stagnation – a negative post about feeling discontent with oneself

i am a little over 2 months into my 8-month break from university and already i feel like my brain is rotting.

i feel no motivation to do anything; anything other than lying on the living room couch and staring at the rotating ceiling fan feels like too much effort. netflix is no longer the treasure chest it once was when i discovered it just before my year-end exams. the books lying haphazardly in my wardrobe are suddenly too bland, too unfulfilling. studying for university feels like a task too far away, its consequences not in the horizon of my sight. my trips to tokyo and pulau redang happening in the next couple of weeks are no longer exciting prospects. the lives of my friends and acquaintances seem to be a world's distance away from me, after i decided, one day, that facebook and instagram and twitter disgusted me with its shiny, lacquered film of perceived glamour, the scent of desperation and desire to impress. i feel isolated, despite spending all of my days eating and sleeping and breathing in a house with 7 (and sometimes more) relatives.

in the past, i escaped discontentment by filling my days with shows and books about people unlike me. now, even escaping is too tiring.

it's absurd how, even after deactivating my social media accounts, trying to bathe myself in the ignorance of what my old classmates are doing, trying to revel in a blanket of disinterest, i still feel so discontented with what i am doing (or not doing) with my life. although i no longer see smiling pictures of gatherings i am not at, my mind keeps wandering, when i am lazing around the house, to how i'm just wasting my life away, whilst everyone else is living it up every day, making new friends and laughing at new jokes. whereas once i compared myself to an image others had created for themselves, now i compare myself to an image i have created for others, and my self-loathing multiplies: i want to stop this incessant comparison, and i also want to use my life for something useful so that i will no longer feel the need to compare.

every time i have too much time on my hands, my brain becomes stagnant, and, like stagnant water, it becomes an incubator for bacteria, parasites that leech any trace of positivity from my mind, leaving me with a stinking swirl of grey, poisonous thoughts. it's horrible.

what a year

my first year in uni has ended, and although part of me feels like i haven't achieved anything i had planned to before moving to london, another part of me is also really proud of the fact that i have survived a year of adulthood.

i'm happy to be back home, breathing in that familiar sweet scent of smoggy air, but i also miss the independence and the flurried life that i've come to associate with london. i miss being able to stay up and talk to friends about Life until the wee hours of the morning; being able to get turkish food, vegan ice cream, and egg tarts all in a 30 minute trip from my room. this constant movement is what i reminisce about in boredom-drenched days, as well as the wholesome (as mariana would put it) friends that i've gotten to know.

so – cue awesome segue – i have compiled a whole bunch of photos from the year to feed this nostalgia and to escape my current lacklustre state of mind.

brick lane vintage market

rough trade

mariana

zaana

kyoto garden, holland park

yvonne

v&a museum

over and out,

grainy photos from shanghai

photos from december on grainy film, taken in shanghai two days before i left for london.

over and out,

new year new me???

wowz it's 2017 already. it feels like just yesterday when i posted my 2016 bucket list (of which i merely completed two things), and now i'm here to write another list of things i will do in 2017 – if only to just leave and never accomplish them.

2016 was full of hectic ups and downs. my hair turned grey over exams, i graduated, left my home of 10 years, and experienced painful homesickness for the first time in my life. i learnt how to become more comfortable with being alone. i began to skip classes. i became more independent. i cried more than i've ever cried, but i've also laughed more than i can remember. i can't say 2016 was a good year, because i am a pessimistic person and nothing is ever really good enough, but it's changed me into someone i'm happier with.

but i want to grow more, to be the best person i can be. i want to be less guarded, less judgemental, less angry – more appreciative, more dedicated, more productive.

in 2017, i will...

...read 15 books.

upgrading from last year's resolution to read 10 books (which i only barely accomplished, reading 12 texts), i vow to myself that i will read 15 novels. will i succeed? we shall see in 12 months' time.

(i am a pathetic excuse for an english student.)

...journal.

ever since uni life started and i became inundated with work and inexplicable mood swings, i've neglected the one thing i used to really love doing: journalling. for some reason, it gradually turned into a sort of chore rather than a cathartic experience, and as a result, i just stopped. but seeing stephany's instagram post yesterday made me realise how much i miss the process of looking back at pages i wrote months ago, reliving joyful / painful memories and scoffing at my (or other people's) ignorance. so in this new year, i'll try and fill up the remaining pages of my moleskine.

...take more photographs.

i have five cameras sitting in a suitcase under my bed and i really need to use them more.

