I would tell you it’s my favorite dish in the whole world, even when it’s so spicy it literally makes me cry. But if you ask me on a deeper level, I’d tell you that it’s the dish my Oma would make me every day growing up. The dish I’d have for dinner while watching “Jin dan Jun” with Opa on a school night. The dish I had some 20 years later after rushing home in the middle of work one day upon hearing news of Opa’s passing. The same dish on the table the day Oma moved abroad for good not long after. Through deaths, births, departures, returns, and many a change in the family, the dish remained a constant. It’s the dish that my dad’s wife would go on to perfect and turn into an admirable hustle. If my much younger siblings grow into the kind of travelers who pack sambal botol in their carry-on, whoever they introduce their mediocre bottle of sambal to on the road will have this dish to thank for raising spice-loving adults. I’ll tell you it’s a dish you’ll find at restaurants, or on your food delivery app, but few get right. Certainly none as right as the one from home.

It’s the dish I’ll think about when my grandparents’ house finally gets sold. When the dreaded but inevitable move arrives and we dispose of decades’ worth of family belongings. This home is older than I am. A witness to lives far before mine and families beyond the faces I know by name. There will come a day when the house is no longer a “saved address” on every app with a map on my phone. When the zip code I’d learned to memorize when I was six joins the pile of useless information in the back of my head. When the neighborhood printed on my KTP will come up in conversations as a marker of time, nothing beyond the context of nostalgia.

I may find myself driving past the old house then, just for fun. It may be unrecognizable. Perhaps it will no longer be standing, some other family with a shiny new home in its place. I’ll wonder who they are and if they have grandparents who tells them “I love you” as often as they tell them “don’t get fat”. Is their family lore as complicated and weird and maybe kinda fun? Do their kids grow up guilt-ridden faux-rebels? I don’t know if being there will make me sad but it will definitely make me hungry. I can see that feeling coming from a mile away. A craving in my stomach only one dish can satisfy. I’ll wonder what this new family in this new house where my old family house used to be are having for dinner? Because I can tell you with complete certainty that whatever it is will not be as good as our cakalang rica, which truly is the absolute bomb. 🌶️🌶️🌶️

P.S. Uhhhhhh yeah this post is (inspired by?) a TikTok trend I’d fully intended on joining, except in true “me” fashion I ended up taking it way too seriously and writing way more than I was supposed to. Definitely way more than I could fit on the app, lololol. I swear to god I was going to keep this funny or cool or something in between, but alas I am only ever cheesy and cringe (or something in between). I really do love me some cakalang rica, you’d think I’d have learned to make it at this point. Maybe soon. 🥴

I.

One thing I’m starting to realize about myself is that writing was never a hobby to begin with. It wasn’t one of those things that my parents would always find me doing growing up, not an activity I would necessarily “look forward to” in my free time. No one ever saw me, as a kid at an adult party, just making stuff up on a piece of paper in a corner. I never really made stuff up I think, beyond cute scenarios of my crush liking me back, which is truly very on brand. From the beginning, writing was a necessity. It was a tool I’d discovered that, when put into use, gave me inexplicable release, a feeling that must have been so comforting that I wanted to access again and again.

By “the beginning” I mean seventh grade English class, which would require us to turn in the occasional essay and book report. While I dragged my feet through the latter, something felt different about those essays. I must have simply talked about myself in them (also very on brand), and it felt good enough as an exercise that I eventually thought: “Wow, okay, I could do this when I grow up. I could be a writer.” A clear and conscious decision that I gladly pledged my loyalty to.

Come to think of it, it is really so unserious how I, as a 34-year-old with a LinkedIn account, beat myself up day in day out trying to commit to this random idea that I had made on a random Wednesday afternoon at the young age of 13. Surely I did not have to do it? Surely I do not have to trust a kid with a barely developed frontal lobe so much? (I actually know nothing about the development of frontal lobes, so don’t come at me). And yet I did. Clearly I still do because here I am still writing about writing in a newsletter where I kinda swore I would stop doing that.

What I’m saying is, while I love writing, I don’t think I’ll ever find pleasure in its process, the way I think you are supposed to with hobbies, and that’s OK. I can get better, and I want to, but I don’t think getting better at writing will allow me to enjoy the process any more than I do now. It was never truly delightful. There was never a time where I wrote freely. Never knew of a period in a past life where I wrote like nobody's watching (maybe those book reports, actually). I stopped consistently writing a diary after middle school over fear someone might read them.

Writing became important to me before I could ever properly derive joy from it. I approached it with so much intention and seriousness — a reverence, almost, which may not necessarily be misplaced but clearly comes with so much self-imposed expectations. I used to want so bad for writing to be fun and feel good, but I’m slowly accepting that it never will be! Maybe it’s never meant to be! At least not for me. Two decades since deciding I was going to become a writer, the one true joy is really in having written.

II.

I’ve cultivated new interests in my adult life that have expanded my world in a way my 14-year-old self would’ve never imagined. At first I thought of them as hobbies, little sparks of joy while scrolling and contributing to the noise of social media. Little curiosities that I could learn to do something useful with my time. Things that could maybe become great life skill for when I leave civilization and join a commune/cult, whichever gets on my FYP first. But then I started thinking about these things too hard and too seriously that I suspect they, too, have stopped qualifying as something I do purely out of pleasure. If writing was necessity, these things are curiosity.

My relationship with clothes, getting dressed, sewing, and by extension shopping (lol), falls under this category. I don’t know. Maybe I’ve always been interested, perhaps even from a younger age than 13, but I simply denied myself that path because I was busy being A Writer. (I’m thinking of that time in sixth grade I told myself I’d strictly wear red for a week in the name of establishing a personality.) Thinking about and making clothes stopped qualifying as mere hobby because while I derive a great deal of pleasure from them, I also think about them with this funny concoction of anger and annoyance — the good kind — that I can feel growing in the pit of my stomach. They’ve become at once a delight and a bone that I want to pick with the world. Does that make sense? (I’m trying to “free write” so this might all be nonsense.) Of course there is joy here, too, but the joy feels more utilitarian. The kind of joy you feel when you get close to answers, or you realize you’re asking the right questions. 

III.

Music is probably the closest thing I have to a hobby. I’m not excellent at it, but I’m also not terrible. For two years in a row now I’ve written “sing better” in my annual goal setting page on Notion. It’s an embarrassing thing to admit but it’s true. This year I added “play the violin better” to that list. I’m okay enough on the piano to not hate the sound of my playing, but even on that, the room for improvement remains substantial.

There’s an essay in my head about rediscovering my love for music that I’m not gonna get into here and now, but I’ve spent a great deal of time these past two years wondering why I ever thought I had to stop playing just because I stopped going to church. Heck I started going to church again this year partly to investigate that question. Unlike the things I mentioned earlier, my relationship with music is free of the burden of being correct or even being great. Devoid of that burning passion to problem-solve. Any desire to improve is based solely on the desire to enjoy myself more. To hear myself screech less on the violin. To truly get to know the range where I feel freest to sing a tune. To brave the higher keys that I tended to avoid. Maybe even to sing and play an instrument at once, because that must feel so good to do!

