Dust

It's most often at the deepest hours of the night, when Chaos triumphs over Law, enabling creativity to turn mundanity upside down, when the darkest thoughts swirl around me, threatening to sweep me away like an uprooted sapling, that I turn to writing in an effort to calm the frenzied waves.

Apart from the obvious creative gratification, there is a certain pleasing utility in churning out word after planned word, the sensation that by focusing on typing letters on a keyboard, a disordered mind is straightened into neat rows of sentences and thoughts. It's almost like that scene in Mushishi, when miles and miles of written text escape from the supernatural bondage of their scrolls, a seething inky mass across all surfaces in the room, and Tanyu grabs her special chopsticks and expertly proceeds to stick the lines of words back onto the page in the order that they belong.

See? Feeling a great deal calmer already.

So, why the ruminating around at 3-something this morning? In one sentence, the end of childhood, the beginning of adulthood and assuming the responsibilities attached to it, and trying to tackle head-on the tough decisions to come.

I worry about how I've done in these last few exams of my university days. I worry about how this one wasted year is sending difficult ripples through my future years. I worry that the decision not to redo 3rd Year was the wrong one after all. Most of all, I worry that I'll never have the strength to get better and stand on my own feet again.

I think I can pinpoint the beginning of this rapid downward spiral - when all these years I've managed to cope - to that moment last July when our exam results were released on the intranet. As expected, I did pretty all right with middling grades that were hovering around the 60 mark, give or take a couple. Except for one shocker of a grade. 39.66 for the 'Marketing: Foundations and Applications' exam. Luckily that 20-credit module was saved by the essay which made up the remaining 50%, for which I'd gotten 76%.

Thing is, it's not as if I'd never failed a paper in my life before. Just the previous August I had to resit for 3 Year 1 papers, but those were in Quantitative Methods and Finance, and it's no secret that numbers ain't my selling point. But this time around, I failed in Marketing. Of all subjects, one that I enjoyed and was so sure I was good in. It's one thing to do poorly in something you have no talent in or don't even like doing, and a completely different issue to fail something you thought was a breeze. It wreaks havoc on your confidence. And for someone who always got away with just intelligence and marginal hard work to get good grades, the crumbling on this last bastion shook my faith in myself to the core. So badly that it's taken me 9 months to admit this on my blog.

In the end, I've failed to build a solid foundation of tertiary education for my future career to stand on. With so much competition in getting a job, one way of salvaging my marketability is to get a further qualification. But is further study what I really need? Then there's the IGS which has been extended to 2 years, and at the same time a change in British immigration policy. It's the big boys that can afford to pay £1,000 to get onto the register to legally issue certificates for foreign employees to obtain work visas, but they are the ones with the highest degree class requirements. Smaller firms are more likely to take me in, but can't afford it. On the one hand, there is a desire to try and live out the next year in the UK solely on my own endeavours, prove to myself that I can handle things on my own, make something of myself without relying on others. It's partly the urge to properly 'fly the nest' all the way through, the pride in saying I was fully independent from my parents even for a short while, and partly the need to reestablish my own esteem by doing so. But already we've seen 55,000 jobs lost in the UK financial sector (of which insurance is part of) due to the credit crunch, and at the same time I've completely lost the confidence to go into marketing. Then there's that conflicting pull of home - that I still call Malaysia "home" means that there's still something there that I can't find anywhere else. It's pretty probably that home is the only place where I can get better quickly and fully, plus the added benefit of being able to *ahem* "pull strings" to get a decent first job, but will that then deny me the career advantage of first gaining work experience in the UK? Decisions were easier to make when you were still a kid.

So many choices, only one lifetime to live it all. It's finally time to go out into society as an individual, not an extension of my peer group, nor a continuation of my parents' hopes, but just as me.

I guess it is futile to resist change - each of us lives in an continuous state of limbo throughout our lives. We only reach the state of completion when there is nothing more to see, to do and to learn, when the journey ends and we die. The ancient Greeks had this saying, "Never call a man happy until he is dead." Somewhat cynical, but so very true. Seeing that life is unpredictable from one moment to the next, we earn the right to call ourselves something only when the possibility of change ceases to exist, that is, when we are no longer living.

And though the darkest period of night allows luxurious time for silent contemplation, it is in the brightening of day that one gains renewed strength to take charge of the exhilarating changes from dawn to dusk.

Dawn's dreams are done.
From misty slumber half-born sprites
spring towards the fingering light
tumbling, cavorting
golden ether forming,
caressing contours
and raising clamours,
melting into the blaze of day.