To be believed, you must explain. You must open the wall again, let the water show itself, pay the cost of telling. We would never ask this of the physical. We would never say: break it again, so we can see.

A worker lives six weeks, visits a million flowers, yields ¹/₁₂ teaspoon of honey she never tastes; which is similar to the human experience of finding something beautiful, then immediately translating it into service, information, care, or work.

Most love poems choose beauty over the beloved’s actual reality. This is about the poems that do not.

If I stop doing what makes me recognisable to myself and others, will there still be a life for me to return to? If I must promise that stopping will eventually make something of me, have I ever truly been permitted to stop?

I wished someone had been more patient with Nora (The Midnight Library) before she started converting every experience into lessons. So I wrote her a letter, because sometimes the most honest way to examine what a book gets wrong is to offer what it couldn't give its protagonist.

They could reason through anything. What they couldn't do was choose lunch.

Florence Nightingale was burning. On my Day 1 that became triage. We are told to put on our oxygen masks first. But what happens when you're the only one who knows where the masks are?

Fiction's capacity to expand moral imagination is also its capacity to colonize it. Every time you inhabit a character, you bring your own architecture of feeling to their experience. You can only understand them through your available emotions. This is why diverse literature matters.

When did amateur become an insult? From the Latin amator: lover. Someone who does something for love of it. The professionalisation of food culture has given us access to knowledge, but it's also made us feel like impostors in our own kitchens.

The nervous system, ancient and efficient and not remotely interested in your analysis of it, cannot tell the difference between a pigeon and a person. It only knows that something came before. Something might come again.

The designated devil's crime was not cruelty or failure or rebellion. It was witnessing. She was in the room. She remembers what was said. She noticed the distance between the family's narrative and the family's actions, and she made the error of not forgetting. She holds the archive the family needs destroyed.

An exploration of how disbelief scrapes away not just testimony, but the very legibility of a life; and what it takes to read the faint marks that remain.

I’ve been thinking about excess that wants to be mistaken for care, curation, almost moral attentiveness. How it borrows the language of virtue, and calls itself intentional, presents itself as edited, curated, almost ethical.

We are all walking around on each other's crusts. Mistaking the managed surface for the person. The cost of holding yourself together so well is that no one knows to hold you.

The objective was to deconstruct "Goblin Mode"—Oxford’s 2022 Word of the Year—moving beyond its surface-level definition of laziness. I wanted to explore it as a legitimate psychological rebellion against the "perpetual performance" of modern life, specifically within the high-pressure context of the Singapore expat community.