Awesome is as Crazy gets

As a kid, I constantly tried to convince myself that I was an alien like Superman, brought to the earth to do something fabulous. Now that I’m grown (like since 2 days ago), I know that I was just trying to explain away the discrepancy between the other kids and myself. I wrote stories, I talked to the moon and my all-time dream was to run away with Rock Hudson and be his manager. Needless to say, some of the other kids thought I was weird (which I was and can only now appreciate the merits of weirdness in a writer).

The friends I made were equally loony or soon crossed over (much to the annoyance of their strict Malaysian parents). We dreamed up demons that followed us around, doing our every bidding until the principal of our primary school made us stand up at assembly and apologize. Some kids pointed and laughed (kids through the centuries have really mastered the art of ridicule). Others were merely carefully polite in case our demons decided to possess them. But the best were my friends and cousins who were all like, “Just keep it coming!” I will adore them forever.

I spent most of my high school years running from one end of the extreme to the other. Diets, boys, exercise, dares—the crazier the better. After I became a mum I tried being moderate, constantly watching my surroundings for whoever I could steal some tips from about being an uptight citizen. And you know what? I was as unhappy as a pickpocket at the end of Black Friday. Thankfully, I soon found out that mostly everyone had some sort of banshee in the cupboard, making no one I met actually normal. That was consoling *insert wicked cackle here*. As a writer, I love the idea of the mail man secretly seeing the milk man and of the cranky school janitor winning the annual ‘Karaoke Ka-blamm’.

Drama. It’s all about the excitement and heartache. I love drama and that’s just one of the many reasons that I write stories, fall madly in love and sulk for the smallest things (I’m working on this baddie). I like to entice; I love the adrenaline and I simply adore dreaming up worlds where readers would like to stay forever. The need for drama and the revulsion for boredom are some of my extreme qualities (they drive my husband mad, but there you go). I became happier once I accepted these things about myself and that growing up doesn’t mean growing a stiff upper lip.

“….Who controls your life? You have all the weapons you need, so fight.”—Sucker Punch, the movie.

I met an excellent life couch in Malaysia who told me, “Just be awesome, what’s the problem?!” Her advice has had a major impact on me, giving me the confidence to be who I want to be and to ignore the stares and glares that come my way from more moderate members of society. So what if I’m the only mum running down the street with a cape and Darth Maul mask, wielding a red light-saber at my equally scary-looking son? Who cares if I jump out from behind a door with my fake vampire teeth and scare him and his friends half to death? They love it, so do I and I guess that’s all that matters.

We spend our lives looking through other people’s windows, forgetting to enjoy the scene unfolding in our own. If we could only realize that it’s okay to be different, then life would become that much simpler and things like drugs, bullying and peer pressure will have no place in our world. It’s a constant struggle and it’s always easier to fall for the vices of our existence, but if we know that we tend to extreme behavior, we also know how to say, “Stop being such a drama queen, put that burrito away and eat your muesli bar!”

With that, I’d like to wish you all a great weekend of being awesome in an extreme and positive way and my prayers are with youJ Till our cyber paths cross again on Monday!

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