Eric Tian

The last two months were a painful experiment.

I stepped away from regular blogging for a while – for reasons I’ll share another time – and not writing made me realise how much I need to write. To compensate, I’ve begun journalling more obsessively, taking more online notes, and writing compulsive short stories, some of which I’ll share in the future. But it just hasn’t been the same.

In particular, there are three main reasons why I’ve come back to blogging.

1. The thrill of clarity

The more I write, the more I realise I have no idea what’s actually in my head. It takes a lot of painful exploration to even begin to understand your thoughts. But when a breakthrough occurs, the feeling of clarity is completely worth it. It’s like finding a little crystal in a room full of dust.

During the blogging break I’ve begun noticing my ideas aren’t as sharp anymore. It takes more time for me to explain my thoughts now and it’s often in incoherent ways. That’s when I realised writing online was crucial in examining my ideas. Without this practice, the quality of my conversations and reflections rapidly deteriorated.

2. Sharing is fun

I find something beautiful in throwing your voice into the void and leaving it for the world to discover. Most of the time, the call goes unanswered. But the thought of a stranger reading a post and having their life improved, even for just a moment, brings me enormous joy.

I have had the trajectory of my life drastically altered from other people’s blog posts. Despite the increasing abundance of social media, I still firmly believe in the power of this medium.

3. I like the pain

Finding ideas worth sharing is difficult. But it’s kind of satisfying in a weird way, similar to how bodybuilders enjoy muscle soreness. The exhaustion that comes from finding and consolidating an idea is one unlike that from studying or exercise or in other domains. It is unique, more addictive, more intoxicating. One I will keep running back to.

More thoughts to come.

This will be my last post for a while. After writing 300+ articles over three years, I’ve decided to take a break from writing publicly.

This decision was not made lightly. This blog has been a sanctuary for me to share my most sincere thoughts. I’ve rambled about about religion, happiness and art; shared stories on medicine, introversion and suicide; cried over suffering, poetry and love. My ideas and writing have evolved over time and this blog has captured some of its most precious, delicate moments.

It depresses me to step away from this sanctuary, knowing the clarity and relief it brings to my conscience, but a time has come where I no longer feel able to write with genuine honesty. And if one cannot write with honesty, one should not write at all.

To the readers: this blog was never written for you, but I am deeply moved by the possibility of it having improved your life. Every email, comment or like on a post touches me like no other compliment can. It is a terrifying thing to cast your voice into the void; to hear it reaffirmed is endlessly comforting. Thank you.

This site will still exist to keep my old posts and thoughts alive but will no longer be updated. As for me, the future is uncertain. But if it contains books, stories, challenges and love, there must be good waiting.

Take care.

Eric

Sometimes a random memory pops into my head. When this happens, I always search through my journal or memory banks to relive it. And whenever I do, I always wish I wrote more of the moment down.

It could be a joke somebody said. The clothes somebody wore. The feelings I felt. The details feel unimportant and excessive at the time, but in retrospect you wish you had more to look back on. There are few things more painful than a half-remembered moment.

Sometimes you never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.

Whenever I get writer’s block, it’s always due to one cause: I’m terrified of writing something bad.

What if this idea isn’t interesting enough? What’s the best way to start this piece? How will I structure my argument? What even is my argument?

The considerations can be paralyzing. There are days where I’ve spent literal hours staring at a blank text editor, unsure what to do and how to start.

Here’s an idea: just write anything down. Anything remotely interesting that comes to your mind. Just one line. And then elaborate on that line as if you were explaining it to a child. And then keep going and going, making wild and brilliant tangents in the process, until you discover something in your messy pile you can write about for a post.

It’s messy and unprofessional. Your sentences don’t make grammatical sense, the logic disappears then reappears again paragraphs later, and there are misspelled words and missing punctuation everywhere.

But from this chaos comes form, and with the tools of editing and hindsight, you can shape the form into something tangible; something beautiful. Like all sculptures beginning as a messy block, so too can we carve out ideas from our block of words and experience.

It all begins with one line.

One of the greatest ironies is that to be happy, you need to experience sadness.

If you are always happy, you are not happy. That is your normal state. Happiness ranges from contentment to immense joy, and these only exist if a discontent and immensely sad side of the spectrum exists as well.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been hit with waves of sadness. Patients passing away. World issues. Getting silly questions wrong in an exam. They all suck in the moment. Some days I seriously considered disappearing just to get rid of it all. You could call it a season of sadness.

