The other side of 'millennial privilege'

'before you experience success, there will be this point where you will experience a lot of shit. but that's just how life works.' 

he said it in a less eloquent and in a more...'manglish' way in the meeting room the other day but it does hit home, at least to me.

i never considered myself a 'privileged millennial' and maybe that's why i've always felt different from my peers.

while my friends went off on holidays with the money that their parents provided them, i, on the other hand, only could travel once i started a regular job. while most of my friends studied abroad on the hard-earned wages inhabited by their parents, i had to complete my American degree at a local school and go on a special scholarship. while most of my 'millennial friends' grew up with iPhones and laptops being gifted to them by their parents, i had to earn my own money through the part-time job that i had whilst at college just to get that beat up Samsung Galaxy Y that only lasted me a year.

and as i cruise through life and see more of my millennial friends get jobs and continue to be spoon fed, i realize that life is unfair. i'm pretty sure that there are people who have it worse than me. i should know, because i've gone on enough mission trips and community outreach programs to know that people are going through stuff, sometimes involving matters of life and death.

once again, during a friendly catch up with my best friends, I felt small.
small because i'm the lowest paid of the group. small because they have embarked on adventures that i could only dream of but never go because i didn't have the money. small because my job in advertising is 'pitiful', that i have to answer to my boss and clients during the weekend or that i am sometimes expected to stay past 6pm and 'not have a life',

i had two ways to go about it: 1) throw a pity party for myself or, 2) work that situation and make the best out of it.

there will be a point in life where we can't blame our circumstances or our upbringing or the past. there will be a time in our lives that we, as adults, need to make choices and take responsibility for those choices. there will be a point in life where we have to suffer because suffering teaches us to be better people. because, in the words of my boss, sometimes you just have to go through shit in order to finally reap success.

and then I ask myself, how do i define success?
is success a four-billion dollar apartment or a Porsche? is success a passport filled with stamps or a Prada-filled closet? i guess success, to me, is not about the externals.
i would define success as that feeling you get when you see a smile on someone's face after you've helped them with something. success would also be achieving my goals that i have set for myself. my goals of community building in different parts of the world and the goal of being a kick-ass writer. success, to me, would also mean a handful of quality, fulfilling relationships where you know you can always fall back on the people you love.

as i finally come to a conclusion, i guess it's pretty simple for me. i was never born with a silver spoon and i don't think my life will get any easier or more luxurious than how it is right now. and i'm okay with that. i'm okay with doing a job that sharpens my skill as a communicator. i'm okay with saving up to travel the world on my own hard-earned cash. i'm okay with helping people, with learning to be humble and giving, to look out for the ones i love.

"Finally, graduates, our greatness has never, ever come from sitting back and feeling entitled to what we have.  It’s never come from folks who climb the ladder of success, or who happen to be born near the top and then pull that ladder up after themselves.  No, our greatness has always come from people who expect nothing and take nothing for granted -- folks who work hard for what they have then reach back and help others after them...

...I encountered students who had every advantage –- their parents paid their full tuition, they lived in beautiful campus dorms.  They had every material possession a college kid could want –- cars, computers, spending money. But when some of them got their first bad grade, they just fell apart.  They lost it, because they were ill-equipped to handle their first encounter with disappointment or falling short.

But, graduates, as you all know, life will put many obstacles in your path that are far worse than a bad grade.  You’ll have unreasonable bosses and difficult clients and patients.  You’ll experience illnesses and losses, crises and setbacks that will come out of nowhere and knock you off your feet.  But unlike so many other young people, you have already developed the resilience and the maturity that you need to pick yourself up and dust yourself off and keep moving through the pain, keep moving forward.  You have developed that muscle."

- Michelle Obama, excerpt from her speech at the City College of New York, 2016. 

Read the full speech here.

Body Painting for The Little Black Dress Project

body painting is a form of art that I've always thought about but kept hidden in the corner of my mind. To bring it closer to home, I've always been enraptured with henna art or tattoos or even just paint. I remember buying a henna cone and spending hours drawing traditional Indian patterns on my hands or for people. Art, in its many forms, has always been something that I've been passionate about. It was something that I couldn't really talk about with people.

but not till I met Sammi Lim. 

Sammi was my 'partner-in-crime' during my year at Time Out magazine and we were the only ones handling Malaysia, Penang and Kids, so we embarked on a lot of adventures together 'for the sake of art' and yes, the paycheck. We had our ups and downs but there was this one thing we've always had in common: a love for art. 

Prior to this, Sammi was a writer and body painter in New York and has exhibited her art in New York and Austria, all while maintaining a job as a writer. I still continue to be inspired by her love for the arts. 

