#anxieties

It wasn't an existential threat like it was for many---but 2025 was for me still quite a wrestle. The past two years have been.

I am still not over stuff that happened in 2023. Maintaining friendships is hard; I am often angry; I always feel like I am nothing at all.

But hey! I am finally getting the therapy I need; Sharon and I have been working more on our house; and my personal + political convictions took a hard, clarifying tack left.

Unalloyed goods.

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A practice I began as a countervailing force against the internal roar of:

"You have made nothing! You are too slow a writer! You don't know how to design games! You are not worthy to make art! You are too naive and stupid to understand the way the world works!" etc

are these rings. They don't fit me super well and scratch easy; none of them cost me more than RM50. I like how understated they are.

I get a ring whenever I finish a personal project and it is fully out in the world. I have five rings now:

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SHRINESHARE, an art folio made with Sharon Chin and David Blandy. Featuring 16 (and counting) artists from around the world; exhibited over a half dozen (and counting) times around Malaysia and the UK. Inspired by Amze Emmons' Help Yourself, and explores ways we can shared ideas of the sacred without depending on the temples of the state (museums, institutions).

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A PERFECT WIFE, a contemporary horror adventure made with Amanda Lee Franck, Scrap World, and David Blandy. (Physical copies here!) About a pontianak, a refugee community, and the impunity of patriarchal power. (This ring is also shared with A CROCODILE, EATING, a shrine and art installation about how pain is metabolised, for WEIRD HOPE ENGINES. That show is the reason we made A PERFECT WIFE---it was a fundraiser to get Amanda, Scrap and me to the UK. But the crocodile should really have their own ring!)

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TO PUT AWAY A SWORD, an adventure campaign for David Blandy and Daniel Locke's ECO MOFOS!!. About dead mecha, and what to do what to do when the ruins of hypercapitalism still poison the garden you're trying to plant, after its collapse. Pretty personal to me, as I live next to an aging petroleum refinery; it is the focus of our IRL environmental activism. (Sequel coming soon!)

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CHAPTER SERF, a full TTRPG fan game for Warhammer 40K. (It's free, obvs.) You play peons serving the setting's demigod supersoldier man-children. About toil under feudal lords who were never raised to mind your humanity. My most recent project, and one am unreasonably proud of; a lot of the design work in this is me test-running stuff that will be part of my big 2026 game project, Inshallah.

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THE TIDE RETURNING, an adventure campaign for Yochai Gal's Cairn; it is part of the Cairn 2E Box Set. About mangroves as a landscape; conflict between a settler-colonial project and an indigenous resistance; cycles of repetition, of consequence, of justice. Colonialism that I return to often, given my homeland's own history and the horror abroad in the world today. Every return comes with more clarity.

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Because these rings are loose, when I wriggle my fingers they turn around and around and rub against each other with a pleasing (annoying?) clinking sound, and they help remind me I matter.

I am working on a book now---the wayang puppet on our library shelf isn't ornamentation; they are both patron and research informant!

Maybe I can add another ring, soon.

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In 2026 I will still be fidgeting my fingers, clinking my rings together---but it is a tic I hope to rely on less and less, as time passes.

In 2026 I hope I will be less angry.

In 2026 I hope I can be well enough to be a better friend to the many, many people who were friends to me, who I can never adequately thank.

I hope 2026 will be kind to us, all.

plain text: tw mention of death (but in caps)

[“The family therapist David Freeman once concluded a public lecture on intimacy and relationships by saying that if there was any one thing he hoped his audience would remember from his talk, it was the awareness that one does not know his or her spouse, his or her children. We may believe we have a perfect idea of why they act as they do, when in reality our beliefs reflect no more than our own anxieties. Whenever we ascribe a motive to the other person, as in “you are doing this because...,” we discard curiosity and immobilize compassion. The person who knows has nothing to learn, has given up on learning.”]

Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder