I spent a decent chunk of last week on T:>Works’s Per˚Form Open Academy (POA), either spending time with the Global South Fellows I’d been paired with as “ArtPals” (like penpals, but artsy, get it?) or attending keynote sessions and performances during their 12-hour marathon session on Saturday (no, I wasn’t there for the whole 12 hours, but I did get home at 3am that night and suffered throughout the next day like someone who is no longer in her twenties).

I was surprised to have been invited to take part in this; although I know many artists, I’ve never really considered myself a part of the arts space or community in Singapore. Writing is an art, for sure, but journalism and activism—at least, the sort that I do—still feel a bit removed. I looked forward to POA generally because my role as ArtPal was to introduce the fellows to Singapore a bit and I love showing visitors around, but I wasn’t sure if I would really ‘get’ the art that would be shown. I usually feel like a philistine when I attend art events, like I’m just too dumb to interpret and appreciate the work properly. But I was ultimately glad to have experienced what I experienced last week.

Because POA is about “art + activations”, all the Fellows who participated were creating work linked to many of the political issues of our times, doing activism through their art regardless of whether they defined themselves as activists or not. On that level, it was easy to relate; even if we work with different modes and mediums, we could all connect over shared politics, values and commitment to causes that we feel strongly about. My ArtPals, for instance, were members of YoNoFui, an Argentinian abolitionist collective working with women in prison or who have previously been incarcerated, and it was sweet relief to be able to talk to them about the Transformative Justice Collective’s work without having to first explain why we are abolitionist, why we don’t believe in prisons or jailing or killing people for drug offences. It felt like I’d reached out across the world and been seen across geography, history, politics and language.

There was also something else about the power of the Fellows’ work, be it dance or music or lecture-performance, and the way they were able to tap on emotions. Tears sprang to my eyes and a lump formed in my throat during a session about the use of dance to address political issues in Lagos, Nigeria. I couldn’t have explained why this feeling welled up inside my chest—I’ve never been to Nigeria and know very little about the politics of the place, or the violence that people living in the slums experience. But when Valu, the dancer, talked about the need to find humour and laughter to survive because “the world is not okay”, I felt that in my heart—every single day I, too, come up against the many ways in which the world is not okay, and have to struggle to find a way through. In that moment during Valu’s performance, the reminder of what a profoundly human experience that is brought comfort and pain all at once.

Since getting that reminder, I’ve been thinking of my work. As a journalist in a hostile environment, I’ve consciously and unconsciously developed strategies to mitigate risk and to survive. This was necessary, but has also exacted a cost—as I wrote in my chapter in We Are Not The Enemy: The Practice of Advocacy in Singapore, it feels as if a troll has moved into my head, making me second-guess and over-think what I write, at times almost to the point of paralysis. This has helped me navigate some minefields but has also made me my first and worst enemy. Knowing that I operate in a climate where one might get in trouble over syntax and different interpretations of language and literary choice, I confine myself in smaller and smaller boxes, growing increasingly worried about rephrasing legalese or paraphrasing quotes in case I inadvertently introduce some ambiguity or slight error that can be exploited as a weapon against me. Writing—an activity I’ve loved from childhood, as natural to me as thinking and breathing—has become exhausting under the weight of the anxiety I bear.

The first time I went for therapy, I gave the therapist a potted summary of my work and some of the stressful things I’ve experienced. I explained that I’d been an anti-death penalty activist for over a decade, that most of my work involves supporting the families of death row prisoners through trauma and heartbreak, and that, too often, this work has ended with devastating loss. I talked about how 2022 had been especially brutal; despite our best efforts, 11 men were marched off to their deaths. I told her that, despite burn-out, I often felt anxious or guilty, worried that I was slacking off, letting my peers down and not doing enough.

She listened patiently, then said gently, “You’ve talked a lot about what you do. But when do you let yourself feel?”

I was stumped. It’s not that I hadn’t been aware that there were a lot of feelings to process. I still remember the day, in 2018, when I stood in the car park outside a funeral parlour, waiting for the undertakers to finish their work with the body of a prisoner who’d just been hanged that morning. There would be simple rites, then he would be sent off for cremation. Standing there in the car park, thinking of his brother pale with grief and exhaustion inside, his best friend busy taking care of things on the bereaved family’s behalf, I thought, There’s so much grief. Maybe that’s what I do now: absorb grief. Some days later, I joined his family in sweeping his ashes into an urn before our tiny party headed out to sea to give him a final send-off. In those years, when the anti-death penalty movement was even smaller than what it is now, it’d often felt like that was all I could do: attend funerals, keep families company, bear witness and absorb grief. But when have I felt this grief? And when have I allowed it to flow through my body and into my words? When have I processed this pain through writing—the way I process everything else?

It surfaces from time to time, when I momentarily fail to keep the lid on. When I burst into tears in the shower the day after an execution. When the magnitude of the state’s violence and cruelty hits me in a moment of solitude. Some of the writing people have said they were most moved by were written during such periods: when I was deeply sad or angry, or too burnt-out and depressed to maintain the usual strict filters of control and paranoia. Multiple friends have told me recently that they found my chapter in We Are Not the Enemy powerful and illuminating; when I read that chapter again it just strikes me that I wasn’t well at the time of writing.

But for the most part, the strategies I’ve learnt—honed by both necessary journalism ethics and unnecessary bad-faith pedantry—have had the effect of suppressing the truth of what I feel when I move through my country and do my work. I might get the facts right but I dampen the feelings, because I worry about the risk of getting carried away by emotion and slipping up. Because there’s also sexism and misogyny at play, I often feel like I have to work harder to sound matter-of-fact and rational so as not to be accused of being “emotionally manipulative” or “ranty”… although I see people say that of me anyway. Then there are the times when the grief cannot be put into words, out of consideration for requests to maintain silence, or because some stories are just not mine to tell. I might write the words “furious”, “disappointed”, “angry”, “sad”, but I avoid digging deeper into what these words mean—both on and off the page. I just let these feelings burrow deeper into my bones, where they rot and take some of me with them too.

There was a catharsis, then, in watching the Fellows in POA tell their truths, through film, through fashion, through dance and song. It felt like there was a freedom in their work that I haven’t felt in mine for some time. And that realisation fills me with a melancholy that I do not yet know what to do with. It’s a woefulness that, tonight, is suffused with an additional sorrow of which I am once again unable to speak.

I, too, want to be a writer and a creator who feels free. But there are days, like today, when the heaviness sits like an anchor in my chest, and I fear I will never get there.