The Dilemma of Writing

One of the things that I want to be when I grow up is a writer. I love writing because since I'm a person who cannot very much speak that laudably, I can express my feelings and opinions better by writing them. But who knows, writing has its own price. Try to think, when you write, you become so invested with it that you let your thought, imagination, and creativity run freely. Some people let them run too much that it becomes a piece that hurts other people. It becomes a piece that destroys relationships.

I always wonder how writers (such as journalists, creative writers, etc) write and still have to face their emotional and ethical dilemma in day-by-day basis. When they write something, they don't just involve their own selves, but also the subjects whom they are writing about. And the topics that they have to write about are not always safe, but can be very controversial and emotion-provoking in nature. In brief, the scopes of their writing is something that hurts others, and when this happens, you ruin the reputation you have, not as a writer only, but as a human being.

I don't have much to talk about this issue, but I promise myself I'll learn better. There is someone who I hurt and I think I have betrayed his trust. I am truly deeply sorry for what I wrote and I hope my entries in the future will be something that are professional and beneficial in nature.

The Art of Accepting Your Friends

First of all, a disclaimer for all of you who read this entry. I will be using, as my lecturer used to describe, "bombastic" words because right now I am learning the words that are common in Graduate Record Examination (GRE). I believe remembering them by using them in contexts and sentences are more effective than blind memorizing. And I'm sorry if some of these words are not used correctly. I highlight these words in case you are also interested to know what those words are.

So, this week I would like to expatiate on the issue of friendship, again. I was pondering on the question: How do you unexceptionably accept your friends? We are humans and humans err. We are all conceded with the fact that each one of us is fraught with weaknesses. Not one weakness, but sundry weaknesses. Each one of us has a way of galling others, be it talking too much, being egoic, being indifferent to birthdays, grudging, and so on. I, for one, has been very sentient of my own and my friends' foibles and faulty nature. The thing is, I have been noticing something pronounced about myself, that is I am vigilant and very sensitive to the faults of others. I know it's not good.

So, I was thinking, if they could annoy me in a way, I must have my own way nettling them. Therefore, if they could assent to the way I am, why can't I do the same to them? It is the art of accepting your friends as the way they are. The trick is, how do you modulate your emotions from getting waxed from the annoying behavior that they do, if they do it? Especially when you are close to someone, noticing an irritating behavior can be inevitable. To be honest, I don't have the answer. You can find a lot of tips, exhortation, opinions and so on, but at the end of the day, what you have to do is to really make it as a facile practice and stop flouting every one friendship that you have in your life. I am still a fledgling friend, I am still learning the art.

This entry is just purely to remind me myself and everyone out there on one of the ways to find joy in your friendships with others. I hope it's useful to you to a certain magnitude.

Meaning of the words:

Ponder - think
Unexceptionably - generally acceptable
Err - to make mistake
Conceded - to be given with something (usually unpleasant)
Fraught - filled with
Sundry - several, many
Galling - annoying
Egoic - self-centered,
Grudging - stingy
Sentient - sensitive
Foibles - weaknesses
Pronounced - very noticeable
Nettling - annoying
Assent - accept
Modulate - regulate
Waxed - increased
Exhortation - advices
Facile - accomplished
Flouting - rejecting
Fledgling - unexperienced and still learning
Magnitude - extent

The Meaning of Serenity

How do you define serenity? How do you differentiate serenity from happiness? How do you achieve a state of serenity within your inner psyche?

These questions might be what many of you (and me obviously, or I wouldn't write this entry) have been asking your whole life. Different persons have the different kinds of views on how an individual can achieve a stable state of serenity. Serenity is the state, for me, where you know everything happens for a reason and that you can achieve acceptance without giving up. I don't know about you, but I get my definition of serenity from this old-timey Islamic song that I have been listening to since years ago.

Basically, this song's basic gist is that in every condition, we need to exercise humility.

When you feel difficult, you are not nerve-stricken...
When you're poor, you're still grateful...
When you're sick, you're not restless...
When you're rich, you're generous...
When you're in power, you're trustworthy...
When you're successful, you don't forget...
When you're healthy, you don't abandon God...

The best line that I have been amazed over and over is this one,

"Serenity is when you can understand the art of God's work..."

