Transcendence, Part 3

Photography by Nguyen Thao Ngan

Here we are at last. The end of this little Transcendence trilogy, and therefore, in a way, an end of this self-defining, four-year journey of mine.

Dear readers, thank you for coming all this way. It sounds cheesy and overused as hell, but it really does mean more than me than any of you may realise. Some of you have been here since the very beginning (my first post was a cringe-worthy commentary on the movie New Moon), and I’m honestly stunned by your constancy in a world of variables, to quote a dear friend of mine. Some of you picked up along the way, several maybe only starting to read recently. That’s fine too; you don’t mean any bit less to me. I’ve been doing this for six years now, and there’s no greater joy than to discover that someone is reading and commenting on your latest post; that they can relate or, even better, that it helped them in some way. I’m humbled to have been able to write for you, and entertain/amuse/shock you for a brief part of your day.

I may sound extraordinarily reflective today, and it’s no coincidence: this is my last major contribution to Suburban KID, and quite possibly the last feature post from Suburban KID, ever. There will possibly be a lot of questions arising from that statement, and I promise to answer some of them both in this article, and in a follow-up post after this.

Before that, I’m going to start with a lesson on — stay with me here — economics.

Transcendence, Part 2

Photography by Nguyen Thao Ngan

In part 1, I celebrated the personal resurgence I was blessed to have in Junior College. I recalled how attitude can be the ultimate factor in determining your happiness; in other words, one has the final power to put on a smiling face in the face of difficulty (pun mostly unintended). What this means is that, theoretically speaking, you can always be happy; it gets harder the more difficult your life is, but it is still always possible.

However, I think that most of us understand that we aren’t always strong enough exert that sort of control over our feelings. Sometimes life throws more than what most of us mortals can handle, and we lose it. After all, always possible hardly means always (or even largely) achievable.

The following are stories of some of those times. These are times that are not easy to look back and reflect upon, much less write about. Therefore, I hope that revealing these low points of my life will provide some good to you, dear reader; may they not sadden you, but instead help you see hope where there seems to be none.