At some point in 2022, “stay” became my favourite word. First, the word brought relief. Later, it brought joy.
In the context of anti-death penalty work, a stay is an exhalation, a release of a tense breath I hadn’t even realised I was holding. It means that the dreaded hanging will not proceed as planned, that there is, at the very least, a temporary reprieve that’ll give us more time to find or pray for a miracle. I spent so much of 2022 hoping desperately for stays of execution for so many men. For some, we succeeded, and they’re still alive today. For others, we failed, and grapple with the aftermath of that violence as best we can.
In the context of K-pop, a Stay is a fan of the self-produced boy idol group, Stray Kids. It’s a way to identify with a bigger community, united by ongoing parasocial relationships with eight hilariously chaotic yet devastatingly talented twenty-somethings singing and rapping in Korean, English or Japanese.
I’m not new to fandoms. As a teenager into Britpop of the late 90s and early 2000s I did all the requisite fangirl things like buying Smash Hits magazines, surfing fan sites and diligently saving the photos of my favourite groups and actors onto the clunky desktop computer I was supposed to be doing school projects on. My interest in fandoms and community led me to almost write a Masters thesis on the interaction between the long-running British children’s TV show Doctor Who and its generations of fans. I got very close to enrolling, but then got active in civil society work in Singapore and decided that, if graduate studies were going to cost that much, I should probably do it on something more ‘practical’ (so I did a Masters in journalism, lol). I’ve had my fixations and obsessions from time to time in the years since, but assumed that I’d left my fandom days behind me.
That was before I lost the ability to write.
Burn-out happens when you’ve been subjected to high levels of stress for a prolonged period of time. It is what it sounds like; a state of exhaustion, of being completely spent, like a melted candle with no more wick. After having dealt with too much for too long, there’s nothing left to give.
I’d been burnt out before, tired and fed up by never-ending to-do lists and late nights at work. But last year I discovered a whole new level of burn-out. I’ve always processed my thoughts and emotions through writing, and have spent most of my career identifying as a writer and a journalist. After months of working almost solidly on death row cases, meeting terrified or grieving families and jumping on Zoom calls with international human rights groups—basically, becoming more like a caseworker or campaigner than a writer—I sat down to find that the familiar and usually comforting exercise of writing felt like trying to pick letters out of a thick sludge in my head. When I finally managed to pluck the words out of the muck, they didn’t fit. None of it was right, and trying to fix it felt like Too Much.
Let’s be honest: it wasn’t just the writing that was Too Much. On top of all the death row cases, it’d also become clearer than ever that my husband and I would never be able to establish a stable family life in Singapore, and that we’d have to deal with yet another indeterminate period of long-distance. It was not where either of us had hoped to be after being married for the best part of a decade, and it was that much harder to accept because it felt so unfair and unnecessary.
Everything was Too Much. Yet it also felt like it couldn’t be allowed to be too much, because I had to brace myself for more—more execution notices, more cruelty, more heartache and anger and grief. There were periods when we hadn’t even mentally or emotionally processed an execution before we found out about the next. So, along with my fellow activists at the Transformative Justice Collective, I kept plugging away. At least, I think I did. I don’t have a very clear memory of that time. When I look back on 2022, especially the first half of the year, all I recall is a dense fog of desperation and despair, both others’ and mine.
In this haze of fatigue and overwhelm, on the days when I wasn’t running on panic or adrenaline and it got hard to get out of bed, I’d look for mindless distractions. I landed on Instagram Reels. Hours were lost to scrolling, not necessarily because I was thoroughly entertained, but because I couldn’t drum up enough energy to get up and do something different. It was the sort of activity associated with ‘wasting time’, and I’ve read enough about the problems of social media to know that the algorithm was cynically messing with my brain, but it also felt like relief.
K-pop fans won’t be surprised to know that I first came to Stray Kids (and other idol groups) through random video clips and fan edits on social media instead of their music. K-pop is, after all, an industry that stretches far beyond just pop music. Social media and eternally online fanbases demand an endless stream of content: music videos, livestreams, vlogs, behind-the-scenes videos, dance practice videos, stage practice videos, fancams for each member of each group, variety shows, reality TV… all of which can then be edited and remixed by digital native fans, thus creating even more content. It was a hell of a rabbit hole to fall into. I’d characterise it more as a sharp drop than a gentle slide.
It was surprising how quickly and completely I fell in love with the music, too. In complete contrast to their doofus antics in variety shows, Stray Kids has a big, braggadocious sound. It’s not the sort of thing that, if anyone had asked me before 2022, I would have said I liked. I used to have melancholy ballads, Broadway musicals and Chinese drama OSTs on repeat, and almost never listened to anything that had rap in it. But at a time when I was feeling worn out and worn down, ineffectual and miserable, Stray Kids’s loud, unapologetic vibe rubbed off on me in ways that made me feel like I was perhaps not a mouldy potato after all. When I left the house with their noise music blasting in my earphones, it felt like I could go out with my shoulders set a little squarer, my chin held a little higher. Even if that wasn’t how I felt inside, it at least made getting through the day a little more enjoyable. Over time, I realised that it was good enough to feel just a little more enjoyment, day after day.
