Welcome, you are listening to Every Song. A series where I play songs I’ve written throughout the years and share the stories behind them. 3 months. 54 episodes. 120 songs. If my math is correct (which it rarely ever is). This here is the season finale of the first season of Every Song. Oh, how very fitting that I am once again, sick for the very last episode and my nose is so stuffy yet runny and itchy and eurgh. And my voioce is low again and I’m trying to like pitch it up higher and give it a bit more energy. I realise that in some of the episode openings I sound really soft and high-pitched and some I sound really, like, “WELCOME”, like I’m ready to confront an issue or confront something that is inside me that I’m about to tell people. Some are, like, really soft and feminine and vulnerable. I was listening through some of the openings the other day and I was like, “Oh my god, I sound different in every episode”. So, in this episode I sound sick again. It feels like my body is purging as I purge and release a lot of pent up emotions from my life through these songs. I don’t know what my body’s doing. It’s just been a really weird and stressful year. My mental stress is manifesting physically. Not really emotional stress. I think emotionally, I’ve been really good this year. Things for me emotionally have been really stabel and nice and my life is, I guess, emotionally peaceful. But just the mental load of career and finances - just the logistics of life. The really boring logistics of life has been really ‘wearing down on me’? (Is that a saying?) It’s just taking a toll on me. I feel like it’s physically manifesting in my body. When I started this series a few months ago, I did so at a place in my life where I felt like I was coming up to a crossroads or an overlap between limbo and my previous life. It felt like I was waking up everyday to a previous life even though I had not yet lived a future life. It just felt like everyday I woke up, it was already over and I was living a flashback for months and months. I was only working part-time as an elected governor for my local council, which I was trying to supplement with a second job so I can survive. However, for that first half of the year, I just kept getting rejected. I just could not get a second job. I just ended up having a lot of time on my hands all of a sudden after the last few years of working two jobs and doing post-grad studies all at once. At the same time, my boyfriend Lloyd was stationed out of town for work and we did long distance for over 3 months. I was just alone in our apartment for ages with my thoughts. That’s when I slowly started to pick up my guitar again. I slowly started to sit in front of my digital piano and play, a little more every single day. I just started writing little by little again day after day. When I first started playing and singing again, I was very rusty. Well, I still am. But it is because I haven’t seriously been disciplined with music or seriously been in practise for years, since before COVID. So, my vocals weren’t what they used to be. Also, as an instrumentalist, as a musician, I knew I was very very rusty. My timing, my finger dexterity, my theory; I was just very out of practice. I started wondering if I should get myself back in the swing of things and dust of my old fingers and vocal chords. Not to mention, the only software I have right now is Garageband. My knockoff Logic Pro X doesn’t work on this laptop so I don’t have access to any fancy effects or mixing and editing features. Which, I guess, is supposed to be the purpose of this songwriting series: to be as stripped back as possible. Another point that I was going to make was that, because at this time I was already capitalistically conditioned, I did initially wonder what the hell the point would be since it’s not going to be a reliable second job that could supplement my lifestyle. But there was not much else to do at that time and I felt a little bit of a calling to just play music. And so, I did. I thought it might be a good idea to start forcing myself to write full songs again as well as play through my old songs. Everything I have ever written before. That’s where I got the idea for this series. I thought playing through the evolution of my songwriting might get me back in the zone. I feel like it definitely did. I do feel like now that I’m at the end of this first part of the series, I’m in a good space creatively. Although, it could get a lot better if I cultivated an environment of creativity everyday at home or hopefully at a new job now that I’ve moved to a new country in search for a new job. They keep calling us financial refugees or economic refugees. Even though the word refugees, obviously, I don’t agree with labelling myself that. But I think just because a lot of Kiwis are moving in hoardes to Australia now because there are no jobs in New Zealand, that’s what the news and a lot of the street language (I was gonna call it street slang)- a lot of people, a lot of us are being financial/economic refugees. Well, I would rather just call myself an economic migrant, but yeah. What was I saying? Yeah, so, creatively I’m in a good place and I just hope that I don’t lose this momentum. Especially when this creative flow that I’ve found myself in these days, in addition to the regular self-reflection that comes with singing through old music, has helped contextualise how far I’ve come. Even though, I have so much to go, still, with improving myself. When I was younger I had so many confusing and harmful thoughts and emotions that I didn’t know quite what to do with or how to process or how to release in a healthy way. That’s due, in part, to not being taught in a way that goes through to me and not being taught because I had no reliable close adults who also possessed the skill to do it themselves in their own lives. It is really harrowing now, looking back at how much damage being raised by a community of emotionally illiterate adults and religious dogma can do to a child. To nobody’s surprise, I turned out, also, to be an emotionally illiterate young adult who has caused harm toward others without awareness and care. Until now, I guess. I have been trying to work on being less of an a*****e for the last few years, since my late twenties but it is of course going to be a lifelong journey. As Scanlon says, “Working out the terms of moral justification is an unending task”. I should accept that for the rest of my life I will be continuously trying to justify the implications of my decisions against various moral codes and worldviews of whatever specific context and time period. Additionally, I will also be continuously trying to justify the wrongdoings of others unto me, because I’m trying to make sense of it all, especially by grown adults who were supposed to support and love me unconditionally, grown adults who we’re supposed to trust with our lives as children, not just in practicality and survival but also with spiritual and ethical enrichment. Although, I do wonder, since I am a child of—or rather, a product of—Asian cultural and philosophical upbringing, was I ever even entitled to being given anything more by the people who conceived and raised me than just a roof over my head, food, clothing, and an education? Some say that if you have those essentials then you ask for nothing more. Your legal guardians are not your little friends, they say. They are not there to give you unconditional support with your personal ventures outside of academic success or commercial success that doesn’t conform to the structures of traditional employment; they are not here to give you an emotional safe space for you to be vulnerable with your mental state and give you nuanced, sensitive emotional care and affection. Their only job is to make sure you toughen the f**k up so that you can survive that harsh world out there, stay alive and be of acceptable social and medical standing (because if you are not, that’s very embarassing on their part and god forbid they be perceived as a failure as legal guardians). As a 34-year-old woman now, in the midst of serious consideration on bearing children and fertility, I cannot help but wonder if the end goal of parenthood is just the performance of parenthood for the public; to conform to societal standards of familybuilding and homemaking; to simply be deemed an exceptional parent or legal guardian; to show off smiles in family holiday photos and a neat home when hosting dinner parties; to give ones offspring an adequate amount of practical protection from exposure to the natural climate and a home environment to churn out little baby cogs in the machine so that they can wash their hands clean of any other mental or emotional responsibility (“If I did ABC then I don’t have to do DEF and you should just shut up and be thankful for it”). I cannot help but wonder if that is just the whole point and logistics of parenthood and building a family. From what I have personally witnessed and lived through, I just simply struggle to see parenthood as a phase in ones human life to create and nourish another human life to being their best and most authentic self with no expectations, no judgement, no conditions, just pure acceptance. Is that the way it’s supposed to be? Because I didn’t experience that. I just felt a lot of pressure to become something I’m not everyday, and show up as something I’m not everyday and only be given support if I show up as something I’m not and cannot be everyday. I have met other adults now who did experience pure, unconditional support and love from the people who raised them and I feel jealousy, to be honest. And to be honest, I am so deathly afraid of becoming a parent myself, lest I become just another life-bearing adult who only gives a child the bare essentials to survive but not