Music is perhaps the only thing I don’t mind being “just okay” at. I can suck and laugh at myself. I can play the same song imperfectly over and over and over again without getting frustrated, regardless how many wrong turns I take. At 13, it would always take some reprimanding from my parents to get me to practice. But at 34, fully-developed frontal lobe and all, I am able to appreciate repetition as a means of developing muscle memory.

Most recently, I’ve been obsessed with doing Billie Eilish’s “L’amour De Ma Vie” on the piano. I sound nothing like her, but what a gift it still is.

My last paycheck as a full-time employee was … delicious. When the transfer notice came in by text, instead of ignoring it like I usually do, I read and savored every word and every digit.

Getting that paycheck felt cozy. Crisp new sheets cozy. Pulling the covers at 10pm on a weeknight and turning on the TV to “Princess Diaries” cozy. Empty streets on the first day of Lebaran cozy, when going anywhere takes just 10 minutes and for a minute you forget Jakarta was ever hard on you. That paycheck felt like problems were going to be solved, and good things were going to keep on happening. So tasty; a Michelin-starred meal. Girl dinner of the year.

In the month that followed, I lived peacefully, happy in the knowledge that I had fresh money. One would think money is money. It wasn’t until my last paycheck that I realized fresh money was superior. Fresh money feels good to spend. Something about it makes you feel like you will always have it. Like abundance was the natural state of your life; the default factory settings. You’re convinced you’d easily make that money again, except in the case of final paychecks, you won’t — not in the same way anyway — and actually… maybe… I should worry?

Spending old money (i.e. money that came from your savings) on the other hand, feels like a punch to the gut. Almost illegal, even though it’s your money, saved for the very purpose of being used on days when you have none. Like when you stop getting monthly paychecks.

I’m not put together enough to be leaving jobs without the guarantee of another one lined up. I’m probably the last person who should be doing that, to be honest, but that’s the kind of turn things took last July.

You are either the type who thinks having money to survive without work for three months is luxury, or the type to whom having only enough to survive three months is insane. The Tiktok financial gurus, online life coaches, and some friends would suggest I save more. But, not used to having much money in the first place, not enough anyway to ever register the idea of not working as a possible choice in life however briefly, I couldn’t help but see the glass as half full. Perhaps even a luxury. I felt the sudden need to do this now because somewhere in my mind I thought I’d never find myself in this position again.

There are days I look at my bank account and the idea of not having a full-time job would sound completely unhinged. But there are more days where I wake up and the whole thing would feel like a gift. I knew I’d eventually panic about not having money, but for once I wanted time more than a paycheck. I chose the lens through which all of this was privilege, even if only for a few months, and trusted the universe and my gut feeling that the rest will work itself out somehow.

There is nothing sexy about my full-time-to-self-employed arc. No LinkedIn-worthy epiphanies, or anything like that. The easiest way to put it is that my anxiety had gotten the best of me these past three years, and I needed distance from other people’s ideas — of the world, of myself — to once again believe in mine.

I don’t know when it started, really, but by the end of 2021, what was initially just whispers of “maybe I’m not cut out for this” had grown into a massive tumor of a false truth than I’d fully embraced: “I am incompetent”.

The thought haunted my every waking hour. At work, I was purposely shrinking myself to avoid having to perform competence in front of an audience, thinking I’d fail and embarrass myself. The collaborative working environment meant to nurture open communication instead amplified my anxiety. I’d delegate decisions out of a distrust towards my own understanding of complex problems (“others understand better”). I’d withhold opinions because others surely had better ones (“I don’t know enough to have a say”). When quarterly planning season came around, I tried being as invisible as I possibly could to avoid being assigned to lead projects (“I can’t fuck up if I don’t take any responsibilities”). And as for the projects that inevitably ended up on my lap, I’d have panic attacks before meetings, shaking and hyperventilating, then join calls, speak in my work voice, act like my internal walls weren’t collapsing. When people spoke highly of me, I’d smile a nervous smile and a timer would go off in my mind, counting down the day “the truth” will reveal itself and I would disappoint them (this is who you are).

I’d especially flinch when anyone at work would bring up the idea of “self-advocacy”, which used to come up a lot. The idea is that if you aren’t advocating for yourself, others aren’t going to see your work, and your work will not be recognized, let alone appreciated. All of this, of course, was especially relevant if you wanted to “advance”. I’m not entirely opposed to the idea, but my main gripe with it is that it’s hard advocating for yourself from a place of self-hatred and self-doubt. I’d look around and feel crazy. Everyone else seemed to be doing just fine, many even seemed to thrive, so I volunteered to take the blame for my own failures, feeling like a weak little loser for not being strong enough to get my shit together.

I write this now from a place of self compassion, which I am only able to develop years after the fact. Of course, to one one’s surprise, a big part of it was the pandemic, which was inevitably followed by a series of unfortunate events that in so, so many direct and indirect ways amplified my cynicism and eroded my enthusiasm towards towards the path that I was on. I struggled a lot with working from home, mainly with how extremely transactional and devoid of humanness the culture that came out of that ended up being. Constant organizational changes made me question my purpose, which at the time I heavily attached with my livelihood. The pandemic changed my mind about a lot of things, including and especially work. And while I get to easily say that now, processing the weight of that shift while continuing to perform myself like I wasn’t affected was tough.

Towards the end of 2021, my manager suggested I extend my end-of-year time-off to get proper rest. I took a whole month off. It didn’t do much. It would be another 1.5 year, a whole new workplace, and months of therapy before I finally decided to properly give myself this gift of time.

When I decided to leave my last job, I told myself that for at least three months I was going to live my life as a Jaksel nepobaby, despite having neither the financial cushion nor the social currency.

What I had was an open mind, an experimental spirit, and a vague outline of a plan.

On the finances front, I had some work coming my way and I swore (to myself) to actively chase potential projects. I wasn’t going to “not work”, this wasn’t going to be “unemployment”. It’s work, reframed, for my benefit.

But what I really wanted to do with this time was write. Or more like, reset my relationship with writing.

Initially, I wanted to write because my boss, who I deeply respect and look up to, seemed to believe that I had it in me to write. Eventually — encouraged by that endorsement — I wanted to write because the idea that I wasn’t going to take my writing seriously was becoming silly.

I don’t even mean “take my writing seriously” as in “write a book”. I mean “take my writing seriously” as in… just fucking write, bro??? It was becoming ridiculous that I had no problems being a writer on my resume (where writing meant speaking on behalf of other people about their corner of the world), but actively denied myself the possible joy of writing from my own corner of the world, torturous a process as it may be.

