Bouncing Back from the Dead

Danny Raven Tan

Today, one of the fundamental beliefs I held, got challenged, destroyed, and completely rewritten – all of this within the time frame of a single hour.

I had always fantasized living what I thought was the life authors and artists lived. A social recluse, always in their home writing away until they eventually published and instantly came into the spotlight, with thousands of adoring readers sending you message after message.

“I wish”, was all I could say to that vision, after listening to the talk given by Danny Raven Tan, an artist born and raised in Singapore.  A straightforward, ‘says it like it is’, kind of person, he put no filters on when talking about the life of an artist and the struggle that came with it. “It’s all about marketing”, he advised us, after being asked a question regarding how the competition was like, and what he did to stay ahead.

He went on to describe how in order to become successful, one had to become a “social whore” and in a sense “prostitute oneself”, going to event after event, talk after talk; just to remind people that you were still alive and hadn’t died off. My dream had turned into this horrible nightmare.

However, at the same time, there was something inspiring about his talk and presentation. A man who was faced with the death of his father,  his mother getting dementia, pancreatic cancer, depression, who went through so much “shit”, was still in front of us, smiling, laughing, and talking about something he clearly loved and was passionate about.

In fact, that was a recurring theme of his talk, never giving up, even when you were in a “shit hole”. For example, while facing depression, he used to keep a simple statement in mind, that would help me get through the day: “God sends his toughest soldiers to fight the hardest battles”.  For all his talk about how hard it was as an artist, especially in Singapore, if you had the passion and drive, you could and would make it, and for an aspiring writer like me, that was more than enough to keep me on the path I had chosen.

In terms of how I could relate this back to the classroom, one important thing is to remember that we are in school and school is radically different from real life. This is an environment where we can try all kinds of wacky things while creating, while writing, without any negative repercussions [except for the bad grade]. Additionally, the rules in class and in the real world are different, which is something that I believe is increasingly important to remember in this competitive world, and success in school might not mean success in the real world. This is both positive, where if you are getting bad grades, it doesn’t mean you can’t succeed in life, and a warning, where you need to remind yourself of the importance of adapting and change, not getting too used to the routine all schools follow.

This session has left me with a lot of questions, one prominent one being exactly what the future holds. After all, the one thing I have learnt through Danny Raven Tan is that life often throws unexpected curveballs that you just have to deal with. As of now, I still want to become an author and write as much as I can, but who knows what may happen as time goes on.

Some notes I took: