Rania, Aug 29th, Doha

The title of this article is a joke my older sister used to tell me when I was old enough to try and follow in her academic and professional footsteps, teasing me that I was ‘plagiarising her CV’.

I never denied it, mostly because it was hilarious. Also, it was kind of true. Very true. But not exactly in a resume-way.

Practically ever since I learned how to walk, all I wanted to do was follow Dea everywhere. When I was too young to go to school, I’d dress up in her old uniform, grab a random bag and hop in the car with her, kicking up a tantrum when my parents dragged me out and returned me to my room. I would want to blow out her birthday cake and eat it too because of course we shared the same birthday (mine is in January). When she went to swimming lessons, I would try to jump in with her without knowing the first thing about water (mainly that you could drown in it).

I wanted to wear the things she was wearing, and I wanted to grow out my hair the way she had it—unfortunately I was cursed to be the baldest baby imaginable while she had her locks of long, curly, beautiful hair. I don’t remember what was in my 4-year-old head anymore, but it must have been instinctual—all I wanted was for us to be close.

My older sister had always been a lot more hardworking than I was. Graduating undergrad at 19 aside (diabolical, I know), she had always wanted to do things that seemed foreign and alien to teenage me. She competed in business competitions in university, and in turn I competed in my own nerdy competitions at school. She went for undergrad exchange in Finland, so at age 14 I flew on my own to shadow her in her day-to-day routine in Helsinki. One of the most difficult things about life, I think, is knowing what is out there, and where to begin—and she made it so that all I had to do was look ahead, see where she’s heading off to, and figure out my own steps.

She flew me to Bangkok to watch our first K-Pop concert together (BTS Red Bullet in 2015, very OG of her), so for the next three consecutive years, we would fly to Bangkok for our yearly concert trip. When she was a tween and got her first Nokia flip phone, I begged my parents to have the exact same model—just in a different colour. I think I’ve always seen my older sister as a trendsetter; a belief I only grew out of once she left home, and I was left alone to figure out my own tastes.

She was the first to pursue a fully-funded master’s degree in our family. And she pursued it relentlessly, not conceding for a second to the ‘easy outs’ she had. It must have been hell to shoulder her own expectations in that way, without knowing if what she wanted was possible or not. I had it easy—all I had to do was look ahead and know that if she did it, I could do it too.

There is a clarity that she carries with her throughout her life that I never seem to cultivate even as I grew older. She had always known which doors she wanted to open; would knock on them and step in confidently with all her preparation under her belt. That was Dea—she was always prepared. In comparison, I prepare with a lot of ‘maybes’ attached. I float around in the hallway of choices, hovering in front of closed doors and deciding whether I like the look of them or not as I leave many open in my wake. This has frustrated both her and myself at times, and I can only be thankful that she continues to respond to my complaints without a single “I told you so”.

Dea is what you would call your typical perfectionist—sometimes to a fault. I very quickly realised I was bad at a LOT of things, and have found a way to truly enjoy the process of getting better. But Dea absolutely hates hobbies she’s not immediately good at, and I tease her about this—but in a way this made her focus on the things she does like in her own time, and she gets really good at what she is good at. Also, she’s great at details. I miss details all the time. She doesn’t really get FOMO. And me—well. My friends who I have dragged from one end of the city to the other for 2 completely different events would know…

Now that we’re both grown adults with our own distinct trove of life experiences and responsibilities, we have settled into becoming incredibly different people. Both our personal and professional resumes have a big chasm between them and we occasionally meet in the middle to gossip about people at work, bully (lovingly) Izhar and Hanan, or complain about our parents (lovingly too. Mostly). She has a child and household to take care of now, and I am waiting patiently to buy my next Fire Emblem game.

For us younger siblings, we may all be walking on different kinds of paths, but I hope my older sister knows that each twist and turn has been made easier now that she’s tread through them. She probably has no idea the kind of horizons she has opened up to me when we were younger, and how much fun I had along the way. I hope she remembers to look back, once in a while, just to remember how far she’s come not just for herself, but for everyone who loves her, too.

I was always inexplicably in awe of Dea as a toddler—and now, I couldn’t be any prouder of the woman she has become, and continues to become.

Happy 31st birthday Kakak Dea! <3

Love,

Your most delightful oldest younger Susib.

(pc: IMDb)

Rania, Aug 17th, Doha

Almost a month ago, the Doha Film Institute screened My Father’s Shadow (2025) by Akinola Davies as part of their limited-run Contemporary Releases. It’s the first ever Nigerian film to be selected and screened at the Cannes Film Festival, and being unfamiliar with West African cinema in general, I was super excited to watch it. The movie is set in 1993, a period of time in which Nigeria was ruled by a military regime and a presidential election was underway. Our story is told through the point of view of two brothers, Akin and Remi, on an unexpected daytrip to Lagos with their estranged father.

(I’ll save my review of this movie for a separate post? Maybe? So I don’t spoil it for anyone who is curious about it!)

I didn’t expect to be swept off my feet at the end. I think I sat staring at the screen for about ten minutes after the credits rolled, so shocked and disoriented by the experience. Watching this movie had moved something incredibly deep-seated within me.

I was reminded, once again, of all the ways I love cinema.

I love that movies, no matter how distant its setting, brings us back to the emotions, ideas and thoughts already so familiar to us. I have never been to Lagos, and I didn’t have the first idea of what it looked like, but I felt close to Akin and Remi in their joy, grief, confusion the entire runtime. Whether it be through a cartoon dog, a badly written installment of a superhero franchise, an achingly heartbreaking period drama, or a science fiction epic, movies constantly remind me of our collective humanity. They connect us, and teach us how to weave the braids of empathy by presenting different problems in different ways.

I love watching a masterpiece and becoming envious of the masterful minds that created it! But I also love watching a ‘bad’ movie and complaining about how bad I found it! I don’t think living a full life means you have to only let the good things in. And I don’t think the bad is only useful in its service of the good. Why can’t the bad be an experience on its own, another set of emotions and thoughts to unlock? How exciting to think a piece of media can move you to anger, to surprise you by pulling a side of yourself you weren’t aware of.

Like books, watching movies sometimes helps me find the language for things I did not have the words for. But unlike books, I love how that language can exist without any words at all. Sometimes I find it in the way a character stares at someone they love, in the way someone wails in pain, in the way a plan fails, in the changing shades of the sky, in the choppy cuts that pull me away from one scene to the next. I love that movies shape the feeling for me, and I get to find my own words for it.

The 1993 elections in Nigeria was an event I did not have the slightest idea about before I stepped into the cinema. The severity of the controversy—and fatality—of its aftermath was completely unknown to me, much to my embarrassment as a ‘person in policy’. I love that I get to learn about a historical turning point as it unfolded in the midst of people’s lives, not just as a date on a vague timeline of events. It was less important that I knew when the elections took place. What were people talking about before the big event? How did people go about their day in the weeks leading up to it? What did the afternoon feel like on the day? The movie does not have to be a factual, minute-to-minute recount of the event to matter—all it needs to do is tell a part of the view and let the audience in through one possible window.

Watching this movie made me reflect on storytelling and its power. Storytelling is central and essential to pretty much every facet of life, and not just in creative or fictional works. It is crucial in the way we process our emotions, narrate our experiences, form our very identities; business pitches, deals, multilateral agreements, court cases; history, as a subject, is in large part a storytelling exercise by powers to own, dismantle, or reconstruct the course of events.

Leaving the cinema after watching this movie, I was inconsolable. I had to find a refuge in a cafe on the ground floor and, borrowing a pen from a waiter, put thought to paper as if afraid of them dissipating to thin air. The last time a movie had this effect on me was Happyend (2024) by Neo Sora, which I decided to watch last-minute in an independent cinema, somewhere in Hong Kong on a sweltering summer night in 2025. Back then, I similarly had to sit and reorganise my thoughts before I had enough wits about me to start walking again.

And these are the words I wrote to myself then:

Movies keep me grounded. I like that they bring me out of the narrow lens of my own life and into a vast, endless universe. I love that it allows me to witness different lives because I only have this one to live—and to understand not all of them are enviable, and why this one is mine.

What a privilege it is to live in a time of movies, and to have come across such powerful ones that my world occasionally gets knocked off its axis onto wider horizons.

Rania, Aug 1st, Doha

For the past five years of my life, I’ve been living in a whirlwind state of dazzlingly, glitteringly new.

New places, new cities, new homes; new people, new friends, new loves; new books, new facts, new fiction, new lessons, new classes; new ecstasies, new hurts; new sights, new sceneries, new landscapes. Someone looking in might think I was trying to transplant a new life on top of my old one, but that would be giving the whole thing too much credit—I’m not sure that it was as active a process as it appears. Mostly, I felt like I was just letting myself be carried away by the currents of life’s rivers, which had somehow come across a particularly torrential bend.

I can’t remember when the last time I had consecutive, long stretches of vacant mental space that, instead of making me soft and lazy, made me itch for a pen or keyboard. I’m not the kind of person to write among chaos—I think of it as quiet, deliberate pastime, when everything else is empty. And in the last five years, there’s been so much to take in that my head hasn’t really known much quiet nor the chance to be empty.

Coincidentally, I’ve also stopped writing (fiction) five years ago. Not completely, of course—I think that might actually kill me—but consistently, deliberately. I think I’ve stopped writing from the soul, as cheesy as that sounds.

So much of what I end up putting into words are thoughts processed at an arm’s length, feelings placed on a petri dish and picked out with tweezers under a microscope. Every idea is packaged into a series of arguments. I’ve forgotten how to write dialogues between characters that are angry and heartbroken, because what I know of it I’ve taken it out of my head and pieced it together like a thesis statement.

I wish I wrote while I traveled! But my head never seems to come up with anything worth saying while I’m doing it, and it is only in moments of explicit intent do these experiences amount to something tangible.

The truth is, I think in my pursuit of a bigger, more expansive life, I’ve grown numb to my own voice. It seems that the architecture of time has grown so vast that I find myself lost in its winding stairs, all leading to new and exciting destinations. Maybe the best way to put it is that my brain is constantly indexing all the new information: it’s never had time to sit and reflect, create something out of it, because the cabinets are always full and the desk always cluttered.

I don’t think I’ve truly put into words, for example, what it felt like to be wrong about someone for the first time in my life, to bare my soul quite embarrassingly to an unsympathetic audience. What did it feel like to have cried over someone so wretchedly that another person had to hold you? Somehow, my fifteen-year-old self that had never experienced anything close knew exactly how to write about it in her poems and prose wracked with speculative teenage angst.

And here stands my twenty-seven-year-old self, who has known all shades and forms of heartbreak yet can only recognise it as a dull ache in the chest and a series of memory-stored motions. I don’t remember anymore why it mattered so much to me at the time—I can only guess. That’s what makes fiction easier to write sometimes, I guess—when no knowledge exists there is nothing constraining you. But then how did I used to get it so right?

Not everything has to be turned into words, I know, but for the longest time this is how I’ve always found and come back to myself. It seems as though the bigger my life has gotten, the deeper the cave I get lost in grows and the farther away I get. It’s time I find my way out, and for that I think I need to navigate the chambers in silence and listen to the echoes a little better.

This post might not make a ton of sense, but I’m trying my hardest not to package it so much the way I usually do. Maybe I’ll look back on this in a month or so and decide I hate it. But for now, I’m taking a page out of my sister’s book and I’m trying to write something just a little more vulnerable and raw. There is also a lot to be said about the need to create after so much consumption (which, arguably, is what I’ve been doing the past five years), but that’s for another self-indulgent thinkpiece.

Rania, Mar 15th, Doha

(Edited Mar 16th post-Oscar’s)

I’m no cinephile, but I kind of want to try my hand at this review + predictions thing ahead of the Academy Awards because I think this is one of the few years I’ve been able to watch almost all the movies nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. My commentary is not technical at all, just some rogue thoughts. All reviews will be spoiler-free unless stated otherwise.

Star ratings (out of 5) are what I’d rate the movie now (not when I first watched them lol sorry Letterboxd ratings). In alphabetical order:

Nominated Movies

Bugonia — ★★★☆☆

Honestly this movie felt a bit too much and too weird for me (even for a Yorgos Lanthimos movie), because it didn’t have any strong thematic message(s) that justified the weirdness. I understand that it’s trying to juggle a lot—largely discussions about the environment and social hierarchy I guess?—but maybe a little too much as I felt like it lost the thread towards the end of the second act. The ending, though a fun one, took away from the stakes we felt in the first place that the entire journey of the movie ended up feeling pointless. I would say that Poor Things (2023) was equally weird, but the theme was strong enough to have weight that made all the strangeness matter. Emma Stone did not have to be there for this movie (as in, this could totally have been played by someone else). Her performance felt lacklustre and not noteworthy to me.

This made me wonder if the original Korean movie Bugonia was based on (Save the Green Planet! (2003) by Jang Junhwan) is a better execution of the themes it tried to explore.

F1 — ½☆☆☆☆

I have very little to say except why is this movie even here.

Actually wrong, I do have things to say. Disclaimer because I do watch F1 and although my feelings for this movie would be the same no matter the sport, I will admit (at the behest of a friend…) that maybe I’m slightly more invested in it…

This was an abomination, and I don’t even care about whether they got the technicalities of F1 right or not—my problem is that this is clearly a movie written as a self-insert fanfic, based on some dude’s wet dreams of being a motorsports champion after being a loser most of his life. It’s so self-serving and male-centric in its storyline of “he’s an underdog and now he’s going to prove everyone wrong cause everyone underestimated him” and does a disservice to women in the sport with the weird romantic storyline (again, self-serving because of course they’d fantasise about sleeping with the most powerful, badass woman engineer on the paddock and reducing her to a romantic interest). It doesn’t even do the guilt storyline very well because all it did was give Br*d P*tt’s character a redemption arc. Also, be so for real, we were supposed to find Br*d P*tt hot in the movie? I was supposed to believe he was some kickass underdog??? This movie made me so angry and it’s crazy that Lewis Hamilton was involved in the production tbh.

Frankenstein — ★★★★★

I am biased because I love Frankenstein’s story, founder of modern sci-fi. Beautiful, exquisite, soulful, so visually stunning and a faithful way to tell the story the way the novel intended—layered in the plotline and biased in its storytelling from each narrator’s point of view. I was so lucky to watch the 35mm version in the cinemas and I cried multiple times. I’ve never been a big fan of Jacob Elordi (thought he was kind of overrated and often typecast), so imagine my horror at realising, in real-time, that I had to give another white boy some acting credit. I felt like in the days after watching it, there were so many new details I learned about the movie—from the costumes to the settings, and character design choices… I think this is one of those movies that we moved on too quickly from, that actually deserves a lot of rumination because of the artistry involved. Not gonna lie, there were moments that looked a bit too CGI-ed even though they were real sets (like parts of the mansion), so it did take me out, but I loved understanding the process behind it and so thankful that such analog art forms still exist (Netflix release aside).

I’m not sure if this is Best Picture material though. I can’t tell you why, but my gut says it’s not an Oscar darling. Has there ever been a best picture for an adaptation of such a well known IP actually? I should probably look that up.

Hamnet — ★★★★☆

I think… this is a serious contender… hear me out! A lot of people’s criticism of this movie is apparently like… this movie is trauma porn? It was just a lot of gratuitous shots of Jessi Buckley crying over her baby? Or that her crying was too over the top and as subtly tear-jerking as someone pulling at your hair to make you cry? I don’t know have these people known grief and death… The movie didn’t feel that way at all to me and I found that it built up to the pain and hurt quite well.

There were also criticisms for the Hamlet performance at the end because apparently the delivery sucked. Maybe I’m not enough of a Shakespeare snob because to me, it worked for what the movie was—a heavily dramaticised, romanticised version of his life told mainly through his wife’s POV.

I genuinely really enjoyed this movie and didn’t realise it was so polarising. I think Jessie’s been sweeping up awards this season, and Paul Mescal performed better than people thought, so I would say this movie is a front-runner for the award.

Marty Supreme — ★★☆☆☆

I will be mad if this movie wins. Stressed me out for no reason—as in, I did not feel his agenda compelled me to find the movie riveting. Marty is flat as a character and the movie felt incredibly pointless to me. Was it a visually stunning, well-edited movie? Sure. I still think it’s a bootleg version of Uncut Gems.

Also the press run annoyed me even though I wasn’t even keeping up with it. I thought it was a serious contender to win Best Picture, but I watched the movie and honestly everyone was overselling it. Sorry Marty and Timmy but I really hope this movie flops.

One Battle After Another — ★★★½☆

I can see this winning but I think the longer I sit with this movie the less I like it. I was swept up by the action scenes and the thrill of a revolutionary storyline. The action shots were some of the best I’ve seen as of late—everyone talks about that one scene in the third act and tbh… deserved. It was as good as everyone made it out to be. When I watched it in the cinema I felt like there was so much to the movie that spoke of the current temperature of the world, and it definitely coloured my opinion of it positively. But the more time I spent away from it, the more the world has changed, and the less depth I feel like the movie had in discussing what it meant to try and dismantle a system that worked against you your whole life. It actually reminds me of how difficult it is to make a movie truly timeless.

Still love PTA’s direction and storytelling, though. EDIT: Oh my god I had no idea that PTA said “filmmakers shouldn’t be involved in politics” while winning a whole movie about systematic injustice and collective armed rebellion… what the hell. Men always disappoint. No wonder this movie rings hollow the more you sit with it.

The Secret Agent

Sorry I haven’t watched this yet…

Sentimental Value — ★★★★★

GUN TO MY OWN HEAD this movie was PAINFUL and beautiful and HAUNTING and an absolute mastery of emotions. If this movie won, I would be pretty happy and think it was deserved.

It’s one of those movies where I feel like with each re-watch it would hit harder. The sucker-punch blow of emotions for this movie felt delayed for me—the gravity of it really hit hardest after stepping away from it and evaluating what the hell just happened. Which I think is very reminiscent of every interaction with any parental figure in your adulthood lmao.

I told my friend this movie felt like it had a lot of restraint, and she disagreed saying this felt like it was the most violent thing to watch if you have a certain relationship with your parents. I don’t deny that this movie is violent in its own way (the violence, to me, was in the unpacking of older sister-younger siblings relationship…) but I still want to give it credit for its restraint. There wasn’t a single scene of external emotional outburst, yet I felt like I had to take a smoke break (I do not smoke) and smash some windows afterwards (I’m afraid of glass shards).

Sinners — ★★★★★

This movie should be winning original OST tbh… and maybe the Best Picture too, though I don’t know if the Academy moves like that. It feels a little too good and too ‘radical’ to be an Oscar darling unfortunately.

But this movie was seriously so! Much fun! And this is coming from someone who can’t stomach the slightest gore at all. Super fun action scenes, gorgeous set, fun characters—I found myself being invested in a short amount of movie time. The exposition spent for world-building also didn’t feel draggy at all. Insane allusions to systemic racism and violence against African Americans, and such a clever way of portraying the injustice experienced by the community—specifically, the way they’d get screwed over no matter what course of action they took, and that this injustice was baked in the system.

This was… so fresh. It made me think a lot about how magical storytelling can be when it’s inventive. I really hope they win, but I don’t have that much faith in the Academy.

Train Dreams

Sorry I haven’t watched this yet…

Movie(s) I think should have been nominated but didn’t:

As if this post isn’t getting too long already, but I want to mention 2 movies I wish got nominated but didn’t!

It Was Just An Accident — ★★★★★

Something that absolutely shocked me was to know this movie was shot completely in secret in Iran. Again, this movie was funnier than I thought, but the humour didn’t take away from the gravity of the movie at all. It added to the absurdity of the situation, and of the larger political situation. I learned a lot about Iran and Iranian lives here—something that feels incredibly pertinent to internalise in current world. Also, Mariam Afshari delivered a performance so incredibly in the last 10 minutes of that movie it actually froze me to my cinema seat long after the lights were turned on. I wish I was more eloquent in what I have to say about this movie, because I truly think it’s a generational production.

No Other Choice — ★★★★☆

This was funnier than I thought. And no one does editing better than Park Chan-wook. What a stunning, tension-filled movie. All the shots of technological devices and their blacked out screens? The use of mirrors? The incredible landscape shots and transitions? Oh my god.

I think this felt more subtle than Parasite in what it was trying to say, because I don’t think this ultimately wanted to centralise social hierarchy in its critique. It felt, to me, more of a study into human psyche—and it’s a super intelligent movie when viewed that way.

Conclusion

TL;DR here are my predictions!

Winner: Probably Sentimental Value or Hamnet?

Winner in my heart: Sinners but I know it’s too good to hope

Winner in my deepest of hearts: It Was Just An Accident

If either The Secret Agent or Train Dreams win then… sorry…

(Happy International Women’s Day. This is a painting by a Palestinian artist Asmaa Aljueithni, which was reported to be ‘the only thing to survive the destructive strike on her home in Gaza at the start of the genocide.’ pc: here).

Rania, Mar 8th, Doha

Art has the power to comfort the disturbed, and disturb the comfortable.

I can’t remember where I first read it, but this was a statement I naively held onto. But recently I’ve had to revisit how much power it truly has in disturbing the comfortable.

I’ve always felt a little hurt whenever I had to defend my policy/professional interest. Most people receive my explanation with genuine fascination, trying to wrap their heads around what ‘arts and culture policy’ actually means (tourism? Art galleries and art fairs? Ethnic textiles? Do I long for a career in museum ticketing or to be an archeologist?)

But I do receive the occasional disdainful replies that carry similar tones of skepticism: why prioritise art, when so many people don’t even have food or water?

And I would always defend art against this perceived foe, no matter if they were some effective altruism bro or Serious Economist. I would even try to use their language. I would bring up multiple case studies, assess it from both a macro and micro point of view, from national mandates to grassroots activities. I would point to the Arab Gulf’s insane investment into the arts and culture to build national identities they so strongly covet, to distinguish themselves from their neighbours and signal to the world their capacity to be the next trade, social, entrepreneurial hubs of the modern era.

I would speak from my (albeit limited) understanding of how creative economies affect many indigenous and marginalised populations in Southeast Asia, how they are channels to not only provide people with livelihoods, but to preserve their centuries-old heritage and important customs—all of which give us humans history, identity, dignity and a sense of belonging.

And is this not what underscores the efforts of everything from billion-dollar national museum projects to your local arts advocacy group? Is to belong not a form of autonomy? A form of power in and of itself?

The arts is vast. For now, I want to talk about cinema.

I recently learned about a mobile cinema initiative built by gazasunbirds [1] for displaced children in Gaza’s camps. Many of these children, apart from having all the places they ever knew and the things they ever owned destroyed by Israel’s genocidal occupation, are also orphans, or have lost a significant number of family members.

Not long ago, they hosted a cinema night for children in Gaza, screening Pixar’s Ratatouille (2007) while handing out free popcorn that they cooked over an open fire and served in little decorated paper cones. For many of us who have spent months, and now years, of watching children in anguish crying for their dead parents, or carrying the dismembered limbs of their siblings—all to the point of desensitisation—it felt… hopeful.

This single movie may not have changed their material condition. The popcorn they were fed may not even have cured their hunger—in fact, some people may even argue they should have used the corn kernels to make more nutritious food. But this is why cinema can be so important to humanity in times of absolute darkness and crisis—it is a reminder that the life they are clinging on to is still dignified, worthwhile and full of meaning.

It has the power to comfort the disturbed.

But what power does it in disturbing the comfortable?

We don’t have to reach so far back to feel like the answer is a hopeless one. I think about the Oscar-nominated movie The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025) a lot. When it entered mainstream cinemas, it received a reception that was deceivingly optimistic. It shocked (particularly Western) audiences. It humanised the absolute impossibility of rescue operations in occupied states subjected to incessant violence, and most of all brought to life the feeling of powerlessness of all those involved.

One would assume the movie inspired guilt in its audience—and for a time, it did. We all cried over it, gave it accolades, put Hind’s mother who suffered immense losses on platforms to speak her piece, accompanied with standing ovations.

And then we let the atrocities continue unabated. The comfortable were in discomfort for exactly one business day, if even that. Witnessing a two-hour repackage of the atrocity assuaged us of the guilt we carried before. See? We kept our eyes open the entire time. We spared thoughts.

So instead, art comforts the comfortable.

As with many things in life, the disconnect here is that emotions and feelings don’t always translate to action. There is value in rage, yes—but what are the tears of the powerful if they are not enough to inspire direct action to bring about change?

I try to think back of instances from my immediate experience of when art has moved people to action beyond cinema. What comes to mind are art builds during protests and speeches that rallied masses for collective action. There’s also literature shaping minds that go on to teach new generations of scholars, academics, policymakers, etc.

The things I can think of are either small or slow. In the immediate crisis, do these actions have any sway in how things play out, how decisions are made?

If not, what is the point of all this art?

This is now a question that I find myself wrestling with, sitting in front of my laptop staring at business plans for a museum that will be built in four years’ time. In Doha, we’ve been told to shelter in place until further notice a week ago. The work remains important, but I can’t help but feel a little silly doing it during this time.

I am not saying Timothee Chalamet has a point whatsoever (his weird demeaning statement, as an artist himself, is another issue altogether). But I do understand, more tangibly now, that it is not enough for art to comfort. It is not enough to soothe if the effects last only until the next round of shelling comes around.

I understand, more deeply now, that it is possible to weaponise art as a form of detached involvement for the privileged, so that they can say ‘Look! I do care!’ while never stepping outside their carefully curated, heavily defended, bubble of a life.

Until the comforted have been thoroughly disturbed to resist the status quo and change systematic violence, there will always be those caught in the crossfire. And the rest of us will continue to look on with distant dismay.

I don’t know how we can change that with art.

(And if anyone has any thoughts to share, I would love to hear them — no matter if they are hopeful or not!)

Footnotes

[1] gazasunbirds is a group of paracyclists who, since 2021, have kept a social media presence to elevate Palestinian athletes on the world stage, who have famously been repeatedly barred from participation in important global sporting events such as the Olympics and Paralympics, or face significant barriers to do so. This feels increasingly important to address as the Olympics approach in the USA. Their previous projects in Gaza include food distribution, community training for injured and disabled athletes, and awareness campaigns, while they have also hosted virtual races to fundraise for various causes. They are not a group of artists, but in building their mobile cinema initiative they highlight the importance of art, sports and entertainment even in the face of atrocity and violence.

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(credit: McNally Editions)

Rania, Dec 11th, Doha

I’m turning 27 in a little over a month, and although my life has (thankfully?) been relatively square and modestly fun, I’m beginning to think about womanhood in ways I’ve always deemed myself too young for and held at an arm’s length, like some inconsequential bystander.

Having finished Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott, I realised that it isn’t true that I’m just some inconsequential bystander. Of course, this book is set during a demographically very different New York to the one I briefly spent time in. And, of course, I have barely experienced being an ex-girlfriend, let alone a whole ex-wife…

But reading it, I found myself transposing my own days onto these women’s (albeit, of course, much less glamorously) and turning over the question they ask themselves in my own head: what choices must I make to prove to myself that I want what is best for me?

Something I love about this book is its depiction of how our protagonist (and ex-wife) Patricia—to use today’s catchphrase—attempts to ‘decenter men’ in her life. (Mild spoilers ahead!)

Much of the book is spent following Patricia as she spends all her youth trying to get over Peter, her ex-husband, after a failed attempt to make an open marriage work. She throws herself into work, spends her money on luxurious clothes and accessories she could never afford in her marriage, refuses to commit to anything more than casual encounters with socialite men. She is what one would call the pinnacle of a ‘modern woman’—successful in her career, more money to spend than she could ever need, and almost heartless in her refusal to take men any more seriously than the surface level. She turns the focus inwards onto herself—her personal success and her own individual fulfilment. Yet she is always left wondering why she still feels so cold.

Then there comes a shift. We see it slowly, then all at once: when Patricia eventually gives up the man she was convinced to be her Next Great Love, Noel, in favour of a woman, Beatrice, despite the act going directly in contention to her fantasy of a happy-ever-after with Noel (I won’t spoil how).

In my opinion, the last climax of the book is what a true act of ‘decentering men’ looks like. Patricia picks her wish to see Beatrice’s life improve over her love for Noel because, to quote the book, Patricia realises that ‘whatever minor hells I have visited, [Beatrice]’s lived in a major one.’

Her greatest act of decentering is not to hyper-focus on the self, but to build, tend to and pour herself into a community. This also suggests that decentering men does not lie in devaluing our existing, or potential, relationships with men—it is in the elevation of other relationships in our lives that extend beyond the self: in the bond between friends, other women, family and everyone we see as such.

I love all the women in this book because they remind me of how important friendships are!!!

The book’s descriptions of New York City as a glittering city does make one yearn for a place where they could be themselves fully while remaining anonymous all at once. The afterword by Parrott’s son, written in 1988, talks about the book’s version of 1920s New York City being much smaller, cheaper and more intimate that the one he’s familiar with in the 80s. I wonder what he’d think of the city in 2025—how much bigger, more diverse and all the more interesting it has become, but how it has also slowly seen more dreams die than come to life.

The last lines of the book talk about how Patricia finds reprieve in the escapism of travel. It reminds me of how perennially tied we are to a physical place—how even the streets traversed by millions of strangers still host tender moments we’d rather bury or painful memories we’ve polished so hard to a misleading shine.

I feel as though, through this book, I’ve come to know a little better about the feeling of victory Patricia feels about her agency, the warmth she feels from various lovers she encounters—both the fun and cruelty of desire. I feel as though I’ve sat with these women’s griefs, and felt the chill of loneliness as familiarly as if they were my own.

I’m reflecting on the past three to four years of my life through this book, why I felt like I’d lived with a fuse being lit on my back—frantically, erratically, almost like I’d die if I ever stopped doing. Perhaps it’s because I felt that there was a certain recklessness I could indulge in with the knowledge that all this, one day, will cease to be, and to keep the time flowing I, too, had to constantly be shifting and changing.

But I hesitate to say it is so. I teeter on the edge of this thought, because for all my supposed frivolity, I know that with the friends I made and the connections I forged, I flung myself headfirst into them, with all the intensity and earnestness I could muster in my being—in the hopes that I’d feel those moments when time becomes irrelevant and the world feels stationary, and I can bask in the company of others while uncaring of how dark or light it grows outside.

I also enjoy the slight investigation into relationships between parent and child, and the cold detachment of it all. But this would be for another essay.

No doubt I’ll have many, many more things to say about this book as I grow older and, hopefully wiser, to its layers (casual treatment of assault and domestic abuse notwithstanding—I don’t claim that this is a flawless book!). I’m not sure if I am impressed or depressed at the thought that modern women can still connect so deeply to what is ultimately a book about Patricia’s constant struggles despite her life’s abundance.

This will be a book I revisit again and again not as a cautionary tale, but as a mirror of what life is—and, perhaps, could be.

Dea, May 3rd, Jakarta

Came across this tweet as I was devouring my bowl of scrambled eggs and porcini mushrooms earlier today:

In this era of distant friends shocking one another with a new Strava update of another half-marathon at a pace of 5 and a series of Instagram stories of their Hyrox training regime, it’s been made incredibly easy to feel that exactly, you are not better than everyone else. In fact, you may be worse. You are low agency because you skipped another cardio session this morning. You are low agency because you didn’t put in longer hours at work last week. You are never going to achieve greatness because you don’t make it a goal to be amongst the best.

