Sore

Like a moth to a light
I glide to my irresistible doom
Blinking off in electricity and singed wings.
An Icarus of another age.

Why do I fly?
When the destination is only down
and the solace of the sun lies only in its consuming fire?
Yet
In burning there is the briefest flash
Of warmth before the pain.

I soar.

Shades of Solace. Taken in November 2013, Yale University, New Haven. OKJ All rights reserved.
Click for larger image.

Nikmat Padat

Segala yang dihasrat
Tapi tak dapat
Adalah nikmat
yang paling padat.
- A. Samad Said.

Benarkah ini? Adakah sesuatu yang diidami tetapi tidak mungkin diperolehi dapat memberi kebahagiaan kepada seseorang?

Pada permukaannya fikiran ini langsung tidak masuk akal. Kan sepatutnya kita berasa resah? Kan keinginan yang tidak tercapai akan meresap dalam sanubari kita dan meracuni emosi kita? Kan kita semua diajar sejak kecil lagi bahawa tiada benda yang tidak dapat didapati, bahawa di mana ada kemahuan di situ ada jalan, bahawa kegagalan untuk mengambil apa yang kita inginkan merupakan salah sendiri?

Namun makin lama aku merenungi puisi ini, maka makin ku rasa ku dapat menghayati isinya. Aku memerhati sekelilingku. Ku lihat segala yang dihasrat olehku.

Mungkin nikmat itu merupakan suatu perasaan yang lebih mendalam. Mungkin wujudnya suatu kegembiraan dalam memahami bahawa ada benda dalam dunia ini yang kita tidak berupaya untuk mengawal. Mungkin wujudnya sejenis kepuasan dalam menatapi seseorang atau sesuatu dan tidak menyentuh atau mengalaminya, bagaikan merenung ke langit dan menikmati bintang-bintang dari beribu-ribu batu.

Apa yang dingini dan dilihat dari jauh dapat mengekalkan kejelitaannya, keindahannya, kesempurnaannya. Selama ia kekal sebagai teori, dalam minda ia menjadi segala yang murni.

Keupayaan untuk berpura-pura bahawa sesuatu itu adalah sempurna, untuk percaya dunia ini mempunyai sesuatu yang suci dan tidak dicemari, untuk merendam diri dalam satu pelarian dari realiti, mungkin inilah merupakan nikmat yang paling padat.

"The Window Above". Taken in NYC, November 2013. OKJ All rights reserved.
Click for larger image.

Broken Reflections

When I was about 9 years old, my grandmother passed away. At the time of her passing I was at my godparents house, having fun with computer games and just fooling around. My godfather tried to convey the news to me lightly, by telling me that grandma had gone to a better place. A better place without suffering, where everyone was happy all the time and lead blissful lives.

I knew what he was talking about. It was not heaven or some sort of paradise that sprang to my mind but death. I had seen my fish dead, floating right side up in a murky bowl of water clouded by fish pellets and droppings. I had witnessed hens slaughtered at the wet market, their necks choked by clenched fists while a clean cleaver slit their throats, their blood spilling onto the concrete floor mixing with the rainwater and scattered bits of vegetable. I had observed ants, by the hundreds carrying dead cockroaches murdered by pesticide, back in a cannibalistic funeral procession. 

Somehow, I had been acutely aware, from a very young age, that death was natural, universal, and inevitable. Yet I seemed to have no fear of it. It occurred to me as futile to fear something that was so ... part of the way the world functioned. I often imagined myself dying in various ways, from cancer, from a car accident, from drowning. 

In fact, I still remember an incident where I very nearly drowned myself. And by Jove it was such an incredibly stupid way to drown too. My younger brother and I both took swimming classes together, and after class we would fool around in the pool just having fun. One day, I had the bright idea of giving my brother a piggyback just like my dad usually did. It was pretty fun up until the point when I waded into the deeper end of the pool. Can't really remember why but it was something about trying to allay my brother's fears of the water by immersion and crap like that. And boy did I get immersed.

The moment his head went near the water line, my brother panicked and in attempting to get higher, pushed on the only surface he could find: my head. This of course, caused me, his support to simply go deeper into the pool, and he panicked more and more. I remember desperately shouting "LET GO! LET GO! YOU WON'T DROWN!", the words in between lost in gulps of water. I laugh when I think of it now, drowning in 6 feet of water. I tried to push off my brother so that I could save the both of us, but this only caused him to panic more and wrap his legs around my neck ever tighter.

