Dear 21-year-old Me

 Dear 21-year-old Me, 

It feels a bit weird, writing to a me that I've once known but don't remember. You being nine years away. Nine years sounds like such a pathetically meagre amount of time, yet so much has happened since. 

You probably won't believe most of what I'm to tell you anyway; we both know I have a tendency towards exaggeration and drama. Not much have changed; I'm still prone to dramatic explosions, still binge eating away, still the foolish swooning anglophilic logophile you are. Still pretentious, and somewhat still in love with arabesques and pas de deux like you are; I miss those ballet trips the most, lounging in the steps of the National Museum, eating sandwiches at the foot of those lions and the blue rooster in Trafalgar Square, drenched in rain in the artsy Covent Garden atmosphere eating Ben's cookies. 

So, no, not much have changed. Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hiddleston still gives me headgasms; Ed Sheeran in my ear still makes me feel like autumn. Christmas still feels like a magical warm hug in the midst of winter, despite the four-summers-per-year here back in Malaysia.

Yet almost everything have changed. You've known the touch of despair and depression, felt the suffocating embrace of anxiety. You've spent nights and nights wishing you could cry wishing something would hurt enough to make you feel alive. You've learnt that pain, instead of joy, is what makes us feel alive, and being able to feel pain is such a blessing. You've learnt that most words are deceitful, and that action speaks louder than words, especially those tiny seemingly insignificant actions that flits away like an afterthought. You've learnt that most everyone cannot be trusted or relied upon, and blood runs infinitely stronger than the tempestuous tenuous ties of friendship that the world lauds so frequently. And then you've learnt to be so self sufficient that you became hyperindependant and spiky and misanthropic and generally spends every iota of free time with fictional characters who can't inflict more pain than the sympathetic heartache. 

You've spent so much time being groomed subconsciously into thinking yourself undesirable and never worthy enough. You've learnt to emphasize your feminine side, learnt to flaunt and use it, learnt that you possess the ability to cripple common sense and induce jealousy, and that you have to be careful with it. And then, discovered that it still wasn't enough to hold the person you want.  You've learnt that you could become quite the contortionist in the face of possible romance, so willfully blind to red flags of inconsistency and commitment issues, for the sake of deceptive compatibility. You learnt the awkwardness of unrequited love, the absolute trainwreck of a rekindled infatuation that went down the same destructive road, and again and again, you learnt the ache of being placed secondary to everything else. 

And then you learnt the touch of love. You've known infatuation, but now you know love. Not how love felt; I think we've always known what love felt like, how it looked like. But now, you've learnt how to love. You learnt that love could be letting go, that unselfish love wasn't a thing of myth, even if it came at the price of trudging through every single day with a weird sort of empty within. You've learnt what love songs mean--heartache isn't another strange concept you read in books anymore, but something that once replaced the blood that flow within your veins. You've debated so many times and still can't make up your mind if it's better 'to have loved and lost, or to have never loved at all'. You've learnt that you are capable of loving someone, and that realisation will soothe you in the nights when regrets try to drown you in waves. Through all of these, you will have learnt who you are, what you love, what you weren't willing to part with, what you would never compromise. You will finally learn what it means to be yourself, and come to terms with the price of being true to yourself. 



I know you've suspected that this career wasn't what you had in mind--we've always been annoyingly intrigued by the creative arts, but terrified with the rigidity of our mind to actually make it our living. But work is crucial to the sustainability of life, and I hope it will be of relief to know that you will find something to love about your job. You will go through housemanship with the weariness of a person at wits' end, pondering the point of going through the endless cycle of going to work before sunrise and coming home past midnight. In your fatigue, you will become numbed to the suffering of the sick and diseased, and then suffused with guilt at your heartlessness. But you will grow efficient, and open your eyes to what you are capable of in your position--to ease and to provide relief, to help and to give aid, and in certain cases, to walk with a person till the end of their lives with dignity. Being able to help? That would be the basis of what you will learn to love about your job. 

