Let’s not mince words and cut right to the chase: it’s been bad. My twentieth year on this planet has been nothing short of brutal in terms of how much I’ve been put through and all the new emotions I’ve come to learn the names of.
Category Archive: Personal
I wrote a letter to myself at the end of 2020, setting down some things I hope I’ll have achieved a year from then. The sand in the hourglass has since stopped running and it’s high time I reply to that letter…
Here are words I left unsaid. Not because the timing was never right. Not because I felt you were the wrong person to bestow them upon. Not because I didn’t mean them wholeheartedly. Here are words I left unsaid because I didn’t know at the time…
It rains constantly in Manchester. Six and a half days out of seven, the sky cries in showers. I resonated with the city my first week here; I had cried through the first week, staining pillow covers wondering if I had made the right decision coming here, leaving all familiarity behind, packing twenty years of my life into two suitcases.
Two decades sound short when it is used in a mathematical equation, even shorter when you’re in earth […]
To label my college experience as a bad one and store it away in my mental attic would do the thousands of tuition ringgit paid no justice; it was a less-than-satisfactory one, undoubtedly, but I walked away knowing more than when I first walked through its gates. And I suppose, any situation that you walk away from as a better version of yourself can’t be that bad after all.
Allow me to walk you through what doing a standard practice set was like in my early youth. We’d do one round of thirty MCQs, my dad would grade it, have me explain my thought process for questions that I got wrong, figure out the correct answers, erase the set, and have me do it all over again. We’d do this for each set for however long it took me to get a perfect score—however long it took me to understand and learn from my mistakes.
In Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa wakes up only to realize he is now living as a giant insect, his life immediately overturned without warning or foreboding. I guess these two pieces have more in common than I thought then, since my life—though not as ridiculous as that of Samsa’s—was also thwarted into an unpredictable trajectory this year…
As the devastating year of 2020 draws to an end, here are some things I hope you’ll have achieved when you read this a year from now…
happy birthday, kiddo. it’s only going to get tougher from here on out, but don’t worry—you get tougher too.
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