Hmmm… Maybe I like self-advocacy more than I let on? After all, what is writing, what is this newsletter if not an experiment on telling my side of the story (what story that is remains to be explored).

This TikTok, basically:

“I don’t like that there’s such a negative connotation towards oversharing because I don’t overshare because I like to talk about myself. I overshare because I think I’m more tolerable with context.”

I love this take on the idea of putting yourself out there through whatever means you feel works best for you (“oversharing” on TikTok for this creator) because really the stakes aren’t that high? Some of us aren’t trying to be an intellectual and just want to be seen; be as close to being understood as possible.

All this time I’d been so afraid of writing badly that I’d settled for writing occasionally, getting high on the “approval” of people whose social media likes probably meant more “happy to see you alive” than “cool work with the words and the thoughts and stuff!” (I can never tell, and honestly there is nothing wrong with the former other than my own inclination to depend on it for validation).

I had approached writing with a sort of “cool girl” mentality, where I pretended not to care and believed it was cringe to try so hard. I wanted to be an effortless queen who produced magic on little to no planning at all. I had the audacity to think writing had to be easy flowing to be worth it. In my cool girl bubble, not practicing my craft was self-preservation and mystery, two essentials in the cool girl starter pack. Everything has to be chill and no big deal.

It should be no surprise that, like anyone stuck in this cool girl mentality, the fear of being caught caring is really just (gasp!) insecurity. In my mind I wasn’t good enough. Not funny enough. Not informed enough. Not original enough. My vocabulary not vast enough. My diction not fucking “English” enough. Everything I have to say has been said better. I wanted to buy myself some time to “magically” develop all of the wisdom and live all of the lives that I thought would make me the perfect writer before I surrendered myself to the page. Lately I’m accepting that who I am right now is pretty much all I am ever going to be, at least for the foreseeable future. And really none of this should be that deep anyway.

I know now that the only prerequisite to being whatever writer I wanted to be was to keep writing in the direction that my gut feeling compelled me to. Writing didn’t have to be this big lofty dream that died with the collapse of the media industry as we know it. It could just be a thing that I do, however imperfectly. I just need to stop being too cool for bad sentences and cringe takes. I also need to stop seeing intentionality as something that takes away from the work and acknowledge all of the ways it adds to it.

By the end of October, it will be three months since my last full-time paycheck.

Things were weird at first, I’m not going to lie. I slept a lot. Pretty sure I was asleep more than I was awake in all of August. Some days I slept 16 hours on-and-off. I’d eat lunch and sleep again. Have coffee and go back to sleep. I “listened to my body” and my body said “no thank you”. Part of me knew I needed the rest, part of me was overwhelmed with options of things to do. I also wondered if I was maybe teetering on the edge of depression but took my self-awareness as a sign that I was probably not. Rest felt good until it didn’t. While I like being ruler of my own time, I didn’t like it when weekends would arrive without a sense of relief. When friends ask me out, I’d stay in feeling like I didn’t deserve to have fun.

You know how people say if you don’t know what you want, flip a coin, and you’ll know when that coin is up in the air? I like to think of August as that coin, flipping in the air, full of possibilities, some obvious, others less so. As I watched, I was hoping it would land on the obvious. Not because I was scared of the unknown, but because I know sometimes it’s easier to say I’ve walked boldly into the unknown rather than to say I’ve walked boldly to do the thing I know I have to do but am too scared of for totally made up reasons.

I was supposed to publish this piece last week, on my 4th week of publishing 3x a week, but my self-consciousness got the better of me. Talking about workplace anxieties makes me feel like a walking cliche. I also still feel a tinge of embarrassment from so boldly wanting to be a person who writes. I wish I could be cooler about it. But I’m also trying to be more forgiving about all of these feelings, and the resulting failure to send this out last week.

Earlier in therapy for (what turned out to be) perfectionism OCD, my therapist advised me against committing to treatments that required daily commitment (e.g. daily journaling). Her concern was that it wouldn’t be sustainable, as any minor failure to commit to the routine would triggering my compulsions and I would end up falling off the routine completely. Later on, she would introduce me to what they call ERP — Exposure and Response Prevention — where, with guidance, facing some of those failures would save me from myself.

Well, at least we know now that therapy works, because even though this voice in my head won’t shut up about how I missed publishing last week, telling me this is all just a phase, questioning if I’ll even show up to the page next week, telling me I probably wont, I’m determined not to let it win.

“Writing 3x a week for a free self-published newsletter” doesn’t make monetary nor career sense to my parents, obviously. When ex-colleagues or acquaintances ask me what I’ve been up to lately, I compulsively tell them I’m on a “sabbatical”, which feels kind of reductive but it’s also easy. I mean, I’m not saying I’ll never go back to a 9-to-5, — maybe I will? Who knows. I sometimes wonder what recruiters looking at my LinkedIn profile thinks, though I have some ideas on where I might be lacking appeal. My friends get it though, and that’s already more than enough for me.

My three months is about to be up and I’ll need to start worrying about sustaining myself beyond it soon. I’m less aimless these days. I even feel good? Excited about the path I’m on, the way I haven’t in a long time. This peace I find from reclaiming my time feels so unoriginal and that’s ok. I’m so tired of fighting against the current of cliches, I might as well swim in it.

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Every once in a while, my mind would glitch and I'd wonder if maybe I should save up for a car. Oh the places I could go. Out-of-town trips I don’t have to wait until the weekend to take. Long solo drives I could go on when my body tells me to leave the house without a particular destination in mind. I was never one of those kids who had a car to drive to school in high school or college, which is why I think I still have it in me to romanticize the idea of a car in a city where cars can barely move. Most of my friends who spent their teens and/or 20s driving no longer do so these days, opting for the backseat of cabs or Grab/Gocars instead. Too tired. Too stressful. Too much time precious time wasted driving. If I had a car, though, I think I’d be free. There’s this idea that I could just go at any given moment, without the hassle of ordering on an app, or having strangers know my address. And with my current working hours — which is non-existent — I imagine being able to easily beat inconveniences like ganjil-genap, rush hour, and the likes.

The saner part of my brain would argue against it. The taxes aren’t worth it. General maintenance just isn’t worth it. And plus I won’t get as much use out of it as I think, because eventually I’d just grow tired of it. And yet. I wish…

Some of my favorite memories of people have to do with cars. There was more to our family’s Mitsubishi Colt van than the long early morning commute from our Jatibening home in Bekasi to our school in Salemba, Central Jakarta. When I was a kid, we often took road trips, to Pangandaran, to Yogyakarta, even went on several trans-Sumatra trips. My dad would magically turn the back of our van into a flat bed convenient for us kids to sleep in and we would spend days on end on the road, listening to a Chrisye album on repeat. I had a pretty great childhood, for all those trips and several other reasons (maybe someday I’ll write about that too). But a big part of that childhood had to do with the fact that our family had a car to take us places.