I’ve been reading Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others by Laura van Dernoot Lipsky (with Connie Burk). In it, she lists some common signs of trauma exposure response, from chronic exhaustion to avoidance to the crippling sense of never being “enough”. It was a little alarming, as I read, to discover how much I related to many of the sixteen warning signs mentioned in the book. Passages like this resonate:
Trauma exposure itself is tiring. As exposure accrues, our bodies and minds will require extra attention in order to become fully rested and refreshed. The situation becomes even more difficult if we get stuck in a trauma exposure response. Our symptoms, like feeling helpless and hopeless, or being hypervigilant, are exhausting in their own right.
I haven’t made it to the end of the book yet, so I’ve yet to discover all the recommendations and advice van Dernoot Lipsky has for me. Somehow I doubt it’ll have much to do with the eight (self-identified) wandering waifs of the K-pop industry. But, given that I always feel like I have to be “on”, as Trauma Stewardship puts it, K-pop creates an opportunity to switch off, at least for a little while. The video content can be silly and frivolous: in one episode of SKZ Code (Stray Kids’s web variety series), they play random characters—detective, pastry chef, unemployed-yet-rich landlord, kindergarten teacher, “world star”—trying to solve a murder mystery in a messy mafia game. Or it can be soothing or calming, like in little video logs where they’re just sight-seeing on days off and eating delicious food. There are also fan-edits to dive into, full of inside jokes that only make sense within the Stay fandom, affectionately referred to as Stayville. Regardless of the vibe, what’s most comforting is that none of it reminds me of the tragedies that I witness or read and write about in my work and activism. (I mean, nothing serious is going on here.) In those little blocks of time—sometimes they’re as short as five or ten minutes in the middle of a work day—I’m not feeling existential angst about the climate crisis, or outrage at the layers upon layers of oppression and violence inherent in the criminal punishment system. I’m just laughing at some silly little guys playing silly little games, or sharing in the “small but certain happiness” of some friends hanging out by the Han river.
This feels a little embarrassing to write about. I’m a professional with more than a decade of work experience under my belt. I run a literary magazine. I’m an activist in an authoritarian state, working on issues like freedom of expression, drug policy and the death penalty. I give briefings to international human rights groups, diplomats and UN officials. It feels so frivolous, so childish, to be giggling over idols and waxing lyrical about how much pop songs mean to me. How is it that I’ve suddenly become an avid collector of official and fan-made SKZOO plushies? It feels like something I should have got out of my system at 15, not something to dive headfirst into at 35.
But there’s a little time travel magic in this, too. When I do all this—adopt plushies, get excited about new music releases, chat with other fans online—I feel the delight of the 15-year-old Kirsten who still lives somewhere inside me. I think about how awkward and insecure and stressed out that baby Kirsten used to be, and how much it would have meant to her to have heard some of these songs, with their encouraging and comforting lyrics. When I went to Stray Kids’s concert at the Indoor Stadium in February this year, it was the achievement of a twenty-year-old dream, because I never got to go to a big pop concert with my friends when I was a teenager. I have fun now both for myself, and the child I used to be.
Coping mechanisms aren’t solutions. I know that. Stanning Stray Kids is no replacement for therapy, something I often tell other people is very important while never going myself. I’m not sure which makes less sense—to rely on idols about a decade younger than me for emotional support, or to rely on the plushie animal versions of them for joy and comfort—but I’m doing both. I’m aware that, while I do genuinely enjoy the music and the videos, I’ve also glommed on to this as much as I have because I am tired, anxious and under pressure in other parts of my life, and desperately craving something different. I’ve pressed on throughout my twenties and into my thirties in my workaholic way, always feeling guilty about stopping because it makes me feel lazy or irrelevant or disappointing, but it’s become increasingly difficult to ignore how often I feel balanced precariously on the cusp of burn-out, or notice trauma exposure responses in myself. After years of acting as if I was unflappable and unstoppable, in the past year or so I’ve started to acknowledge that the many experiences I’ve had over the past thirteen years have left me a little broken.
The fire isn’t burning quite as steadily as it used to. I ignore that at my own risk. I’m trying to do something about it: re-evaluate my workload, review my motivations, address my anxieties and find my focus. None of this is easy, because I’ve had a lifetime of programming telling me that taking time off is equivalent to laziness or shirking responsibilities, and I’m constantly over-committing then feeling overwhelmed. K-pop is obviously not the answer, but it’s helping in the quest. When I indulge in this frivolous hobby, when I let it pull me out of my stressed-out funk, I’m creating the space for myself to decompress and get to the point where I can actually start to consider proper self-care over the long term. Enjoying Stray Kids helped me out of a rut where all I had energy for was lying on the sofa feeling demotivated, demoralised and depressed about everything in the world. It’s only by wholeheartedly embracing joy and fun, even (or perhaps especially) when it feels really silly or like I’m not acting my age, that I get myself into a headspace where I can think about things like exercising, eating well and dealing with my feelings.
I’m still on the journey to figuring things out. Honestly, I don’t know if I’ll ever figure it out. I don’t even know if I’ll be Stray Kids stan forever. But until then, at least I’m having a good laugh at their kitchen disasters, and the day gets a little brighter.
Kirsten Han 