New Year's Post (Part 1)

It really is 2016. I'm turning 25 this year.

I've been hearing this lately - that wherever you end up, regardless of how you feel about it at the time, you will learn something. At least something.

I started 2015 as a fresh grad, facing that fresh grad syndrome of not knowing whether anyone would want to employ me for a period of one month or so. To be fair I've been angsting for the whole year before that so it probably was longer.

I've had 3 jobs over the span of last year. The first as a substitute English teacher. The second as a junior paralegal. The third as a government trainee of sorts. I can safely say that I've learned from all of them.

That brief time as a sub teacher taught me of the heavy burden that teachers face. You think teaching is easy? Go teach at a sekolah kebangsaan for one or two weeks. I've always had uncharitable thoughts towards some of my own teachers who fall short of my oh captain-my captain ideal. I thought that if you give me a class I'll surely do it the right way.

Sometime during that short period I ended up crying before a classroom full of students. Raised my voice and talked down to students who just won't reciprocate. Giving apologetic looks to teachers who pass by my class for not being able to keep the class volume down.

Your class will never be ideal enough for you to bring your teaching ideals to life. You can't exactly look at them as equals and expect them to reciprocate as equals do. When you first come in, establish your dominance or they'll walk all over you. Animal Planet voiceover played in my head as I justify shouting at my students. I generally don't shout to anyone outside my immediate family but my vocal box got a fair exercise those few weeks.

I also learn a lot from the teachers themselves. You have to really love teaching to be able to withstand this kind of stress for a long time. One particular teached wrote really personal, attentive notes on her students in her Buku Rekod Mengajar. Things like, the students disappointed me today, or, the students showed great initiative, they've improved - things like that. I'm not good at describing how it was but when I went through that one record book I got inspired by her dedication and tirelessness. How, despite losing her idealistic view of how students can be developed to their full potential years ago, she still does her best.

So, lesson: no matter what you end up becoming, do your best.

I'll talk about the other two jobs another time. For now, happy new year!!!

Just Can't Deal

How often do you have to tell yourself that you are good enough? That you don't have to tailor yourself to a certain ideal of personhood, because you think that it'll make you fit in the world better, become happier?

How often do you resign yourself to thinking, I have got to change because something needs to and others just won't so it'll have to be me?

Do you realise the burden of constantly measuring yourself to others - to always need to categorise between feeling superior or inferior, nothing in between? You must realise how tiresome and repulsive it is to be around someone who always has something to prove. But you need others to make sense of where you stand, how you're supposed to be.

You're not confident enough to believe that what you think is valid. You always need others in order to figure out where you stand. That's why despite your desire to grow you pathetically cling on.

2015'S Ending

Hello.

Quick update: currently attached to a government department, apprenticing in the lawmaking side of the law. Studying for CLP on the other. Apprehensive of the big snap when I finally hit my limit.

But anyway. I don't know what to talk about now. Every now and then I get the desire to sit down and write something, then think better of it and say, ah, later. Now I've got a long weekend and I don't know what to write about.

It has been a year since my graduation eh. I don't feel like I achieved much since then. I'm still a bumbling fresh grad in some ways, all kinds of insecure about the future. I see that obsessive fear of failure is still strongly embedded in me.

Now I'm just getting unnecessarily melancholic. CLP stress just doing things to my head. I think I'm getting hungry.