queen of the chantilly lace bodice, elegantly embossed stationery and exquisitely clean bone china - philippine-born Monique Lhuillier. 

somehow after leaving high school life goes by in phases. you no longer remember each day as clearly as you used to. you just wake up one day and go, shit! i’m twenty-three?! you scurry to rewind the last couple of years in your head but everything is just a great big blur. the last thing you probably remember was turning eighteen. your young and nubile body just became legal and the world was laid out in front of you with a long red carpet, eagerly awaiting your debut. the idea of "when i grow up" was still reasonably light years away.

the newfound enthusiasm of pre-adulthood must have lasted all of five minutes before you find that you still don’t know what you want and how to get it. nothing has changed, no siree! so you spend a couple years flailing about like a fish out of water while you find the ever mysterious "purpose in life". in the meantime, all sorts of new doors open up for you and seduced by the unknown limitations of your own potential, you drift like a dandelion seed in whichever direction the wind might take you.

well before you know it you’re five years older and you might not be the surest on what you do want but you pretty much know what you don’t want to be - a failure. so you sit yourself down and start to think real hard. you think perhaps you’ve made your decision but a closer look in the mirror and you realise just how much the last few years of tumbling around in the wind has consumed you.

at this point you start to panic and perhaps even wallow in an ankle deep wade pool of regret. you spend a couple days beating yourself up about it while in the faint background, the clock continues ticking.

so you know you don’t want to be a failure. what is the opposite of failure? success? but what does that mean! a mere stable job? a significant contribution to a firm? setting up your own organisation? people knowing your name and who you are? what the hell is success!

and having realised you wasted too much time off focus, a light dawns on you that this is it - it is now or inevitably never. you either drop what you’re doing and follow the yellow brick road to your interpretation of success, or you will wake up in the next phase of your life, at thirty, with a painful sting of reality and a thrashing of panic. 

the hardest part really is deciding what you want. once the light at the end of the tunnel ignites, all you have to do is brave the darkness and impediments along the way. the need for focus has been extremely understated. the absence of which, no amount of hardwork can truly bear any fruit.

this weekend i intend to recalibrate my focus. i hope i can encourage you to do the same.

i was in the train home last night and i was observing a young couple in front of me. they couldn’t be any older than sixteen with teenage body odour.

they stood in embrace and the girl had a big bright smile as her boyfriend presented her jewellery from couple lab. it had probably cost him a week’s allowance but you could tell that to him, she was worth it. he caressed her hair and kissed her on the forehead as he pulled her closer to him. if you looked close enough you could probably see them levitating off the ground into their own world of everlasting love and bliss. how innocently beautiful it was to be sixteen and in love!

i had to admit, seeing them together made me smile and remember the days when i believed that love was everything and love was all it took. fast forward seven years later, i am still quite the romantic but i am also extremely pragmatic about relationships and the effort and hardwork that it takes to keep it meaningful. i thought about all the things the young couple would eventually go through. it’s quite likely they won’t even make it to twenty-one (together) because one day they will graduate from secondary school, maybe enter the same tertiary institution, maybe not. the guy will go off to serve the nation and the girl will meet new people and evolve. they will fight, they will cry but they will be alright. they just might not be together. because that’s how the story goes, save for the few who do make it.

i remember my own string of heartbreak, the partners who walked in and out of my life, leaving mere footprints in the sand and lessons that i can take with me. all the wrong choices that i made and all the right ones i should’ve taken, it all boils down to the present and the future’s potential.

anyway, although i can proudly say that after much trial and error i do have an extremely grounded and meaningful relationship, i still reminisce what it must be like to be so young, carefree and in love. yes, once in a while the other half and i manage to have our own floating-off-the-ground moments but we are both in a crucial time of our lives where other things take precendence over the relationship. we’re both trying to figure out the kind of individuals we want to be so that we may best adopt the roles of being spouses and parents.

i think that while fairytales are great, they omit the part about the princesses and princes having ambitions and dreams separate from each other. that they have careers to feed their livelihood and that they have responsibilities to themselves, to their families, to their comrades, to God and to their community. it’s not as simple as finding the love of your life and then living happily ever after.

and there in the train last night, i wished i could tell them that. i wished i could tell them about the inevitability of getting your heart broken into a million seemingly unfixable pieces but that life goes on. but seeing them so glued to each other with hope in their eyes, i couldn’t help but walk away with empathy. afterall, what are we without our heartbreak?

as many of you would’ve known by now, i have embarked on a journey to discover faith and islam in particular. 

it would occur to many that this may be largely due to the fact that i am in love with a muslim man. however, for those of you i’ve confided in would know that religion has been a long personal conflict in my life.

a lot of my perception on islam has changed drastically since reading the quran in a way that has drawn me closer to the religion. however, as i believe that your spiritual journey should be kept close and personal, i regret that i will not be sharing a lot of my experience publicly on this blog, unless it has to do with a finding that i believe will help many others in my position or enlighten a non-muslim to understand the religion and the believers a little better. the rest will be password protected which has already been revealed to my closest friends and readers who have been following me for some time now. 

let this mark my first contribution - an article on the hijab that i came across while reading more on the subject. this is something that i can definitely relate to, especially in singapore where converts often feel outcast from the muslim community. it expresses my concern on the judgement and method of enforcement on practising many fundamental quranic injuctions in the local society.

i found the article extremely hopeful and deeply encouraging in my contemplation of the hijab. there are more of its kind linked to it. as the article has mentioned, i am still in the most basic stages of my journey, my iman (my faith in God). i strongly encourage all muslim readers to take the time to read this article. and may peace be upon you.