jom balik :)

Coming back to Malaysia, I had one concern: that I would find it difficult to establish myself here. I’m not even entirely sure what I meant by “establish myself” at the time, but without sounding angkat bakul, I genuinely feel accomplished with everything that I have achieved whilst in the UK. I came to England not really knowing who I was, what I wanted from life, or what kind of person I wanted to become, and somehow, four years later, I came back having built a life that I once could not have imagined for myself. I had my expectations of advocacy crashed, I lost faith in people whom I thought were supposed to be my comrades, I had to rebuild my understanding of what community and solidarity actually meant, and somewhere along the looooooooong way, I also rebuilt myself. So I think a part of me was scared that I would come home and suddenly feel like I had to start all over again, as if everything I had become in England only belonged there.

I think one of the biggest changes in me throughout those four years was the kind of validation I wanted. When I first went to the UK, so much of my self-worth was tied to academic validation. I wanted good grades, awards, achievements, things that I could point to and say, look, I am doing well. But somewhere along the way, that changed. I started finding a different kind of validation from older women whom I genuinely admire, women who had built careers, women who had found themselves in rooms full of important people, women who had lived through things and still managed to remain grounded in what they believed in. Whenever one of them complimented me on something I had achieved, I remember thinking that this was probably the biggest compliment I could receive. This doesnt not necessarily take place because they were important people, but because I wanted to become the kind of woman they were. I think that meant much more to me than being told that I was a good student ever could.

I started venturing into online advocacy about a year ago, and if I am being honest, it started from a place of disappointment. I had lost hope in the people whom I thought were supposed to be my comrades, and I started questioning whether genuine solidarity could really exist in an environment that sometimes felt so transactional. Can I find comrades in an elitist organisation, an organisation where people join because they want internship opportunities, where every interaction can feel like a calculated move, where every relationship is built with the possibility that one day this person might become useful when they enter corporate roles or political roles? I think I became quite cynical about community because I had always wanted to believe that people who shared the same causes would necessarily share the same values, and I eventually realised that it was not that simple. Sometimes people can speak the same language as you, attend the same events as you, post about the same causes as you, and still have very different ideas about what solidarity actually means.

I have always looked up to activists in Malaysia for precisely that reason. I am not used to demonstrations, and my involvement in student organisations in the UK has always been quite polite and organised. You could write a statement, organise a meeting, submit a proposal, make your argument and hope that the people in power would listen. There was a certain comfort in believing that if you were organised and reasonable enough, someone would eventually hear you. But I knew that activism in Malaysia often exists within a very different reality, and I have always admired the people who were willing to speak despite that. I remember thinking that you are braver than I was in the UK, and I wished I could become like you. I wanted that courage, that willingness to say benda yang orang tak nak dengar, to show up even when it was uncomfortable, and to care about something enough that you were willing to be disliked for it.

Then, about a month before coming back to Malaysia for good, my digital advocacy started gaining traction, and it happened much quicker than I expected. It was exciting, but it was also quite scary because suddenly people were listening to things that I had previously only shared with a small circle of people. Then I came back to Malaysia, and less than two months later, I somehow found myself among the community of activists and advocates that I had spent years looking up to from afar. People invited me to their events personally, people recognised my work, people introduced me to other people, and suddenly I was sitting in rooms with people whom I had once only known through my screen. It was surreal because the thing I was most afraid of before coming home almost immediately turned out not to be a problem at all. I was afraid that I would not find my community, and somehow, I did.

But finding that community also made me reflect on what I actually wanted from advocacy. When I first felt accepted by my community in the UK, it felt like this too. I thought I had found my people, people who shared my values and whom I could call my comrades, until an incident happened that shattered that view completely. It made me realise that being accepted by a community and actually belonging to a community are not necessarily the same thing, and that sharing a cause does not automatically mean sharing values. So now, being welcomed into this community in Malaysia, I find myself asking whether I am doing advocacy because I genuinely care about the causes I talk about, or whether there is also a part of me that wants to belong somewhere. I don't think wanting to belong is necessarily a bad thing, because of course it feels good to be seen and understood, but I never want belonging to become the reason I advocate.

Advocacy for me has always changed shape. It started as a reflex to my own experience with educational inequality, but I have also grown very privileged over the years. I have had access to an education that many people do not have, I have been given opportunities that many people never get, and I have had the privilege of leaving Malaysia, studying abroad, building a network and coming home with a platform. So I need to constantly remind myself that my role is to amplify voices, not speak on anyone's behalf. I don't want to make myself the centre of someone else's struggle simply because I have the platform to do so. Sometimes the most meaningful thing I can do is simply make sure someone else's voice travels further than it otherwise would have. I think the more I grow, the more I understand that advocacy is not about becoming the loudest person in the room, but rather whose voice should be louder than yours.

