You may have heard this one before.

I bet you, ask anyone from my alma-mater school,… SCGS or NYPS or NJC or NUS. ANY SCHOOL. :) No one really remembers me. I woulda very well been phantom all my life till 2000 when i stepped on stage at the Indoor Stadium for the Millenium show with 草蜢 and the rest of the butterflies ‘across the ocean’, an insider joke, Lydia used to crack. Anyways.

Point is I thank God that the children and teens of this generation are offered way more options than before.

I wanted to do music, but it was a taboo thing to even think about. Art was a lil more advanced and accepted at the time, but music? unheard of unless you dedicated your heart body and soul to classical music. Which, by the way i love. I’m a big fan of Debussy, and Chopin. And for those reasons, i regret not havin stuck my head through the wall through the pains and trauma of falling asleep at the piano running drills. But i’m very grateful for all those push factors and for my incompetence of simply compromising who i am, and what a stiff-neck i must’ve been to those about me, who were, well, different.

nobody about me did music, sang or danced or made a career out of the arts.

I was just in the very wrong place.

But that was precisely the impetus for needing to create, to explore a means to not go mad without a language i could finally hear myself be understood in.

What an awkward person i must’ve been, not being able to articulate my very visions and those colours in my head. The same that i find sanity in now, through the keys, the notes, the lines, the phrasings, the words, the sounds, the colours, the light and the lack of it, and everything else that i was misunderstood for.

I recalled that once in secondary/high school, the class monitress/ic came up to me when i was doodling and writing some journal, … my safe spot, where nothing needed to be explained and rambling was my only means to sanity. She very nicely asked me, what are you writing, and i remembered covering the entry in embrassment,… i said No! Lol. Oh, it sounded as awkward as it does now. But man, what i wanted to say was, look, back off, this is the only space i got to not be questioned for the things i felt strongly for. I was just different and afraid, and then got tired.. But i didn’t realise, so were they.

I just didn’t speak their language and they were trying to speak mine.

These things i reflect upon now, made me realise how the world needs to not just be understood, but to know they are loved for whoever they are.

I suppose each an everyone of us had a phase in life where they felt completely useless tryin to explain to anyone what they felt or who they are, but don’t give up.

When i received news that the article had really been published(我报 ｜ www.mypaper.com.sg), and quite unexpectedly almost a full page coverage on my journey(pg 10 of mypaper.com.sg or julietpang.net/media.php), i was really emotional. Friends and family congratulated me, and maybe just a few may still remember the journey, a very long one i’d taken to find that language to communicate the love i have for those about me. Music, art, and perhaps even dance.

These tokens we have everyday of our lives, are opportunities for us to say something, touch someone, and they accumulate to become a storybook of adventures. Haphazard or not, no matter, it’s yours to keep. But keep walking, making new stories, meet new people.

Isn’t it wonderful to know that we always have a choice to make idleness, resignation and boredom the very ambitions of our lives, or just use those tokens to make a difference, start a butterfly,… or caterpillar effect… whichever it is, as they say, you never move/tread so lightly that you don’t leave a mark in someone’s life? 

The best part is, you end up with a carnivalicious time of your life, ferris wheels, yes, roller-coasters and mini ones for the faint-hearted etcetc.

We have such a privilege of having fun while we use these free tokens to be part of the storymaking process. How are you using your tokens today?