Halfway through the ordeal, which seemed like the longest time ever, I stopped struggling. It wasn't that I had run out of breath. I just realized the futility of the whole situation and felt this impending sense of doom. Somehow everything seemed sharper in that moment, like one of those super High-Definition videos where it all seems so incredibly detailed as to be unreal. And I just let go. I closed my eyes, and let myself drift-drown like a metal pin dropped into water, rolling gently as it falls, almost without resistance. 

The swimming instructor eventually fished us both out of the water. I just lay down on the floor like a limp fish. Maybe I was in shock. But thinking back to it now the experience seemed almost serene, almost meditative in nature. I knew I could have died. It hung over me like that phantom indent on your head after wearing a head band for a long time then taking it off. It sometimes still hangs over me. But I never associated the whole incident with fear.

"Death Over The Hill" Taken in Auckland, NZ 2011. OKJ All rights reserved.
Click for larger image.

There are few things that truly scare me. Sure, there is the occasional ghost jumping out at the screen in horror movies and the moment when a roller coaster dips from a gravity defying loop, but true terror? The kind of fear that seeps into your very being, that paralyzes you even as it panics you, that shadows your moves and thoughts and dreams and sinks its teeth into you while never letting go?

Only two things have managed to invoke this sort of foreboding doom in my heart, and they are in some ways diametrically opposed. The first was a fear of being forgotten. History had always fascinated me and the deeds and legacies of great men like Alexander, Saladin, Washington and Gandhi struck me as something to aspire to. To be remembered, to be spoken after one's passing, to become, in a way, immortal. I had read somewhere that the poet Keats epitaph had been "Here lies he whose name was writ in water", and I was determined to have my name carved in stone. I wanted to leave a mark in the world, to do something great and be remembered for it. 

Yet there was something extremely disquieting about such a fear. I didn't only admire the Mandelas and St. Francis' of the world; increasingly I found myself drawn to figures like Hitler, Qin Shi Huang, Caesar and Stalin.  These were the giant who were great, but also terrible ( #Voldemort). I was slowly coming to a realization there was very little I would not do to be remembered, be it great evil or great good. Or as Milton puts it in Paradise Lost: "Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven". Perhaps the acceptance of the inevitability of death made me infatuated of living after death by leaving a legacy. Maybe this was my way of dealing with the specter of the end of life, the sense of mortality that I grew up with. 

This was the fear of my high school years. But as I grew older, a new fear emerged. I feared myself. 

I came to the realization that fundamentally, I was not a good person. I could be very selfish, I could very incredibly self-centered, and had a supreme sense of self-preservation. I craved attention, thought myself very smart indeed, and reveled the freedom that came with positions of authority. I could be abrasive, temperamental and capable of much dishonesty. Increasingly, I viewed my fascination with fame and legacy and the martial as something repugnant, something corrupting and dangerous. I have done bad things, things that at the time I thought were justified, or dismiss-able in the name of some higher cause. But as they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. 

This process of realization took a long time. It felt like an egg being cracked over my head while still sleeping. First you don't notice it, simply thinking it cold. Then it somehow incorporates itself into your dream, weaving in and out, droplets of egg white and yolk stringing over your hair. Finally comes the awakening, the touching, and then the horror of realizing that a life that could have been was shattered on you, the liquids of the womb dripping over your face, your neck, your T-shirt emblazoned with self-righteous quotes. 

The horror of realizing that even as you woke, you had the power, and perhaps even a desire, to crush yet more lives and eggs. The fear that pervades you as you look into the mirror, and recognize but refuse to acknowledge that the person staring back is you. 

It was a moment of truth for me because I had always believed myself essentially a good person. Yet my desires, my ambitions, my actions often contradicted with the self-image I had forged in the fires of egotism. And as fear of myself surpassed my fear of anonymity, I entered a phase of extreme self-examination. 

That process continues today, every waking hour, every passing moment. I subject my actions to scrutiny, I criticize myself, I question my own motives for doing the things I do. It's why so many of my blog posts including this one are self-deprecatory, reflective, and sobering. They serve to provide a counterbalance to my natural tendencies to think myself all-knowing and all-powerful, and anchor me with an open confession of my vulnerabilities, bared for all the world to see, so I never fall into the trap of thinking myself above others. A friend once described my writing as agonizingly self-aware while at the same time indulgent. I think of it as almost like trying to get drunk while in a cold shower. 

