It was with curiosity - and a little trepidation - that I signed up to my first social media platform more than a decade ago.
In Simon Sinek’s account of the law of diffusion pertaining to innovation and culture change, there are those - “the early adopters” - who are willing to venture early into unfamiliar territory. They are curious enough to experiment and perhaps courageous enough to proceed without knowing quite where it will lead. I recognised something of myself in them.
Substack, however, took me a little longer.
Perhaps I had become too ti(r)ed to the familiar. Life had taken unexpected turns, as it is inclined to do, and I no longer felt the same urgency to enter every new space simply because it had appeared.
Perhaps I had mellowed.
Mellowed is an interesting word to use of a woman as she ages. It carries a romantic expectation of softening - that time will somehow smooth her sharper edges, quieten her opinions and make her less demanding of the world. She will become more accommodating, less troublesome. Less “passionate”, perhaps. Less vital.
I say NO to that.
Age need not extinguish the fire. It may instead teach us how to tend it.
There is a difference between losing one’s fire and becoming more discerning about where to place it. There is a difference between becoming silent and learning when words are necessary, between reacting to everything and choosing what deserves a response.
If I have mellowed, I hope it is in this sense - not that I care less, but that I have become more deliberate about how I care. The fire remains. I simply no longer feel compelled to set everything alight.
Anger, too, carries energy. In physics, energy does not simply disappear; it changes form. I wonder whether something similar might be said of our inner lives - as a way of understanding what we do with what moves through us.
I do not wish to deny anger or pretend myself beyond it. Anger can tell us that something matters, that a boundary has been crossed or that an injustice should no longer be tolerated. But I want to be discerning about what I allow that energy to become, and to whom or what it needs to be directed.
If I am angry, I allow the energy of that anger move towards clarity rather than cruelty, towards courage rather than destruction, towards constructive action rather than careless scattering of more hurt into the world.
The choice lies in how I carry and transform this energy, any energy.
Even in the early days of social media, I knew there were things I would and would not do there. I watched Facebook and Twitter become places of connection, discovery and exchange but also arenas for keyboard warriors, manufactured outrage and echo chambers in which certainty grew louder while curiosity diminished.
I have always been inclined to watch and learn before jumping in. Not because I am without opinions, but because I want to understand the shape or nature of a space before deciding how I will inhabit it.
And when I did enter, I made a promise to myself and, in some small way, to the world I was co-creating.
I would not use my words merely to provoke a reaction. I would not knowingly diminish another person for the satisfaction of making a point. I would not manufacture division in order to attract attention, even as I wrote about the absurdities, contradictions and horrors of our shared life.
This does not mean avoiding difficult subjects. Nor does it mean being agreeable, neutral or silent in the presence of injustice.
Some things need to be named. Some assumptions need to be unsettled. Some questions must be asked precisely because they make us uncomfortable.
But there is a difference between provocation that opens a space and provocation that closes one. There is a difference between a question that invites us to consider and discern, and a declaration designed to make us take sides. Between challenging an idea and stripping dignity from the person who holds it.
Clickbait trades in immediacy. It asks us to react before we have had time to reflect. It rewards certainty, outrage and the clean division of the world into opposing camps.
Introspection requires something more from us. It asks us to pause. To notice not only what we believe, but why we believe it. To consider what our responses reveal about our fears, loyalties and longings. To remain with a question long enough for it to “trouble” the stories we tell about ourselves.
As a woman, a migrant and a South-East Asian person who has spent most of her life in the West, I have lived within and sometimes between different cultural narratives. I have seen how easily people can be reduced to categories, and how categories can become assumptions about whose voice carries authority, who belongs and whose humanity is readily recognised.
As a former lawyer, an educator and a psychotherapist, I have also spent much of my working life in the presence of competing stories. I know that disagreement does not disappear simply because we wish to be kind. Nor should it. Difference can illuminate what certainty conceals.
The question is not whether we provoke, but what our provocation is in service of.
Does it deepen understanding, or merely display our cleverness? Does it make room for complexity, or flatten the world into heroes and villains? Does it invite reflection, or demand allegiance? Does it retain the humanity of those with whom we disagree?
My values lie in lifting up, in healing and in sustaining hope, not a shallow optimism that turns away from suffering, but a hope capacious enough to look directly at the messiness of life and remain engaged with it.
Hope, after all, is not the denial of what is painful. It is a decision about how we will meet it.
And so, as I begin again in this new space, I remind myself of the promise I made all those years ago.
to question without reducing complexity to a slogan,
to provoke thought without manufacturing division,
to speak honestly without forgetting the human being on the other side of my words,
to resist the temptation to trade nuance for attention, and
to remain willing to turn the questions towards myself.
Because our words do more than express who we are. They shape the spaces we inhabit and the world we share.
The fire remains. The task is to tend it well.
How are you with the contradictions and conflicts in your life?
How are you tending to the fire within?
In the messiness of life, we keep becoming.