Frayed

I had a sudden urge to run. This upcoming company audit has made work extra shitty this week and I needed to distract myself.

And so I laced up, added the most bass-driven hip-hop/rap tunes I could think of to my running playlist, and took off. I didn't even bother timing myself.

What a fuck up that was.

Ten minutes. That's how long I lasted before the music melted away and the floodgates in my mind broke open.

My mind was finally unbound, ideas burgeoning without restraint, now inexorable because I had broken the lock.

I couldn't stop. Thoughts swirled in my head as though my body was a husk with someone else piloting it, racing through my personal psychoanalysis of recent dreams, to my dating life, to my floundering career, whelming my mind as I realized the horrors of what I have locked up.

I never thought that video games and TV shows had such a profound effect in limiting my mental capacity to conjure up all these notions. Escapism has its merits, but isn't this all just illusionary? How long can I stanch this stream of consciousness with pop culture references and in-game micro-management?

Running didn't take my mind off my problems as much as it revealed the real issues buried deeper within me.

Oh, no.

It had only compensated my physical wellbeing for my mental health.

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(Un)fazed

The resistance period is waning. I feel the adrenaline starting to lose effect, as a wave of exhaustion sweeps by.

This facade of a stoic, calm and collected 24-year old grandson is falling apart.

My maternal grandmother was recently admitted to the hospital for a minor stroke. She's back at home now, but the left side of her face is partially paralysed and her speech is slurred.

She's been doing some regular physiotherapy by walking with a stroller to and fro the toilet, but she needs a feeding tube to make sure food doesn't enter her windpipe instead.

At least she still has her sense of humour. I still have my grandmother, as selfish as that sounds.

My dad's still cracking jokes with grandma, as he rained glowing reviews while she worked on her physiotherapy earlier this evening. How he manages to find the bright side of optimism in a sombre setting astounds me.

Just a few minutes ago, my mom, together with the help of my (fresh grad) doctor cousin, just fixed grandma's feeding tube in place as she subconsciously tried to yank it out for the second time today. This is the first time in her life that my mom's doing this and she's unfazed.

I've the hardest fucking parents in the world, and I'm extremely proud to be their son. I just pray that I'll have the mental strength and fortitude to do them right when the moment requires me to step up.

Right now, my usual borderline-sociopathic ability to seamlessly disassociate with reality has been subdued. I am a shadow of myself, sitting in the kitchen alone, breaking apart inside.

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Rage

First of all, I'm emotionally all over the place. I'm angry. Angry at what my nation could do, and I mean the amount of evil we have the capacity for. So yeah, I'm going into this without pulling any punches.

To lend some context, I just heard BFM's interview with The Star's youth platform-turned investigative journalism team R.AGE, regarding their piece on the student trafficking of foreign students.

Long story short, these bright, hopeful individuals are swindled into spending their nest eggs, and even their families's possessions, for the prospects of receiving a good education from bogus institutions set up in Malaysia. Then, on their student visas, they're forced to work with their student visas (which is an immigration crime) to survive, while earning less than the minimum wage, all while their family goes on with their lives unaware of the horrors students face.

It sickens me that Malaysia, a nation of multicultural and ethnic diversity can resort in such exploitative measures. I'm angry at how vulnerable people are exploited just because they want to break out of the poverty cycle.

I'm angry that these shit bag, scamming cunts walk among the rakyat, without receiving justice because these syndicates are so entrenched in the grey area of the law that they can get away unscathed.

I'm angry, because I have been in that position before, albeit I was lucky and privileged enough to get out of the scam. Yeah, I'm priveleged. I've never denied it (and it's besides the point here).

If I wasn't writhing in my car seat listening to this, driving home from work, then I might just be weeping in the corner of my room for thinking how cruel the world is at exploiting the poor and underprivileged.

I know I'm angry because of my passion for being social justice-y at the slightest of things. But the root of the problem is how I don't know how to redirect that anger into something useful.

How the fuck do we solve these issues? I'm not willing to put my career on hold to address these atrocities, either.

Maybe that's the cost I'm not willing to bear. Maybe the toll isn't just my ideals and values, but my lifetime as well...

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