This blog post is perhaps the coldest of such "showers" yet. It has taken me a long time to confront these fears of mine, and to surmount perhaps another fear, the fear of being judged by others when this post is published. But I believe that it is necessary, at this crossroads of my life, to be brutally honest with myself, and to not only recognize but acknowledge, nay, shout out in a megaphone who I see in the mirror. I don't think I'm alone in recognizing there are parts of my own character that I am deeply uncomfortable with, and maybe sharing this odyssey will help others step up and face their own inner demons. 

I yearn for a day when I will be able to say confidently I believe I am a good person. (Yet, how will I know if it's not self-conceit?) I hope that I will have not only the strength to change, but also the strength to acknowledge my weakness. And I pray that one day, I will no longer be haunted by the fears of anonymity and myself.

Until then, I will continue to look into a cracked mirror stained by the splatter of shattered eggs, while drowning in the blood of slaughtered chickens and choking from the iron grip of tightening legs. 

"Staring Upon The Mind" Taken in New York, December 2013. OKJ All rights reserved.
Click for larger image.

Metempsychosis

Somehow, the parade and the block party of the President's Inaugural evoked in me a deep-seated, irrational fear.

At first there was the excitement, the thrill that came with trailing the jolly band, the colorful procession of trumpets, whistles and drums. President Salovey was in high spirits, waving to his bevy of followers, the faculty clad in full dress and regalia were prancing away, the whole scene was one of and joy and jubilation. I scrambled after the marching company, snapping away on my smartphone, tailing them like the paparazzi.

Then this overwhelming sense of deja vu crept in, like a raw egg cracked over a bare heart, the liquid coating it in an eerie coldness of life lost. It was not the first time I was doing this. I had been in this situation before, the intrepid, excited reporter seeking a snapshot of the band. The chasing after a marching company, the noises and beats of drum and fanfare, the beautiful chaos of the moment: these were familiar to me.

I had experienced all of it during my time in the protest movement. The excitement, the joy of seeing so many turn out to support the cause of free and fair elections, to see people power in the making! I had been there, documenting everything in my mind and my camera, running frantically after the tails of this or that prominent politician or activist. I still think about it and my heart swells with joy.

But such joy was always temporary. Something would always turn ugly. The police would crackdown, someone would be trampled by the crowds, a horrific car acccident would occur. I often thought of that momentary joy in the odd lens of tall building suicide. Jumping off a building, there is perhaps a moment when you feel the gust of wind against your cheeks, your arms spread like an eagle ready to soar, and maybe, just maybe you think ironically by descending you ascend the heights of ecstasy. But such a moment is always fleeting, and then you hit the ground and your body splatters against a hard concrete ground or somebody's Lamborghini and it's all over, you're literally brought back to a blood soaked earth.

As I followed the president's procession, a mounting sense of urgency overtook my joy. As I looked to President Salovey and the smile on his face, I had this sudden feeling that all was not well, and that at any moment shouts of joy would turn into screams of terror. My "Spider-Sense" went on high alert.

I tried to reassure myself nothing could possibly go wrong, walking backwards to capture the scene. Then I turned to walk forwards and was confronted with the sight of a police car. The officer smiled and lightly tapped my shoulder to direct me to the sides. I recoiled slightly from his touch.

It felt incredibly odd to see a smiling police officer. When I had been working in the protest movement as secretary to an NGO coalition, the police were people you avoided. They represented the authorities who were looking for any crack in your defenses, any excuse to clamp down and end it all.

I had witnessed with my own eyes police dragging people out on the streets, beating them to a pulp and narrowly escaped such a fate myself. I had evaded trailing police vans in the dead of night, trying to rendezvous with my colleagues just released from detainment for voicing their dissent, at one time even switching meeting points 3 times to slip out under the watchful eyes of the police. I had choked on tear gas, been bruised by a stray canister, run frantically away from them in a cat and mouse game in the narrow street alleys of Kuala Lumpur.

And now they were the good guys.

Trying to ignore the storm of emotions I turned to my usual refuge, food. Food trucks galore presented themselves and for the first time that day, in the midst of Snowcones, kettle corn and fried dough everything seemed better. Free food always makes me happy.

