Sacrifice

One of the best things about being part of a small family business is our family coffee time. My family have an obsession for ‘tea’ and what I mean by ‘tea’, I actually mean a time in between lunch and dinner where we have coffee, tea, cakes and lots of cakes. Sometimes it is just lots of coffee.

Of course, the idea is that we discuss business during these coffee hour but most of the time we end up talking nonsense. And now that my family had discovered Iced Australian Coffee from Ben’s, which, incidentally stocks coffee from Market Lane, currently the place in the world to go for coffee, we end up talking more nonsense. See Ben’s have these little placards that is intended to help the conversation. So we browse through them and pick a topic and see where we go from there.

There tends to be far away from work as possible.

Yesterday’s question was “If you could write a book on any subject matter, what would it be?”

My answer was the same. Still writing the damned thing.

Before I got married, a lot of women warned me that I should try and delaying getting married for as long as possible. Marriage takes up a lot of your time, you will no longer have any time for yourself and do whatever it takes to achieve your dreams before you marry.

It sort of makes it sound as though marriage is a death sentence.

Well, now, one and half years later – the assessment is not quite true. If I had a non-supportive husband, marriage probably would be a death sentence for dreams. But I do and I’ve written about it countless of times that I have a husband who actively encourages and supports my over optimistic ambition of being an author and screenwriter.

Having said that however, you really don’t have that much time post-marriage. We live on our own, and even though we’re fair with the household chores, the house takes up a lot of our time. We are unfortunately, not well off enough to afford a variety of robots to take care of the house and despite my best attempts at training the cats to mop the floor, the only thing they would do is catch roaches. Which is good I suppose but since the house is pretty clean, it has left them redundant. Nowadays they assume their job is to frolick on the carpets and they do a damn good job at that I tell you, based on the number of times we have to vacuum the floor and carpet.

And here’s the thing. Between your real job of paying the bills, and busy household work, it is easy to let what you really want to do down the wayside. What you really want to do takes time, effort and a lot of tenacity. Tenacity you don’t quite have when you’re working a job and being a responsible motherfucking adult because really, after you’ve cooked and cleaned, all you want to do is fall asleep in front of the TV as opposed to sitting in front of the PC and cranking your brain to churn out at least 500 words.

When I decided to rewrite my novel, a very difficult and painful decision after working on it for so long, I set myself a timeline of when I would complete it.

That was of course, months ago.

In nearly 8 months time, I will be 2 years married and I am nowhere near close to my deadline of finishing my novel that I’ve been working on for yonks. And it is disheartening. My mum, the efficient android, opined that it was because I did not have the discipline to do so. I was very hurt by her remarks but it probably hurt more because it was true. To admit to myself, that despite doing all the things, I was still not doing enough was tough.

The thing about dreams is that frankly, it requires sacrifice. Nothing good ever comes easy. I lost weight this year, about 10 kilos. That required me giving up food and trust me, I love my food.

So if I want to get this done, I have to sacrifice something very dear to me.

Two weeks ago, I opted to sacrifice sleep.

You have no idea how much I love sleeping. I love taking long naps, getting into my pj’s and pulling the covers over me with the aircond blasting cold (sorry environment). Heck, I can even sleep in the warmest of weathers with just the fan on, I just love sleep and I try to make sure I get my 8 hours every night.

But let’s face it. I am not disciplined enough to write in the evenings after dinner. Besides, I also want to spend time with the husband. It’s not fair on him that instead of spending time with the wife, I’m working in the study. And frankly, I’m not that good at doing that either because I keep bugging him to come over and to show him a picture of a cat in a bowl. See? Cat in a bowl. So cute.

If I wake up in the mornings however, Eizwan would be asleep and there is very little distraction (save for Nadal the cat who keeps whining for me to ‘Feed meeee! I’m hungryyyyy!’) to work on my novel. So every morning, I set the alarm to 5:30am and I wake up, brush my teeth, dance to SuperJunior’s Mr. Simple before I do a bit of writing in the study before I go to work.

