At the tail-end of 2022...

Rania, Jakarta, December 31st.

(A belated post!)

I’m finding it difficult to summarise the year in the form of a commitment letter, bullet points, or a carousel of photo dumps. My brain is tiny and human biases mean I place greater weight on the present and recent occurrences—e.g. my last office retreat, the third Seventeen concert of the year, the World Cup and the associated reunions that came with it—and an even greater emphasis on the good, happy memories, carefully curated to include the least instances of sadness, disappointment and pain possible. This means the memories of other, less savoury (but arguably more important to my self-development) events require tougher digging.

There is a lot for me to reflect on the past year, but as I’ve come to learn, processing things that have happened over a certain span of time isn’t necessarily (or exclusively) an active, conscious occurrence. Sometimes I will remember them in a random taxi ride, or things will click into place just as I’m falling asleep. Perhaps I will find myself in an acute sense of deja-vu, and the consequences of my previous choice would only become obvious then. Other times, someone else will bring it up and their objective recount would make me see everything in a different light.

So for now, I won’t unfold the dog-eared corners of 2022’s pages just yet. I want to linger between them a little more, if I’m allowed to, within all the good and bad chapters, to see where the plot strings end up—if they end up anywhere at all.