." That was what was said, or something to that effect.

I chewed on that thought for a few thousand kilometers. 

We finished the ride and shipped the motorcycles home from Iran. I flew to Scotland to meet The Boy with Expectations, and when he ambushed me with a ring and a question, I said yes. Against my better judgement of 30-something years, I figured that what marriage might do is worth riding out the fear: it offers security to someone else. Not to me, but then stuff in a a proper partnership is seldom about one person. 

"Imperfect processes can still be beneficial" - that's what the New York Times had to say about international negotiations for peace with North Korea. I suppose you could say the same for marriage. 

I'm putting on my sparkly sneakers and going to the Registry of Marriages in a few hours, and I'm still terrified. Anyhowly Go is about to become Mrs Anyhowly Goh. I'd ask you to wish me luck, but luck has nothing to do with it. I'll just have to take a deep breath and gun the throttle.

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A fit of savage doodling. #illustration

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sketched out our super naughtiness maximus: paddy the little english bulldog.

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pro bono work for an aid group for hearing-impaired children. 

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a month in Thailand by motorbike; from the sketchbook.

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... said Cecil, because there were a thousand better things to believe in. 

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/ Old Friends /

sometimes, when somebody has to leave, all we can do is stand at the gates. 

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Rakhine

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happens everytime i forget to pull down the visor. 

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kopitiam politics. 

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home.

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remember those phone marathons before facebook got in the way?