Timeline Thingy
Looking back on those super depressing times, I see that I've never really posted much on here about my actual life - just my morbid thoughts. You'll find that this continues to be a running theme in everything I post though, because silly me, I've made it such a big part of who I am. I'm still working on that, okay? And this blogging thing, like I've said before, is just something I do for myself.
Now then, I'm already anticipating blanks here and there throughout this chronology because it had been a very fuzzy time for me overall. It's just an exercise to look back at my past through a different lens.
I like my stories to start at the beginning but right now that would be just too far back so let's do one (1) full decade up to the present instead.
I was 16. I had just transferred to a boarding school, a Sekolah Menengah Kebangsaan Agama Kota Kinabalu, which everyone, ever, refers to as "smack", spelled SMAKK. (It's actually SMK(A) KK, I dunno why it had become SMAKK, it had just did.)
I remember very little from this time because - and I'm not exaggerating, you could go and ask just about anyone who had been in SMAKK between 2006 and 2007 - I had literally slept the years away. Literally.
And I know how to properly use "literally". Wallahi, I practically slept for two years in high school.
It's no secret that I was already depressed at that point too, so let's move on.
It was SPM year. I started dedicating a few hours to actually learning things for school only not at school. I took private tuitions over the weekends and my performance got dramatically better.
Well, considering it went from fails to B's, I'd say it was a drastic enough change. One time I was the only one who scored the full 100% for an Add Maths test - I cried right there in class. But I don't think anyone had noticed, I'm sure they all thought I had just gone back to sleep again.
I did okay for SPM in the end, for me. My parents and everybody else though, they all reprimanded me for not living up to my full potential.
Come on. I had been failing. But somehow still managed to scrape 5A's 4B's and an E (which was still a pass, mind. It was Arabic).
And all the sleeping and moping? I'm done beating myself up for it - I had clearly needed help and had been too ashamed to ask for it. So yeah, not only had that already been my full potential, all things considered, it had been in fact a miracle.
I started to draw. Not like the sucky ones I did back in middle school while facing PMR. But like proper ones where you start with a sketch then you start adding the details and use ink to line it out. In fact, it had been - and remains today - the biggest project I had ever dared to embark on.
Alas, I hadn't gotten far with it at all. I never even got a name. It is still stuck with the name "The unnamed Project".
I had grand stories planned out. I spent the time to develop the characters, their worlds, their histories. I started with one chapter, continued to the next chapter and the next, and would go back again to earlier chapters after a while and tweak everything. For one part, I even restarted from scratch. The final product of it all was going to be my masterpiece.
Soon I began attending a private school to study for the A-levels. It had cost my father A LOT of hard-earned money. I had been confident at first to be able to work hard and get it right.
But no. I really messed it up. I had missed out on so much of the things you were supposed to have learned in high school and I had just been too slow to try to catch up with where the classes had stood then.
And I had been just too ashamed to admit defeat, too ashamed to ask for help, again, and had just let it all come crashing down.
I was going to be a doctor. I was going to fulfil a fardhu kifayyah. It was such a big, important mission. But I was already failing from the start.
Finally, I also got diagnosed with scoliosis (which also disqualified me and apparently all my younger siblings from the National Service Programme). Thus began my visits to the doctor's.
But the year had ended the best way possible: a family trip to London.
I had kept silent about my shortcomings and my inability to cope with just everything, hid them by putting on this lazy uncaring attitude like it was protection for me from the shame of defeat and the guilt from needing so much help. Man, was I stupid.
So I failed A-levels. All five subjects, all those thousands of ringgits, just wasted just like that.
My father had been so disappointed. I couldn't face it. And there was nothing I could do to make it right.
The one single good thing that came from all of that had been meeting a friend for life.
I had met my only friend, Yvonne during those A-level studies. To this day we remain friends, in my case the only one I tell anything of any importance to. I do consider her my best friend because she has been my only confidant through my darkest of days, but I don't think I had been a good friend to her at all so I don't know if I'm her best friend too.