...get out more.

i have the privilege of spending my uni days in london, the "flower of cities all", yet i'm positive that i've spent 85% of my first semester cooped up in my room watching youtube videos and k-dramas. this is a city with so many markets that i can't even keep track of them all; a city with so many theatre productions and museum exhibitions happening every day. in this new year i will try and brave the shitty, depressing weather and explore the city more than i have the past three months. there are cafés to be discovered, vintage stores to be browsed, bookstores to be drooled over. oh, and i need to stop skipping seminars.

over and out,

just floating

i was walking down holborn a few days ago, invoking my inner virginia woolf and observing the hustle and bustle around me (funnily enough, i was heading towards the virginia woolf building for my seminar).

for the first time in two months, i realised why i've been feeling a sort of unease in my surroundings – i don't feel like i belong anywhere.

i've spent more than half of my life in china, but i've only ever had two chinese friends (actually, 'friends' is probably too intimate a term – i think of them more as acquaintances) because i've never really had any opportunities to befriend the locals. here, in london, i pass by so many students from china as i approach LSE on my way to class, with their arms intertwined, in their big winter coats reaching down to their calves, and i catch snippets of their conversations and it sounds like home. i recall the loud laughs down the streets of my childhood, as well as my inner monologue of adolescent frustration as i try to push past them. but now, having been separated, for almost half a year, from the cacophany i associate with that country, i don't push past. i walk by and i try to enjoy the familiar intonations and inflexions as long as i possibly can. yet although i miss china, and although i've come to discover how much i think of the place as home, to say that i feel (or felt) completely comfortable in their culture is a lie, because i don't understand chinese culture enough. i know nothing about their politics, their media, their slang, their economy. the only china i truly understand is my china. the country i have experienced with my taiwanese friends and malaysian parents.

i always thought, back in those days before graduation, that when i left for london i would feel right at home. if i didn't fit in fully in china, if some of their more traditional ideas irked me, surely london would fit me like a glove. but i think one of the biggest reasons why i was so unhappy in my first few weeks here was because i felt so odd where i was; i didn't feel like i belonged. it was hard, and it still is hard, because i struggle to talk to the people on my course (the vast majority of which are british). there's a sort of gap that i feel between me and them. it's the trivial things – the volume at which they speak, their stance, the words they use. i've found that here, it's normal to just join in on a conversation, and oftentimes strangers converse like they've known each other for months. back home, that would never pass. there would be an initial tinge of awkward formality in conversations and interactions. back home, even when i've known someone for years, i sometimes still speak to them with reserve.

or maybe i'm completely off-track and it's just my problem.

the other day someone in my seminar said that she doesn't understand why some people feel so much pride in their national identity, and why there are people with such strong patriotism. and i thought, "you don't understand, because you're white and you're from england. you've never been colonised by anyone else, and you've never felt oppression due to your race. you don't understand, because you've never felt that your culture was inferior to someone else's. you don't understand, because you've never had to feel a sense of shame when you speak your own language and people look at you like you've done something wrong. for someone who's been through all this, to be able to embrace their national identity and revel in that golden goodness is monumental, and they should strive as hard they can to not lose that". there were arguments against this claim, however, and i know this view isn't representative of all white britons, but i still feel like it exists subconsciously in people's brains, just in varying degrees of intensity. and although i know that the chances such topics will come up in social situations is very slight, these kinds of ideas and perspectives on the world still seep into other parts of life. and this is the gap i feel with england.

i introduce myself to people i meet as a malaysian. but to say i'm malaysian, i've realised, is to just mean that i have a malaysian passport. i feel pride in my country, yes. but akin to china, i only know malaysia as my malaysia. i don't understand the politics. the racial tensions don't feel as real to me as they should, and i can't even speak my national language. i don't know most of the places my malaysian friends here talk about, and even if i do know them, it's a superficial kind of knowledge, where i only know vaguely where it is and what's vaguely in that area.

i feel that, as an international kid, i should be able to integrate myself seamlessly into whatever culture i'm thrown into. rather, all i've experienced so far is a sense of detachment from the cultures i've been exposed to, and an acute awareness of the fact that i'm just floating.

over and out,

fireworks on nov. 5

some photos from guy fawkes night a couple weeks ago:

over and out,

canvas // blackout poetry

i tried to do a little blackout poem for my uni's english literary journal.

dim sum with co.

i never really appreciated how much i would miss chinese food after moving to london. but i miss it. very very much.

i cannot even begin to express just how sick i am of white people food. i am tired of eating baked beans, sandwiches, salads, pasta. i need rice. i need congee. i need my mum's soup. every morning at breakfast it is baked beans on toast with hash browns on my plate, when really i would give anything to have mee goreng instead.

a couple friends and i decided that we were becoming too reliant on prêt a manger and needed to get a fresh dose of MSG, so we headed to chinatown in search of dim sum.

the food was alright – it was really fucking expensive, but considering how desperate i was for a taste of home, i wasn't too upset.

we headed to oxford street after food. we're students and we shouldn't be spending this much money, but the weather is becoming tit-freezing cold, and we needed winter jackets, so we had no choice.

it was a good sunday. i froze my face off, but i just see that as the ultimate experience of british lifestyle.

over and out,