Reflective Writing

Every start demands a small funeral for who I’ve been (pretending to be)

I have been thinking about writing again more frequently and perhaps sharing more of what I think and have learnt with the world. So here I am, again, posting my unfiltered thoughts. I’m actually a bit scared of exposing my real blog on my website, but I thought one day when I die, and if my digital footprints remain, I just want to be known as I am, a little selfish proof that I once lived. And after all, I won’t care about my image when I die.

The way I’m doing this is by generating a random word every time I’m in the mood to write, and this time it’s “start“, a perfectly matching theme.

My Initial Blunder

A ‘start’, according to the normal definition, is the point in time or space at which something has its origin; the beginning.

The first thing that came into my mind is that a start is the first action or journey into becoming, a process to come into being, and that I kind of like a start. (I have ADHD, if that’s relevant.)

I like “start” because it is novel. It gives hope. So many possibilities. It’s the only time when the future is perfect. It is the moment when the boulder is still at the bottom of the hill and its weight isn’t crushing Sisyphus’ spine yet. You get a few seconds of standing at the base, looking up, and thinking, “Yes, today I shall be the one to defeat gravity.”

I do sometimes wonder though, whether my addiction to starting something is an attempt to create more noises because I am terrified of the silence that follows completion. And I am wondering if others like to start because it is the only time we can pretend we are not finite.

But… I am a divine comedy of procrastination.

I realised that I am also terrified of start.

For many years, I was “about to start” coding. In 2012 I purchased a book about C++. In my defense, I wasn’t lazy. I was just a romantic. I was in love with the idea of being a programmer, and reality is the death of romance. To actually open a terminal was to admit that I was just a human with a flickering lamp and a limited brain. Only by the end of 2018 when I was at the lowest point of my life did I revisit that idea and really learn to program. I started scared and sad, but I had no other choice, and somehow that made me brave.

Then, after more than 5 years in the industry, burnouts hit me. That’s when I really applied for master’s studies and got accepted. I actually had been eyeing this specific programme at Leiden University and attended the master’s “open day” during COVID (so around 2021). Imagine procrastinating this hard and choosing to start only at the end of the world.

I had spent years worrying about “who I would become”, only to realise that the “new me” is just the “old me” with a slightly more expensive laptop and a very specific, academic way of saying “I (still) have no idea what’s going on.”

A Reluctant Surrender

What if the real reason I don’t start is because I suspect I won’t like who I become? That I have to endure the indignity of being perceived as a new, potentially less interesting, or, God forbid, a happier person?

The scary part is becoming someone unfamiliar to the people who knew your old sadness, unrecognised by the person who loved your wreckage, because the one who understood the exact frequency of your sadness is comfort.

I’ve spent years as a brown dwarf, a failed star circling the drain of my own melancholy. I’m always too cold to ignite, and getting off the orbit is terrifying. What if I just drift in the blackness between two points and end up belonging to neither? If I never ignite, I can never burn out.

However, a star that refuses to fuse its atoms stays a cold, dark lump of gas forever. It’s safer, yes, but it’s not really a star. It’s just debris. And the universe is very, very good at ignoring debris.

I ask myself, do I just want to be debris? There’s relief in that for sure, but I realised that I want to be a star. Even a tiny one.

I do not need to be a supernova that blinds the world; I am content to be a faint, silver flicker of light that catches your eye for a single, breathless second on a random Tuesday night and makes you wonder if you imagined it. Even if I am a small star, a dying star, or a star that only burns for a moment, I will finally be part of the architecture of the sky.

Now, of course, I have a couple of things I am terrified to start. When I’m terrified, I need to be reminded that in many years in the future, everyone will forget every embarrassing thing and failure I have done. And even further in the future of that future, the heat death of the universe will erase everything, including every mediocre creation I have done in my lifetime. So who cares, right?! I can always afford to be a beginner, because on a galactic scale, everyone is a beginner. and on the grand scheme of things it doesn’t matter, my embarassment is statistically insignificant.

I haven’t finished gathering courage, and I hope it’s not too late. But I’ve learned one thing for sure: a “start” doesn’t actually kill my old self; it just gives my old sadness something productive to do on the weekends.

I want to crush my own doubts until they have no choice but to emit light.

God didn’t choose me

I grew up inside religion, believing I would live well if I stayed close enough to God and His people. I tried for a long time. I struggled quietly, but in high school, belief loosened its grip on me.

When I see my childhood friends now and people from my past, from church, I feel sadness. Not because their lives are good. I’m not envious at all, and I’m glad that their lives unfolded gently, like they were met by the world instead of having to wrestle it. But I’m sad because I never really got to know them, and they never got the chance to know me. It feels like we passed each other behind glass, close enough to recognize, too far to touch.

What hurts is the sense that I was never understood back then, not truly. But I was an observer, trying to solve them like a puzzle.

And now that time has moved on, that door is sealed not by conflict but by silence. There is no moment left where I could finally explain myself or ask more questions.

Back then my Sunday school teacher often said, “God chose us; it’s not us who decides.” So this choice was not based on human merit. And every time, there’s always this sting inside my chest saying, “Then I’m not the chosen one. I must not be one of the chosen ones.”

