For the first time in quite a long time, I really want to write.

It doesn’t matter if it’s on my loud clackety mechanical keyboard at home, or on my laptop in a café somewhere in town, or even typing on my phone with just my thumbs. I want to watch the letters appearing on screen, the words forming before my eyes. For the first time in awhile, it feels like it’s flowing quite nicely.

I think I can trace this back to my decision to get back to writing for myself and not just for work. There is a slight feeling of liberation at the thought of being free to write whatever I want. It doesn’t need to be about politics or democracy or human rights or the death penalty. It doesn’t need to be super tightly crafted. It doesn’t even need to be that intelligent. It’s just about getting down what’s in my head and what gives me satisfaction. I am reminded that this is my natural state, the mode of communication that I feel most comfortable with.

It was incredibly well-timed that, right after I decided that I should make more of an effort to give myself the time and space to do more writing for myself, my friends and I very organically came up with the idea to start a newsletter that would be just about fun and impulse and whimsy. We named it Passion Procrastination; a passion project born out of procrastinating on our actual jobs. The night we launched it, I felt such a giddy joy. It might have made me even happier than finding out that my book had made Kinokuniya’s best seller list.

When I was a kid, I was told of the virtues of 先苦后甜. First the bitter, then the sweet. First the homework, then the play. Instant gratification was cast as impulsive, childish weakness, while delayed gratification was a sign of maturity and responsibility. It went a long way in teaching me to have a good ethic. The problem was that it then kept going.

First the work, then the play. But what if there is no end to the work? As a ‘no work, no pay’ freelancer, there was always something that could be done: if I had commissioned work I had to finish it and deliver; if I didn’t have work then it felt like I should be looking for some. Otherwise, there would be civil society work to get done. Even if there wasn’t, time would be spent wondering about whether there was anything to be done. Play would be suspended as I looked around for work to do, nervous that I might have missed something that needed my attention.

First the work, then the play. First the work, then. First the work. The work. First.

I finished all the work I had scheduled for myself at about two in the afternoon the other day. I was immediately at a loose end. I felt like I’d sat for an exam that had turned out to be much easier than expected. Too easy. Suspiciously easy. 😒😒😒

My first thought was to immediately plow ahead and do the work I’d planned for the next few days too. Wouldn’t it be better to get through all of them so I could play more later? 先苦后甜.

I had to make a deliberate decision not to do that, to force myself to recognise that I need time to have fun, to do nothing, to have hobbies and passion projects. Let’s be honest, I have so many hobbies and passion projects—books to read! cross-stitch to finish! dramas to watch!—that I can’t do them all. Even with my fun I am constantly feeling like I’m running out of time.

I’m trying to learn to go with the flow a little more—in an intentional way, not a ‘paper boat on the current and eventually capsizing’ way. As always with me, writing seems to be part of the process. On some level, you could say that I’ve written myself to where I am now. Perhaps I might write myself out again.