I am a compulsive comparer. I kind of half-blame this on my Dad who kept asking me, “How high did everyone else score?” every time I brought him a test or exam result for the first sixteen years of my life, but the comparing really only intensified after graduating college, then securing my first internship, then my first job. I secretly looked to my right and left at all times to see where my performance was on the leaderboard. For the longest time, this was the only way I knew how to operate. But because most things I ended up disappointing myself on were related to some notion of merit, I thought that this would have never carried over to personal relationship aspects, like my role in a marriage.

Wrong.

It is quite literally effortless to compare yourself to your husband’s past romantic involvements. At this point your everyone else is women in his life before you came into the picture, and to be better than them requires you to know just precisely how they’ve been graced by his charm and wit. It feels good in a very sick way when you know exactly what to hold him against. The comparisons get even more feral then, because now you get to construct stories in your head about how things went with them, and how or why he chose to “end up settling with” you. It’s a million narratives that don’t end and somehow you’re always on the losing side.

So yes, I have to admit I found it helpful to have been diagnosed with OCD. What it confirms is that I have these rules I make up in my head about how things are supposed to go and when they don’t proceed in the exact way, form or shape as my mind intended them, I obsessively seek reassurances that bad things (for instance, my husband leaving me) won’t happen to me as a result. One of those rules, the most primary rule, is that I have to do a thing incredibly well and when possible, beat everyone else.

Exposure therapy was terrible, but it was successful in helping me detach myself from some of the more harmful elements in my own belief system. Such as one where I believed that I had to continuously outperform in all aspects so that my husband would see me as the perfect wife (there is no such thing, but my husband says he already does, I thank him for it). Or the one where I measure myself against others day in day out because I felt that I had to be in the top x percentile amongst my peers at what I do at all times (because otherwise, what…?)

The habit of comparing tends to stick and for a long time. For me, it has led to depressive episodes and many fights and a lot of money spent on undoing all the comparing. I loved the above tweet, I thought it was hilarious, but if you’re reading this, I want you to know that consistently looking outward has not brought me any joy in life.

It did, however, bring me to a realisation that what I feel most threatened by is people with deep curiosity who commit to things purely out of love for trying and with the intention of widening their own knowledge of the world, allowing themselves to continue doing the thing badly, if that happens to be the case, because they owe it to no one but themselves to see things through.

So I will allow myself to do all of this, including being married, badly and in ways that don’t necessarily make me better than everyone else at it, because I owe it to myself to love and be loved. And that’s a good enough reason.

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Rania, Cusco, December 15th.

Dec 14th

Where has time gone? I meant to post this many, many days ago. If I didn't have four hours to kill between one flight and the next, this might have truly stayed in the drafts forever.

Re-reading this four-ish months later, I have to admit I don’t recognise this writing anymore. But maybe that's the point of writing 'in the moment'? Over the time inbetween, I've taken a pretty big step back from organising on campus. I have a million and one excuses I could fish out, but at the end of the day, I think it came down to this: I felt sick thinking about how quickly everything we built got torn down, and how quickly the world continued on as if nothing happened, and how much worse the situation has gotten when all my goodbyes to my friends before the summer were variations of "next year, we won't have to do this because the world wouldn't let it last this long, right?" How naive we were.

This, of course, is itself an excuse. Maybe I will be a better, more motivated person next term. Or maybe, knowing it's my last one on campus, I will grow more selfish. In the meantime, there are only small corners of this horror that we can tend to—and tend to them, we will.

August 8th

I am currently sitting in the office of the organisation where I am completing my summer internship. The day is unfurling slowly and the op-ed I've written as a deliverable is pending reviews from my boss.

I found this piece of writing below in my email drafts, composed when I was in the middle of sending it to my writing advisor. It was still unfinished. Seeing it now, it seemed a waste that I had let the emotions run over me without carving a pool for them to trickle into.

Recently, time has gone too quickly and life, for me, has been stuffed to the brim with thoughts and new memories that keep it occupied. While I am so thankful for them, and realise what a privilege it is, I do lament my tendency to not give them the space they need to fester. To solidify into something I can then dissect and understand. To hold them in my palm and feel, compute, understand the weight of them, the effects they've had on my life.

I wrote this back in May, and revisited it 3 months later, now in August. I've remained proud of what students across the world have done since then. I've spent some parts of my summer speaking to encampment leaders in the UK and Japan to share thoughts. A unique network of information and student solidarity has risen out of the movement that gripped the world for a better part of spring.

I wish I could say that this has made me grow more hopeful, but I cannot. Today marks the 307th day since October 7, 2023. This piece was written many weeks after that, and completed in the many months that followed it. Too many months. I had hoped that by then, this piece would become irrelevant, something of an artefact.

May

Starvation has been portrayed as an instrument of violence through what it denies a human being—namely, the essential nutrition we need to survive.

In the context of starvation as a weapon of war, mainstream discourse focuses on what it deprives in the short-term, and rarely discusses what it inflicts in the long-term, especially to the psyche. A report by the UN on the 24^th of April 2024 states that about 70% of the population in Gaza faces ‘catastrophic’ hunger, and that in the next six weeks, all three thresholds of famine—food insecurity, malnutrition, mortality—will be passed.

It is August now, and surely the state of Gaza has passed these thresholds. And it is no wonder, too—the population of Gaza had, for weeks, turned to feeding themselves everything from birdfeed, weeds to donkey food to survive the continuous restrictions on aid flowing into the region.

On April 13, to protest Yale’s immovable stance on investments in weapon manufacturing companies (such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, etc.), a group of Yale students began a hunger strike campaign. I was part of this group, which consisted of 14 hunger strikers and countless others who were part of the organising group, including the medical/care team, mobility assistants and donators.

We'd attempted numerous methods to communicate our frustrations with the university before; engaging civil dialogues in campus town halls, sending letters (handwritten and typed, eventually in any-coloured paper we could find), signing petitions and, more uniquely amongst my classmates of Public Policy students, trying to 'diplomatically' lobby for the support of retired politicians or active ambassadors to call for a ceasefire. We called our WhatsApp group chat 'Letters for Ceasefire'. Rallies after rallies, in basketball stadiums and in the streets. All to no avail. We knew that the US' stance is not an easy task to contend with, but we similarly did not expect such silence from an academic institution meant to foster an environment amenable to dialogue. Something else needs to happen—something that could get us in the news, and could get Yale to not only sit with us at a table, but to listen to us, too.

Our team of graduate and undergraduate students started with a small tent on one of the most conspicuous spots on campus—right in front of the Sterling Library. It’s a towering gothic structure that has become synonymous with Yale as one of its most recognisable architectural landmarks. The building stands overlooking Cross Campus, a large open field that serves as a hub for informal student activity. On sunny days, one would expect the grassy fields to be swarmed with students setting up lawn chairs, picnic mats, and even volleyball nets.

On the first day, there sat a little white tent in front of the library, under which we had set out some blankets, chairs and art supplies. It was to be our strike tent—a space for us to come together during the duration of the movement to reflect on our experience, ground us in our intentions and speak about the violence in Gaza. A topic that would otherwise spark tension in our respective classrooms.

I carried with me a little thimble of arrogance, that first day of hunger strike, especially when Ramadan had just ended the day before and the festivities of Eid had barely dimmed. Eight days without food felt trivial compared to the month of fasting, especially since our approach of a 'wet strike' meant we were still able to consume pedialyte-infused water, broth and other liquids that were (as close to) zero-calorie (as possible). This was going to be a piece of cake. I thought, selfishly, that this was more about raising awareness, about showcasing the anger and frustration of the last seven months of violence in Gaza. This was the hubris I carried as I sat in the tent with my friends, folding cranes and engaging passersby in conversation when they wanted.

But the second day rolled along and I was already starting to feel the effects. My limbs felt like lead in the morning, heavy as I dragged myself out of bed and nothing I dressed myself in felt adequate—everything felt too hot one second, and too cold the next.

My mind ran slower in class, barely keeping up with the writing displayed on the projector, much less the ones being spoken out loud. That day, I delivered my Salon presentation—a school tradition similar to a Brown Bag Lunch where students take turns to speak about any topic of their choosing. Mine was on the 'Babygirl-ification of Indonesian presidential candidates', a topic clearly up my alley! I had spent weeks thinking about it, and that night I stood in front of my classmates excitedly, animated in my speech and mannerisms. Yet my body temperature felt elevated, and I constantly struggled to find the right words for the thoughts I had. I ended up repeating words often, and pausing in the middle of my sentences because the right vocabulary had escaped my mind.

I had also become somewhat of a lonely creature. I craved human interaction more desperately than usual—and my usual was already a lot. Curiously, while I'd normally seek my friends for a chat or a mind-bending activity, this time the company I sought did not matter. It did not matter whether I saw my friends or strangers, whether we sat or stood, whether we talked or simply sat shoulder-to-shoulder in silence. I simply needed all my senses to be busied: to see, to hear, to smell, to touch. Well, almost all. By the third day, I was sick of what I was allowed to taste—-the medicinal flavour of Pedialytes and the now sickening warm chicken stock. The tent became my refuge.

This was not the case with everyone. I was slow to notice this disparity, being one of the members who dipped in and out of the tent for classes. Some of my friends, on top of the fatigue, receded into themselves, becoming quiet or avoiding interaction altogether. My close friend A, by day four, had her sociable disposition almost entirely eroded, still choosing to show up to the tent but retreating into isolation every single time despite the hubbub of activity around the tent.

By this time, the hunger strike tent had moved to the Beinecke Plaza in support of an accompanying movement—-Books Not Bombs, which later became the catalyst to the start of Yale's two-week long encampment. This movement deserves its own reflection, along with what the hunger strike had been able to achieve in tandem negotiations with it, so I will refrain from exhausting the topic. But it is worth noting Beinecke Plaza's significance: the site of some of Yale's most pivotal (and sometimes, violent) student protests, including the encampment against the South African apartheid state and Fossil Fuel investments in its endowments.

I remember the fourth or fifth day of the strike being rainy. The tent, propped up by the walls of Beinecke Plaza, was leaking in places that made sitting in sleeping bags unpleasant under its roof. Calls for tarp and rope donations arrived to save the day—as did other donations from the community—but it took us a long time to get the rain protection tarps set up, for the rows of umbrellas to be taped well enough so the ground around the tent can stay decently dry, and for the strikers to find a source of warm water to maintain their warmth.

My most arduous contribution of that day was tying a corner of a blue piece of tarp to the tent roof closest to my spot, and afterwards I was filled with an inexplicable sense of irritation. When I checked my watch, I remember lamenting at the time. It was barely 1:30pm.