It’s not always about some grand adventure either. Having a car in a city like Jakarta, where one would be hard pressed to entertain themselves other than going to the mall (which I admittedly love), gives you an opportunity to microdose on adventure. A late-night drive along Sudirman towards Mangga Besar. Weekend foodie trips to Kelapa Gading. People like to think they’re going out of their comfort zone when they do this, but when you have your car with you, the only comfort zone you’re getting out of is your usual parking spot at Plaza Senayan, which you frequent way too often. And that’s kind of the appeal to be honest? A car doesn’t just get you out of your comfort zone, it eases you out of it.

In some cases just being in the car, whether moving or parked, can be the whole point. There is nothing I love more than sharing car space with friends, listening to something we all love, whether songs or a podcast. This is how I remember falling in love with the Call Your Girlfriend podcast almost 10 years ago, in my friend Lisa’s car, driving to grab dinner after our Sunday shift at the newspaper we used to work for. I remember one night being particularly hooked on their conversation that we sat in the car at Setiabudi One’s parking lot for half an hour just laughing our heads off. Sharing car space affords you a slice of intimacy amidst the noise of the world. When you’re in a car, everything fades away; it’s just you in the privacy of your own new reality.

People who own cars in this city experience a romance that us mortals who can’t afford one or are too commitment-averse to be on a “cicilan mobil” plan simply do not have access to. When you drive in the city, you hold the ultimate rizz card. You get to say “gue anterin aja” and be the absolute man. I recently rewatched “Catatan Harian Si Boy” (2011) — where the characters speak Indonesian like actual normal people, a cinematic feat few Indonesian films have achieved — Ario Bayu’s character pulled a “gue anterin aja” and just like that, Tasya, the girl he met at the local police station one serendipitous night after being arrested for street racing, found a whole new friend group she would go on to love.

I love driving friends home and try to do it in the rare occasion that I have a car with me. Love knowing we have another 30 minutes to continue — or debrief from — a dinner conversation.

All of this, of course, is a rose-tinted view of car ownership, and it’s really more of a symptom for something else. Maybe I miss my friends? At least 80% of my friendships take place over Facetime and Whatsapp these days and I miss actually spending time with them, making new memories and stuff. I recently drove to Bandung for a quick one-night trip and had a super lovely time. I want more of that. Maybe I’m dire need of getting out of my element? Now that I’m not working full-time and have more time to myself, I’m suddenly aware of all the ways I could be more adventurous. I imagine a car would give me more control over that part of my life (control is often what most of my material desires boils down to, tbh). I’d love to “live” the life I want with minimal third-party coordination.

I’m not actually going to ever get a car, I think. Maybe, more than anything, I want to be taken on a ride (???)

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Just know that I edit these pieces all the time post-publishing! Haha. The edits are never reflected on the newsletter you get in your inbox, but they’re there on the website/Substack app. Most of the time the story doesn’t change — I just feel like I get to tell it better and then I get to feel better about my decision to write these things. :’)

Thank you so much for reading!

The most impressive thing about N’s new house is its location. It’s a short 20-minute cab ride from where I’m currently renting, and I rent pretty central in Jakarta Selatan. On the top floor of his house, a door opens to a rooftop terrace, where several identifiable buildings come into view in the distance, signaling to me I wasn’t anywhere unfamiliar.

Unfamiliar is what I feel driving around my sister’s BSD neighborhood, in her a car, which is constantly blasting baby songs. I once tried to change the playlist on the basis of “gantian” but was promptly advised against it; apparently taking turns, or the sheer concept of fairness, was not a thing in baby-adult relationships. I swear I’m not selfless enough to have babies. I don’t see how I can ever drive the kind of distance people who live in BSD and work in the city do without being able to blast my Carly Rae Jepsen the whole trip.

Mom’s place is even farther away, about 45 minutes to an hour from my sister’s — which in my book is far enough in the first place. When I look around from the roof of mom’s work-in-progress home, I don’t know where I am. I pride myself for being pretty well-oriented with this city. Not just Jakarta, but to some extent, Jabodetabek. When Grab fails to locate the destination I’m typing onto its search bar, I can open its map and manually locate where I want to go, expertly telling one street from another without much clue. Give me a map of Jakarta and there are roads, coffee shops, homes I’d be able to accurately point out. But I couldn’t point out the road to my mom’s if my life depended on it.

A brief history of the places I’ve lived

I grew up in my grandparents house in Central Jakarta. It’s the place I refer to when I say “home”, the place my bills still gets sent to occasionally.

Friends have attempted to discount just how “Central” it actually is, and I love to entertain them as a bit. Frankly, it’s Central in the sense that my government-issued ID labels my address Central, with a Central Jakarta zip code and everything. But I understand the doubts. You can’t be this close to the North and East and claim to be Central. You can’t take 40 minutes to get to Senayan, maybe even an hour by TransJakarta, and claim to be Central. You can’t make a habit out of jogging in Kelapa Gading — which I did, at one point — and claim to live somewhere Central.

Home was also once Jatibening, which isn’t really Bekasi but is too Kalimalang-adjacent not to feel like it. We would wake up at 4.30 a.m. and leave at 5.30 a.m. in hopes of beating the traffic on our way to school in Salemba, Central Jakarta. We ate breakfast on the way, and by the time we made it back home, usually at night after spending after-school hours at my grandparents while waiting for my parents to finish work, the car would sometimes stink of leftovers that had been sitting in the there all day.

On days when my parents couldn’t pick me up from school, I’d take the angkot home. The M01 which passes by Salemba on its way from Senen to Kampung Melayu, and then M26 from Kampung Melayu to Kalimalang. During a recent conversation, I brought up this fact to my dad and he responded with surprise. “Did you really?” He has no memory of me taking public transportation in fifth grade. Mind you this was pre-smartphone era! I don’t know which is wilder, being 10 and navigating Jakarta’s public transport system in the year 2000 or having your dad completely forget he let you do that. Lmao.

There was also that time I kind of partially lived in BSD. I was in college by then, living my best life as the daughter of parents who were on their way to finalizing their divorce. I would lug clothes between Central Jakarta – Depok (where I was studying) – Tangerang. I could tell one parent that I was spending the night at the other parent’s place and get away with actually going back to neither. I never did it! But the idea that I could if I ever wanted to was comforting. It was around this time that Teras Kota opened. When it opened, I thought finally a nice enough mall in this part of town. I can only assume that these days Teras Kota lives under the shadows of Aeon, which marks a whole different era for BSD. Back when I kind of lived there, the area where Aeon now stands was a swamp. The city is so sterile these days it’s hard to imagine a time when it was anything but tree-lined residential areas, though drive far enough and you might just see it.