Despite it all, the specter of ruinous protests still lingered in the back of my mind. It was so ridiculously irrational yet it was something of an instinct I had developed. You needed to be constantly on high alert to survive. Surveying the scene, I couldn't help but notice how calm everything was. It was organized chaos. Images of destruction and mayhem flashed in my head in stark contrast.

The giant inflatable bulldog stood tall as a monument to the nature of the block party: full of a festive air, way over the top and comical.

I thought about the other "monuments" that I had encountered in protest. There were the barbed wire fences, hastily set up to prevent citizens from gathering, ironically enough, in Freedom Square. There were the ominous black vans, complete with cages in the back that transported away many a friend. And then there was the smashed up, overturned police car pounded to bits by angry protestors, and left as it was for hours into the aftermath, like some grotesque monument attesting to the ugliness of the mob, the chaos of what became a riot, the blurred lines between right and wrong.

I didn't have much time to ruminate as I was pulled along into a line of fawning students wanting a part in the event I called the SSS: Selfie Sunday with Salovey.

It was good fun and when I got back I thought about making it my profile picture, just for bragging rights and all. I'm not a fan of selfies so I don't take many photos of myself, I prefer to be the guy taking the photo or if I am already wielding the camera I prefer to take monochrome shots of inanimate objects like buildings or leaves or some abstract act piece.

So I looked through my previous profile pictures and stumbled upon one from a long time ago. There I was, getting my shot taken in front of a line of riot police. The two photos with two very different figures of authority.

I reflected long and hard on the day, and it's taken me weeks to be able to pen down some of the feelings I felt, and even then I don't feel like I'm doing them justice.

It took me a long while to realize I had nothing to fear. The police were not going to pull out a gun and start shooting into the crowd, the only smoke that appeared was from a fog machine not a tear gas canister, and President Salovey certainly wasn't going to go berserk and choke me with that  flashy looking necklace thing (though I can imagine such a scene in a future YSO Halloween show). As I calmed down and the ridiculousness of it all dawned upon me, I felt something else.

At first, I was confused at what I was feeling. It was a sensation alien to me especially at such events, when always I had to look over my shoulder, evaluate every street to assess its viability for a swift escape, or keep a wary distance between a police officer and myself. Then I realized what it was I was feeling.

For the first time in the longest time, I felt safe. I felt welcomed.

I felt free.

"Horizon Beyond Chains" Taken November 2011. Milford Sound, NZ.
Click to view higher quality photo.

Pantun Keseorangan

Angin dingin bertiup mencipta rima,
Dedaun pokok bergoyang mengikut lagu.
Dalam kesepian malam bertepuk dada,
Tanya minda apa isi hatiku.

Tupai bersantap di atas dahan,
Menikmati cuaca menjamu selera.
Bukanlah suatu kelaparan malah lebih mendalam,
Keinginan yang makin hari makin bergelora.

Kekasih berbaring di atas laman,
Berbisik-bisik berkongsi isi.
Berjalan sunyi tanpa teman,
Kekosongan memenuhi sanubari.

Monyet cuba memanjat tali,
Dihalang oleh suatu perangkap.
Imbas kembali sengsaranya hati,
Cuba lupamu tetapi kurasa tidak lengkap.

Kemarau melanda bagaikan gurun,
Bila datangnya hujan siapa tahu.
Tanpamu sesaat menjadi tahun,
Kedahagaan jiwa— inginku bersamamu.

"Solace" Taken at Queenstown, NZ, December 2011. Copyright of OKJ.
Click for larger image. 

Young & Beautiful?

Blogger's note: The following article is by Ahmed, a very good friend of mine who was 15 years old when he entered senior year in high school. His is the counterpart to my tale, that of being younger than everyone else in school. Enjoy.

I've always identified myself as a third culture kid, a TCK, a citizen of the world. Essentially, that means that I don’t belong to the culture of the country I was born in, nor do I belong to the culture of the country that I am living in now, but another, international third culture.

Yet it’s not the question “where are you from?” that I struggle with. It’s “how old are you?”

Instantly, the wheels click in my head when I hear those four dreaded words, the bane of my existence. I wonder how to answer the question. Most of the time, I just deflect, change the subject, and try to talk about something else. Occasionally, I tell the truth, that I am 17 (and in my second year of university). It’s a question that really tears me apart, because once you answer it and other people find out, it instantly becomes your only defining characteristic. You stop being that nice guy or that funny guy or that lively guy (I really flatter myself too much), but instantly turn into the guy that’s younger than everyone else. And with that comes its own set stereotypes.

