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About
Some of us, functional adults, would love to drag our safety blanket with us everywhere we go.
It’s a little like that scientific phenomenon of neural nostalgia, that turns the playlist we used to listen to on our Walkman, or discman, or PMP all throughout our adolescence, into the original soundtrack of our life. Just like this collection of classic songs, that make the feel-good hormones rush through our system, I want to bring with me, in my adult life, everything that made the hardest decade of my life easier to navigate.
Here’s an exhaustive list of everything that made my teenage years sweeter:
— the English language, literal background noise of my life, that I didn’t even properly understand, until that fated school trip when I was in year 10, that flipped my world on its head and prompted me to study it at University
— writing, my favourite way to escape from reality and daily life, as much as all these Choose Your Own Adventure books that I like to enter and get lost in, and all these romance and found family stories I devour, with no crumb left behind
— home, the ultimate safe space, especially in the dead of night, when it's all quiet and the stars are burning bright up above and inspiration is sitting on my shoulder, whispering quirky turn of phrases right into my ear
— puzzles and brain-teasers, to distract my mind from misery and existential dread
These four things are my safety blanket. They’re my shield against the horrors of the world, they're how the formula for my dopamine shows in the eye of the microscope. It’s not exactly that I wish to drag them around wherever I go, it’s more that they're always with me.
I’ve fallen in love with translating, ever since I got introduced to it, back in middle school.
Thinking about it, it must be because translating encompasses the four things that comfort me so.
To me, translating is a way to play with the English language, to spend my days dwelling into terms and sentences like they’re mysteries to solve, like they’re puzzles to piece together, in order to build the prettiest most cohesive picture possible.
As an aspiring writer, translating means understanding the significance of each word and doing it justice. Translating means becoming an intermediary for an author who wants to share a strong message and scream it in their place, with as much intensity.
And by translating, make a contribution to the daily life of these functional adults, to whom reading is the safety blanket.