Where do adults live anyway

For the past six years, I’ve lived alone in the city. Central central. I am 10 to 20 minutes away from whatever mall or bar I would be meeting up with friends for dinner at all times. Yet while I’ve enjoyed experiencing the city without the exhaustion of a one-hour commute, lately I find myself feeling increasingly opposed to my current living situation. Well maybe not opposed, necessarily, but the thought of it no longer gives me the sense of excitement and freedom as it once did. Without going into details, I’m currently at a place in my life where the kind of changes that are happening requires me to also consider making changes to my living situation — and this has been a major source of anxiety for me. Maybe this is why I felt compelled to write about this today? All of my writings are really just ways for me to process or defend myself against things I’m extremely anxious about.

When I still lived with family, in the Central Jakarta home, the ideal life that I wanted for myself was simply one where I would get to make up my own rules, be surrounded by the things that reflected who I am. I also wanted to live closer to the city center, I wanted to look at the city from up close. And so when a job came along that required going to an office far enough from home (in West Jakarta), I took that as a chance to tap out and start renting. It wasn’t out of necessity as much as the desire to feel like I could finally get my life started.

These days, I look around and things don’t feel right. My place is at once too big and too small for the life that I want. In some ways it’s perfect: the right location, the the right size, and price for what I get. I also like the serendipitous way with which I found it two years ago. But it’s also not idea: I want a cheaper rent now that I’m self-employed, but I’ve also been hating living alone; feeling too lonely too much of the time, feeling like I need the presence of others to push me out of bed, like I need to feel “being perceived” — just the right amount — to function as myself.

Other than the obvious fact that changes suck and general problem solving can be hard and also essentially suck, I hate having this problem because it seems to highlight all the ways in which I am failing as an adult. I can hear echoes of the “rent vs buying” argument in my head, one of those “adult conversations” I never wanted to be a part of because making the best investment was never a priority in my life — freedom and my own personhood is. I hate how little I have it together at a time when I feel like I should be performing my best adult self. Or at least I’ve been led to believe that I should. I swear if I think about my ideal living situation long enough, these thoughts grow into a tornado that eventually eat on my sense of self.

Many of my peers seem to have taken the BSD or Bintaro route. All that space, all that greenery, with a train connection for “easy access” to the city. Are you even a proper adult if you haven’t considered putting a downpayment on a Sinarmas Land apartment? When my West Jakarta workplace eventually moved its offices to BSD, I went to look for apartments to rent in the area and was immediately put off by the silence.

N’s home, which is in Jakarta and is central central, an easy 20-minute from many of our go-to neighborhoods, with actually beautiful finishings and a Dyson fan we like to tease him about, made me think of an alternate life where maybe I had more to offer this world other than some essay about the perils of adulthood and moving.

Today, I wanted to write about crushes. I find this emotion, or this condition, so deeply fascinating that I doubt this will be my last piece on the matter. So much happens during a crush, almost like a rewiring of the brain, that makes them so fun to observe (though less fun to experience, that’s for sure). I hope this makes sense.

Thank you so much for reading!

Have you ever had a text message change your life? One second you’re calm and confident, the next you’re ball of nervous energy stripped of any sense of self? I was out at a party with a friend when one of those texts landed on my phone. It came out of nowhere, catching me at a tipping point I didn’t even realize I was standing on. The muscles on my face contorted into a smile so freakishly wide that, when Audi asked what the fuck was going on, there was no believable way to lie.

The truth is that — idk, maybe it’s not even that interesting, but — I suddenly found myself with a big fat crush on my lap and in that moment, everything I have ever known about myself dissolved into thin air.

Months before this text, during one of those dusty 3pm Jakarta lulls, I had the feeling that life had gotten a little too plain for my liking. Things weren’t necessarily going so well with my life, they were just… predictable. Just a little too flat. And so in that moment, bored and unserious, I whispered a wish to the universe… that I would please like to be shown the way to a crush. I’d missed being occupied by something intense. I wanted to feel. I’d missed the out-of-body experience that comes with having a crush. I wanted to go on a ride, baby!

And so that ride arrived.

Know that as I write this very paragraph, Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” is blasting from the speakers. If there was a song that could perfectly soundtrack the arrival of this feeling in my life and my departure from sanity land, it was this. Make no mistake, I’m not Taylor singing about having a long list of lovers. I’m the person Taylor is singing to. I am who she’s referring to when she says “I know you love the game”, or when she says “boys only want love when it’s torture”. I am “you”. I am “boys”. Eagerly waiting to be left breathless, to see if the high was going to be worth the pain, my name imprinted on that blank space.

In a recent piece, Heather Havrilesky of the famous advice column Ask Polly beckoned on readers to “pay attention to how you feel” in the presence of a partner as a way of gauging whether or not things were truly good. “Love shouldn’t feel bad”, she says. While a crush is hardly a relationship, or even “love”, the suggestion is valid and applicable. I knew I was fucked the moment I became fully aware of this crush because I immediately felt defeated. So much so that when I called Avi the next day to report this new information I’d discovered about myself, I was crying so much that she thought I was about to inform her of some terminal illness.

“What is going on?? You’re making me scared,” she said, visibly concerned. Any attempt to collect myself was useless. The words wouldn’t come. I remember feeling too embarrassed. Not the cute “shy” kind, but the “shameful” kind. I was ashamed because the crush had made me feel so awful, so unworthy. The crush had triggered the worst of my thoughts about myself, and unlocked the kind of shame I knew better than to feel. I resisted verbalizing my crush out of fear that the admission would grant it too much power over me.

After a few minutes of fumbling, I forced it out of me and whispered “I have a crush”. The words tasted sour on my lips, like I might actually like the idea despite the ugly crying face I was making. I can’t recall what Avi’s specific response was, but I remember her laughing — relieved that I wasn’t dying — before telling me “you should write about this someday” (today is that day).

Most musings on crushes describe the experience as a temporary shift in focus, or a distraction, from the things that should otherwise be getting our attention (i.e. work, our hobbies, our life), to this person and this person alone. If my gaze were a camera, instead of documenting the details of my life, I was now constantly pointed on this other person, watching their every move, hyperfocused on their every detail… the marks on their face, the way their smile starts from left to right, the way their eyes twinkled when they laughed, or how awkwardly they wave their hands around when they speak.

In the case of my recent crush though, I realized that I hadn’t temporarily shifted focus to this other person as much as I was suddenly using him as a lens through which to look at myself. It wasn’t his eyes I was thinking about, but rather the right way to move, the perfect thing to do or say if he were to turn and look in my general direction.