But there is always a light at the end of the tunnel. When you crawl through the battlefield, scathed but alive, a different person emerges. You have metamorphosed into a more complex, appreciative and tender creature.

Change is always difficult and often follows sadness. But these low moments are what make the high moments ones shine, like how the bliss of sleep feels warmer after a long, hard day.

As a cyclist, I hate traffic lights. More specifically, I hate the moment when the light goes from green to orange. In this moment, there’s this grey zone where it’s not clear whether you should speed up to make the light, or slow down to a stop. This uncertainty is one of my biggest dreads, and hesitating in this moment has led me nearly getting run over multiple times, or braking to an abrupt stop.

One day, I was riding my bike and realised that for most of the times I was slowing down for a red light, I could’ve easily made it if I sped up. From that moment, I told myself I would try to make the orange light every time if I was reasonably close enough. This meant I would accelerate towards green lights as much as possible, and once past a certain “point of no return”, I just maintained a high speed until I got through.

The most interesting thing about this experiment was the shift in mentality in other areas of life. There are many “orange lights” in our day-to-day experience. These are moments where you have made progress in an area, like applying for a job, finding a romantic partner or finishing a project, but there is a final hurdle waiting to be overcome. And the annoying thing is, the hurdle is time-sensitive.

If you wait too long to send a job application, the recruitment period will be over. If you wait too long to ask your love interest out, the other person may have lost interest in you. If you procrastinate on a project, you face a criticism from your boss or your own self-talk.

You have a choice in these moments. Speed up and chase for the green light, not letting the opportunity pass, or slow down in the face of a potential rejection. Make it or wait. What I’ve found is that meeting an orange light and accelerating through it through the finish line is the best feeling ever. You feel an amazing breeze against your face, and the world around you stops as cars wait for their turn to go. In that moment, you feel like the world is watching you.

And braking last minute at the red traffic light, knowing you could’ve made it if you put in just a little more effort, is terribly heartbreaking.

My favourite piece in chess is the pawn. Why, you might ask, a pawn, when there are far more powerful, interesting pieces like the almighty queen, the elusive knight or the game-deciding king? The reason is because of the pawn’s potential. A pawn, upon reaching the back rank, can become any other piece in the game. It can start off the game as a most ordinary henchman, but 40 moves later, turn the tables as a game-winning queen. To me, that is beautiful.

My favourite moments in life are the ones that force change. Most of my life decisions are driven by a search for sights, conversations and ideas that make me go, “wait a second, let me reconsider that”. My hobby of reading gives me insights to new ideas, my career in medicine gives allows me unexpected conversations, and my practice of journalling allows me to reflect on these for change.

The frustrating thing is that change is difficult. We hope it will be as simple as taking the pawn off the board and replacing it with a queen, but it rarely is. Change often requires two processes: recognising a flaw in ourselves and initiating its necessary death. Both are immensely difficult to do.

For similar reasons as the pawn, the caterpillar is one of my favourite animals. Its transformation into a butterfly is extraordinarily beautiful, and unique in the animal kingdom. But the process of change in a caterpillar is far from easy. From The New York Times:

“It turns out that the inside of a cocoon is — at least by outside-of-a-cocoon standards — pretty bleak. Terrible things happen in there: a campaign of grisly desolation that would put most horror movies to shame. What a caterpillar is doing, in its self–imposed quarantine, is basically digesting itself. It is using enzymes to reduce its body to goo, turning itself into a soup of ex-caterpillar — a nearly formless sludge oozing around a couple of leftover essential organs (tracheal tubes, gut).

Only after this near-total self-annihilation can the new growth begin. Inside that gruesome mush are special clusters of cells called “imaginal discs,” which sounds like something from a Disney movie but which I have been assured is actual biology. Imaginal discs are basically the seeds of crucial butterfly structures: eyes, wings, genitalia and so on. These parts gorge themselves on the protein of the deconstructed caterpillar, growing exponentially, taking form, becoming real. That’s how you get a butterfly: out of the horrid meltdown of a modest caterpillar.”

Did you catch that last line? The origins of the beautiful butterfly are from the meltdown of a modest caterpillar.