There’s something peaceful about waking up early in the morning to write. The mornings are very quiet where I live and it’s a relief to be working outside in silence. No one is online save my sister who lives in Scotland and so there is no one to pull me in different directions and there is no need to attend to any matters. There are no chores to be done at 5:30am, just one thing and that is writing. In a way, it is the only time that is possible for me to have time just for myself and I am starting to treasure these quiet and private times.

Is there a downside to this writing in the morning?

Sleeping during lunch.

*

Four days and counting.

Meeting Gordon Ramsey. Sort of.

Last night, I dreamt that I got a writing mentor by the name of Gordon Ramsey. The rest of the dream was spent doing a tomato run at 10pm and getting my ass kicked in the kitchen. GR made me cry really, really hard.

Thank God it was just a dream. Although, I would really like to meet Gordon Ramsey.

Preferably from a safe distance though.

About the Writer

Strangely enough, for someone who is often so fiery and opinionated, I recently, well, not quite recently, have figured out that I am very much afraid of voicing out my opinions. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, it really had to do with my previous job where my self-esteem was completely broken by my boss. My boss was emotionally and mentally abusive, frequently calling into question my integrity and my intelligence.

Not a day would go by without him actually humiliating me in front of my colleagues by dismissing my work or my opinions as “childish” or, the one that haunts me to this day: “You’re asking stupid questions.”

For someone who had spent 21 years in a very nurturing family and had gone to schools where I am expected to question and demand an explanation, it was more than a shock. Three years in one of UK’s most prestigious universities and four scholarships later and suddenly, I was stuck to doing data entry work with no possibility of going further than data entry because “she’s inexperienced and we don’t think she can do anything.”

That was almost 2 years ago and I am still shaken by my experiences. I cannot write anything without worrying that it would offend anyone or that my opinions are stupid. And I start to realize that I start not having an opinion on anything and that I’m just indifferent to anything that goes on around me.

It’s hard for me to write anything without fearing that someone would “judge” me. I’m taking baby steps all around, from the play to writing classes to overcome this fear. Yet, the scars remain and despite the number of times I’ve told myself to get over it, there are nights where I still cry myself to sleep. It’s easier to not have an opinion, everyone will just leave me alone.

But the thing is, I do have an opinion. I love my Doctor Who, I love writing, I love murder mysteries and to an extent, I still love politics. If a close friend asks for my opinion, I can share them and be open about it. However, it’s not the same when it comes to strangers. I rarely share my opinion with people I don’t know, certainly a bizarre trait for a writer. Writers are, by nature, egoistic and opinionated. It’s what fuels us to write, we want to share what we feel and what we experience because we cannot contain it within us. We want people to read and dammit, agree with what we say.

However, humanity isn’t so kind as to always agree with what the Writer says. If I want to write, I have to accept that there will be disagreements. The question that I have to ask myself very strongly is: am I brave enough to stand and say what I believe? From my scathing review of P Ramlee the musical, which I disliked for being indulgent and for its greatest failure: failing to capture the zeitgist of an era that I adore to even my very bizarre interpretation of Malaysian society, it’s my opinion, it’s how I see it. Do I dare stand and be criticized and to a greater extent which I’ve experienced here, be ridiculed for an opinion that is different?

If I don’t, the alternative is to go back to what I was doing, go back to getting a “normal” job: an office job which I can get and then suppress whatever desire I have when it comes to writing. The thought of going back to “normality” frightens the hell out of me. At the same time, pursuing this dream of writing makes me feel like it’s some form of a dirty secret. I wrote blogs but to openly admit, I want to write for a living and not as a journalist was like admitting I wanted to have deviant sex. Lots of hot deviant sex.

I still have a long way to go to be able to chase this dream. I still need to build the strength and courage to be open and to write without fear. One writer commented that writing is a lot like standing in front of the mirror naked. I need to be able to stand in front of the mirror, bare naked and all and stare at my body, all it’s imperfections and love it. Not squirming and being embarrassed, covering my bits and tits with my hands.

There are days where I can pursue with confidence and know that this is the life that I have chosen and this is the only way forward. These are the days that I treasure, where I can write openly and write whatever things I feel inside of me are terrible and be open about it. The days where I want the world to see what I see and feel what I feel.

And yet, there are days, where I wonder, if I am indulgent and I wonder, what right do I have to pursue my dreams when I have a life to lead and live?