We’re two months and a half into 2025, and these eleven weeks have hit me like a ton of bricks. I thought I had a handle on how I’m going to take this year by the horns, but it seems each week has been smacking me with a big, gnarly, unwelcome surprise. Fromconscription-aged team members from Myanmar having tourgently cross borders, to having to cross the border myself into Laos to do a seat-of-the-pants visa run, to being forcibly kicked out of a volunteer thing I’ve been doing for half a year, to a relationship I treasure coming to an end, to the Trump administration’spulling of USAID funding that is directly screwing over people like me who work in international development — my anxiety levels have not been healthy. Even when I know full well we live in precarious times, facing the reality of it all still has me winded more often than I’d like.
I meant to write this post in time for the 4th anniversary of thecoup in Myanmar on 1 February, but the past few weeks just had me overwhelmed. To be honest, I’m scrambling to get more of a handle on things now. Please bear with me as I try my best to grapple, mend and muddle through even as the headwinds blow.
In September 2024, as devastating floods ripped through Myanmar, affecting over a million people who were already beaten and battered by the civil war, I found myself thinking up a poem. I hardly ever write poetry. I don’t ever seek out poetry to read either. As much as I enjoy curated poems that my friends send to me, I never feel like I have a knack for it. But sometimes, maybe once a year, thoughts and feelings percolate in my head into words I feel could be strung together in formats other than prose.
That time around, it was a feeling of things accumulating, becoming too much to hold on to, in our bodies, in our hearts, and in our memories. Looking at it again a few months after writing it, I am somewhat trying to puzzle through my own memories of it.
Disappearing Messages
One week
One day
8 hours
5 minutes
30 seconds
4 years
They are not there anymore.
How many times
before we call it a day?
How many things
can we be under in one lifetime?
Under water.
Under fire.
Under watchful eyes.
Under the weight of distance.
Understand
we choose to forget
because we can choose to remember
Choosing to forget
I have friends who work in digital security, whose job it is to get vulnerable people in civil society (activists who are routinely targeted by trolls and hackers, for example) to adopt secure digital practices, like not using the same password for all their accounts, backing up their data onto a secure cloud, or using the encrypted messaging app Signal. Their perennial complaint is that, for many things in life, people don’t worry about nightmare scenarios until they are in one, and suddenly they remember to start taking all the precautions they should have taken ages ago.
Within a few months of the coup in February 2021, millions of people in Myanmar had started using Signal for all their instant messaging needs. Nobody knew what kinds of sophisticated digital surveillance technologies the new military junta had, and nobody wanted to take their chances. Everyone finally remembered the app that all their techie friends wanted them to install that supposedly makes your messages impossible to spy on.
If you are not familiar with it, Signal is an app that is made by idealistic geeks under a non-profit foundation, supported only through charitable funding, and is completely open source. Unlike other messaging apps that have surveillance capitalism as their business model — making money by gathering as much data on their users as they can get away with — Signal does not gather any information about their users.
It also pioneered some features that have been adopted by many other messaging apps, such as disappearing messages. For chats that are highly sensitive, you can make it so that no record of your conversations remains on your phone, computer or the cloud after a certain period of time. This goes counter to the way most of the digital world operates today, where governments, corporations and individual people alike want to record and then remember everything. You are induced into the FOMO of believing that you can’t possibly lose any photo you have ever taken in your life, because why let go unless you absolutely have to, right?
Right.
Right at this moment, some policeman in Tehran sits back as an algorithm matches a protester’s face to a name, because the surveillance state remembers everyone. Some billionaire in San Francisco schemes to make sure everything ever recorded is made into a teachable moment for AI shoggoths.
But in the early days of the coup in Myanmar, we did not want to leave digital memories. We all got on Signal and turned on our disappearing messages. Some conversations had messages blipping in and out of existence every 30 seconds. Other conversations were less disorienting, but still short lived, staying on our phones for mere hours, or if you knew for sure all parties were in a safe space, maybe a week. When it’s too risky to offload the task of remembering to our digital devices, we have to go back to relying on our human memories.
Human memory is not like a computer’s. We attach meaning to our memories. I don’t even know if we can remember things that don’t mean anything to us. As such, we curate all our experiences down to the things we need to hold on to, to tell the stories that we want to remember. I am using the words need and want in a cavalier way to underline the tension between the two. Sometimes our bodies bury these memories and stories against our will into deep parts of our psyches. The line between what our bodies need and our minds want and vice versa blurs.