When you live alone, with no one watching your every move, it’s easy to slip into a habit of performing your days on bare-minimum mode. I could sleep all day and no one would bat an eye. I could forget to do the laundry for two weeks and no one would tell me to do otherwise. Eat breakfast for dinner to no resistance. There is so much freedom from having no one witness how you live your days (so much so that, admittedly, it is easy to believe you’re living you’re best life when some days that may not be the case). Now, powered by this crush and the illusion of being constantly perceived, I often found myself striving to be on my best behavior. The idea of my crush watching would get me out of bed and make me put on an outfit I loved. I was suddenly living life at hardcore mode and crushing it. I was the best performance of myself — at least on good days.

On most other days, though, the more I entertained the fantasy of his gaze, the more critical I became of myself. All of a sudden it was less about being excited to start the day and more about how I wasn’t enough. When I tell a friend he’s cute, I was really wondering if I, too, was cute to him. Me saying “he’s hot” was really me telling myself (with rather unnecessary harshness) that I didn’t consider myself hot — I suddenly hated my body. Descriptions of his character was really about me wondering if my character would be good enough for him. The more I thought about this person, the more I thought about all the ways I was… not up to par? I held the both of us up under the light, to compare, and decided he was precious stone and I was whatever would be leagues below. The louder I sang him praises, the louder my self-doubt reverberated.

In the days before my crush, free from the gaze of this random man I had chosen to use to judge myself, I’d gotten very good at not just resisting but actively not believing these funky thoughts. I’d been on a journey to free myself from the chains of societal norms that told me look down on myself. I was learning a gentler, kinder language to process my existence. I was getting better at believing in myself. The messy corners of my life? I could chalk them up to… charm — or edge, I don’t know. Under my fantasy of his POV, though, they were questionable piles of stuff that would be a burden to eventually deal with.

I wouldn’t say I’ve sobered up from this delusion. It’s just I’ve had enough distance from that night I got the text that made me smile to now be more level headed when the thought of my crush lands on my mind on a random afternoon. Absolutely nothing has happened since, other than the occasional overanalyzing of completely neutral, completely uncoded moments. I still swing back and forth between enjoying the illusion of my independence and confidence and the idea of myself as an undeserving mess under the microscope of his (completely imagined) gaze. But! I’ve also sat long enough with this crush for it to stop holding so much power over me. While order hasn’t completely been restored, I think it’s getting there.

“You should make a move,” friends tell me. “Fuck around and find out!”

I resist, because I don’t know how to, but also because a part of me is afraid to find out he was never looking in the first place.

This week I write about Rocky leaving, a.k.a I dump any and all thoughts related to this that have been circling my brain for practically the past month. I say that as a warning that what you’re about to read may lack coherence. I’ve been writing this for two weeks, wondering if I should even send this out at all because not only does it feel the least cool type of vulnerable(?), there’s also a part of this that feels slightly “origin story”-ish that I find hard to write about without sounding like I’m self-therapizing, idk. It’s also one of those things where any word I string together feel like a misrepresentation and a reduction of the real thing.

Anyway, I wanted to get this out because, like I said, it’s hard but I’m trying. I have a reminder on my phone that goes off every two hours that says “hot girls write finished pieces” and so here is one finished thing, because I want so bad to be hot — story for another time.

Is change a good thing? Or do we just like to think of change as good because the alternative would be too bleak, given how central and fated it is to our day-to-day experience of life?

The night before Rocky’s last day in Jakarta I found myself desperate to talk to him over video call, even though I had quite literally just gotten back from his place, where Audi and I spent the afternoon helping him pack (or more like, we both made our last-ditch attempt to convince Rocky to leave behind his skinny jeans and make room for newer, better, baggier pants in this new PhD-pursuing phase of his life). He missed my call while in the shower and texted back: “u good????”

Me? I could not be more the opposite of “good”. I’d spent the entire ride home from his place ugly crying as silently as I could in the back of the GoCar. It didn’t help that I was also nursing a cold, so not only was my crying barely silent, I also had snot all over my shirt.

I told him I just wanted to talk while we were in the same timezone, fully aware I’m being sooo melodramatic. Sue me. I wanted to call him like it was just any other day. A little check in, talk about his day or mine, complain about something, eventually ask what each other’s dinner plans were and decide to go somewhere or just read at a coffee shop. But it wasn’t one of those days. Times have been hectic as he prepared for his departure, and the busier the week got, the more I selfishly craved for some semblance of normalcy, which I thought the call would offer.

Once home, I looked around my room and all I could think of was that time last July when Rocky, Audi, and I were getting ready to go to Club Vixxen’s prom-themed party, which happened to be the last time Rocky visited my place. We’d planned on a movie night in the weeks that followed, mainly to watch the new season of “And Just Like That”, but never got around to it. All those thoughts obviously made me feel some type of way and I promptly launched Twitter (or “X” — the fuck?) to numb the sads. That, too, turned out to be a stupid idea because as I browsed through the different tabs on the app, it suddenly dawned on me that these things I was seeing on the screen would soon be the default visuals of our friendship. Message bubbles in lieu of loud animated conversations. Emojis in lieu of actual hugs. The idea that this life-affirming experience of a same-city, I’m-walking-to-the-MRT-be-there-in-ten, spontaneous-weekday-brunch friendship would soon turn exclusively into pixelated user experience, little avatars across social media platforms, and text notifications felt like life was regressing.

Sometimes I wonder if I would have become so overwhelmingly sentimental a person — so emotionally overworked, honestly — had I not spent so much of my teenage years mourning friendships. I’d spent what some would call “formative years” living on-campus at a post-graduate institution abroad, where my parents studied for their doctorate programs. Friends walked in and out of my life as people (other parents) arrived on campus and eventually graduated from programs of varying durations. My parents were there for four years, one of the longer programs, and throughout that period of my life crushes, friendships, sisterhoods came together just as quickly as they seemed to disintegrate when it came time for someone to leave.

Each year when a good friend leaves, we would print photos, write letters, put together scrapbooks, anything to be handed over as mementos, reminders of how special these connections had felt. Sometimes, we’d stay up late the night before their departure, crying into the morning, holding each other, promising forever. On the day, those left behind walk around like zombies. Eyes swollen, hearts broken. Over summer break we will attempt to fill the void. With luck, you’ll snap out of it and try to mix with potential new friends, but for the most part you don’t really ever recover. Either way, you get sicker and sicker with nostalgia, and by the time it was my turn to leave, I didn’t have that many close friends left to mourn my departure. Plus, I think the lesson here is that there’s more pain in staying behind than leaving.

It’s funny because in hindsight, four years is such a short time. I’ve stayed at a job longer than four years. Six months from now, it will have been four whole years since the pandemic and yet it’s almost like no time has gone by at all. At 15, though, four years was a whole life.  As far as I was concerned, everything and everyone who happened to share a space with me in that moment were past, present, and future. I wanted those four years to last forever. 

I’d yet to develop the ability to imagine a future without the people I loved. Too bright-eyed to register the possibility of outgrowing them. These people filled nearly every minute of my day in a way that made me sure they were my whole world, so it always comes as a shock to find myself living life without the very friends I’d made such loaded promises to stay in touch with. It’s almost alarming how generally OK I am without them that sometimes I take my current life as a betrayal to my younger self. 