Months passed which I had spent just rotting away at home playing The Sims 2 or drawing or making up stories. I started to colour my drawings at this point.
My unnamed project was still growing, being developed and worked on whenever I felt able to translate my ideas into something tangible. But I couldn't for the life of me settle with my skill level for it at the time. I had wanted it to be just perfect and my low skills didn't help.
And in September, by the Grace of God, I started my foundation studies in Bioscience at the Center for Foundation Studies IIUM in Petaling Jaya.
I beg you, if ever things go bad and you feel like you can't do it, get help. Otherwise, it's bound to only get worse. And that's a promise. So just get help, please.
I started to really destabilise. Nothing like my teenage years when I would go bawling over I-still-don't-even-know-what and then just go back to normal.
I would be laughing and be on top of the world and get things done one week, and then just go back to being a vegetable the next. I was out with my cousin, my roommates, just having fun; and then I was out alone by myself hiding behind a disguise. I haunted empty corridors and unused classrooms sometimes, just sitting somewhere completely static, unthinking and unblinking. Just always at either end of the spectrum, never quite sane. Something just seemed to be slightly off about it all.
I hadn't gotten help. I recognized that I had done very bad the whole time, but I had felt like getting help would mean being a bother. So of course, things just got worse.
The best thing I had at the time were my stories and my drawings. I started to find comfort in them and finishing one part after another filled me with a sense of achievement. It was an escape from reality for me. I cared more for it than I did my studies, which in turn I got bad at.
Still, by Allah's Grace, I was able to move on from foundation studies to undergraduate at IIUM Kuantan.
I was studying Biotechnology in IIUM Kuantan.
I got better... but also continued to get worse. I made friends and tried to make contributions and to learn new things and to develop new skills, but I failed at least one course every semester and my CGPA reached even lower levels of low each time.
Every now and then, with spaces lasting between weeks to months throughout this period, I would fall back to drawing and writing stories and would feel okay with everything for a while. But ultimately, really, all I had wanted was just to completely disappear, to have never been.
I no longer thought I would be a bother if I'd gotten help - I truly believed I was simply unworthy of any.
Like I didn't deserve to live, to feel happy, to Be. What an ungrateful brat I've become, I had told myself always. At this point, I was probably beyond help. Even now, I can't think of anything anyone could've done for me that would've reached me. By the end of it I really hit rock bottom.
Additionally, I did get hospitalised twice in the space of a month.
I underwent corrective surgery to straighten my spine in January of 2013. My condition had gradually been worsening since I was first diagnosed, so my parents had deemed it necessary to get me the surgery. I of course had felt otherwise. I had wished they would've just thrown me out and disowned me and stopped spending good money on me.
The only absolute positive thing from this time had been when I went on that trip with my family to London and Edinburgh.
Past that one sweet memory, a collective messing up of things had struck my family and we all, every one of us, started to become different people. For me personally, it hadn't made anything worse for me really, it just definitely hadn't helped.
It would be a betrayal to disclose any details beyond this point, so just the takeaway here: In despite of whatever good things I had achieved or done during this time, at the very core I had still messed up very very bad.
I went through my cycle of ups and downs still. It was only different in that it became unpredictable. I uploaded my very last vision in January of 2014. No more stories. I started fearing to even try to put pencil to paper and translate my visions onto it. I had all run out of good, comforting ones.
I started to just go with the flow. I went for my industrial training in June of that year and did everything as I was told. I stopped bothering to make something of myself. I wanted to just blend into the crowd, just fit in somewhere, and become invisible that way.
By the end of it I reached my absolute lowest point. I'll spare you the details. The important thing was in despite of purposefully landing myself in that pit, Allah SWT the Most Loving, Most Merciful, didn't forsake me. Never. Even while I still kept at it, trying to ruin everything that had made me, me; forfeiting any future I could possibly have had; I still got Help.
It was an extremely confusing time. Even now, just two years later, looking back at that time I could only say it doesn't look clear enough. I swear, I cannot remember exactly what was going on, what I had thought about it all, and just reading posts from that time shed no light on the matter at all. To illustrate, I would literally be crying and laughing at the same time. It had been just something that happens at the time. So confusing.