In Vessel van der Kolk’s book, The Body Keeps the Score, I learned that traumatic experiences stay buried in one’s body long after they have happened, often bypassing conscious memories. An example he gave was of a girl who was abused as a child but could never recall memories of these abusive acts. When asked to draw pictures of her childhood, however, her subconscious mind dug up images of herself as a child trapped in a cage surrounded by menacing dark figures with no eyes and a giant erect penis pointed towards her.
The author explains that “being traumatized means continuing to organize your life as if the trauma were still going on — unchanged and immutable — as every new encounter or event is contaminated by the past” (p 62). Your traumatized brain will keep sending signals to your body to escape a threat that has happened long ago, as if it literally is still happening to you. How the body deals with this is frightening: from feeling like everything around you can be a threat, to being triggered by things that have the smallest connection to the traumatic event, to entirely not being able to feel certain body parts, to completely blocking out the memories of the events, like in the case of the girl above. There are things that get imprinted onto us that we cannot choose to forget.
Crises are full of silver linings, however faint they might be. About a year into the coup, conversations I would have with people from Myanmar would naturally drift to the topics of mental health and trauma. People shared freely about having to see a therapist and how their experiences with mental health support were like. The fact that people were being so open about these topics that were previously so taboo in Burmese society gave me hope that we can take steps towards collective healing.
“Forgive and forget”, the adage goes, but I am still unclear at which parts of our healing journeys we are supposed to do those things, or in what order. It is both my hope and my worry that we will choose to forget things just so that we can get on with our lives. But can we look back and forgive ourselves if we do that? Will our bodies, our technologies, our communities, and our society still have imprinted on them the things that we have chosen to forget, long after we are gone?
Choosing to remember
I have been going down a particular historical rabbit hole recently. Some interesting chance encounters got me started on the Chinese Revolution, and its spillovers and interconnections with the postcolonial wars in Indochina. It annoys me to no end that important parts of history that do not paint the West in a good light, or where they do not get to be the main character, have really scant sources, at least in English. What is deemed important to remember seldom counts human lives equally. For context, the Chinese Civil War killed up to 9 million, comparable to all the losses of the Axis powers in the Second World War combined. The Americans dropped more bombs on the tiny country of Laos in the 60s and 70s than they did over the whole of the Second World War. We talk about the Cold War as if no shots were fired, completely sidestepping the scale of conflict that embroiled the Global Majority in the second half of the twentieth century. During my recent visa run in Laos, I thankfully got to visit some museums that remembered those times from the communist government’s perspective. Hammer and sickle flags adorned every government building, and monuments marked the victory of their sixteen year civil war over the American backed Royalists. Unlike the millenarian cult that was the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia next door, who also “liberated” their country in the same year, 1975, the Laotian communists learned quickly to emulate the experiments with market economies that Deng Xiaoping was attempting in China. That flexibility allowed them to hold on to power and its people to have what is by now multiple generations of peace. More importantly, they avoided a descent into the unspeakable cruelties that come downstream from an inflexible ideology and a very narrowly defined way of being, which brought us the horrors of the Cambodian genocide and the Great Leap Forward. The worst might have been averted, except of course, the war’s legacy of millions of unexploded bombs still litter the country. The land keeps the score the same way our bodies do.
A monument at the Kaysone Phomvihane Museum in Vientiane, Laos, commemorating the country’s communist revolutionaries. Photo taken by author.When I was growing up in the 90s and 2000s, Southeast Asia was barrelling as fast as it could away from its conflict ridden past. We let orchestrators of genocides like Pol Pot and Suharto live out their final years in relative calm, while a new generation was eagerly building bustling new economies, creating the Southeast Asia we know today of 7-Elevens, ASEAN handshakes, tourist traps and upward mobility. I remember telling my friends once in the early months of the coup, how privileged we were to have lived in a war-torn country all our lives and yet have never had to experience the realities of war, until we were well into our thirties. I hope that Myanmar is the odd one out, and that our friends from neighbouring countries never have to relive the violence of their pasts. As I write that, I feel a voice of doubt, asking “is that a foolish hope?” The geopolitics of the 50s, 60s and 70s pulled the region into senseless wars, and the geopolitics of our time gives me pause.
I want to remember the times when I would not have even bothered to worry about violence and pain. I don’t think I have ever come to terms with how to properly remember loss. I am still confused about how to remember the loved ones we have lost.
