Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call.
There’s something strangely alluring about suicide.
It’s dark, it’s forbidden, chilling. It’s somehow so much more painful than a death of natural causes. For a human being to want to go out of their natural instinct to be alive and maintain that. Yet I wonder why it is romanticised in some cultures.
Sometimes, dark thoughts take over. You can’t explain why they’re there. They just hit you randomly. Life could be really good with no reason to feel this way at all. Everything could be going so well.
That’s usually when guilt hits. The guilt for continuing to feel this way. Why would you want to end your life? Is there something you can’t live with? What’s going so horribly wrong for someone to feel this way about their life?
The questions keep coming but today, we still don’t have the answers for this. Suicide has claimed the lives of many, including people like Robin Williams and the most happiest folks in the world. Politicians have succumbed to it, it surfaces in the most unexpected of people.
As someone who experiences these thoughts from time to time, I can say one thing for certain ; it’s nobody’s fault. Having been there before, I can remember what it was like to stay in one place for absolutely ages and not moved for a whole day, wanting to wither away into non-existence. Sometimes, the thoughts in your head get too painful, too persistent and too intense. Sometimes the guilt eats away and you want to end it all to prevent yourself being a burden onto others.
“Is there no way out of the mind?”
I wonder about this, sometimes...
But if I could blame anyone, for anything like this in my life, it would be my family.
Not my grandparents, stepdad, Chiti, Sitappa or siblings Niraj and Shibs or cousins Lavs, Dash and Medha. These guys did nothing wrong to me.
The rest of them, are horrendously responsible.
The biggest culprits being my uncle, Babumama and his horrible wife and children. I’ve never known evil and hypocrisy like them. Aunty Thaya is horrendously fake and has raised her children to follow suit. My narcissistic uncle has let money and fame get to his head and lost the meaning of being what it means to be a good person. He intimidates, bullies and is unkind to people. He manipulates and alters their reality. A lesser being would not be able to see this. His wife is equally manipulative but I suspect this has all come as a survival tip to be able to stay in that horrible relationship they call a marriage. This man has let me down immensely and I don’t think the relationship can ever be repaired.
Unfortunately my mother is not innocent in all this. She has made right with her two children after me but I guess she decided pretty early on that I was a lost cause. I posed to be too much of a reminder of her failed marriage.
My whole experience with these people has been horrendously traumatising and I do not want to return to this. Their stifling controlling natures and archaic backward perspectives on life are not fit for societal consumption. I know for sure I do not want these values imposed on my own children some day, should I be lucky enough to have a family of my own.
All I can say is, I’m glad to have left Malaysia when I did. My family is ridiculously fucked but I’ll be damned if they ever admit it to themselves. Maintaing an image of nomalcy is much more important to them than anything else. And as such, the family is rife with mental health issues. My siblings have eating disorders, my cousins depression and anxiety and some of them self-harm and feel suicidal.
At some point, these morons that call themselves adults utterly lost the plot. The trick to rehabilitation is to move away and start afresh.
There are some days I struggle with things more than usual.
“I’d risk it all for you,”
I took up writing ages ago for expressionism, to get away from the conservative restrictive controls imposed on me. I feel today that I have matured beyond my family and can never go back. At some point, the issues with family overwhelmed me and I found it hard to recover and focus on my own career and wellbeing. A horrible argument with my uncle in October 2017 caused me to sink into a depressive episode that took months for me to recover from. The man nearly hit me and I swore then that I would never return home.
Life has been tricky before meeting my husband. I was alone and apart from dating some horrible people, I did not have support or a nurturing environment from family. I always felt like a burden or second class citizen in my own family. Yes, I got given things - I was lucky to have my education and allowance given to me by the same uncle who was abusive towards me. But it is not a gift to be treated decently and like a normal human being. I should not be made to feel like I was lucky. We should be this way with everyone in our lives. And I was blood.
I have a strong feeling my children will never be close to this side of the family outside of my mum, stepdad, siblings and favourite cousins.
But its alright, I’ll be doing them a massive favour.
This has been a whopper of an emotional post to write. I find it hard coping with my emotions sometimes especially when thoughts of family continue to haunt me. I have gotten a lot better at blocking it all out and taking time away from them. But from time to time, these thoughts resurface and when I am reminded of their stupidity, I am overwhelmed by sadness that causes me to feel once more like a burden and unworthy. This is when the darkness returns and I start to feel this way.
Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call.
Just kinda experimenting with Tumblr. It’s been a while since I rejoined the blogging scene and I’m kinda struggling with maintaining a Wix website. Only cuz most of the time, I do end up spouting nonsensical bits of info that I myself cant bear to inflict onto the world - there is enough insanity out here.
This seems miles easier!
Totally a tune on my playlist now! Though check out the Coronavirus version...
Got a song on repeat. Courtesy of FIFA 2019 and my brother’s incessant game-playing frenzies.
Got a cat on my lap. She says wjhreiroewfnaoidsnfiwnef.
I did say I’d explain what Keling meant. So here goes...
If you were to perform a simple google search on the word ‘Keling’, you’d find the following...
Not far behind are articles on the origin of the word Keling (by word of WorldofBuzz) and even a ‘healthy’ mention of its many uses in Malaysian politics albeit our prime minister who suddenly saw fit to expand his trilingual repertoire at a fundraising event.
The word ‘Keling’ is thought to have originated from ancient India in which the kingdom of Kalinga existed. - which is very much likened to a modern day Orissa. People from said kingdom were thought to be referred to by tradespeople as Kalings.
