You’ve always felt different from a young age. You grew up being told you weren’t enough. These would be the voices of a permanent gloom, a cloud that would follow you for the rest of your life.
Yet you try outrunning your cloud. You pick up self-help books. You play motivational podcasts on repeat. You adopt the billionaires’ morning routines. But nothing changes. You’re still you. Only now you take cold showers and meditate as soon as you wake up.
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”It’s just puppy love.”
That’s what my mum said when I was all but 14 years old and going through my first heartbreak. “Don’t worry. You’ll know real love soon enough,” she said.
Then you don’t know love, I thought. I was hurting so bad that it had to be real love. My parents just forgot how it was to be a teen. That’s how I justified it.
But as it’d turn out, she was right. I would finally meet my soulmate and we’d be together for more than a decade. And only now I’m learning what true love is. Danged adults and their wisdom.
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You know how I started my blogging career? By writing about my heartbreaks. This was during the Geocities days where you had to manually write each page’s HTML through Notepad.
You know what would’ve happened had I been lucky with the girls? I wouldn’t have had any reason to share my collection of cringe-rants. And I’ll tell you, my posts were so emo they could’ve fronted for My Chemical Romance.
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Photo: Deon Black
“Hey, any idea what’s cool to do around here?”
The woman I’d just spoken to held her book closer to her chest, sidestepping away like a crab. No reply, no smile. In fact, she scrunched her face as if I smelled like goat droppings.
I still cringe at the memory of me talking up to random girls in the shopping mall, just because I’d gotten a copy of The Game during my young adulthood, and I thought it that it would be the key to my relationship problems.
Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.
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Photo: Luan Cabral
“I think you’re in a cult,” I said.
“You’re just not used to it,” Sara replied.
“Not used to what, a man telling me that mercury is medicine?”
“Forget it,” she said, more to keep me quiet than to concede her point. The other volunteers still flitted around us, packing up the event space and patting each other’s backs for a job well done. Some of them glanced sideways as they overheard my skeptic thoughts.
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Your Friendly Malaysian Writer 