Every hunger striker was assigned a head 'carer', a student in the care team who was our first point of contact in case of any emergencies (if our preferred emergency contacts weren't available) and were responsible for our wellbeing. Despite knowing—and seeing—how busy my carer 'R' was with the general runnings of the movement, I couldn't help the bile of selfishness that rose up in me. I wanted her to take care of me, to bring me my zero-calorie matcha drinks, to constantly check in and to be present while they measured my blood sugar and temperature. With my housemates who stopped by the tent to make sure I was okay, I in turn made sure they lingered for longer than they anticipated, siphoning off whatever time they had to feed my own loneliness and hyper-attachment. Looking back, I made everything about me. I don't think I did a good enough job of looking and acting normal—I let my fatigue show, I made it very obvious that I skipped classes and left early whenever I could.

A few days without solid foods or calorie-filled drinks and I felt the changes in my body before I saw them. By the fourth day, I caved and told my carer I needed a cup of hot chocolate, breaking the zero-calorie rule. I felt ill on the morning of the fifth day, and had two members of the care team drive to my house in the dead of the morning to heat up some broth and check my vitals. I lost 4.5kg in 4 days—at my lowest weight in probably three years. My hair was falling out faster than usual.

All these physical changes were overshadowed by the psychological effects I felt, and the reflection that came after. Perhaps what I described seemed like mild shifts in behaviour; after all, there were strikers who grew irrationally emotional, bursting into tears or growing angry at issues that normally would not affect them.

I do not have better words to put the feeling into, but simply put, I did not feel like myself at all.

Maybe in the time to come, I will find better sentences to use to describe the realisations this brought about, but these are the best I can do as I look back in hindsight on how the hunger strike morphed people in its short eight-day run:

I had a whole care team taking care of my well-being, stocked up on any and all vitamins I requested and all the nutrients I was able (allowed) to consume. I was in a safe environment where friends made music, created art together, talked about their day to get my mind off the hunger and frequently asked how I was doing. Even strangers handed blankets, pillows and supplies to support us, even when I had a warm, well-lit apartment to go back to.

The roof over my head had not been shattered by a missile, nor had its previously reliable weight crushed me as it had splintered off into rubble. I did not wake up fearful for my survival, nor was I forced to run endlessly from shelter to shelter, seeking safety that does not exist. There were no dead family members for me to grieve over—and no grief to eat away my insides more than the hunger ever could.

Most of all, I knew there was an end. Eight days. Less than the fingers on our hands. A mere eight days. Knowing there was an end in sight carried me through. I can't imagine the long-term scar of sustained hunger with no end in sight could leave on a person.

And if things do improve—what of the relationship between the survivor and food that had been decimated beyond appetite, beyond trust?

I signed up to participate with the hubris of making an 'impact' in the community, raising 'awareness' as if those with their eyes and ears closed did not do so as a lucid, conscious choice. This intention, I realised, was built on the presumptuous thought of me 'understanding' the plight of Palestinians, the violence enacted on them through this genocide.

I do not. I don't think any of us ever will. It is a violence that surpasses the physical, the magnitude of which outstrips any conceivable though. It is the kind of violence that, if things ever get better, would imprint trauma on many, many generations afterwards

At the time of writing this piece, the movement had spread worldwide. Encampments have been set up in many campuses in dozens of countries, and there seems to be a shift in the tide of sentiments. If there is something to be read in the air, I hope desperately that it is change.

Rania, Jakarta, December 31st.

(A belated post!)

I’m finding it difficult to summarise the year in the form of a commitment letter, bullet points, or a carousel of photo dumps. My brain is tiny and human biases mean I place greater weight on the present and recent occurrences—e.g. my last office retreat, the third Seventeen concert of the year, the World Cup and the associated reunions that came with it—and an even greater emphasis on the good, happy memories, carefully curated to include the least instances of sadness, disappointment and pain possible. This means the memories of other, less savoury (but arguably more important to my self-development) events require tougher digging.

There is a lot for me to reflect on the past year, but as I’ve come to learn, processing things that have happened over a certain span of time isn’t necessarily (or exclusively) an active, conscious occurrence. Sometimes I will remember them in a random taxi ride, or things will click into place just as I’m falling asleep. Perhaps I will find myself in an acute sense of deja-vu, and the consequences of my previous choice would only become obvious then. Other times, someone else will bring it up and their objective recount would make me see everything in a different light.

So for now, I won’t unfold the dog-eared corners of 2022’s pages just yet. I want to linger between them a little more, if I’m allowed to, within all the good and bad chapters, to see where the plot strings end up—if they end up anywhere at all.

Dea, September 27th, Philadelphia

We are well into the first week of fall, which means now is the perfect time to sit myself down and let you all know, in writing, that this past summer, I:

1. went to Six Flags for the first time and had to nurse a 3-day-long headache as a consequence of El Toro.

2. spent a weekend in lovely, lovely New Orleans.

3. did not post a single newsletter entry.

4. read close to 0 books.

5. flew back home twice in a span of 3 months.

6. hated everything I was attempting to write.

7. saw my closest friends leave Philadelphia. The first goodbye I had to bid consisted of impulsively buying a return bus ticket to New York on the day of my friend’s flight and spending less than 7 hours in the city. Clearly he wanted to leave with a bang, including making us three other people stress over his flight for which he was the absolutely last person in the check-in line. He had a banjo with him too, which just added comedy value to the entire thing.

   The second goodbye I bid was just the three of us. My friend told us specifically that he didn’t want a farewell situation, because we’ll meet again, for sure, it was not a goodbye. (He was right.)

   I thought I’d cry as I dropped off my ex-housemate at the airport, after which I’d be last out of the four to stay in the city. But we had taken pictures in our regalia around campus on the morning of her flight, had stayed up talking till 3am the night before, had created shared memory after shared memory over the past year that we both knew in our hearts that we will be in each other’s lives for a long, long time. Even if a small part of me was dreading a life in the city without her, I was looking forward to the things this next phase (and the next, and the next) of our friendship would bring.

8. discovered, as my ex-housemates and I were packing for the move-out and seeing how many things we had accumulated over the past year, that all we were trying to do was build a home.

9. learned that these things make a home:

   1. mutually understood dishwashing roles

   2. making sure to cook just enough so there are leftovers for whomever was not home

   3. a ridiculously comfy sofa

   4. monthly H-Mart visits

   5. conversations that should not see the light of day

   6. kitchen utensils, so many kitchen utensils

10. got to live my NYC office job dreams.

11. and quickly realised that my dream beyond the summer internship has changed. For the first time in my life, I find that dreams don’t have to be so big. In fact, simpler dreams are scarier. More slippery.

12. experienced big love in countless forms. Everyday I was reminded that a lot of things I’ve been able to claim as mine were a result of other people’s kindness. The most dangerous thought is thinking we got here on our own.

13. learned the hard way that while your partner deserves your honesty, a lot of the work requires us to first be honest with ourselves.

14. came to the conclusion that loving someone does not mean you can’t live without them. It is simply that life is better with their presence in it, because of all the things you’re able to learn about yourself through and all the ways you want to grow alongside them. Love does work best not out of necessity, but out of abundance. You want them in your lives because you amplify each other, not because you feel lost without them.

15. told my partner that I am a sad person at my core. When some weeks later I got into a miserable mood and ended up in tears, he pointed out the doom and gloom by first asking, “What happened?” but quickly following up with, “Actually, you once told me you’re sad at your core and that’s okay. I’m okay with that.” I once read that healthy relationships could have healing properties, and in that moment that was all I could think about.

16. became aware of how extremely fond I am of him, the warmest person I know and never really dared to dream for myself. On the morning of August 6th, we got engaged in front of our extended families and everything that took place that day was one of the biggest loves I've ever experienced.

17. understood what it means to fight well, because disagreements and misunderstandings are unavoidable when you are trying to build a life together, and that it’s acceptable to whine and sulk and ask for what you need because confidence is earned even in the best of relationships. When two people are able to argue with the goal of understanding and not winning, is that not one of the highest forms of trust?

18. decided that I do not agree with the “right person, wrong time” sentiment. I don’t think it’s respectful towards the person you were with; implies that they did not deserve your best. Maybe you already were at your best then, but the wheels spin and life continues and your heart grows bigger, and you realise your version of best has expanded. That’s okay — it doesn’t make you a bad person. It just makes you a person.

This fall, I hope to continue to cross paths with beautiful people and revel in whatever our encounter decides to offer.

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Rania, Bogor, September 5th.

Nature has this remarkable ability of making us feel small. Of humbling us, reminding us of the shallow distance between our skin and meat and blood and bones that could be just as easily swept away by the oceans as it is knocked over, scattered by a particularly strong gust of wind.

We seek out adventures to filch the high of a conquest gone right, a little hill of achievement protruding from our valleys of routine frustrations. We climb a mountain because its acme seems within reach, only to be reminded that the vastness is incomprehensible to our naked eyes. We try to reify distances we cannot compute, and fail. We think our boats chart the rivers when we are only sailing in the path it has carved out itself for thousands of years.

And yet it is these shortfalls that keep us coming back for more. It is this acute feeling of inadequacy, the trembling of helplessness and, eventually the reality of our mortality that keeps us grounded, tethered to the Earth. Stops our heads from inflating so much that the world shrinks under our solipsistic points of view.

At least, this is what I think about every time I am in the proximity of nature, however bite-sized it may be. I write this piece thinking I will never forget this feeling for the entirety of my life, that this singular sensation has become so integral to my own character that should it fade I, too, will simply dissolve to leave an empty husk behind.

I spend a few days there in serenity, before packing my bags to drive, fly, sail back to the cushions of the man-made metropolis. I move around papers, agonise over words, tussle with numbers, talk to people whose words hold the same amount of arrogance as a fool who believes the oceans would bend under their will, the mountains could crumble under their devices. Then I forget, once again, that nature is immovable and I am simply a body with a deadline, running its course.

Until I return to reset this perspective, I will remain trapped in an inconsolable distortion of importance.

Rania, Jakarta, August 22.

This article was spuriously written in one sitting thanks to Zadie Smith’s Intimations. It's the kind of book with the type of writing that makes your heart flutter with admiration—to borrow her own words, Smith is very skilled at creating the perfect ‘moulds’ for the shapeless ideas or thoughts that seem difficult to express out loud. Her short essay on many art crafts not as a form of expression, but a form of restraint and control, reminded me a lot of one of my favourite essays by Oscar Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying.’

But something in one of her essays made me pause and think; and eventually react. In the short essay, she reflected on the phenomena of handicrafts, DIYs, cooking as activities that people did simply to fill their time during the lockdown period that they otherwise did not know what to do with. She then states:

“The people sometimes demand change. They almost never demand art. As a consequence, art stands in a dubious relation to necessity—and to time itself. It is something to do… / Fills the time. / The rest of us have been suddenly confronted with the perennial problem of artists: time, and what to do with it.”