I have had my fair share of loss. Maternal figures who have passed on: my mother, grandmother and aunt. A relationship with my father that has frayed as I got older. A failed marriage that broke me to my core. The collective hopes for my country, crushed after the coup. I have just recently gotten back to therapy and last Saturday I had a particularly heavy session where I had to confront grief, or rather, how I have not made the space and time needed to process the loss of loved ones I’ve experienced throughout my life. I don’t know how to grieve, and have not had the chance to figure it out. For me, it has always been a matter of picking up the pieces, moving on, building things back up and not dwelling on the pain, or trying to alleviate the feelings of guilt by taking the next steps to make good on the hopes of those we have lost. Apparently it took therapy to figure out that part of their hopes would be for me to not be in pain.
When I extrapolate from my personal experience to that of millions of us from Myanmar, it is an unfathomable amount of collective pain and loss. How do we process all of that? Do we find joy in remembering the times before all was lost? Do we find rest by remembering the ones we have lost? Or do we build hope for a future where we can both rest and be joyful? I am beginning to believe that we can’t build healthy futures that don’t repeat vicious cycles if we don’t know how to both let go and hold on to our pasts.
Choosing a future
“Our kids will grow up with half as much Trying to build something out of dust Finding out too late what they need”
- “God’s Country”, by Ethel Cain
I was in Taipei for a conference at the end of February, and spent a lot of time walking around under melancholic grey skies. The conference participants were mostly from civil society groups around the world who worked in digital rights, and there was a general sense of desperation in the air. Everyone shared a feeling that the shrinking of civic space and squeezing of funding for the work that we do was only going to get worse from here on out. The lyrics above from singer-songwriter Ethel Cain’s very Southern Gothic influenced song, God’s Country, played on repeat in my headphones as I walked around Taipei for hours on end. The country stands defiant against the behemoth across the straits that has vowed to devour it. Friends told me to “enjoy it while you still can”. I was mourning a place that I had just been to, in advance, it seemed. Or perhaps I was grieving for my own homeland, because I never really got to enjoy it in a way it deserved while I still could. Isn’t that how it always is with all that we love? Maybe I was grieving for the whole entire state of the world. Ethel’s lyrics rang in my head like an inverse of a siren’s song, luring me to a solemn truth — it felt inevitable that our kids will indeed grow up with half as much, and will be burdened with having to build everything back from dust.
Cloudy skies over the Liberty Square in Taipei, Taiwan. Photo by author.I barely knew anything about Taiwanese history, but coincidentally during the week I was visiting, I chanced upon their national holiday commemorating the “228 massacre” of 28 February 1947. I knew nothing about it but it fit right in with the Chinese Revolution rabbit hole I had been going down so I took the opportunity to educate myself.
After the defeat of Imperial Japan in the Second World War, the island of Taiwan was handed back to the Kuomintang — the Chinese Nationalist government led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek — after five decades of Japanese rule. The Taiwanese population had a mixed identity, having never felt connected entirely to the mainland, and having enjoyed a flourishing of industry and modernisation under Japanese rule unparalleled elsewhere in Asia. Despite the ruthlessness they displayed across their colonies in Asia, the Japanese had made Taiwan their “model colony”, bringing infrastructure, education, jobs and a newly forged Taiwanese identity to the island’s residents. The postwar handover back to the mainland’s flailing and paranoid nationalist government was hasty, and many Taiwanese were devastated by a subsequent nosedive of the economy. Tensions flared between the authorities and their citizens who, in the minds of the former, ought to feel more grateful for being liberated from an imperialist power. It was the classic situation of a powder keg waiting for a spark.
The same patterns repeat when a society on a hair trigger erupts. A single choice, a single act of defiance sets it off. A man immolates himself in Tunisia. A group of students get into a quarrel at a tea shop in Yangon. A woman refuses to sit at the back of the bus in the American South. On February 28, 1947, a Taiwanese widow selling contraband cigarettes confronted a group of police who were harassing her. A crowd of bystanders tried to intervene. A panicked soldier shot into the crowd. A martyr was made and public rage boiled over. A backlash from a paranoid police state followed.