So I guess, in that sense, my original concern about coming back to Malaysia has gone. I have found my community. I have found people who make me feel included, people whose work I admire, and people who remind me why I wanted to be involved in advocacy in the first place. I came home afraid that I would have to prove myself all over again, and instead I found myself being welcomed into spaces I had once only dreamed of entering. There is something very comforting about that, because for so long I wondered whether the person I had become in England would have a place in Malaysia. Now I know that she does.

But what I did not expect was that, at the same time that I was being given the comfort of finding my community, I would also be brought straight back to the reality of being a woman here. My first day at XXXX, someone made a joke about how I could stay at his place and how his wife would not mind. My relationship status somehow became a recurring source of entertainment, and I could not interact with a male without someone making a joke about how the man must like me. Things that I had almost forgotten to think about became part of my everyday reality again. It made me hypervigilant in a way that I had not realised I had become accustomed to, constantly thinking about how I was perceived, whether something was simply a joke, whether I should laugh it off, whether I should say something, and whether I was making too much of it.

But I don't think I want to end this reflection by saying that this is simply the reality of being a woman in Malaysia and that I have to learn to live with it. Of course there will always be challenges, and I know there will be many more that I have yet to encounter. But I also think about the kind of life I have been praying for. I have prayed to be useful. I have prayed to have a platform that means something. I have prayed to be able to contribute to something bigger than myself. I have prayed to meet the right people and to be given opportunities to do work that actually matters. And sometimes I wonder whether Allah is answering those prayers in a way that I did not expect. Maybe the challenges are part of the answer too.

I sometimes feel like I never really get to take a breather. Every time I think I have finally figured something out, there seems to be another thing waiting for me to learn, another room I have to enter, another conversation I have to have, another uncomfortable truth that I have to sit with. But perhaps I should not be so surprised. I have always said that I want to do something bigger with my life. I have always wanted to be involved in things that matter. I have always wanted to change something, even if I did not always know exactly what. So maybe it is a little ridiculous for me to pray for a meaningful life and then be surprised when a meaningful life comes with difficult things too.

I genuinely believe that I am destined for bigger things. Maybe that sounds very angkat bakul, but bukan maksud bigger in the sense of being famous or important. I mean bigger in the sense that I do not believe all the experiences I have been given were meant to end with me. The opportunities, the privilege, the failures, the people I have met, the things that have broken my heart, the things that have made me angry, even the things that have made me question myself, I want to be able to turn all of that into something useful. I want to change culture. I want to challenge the things that people have become so used to that they no longer question them. I want to make people uncomfortable enough to think differently, and perhaps that is already beginning to happen.

Because if I am being honest, the advocacy has already come with its own little reminders that perhaps I am actually shaking people's perspectives. I have been insulted. I have been called names. I have even received rape threats. I don't think those things are something to romanticise, and I certainly don't think abuse is proof that someone is doing good work. But I would be lying if I said it did not make me realise that some of the things I say are reaching people who would otherwise never have questioned their own beliefs. Sometimes the reaction itself tells me that a conversation has landed somewhere uncomfortable. And that is how I want my advocacy to work. Not to make everyone agree with me, but to make people stop for a second and think, why do I believe this? Who taught me this? What if I have been wrong about this my entire life?

At the same time, I know I still have so much to learn. I have so much to unlearn too. Coming back to Malaysia does not mean I have arrived as some fully formed advocate who suddenly knows how to fix everything. If anything, I feel like I have come home with a much longer list of things that I need to understand. There are communities I have never spoken to, histories I have never learnt, experiences that I will never personally understand, and conversations that I have only just begun to enter. There is so much work to do, and I think that is both terrifying and exciting.

And here I am, writing all of this almost like a diary, just like when I first started this blog six years ago. Everything is a loop, really. Six years ago, I was writing because I was trying to make sense of the world around me. I did not know where all of this would take me, I did not know who I would become, and I definitely did not know that one day I would be writing about coming home after four years abroad, finding myself surrounded by the very people I used to look up to, and trying to figure out what it means to use my voice here. Somehow, after everything, I am back where I started: writing, thinking, questioning, and trying to make sense of what I have just experienced.

Except I am not the same girl who started this blog six years ago.

I think that is what makes coming home so strange. I thought I was coming back to Malaysia after four years, but really, I am coming back to a place that I have changed enough to see differently. I know there is so much work to do here, and honestly, there is probably so much work to do that I could spend the rest of my life doing it. For the first time, this doesn't scare me as much as it used to. I think I finally understand that I don't need to have everything figured out before I begin.

I just need to keep going.

I pray that Allah makes it easy for me, that He gives me the strength to carry whatever He has written for me, the wisdom to know when I need to speak and when I need to listen, and the humility to remember that whatever platform I have is ultimately an amanah. I pray that I never become so attached to being seen that I forget why I started, and that I never become so convinced that I am right that I stop learning. I pray that if I am really destined for bigger things, Allah makes me strong enough to carry them without losing myself along the way.