I write about all of that because when Rocky left, I felt what I haven’t felt in a very long time, which is the inevitable, gut-wrenching ending of a thing that had managed to make itself too important for me to lose. It felt like confirmation of a thought seemingly too corny to hurt: that good things don’t last forever. Suddenly I was 15 again sitting at home, wondering what to do with this void, wondering if that was it for me and this beautiful thing, wishing I could have had the good thing for just a little longer.  Nevermind that it’s so much easier now to stay in touch compared to the dial-up era of the early 2000s. Nevermind that I was literally tracking Rocky’s flight and he was literally able to text from inside the airplane. Nevermind that I now know enough about myself and about friendships to know that this one is fundamentally different from the ones I’d formed in my earlier years. His moving away for an indefinite amount of time was the end of an era, and as far as I’m concerned, when eras end, friendships do too. At least they tend to. 

I was sad for the immediate changes that come with his absence: Sunday nights I’d have no choice but to spend alone with my anxiety instead of out on some spontaneous dinner with Rocky, the random movie nights at my place, the iconic dance moves at parties, the sheer lack of planning that living in the same timezone affords you. But I was gutted for what it could mean long-term. Will we still be friends in five years? Seven years? Will I evolve in a way that would still be worthy of this friendship? 

I still don’t know if change is good or bad. All I know is that I hate it, because of how little control I have over it, and how little information I am afforded about the future at any given time. One thing I know is that some changes are bigger than others, and whether that’s Rocky leaving for his PhD or maybe just this particular time in my life, but this cycle of change feels like one of the bigger ones in recent memory. Suddenly things feel unfamiliar and mapless in a way I didn’t realize life could still be, and I have yet to extract enough clarity from it to be excited by the blankness of this canvas. 

I wish there was a ceremony for when you knowingly decide to jump into scary things without the guarantee of a happy ending — something like a wedding is to marriage, except it’s not marriage you’re getting into, though it may call for just as much commitment (in Rocky’s case, a five-year PhD program? If that isn’t commitment I don’t know what is). I love the idea that ceremonies help give language to nuanced life events. Rituals and symbolisms to acknowledge the weight of change or the inevitable duality that comes with periods of transition: the mourning of past selves, the celebration of who you could be, where you could go from this point on.

Spending days helping Rocky pack his life into three suitcases, riding in the back of a Bluebird to the airport with me clinging to him like physical touch was suddenly my love language, having Sate Senayan dinner before finally walking him to the departure hall, and crying endless bittersweet tears, though universal enough to be a ritual, didn’t do justice to encapsulate the leap that his leaving meant for him and whatever it could be for everyone watching him go. The ritual of airport goodbyes can often feel a little too “such is life” for me, if you know what I mean. And if I may be allowed to add just one more thing I hate about changes it is exactly that — the “such is life” attitude we tend to adopt as a response to the buffet of uncomfortable feelings that come with change. Like riding on a roller coaster and being told to sit still and shrug it off. No. Change makes me want to scream and throw up. It makes me want to cry, it definitely makes me laugh, and in that moment just before you’re released from the highest drop point, there’s that millisecond of thrill that makes you think it might be worth it after all, for everyone involved. 

I think what I was hoping to get out of that phone call that night was assurance that we were going to be OK. Sure I was sad that he was leaving but I was also feeling insecure about the friendship. Beyond time zones and the obvious distance, are we going to change? Will we make time? Will I still matter? Clearly a single phone call wasn’t going to give me all the answers. 

Two weeks in and I know that the best reference I have to just how well we might do this long-distance friendship is in the things that have already happened. The two years we spent staying good long-distance friends during his Columbia program. That one pandemic year I ditched Jakarta and moved to Bali. The very real ways that we have shown up for each other, made each other feel safe, seen, and understood. Everything that could potentially serve as meaningful examples to how OK we will be, all of this change be damned, has already happened. And while the way life works is that nothing is 100% guaranteed, the clues are all there, real as they can be. A little faith could go a long way.

Yesterday was a nice day, one I was lucky enough to get to spend with some friends from pretty early in the morning to the wee hours of Sunday. I wanted to write a bit about that.

08.00 - 11.00

When I woke up Saturday morning, Avi had already landed in Jakarta. She was in town for a quick interpreting gig and was flying back to Bali later that evening. It was 08.00 and I’d only had 4.5 hours of sleep, but I like doing breakfasts and I like Avi, so I took a cold shower to shock my system into consciousness and started my day.

I told Avi to meet me at Ombe Senopati, which I have a love/hate relationship with. On one hand, they serve one of my favorite bakmies (by the standard of what is available in Jaksel ok, this is not a bakmie discourse bait!). On the other hand, spending Rp90.000 on a bowl of bakmie is not how I typically like to start my day. It’s not how I like to have my bakmie at all, but alas. Ombe Senopati is one of the perfect non-mall places I go to microdose the city. Not that it’s the perfect representation, but it does put you smack in the middle of its endless contradictions, which is core to any Jakarta experience; hating how expensive shit is but refusing to part with its many delightful conveniences, turning people into caricatures in my head while walking around being that very caricature myself, needing so much space alone but also needing the noise, the buzz, the feel of people around me to function.

Jakarta is a city or ironies and Ombe is the ideal place for a quick hit. By the time you finish your delicious cup of overpriced coffee, you will have caught a glimpse into the lives of yoga moms, bicycle dads, tante arisan, kakak SCBD, om-om shouting business deals into a phone. Everything equal parts demoralizing and aspirational, everyone looking like they have their shit together, and then there’s me and my little life with nothing worth screaming into the phone about.

“That bakmie was 90k???” — Avi, before the meal.
”Rasanya kayak pengen bungkus 3 porsi…” — Avi after the meal.

14.00-16.30

I waited for Avi to finish work at the always lovely, forever missed Fillmore, and after that Audi, Rocky, Meisya, and Odi joined us for lunch at Silk.

Silk is this new Biko Group restaurant in Menteng that came as a kind of pleasant surprise when they opened earlier this year. A surprise because the year is 2023 and the idea of a pan asian restaurant just did not seem that … groundbreaking and necessary. New, hip concepts have been popping up on my IG feed lately and a chic Menteng restaurant serving dimsum, kwetiau, laksa, etc. seemed to go against this current of more experimental hangs. Pleasant because after several visits I’m thinking that may just be the whole point.

Perhaps the post-pandemic hangout isn’t so much new, neon-bright spaces that make you feel like you’re in a space ship, and more about cozy comforts in a midcentury interior that made us feel something at the height of lockdown when influencers doing interior design content was all the rage. Silk does this well, dressing up classic comforts with vibes — and Menteng, a neighborhood too posh and government-officials-in-batik–adjacent to be “cool”, could use just a touch more vibes.

