On holding your pee

For someone like me, English is not my mother tongue, writing in English, in the sense of expressing oneself, is hard. It’s not that you don’t have an urge to say, nor you don’t have anything to say. Most of the time, it’s the other way around. As if 5 pints of beer in your belly, you keep searching for a loo, and after hours of desperate searching, you find nothing. You wake up, ah it’s a dream, maybe a nightmare for some. Well, we all have that kind of dreams. It’s good that it is just a dream, not an urgent demand in real life — just like expressing ourselves in English, it’s merely a hobby, a bonus, a nice-to-have skill. But what’s real is, that all of us has experience that we need to hold our pee from time to time, a never-ending meeting, a long movie in cinema, a Lady Gaga concert — just like we stumbled upon cases that we are expected to express ourselves in English from time to time when you are not living in your country, you stutter, you cannot let your words out.

Just as there’s no scientific proof that your bladder could be trained for a better endurance, I don’t expect anyone to tolerate their being mute. What keeps one holding their pee is merely the shame of letting it out in public. The same goes with why we become mute when we are expected or feel the urge to express in English: it is the shame of making mistakes, essentially the shame of letting it out. Your bladder cannot be trained, but your gut can. You’ve heard enough of me talking about holding pee, but my point here is not persuading you to pee in public. Rather, to remove the obstacle preventing you from letting out the words. You have done it before, after all. Imagine when you were still a teen and would post anything on socials without proof-reading of the text by someone you know who speaks the language better than you — for instance, an adult, or a student majoring in your mother tongue. But still, you would post it anyway. You know you have the urge writing it, and it’s your authentic feelings at that moment, and you don’t care about feedback from a language perspective. Despite the formal composition training you get in class, you often notice another level of sophistication, an art of expression, compared to your informal social posts years ago. And it’s often underestimated that, comparing the frequency you write a social post to how often you write a formal essay at school, social posts are greater writing practices.

One step back: I am not highlighting the importance of social posts only, but nearly all kinds of informal writing opportunities help you knock down the wall brick by brick and let your words out. As people always say, trust the process. In the end, I would like to quote a recent interview of Utada Hikaru, one of my favourite Japanese-American singer-songwriters, a public non-binary figure (in response to the question of what she wants in producing a track): “the outcome song is always a by-product, I have already got what I want throughout the journey.” So let it out. What comes of it was never the point.