You'd go through a pandemic, through days of being suffocated within the confines of Personal Protective Equipment, witness countless deaths every single day because of a single virus. You'd  basically go through what is movie material, trudging on as an active fighter in the medical battleground while the rest of the world slows down and shuts down in quarantine. You'd watch everyone else work from home, finally noticing their kids and their family and their own health for the first time, while you are still dragging yourself to work every single day, not daring to go home in fear that you bring death and disease upon the feet of your loved ones. 

You will learn that you definitely dread going to work, yet work is the only thing that can release you from the ails of your body. You will learn that you're more than passable at what you do, generally, but demand so much out of yourself that stress and anxiety became synonymous with work. And then you will be sent over a tiny piece of sea to a land called Sarawak, where you rediscover the joy of working in a non-toxic environment, and the simple pleasures of a simple life. You will rediscover a forgotten interest, and start your journey in the fifty shades of grey and darkness, and start to work with words again. But you will get so stressed with the steep learning curve, and so annoyed with yourself for the slow progress that you cry at work regularly; but eventually, you'll learn to love the challenge of recognising patterns in greyscale, putting pieces together and then constructing the big picture with nothing but words. 

And in the midst of all these, your skeptical soul found someone. Yes. We found someone. Someone who, despite all the others before him who'd proved your skepticism necessary, despite all the others who had allowed you to feel unworthy and unlovable, despite your well-built solid walls-- someone had made it into your fortress and built a garden. He is sweet and thoughtful and considerate, and ultimately careful with your heart. Anxious and overthinking like you are, which, sometimes makes things very very difficult but also makes you feel like, yes, exactly, this is why I'm worried, thank you for getting it. He is pessimistic where you are optimistic, and bright when you are dimmed. I don't know why he loves me, but god, I can feel it in my very pores that he does.  

You'd have lived in closed confined quarters together for nearly a year and haven't felt like you need to take a breather, or like you need to insert a knife into his back. And then you'd have to suffer the absolute heartache of leaving him behind while you flew across the sea for work, and start the arduous journey of a long-distance relationship. You will learn that all your failed almost-relationships taught you something that worked in your favour now, and that a relationship needs hard elbow-grease work. You will learn that compatibility doesn't mean it will be easy, and that communication is not just talking. Being the wordsmith that you are, you will learn how capable words are of hurting and soothing, and yet as you learn to be careful with words, you will also learn that sometimes things need to be said face to face as soon as possible and not have the luxury of 2976349 edits. 

Love is a choice, and a verb, instead of a feeling. It is learning what love looks like and sounds like to each person, and learning to speak it and show it. It is waking up every morning and choosing to stay in love. Happiness is the same. True contentment stems from the mind instead of whatever trivial goals or milestones in life we've arbitrarily set for ourselves.  You will learn that. You will etch it in your very being. You will fail, from time to time, more times than you like. And you will learn that you are more resilient and stronger than you think you are, and climb back up to your feet again. 

Ultimately, you will learn that you need nothing and no one but your self and your own two hands.  You will learn that even though you're okay alone because it's safe and cozy and doesn't expose your trust issues, you don't actually want to be alone. But wanting is dangerous. Wanting makes you vulnerable, and doesn't that make wanting so much more precious than needing? But vulnerability means opening your doors and showing where it hurts, and trusting that people will not laugh at it or poke at it. It is treacherous and potentially fatal, yet, to misquote Brene Brown, vulnerability is where bravery starts. It is where all the most precious things in life are. We can't love without vulnerability. You will learn that, and it will take so much work to consciously let down your guard and let yourself be vulnerable.

Dearest 21-year-old Me, 

We are at the brink of middle age now, you and me. One foot into the big three, one foot left behind nostalgically in the edges of your twenties. Time runs so fast now; yet we are still caught up in the middle of it, strangulated by our indecisiveness, frozen by our fear. So many things are different now, and yet, it still reeks of that youthful outlook where everything is so vast and possible. Still so many things to work on--on work, on our lives, on our selves. But that is the beauty of it all, isn't it?

You have so much to go through, as do I. I wish you all the courage in the world, and remember, it's all going to be okay. We're going to be just fine. 


Love,
Your 30-year-old Self