yeah, words.

My mother used to have this Monty Python T-shirt—no doubt a gift from her similarly gila friend—of a Gumby saying “My brain hurts!”

As a kid I just thought this shirt was funny because it was a man making a funny face saying his brain hurt. But now that I’m an adult, I have a whole other take:

I’m tired and my brain actually does fucking hurt?!

It’s not like I work the longest hours ever. But quite a lot of the ‘core’ work I do, like editing drafts and writing newsletters, takes a lot of brain energy, even if I take many YouTube and IG Reel breaks in between sentences and paragraphs. Then there’s the endless stream of admin and emails to wade through, almost every one wanting me to make some sort of decision or judgement call that I almost always secretly feel like I shouldn’t be qualified to be making, even when I quite obviously am. By the time I make it to the end of the day—or whenever it is that I decide I’ve done a respectable enough amount and allow myself to stop—my brain often feels like it’s been through a juicer.

It’s a pity, because I do have projects of my own that I want to work on. I do have another idea for a (possible) book that would be excitingly different from all the writing I’m known for. I have ideas for essays simmering in my head, and sometimes I scribble bits and pieces down in notebooks or type some keywords into my Notes (previously Notability, previously Craft, previously I don’t even remember what—I really like switching productivity apps). But when I finally get some time to myself to do whatever I want, I can’t write anymore because, see above, my brain hurts.

I used to blog on my website, kirstenhan.com. But because that’s public-facing, and also kind of my professional website, where journalists and researchers and sometimes editors and whoever else visit to fill in the contact form to email me, it kind of doesn’t make sense to keep my personal blog there. It puts the pressure on me to write good words, only the best words, when I blog there, because I never know if someone I need to have a working relationship with might make a little detour before checking my bio or going to the contact form and actually read a blog post. That page should, by rights, be me on ‘work mode’, where I should ideally present as a public intellectual (or at least someone who can be intellectual in public) and not a public meltdown.

And if there’s an editor out there who might be looking to commission someone to write a magnum opus about Singapore’s political culture (and ideally pay me US$2 per word for it), they should probably not also be reading about how my brain hurts.

Most of the spaces I write in are meant to be big: the more subscribers, the more reach, the better. There is, of course, good reason for it, and I do want my writing on those platforms to get out as far into the world as possible. But it also ups the stakes, and with it, often my anxiety and hyper-vigilance—which in turn contributes to more hurty brain.

This space, I’d quite like to keep small. To people I actually know, and people who I think it’s okay to not be using my most professional, measured and intelligent words with. People who would be okay with me writing, perhaps less intellectually, but possibly also more frankly (and hopefully, emotionally honestly, since I will get to worry less about getting POFMA-ed or charged with contempt of court or God knows what else here).

So if you’re reading this, thank you for giving and sharing this space and reading my very okay, but not always best, words.