It is estimated that up to 28,000 people died in the killings that followed. The Kuomintang government brought in troops from the mainland, who have gone through their own unfair share of trauma from fighting a gruelling war against both the Japanese and Mao’s communists, who proceeded to indiscriminately gun down civilians across Taiwan. These gruelling weeks of crackdowns then fed into a regime of martial law that lasted nearly four decades, ending only in 1987. For decades, the Taiwanese population lived under a brutal dictatorship that disappeared, tortured, and imprisoned hundreds of thousands. Called the “White Terror”, it was a time when a knock on the door by the secret police at night would mean it was the last time you would see your loved ones. The Kuomintang government, paranoid about the ever present threat from the communist controlled mainland, and occupying a land that had mixed loyalties to them, held onto power in ways that are unfortunately very familiar to many of us who have lived under authoritarianism. Those who are consumed by fear only know how to rule by fear.
Hurt people hurt people. Or so they say.
I have learned from my own personal experiences, that knowingly or unknowingly, we will cause pain in others. Sometimes life presents us with hard choices where it is inevitable that someone will be hurt. Sometimes it is by neglect and being unable to confront reality that our actions hurt someone. Sometimes it is by fear of being hurt that we lash out. But I want to believe… no, I believe it must be the case, that when you are put face to face with someone’s pain, you must feel some shred of empathy, you must feel that if it could be avoided we must take steps to avoid it. What I want is for us to not inflict pain with glee.
We just spent a year watching the genocide in Gaza live streamed for fuck’s sake. And instead of waking up to what horrors we have allowed into the world, people across the globe went to the polls to double down on authoritarianism. We are hurtling towards the opposite end from empathy.
When I was growing up, I got educated into a very western set of values that I did question, but looking back, definitely did not question enough. What I grew into believing wholeheartedly was that western democracies had unshakeably strong institutions. Individual people might be irrational, demagogue politicians can capture the limelight, but these western democracies have strong institutions that will restore things to a liberal, rules based, status quo. We just need to shed light on social ills and summon the political will to fix them. Coups by power hungry madmen only happen in countries where the magical powers of these democratic institutions have not matured.
We are now getting an education in how much of that was wishful thinking. Because here’s the thing about how a system of rules works: rules break as easily as twigs when people choose to break them. We are not automatons or lines of computer code — these systems rely on people to choose a future with every decision. We don’t get to choose with the benefit of calm, or do so in considered, centered and grounded ways. We choose while our bodies jolt us into panic. We choose while our deepest fears harass us with vivid mental imagery of pain we cannot bear. We choose from our shame. We choose the “Hail Marys” with impossible odds. We choose from what we have repeatedly told ourselves “this is who we are”, and yet were too afraid to examine. Our choices for the future are shaped by what we have already chosen to remember and forget.
So, maybe we are not inflicting pain with glee. Maybe it’s just that we have taken so many steps that have brought us towards the edge of sadism and the door was wide open, so we took a peek. Maybe some of us walk right in, having forgotten everything else about who we are. The banality of evil is just in that last step that people take.
But, maybe courage doesn’t need to be so profound either. The banality of courage? What? Let me explain.
The Banality of Courage
I still believe in institutions, but no longer in the ones that we have written down and forgotten the rules of, and believe somehow exist in an ether outside of ourselves. I believe in institutions where we are made to always spontaneously pick up the mantle and affirm our agency. How much can an institution be like a piece of modern art, which invites the viewer to imbue it with the meaning needed to complete it? How much can an institution capture the feeling of being in a concert, filling every participant with the euphoria of singing along to lyrics they have etched into memory since their formative years, where you are having an intensely personal experience precisely because you are feeling at one with the crowd?
Politics is just the things that we do together. The catch is that we can never get to a point where we all agree on things enough that all that is left is to work out the finer details. Just as art and music are eternal wellsprings of human endeavour, where we will never stop creating, building, and losing ourselves in the all consuming beauty they bring to our lives, we will never stop politicking either.
My identity in my twenties was very much that of an economist policy wonk type who believed that politics was for clueless people bickering about things they didn’t understand whereas policy discussions were for the nuanced, deep thinkers who actually made meaningful progress. It took another decade of being close to the mechanisms of how activism works, how laws get made, how laws translate to governance, what gets paid attention to and what gets ignored and left behind, before I understood that our political processes are designed — or have been hijacked — to sidestep the political. It was also a decade where I had gone through enough personal experiences of pain, loss, hope, betrayal and solidarity, to notice how important the imprints of trauma were for myself and for everyone else in the way we choose every decision in our lives.