I just remember that I absolutely did not want things to stay the way they had been.
Then I met the man whom I am now married to. And after all the things I'd done, I really don't care if people still want to comment about how we rushed things.
He had been all in for the journey from the start. I couldn't possibly be happier.
So happy and accepting of my reality I was, that I returned to IIUM for the second half of my FYP only to officially stop it halfway.
I had accepted that I was behind everyone else in my studies. I had finally accepted that it was okay to go at my own pace. I had found a little bit of peace within myself. I had started to heal inside. To forgive myself, for the most part. It's been pretty good since then.
Extending my studies the maximum of two years had been the best decision for me.
I married the most sincere, most diligent, and most admirable man I ever met in June of that year. For once, I had finally opened my eyes to everything I had to be so grateful for.
Where I'm from; Semporna, Sabah; we love our salty seafood, get married and settle down as soon as we're able, and speak a language so old it doesn't have a written form. We also prefer to marry within our own family trees and we perform the igal at our wedding ceremonies, after which the new husband and wife live together for a bit within the wife's household.
My husband is from Kelantan. They eat sweet foods, have big engagement ceremonies, have rather drawn out engagements, and speak - for as much as I've come to understand - a foreign language.They would prefer to marry within their own too, only not necessarily so close as under the same family tree; and they have their own customs for their big weddings which would seem to drag on over a period of weeks...?
At least we both agreed that the solemnisation happens at the bride's house.
But when my new husband asked whether he was meant to stay with me at my parents' house after the ceremony or go back with his parents to the guest house they had been staying at, my family was scandalised.
Just kidding, not really. But nobody expected such a thing to be questioned on at all - part of the "get settled and have children as soon as possible" deal, I think.
But after a few weeks at my family's home, my new husband had to go back to Kelantan to begin his industrial training and I were not to come with because my parents and I had wanted to do it properly by our in-laws' customs too - I'll first show up for their Majlis Menyambut Menantu before I go around parading my new husband in KB Mall.
So as newlyweds, we had to be separated.
It was a real friggin hard test, I tell you.
And then we spent our first Eid as a married couple together separately. :|
Finally, in mid-August, I carted off nearly all of my worldly possessions from Kota Kinabalu to Kota Bharu and officially joined my in-laws in Bachok.
But by early September I had to leave again to go back to uni and repeat those failed courses.
So we've caught up to the present. I'm still in uni. I live in the dorms. My marriage is a long distance relationship. Except during intersemester breaks, at which time I'd go back to Bachok and demand attention and time from my husband. All of them.
Don't shake your heads just yet. I still have my own self-sufficient outlet - in the form of The Sims 4. Which my husband got for me. Okay shut up.
I don't draw anymore. I'm still scared to. My drawings never felt good enough and right now I just don't want to do something that I'd just be disappointed with after seeing the final result. I might come back to honing the skill again some day but for now, I'm happy with my sims. I make them into actors, my mouthpieces, telling my stories as I used to do with the characters I drew.
She wasn't the first sim I did stories with. But she's my most favourite. Even my husband is fond of her. I had made multiple sim males to be her companion and he had disapproved of all of them.
The obvious solution was of course to make a sim of himself and get him to woo Faye. We both actually prefer this. Faye now has the best possible sim by her side. <3
I must stress that my decade-long depression didn't just simply become solved by getting married.
It had been a process which had lasted almost as long as I'd been battling it. Triumphing over it one moment and then crushed by it again the next.
I only ever manage to get back up every single time due to one thing: I have faith. Its strength varies from time to time but so long as I have it, I'll get back up.
Even now I still have bad days, they're just not as awful or last as long because I finally grasp that Allah SWT is ever present.
And anyway, how is being married supposed to just miraculously solve everything? You must be crazy. *shakes head*
Now then, I'm already anticipating blanks here and there throughout this chronology because it had been a very fuzzy time for me overall. It's just an exercise to look back at my past through a different lens.
