Five weeks ago, I had pledged to go on a writing journey to write my truth with Foster.co. Admittedly, I wasn’t too involved in many of the Season 2 workshops. However, the few I did attend left a significant impact on how I approached the writing process. As a result, here is my truth I’d like to share…
I'm good at being open. But I struggle with being vulnerable.
To me, the difference between the two is that being open is telling people your story. Being vulnerable is letting other people in to be part of it.
I see the two as inversely correlated. Because when you’re open, few people dig deeper into who you are. Few people ask you harder questions. They assume that if you’re open, you’re telling them the whole story. But often, my openness serves as a shield to stop me from showing vulnerability.
I often shy away even when a safe space is cultivated for people to share their vulnerability. For instance, a week ago, Tom White (
) gave a workshop for Foster.co. Despite putting together a presentation, he threw it away and spoke candidly on the importance of exercising your vulnerability in writing. He emphasised using words to expose yourself to connect with others. And how the more scared you are of writing about a topic, the more you need to write about it. He asked us to think about why we write and to honestly share the reasons in the workshop. Yet I remained quiet.The question of why I write has since been on my mind. And I’ve got a raging urge to answer it truthfully.
There are often two reasons behind people’s behaviours: the supposed logical reason and the real reason. The supposed logical reason I tell people why I write is to clarify and distil the things I learn. I write to share my stories and perceptions of the world.
But to know the real reason, first, we have to let George Orwell say a few words:
“I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject-matter will be determined by the age he lives in – at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own – but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, or in some perverse mood: but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write.”
I am the eldest child of three, but there’s quite a gap between my brothers and me - four years and fifteen years. For this reason, I've inherited the birthright of telling my brothers what to do when my parents aren’t around.
From an early age, perhaps, nine or ten, I became aware of a hidden game with hidden rules that everyone was playing. It’s a game that silently directs our thoughts and actions. It consumes everyone alive, and there’s no way to escape it. It’s the game of status.
Status drives us to seek connection and rank ourselves. It drives us to be accepted into groups and acquire status within them. It’s a game that never ends. And it’s a game that brings out the worst and the best in us.
I first became aware of it at my local Vietnamese church. The Vietnamese community had heard how my mum heavily invested in my education and succeeded in getting me into a grammar school. At the same time, my parents had done well in their takeaway business. Allowing us to move out from one of the roughest parts of Birmingham and into a more affluent area. Praise and admiration poured in of our family's success.
When I was seventeen, I signed up for my first psychology lesson. I learned about the insidious nature of human authority in the Stanley Milgram experiments. And how Burrhus Frederic Skinner conditioned behaviour. The studies of human psychology sent shivers down my spine, yet it hooked my curiosity in further.
At nineteen, I moved to London to pursue a degree in Psychology. Around the same time, I started playing poker to fund my newfound drinking habits. Two poker friends discovered I had an intuition for it, and their encouragement kickstarted my infatuation with the game. Over the course of my psychology degree, my obsession with poker led to a decline in my grades. Despite pouring all my efforts into poker, I managed to graduate from university.
Upon graduation, I got asked the question that everybody gets asked: What do you want to do? I didn't know. But also, I felt inadequate for not knowing. Everyone around me seemed to have life figured out. So I did the only thing I knew I liked - play poker.
I enjoyed poker for its intellectual challenge. It allowed me to strategise and outthink my opponents.
Over time I refined the skill of being able to step into my opponent's shoes, parsing the specifics and figuring out what they were thinking. In many ways, it’s like being omniscient. Given enough time, I could guess accurately what an opponent was going to do. When their bets were value or when they were bluffs. I had fine-tuned my observational skills to spot small deviations in an opponent's strategy and plan accordingly.
At some point, perhaps, when I moved into high stakes, poker became less about the intellectual challenge and more of a power trip for my ego. There was a sense of power I felt when bluffing an opponent, knowing full well they couldn’t withstand the pressure. Or deploying every aggressive tactic to frustrate a bad professional and relish in their rage. Or looking someone in the eyes and sending them broke, knowing that all they had was the money on the table. Poker became a game where I imposed my will on those who dared to sit down to challenge me.
Poker brought out not only the best but also the worst in me. I saw the underbelly of my character. The arrogance. The ego. The hubris. The pride. The vanity. I operated in a world where it was either take or be taken. And when you spend so much time taking, all you know is how to be envious, greedy and selfish.
I had never intended to stay in poker for as long as I did. The intention was always to try and figure out what I wanted to do in life, but the money became too good. It was only after a long, hard-fought poker session that I finally snapped and began questioning what this was all for.
I started writing to find out what I was thinking, what I felt, what I wanted and what I feared. I wanted to know why. Why did I feel a lack of fulfilment? Why did I want to be admired so much? Why do I have certain beliefs? Why am I the way I am?
It's been one and a half years since I left poker behind. And I’ve somehow ended up as a (copy)writer. This transition often baffles me. Numbers come naturally to me more than words ever did. Curating descriptive language feels impossible to me. And I often find lines of poetry and literature far too beautiful and strange to comprehend.
Yet the more I write, the more I feel a familiarity in writing akin to poker. In many ways, writing is the act of imposing your will on readers. Writing is aggressive and hostile. It's vain and self-centred. Or, as William Zinsser writes, “writing is an act of ego.” There’s a desire to seem clever and to sound well-articulated.
When you write, you’re telling your readers listen to me, see it my way and change your mind. Just like how on the poker table, you try to convince your opponent that you’re weak whilst concealing a monstrously strong hand. You can dress your words up in gentle, flowery and tender vocabulary, but there’s no denying that the act of putting pen to paper is the imposition of the writer’s judgment on a reader’s private space.
I’m not lying when I tell people the logical reason. But I also write because I have the desire to push my readers in a certain direction. To alter their thoughts. To persuade them that I know better. And to influence them into taking action. Had I been born as the middle child or the youngest and not raised to be competitive, perhaps I might have written with less of a temperament for power, admiration and persuasion. There lies within me this deep compulsion to be admired and understood. But it runs as deep as my desire to help and connect with others.
The white space allows me to be vulnerable with myself. To make sense of the unthinkable things. To illuminate the complex and moral grey areas of my human nature. To admit to error. To kill outdated thoughts, habits and beliefs that impede my growth. To see where I am so that I do not repeat the mistakes of my past. It’s the only way I know how to figure out what I really think and honestly feel.
And every time I share my story and hit publish, I become more aware of the magnitude of influence my words have. Every writer has this influence. We have the superpower of shining a magnifying glass on what people recognise but haven’t consciously thought about or seen. We have the ability to make people feel a little less lonely and to make others belong. Because of this, writers must be careful with words. Words are dangerous. Words are powerful. Words are like a fire, and the outcome depends on how you use it – to light the way or to destroy.
And this is what writing does. It keeps me honest. It keeps me modest. It gives me something to consider that’s bigger than me.
I can't vouch for why other writers write. But I do have one theory: We write to understand and connect with ourselves. Had we known the answers about ourselves, we would have never become writers.