To be courageous in making those choices is something we always already do. We exercise our agency every day. The trick is to get out of the box of thinking that everything we can conceive of doing is already whittled down into a menu of lacklustre options. Your job when someone hands you that menu is to rip it apart and instead create, imagine, connect and affirm your reality that you exist as a true actor in the world.
During my trip to Taiwan, I made a pilgrimage to an institution that I have observed with admiration for a decade — a hackathon organised by g0v (pronounced Gov-Zero). It is a community of civic technologists who come together on weekends to work on projects that they are passionate about that address social issues. One guy took it upon himself to research how fragile Taiwan’s network of undersea internet cables are and how much of a risk they pose in the advent of war. Another group was cataloging details about the country’s public hospitals and entering them on the free mapping platform Open Street Map. Another guy was writing code to extract meaningful data from government budget reports. A visiting Ukrainian was sharing how they mobilised to provide online education to thousands of kids when the Russian invasion began. If you know me, you know that these are my people, my tribe, the kinds of folks I vibe with the most. Everywhere in the world you have these people who are not making grand heroic gestures, just chugging along making little dents every day to build a better future.
G0v started a couple of years before the Sunflower Student Movement of 2014, when Taiwan had transitioned into a democracy for two decades but was hitting major road bumps. The Kuomintang, still in power but now democratically elected, was warming up to China and rushing to pass a very unpopular trade agreement with the mainland. Students occupied Taiwan’s parliament for 23 days and half a million people protested on the streets in a show of solidarity with the student occupiers. With an approach of radical transparency, the occupy movement held town halls that were live streamed, their deliberations were carefully digitally documented, and that openness made sure that it was not hijacked by trolls and disinformation. The civic technologists from g0v were the digital backbone of this movement, enabling and coordinating the livestreams, documentation and facilitation in a way that the whole country could watch and participate. In the decade since, Taiwanese democracy has doubled down over and over again on digitally enabled civic participation. It is a topic I can go on and on about but will leave for another post.
This kind of collective action gets at what I mean when I say I believe in institutions that make us affirm our agency. The students of the Sunflower movement called themselves demonstrators instead of protestors, because they were demonstrating how things could be. Demonstrating better, alternative ways to do things. It is anger channeled into optimism, passivity flipping into solidarity, and a spirit of service to your fellow citizens that builds a basis for finding common ground. When you have this kind of organically self-organised institution that compels you to bring out the best in yourself, courage is not some big heroic act, and instead just a natural, reflexive thing to do1.
I studied patterns of collective action for my undergraduate thesis a long time ago. One thing that I consistently found in the literature was that agency was always a bedrock of movements. During the Civil Rights era in the US, close-knit communities that formed around Black churches in the American South gave people a nurturing space from which to springboard into a national movement. In El Savaldor’s civil war in the 80s, small scale successes of collective action from the insurgents fighting the brutally oppressive government percolated forward bit by bit, and reinforced beliefs that change was possible, and slowly, partaking in the movement became a pleasurable, affirming activity.
The belief that comes from deep within our bodies, that because of pains of the past, the future is already preordained, narrowed down into a tiny island of middling comfort surrounded by scary spaces we don’t dare to tread, is what leads us to paralysis. Or things that are much worse.
Laos and Cambodia post-1975 show a literal side-by-side comparison of radically different paths a country could go down based on whether you are choosing to amplify patterns or trauma or break from them. To be clear, I am no fan of Laos’ one party communist government, but its leaders, like Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, were also jungle guerillas battered down by a superpower’s proxy wars when they took power, and yet they did not choose to amplify the cycles of violence that were their day-to-day experience for decades. The door to gleefully inflicting pain was open, and they did not walk through.
Coming full circle back to Myanmar, we have the folks who have been working tirelessly in digital security to thank for building the foundations that led to the whole country adopting a secure messaging service like Signal overnight. Over the period that we had a fledgling democracy in the 2010s, there were so many groups and initiatives and communities that felt like they could make a dent in the future. They were just doing their jobs and working on things they were passionate about, but they built a foundation for acts of everyday courage.
This was an exhausting but necessary exercise in sorting out the mix of ideas and feelings that have been swirling around inside me for the past few months. I am glad I wrote that poem and have sat with the emotions that flooded me. I now know what I was trying to say. My poem ends with a message to those that seek to control us. Understand, we choose what we will make of our lives.
1This excellent essay gives seven different underrated models of changing the world. It is just a joy to read and empowering in just the ways that I yearn for in my current post.