The word “genius” is tossed around a lot. People expect you to possess unparalleled intelligence, they instantly think “oh, I read about this 14-year old kid in the news that’s doing a PhD in neuroscience, who must be like you, right?” No. Not even close.

People expect you to be immature. Those are people that I could never hang out with, people that every time you’d meet the first and only thing they would bring up was your age, and you’d have to sit there and watch them struggle to do math backwards to find out what year I was born.

Then, there were the people that always had it in the back of their minds. The people who, when you try to have a conversation with them, are giving you this blank stare, because you know they’re not even listening to you but thinking about how they could have possibly ended up in this situation where they’re having a serious conversation with someone who, to them, is a child.

To a lot of people, it was as if my age was the only explanation for all of my actions and accomplishments, not because I was smarter or had out-competed my classmates, but because of a number that I had grown to resent and distance myself from overtime. To be honest, I always dismissed these explanations as some underlying resentment or envy from my classmates, not willing to accept that I performed better in school because of factors that were within their control. They would use my age to reassure themselves that was the explanation, and so there was nothing they could do about it.

There are a few that managed to stay above the fray, to be able to accept me for being me and not a product of my age, and those are the people I would count among my closest and dearest friends. Those are the people who were never bothered by my age. They’d be shocked when I told them the first time, then you’d completely forget about it.

Kar Jin writes in his blog post, “At the same time, I also took on with ever greater fervor the perks of being young. Chatting away the wee hours of the morning on the merits of Games of Thrones, dancing and looking like a complete fool in the process, and just YOLO-ing the simple things in daily life.” Life will afford me those guilty pleasures. But then, once I do something that’s more traditionally “my age,” people will respond: ‘Ah, that’s so predictable. It’s because he’s younger than all of us.’ This really makes it difficult to revert back to the way I normally am, because people will just say ‘wait, go back to the silly person you were yesterday, that representation of you makes me more comfortable, because it’s how society has taught me to think you should be like, plus it makes me more comfortable about my own insecurities.’ I’m paraphrasing, of course.

Another thing I faced were girl issues. Girls would NEVER see me as date-able (at least in my grade), but rather as a little brother. This is especially compounded by the fact that girls mature faster than guys. And so, you might be wondering, “well Ahmed, why don’t you date someone your age who isn't in your grade?”

To that, I say that I can never hang out with people that are my own age anymore. That’s because I've spent my whole life surrounded by older people. I am an only child, so I had my parents in the early stages. Then when I went to school, my classmates were older than me, and it has been that way ever since. I've matured at the same speed and level of people that are two, three, heck sometimes four years older than me, and so now I find people my age unbearably childish, ironically just as people older than me sometimes find me incredibly childish. I’m sure this’ll be straightened out in my 20s when we’re all around the same maturity level, more or less, hopefully.

I've decided to tell no one at my university. No one knows my real age (although maybe if they manage to unearth this, my secret will be out). I feel like that’s made people take me more seriously, but I've lost what’s made me unique – I was the child prodigy in ISKL, both a blessing and a curse.

Now, I’ll have to find other avenues to be special. And hopefully, I will be able to find a way to be simply me.

"I've spent my whole life surrounded by older people..."
"Childhood", Taken December 2012 at Napier, NZ. Copyright of OKJ.
Click for larger image.

The Old And New

"Wait a minute… how old are you again?"

That's usually the standard reaction I get from most people when they realize that I'm a 20 year old freshman. That expression of incredulity is most swiftly followed by watching them struggle to do math backwards to find out what year I was born, along with some sort of slow revelation on their part, usually something along the lines of: "Woah... So you can get us booze next year?" Yeah that's right, looks like I might get a lot more popular come February next year.

Sometimes I do wonder though: What do people think of me when they find out how old I am? Does their opinion of me change? Am I some sort of walking fossil, a freak anomaly that somehow ended up in the wrong class?

To be honest, it's been something I have struggled with in the past few years. Spending time working for NGOs and activism in Malaysia, taking the unconventional route of doing the International Baccalaureate program under a scholarship, added to the already late nature of the idiosyncratic Malaysian education system made me a year or two older than many of my classmates.

When I was doing the IB in ISKL (International School of Kuala Lumpur), I felt almost defined by my age. At times, I found it difficult to let go, to let loose and just have some crazy, unfettered fun. At the back of my head, always there was a nagging feeling that there were larger things at stake, be it the economy, politics or some lofty ideal. There were times, especially when seeing friends of the same age go into higher education while I was still in high school, that I wondered deeply if I was making the right decision.

