On Change (A Reflection On My First Year At Uni Abroad)

(Note: this blog will likely get more textual than visual from now on. I'm in a writing phase.)

Now that it’s been a little over a month since first year ended, the days of summer school get warmer and go by quieter as most friends have flown home for the summer, taking with them the precious rowdiness that had filled my daily life with so much vibrancy throughout first year. A kind of lull settles in now, in a good way. Between classes and work, the summer somehow spares me time to bask in sun, in the outdoors, in books, and inevitably because of the quietness – in more of my own thoughts. I realize my passions for doing certain things (playing the piano, binge-watching films, reading voraciously, etc) approach me in waves, and now it is the wave of going back to writing.

Since I’ve reflected on first year and it’d be a shame to not put it down in words, here it is: first year was full of amazing things. Not knowing how to sound any less cliché, I can say it was exactly just that. Vancouver surprisingly and easily became a home away from home and I am glad to be here. Great times were spent with friends I’m immensely grateful for, new things were tried (snowboarding, thrift shopping, skateboarding, dance show performing), loud music drifted into late nights out, beautiful places were visited, money was made part-time, exams and assignments were toiled over, everything was hectic but productive and fulfilling, I learned things, new inspirations drove me, my perspectives changed, my diet changed, I changed.

I’ve always known I can be prone to change within a short period of even a few months. In one lifetime we can be made up of many different people. As Xu MingHao of the boy group Seventeen (and yes contrary to popular belief pop culture is indeed capable of inspiring and morally impacting people in the most positive ways) once pointed out, if looking back you hate the person you used to be, you can be glad now because you’re not that person anymore. Not that I detested every single person I was in the past but I do appreciate every change I’ve undergone thus far. In the past 10 months, what I would previously loudly oppose I found myself consciously doing, issues I used to stay on the fence about I now actively defend, things that used to stress me out to the point of mental breakdown I now treat more nonchalantly, and I trust all these transitions are for the better.

My shift to a pescatarian/most-part-vegan diet in February was one of the biggest changes, and the only physical one. The prompt to do it hit me very much out of the blue: a talk I attended which included the drumming line “Before an animal is slaughtered, it feels a lot of fear for its own life and when we eat them we consume all that fear” was followed the next day by an all-evening discussion in favor of cruelty-free lifestyles (which in turn greatly impact the environment, so much more than I could have imagined) by my sustainability club, and by the end of the week someone had given me a handwritten, hand-drawn booklet on veganism. With all these signs surfacing all at once, I felt more than obliged to give this diet a shot, and I haven’t looked back since. Back home in Malaysia in my pure ignorance I could never for the life of me understand vegetarians or vegans. I have become what I once couldn’t understand or open my mind to.

While there is so much more on change and first year I could talk about, it’s hard to condense it all into one entry so I’ll leave this as it is for now.

Here's a list I put together of reasons to reduce animal product consumption.

Edit: In my recent Creative Writing class someone pointed out that truly or freely expressing thoughts on social media is like permanently baring our souls for all to access. I agree with that but I do think a 'journal' blog is a low-profile enough platform for me to lay out certain thoughts in a manner that's less exposing than, say, Instagram.