last year, feeling and motivation came in unreliable, difficult bursts, like forcing a breath into myself when my shoulders and chest were stiff, or like trying to stretch a strained, pulled muscle back into flexibility. i wrote, but only very rarely and in extremely brief, almost-micro fits. everything felt like moving through porridge. like the way i imagine oil-pulling feels, wet and heavy and with a lot of drag, and not entirely pleasant. it forced me to start learning new ways of tethering myself so i didn’t get lost in my own sea.

i barely managed to document! i barely managed much more beyond staying afloat. this was particularly true for the last quarter of the year — october to december found me sinking fast, and trying my absolute hardest to stay afloat. functionally i was fine — i was making myself meals in the kitchen, keeping warm, going to spin classes and the gym in an effort to force-produce myself some endorphins, keeping up with readings for school. emotionally i was stuck in an existential spiral that soon became an isolation spiral: i would feel alone, get upset about feeling alone, decide that that meant i needed to get better at being alone, and then decide that i needed to do that by practising being alone and being alone more. if that sounds like a consuming, tunnel-visioned spiral, that’s because it was. it also sounds really silly! but it happened.

outside of basic functioning, i could barely eat the food that i cooked, and was cycling through podcasts and youtube videos in desperate attempts not to feel so desperately lonely, but also in a way that meant i wouldn’t have to talk or be vulnerable with other people. i went through long spots of not trusting myself to talk to or connect with people well enough. all this to say things were deeply destabilising on most if not all fronts of my life, even and especially physical, and it forced me to learn how to grab onto myself and hold fast.

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two days before the winter solstice, when it was rainiest and most grey in 2023 in berlin, i got on a plane and flew back to singapore for christmas. i wanted to type “home”, and then second-guessed myself. i guess it still is! but so is berlin in a way that i didn’t expect it to be in a year. it’s that home, for me, has always been the people, and not merely the place. not mere physical or geographical familiarity — but familiarity in a way that depends on my heart and what i know of the place. somewhere feels home where i have been places around it, felt things in spots around it. singapore is home for the kbbq restaurant that i love to be at with my close friends, with the good kimchi pancakes that are palm-sized and delicious. for the reservoir around which i’ve done 12km and 4km walks, over clattering boardwalks and beside dreamy emerald water. for my room in my parents’ flat that is so clearly not mine (if only in terms of interior decor), and the sound of a tropical storm outside it, which i never get on this side of the world. for the bus that takes me through the center of the city — the commute that i’ve cried on, been happy on, giggled at my phone while texting my friends on, the commute i’ve taken at the end of a temporary job i loved, in the middle of a full time job i dreaded, towards a meeting with an old friend that filled my heart up again.

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and speaking of meeting old friends, it’s always so moving. and i mean that as in, it makes me feel physically moved or in movement, a heady sort of swirling sensation that makes me feel like an ocean, wide and expansive and swaying. meeting old friends is always so…oh!!! i loved you for a reason and a season! and some of that reason still exists and sometimes there you are at last! i recognise you and now i remember and feel all of the love i still hold for you!! so much feeling comes pouring out of me in tears and i feel like a full person with a full heart again.

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psychogeography, i think the word is. for how i feel home. wikipedia says that’s the exploration of urban environments that emphasizes interpersonal connections to places and arbitrary routes…that 17 minute walk that google maps tells me to take to the nearest train station to my home in singapore inspires such dread and calm in me. i’ve taken that walk burnt out, calm, excited, anxious, at peace. i’ve found peace on that walk, or at least a version of myself that’s more present, whom i like more. i’ve dissociated through it. i’ve been eager to remember every single moment, stopping by the highway for photos of the monstera crawling up the side of a tree or the bougainvillea draped extravagantly over the side of the bridge railing like hands raised to take in the wind.

home is also this street, the one i walk down one morning in -8°c for a whole 45 minutes just to feel the sun on my face in a way it hasn’t been for about two months, the kbbq restaurant across my door that i brought my lover to after a day at the beach last summer, the different chinese restaurants i am making my way through slowly. home is the walk to the train station, the heavy luxurious petals on the roses at the flower shop in the train station, the street filled with wood cabins when the christmas market sets up shop in december. home is this couch with the curtains flung open so i can let the light in and look out at the blue sky, the parks i’ve been in in the summer, smoke and laughter and flies in the air, the bars i’ve sat in with the friends i made here. when i say i miss home and i’m homesick i mean i miss the people, these spaces, the air i breathed in these moments. maybe i’ll always be missing it all because it’s always passed me by.

home is difficult because it’s placeless now — now that my heart is with people both in singapore and here in europe. difficult because i want both and don’t understand (yet) how i can have that in exactly the way i think i want it currently.

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but i took the long meandering 12km route to say that i figured out again how to create my own ground. how to keep myself rooted. rooted that word that we so often think about in relation to finding a home or making one…rooting the ide athat if you don’t find a homeground suitable enough you cannot then grow. but that’s not entirely true and not entirely fitting a metaphor — i have been growing this whole time, even if i was retracing my steps to make the lines i traced out more and more solid. i had to relearn something i always knew but had trouble holding onto. the more i realised i missed home and was always feeling like it was missing from me in some way, the more i realised i needed to make it for myself.

here’s what it looks like: a baseline routine that involves getting fresh air on long walks, exercise at the gym, being around people even if i don’t think they’re super close and don’t trust myself to be completely perfectly likeable around them, going to class, reading, eating well and cooking even better. on top of that, little luxuries like the apfel krapfen at the bakery downstairs, or a donut. ginger tea whenever i want it, and marble cake for a snack from the grocery store. i’m much happier when my world has me at its center — not in an obsessive, selfish way, but in a way that prioritises my own physical and mental safety and comfort. i can only love and give from a place of already having loved and comforted myself. and then, my goodness, how big my love can be. when i am off-kilter nothing runs.

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at the cusp of the new year i felt something shifting hugely in me, something eddying in the air that caught me up in it like ribbons. it’s the same magic i feel at the precipice of something big. wherever it takes me i know i must go. it’s the same energy i feel when maggie rogers’s honey plays and i hear the lyrics i believe i could’ve been your girl for a hundred years, but i had to leave — something gripping. i feel it all. i must let myself be magic.

this is my mantra for the year that stretches ahead: there are things i must do in life that i cannot go without. i must love, i must create, i must write i must read i must sleep and be alone and be with people i love and i must eat well. if i don’t do these things the time passes anyway only i am sadder through it, so why wouldn’t i protect the time i spend doing these things?

there are fundamental to me and whatever peripheral things i think i want will come or won’t but they won’t change the fact that my dream life involves creating and writing and reading and eating and loving well. and the time will pass anyway! i must allow myself to be magic. i must do what i dream (and must!) and be who i am and i must trust that the universe and god will have me exactly where i need to be.