homecoming

back to where it all began

I’m in my new home, I’ve got my macbook and monitors setup, and I’m itching to get back to work. I’ve been so busy with the move that I’ve barely touched my devices at all for weeks, which I initially found stressful, but eventually came to find quite relaxing. It made me realize (re-realize?) that I’ve been in this ‘neurotic holding pattern’ for years– gripping anxiously and tightly onto my ‘work’ past the point of any meaningful productivity– and whatever branch of this I’ve been on lately, the stem and roots of it go all the way back to the beginning of my childhood. So that’s something I’ve been really sitting with. I’ve also coincidentally spent a lot of time just staring at trees.

I’ve been self-employed for over 7 years now, which is longer than the longest job I had (5.5 years). My parents were self-employed my whole life, and I’ve come to see that it deeply shaped me without them ever making any sort of effort to– both for better and worse. I’ve always chafed at authority, and I don’t mean that in a “i’m a rebel outlaw too cool for school” way– I mean that I’ve always struggled even with the most basic sense of structure and routine. I’ve always struggled even to get myself to do things that I believe that I want to do. And this has had Consequences for me in every area of my life.

(source tweet)

For those of you who remember when my profile picture used to have a crown motif on it, that was very much about me trying to step into my own sovereignty, earn my own respect, recognize that I’m already the monarch of my own life. I want to believe that I’ve made some progress on that front over the years, but lately I’ve been really coming to face the areas in which I made little progress, or even somehow regressed and made things worse over the years. I have a lot of feelings about it. It’s tiresome, humbling, humiliating… and usually this is the part where I do a ‘turnaround’ where I find some silver lining or make some promise to make things better, but on this particular cycle I’ve been wondering if that’s premature. If I don’t sit with my feelings long enough to actually process them, and if my anxious eagerness to try and fix things is precisely what keeps things from getting ‘fixed’, if there’s even anything to fix at all.

Raising a toddler has been eye-opening about this sort of thing. It’s sort of like one of those detective tv shows where the detective is working on a case and also some personal issues, and then some insight from either the case or the personal issue turns out to have Implications for the other thing. I always thought that was kind of cheesy, but as I get older and accumulate more experience, I’ve found that it really does often work out that way. It’s happened for me with many of my marketing clients, too– my clients tend to pick me because they (correctly) see something of themselves in me, and the advice that I give them as a professional tends to have Implications for my own work and life. It’s always easier to see the way out of other people’s problems. So, like Uncle Iroh said, sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself is to help somebody else.

I didn’t really have a particular goal in mind when I started writing this post. I just knew that I wanted to get to my computer and allow words to flow, since I haven’t done that in months, and much has happened since. I have multiple things I could talk about from here. Maybe I’ll quickly sketch them out:

• I’d like to write more about my experience of moving. An idea I had for a title was “the halfway house”, since that’s how I often half-jokingly (but earnestly) described my previous home to my friends. We (my wife and I) never quite fully made a home of it, and I am filled with regret and shame about that. It’s tricky to make sense of. In the spirit of The Parable of the Horses, maybe the bad thing led to other good things. Maybe the sprawling online world of friends that I’ve built was significantly a consequence of me not feeling at home in my own home. But was that necessarily a good thing? I don’t know. We’ll see.

• Another angle I’ve thought about is in terms of exile. My wife and I eloped in secret in December 2012 largely because her parents disapproved of our relationship, and we wanted a place of our own far away from our families. They eventually came around years later, and the birth of our son in 2023 really brought our families closer together. And now in 2025, we’ve finally moved ‘back’ to the east of Singapore, where most of both of our families are, drastically cutting down travel time between our homes, making it much easier for all of to be together, even on a whim. There are all sorts of other interesting things that are arising out of this. Many of my memories from my childhood and teens are rooted in locations in the east, and I’d spent a dozen years– a full zodiac cycle, and also coincidentally the length of time the Pandavas from the Mahabharata spent in exile in the forest– away from all of that. I’ve now been “back” for 2 weeks, so maybe this is premature, because I still don’t know what I’m in for with my “return”. But I have a sense that it will be both familiar and surprising.

• I met an old friend that I used to play in a band with, to return him his guitar which I had held on to for years while he was studying in Canada. Amongst other things, we found ourselves talking about our respective thoughts and experiences about ‘homecoming’– and I joked, “no man ever steps in Bedok twice, for he is not the same man, and it is not the same Bedok” (Bedok is a neighborhood in the east of Singapore, close to where I grew up). I think this is going to be a theme for me in the coming year.

As always, I have more to say about everything, but I’m trying to get into the habit of wrapping things up and actually hitting send, rather than leaving things to languish in my drafts indefinitely. Let’s end with a classic bit from TS Eliot’s Little Gidding (1942):

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.