Soul to Squeeze

Some of the readers of my blog gripe that it is all about politics (you know who you are!); that I'm simply obsessed with politics (which I am) and that I should write more heart-felt and personal posts that lay bare my soul for the whole world to see, share, or even ridicule. One particular reader even went to the extent of telling me to stop being the know-it-all person (I don't know that much, really) whom she knows really well and to start sharing some of the darkest and the most vulnerable aspects of my life hitherto unknown to even most of my closest friends.

I'm not good in transcribing my feelings; I'm a verbal person by nature. I used to keep diaries when I was in boarding school and during my first year in college. I read some of my old diaries last summer when I was back in Malaysia and I cannot believed that I even wrote them in the first place. Not that they were all trivial and juvenile; most fundamentally, they were boring. It was as if I was writing after-the-fact entries in a daily planner, if this makes any sense at all. Most of the entries were about my daily activities, like playing soccer, takraw and snooker with my friends, hanging out at Central Market, Lot 10 or Pertama Complex, going to tea-dance at Piccadilly on Saturdays, sneaking out at night to go to the grown-up clubs like Phase 2 or Tin Mine, or engaging in other typical urban Malaysian teenage activities of my generation (my God, I do sound old!).

Entries that touched on personal feelings were few and far in between. In fact, I was vigorously looking for them as I thumbed through the pages, in a way to sort of track my own emotional evolution over all these years. Virtually all of the so-called personal entries were about girls or fights with my dad. I don't think what I wrote about my dad can be called bona fide introspection of the soul; they were all vulgarish, sophomoric, and were only words that I wished I could yell at his face.

Entries about girls were equally juvenile--and comedic. There were entries about the nervous exhilaration of trying to chat up Yanti, the well-endowed Kelantanese, for the first time; the confused feeling in response to Chen's obvious interest in me (she was in a relationship with that cricket player at the time); and the sense of accomplishment and macho pride after spending a two-hour lunch with Judy, the cute and much sought-after Sabahan, before the envious eyes of all the guys (there was also an account of looking down her unhooked baju kurung into her supple mammaries and counting the few tiny moles in between the milky-smooth twin peaks). The only brutally honest emotional baring was when Ucu broke up with me for stupid reasons, which I wrote drenching wet after walking in the rain along Jln. Raja Chulan from BB Plaza to CM while listening to G N' R's November Rain on my walkman--yeah, it's corny, it's melodramatic, yada yada yada. To all the young 'uns, iPod didn't exist yet at the time; hence the Walkman! You can buy them on eBay now as collectibles.

This post proves that I suck at self-introspective writing. My excuse is what is the point of transcribing my feelings when I can or already have confided in my family and friends. Whenever there is an emotional crisis, I'll almost immediately find somebody to talk to. When Jess dropped the A-Bomb on that fateful Tuesday morning, the first person I talked to right after was my beloved boss, Leslie, who did a great job in helping me picking up pieces of my shattered self-esteem and ridding myself of the feeling of inferiority and dejection. Well, it so happened that I was in the office at the time and the closest available confidant was my boss.

Also, I don't think I'm well-suited for this type of writing. My writing style is more methodical, direct, and structured; in other word, dry. I'm simply not able to unbridle myself, to let my mind run amok long enough, in order to capture the free-wheeling emotional rollercoaster. When one has to stop and ponder about the outline of one's writing, it is definitely not a good tool to employ to effectively articulate one's inner and deepest feelings. There's a reason why I'm training to be a political scientist, instead of a creative writer.

But I have yet given up hope. The skill may be needed of me later in life, especially if I want to write my memoir 30-40 years down the road... yeah, I'm that vain!