The Girl Who...

What happens when you have it all? For someone like Mae Tan, sometimes the way forward is to start over.

- Wayne Cheong

This is the story of a girl who was sad. She is 19, an age that’s not quite adult and past the safety of teenhood. This is also a moment where a confluence of events causes the cracks to appear: break-up with her first boyfriend; emotions building to a crescendo; angst. Her enrolment into an art school where the seemingly binary questions of life now bleed into the in-betweens of greys.

If sadness was a shape, it would be a bubble that’s slowly swelling up inside her. And if it had popped, it would be the end. Whatever the bubble contained would spill out from within her and it would affect the things that it touches. So, the girl kept it in her. But it was like holding her gut in as she continued to feed.

She could blog about it but she felt that the platform had enough scrutiny as it was. So, she pulled out a typewriter that she bought when she was 14 and started writing letters to herself. Short stories about her day, a rumination of what had transpired. She ended every letter with “You’ll get better”.

“Basically, I wrote a book,” Mae Tan says, “or something that’s the size of one.”

Mae Tan: 24 years old, influencer and now ex-creative manager of fashion boutique, Surrender. The title of ex-creative manager is recent. After four years, Tan sent out a farewell email on 28 June, effusively thanking her recipients for the support.

But for someone who is unemployed, she is still busy.

Her schedule is well-fed. Prior to our interview at PS Café, she had a meeting and, afterwards, she will meet her boyfriend, Leonard Wee, painter and lecturer at NAFA, for dinner at a place yet to be confirmed.