She expands a little more on the topic but it all boils to one thing: creative projects undertaken during the lockdown were simply a result of people looking to kill time. ‘Why bake that banana bread? Why did you make a fort in your living room?’ she writes. ‘It’s something to do, isn’t it? Fills the time.’

Call me idealistic or a romanticist, but I thought this was a bleak point of view in lieu of what may be a more relatable optimistic outlook on the situation. Claiming that engaging in art is ‘something to kill time with’ doesn't only come across as an elitist assertion (although I know this is most likely not Smith's intention at all) and insulting to those who believe this is the best use of their time or those who make their livelihood out of—it also presupposes a few egregious beliefs.

First, it assumes that engagement in art is not driven by a necessity, and is instead a last resort following a lack of better alternatives. However, the activities we undertake in this modern world have always been governed by materialistic needs and a scarcity of time. Is it not precisely when one of these is taken away that we arrive at our true dispositions? Call it a higher nature or our true calling in this life; but whatever they are, do we not gravitate towards them should our basic needs be fulfilled?

It was precisely during these periods of isolation that people sought art most intensely, and I don’t believe it was simply to ‘kill time’. How many of us found comfort in music, or the twists and turns of the latest TV show plot? How many of us revisited nostalgic movies, got lost in books, bought tins of watercolour to try on ill-prepared paper?

But most importantly, how many of these activities were unavailable to us as options when our time was scarce to us?

Smith’s assessment seems to forget the reality that art stands in a ‘dubious relation to necessity’ only because the modern, largely capitalistic structures of society do not reward it. The productivity, or ‘time-killing activities’ we are rewarded for often stands in opposition to the nature of creating art, and because of this we’ve been convinced it is secondary to other, more ‘tangible’ ambitions worth pursuing. Indeed, to us non-artists or the casual enjoyer, art appeared to be dubiously necessary only because for so long we have curtailed its presence—and ironically a true necessity for it—to take up the most minuscule amounts of our time possible.

Smith’s take implies that the alternative to such artistic pursuits (i.e. spending 8+ hours in an office job, commuting, sitting in cafes, exercising) are not ‘time-killing’ activities, and that they are inherently more productive. We come to the second presupposition that I find myself disagreeing with.

If she were talking about a group of people to whom the alternative tasks to engage in were things such as farming, fishing, weaving clothes—you know, things we actually need to survive—then I would be more empathetic. But the demographic she has in mind are mid-town Manhattan folks and the middle-to-upper-middle-class population who have enough disposable income to buy her book, have the leisure time to read it, and enough English proficiency to understand it. Their alternative activities are not essential to our survival—I would argue, as I’ve briefly mentioned previously, that these are simply other forms of time-killing activities that happen to be rewarded by the current model of society.

Humans are inherently artistic creatures. Personally, watching many blossom into amateur artists (and some into more) during this period of our history only cemented my belief of mine. In prehistoric times, the slight lull in danger and war produced the most incredible wall paintings, tapestries, folk music, traditional dances, storytelling, and more. Even with technology—a field thought to be very technical—we try to strike beauty with its design, never stopping until the model or interface or colours are pleasing to our eyes.

There were many accounts of people who moved away from routine jobs that unhappily shackled them to perhaps less stable, but much more enjoyable, creative pursuits. the plausibility of this alternative path was only something they discovered during the lockdown, when they had the time to earnestly put into test what was essentially a gamble.

Without the period of pause in one’s hectic everyday lives, could we have had a clearer outlook of all the choices we had? And better yet, could we have afforded the leisure time to fulfill our creative curiosities, without the burden of having to be any good at it (because you had time to improve, time to try something else, time to actually enjoy it?)

Art has never been simply a time-killing activity for us—rather, it is a need we tend to suppress, one that arises to be sated with the excess of time. It is in our nature to create, and to create beautifully. We only have to turn to our past to confirm the truth, and the truth is this: that yes, 'the people sometimes demand change.' But they will always crave for art.

(cr: cosychey)

Rania, Bandung, June 12th.

At one point not so far away in the past, the Marie Kondo craze took over the Internet (unless I've somehow overlooked mainstream trends as of late and missed the fact that it is very much still around). The phrase 'sparking joy' took on a whole new etymology and meaning, to almost exclusively refer to a crucial criteria in the decluttering process. I had a good time being a spectator of it, because watching messy drawers get upended and transformed into colour-coded blocks, or little trinkets on uneven shelves get weeded out in lieu of minimal spaces gave me, aside from visual satisfaction, a warped sense of productivity by association. It was as if by watching Marie Kondo, I, too, was getting my life together somehow.  

But that was the extent of my enjoyment. The idea of minimalistic living never really appealed to me, and for a while I thought of myself as kind of lazy or maybe a mild hoarder as a consequence (mild because I still had to constantly spring clean, especially thanks to my constant moving all throughout my 3 years of undergrad). 

I knew I was emotionally attached to my 'stuff', but I never gave thought to why this was other than writing myself off as a hoarder.

Then recently, I found myself watching Mina Le's video on Gen Z maximalism and how the pendulum of historical trends seems to have, once again, swung back to the side of ostentation and extravagance. As a fashion enthusiast, Mina's content unsurprisingly focused on fashion, and she talked about how the minimalism and functionality of the 'Uniqlo Revolution' (fast fashion) as well as the saturation of influencers in the last decade are chief among the biggest perpetrators of the death of 'Harajuku Fashion', i.e. fashion that championed mismatched items and seemingly clashing visuals to create a loud but, more importantly, incredibly personal look. A more authentic representation of the self was achieved during this period because much of the clothing items were obtained from 'organic' thrifting (i.e. actually going to thrift shops, rather than buying pieces that 'give off thrifted vibes'), free from the influence of fleeting trends and, more importantly, the influx of 'minimalism' championed by corporates and the silent consensus of the general public.

When it comes to fashion, unfortunately I am of the 'Uniqlo Revolution' camp. As much as I wish it were otherwise, I just don't have the knack for dressing myself well. However, this loss of personalization and the negative connotations associated with having a lot of 'stuff' made me realise what it was that bothered me so much about the (now kinda gone…?) Marie Kondo craze. 

The underlying meaning of 'not sparking joy' seems to apply to items that do not immediately serve a purpose or relevance to one's day-to-day life, but I wholeheartedly disagree with this. I think there is also merit in keeping things you love past their 'purposeful' period of existence for the simple reason that you like them. There is a certain peace that clutter brings, I feel, to the self, and not because you are attaching the essence of yourself to material goods, but because of what those goods can signify to you. The reason could be sentimental nostalgia, or that you actually made the stuff yourself (!!) but it could simply just be because you like having twenty different figurines on your desk acting like your moral support cheerleaders as you crunch those last-minute deadlines. 

The whole philosophy of Marie Kondo-ing your possessions is rooted in minimalism, functionality and a resistance to materialism. Of course, overconsumption is still very much a salient problem in our society, but I don't see why the notion of hanging onto something you love, especially if it's something you already own and are likely to continue cherishing for a long time, should be inherently problematic (I would argue that constantly spring cleaning your items just gives way to more waste and possibly more consequential consumption, but this is a working hypothesis which I won't elaborate on lol). Whether it be clothing pieces you would wear over and over in mismatched outfits, or the 25 pop albums you went crazy over ten years ago, I think there is significance in picking up something from your pile of 'stuff' that was a footprint of your existence or hallmarks of your time in this world.

The spark of magic, to me, is unearthing the time the 'stuff' gave you so much joy—even if that joy has not been sparked for a long time since.

Dea, on a flight to New York City, May 31st.

A reality I'm learning to accept is that we don't always end up with our greatest loves.

I define great loves as those that a small part of us will always miss even without permission. They are grand gestures, they are making it work even though it's painful, they are running around in circles as you gamble on coming out the other side a better version of yourself or a version you no longer recognise. Great loves will most likely happen during your formative years — that's why the longing rarely ever disappears completely, because great loves imprint on your core memory.

Unfortunately like most things in this world, while you get to decide how far your attempt will go, you do not get to choose the outcome. Some of us live the rest of our lives together. Some of us end up walking in wildly different directions.

Recently I learned that to love someone whole is to love the pieces they are not proud of, which is not a task for the faint-hearted because how are we supposed to cherish parts of them they so desperately want to separate themselves from? But maybe we don't have to love, necessarily. Maybe we just have to help them carry the weight.

I have also learned that some love is backwards. Instead of looking up their favourite songs first, you learn about their darkest fears. Instead of taking you out on a lunch date first, they hop on a 24-hour flight to see you and ask for permission to hold your hand. Maybe you try to move on from a previous relationship together even though your friends would say it's a terrible, terrible idea. The logic goes like this: how could you spare attention and care in a space that has been filled to the brim? My answer would be: some people are lucky enough to find someone who will say, "Let's make new space," and/or, "We'll keep what's beautiful and restore whatever is broken."

I want to share one of my favourite pieces on marriage, which happens to be from Andrew Greer's Less:

"But you broke up with him. Something's wrong. Something failed."

"No! No, Arthur, no, it’s the opposite! I’m saying it’s a success. Twenty years of joy and support and friendship, that’s a success. Twenty years of anything with another person is a success. If a band stays together twenty years, it’s a miracle. If a comedy duo stays together twenty years, they’re a triumph. Is this night a failure because it will end in an hour? Is the sun a failure because it’s going to end in a billion years? No, it’s the fucking sun. Why does a marriage not count? Twenty years and one last happy road trip. And I thought, Well, that was nice. Let’s end on success."

Why must we see any separation as a failure when those years were spent in love and building beautiful things? I hope one day my heart will grow big enough to do that — to go into a relationship expecting nothing while also anticipating everything. It does not mean seeing a breakup or divorce down the line; it would simply mean letting myself be vulnerable while still putting in 200% of the work, because as it turns out, there's constant unlearning and relearning that goes into building a healthy relationship. After the great love, there is the committed love, after some time, maybe there's just only that, commitment.

Either way, I hope we all end up with a love worth celebrating. I think that would be nice.

Rania, Jakarta, 23rd May.

(To preface this entry: sorry for disappearing in April (and most of May!) We both took some much-needed time off and are now back with hopefully routine posting!)

I came across a few posts and tweets about how ideally, Ramadan should not be merely a temporary increase in spirituality and worship, but rather an augmentation, an improvement in one’s daily lives. However, I don’t think anyone would argue there is any fault in having that end up being the case. Changes are incremental, and those concerning worship/faith even more so, with the two being such personal facets of our lives. What I feel is more rewarding is not forcing change, but recognising the small miracles and probably brief instances that often unknowingly become catalysts to the blossoming of faith. 