Other thoughts on the origin refer to the sound anklets make on when one walks with them , these accessories being avidly worn by your average brown Indian person.
However, as with all things in humanity, human beings have a lovely knack for adding...depth and connotation to a word, phrase and as It turns out, this word was no different and not spared.
Today, the word Keling is very much used as a derogatory term in Malaysia when referring to a person of south indian descent. It is, equivocally, our N-word though it did not originate with such negative vibes.
Every South Indian person in Malaysia will no doubt have encountered this once in their life time, being at school, work or amidst the seemingly jocular jeers of their multicultural peers.
I believe in us, the brown people of South Indian descent totally owning this word. It’s 2020, peeps. In a culture wrought with the themes of inclusivity, diversity and the likes, it’s time we owned this. The power only lies in a word when one lets it define them. If we give people the power of negativity that this word used to create in our society, it achieves the aims of the despicable people who use it. If we retaliate with hostility, we feed the negativity. Owning it with pride even when used as an insult will very quickly deflate the mentality such narrow-minded individuals possess and take the power away from them.
I for one am proud to be a Keling. I think back to when it was first uttered to me, a seven year old, playing with her peers of all cultures and the second time it was used to jeer at me, when I was 15 and had it said to me by an adult. The hurt of being viewed as a second class citizen was disgusting. The mere fact that one race could think another inferior by mere show of skin colour and difference in geographic origin....Well I guess it only spoke volumes to their intelligence instead.
Racial equality is still very much a taboo subject in Malaysia despite its rampant use of it and the dawn of the Information Age where access to information is easy and thus the means of educating yourself makes it harder for people to remain ignorant of inequalities that still exist within our constitution today. Today’s data-rich age makes it hard for ethnically-charged governments to continue to feed the rhetoric of false teachings into our society. To be able to healthily compete on an international platform, no one race can be given ‘special rights’ or privileges to aid a game of ‘catch-up’. It is our responsibility as human beings with human rights to claim equality in the country we are citizens of and help those that lack the education to develop themselves further to appreciate this fact.
***
No one race is inferior to the other. We are simply, a human race which is sadly a lesson we may only learn when facing an alien invasion at some point in our mutually converging futures on this third rock from the sun.
And that is why...this Keling speaks.
Tune in next week as she plans to...take over the world!!!
I thought the picture above was rather appropriate for someone who intends to blog about anything and everything that ranges from health, music, an existential crisis, what I ate for breakfast to Brexit, the Trump impeachment trial and COVID-19...
“I got the best intentions but I tend to fuck them up,”
...interspersed with quotes from absolutely anything and everything.
But first, lets get into what kicked my lazy-writing butt off the ground this time around! It’s been a fairly long while since your favourite Keling has put fingers to keypad to make some sweet, sexy literary jargon. It seemed each time that happened over the last decade, it was to either type medical entries into painfully slow NHS computers or writing essays on companies, business and ‘corporate social responsibility’ - I swear I’m gonna pull my hair out the next time I hear someone utter the phrase again.
Once upon a time, this Keling used to write under the pseudonym Elite-inc, The Coconut Chronicles and The Brown Woman Speaks. When she started this writing/blogging journey of hers, it was merely a platform of self-expression and a journal of sorts, hidden from pesky and nosey relatives that had a relatively stubborn stance on censorship and innate aversions to social media. Oddly enough, the constant vents and rants started up a following of sorts. It was nice to be read, heard and sometimes, related with. She ended up naturally offending some people with rather controversial posts every now and then but hey - that’s the spice talking.
The Keling lead what some may deem a rather sad existence growing up. She had little to no social life of any kind. This was due to living with a family that had very strict policies on actually being your own individual and leading a life outside of your family. The Keling had siblings way more younger than her and lacked any companionship of a similar age group apart from her friends at school. To top it off, the Keling lived in a rather racially discriminative country where if you wanted a university seat to study medicine, you’d either need to have wealthy family members that could sponsor your medical training or study really hard and get a scholarship. And for some even odder reason, the Keling really wanted to become a doctor. These circumstances did not bode well for a healthy and thriving social life in the real world. To top it off, the Keling would tend to lose herself in books as means of escapism and eventually discovered through several literary pursuits (such as creative writing workshops and short story competitions) that she liked writing too.
This journey continued for a good eight to ten years.
Eventually, the Keling found her way to grey, ole England to realise her dream of becoming a doctor. The more she immersed herself into her medical training, the more she stopped writing. This was due to all the nasty, big medical textbooks she needed to inhale and regurgitate for her copious exams and box-ticking within her medical training. And while the journey into medicine was exactly what the Keling had wanted to do all her life (while subconsciously being the Indian dream), it seemed to somewhat curtail her creative spirit.
Mind you, she did write some short stories here and there plus a few bits of poetry highlighting various instances in her medical world. But between 13-15 hour shifts, no weekends and coming home to basically collapse into a dysfunctional heap onto her bed, it became increasingly hard for the Keling to continue to annotate her life as she used to.
Her blog disappeared when she turned 24-25, her creative juices ran stagnant and she burned out rather quickly.
Fast forward seven years later, she’s now pursuing her Masters in Business Administration with the aim of trying out a career in medical communications and actually has the time to get back into writing like she used to.
Full disclaimer : this could get pretty nonsensical real quick.
As for those wondering what the word ’Keling’ means, stay tuned for further updates on this blog when we go into the origins of the word in our next post and what it means for a young Malaysian Indian living in a multicultural apartheid nation, in 2020.
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