I like my stories to start at the beginning but right now that would be just too far back so let's do one (1) full decade up to the present instead.
2006
I was 16. I had just transferred to a boarding school, a Sekolah Menengah Kebangsaan Agama Kota Kinabalu, which everyone, ever, refers to as "smack", spelled SMAKK. (It's actually SMK(A) KK, I dunno why it had become SMAKK, it had just did.)
I remember very little from this time because - and I'm not exaggerating, you could go and ask just about anyone who had been in SMAKK between 2006 and 2007 - I had literally slept the years away. Literally.
And I know how to properly use "literally". Wallahi, I practically slept for two years in high school.
It's no secret that I was already depressed at that point too, so let's move on.
2007
It was SPM year. I started dedicating a few hours to actually learning things for school only not at school. I took private tuitions over the weekends and my performance got dramatically better.
Well, considering it went from fails to B's, I'd say it was a drastic enough change. One time I was the only one who scored the full 100% for an Add Maths test - I cried right there in class. But I don't think anyone had noticed, I'm sure they all thought I had just gone back to sleep again.
I did okay for SPM in the end, for me. My parents and everybody else though, they all reprimanded me for not living up to my full potential.
Come on. I had been failing. But somehow still managed to scrape 5A's 4B's and an E (which was still a pass, mind. It was Arabic).
And all the sleeping and moping? I'm done beating myself up for it - I had clearly needed help and had been too ashamed to ask for it. So yeah, not only had that already been my full potential, all things considered, it had been in fact a miracle.
2008
I started to draw. Not like the sucky ones I did back in middle school while facing PMR. But like proper ones where you start with a sketch then you start adding the details and use ink to line it out. In fact, it had been - and remains today - the biggest project I had ever dared to embark on.
Alas, I hadn't gotten far with it at all. I never even got a name. It is still stuck with the name "The unnamed Project".
 |
| This was, in all truthfulness, a self-portrait |
I had grand stories planned out. I spent the time to develop the characters, their worlds, their histories. I started with one chapter, continued to the next chapter and the next, and would go back again to earlier chapters after a while and tweak everything. For one part, I even restarted from scratch. The final product of it all was going to be my masterpiece.
Soon I began attending a private school to study for the A-levels. It had cost my father A LOT of hard-earned money. I had been confident at first to be able to work hard and get it right.
But no. I really messed it up. I had missed out on so much of the things you were supposed to have learned in high school and I had just been too slow to try to catch up with where the classes had stood then.
And I had been just too ashamed to admit defeat, too ashamed to ask for help, again, and had just let it all come crashing down.
I was going to be a doctor. I was going to fulfil a fardhu kifayyah. It was such a big, important mission. But I was already failing from the start.
Finally, I also got diagnosed with scoliosis (which also disqualified me and apparently all my younger siblings from the National Service Programme). Thus began my visits to the doctor's.
But the year had ended the best way possible: a family trip to London.
 |
| My parents and siblings minus my two older brothers |
2009
I had kept silent about my shortcomings and my inability to cope with just everything, hid them by putting on this lazy uncaring attitude like it was protection for me from the shame of defeat and the guilt from needing so much help. Man, was I stupid.
So I failed A-levels. All five subjects, all those thousands of ringgits, just wasted just like that.
My father had been so disappointed. I couldn't face it. And there was nothing I could do to make it right.
The one single good thing that came from all of that had been meeting a friend for life.
I had met my only friend, Yvonne during those A-level studies. To this day we remain friends, in my case the only one I tell anything of any importance to. I do consider her my best friend because she has been my only confidant through my darkest of days, but I don't think I had been a good friend to her at all so I don't know if I'm her best friend too.
Months passed which I had spent just rotting away at home playing The Sims 2 or drawing or making up stories. I started to colour my drawings at this point.
 |
| I coloured my sister's drawings first, before I dared to put those colours on my own drawing |
My unnamed project was still growing, being developed and worked on whenever I felt able to translate my ideas into something tangible. But I couldn't for the life of me settle with my skill level for it at the time. I had wanted it to be just perfect and my low skills didn't help.
