Stumbling into Self-Forgetting
Allowing ourselves to move and be moved during significant changes, transitions and turnings.
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These posts are meant to be what Lewis Hyde describes as a “Gift.” What this “Gift” concept means for me is that
Nothing is expected out of you.
I hope you receive it.
I hope this animates and transforms you.
I hope you spread the love to others.
It’s 1990, an era where no one has peanut allergies, a soda plus a 20 cent pack Nutella was a considered lunch, and free-range 10-year-old kids roaming around town was not a crime.
I’m 12-years-old. I’m lying in bed, mulling about the big move from primary to secondary school, my terrible grades from my Primary School Leaving Exams (PSLE) that has caused an extra year ahead in an all-boys school, and all the girls that I’m never going to meet.
There is something else on my mind. My head is swirling. Even though I know it’s still a long way, I know it will be an eventuality. Though it seems both like a lifetime away and something approximating tomorrow, in about 6 years time, I will have to go to a place that I do not want to go.
When I turn 18, I will have to be enlisted. Two and a half years of my life will be lost to the military. I will have to shave my head, dawn on a green uniform, march like an automaton and do manly things like pick up arms, shoot at targets, crawl on mud and climb man-made obstacles. Somehow I also got it in my head that we would have to do jump off a plane and paratroop to the jungles.
The Army
If you are a male living in Singapore, you must be thinking I am a sissy for worrying about nothing. Other boys my age are not even concerned about it; some are even looking forward to it. But the truth is, I’m totally freaked out about this impending doom. Besides the disruption that it will make to the “prime-time” as I come of age, and my philosophical disagreements with the idea of taking up arms, all I could picture is me being ordered to jump off a C-17 Globemaster plane with a parachute pack that won’t open.
And I am afraid of heights.
My dread about heights were confirmed when I turned 13. I am standing on top of a tree, at the start of a makeshift zipline. I’m a reluctant boyscout, and Jason the instructor is cursing at me to get my butt off the tree and make the leap down the rope. I was terrified, and despite the jeering from my peers in the queue, my height phobia is not about to relent. The cursing from Jason ramps up by three notches, and he begins to threaten. He says that I will lose my hands, and he meant it. Not because he will cut them off, but because the rope around my wrist is cutting the bloodflow. Yeah right, so I thought. I check—Oh shit, he’s right. My hands were turning pale-blue; I can barely feel my fingers.
I didn’t realise it at that time that more than 60 mins have passed. I don’t know what happened next, but out of sheer annoyance at my lack of bravery, Jason must have given me a nudge down that zipline. I made it down that tree in one piece. Strangely, my height phobia is still in tact. My fear had not gone away.
In fact, I am now more afraid about the impending helicopter jump that I will have to make in 5 years time and the parachute that malfunctions.
I wasn’t going to go in unprepared. I started to train before I entered the first 3 months of Basic Military Training (BMT). I had to, because I am a borderline underweight, scrawny kid that could have easlier been blown by the westerly winds.
I had another method of preparation in mind: To “downgrade.” When someone is not medically fit, you’d get a downgrade status. With that, comes “privileges.” I’ve heard stories of friends who get downgraded due to things medical conditions like asthma, or as bizarre as allegies to grass, skin reactions to the unifrom, which exempted them from going outfield. This kept them in the frosty air-conditions headquarters throughout their 2.5 years of mandatory service.
So what do I do? Two days before the medical exam, I began my prisoner of war, commando-style home-training: I refrained from sleeping. I drank copious amounts of coffee and energy drinks, hoping to whack my blood pressure temporarily and as well as to reduce the standard deviation to minus 1 in my psychological evaluation. It didn’t work. Oddly, I am still fit as a fiddle, and I have no idea how I faired in those batteries of questionnaires.
Then I thought of my friend Robin. He’s twice my weight. Maybe I could get him to sit on me and slide down my leg to dislocate my knee. Robin laughed at the idea. Well, he could laugh because _he’s_ downgraded.
I know, this all sounds silly. This is a very difficult time in my life. Nearing the time of enlistment, I was on the verge of getting kicked out of school from my tertiary education in Business Administration (I hated the course. There was something not quite right about how economics and marketing were taught.), I was in a tumultous relationship that went nowhere, and the only saving grace was playing music in a band. That is now going to be disrupted, plus all of my bandmates are already enlisted. One of them is an Army Guard, another was a police, and “downgraded” Robin—lucky guy—is a storeman.
To make matters worse, since the business diploma wasn’t my thing, I had no idea where I was going with my life.