I often wonder what goes through a caterpillar’s mind as it begins releasing enzymes to digest itself. Is it terrified at the pain it will endure? Does it consider dropping out halfway through its metamorphosis? Does it ever ask itself, “Who ever said I needed to be a butterfly? I’m damn happy being a caterpillar and will stay this way.”

But of course, we know that becoming a butterfly is the natural progression of a caterpillar’s life. A caterpillar deciding to not metamorphose is like a child deciding to not become an adult. Even though the change is difficult, causing a destruction of itself in the process, it must happen.

Change is difficult, but simultaneously necessary. It requires a painful dissolution of the old, and a slow rebuilding of the new. Yet like a pawn becoming a queen or a caterpillar metamorphosing into a butterfly, the result is beautiful. And because of the effort required for change, its beauty is exponentially greater.

For most my life, I assumed the worst in people.

I assumed people were dangerous, untrustworthy, naive, stupid, uninteresting and pathologically selfish. It was up to them to prove to me that they weren’t these things, and then we could start being friends.

These questions made me terrified of interacting with strangers. I make no eye contact when walking in public, interacted solely with my friendship group and rarely revealed my secrets to anyone.

But recently, as part of a social experiment, I’ve decided to take the opposite approach: to assume the best in people. That means to assume people are trustworthy, intelligent, kind-hearted, immensely talented, can keep secrets and have a strong moral compass. With this baseline, everybody is a friend by default. If they later prove to me that they shouldn’t be a friend, I gently let them go.

This experiment has gone on for about one year now. Having to drastically re-engineer my worldview has been exhausting at times, but overall it has been a wonderful gift.

What I’ve come to realise is people tend to become the person you perceive them to be. If you don’t trust anybody and keep to yourself, people owe you nothing and have less reason to back you. But if you give people the responsibility of your trust, they generally live up to it and prove themselves to be trustworthy.

If you think people are dumb, you will never ask anyone interesting or difficult questions so they will never have a chance to prove their intellect. But if you believe people are smart and give them a chance to speak, even the most unreflective minds might surprise you. The way you see people is the way you treat them, and the way you treat them is what they become.

I wish I could go back and tell little Eric to chill out a little more. I would urge him to see the world as a good place, rather than an evil one, because this would make the world a better place. Being cautious has its context, but to constantly walk in fear and suspicion seems like a sad road to embark on.

I’m fascinated by kids.

Whenever I look at one, I think about all the possibilities life has in store for them. Will they be an athlete or a scholar? A lover or a hermit? An optimist or a pessimist? The infinite paths that they can take, and the different people they can become, is exhilarating.

But in a way, we adults aren’t too different. Even if we’ve graduated, started full time work and even started a family, there is always opportunity for change. Even if our life is at the end of 30 years’ of roads, there may be decades more in front of us.

Choose your paths wisely.

In providing a service, the art of delivery is just as important as the actual service itself. If Amazon shipped all its products in a cheap crumpled up box, its stocks would plummet, regardless of how good the product was. You want the whole buying process – from browsing the website, the shipping and the delivery – to be as high quality as possible. This is where Amazon beats other companies, with its lightning fast delivery times, comprehensive catalogue, and strong customer support, making Jeff Bezos the richest man in the world.

This applies to other domains. Over the last few weeks, I’ve noticed that the best doctors aren’t the smartest ones, the kindest ones, nor the most empathetic ones. They are the ones that make the patient feel like that doctor is the smartest one, the nicest one and the most empathetic one. And when a patient feels this way, they’re more likely to listen closely, take their medications and get better.

You can be smart, but fail to articulate your words clearly, thereby making you seem dumb. You can be kind, but say something the wrong way, thereby making you seem rude. You can be the most empathetic person in the world, taking on all the burden and guilt of the speaker, but forget to acknowledge them, thereby making you appear seem cold. And this matters a great deal, because as Maya Angelou put it,

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

In the world of business, this is where marketing comes in. Does your brand appear trustworthy? Legitimate? Able to succeed? Billions of dollars are thrown into making people say “yes” to these questions because a good company image drives consumer spending.

The importance is not lost in human interactions. Your tone, eye contact, body language and clarity of speech can make the difference between being a hopeless or talented doctor; a trustworthy or unreliable colleague; a wonderful or bad friend. If someone’s perceptions of you matter at all, then your delivery matters a great deal, for this drives how you make them feel.

And how you make someone feel, I would argue, drives everything else.