This year, Ramadan fell in the month of April. It’s been a while since we were allowed to be somewhat festive during Ramadan/Eid. Last year, even when I was lucky enough to spend most of it at home with my family, we couldn’t do much apart from occasionally ordering in takeaway for iftar and pray taraweeh at home. With most Covid restrictions lifted this time round, going out for iftar with friends or going to taraweeh at the masjid felt a little bit like a cautious toe-dip into a pool, re-learning the forgotten skill of swimming. It felt strange, and exciting, but also a relief. Even when the mind forgets how to swim, the body remembers; and even when memories of such festivities fade in our minds, we go through the motions without a second thought.

I never paid much attention to the act of night prayers. In fact, often I found them a nuisance, an extra chore to do before I went to sleep, even when I was aware of their significance, being exclusive to the month and all. It felt like I had much more important things to do other than spend half an hour or forty minutes in prayer all by myself—there was always something more urgent.

This year I started going for taraweeh again at the masjid—and then, for the first time in a very long time, for qiyam when I spent time at my parents’ (the extension of taraweeh nightly prayers performed in the last third of the night). This time, I did not go as a disgruntled child being carried by my parents, who can’t leave me alone in the house. I went of my own will as a very much awake adult.

It’s strange—even when half my night is taken up by prayers, I suddenly felt like I had all the time in the world (such a stark contrast to the constant time scarcity in my daily life). Yet for all the time I felt like I had, nothing felt pressing. Nothing felt urgent—except to get dressed in time for qiyam.

I don’t mean to psycho-analyse the heck out of this experience, or to tout this as a spiritual turning point of any sort. I simply wanted to reflect on how, after feeling suffocated for so long during the past few years by my own anxiousness and explicable worries, I felt like nothing in this world—work or achievement or otherwise—mattered as much as I made them out to be.

For once, there was nothing else I had to do but spend the night in quiet prayers, listening to the imaam’s melodic recital and standing in the slightly humid, yet calming, air of the outdoor masjid. 

And I hope that all of us, in some phases of our lives, are able to find pockets of peace that will overtime unfurl into an all-consuming blanket of contentment.

Dea, Philadelphia, March 18th.

i. In January, I experienced Latin America for the first time and ate my way through Cartagena and Bogota. In February, I started going to therapy again. 

ii. How do you know if someone has given up on you? If I didn’t know better, I would have answered: loud anger. Adulthood has taught me that rather, it is radio silence. The most painful state of being is slow nonexistence, realising after some time that someone has decided to forgo your presence in exchange for some peace of mind. Maybe you deserve an explanation, maybe you don’t. The second most painful state is not knowing where you lie on that spectrum.

iii. My therapist told me that I am thoughtful and compassionate, so I tried telling myself that if someone no longer wanted me in their lives, it would be their loss. Two weeks later, she told me not everything has to be a zero-sum game. On my way home, I wondered, why do I frame everything as a competition? And why do I always want to win? 

iv. I am the furthest from a nonchalant personality.

If the version of myself a couple of years back would try to imitate someone else’s distant personality because I didn’t have confidence in my own perception of the world, these days I believe it is only right to allow myself to feel things in their entirety—which can make me terribly uncool in certain situations. But then I remember that being able to access our full range of human emotions does not come naturally to many others. I am one of the lucky ones, because having this ability means I will never regret being the person who initiates the first connection, who goes to show just a little bit more care. It is simply the right thing to do, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself. I think that would be even harder to live with. 

v. My housemate and I recently had many firsts. Our first housewarming. Our first time cooking for 10 people. Our first time getting on the 21 bus after our night class. Our first time binge-watching a K-drama together. Our first time quietly crying on the sofa next to one another because of said drama (refer to: episode 15 of Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha). My first time telling her about my biggest fear. I think that to build a friendship, you have to experience a lot of shared firsts, the exciting and the scary. I’m lucky to be able to look at the people I call friends and think, yeah, I want to go through my scary firsts with them. 

vi. There is another thing I learned: you can do things out of love as a way to protect and the other person can still refuse. It is not your responsibility to protect their feelings. Why are we drawn to things we cannot protect? I recently killed my houseplant and I still can’t tell if it was because I didn’t water it as often as I should have or because I wasn’t giving it enough sunlight. This was the second plant that I’ve managed to kill here in Philadelphia. I could refrain from killing a third one but I could also just do the opposite and try again. Maybe protecting is a muscle that just needs to be trained enough times. 

vii. My biggest fear is to be an angry person. In my third session, my therapist suggested that I may harbour unresolved resentment, which does not come from a place of jealousy or envy, but rather from a lack of knowledge. Remember not knowing? The second worst state to be in? Don’t I deserve to know and feel at ease? “Of course you do—but they also deserve to decide, on their own terms, when to tell you.”

viii. Also recently, I lost a friendship. This dawned on me when I was hosting an Instagram live and found myself thinking, “Huh, they’re not here to watch me.” What I only realised later was that what I lost along with that friendship, my other friends made up for. My housemates came through, watched the entire thing from start to finish, and quite literally filled a gaping hole I didn’t know I felt. They restored something I thought I had lost. Sometimes people walk out the door but that doesn’t mean you have to shrink the space they’d left behind—as much as possible, give time for others to arrive. How lucky would we be to experience many things more than once? 

ix. To sustain a certain fondness and admiration for someone even when they no longer want anything to do with you is an odd form of grief, because it is not courageous. Mourning is courageous. Asking for time and distance is courageous. Wishing you said or did things differently is not. It is sadness that borders on regret. 

x. What if we were put in this world to restore things in other people’s lives? Wouldn’t realising this make us a little more careful with how we choose to respond to others? Restoration is an art and I like that we can all be artists, in that sense. If someone were to come to me and point out a vacant space in my life and ask for permission to create in it, I think that would be the most romantic thing.  

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Rania, Bogor, February 15th.

To know your purpose; to be able to say “I was born to be a __” 

How great would that be?

Existentialists would say: not very much. Existentialism defies the notion that there is a pre-determined purpose for one’s existence; no one was born to be anything, they were simply born to be. In this sense, we as human beings possess the potential for fundamental freedom (potential because limitations such as oppressive environments are recognised) and to define the purpose of our existence through the choices we make. If ones starts off as a cook, and decides that they’d rather be an author the next day, it doesn’t change who they essentially are. After all, they were never born to be a cook. In this way, one is able to change the course of their life and purpose at any point in time because neither are, nor will they ever be, set in stone. 

Rousseau identifies two spaces of interiority that become the guiding authority of decision-making, and from which impulses (i.e. desires, dislikes, needs etc.) that influence an individual’s actions originate. The first is the core; the second, the periphery. Simply put, the core forms the essential parts of the person’s identity, while the periphery refers to external influences. Impulses within the periphery do not originate from within the self.

When an individual makes choices that are guided by their core and its impulses, they are exercising this potential for freedom and come to live what philosophers call an ‘authentic’ life. To do so, however, is easier said than done. For many, this freedom that presents them with endless possibilities and opportunities for change is frightening. As a result, they ground themselves in repetitive, predictable routines and familiar circles to avoid confronting uncertainties that come with being alive. When the repetitiveness start to create a feeling of emptiness, it’s very likely for them to start attaching themselves to people for validation and actions they believe would give them modicums of self-worth at the expense of their core belief—that is, when they don’t really believe in the activity’s value.

An example is: an individual spending a lot of time applying to a job they know they would hate, but they believe that job would provide them with status and societal approval. The individual would then slowly succumb to living an ‘inauthentic' life— a life shaped and moulded less by their own choices and more by the forces external influences exert on them.

And why shouldn’t they? In a world where so many choices are presented to them, it is impossible not to wonder if alternative options would have yielded better, more satisfying results. It is so much easier to rid oneself of choices by believing external influences; to acknowledge a select few as truly legitimate options while others are deemed as simply inconceivable. 

Accepting this as truth is a defense mechanism against suffering from anxious thoughts, such as “have I made the right choice?” “What if the other option was better?” 

Unfortunately—or fortunately—living an inauthentic life is unsustainable.

In the pursuit to control a fabricated reality, there will come a moment of negative realisation. As the individual continues to try and convince themselves that the prestigious job is truly what they want, they will reach a point where the unfulfilling job demotivates and drains them—mentally and physically. But they find themselves stuck—this is the reality they’ve created for themselves, and it is very difficult to pull oneself out of a reality they’ve spent so long trying to live in. 

Meanwhile, the more pressure this negative realisation places on their psyche, the more they seek refuge in potentially toxic defense mechanisms: denial, self-deprecating humour and irony, projection.

I wish I could end this article on a positive note about how to pull oneself out of this spiral into an inauthentic life. The truth is, I still search for the answer myself. It is easy enough for philosophers to point out the under-used core, to preach for choices guided by the heart and true desires, which would supposedly free someone from all pressures external to themselves. But it is not always so easy to detangle what one wants for themselves and what others want of them, or what the world demands of them. Selfishness is not always easier to choose over selflessness even in the most self-serving situations, and vice versa. Sometimes we want to do things for ourselves because of other people, and sometimes other people want us to do things because they see something in us, and they hope we could accomplish something greater than we could ever realise ourselves. More crucially, at the end of the day it is not always clear what the heart even truly wants.

For something that is meant to bring you pure contentment, it seems that living an authentic life comes with a lot of growing pains to be experienced.

Dea, Philadelphia, January 31st.

On the last day of the year, I tested positive for covid. My family who was here on vacation had to get tested themselves and my brother and youngest sister ended up testing positive too. My mother and siblings had to reschedule their flights. In the end, I had to let go of the non-refundable hundreds of dollars I’d already spent on what was supposed to be a trip to Peru. It was quite tragic, to be honest. But at least I had my family with me. These days, we’re able to find the humour in it. 

Pic: Where I was on the afternoon of January 4th instead of being on the plane to Lima.

I have to admit, because my worst personality trait is that I constantly have terrible FOMO, the most difficult part of going down with a highly infectious disease was having to cancel a trip I had so excitedly planned with my housemates. The thought of missing out on specific inside jokes was more painful than not being able to hike Machu Picchu, because not only do I have FOMO, I’m also constantly craving human connection. 

But what I realised after all this was: so many people were and have been willing to go through great lengths for me. My sister spent hours walking around South Philly to find home test kits—which were in shortage—and did not complain one bit. One morning, she could sense the stress getting to me—I do not recommend the covid x depressive tendencies combo—and let me borrow her Switch. My housemates offered to stay at our other friends’ house so my family could use the house for isolation. I had friends accompanying me through video calls and the occasional, “How was today? Better?” texts. When my roommate arrived in Peru, she still managed to surprise me with tiramisu and a box of cannoli through UberEats. 