So when she told me that she was embarking on a new body painting project called 'The Little Black Dress', I thought it would be a great opportunity to be part of it. The concept of the Little Black Dress project was to paint a series of LBDs (a staple in every woman's closet) on a few different girls to empower different body types, shed the stigma of nudity in art and to break the traditional mindset of how Malaysians viewed art. 

I was really excited when she asked me to be a part of it, coz I thought it would be cool to be the 'artist's assistant' or the photographer's assistant. Until I found out that I was asked to be one of the models. 

Hold it right there. 

To be a body paint model would mean that I had to bare my body. Part of me was super excited because, hello it's art! and of course, the thrill of doing something risqué that I've never done before. Then there was the other part (a smaller part) that was tuned into the conservative religious background that I came from. For some reason, I felt like I needed to do it. Not for the sake of art but for myself. 

I was never confident with my body. Growing up, I dealt with emotional bullying because I was picked on for being fat, I battled with horrible rounds of an eating disorder coupled with depression and the cycle continued until I left college. I did lose a lot of weight when I discovered Blogilates and followed her workouts but I was still uncomfortable. To bare my body to people other than myself was a scary thought, not because it was 'wrong' but because I feared that I would come across as ugly or fat. Indian women like me are not meant to look like chopsticks. It was time I embraced it. 

Volunteering to be a body paint model meant that I had to come to terms with the fact that my body is not perfect, that it will never be, but it doesn't mean that I can't take care of it. I saw past the fact that I had to be semi-naked in front of a photographer and artist. I saw past the fact that I might get into trouble for being 'cheap'. In retrospect, I'm glad I did it. 

Fast forward to today and The Little Black Dress Project is now exhibited at Penang's prestigious George Town Festival. I'm so proud of Sammi for all that she has accomplished in her journey as an artist. As a fellow art enthusiast and artist myself, I think this is a huge deal. When we met up for drinks yesterday, I found out that she was interviewed on TV for Astro Awani about her body painting story. Amazing!

Check out the George Town Festival details here. 

photo creds: GTF 2016
I'm on the right! (yes, with the cigarette)

The portraits will be exhibited at Chulia Court. That place brings me great memories because it was one of the places that I reviewed for Time Out Penang back when I was handling the nightlife portions. To see myself exhibited there is a surreal feeling that I know I will smile about when I'm 80 and wrinkly and incapable of any form of sensuality.

photo credits: Light Show Photography (Shahril Saifol)

Photo credits: Sammi Lim

I won't be able to make it for the exhibition this month due to the two big campaigns that I'm involved in for work, so I won't be able to see these beautiful pieces of art. If you can, do take a road trip to Penang and support the local arts scene throughout this month for George Town Festival. 

Thank you, Sammi and Shahril (master photographer behind Light Show Photography) for having me in this project. 

Through this, I hope Malaysians will be more open to the concept of nudity in art as a form of expression and not for a reason to judge people and to keep prejudices. 

Thoughts on facing the truth

I guess there are some truths that we've gotta accept about ourselves.

Like me, for instance.
I'm not a marketer or an advertiser. I'm a writer.

I stitch words into sentences with hopes of conveying a message that's filled with some form of meaning. I don't stitch measly words just to sell a product. That's not me. That has never been me. So I ask myself, what happened? What happened between the time when I was fresh out of college and ready to be a writer and conquer the world? What happened when I did eventually become a writer for a magazine that I didn't really wanna work for? And now, I'm asking myself how did I end up as a marketing/advertising creative where there seems to be no meaning in the copy that I write for clients.

I guess I've had enough but truth to be told, I feel stuck. I feel like there is something in me that needs to burst forth. Something that has been hidden for a long period of time. Maybe that's why I started this blog, so that I could reconnect with myself as a writer. I'm a writer. I've always been a writer since I was eleven. Writing, to me, was like breathing. I made up my mind that I was gonna be a writer when I first flipped the pages of Seventeen when I was secretly reading it in high school.

If writing was like breathing to me, why do I struggle so much in the office? Why do I struggle to fork out copy for brands that I feel nothing for? How did I end up circling myself in this line called advertising?

I want to believe that dreams come true. I want to believe that I will be a features writer or a features editor of a high profile fashion & lifestyle magazine. But when I think about it, it all seems so far away. Like a dream that will only retain itself in the dusty corner of my brain. People say that writing doesn't not pay the bills. Who cares about what people think? I've come to accept that writing is an art form that will always be undervalued, underpaid and underestimated. Writing has changed the world yet people refuse to acknowledge its power. I don't need to start on writers who have changed the world with their books, articles and periodicals because it's all out there.

I made a mistake. But at least I've accepted the truth.
Will I ever make it to being a features editor of a magazine? I don't know but I want to believe that I will make it one day. As for now, I press on and do whatever I can to never let that precious dream die because I know that I will sorely regret it.

What is it that you've been hiding lately?
Maybe it's time to look deep into yourself and accept the parts that were meant to be.