2020

Quarantine Thoughts

When you stare at the sky long enough from your window and observe the subtle changes, it’s possible to be lulled to a sense of rest. This year, I stared and stared listlessly in search of something. Meaning, beauty, a revelation of some sort, only to realise that there isn’t always something to be made out of something. There isn’t always a need for something proper or profound.

Nobody really talks about the inbetween state of things, such as the hours where there’s not much to do except wait. This is time handed to you which you’re not sure what to do with, like the hours you’d spend in transit in an airport. So much of 2020 felt like that; I’d wake up again in my room to resume from the day before, a Saved point from a story with little progress as the world raged ahead outside. This was the year where the line between work and rest got blurry. Being home cleared my skin and eased some work-related anxieties but it felt strange to have so many days in the year pass by when you’re locked inside for fear of the outside. My mood would dip each day to the point where I found myself napping a lot – a surefire sign of depression. 

When I think about the first lockdown, I think about how our fears were less restrained. We didn’t know what to do or expect. Even a trip to the grocery store proved to be a high-risk occasion. That we’d later be desensitised to this fear, in spite of rising numbers, is a living irony in its own right. 

I purchased a ton of pointless things during the first lockdown. Items include a fake gua sha roller and a tie dye shirt. There was so much madness in not being sure but there was also a weird (oftentimes short-lived) sense of joy in rediscovering fascination over pointless things. I learned how to paint, reorganised my wardrobe again and again, took joy in taking walks outside and surprisingly wore out my sneakers. 

There’s this CAPTCHA checkbox with the phrase I’m not a robot I have to manually tick each time before a Zoom meeting. I’m not a robot. What robot would try to time shampoo days to coincide just a day before workout days? What robot would feel resentment towards other robots for not wanting to mute their mic while on a Zoom call? What robot would, quite honestly, ever worry about living through a pandemic? 

Reticence

I picked up driving regularly again this year. One of my most vivid memories I have from teh year would be driving from Bangsar at 2am whilst listening to Have A Nice Life’s ‘I Don’t Love’.

My favourite thing about the song is the buildup; it starts off super quiet, so quiet you might think nothing’s playing at all, only for the drone, bass and fuzz to come in REALLY loud when you least expect it to. The song is about existential agony but there’s a relief to it which speaks strongly to me. 

It brings to mind one of my favourite poems is by Jean Valentine called ‘I Came to You’. 

“I came to you

Lord, because of

the fucking reticence of this world

no, not the world, not reticence, oh….”

There’s so much restraint we carry with living but there’s also humility in surrendering, in being able to say, This is my limit and I don’t know where to go from here. So much of my life has been about being afraid to turn around only to find nobody there. A lot of 2020 felt like that, in a way. 

Turning 30

I’m surer of myself now, more forgiving of the things that do and don’t make me whole. I no longer want to waste time on half-baked things or books or people that I’m unsure of for too long. I’m surprised by how much is left to learn and how vast yet small our existence feels in the grand scheme of things and am grateful that there’s still a pervasive sense of curiosity.

Maybe parts of it speak laughably like a crisis of some sort. I got a helix piercing this year. Dyed parts of my hair green. Ended a long-term relationship. Co-wrote an app for one of Malaysia’s major banks to generally positive reception. Started seeing a therapist. Made new friends. Lost some friends. Collaborated with other artists. Fell in love and got into a new relationship. When asked what I’d title this year, ‘A Second Adolescence’ immediately sprung to mind. It did feel like a coming of age of sorts. They weren’t all acts of protests but rather acts of discovery. 

We hear it time and again. 2020’s such a weird year. There’s no denying that it’d been a weird year. I just didn’t expect to find so much amidst all the weirdness too.