And in September, by the Grace of God, I started my foundation studies in Bioscience at the Center for Foundation Studies IIUM in Petaling Jaya.
2010
I beg you, if ever things go bad and you feel like you can't do it, get help. Otherwise, it's bound to only get worse. And that's a promise. So just get help, please.
I started to really destabilise. Nothing like my teenage years when I would go bawling over I-still-don't-even-know-what and then just go back to normal.
I would be laughing and be on top of the world and get things done one week, and then just go back to being a vegetable the next. I was out with my cousin, my roommates, just having fun; and then I was out alone by myself hiding behind a disguise. I haunted empty corridors and unused classrooms sometimes, just sitting somewhere completely static, unthinking and unblinking. Just always at either end of the spectrum, never quite sane. Something just seemed to be slightly off about it all.
I hadn't gotten help. I recognized that I had done very bad the whole time, but I had felt like getting help would mean being a bother. So of course, things just got worse.
The best thing I had at the time were my stories and my drawings. I started to find comfort in them and finishing one part after another filled me with a sense of achievement. It was an escape from reality for me. I cared more for it than I did my studies, which in turn I got bad at.
 |
| This character's story. It gave me feels. |
Still, by Allah's Grace, I was able to move on from foundation studies to undergraduate at IIUM Kuantan.
2011 until 2013
I was studying Biotechnology in IIUM Kuantan.
I got better... but also continued to get worse. I made friends and tried to make contributions and to learn new things and to develop new skills, but I failed at least one course every semester and my CGPA reached even lower levels of low each time.
 |
| Looking back, I had been at my prime with drawing. But at the time, everything I did had felt insufficient, not good enough. |
Every now and then, with spaces lasting between weeks to months throughout this period, I would fall back to drawing and writing stories and would feel okay with everything for a while. But ultimately, really, all I had wanted was just to completely disappear, to have never been.
I no longer thought I would be a bother if I'd gotten help - I truly believed I was simply unworthy of any.
Like I didn't deserve to live, to feel happy, to Be. What an ungrateful brat I've become, I had told myself always. At this point, I was probably beyond help. Even now, I can't think of anything anyone could've done for me that would've reached me. By the end of it I really hit rock bottom.
Additionally, I did get hospitalised twice in the space of a month.
I underwent corrective surgery to straighten my spine in January of 2013. My condition had gradually been worsening since I was first diagnosed, so my parents had deemed it necessary to get me the surgery. I of course had felt otherwise. I had wished they would've just thrown me out and disowned me and stopped spending good money on me.
The only absolute positive thing from this time had been when I went on that trip with my family to London and Edinburgh.
Past that one sweet memory, a collective messing up of things had struck my family and we all, every one of us, started to become different people. For me personally, it hadn't made anything worse for me really, it just definitely hadn't helped.
It would be a betrayal to disclose any details beyond this point, so just the takeaway here: In despite of whatever good things I had achieved or done during this time, at the very core I had still messed up very very bad.
2014
I went through my cycle of ups and downs still. It was only different in that it became unpredictable. I uploaded my very last vision in January of 2014. No more stories. I started fearing to even try to put pencil to paper and translate my visions onto it. I had all run out of good, comforting ones.
I started to just go with the flow. I went for my industrial training in June of that year and did everything as I was told. I stopped bothering to make something of myself. I wanted to just blend into the crowd, just fit in somewhere, and become invisible that way.
By the end of it I reached my absolute lowest point. I'll spare you the details. The important thing was in despite of purposefully landing myself in that pit, Allah SWT the Most Loving, Most Merciful, didn't forsake me. Never. Even while I still kept at it, trying to ruin everything that had made me, me; forfeiting any future I could possibly have had; I still got Help.
It was an extremely confusing time. Even now, just two years later, looking back at that time I could only say it doesn't look clear enough. I swear, I cannot remember exactly what was going on, what I had thought about it all, and just reading posts from that time shed no light on the matter at all. To illustrate, I would literally be crying and laughing at the same time. It had been just something that happens at the time. So confusing.