I love that their nasi goreng, both the signature and vegan variety, is actually delicious and pair well with just about any of their other dishes. Their kwetiau is smokey and delightful. Their unagi dry ramen a crowd favorite. The two chicken dishes hits all the right notes. Sides like prawn toast, char siu bun, all gush-worthy. I honestly don’t know if it’s the crowd or the food that makes every visit such a good time, but going with a group + makan tengah is the way to go, since you get to sample more stuff. Bonus points that their tables are just the right height (even the sofa tables), lighting is nice and warm, albeit terrible for food photos. If you’re visiting during the day, like I did get to do for the first time, the space gets so much natural light it’s beautiful.

We left with stomachs full and minds anxious for Avi, an actual virgo, who seemed way too calm about the fact that her flight takes off in two hours. (Is this a Bali thing? I think it’s a Bali thing.)

20.00 - 03.00

This was not a thrifty day. No "Jakarta day” ever is. But it is also the Saturday of a four-day long weekend, so I was kind of on maximizer mode, wanting to keep the good times going.

After a brief visit to Semasa in Lapangan Banteng post-lunch (nice vibes, very hot, very crowded, very long lines), I went home to cool down, have dinner over an episode of Girls, and take a 15-minute nap before heading out again for drinks. I was ready to pass out and call it a day at this point, but Audi had mentioned dancing, which is something that doesn’t happen often enough for me to casually say no to.

Fueled by a persistence to maximize, we ended up going to three different places. The first was this new bar with tasty cocktails, a DJ who played absolutely no flops for two hours, but no crowd. We were practically the only ones there. The second place had okay cocktails, a DJ whose idea of a good time was to blast an afrobeat version of every crowd pleasing song known to mankind, and also no crowd — something that was mattering less and less as our heads got lighter. The third was a place across the street where the drinks were alright but the music was good and there were people dancing.

By the time we got to the last place, the drinks were starting to taste like maybe it was a free flow...? Like maybe I had no ongoing existential crisis? Like I was as good as everyone else? So much joy! Such peace! And then the DJ put on Wonderwall. I swear this city’s nightlife and its relationship with Oasis needs to be studied.

On the way home I replayed photos/videos from the night and thought about how some nights are worth the extra push. How that DJ at that first place managed to set the tone despite the lack of audience, significantly recharging my social battery levels. “Always a shame when good nights end,” I thought as I typed in a reminder on my phone to calculate everyone’s bills first thing the next day.

Before that, though, two things:

1. I changed the URL to this newsletter from partyofthree (dot) substack (dot) com to pagesnotfound (dot) substack (dot) com — just because it’s the most at-home I’ve ever felt with an online identity. 🤠

2. Also, in case you missed it, a few months ago I published a Zine with Cahyati Press. The zine is titled “Some Type of Love” and features poems from Rara and Farhanah, as well as five fragments on love (the only thing I feel comfortable writing about, it seems) by yours truly. I loved working on it, I love having written, and I love Avi & Katy for allowing me the space for it. If you’d like to purchase a copy, email me by replying to this letter!

Sometimes I close my eyes and imagine this was 2021. I am driving down Semat Raya, down Canggu’s world-famous shortcut, coming out of it on the corner where Revolver Coffee sits. Driving pas Batubolong, through the Pererenan shortcut, always so afraid I’ll drive my bike into the walls. This part of “Canggu” is nice and quiet and bearable. There this coffee shop I used to go to really early in the morning, which is 7am, early by my standards, not so early for the surfers. There, I’m a morning person. I was working a job that was was dreadful and anxiety-inducing at the time and I found safety in getting to do things early, before those Slack notifications start coming in. Sometimes Avi would come by. Or Adam. Or Aidil.

I bumped into an acquaintance the other day at my neighborhood coffee shop, someone who had also been there and had stayed for about a year longer after I left. We both ask each other the customary “are you back in Jakarta for good?” that people who “were there” tend to ask when they bump into each other outside of the island. “I am!” I said, proceeding to ask her “Are you so sad to be back?” This particular acquaintance was the outdoorsy type, and she had seriously taken up surfing during her time there, properly maximizing the proximity to nature that living there provided. I was under the impression that, of all people, she would have found being back in the city appalling.

“Actually? Not really. It just feels like it’s time, don’t you think?” her tone so matter-of-fact it seemed she hadn’t had to think too hard to find a bright side to Jakarta.

It’s refreshing to hear people not hate on this city. Sometimes I need to hear the nice things to not feel crazy.

Something’s happening to me. I don’t know what it is, I don’t know if it’s good, but I know it isn’t bad. For almost two months now I’ve been consistently taking lemon shots + honey on an empty stomach first thing in the morning — something my mom has been telling me to do as far back as 2010. Several people have complimented me on my complexion/general facial skin condition and, although I honestly have no idea whether that had anything to do with the lemons, I’d tell them about it anyway just to find it out what it’s like to be the one walking around with unsolicited health tips to pull out of my pocket.. “I’ve been doing this thing every morning…” I feel as insufferable as I sound, 10/10 do not recommend.

I also got myself a walking pad the other day, which, to my surprise, I have managed to take out of the box (it was heavy!) and actually use (it is heavy!), more than once a week. Exercise-averse me. On a foldable treadmill. That I voluntarily spent actual hard-earned money on. And all of that on top of a spin class that I go to once a week after work.

Something happening to me. It’s like I’ve been more afraid of dying than usual, lately. Unusually afraid of missing out on life.

I’ve also been listening to Taylor Swift again (something is happening to me!). The last time I rode on the Swiftie train was circa 2014-2016, her 1989 era, when Snapchat was the “it” social media, when Jokowi was first elected president, when she had that fling with Tom Hiddleston, which eventually gave me the ick. I don’t think I’ve recovered from cringing so hard when those staged beach photos were published. You get the gist.

I’ve been revisiting the Fearless album in particular, with the first two songs playing on loop. At one of her Eras Tour shows a few weeks ago, Abigail, the high school best friend that Taylor mentions by name in the track “Fifteen” was present, watching from the VIP tent, and Taylor played the song as her surprise song of the night. Here’s a clip from that moment. The image of her singing along to shared experiences that are over a decade old sent me down a rabbit hole of my own experiences being 15 — a time that for some reason I rarely ever think about, so much so that I feel like I’ve forgotten most of it. Who reminisces about 2005 these days anyway? At 33, being 15 feels too long ago to be relevant, and listening to the song now is helping me access much-needed compassion for this oft-ignored version of myself.

Cause when you're fifteen,
Somebody tells you they love you
You're gonna believe them
And when you're fifteen

Feeling like there's nothing to figure out

Count to ten
Take it in
This is life before you know who you're gonna be
At fifteen

I mean — when I tell you I SOB TO THIS.