Photo: Noah Busch
Sometimes you try and you try, but all you get for your troubles is falling face-first into the dirt. I remember the first time I had felt hopeless. I was six years into my hairdressing career when I realised I didn’t want to have six-day workweeks anymore.
But change didn’t come easy. I had no other skills, and back then, job-search portals were few and far in between, seeing as to how the first iPhone hadn’t even launched yet.
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Photo credit: Sam Caplat
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I can’t polish a blank page, which is why I actually started writing this piece — I wanted to prove to myself that I couldn’t polish crap either. I haven’t been able to write as freely as I’d like lately, and it’s probably because I’m clinging to perfection.
Much of my workflow involves tinkering the first sentence over and over until I realise I’ve veered so far off what I actually wanted to say that I end up abandoning the piece completely.
It was a breezy night, and the calm winds frisked the trees that grew above the rooftop bar we were in. I was chilling with Len and Jerry, both who just finished their shifts at the turntables. A foreign talent—we’ll name him Russo—had since taken over the decks.
I had somehow figured that the trials and tribulations of a writer made for great conversation. I guess alcohol does that to you.
This piece began in the trash, and there it stayed till I met Myint Soe, a Myanmarese artist. He sat across me in a longyi, chin resting on his hand, as if he was smoking an invisible cigarette.
“If we look at this table, we’d both see the same thing. But if we were to put it in painting, we’d end up with different depictions of it. You see, artists are like drugs. We offer perspectives that people would never have experienced otherwise, and in essence, we become part of them forever.”
And that, ladies and gentlemen, was how I found the ending to this story—a story I began with a question.
Your Friendly Malaysian Writer 