KOHL AND PAPER

A colleague—or maybe a student, I never found out—once left a note on my desk right after the news broke that I had published my first book. In this world, where a good chunk of your life is just a click away on social media, I’ve always made it a point to share my milestones. So, everyone knew about it—except the people I actually wanted to reach.

I remember sitting in the faculty room, staring at the walls, lost in thought about the version of reality I was living. I had already wasted seven years in the cliché of graduating with an IT degree, only to become the resident technician and so-called “database manager,” which mostly meant stoically entering data from 8 to 5. It had been two years since I’d changed the course of my destiny, escaping the limbo of office work to become a teacher. Another cliché in the making, sure, but at least I was on what felt like a progressive path—whatever that meant.

As a Xennial, I’m a walking example of the confusion between Gen-X and Millennials. Technically, that makes my generation the doomed middle child, stuck between the analog past and the digital future. We’re the ones who remember dial-up internet but also embraced smartphones. We’re the bridge, but sometimes it feels like we’re the ones being walked all over.

“Why is a raven like a writing desk?”

Whoever wrote that note on my Jane Austen post-it notepad knew I’d be obsessed with the gesture. They didn’t know me well, but they knew enough. One thing they got right: I couldn’t resist a good riddle. To be honest, I’d never thought about it before. I vaguely remembered sitting through long hours in my all-girls school, my English teacher, Mrs. Banfield, quoting literary gems during Literature class. At thirteen, I’d just doodle in my notebook, missing the point entirely—if there even was one. I carried that habit of doodling through college, but that’s a story for another time.

I picked up my pen, hoping to sound as dry and sarcastic as possible, and wrote: “To be honest, I’ve naver thought of it.”

If you read that carefully, you’d catch the wit—the deliberate misspelling, a nod to Lewis Carroll’s raven spelled backward. I cherished that note. I kept it for years, pinned to my cubicle corkboard, until it was lost in the chaos of moving three times after getting married.

I didn’t expect a reply, but those written post-it messages felt like reliving my teenage years. And yes, after leaving my teaching career to pursue writing (finally), that was the abrupt end of the tale of the Jane Austen notepad riddler. I tried asking around, wondering if anyone had lurked near my desk—after all, I’d once lost fifty dollars from my bag. But no one confessed. Oh, the perks of being a teacher: educating, being educated, surrounded by educated people, earning your worth, losing your mind, and, apparently, fifty bucks.

THE LEGEND OF THE BIRD PEOPLE

As a child, I had minor dyslexia and have struggled with anxiety my whole life. As much as I hate talking about mental health, I strongly believe that grappling with these challenges from a young age is what drew me to reading and writing. I received extra training to improve my handwriting, though my penmanship still falls far short of calligraphy standards. Reading was recommended to help with my dyslexia, and it became my escape. Anxiety, with its endless overthinking, turned out to be a double-edged sword—it fueled my creativity but also made life exhausting.

Growing up in Brunei in the ’90s, where entertainment options were virtually nonexistent, was oddly perfect for me. The lack of distractions allowed my artistic expressions to flourish in various forms: sketching, drawing, painting, doodling, scribbling, and writing. I started creating on various media in 1998, when I was 13, and my peak creative years were between 2002 and 2012. Some of these hobbies faded as technology introduced gadgets that complicated life more than they simplified it.

I never had formal training in Creative Writing or Fine Arts, even though I had the chance after my O-Levels. It’s a point in my life I’m still bitter about. My parents believed that Arts and Literature wouldn’t lead to a stable career. It was an old-fashioned mindset—that such fields were only for the wealthy or those who didn’t take life seriously. Geez, how did they know?

So, I ended up in IT.

I’ve always had a knack for opposing authority, and since technology seemed like a way to escape the bitterness of traditional expectations, it became my rebellion. Those years spent coding ironically contributed to my productivity in arts and literature. Let’s just say I needed somewhere to run to—besides alcohol.

SUBLIMINAL MUSINGS IN A BOTTLE OF J.D.

WITHERING PLIGHTS IN AUSTENVILLE

THE SYSTEM AND THE REBEL

The System—capital S—was something I was supposed to serve. But I’ve always been a rebel at heart. My parents thought they were steering me toward stability, but they didn’t realize that creativity isn’t something you can suppress. It finds a way to surface, whether through code, words, or art. And for me, it surfaced in all three.

I’ve always believed that creativity is a form of resistance. It’s a way to push back against the expectations, the norms, the systems that try to box us in. Whether it’s through writing, drawing, or even coding, creativity is my way of saying, “I exist, and I won’t be silenced.”