For a child, “God chose us” doesn’t land as abstract theology. It lands as a verdict. Belonging might look easy for others, but painful for me, so my mind completes the sentence on its own: “Then I wasn’t chosen.” Not because I reasoned it out, but because my body kept score.

Well, I reasoned a lot of things, even as a kid. You can say that I’m a deep thinker, but I still think that conclusion also came from confusion plus rejection. I was the child who asked too many questions. My siblings lived in the same house, heard the same prayers, but they seemed to rest where I kept searching. Something in me noticed gaps before I had words for them.

If grace is unconditional, why do I feel so outside? The only answer a young heart can assemble is self-erasure: there must be something wrong with me. That sting wasn’t exactly disbelief, but the moment I internalized exile.

One quality about me, if you can call it a quality, or maybe rather my toxic trait, is that when love felt conditional, I tried to understand instead of simply feeling hurt. Confusion and rejection made me think.
And that thinking “saved me”. It also made me lonely. I was not the chosen one. I was different in a place that only knew how to love sameness.

I’m no longer religious, and that loneliness is sharper than before. Faith once promised a place to return to, a life where belonging waited if I tried hard enough, but I didn’t get it.

I think I have tried hard enough, but it’s always been like a sense that there is a room where warmth happens naturally, and I was never given or trusted with the key.

Now I know that even if I went back to church, even if I said the right words, I would never find that life. The wound isn’t even about God anymore. It’s about having been told, implicitly, that love selects, and selection skipped me.

And not because it’s false, but because it was never mine.

I felt it, I carried it, and I survived it.

I was not chosen.

The Weight of Belonging and The Fragility of Home

On Saturday, I was at a photo festival in Naarden. It was excellent! Thank you, Alexandra, for taking me there!

I also liked the theme: Home.

These photos standing in the middle of the grassy fort are the two I really like.

Each image showed a complete living room setup, placed not inside a house or building but out on the streets at night. Rugs, couches, lamps, bookshelves, everything carefully arranged and staged, absurdly cosy, and entirely exposed.

A living room without walls

I stood there, trying to decide whether I found it beautiful, ridiculous, or painfully familiar. Maybe all of them?

I felt fascination because they were beautiful and bold. I felt resonance and sadness, because they mirror my efforts to build “a life” in places (or systems) that will never truly contain me. I also felt admiration because they show vulnerability and what comfort means in the middle of chaos.

For me personally, somehow, these photos feel more familiar than the exhibition where they display a lot of portraits of immigrants.

A False Sense of Shelter

Is this idea where safety dragged into public place, a home?

Is it still a home when placed outside the boundaries of safety?

Is “home” a space, or is it just the act of pretending we belong somewhere?

Can we really ever make a home in this transient, collapsing world?

For me, who has spent most of my life not feeling like I belong, a home is a fragile thing.

I ask myself a lot, what does it mean to belong when you always feel slightly misplaced, no matter where you stand, anyway?

I moved countries, rebuilt my life, and questioned systems, identity, and purpose. These photos hit too personal. Like an attempt I know too well.

No matter how much I don’t feel human, I am after all, a human. And the human needs to belong, to anchor meaning, in a world that offers no guarantees.

In so many ways, I now feel more “at home” here, among strangers, in a different language, than I ever did in my so-called home country, or even among family. And yet, that feeling doesn’t really sit in stone, it wobbles on shifting ground.

The feeling of belonging… will it ever come?

Or is it just another room I decorate in my solitude, knowing I may never stay?

So what and where is home, really?

Maybe home is something we build because the world is indifferent and won’t offer us one?

Maybe it’s an act of rebellion against impermanence? An absurd ritual we repeat, over and over, to insist that something can be ours, even in a world that never really belongs to us?

Maybe it’s the ache that reminds me that I’m still searching?

Or the fragile peace that comes from accepting I might never fully arrive?

Anakin Was Right: Sand Is Coarse and Rough and Irritating.

Yes, I hate sand.

I also hate hot weather.

But I LOVE beaches.

I mainly like going to the beach because I like how multiple parts of the earth combine to manifest as a whole; it embodies nature’s duality. The beach is like a testament to life’s grand scheme, where contradictions blend like a waking dream.

I always feel like being at the beach invites contemplation.
For example, the shifting sands beneath our wandering feet remind us of life’s transient, ephemeral fleet.
And with each passing wave comes a moment of reflection on time’s flow and its relentless persistence.
The horizon’s endless merge of sea and sky hints at boundless possibilities, like a reminder of our own quest for expansion to seek and explore.

The beach teaches humility, and that’s a profound lesson.
As we witness nature’s vastness, it astounds.
It humbles my ego and reminds me of my place.

From the fragility of shells, weathered and worn, to the majestic power of storms, fiercely torn.
A beach is a fusion of chaos and serene tranquillity
It’s my canvas for introspection, a gateway to pondering life’s profound direction.

In the whispers of waves and the sand’s gentle sway, I find a sacred place where I’m reminded of my transient grace.

Lombok, 2023

Life is Short

Life is short they said.

While we perish, history licks a finger and turns the page.

While we vaporized quickly, the universe keeps laughing at its cosmic joke.

While we spark briefly, we’re all also flying at incredible speed into the endless darkness of the unknown.

But if life is really, really short, then why do some moments seem to flatten out into endless streams?