drawer of shelved drafts

There is a private post dated 2016 stored in this blog.

I was nearing the end of my time in London and my Masters. For months, I struggled to make my life convincingly enjoyable and well-deserved, if not adored, for an audience. Clearly, I was burdened by many inflicted expectations and delusions that had been imposed strongly by colonialism and also countless social media boastings by others.

That was possibly my last attempt at blogging before I was swept away by the swift timeline of Twitter and Instagram. The last time I truly blogged was a few months after my last relationship in 2013, which was also affected by such platforms. After a while, I retreated in retweeting and reposting others’ voices.

However, like everyone else, my fatigue towards the ever-running and conflicting timelines has reached its threshold. A lot of my time was spent shitposting on my stan twitter, in which I mix my capslock fangirling with my torrential tweets of real life sadness. The decade was heavily anchored on two things: trying to make poetry possible, and gaining happiness from K-pop. I did not contain both sides well, and in a year my account reaches 40k tweets, with several dead accounts prior to that.

With the high dependency on Twitter, the archival integrity of the platform has lost itself and myself. I can no longer trace who I was, nor can I truly move forward from who I am without a focal point. My autocorrect recognises only a few words. Some are my typos, some are my keyboard smashes. Without knowing, in a desperate attempt to boost my serotonin through my phone screen in fear of losing my grip on my mental health, I was also losing my grasp on language. In real life, I chose to be mute, and loud only when the vocabulary is familiar and comforting to me.

So a return to blogging, especially during a global pandemic that has forced us to stay put at home, felt timely. Underneath my calm “fine-ness” I am afraid of losing more and more of my being due to the lack of opportunity to rise up to such occasions. The pandemic has already removed the privilege of talking face-to-face and replaced it with a fear drenched in surveillance from all sides. The now two-month long Movement Control Order (MCO) is not similar to the time I was stricken with grief and depression years ago, as I am now burdened with the fear of health and political uncertainty.

In an attempt to truly regain my sense of self, especially what had been done and thought of in the past decade, especially through my escape and countless DMs to my friends. I will open this blog with a series of delayed think pieces.

The blog is another drawer of shelved drafts, and I am fine with that.

OTHER THINGS:

• Jia Tolentino articulates the performativity of the self on social media. Her book Trick Mirror provided adequate resources for such critique, amongst other cultural observations.