There is a difference between taking care of someone quietly as an afterthought and taking care of them because it’s what feels right for you. I think I am in the company of people who do the latter.

For what I lost by not going to Peru, their presence made up in warmth. So while I entered 2022 with a sore throat and possible long-term lung damage, at least I’m able to go through it knowing I am surrounded by love and that God has designed my life in a way that I am in the presence of people who will never let me feel alone.

If I could have one wish for the new year, it’s that I hope we’ll always be surrounded by people who do not withhold tenderness and will take care of us even on the periphery. I hope we’ll always find the chance to let those people know how much better life has become with them in it.

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(Set Me On Fire: A Poem For Every Feeling by Ella Risbridger)

Rania, Post-travel quarantine, January 12th.

If there’s anything I learned over the past bizarre couple of years, it’s that you can’t take any day, no matter how dull or mundane or difficult, for granted.

I was 22 last year. For a lot of it, I spent the days as if I were a 60-year-old retiree with my dwindling stamina and growing complacency for my comfort zone. 

In other ways, I also found myself out of depth the way a preschooler stepping into an unfamiliar playground for the first time would—terrified, lost, wanting to go back home. 

I often didn’t know how to carry myself and who to be, but turns out 2021 was generous with time in its own strange way. There was enough of it that I could spend reflecting on these inward-facing problems—enough to make the road out of these troubling woods seem less daunting to take.

2021 was a quick zip and a slow-motion movie all at once. Its pages flipped by quickly but its paragraphs read like reiterations of their predecessors. I could divide each segment into distinct ‘chapters’ and they made an altogether blurry picture. 

If I could pick a recurring battle last year, it would be my battle with independence. It's not a battle completely won or lost. Maybe it doesn’t even have to be a battle, merely a work in progress, in which the endpoint differs from one person to another.

Some things two years ago (2020) taught me were that: first, in this current state, I am truly incapable of living completely alone, and; two, that I miss my family too much all the time to do that. I get terrible homesickness, and I didn’t know what that would have been like while saddling a full-time job.

Last year, I got what I wished for: I lived with family, albeit my extended one, and saw my siblings and parents more often than when I was in university. 

If forcing myself into independence means losing this—the warmth of a nearby hug, the silent company of my grandma at night, my parents’ concerned nagging, and all the endless bickering… then I won't rush headlong into it. Even with 23 years on the horizon, I find myself reluctant to be so far apart from the chaos that’s become so embedded as part of who I am.

I started my first adult full-time job precisely in January 2021, marking this month my first full year of employment. The financial decisions I can now make, with the autonomy I have over the money I earn, remains an alien concept. I hope years of studying economics will translate into at least amateur-level awareness of personal finance!

And work? I still constantly find myself wading in waters deeper than the shallow banks of knowledge I managed to construct for myself—I feel like I spent a lot of time in 2021 finding my footing in these waterbeds, terrified of slipping and drowning. I hope 2022 will bring me the opportunity and courage for me to dig deeper well of expertise and knowledge, and the mastery to swim through unforgiving tides while emerging victorious.

Something I had to learn the hard way in 2021 is that a job is just that: a job. I knew this in theory, but once I started it was difficult to put into practice. What if it’s a job that relies on some level of personal attachment—or at least, some passion? What if I really like my job, and see it as a part of me? Something I want to succeed in? It becomes easy to pin work performance as a metric of achievement, and it is a source of unrest I hope to wean out of my system.

Last year, the few times I tried to love the way everyone expects any 22 year-old to, only underscored just how bad I was at it. 

I often joke about not wanting to be ‘perceived’ because in reality it is the simplest, most reductionist way of explaining my own unpreparedness. I want all the time I have to myself—I don’t want to break pieces of my hours off so all I have left for myself are the day’s leftovers. I clam up at the notion of someone seeing me in a way I never see myself, trying to understand me in an unfamiliar way that may suggest intimacy. It feels like my heart is reverting back to a selfish, childish phase.

I’m not sure if this is because I loved someone so hard and for so long that I didn’t—still don’t—know how to start over from scratch, or that I’m genuinely enjoying my own company. I careen from one camp to the other frequently—longing for affection and being horrified by the mere notion of non-platonic interactions. The times I dipped my toes in such waters last year, I didn’t handle backing out of them well. I owe people apologies that I never really got to deliver. Maybe with time, it will be easier to explain this shortcoming of mine. Maybe with time, I will learn how to fall in love in this way again. But if that time is not anytime soon, that is very much okay, too.

What I didn’t expect 2021 to show me was how deeply I can love my friends and the role they play in my life. 

Sometimes I think about what it would have been like if I chose to stay in London or Doha and be with the friends I have come to see as my sources of comfort, instead of taking myself into completely uncharted plains. Maybe I would have met new people in those places, too. But this particular path of thought always winds down to the alternative where I never meet the new friends I've made in this stage of life (well, I hope they consider me their friends, too). And then I always think, ‘Thank god I met you all.’ 

But I was also given the privilege of time to reconnect and reunite with old friends, and to marvel at the accomplished, determined women they've become after all these years. To see my friends stay true to who they are, to be earnest and so candid makes me realise that I have been shaped by their wisdom and nurtured by their care. It made me feel like the luckiest girl in the world.

Of course there were bad days in 2021, and there were dark days where the feeling of fulfilment felt so out of reach and impossibly far away. I am writing this entry not to romanticise a difficult year for many, or to pretend that there were only good things in store for me and that I deserved them through my own superiority or effort. 

Instead, I want to remind myself—and you, dear reader—that there is much to be savoured, from the little mundane musings to the miracles I never saw coming; that the feeling of contentment does not arise from the occurrence of specific events or from ticking a bucket list, but from the process of understanding, appreciating, and accepting all the storms that weather us down and the sunny days where we shine the brightest.

May this year be one where we smile and thrive often!

Production Warner Bros., Legendary Entertainment, Villeneuve Films

Rania, Bogor, December 9th.

Contains very mild spoilers about premise and character development (though I hope there has been sufficiently enough time for this article to be not so spoiler-y…)

Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Dune does a lot of things right; by making the politics of the story actually make sense for a first-timer, for example, and for the stunning shots and sound design of the desert-scape. It does other things not so well; its integration of Arabic and Islamic imagery is awkward at best, and downright uncomfortable if we are being less generous. The adaptation also arguably trades the more spiritual, subdued conflict over fragile ecosystems and scarcity of water in favour of the more dramatic Westphalian state-like politics so reminiscent of our time. 

A (long) while ago my friend Abeedah brought this Instagram post to my attention, while I was in the middle of my Dune brainrot:

I personally found the post to be worded so well that initially it was difficult to find any grievance in its arguments, but only when we had a voice-note discussion over what these points made us feel did I find small irks with its prepositions. The first is its claim that Dune “propagates the colonialist culture by not casting Middle Easterners.” 

I share OP's disappointment in not casting Middle Eastern actors in the movie, but not exactly for the same reasons. I find it particularly upsetting because even today, non-stereotypical Middle Eastern representation is still very much lacking in Hollywood—or even cinema-scape outside of the Arab world in general. For the past two decades and some, Middle East has become almost synonymous with war, terror and instability in Hollywood’s screens—and while other orientalist stereotypes have slowly moved past their racist roots there seems to be a very large inertia when it comes to moving past stereotypical narrative and casting of the Middle East. These tropes, often involving war and violence, remain a recurring motif in the portrayal of the region today, as if the only source of horror ever experienced by the general American public has singularly been focused on the Middle East and its war-mongering ways. There aren’t enough Arab characters in Hollywood movies just doing… movie stuff, and not stuff that reinforces the already stubbornly immovable stereotype of violence and religious fanaticism. 

So you don’t get many sci-fi media so heavily inspired by and based in the Arab world. You certainly don’t see many Arabs in mainstream Hollywood sci-fi films. I felt like Dune could have been it, the opportunity for the representation that could catalyse the breaking away from stereotypes—representation in a genre so far removed that you can’t help but have your westernised(?) worldview about the Middle East shattered. I feel like it’s a bit of a lost opportunity in that regard. 

But I realise that in some ways this is misplaced disappointment, because claiming the Fremen to be Middle Eastern based on heavily borrowed vocabulary and the fact that they live in the desert would also be incorrect. They are more similar to desert-dwelling nomadic tribes, such as the Bedouin, or can even be compared to more ancient pagan tribes that existed in the region hundreds of years ago. 

(Note that Middle Eastern representation is not the same as Muslim/Islam representation, or even motifs for that matter!!!)

However, does this specific reason mean the movie adaptation propagates colonialism? Yes, if you mean in the way it failed to contribute to breaking this long-lasting stereotype, but in the manner OP was talking about (i.e. through white saviourism represented by a heavily white cast on one side) I don’t think so. If we look at the source content's obvious intentions, the novels certainly try to bring this issue to light—and by that same vein, this largely faithful movie adaptation does try to emulate the layered and often dubious, as can be expected of 1940s, post-colonial discourse—whether successfully or otherwise. But does the absence of Middle Eastern actors warrant this criticism? I honestly feel like this is a conclusion many people will reach upon watching the first half of part 1 film… without watching the other half. For example, one comment said: “That’s a lot of pale people living in the desert.”

But the whole point is that they’re not from the desert! House Atreides are natives of an ocean planet—the complete antithesis of what the planet Arrakis is. The series' plot centres on House Atreides’ ignorance of the planet and the natives’ customs; it highlights their inability to survive on their own and the dangers of holding onto pre-existing beliefs regarding superiority—technologically, intellectually or otherwise. It would have made absolutely no sense to have coded them as resembling the Fremen in any way would not have made any sense narratively, even for ’token’ representation (for e.g. having 1 or 2 POCs casted in the House of Atreides). In the source material, while the Atreides and Fremen were never absolutely coded as “white” and “Arab” respectively, it’s still pretty obvious that they are racially very different. 

I know everyone knows Dune explores the fragile power dynamics between settlers and natives—but I think what gets lost when viewing is what conclusion the movie tries to reach in this debate, and what ideals it ultimately tries to portray. While there are figures in the narratives such as Duke Leto and Dr Keynes that seem to almost be universally agreed upon as “good people”, we never really understand if they are morally correct or not in the grand scheme of things. Yes, Duke Leto was trying his best to bring justice in an otherwise unjust situation during his takeover of Arrakis, but was that the best compromise he could come up with? What about the repercussions of bringing Paul into the fray as a child, and upholding him as some kind of Prophet—most likely against his will? 

These are, I think, among some of the more interesting discussions that Dune brings to light, because the Dune novels win not in its portrayal of the political strife, but I think in the conflict of humans, their environment, and their faith—in their own people, in a higher being, in the future, or in the lands they call home.