Shaven Heads
My head is now shaven; I look like an egg. I’m lined up with the rest of the other eggs, fashioned with green uniform in an island off Singapore for BMT. My folks are with me. I keep a brave front. Some boys are crying, not because of leaving their moms and dads, but mostly because someone who looks like a butcher is stripping their locks of hair like a helpless sheep. Any preferred hairstyle request is met with nonchalance by the butcher/barber; some were mocked by the military instructor nearby. Everyone got the same haircut: Egghead.
As we said goodbye to our parents and marched as a company for the first time to our bunks, I am filled with dread. I’d be cut off from everything else in my world. Cellphones were not a common thing. All I have in my possessions is a pager (a device that someone can “page” you, and you’d have to call them back from a landline or a payphone), my Discman, and a Bible that my friend bought for me a few years back.
Some of these boys carried a gangster bravado. Some knew each other and spoke a dialect that I am vaguely familar with (Hokkien). Some are solemn like me. I will now have to spend at least my 3 months in BMT with boys that I have no affliation with.
As we filed in lines of three as a company and marched to the beat of swearing instructors, I must have dissociated. I was physically there, but my mind went elsewhere into the clouds. My feet is moving, but it’s as if I’ve somehow managed to detach out of my own body.
I look around. Every egghead is in now in the same boat. Something overcame me. For the first time in my life, I decided to “Forget about myself.”
I didn’t realise it then, but this became a pivotal season of my life. It wasn’t just about my mandatory enlistment to National Service. This was what it looked like on the outside. But on the _inside_, it was an invisible story that was unfolding. I didn’t choose this, but I was “moved” and compelled to make this leap inside. Years later, I came to understand this chapter of my life as a period of **“Leaving myself and focusing on others.”**
Leaving Myself
Going in with this frame of mind saved my life, or at least my sanity. I spent the first couple of weeks focusing on the specific 12 section-mates in the Platoon. We were housed in one bunk. I learned that the guy on my left, Bob, was not only born on the same day as I am, but had the National Registration Identity Card (NRIC) that was one last digit smaller than mine. In other words, his mother must have been the person in front of my mother at the birth registrary. The guy on my right––my assigned buddy––was a recluse. He’s more timid than I was. Two weeks into BMT, there was a stench that lurked in our bunk that was coming from my buddy’s cupboard. We had to confront him about it. Turns out he had been too afraid to go to bath with the other lads. He hasn’t taken a proper shower for several days.
To be clear, I am no saint. I had no other coping mechanism. It’s all I could do to not let my anxiety tear me apart. When we did our endurance run, I did what I could to cheer on my section-mates, even though I’m only as fast as a turtle. When we did the obstacle courses, I did what I could to push the slower guys up the brick wall climb.
Back in the bunk at night, we talked sh*t. I listened to Bob talk about his girlfriend woes. In exchange, he would lend me his prized possession, his cellphone (a rarity at that era) to call my girlfriend. A saving grace.
Then there was Eddie. God only knows why he’s there. We suspect he’s gay, but he never said so. But Eddie was the comic relief that we needed. He’s the live-wire. We became good friends. Levity is most welcomed in an insane environment of screaming instructors.
Moving and Being Moved
I didn’t know it then, but more than 2 decades later, I now realise that if we learn to see the movements of our lives, we are moving—and being moved—between different seasons of our lives. Circumstances on the outside may not be our choice, therefore it can feel like we are cajoled into things. But on the inside, we can figure a way. Like a sailboat, we depend on the winds to be moved, but we must also figure out a way to steer it.
During pivotal moments of transitions, we are crossing between worlds. This period could be when you lose a job, struck by illness, bereaved from a death of a close family member or friend, or embark on a new direction. This transition is one that bridges between the old world and the new world. Often times, we don’t know completely what this new terrain is really like until we get there.
The period of bridgecrossing is one that I invite you to take heed. When crossing bridges, our senses are heightened. When we are at the edge of everything, we see things more acutely. Do not aneasathise yourself in this process. If you keep your eyes open, you might realise what this new season asks of you.
Every seasons has its needs. Needs are the prickly needles that keeps poking at you, until you pay attention.
So pay attention.
Note: This is an outtake for an upcoming book, Crossing Between Worlds: Moving and Being Moved Through the Transitions of Life.
Daryl Chow Ph.D. is the author of The First Kiss, co-author of Better Results, and The Write to Recovery, Creating Impact, and the new book The Field Guide to Better Results .
If you are a helping professional, you might like my other Substack, Frontiers of Psychotherapist Development (FPD).