It came to a point when I almost felt embarrassed whenever someone asked me how old I was. I would skirt around the question, answer indirectly, allude, hint, imply, and just do anything short of actually stating flat out that I was 19 years old. And of course, the dreaded "Ah that explains it." Much of what I had done or achieved felt diminished because of it, that somehow it wasn't that I was out-competing people or studying harder than people but more because I was just older than people. It was as if my age had become the primary explanation for all my actions and accomplishments, my entire existence as a student stood upon a number I had grown to distance myself from. Most frustrating of all, was to see how some of my classmates would use age as a reason to reassure themselves they could not do anything about their own situation. I wanted to tell them that age should not matter, and that so many of them could do way better than I did if only they realized it.

Outside of school life, where I volunteered for NGO groups, wrote research papers and organized protests, I received the same reaction but to a different slant. In these activist groups, I would most often be the baby, the spring chicken of the group and people would be genuinely surprised that I was still in school and not a working adult. A lot of people responded positively to this, praising me effusively for "maturity beyond my years". Though well-intended, such comments often held somewhat disparaging assumptions about "people my age" and predicated a lot of merit based on my age.

Really though, I was just a conflicted teenager like everybody else. The two worlds collided frequently, and made me feel too young and too old at the same time. I felt like some kind of circus freak, walking on a tightrope, straddling a thin thread that divided two worlds, one a blistering inferno and the other a freezing arctic wasteland. In short, Katy Perry's “Hot & Cold”.

Initially, I found it rather difficult. Straddling both worlds as old and young; the two extremes pulling me apart created an underlying resentment. There was always this cloud hanging over me, pressuring me to "act my age". I tried to hide it. Suppress it. Pretend it was never there.

Things went by like that for a while, until I recognized there were others with the same struggle. In particular, there was this guy in debate, an Egyptian called Ahmed Elkady. Ahmed is a brilliant guy, funny, smart, and mature. The only thing was he was a senior, and he was 15 years old. Like myself, much of his high school experience had been defined by his age. We were in the same boat but at different ends. There were others like Ahmed, who by the way, I consider today one of my closest friends.

Gradually, I came to terms with my age. More than that, I embraced it. I took pride in my role as the default big brother (though not in the Orwellian sense). I played and teased on my "long years of worldly experience" (I can barely type this without laughing). I took it as a cue to be patient and humble, when so many people younger than myself were doing so many great things I would never have been able to do. I rejoiced in being chauffeur, driving people around and being able to introduce my friends the hidden secrets of Kuala Lumpur restaurant and bar life.

At the same time, I also took on with ever greater fervour the perks of being young. Chatting away the wee hours of the morning on the merits of Games of Thrones, dancing and looking like a complete fool in the process, and just YOLO-ing the simple things in daily life.

My age stopped becoming a rubber band that was being stretched by opposite forces. In the midst of the late night debates, the chauffeuring and the eating, the fire and ice had melded together to form a lukewarm pond, its waters tranquil but for the occasional foray of an animal or two.

I stopped conforming to what my age group was supposed to be. Oddly enough, the whole age crisis had spurred a change in me. It wasn't that I was more mature, or more happy-go-lucky or anything else. I'm not sure how to describe it, but I felt that for the first time in my life, I wasn't acting or behaving my age.

All my life, I had fought against categorization, from the issue of my race to gender to religion. I had faced all of them head on, confronted them, and exposed them in writing or in action. But my age, this was the elephant in the room I had not deigned to look at. Once I did though, I realized that age was another one of those social constructs imposed upon people to make them “behave”, to teach people to think what an ideal person of age so and so should be like. It was another lazy category to explain away things. “Ooh, Malala Yousafzai is so young!” Her deeds are incredible for any age of any circumstance, and though it truly is remarkable that one so young should be so strong, it’s not the sum total of who she is. It should never define or diminish her accomplishments.

By the end of it all, I was no longer 18 or 19 or 20. I was no longer old or young, a fossil or a baby. I was just, simply, me.

Somewhere, somehow, in the process of coming to terms with my age, I had broken free.

Straddling a thin thread that divided two worlds...
"Dichotomy", taken at Wellington, NZ, 19 January 2012. Copyright of OKJ.