I just remember that I absolutely did not want things to stay the way they had been.
Then I met the man whom I am now married to. And after all the things I'd done, I really don't care if people still want to comment about how we rushed things.
He had been all in for the journey from the start. I couldn't possibly be happier.
So happy and accepting of my reality I was, that I returned to IIUM for the second half of my FYP only to officially stop it halfway.
I had accepted that I was behind everyone else in my studies. I had finally accepted that it was okay to go at my own pace. I had found a little bit of peace within myself. I had started to heal inside. To forgive myself, for the most part. It's been pretty good since then.
Extending my studies the maximum of two years had been the best decision for me.
2015
I married the most sincere, most diligent, and most admirable man I ever met in June of that year. For once, I had finally opened my eyes to everything I had to be so grateful for.
Where I'm from; Semporna, Sabah; we love our salty seafood, get married and settle down as soon as we're able, and speak a language so old it doesn't have a written form. We also prefer to marry within our own family trees and we perform the igal at our wedding ceremonies, after which the new husband and wife live together for a bit within the wife's household.
My husband is from Kelantan. They eat sweet foods, have big engagement ceremonies, have rather drawn out engagements, and speak - for as much as I've come to understand - a foreign language.They would prefer to marry within their own too, only not necessarily so close as under the same family tree; and they have their own customs for their big weddings which would seem to drag on over a period of weeks...?
At least we both agreed that the solemnisation happens at the bride's house.
 |
| And in the end my husband did the igal well - I'm sure you can guess by the amount of money he got for it |
But when my new husband asked whether he was meant to stay with me at my parents' house after the ceremony or go back with his parents to the guest house they had been staying at, my family was scandalised.
Just kidding, not really. But nobody expected such a thing to be questioned on at all - part of the "get settled and have children as soon as possible" deal, I think.
But after a few weeks at my family's home, my new husband had to go back to Kelantan to begin his industrial training and I were not to come with because my parents and I had wanted to do it properly by our in-laws' customs too - I'll first show up for their Majlis Menyambut Menantu before I go around parading my new husband in KB Mall.
So as newlyweds, we had to be separated.
It was a real friggin hard test, I tell you.
And then we spent our first Eid as a married couple together separately. :|
Finally, in mid-August, I carted off nearly all of my worldly possessions from Kota Kinabalu to Kota Bharu and officially joined my in-laws in Bachok.
But by early September I had to leave again to go back to uni and repeat those failed courses.
2016
So we've caught up to the present. I'm still in uni. I live in the dorms. My marriage is a long distance relationship. Except during intersemester breaks, at which time I'd go back to Bachok and demand attention and time from my husband. All of them.
Don't shake your heads just yet. I still have my own self-sufficient outlet - in the form of The Sims 4. Which my husband got for me. Okay shut up.
I don't draw anymore. I'm still scared to. My drawings never felt good enough and right now I just don't want to do something that I'd just be disappointed with after seeing the final result. I might come back to honing the skill again some day but for now, I'm happy with my sims. I make them into actors, my mouthpieces, telling my stories as I used to do with the characters I drew.
 |
| Meet my darling Faye~ |
She wasn't the first sim I did stories with. But she's my most favourite. Even my husband is fond of her. I had made multiple sim males to be her companion and he had disapproved of all of them.
The obvious solution was of course to make a sim of himself and get him to woo Faye. We both actually prefer this. Faye now has the best possible sim by her side. <3
Finally,
I must stress that my decade-long depression didn't just simply become solved by getting married.
It had been a process which had lasted almost as long as I'd been battling it. Triumphing over it one moment and then crushed by it again the next.
I only ever manage to get back up every single time due to one thing: I have faith. Its strength varies from time to time but so long as I have it, I'll get back up.
Even now I still have bad days, they're just not as awful or last as long because I finally grasp that Allah SWT is ever present.
And anyway, how is being married supposed to just miraculously solve everything? You must be crazy. *shakes head*
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