The point of this line is, many of us blame the Higher Power whenever they are in distress. In some worse cases, they even abandon their religion because they're losing their faith toward God. But, how many of us who could actually understand how in all these challenging processes, God has provided us with a bigger life meaning? How many realize that God has drawn a life journey for us to embark so we can reach to the final destination with a happy ending? It's true, God's work is an art and just like any art, it has to be appreciated, and it has to be understood.

So, if you feel unhappy, submit yourself to God and see what He has in store for you. Discover and explore life and find out what God has kept for you. Everything happens for a reason, and no matter how much of a cliché this sentence is, it's still true. Start appreciating the substance of it.

Friendship Is Earned, Truly

So, I used to write an entry on friendship before, and I defined friendship as more than a person you meet casually. Friendship is emotional and it should have emotional component. I have thought about it lately and I can't help but wonder if friendships are predestined life courses. Of course as a Muslim, I believe that everything that happens in this life is a fate, and there must also be our own hands to contribute to the direction of the fate. But are friendships more "fate" than "efforts"?

I have a dear friend at USM who had been in a best-friendship with a certain person in our class. They had been together being best friends for more than five years and that should count for something right? But a particular issue that happened several weeks ago made them far apart, and now just two acquaintances who say hi to each other on the street. How could this happen? My friend asked. "We've been together in so many ups and downs. We knew about each others' good and bad. But only now, when we love each other, care about each other, then we have to have our friendship demoted to a lower status?"

As a close friend to this person, I am certain that she is not a person who likes to make enemies, nor does she like to even have a minor conflict. She is very kind and compassionate. But when she is given a chance of an opportunity that her ex-best friend was dying to get a shot for, everything changed.

You see, my point is, my friend was a hard worker when it comes to friendship. She loves her friends and she cares about her friends (note: friends, not acquaintances), and she considers them, especially her best friends as her own family. But still, fate intervenes and has to cut them apart. This happened a lot in my life too. I had a bunch of best friends in my previous universities but now, we barely contacted each other through Facebook (although in my case, it was mostly my fault and their fault equally). What does this mean?

Perhaps it means, we're not in total control of the friendships in our life. They are, no matter how much effort we put in, still a subject of fate. We can't predict the future of even the strongest friendship there is, even more the ones that just bloom. So, what should we do in the event of this? So, appreciate the friends you have now.  We very frequently take some of them for granted and only when we lose them, then we realize how much they mean to us. But it's too late. Still, make effort to make your friends feel like they're a part of your lives, hoping that when you do that, fate (I hope by now, you understand by "fate," I mean God) knows that your effort should be worth your friendship.

When Can You Be Truly Self-Determined?

One of the values social workers are taught to hold strongly is self-determination. It is a principle that tells the practitioners that their clients have the right to not be forced into deciding or acting anything. Clients of social work, or any other fields, should have the freedom to choose "their own economic, social, and cultural development" (International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, n.d., para. 2). Note the word "development." What does it entail then? In social work practice, the outcome of services should preferably be social functioning. Hence, the logical conclusion we can see here is that, one of the social work values is people's right to determine their own ways of developing that promote their own social functioning.


If you read one of my entries lately titled, "Sometimes, We're Trying So Hard Not to Be Judgmental" where I argued that every social worker should be able to exercise a healthy degree of "judgmental capacity" for certain service advantages. But this seems to oppose one of the dear values abovementioned, self-determination. What I can argue further is that, self-determination comes after social functioning. It means the clinets have the capacity to know what's best for them in order to decide for themselves. I'm sure you'll agree that we don't apply self-determination on children and mentally-challenged individuals right? I don't intend to compare certain clients to being childish or mentally challenged, but we're not perfect, we can't know everything. Until we're trained to be be knowledgeable on certain issues, we can't fully be sure if what we decide or act upon is the best thing we do. 


For example, a young highschool leaver is trying to decide which college is the best for him. Can you be confident in telling that this young man has the capacity to decide what is best for him without knowing a discernible amount of knowledge on colleges and universities in his place? If we're to fully practice the notion of self-determination, we'll just let this man decide and be the decision good or bad for him, we shall not judge. 


But for me, of course you, as a social worker, have to educate this young man on the issue. Not just about colleges, but as a scientific practitioner, you have to be able to see the options that are the best for him psychologically and socially. Some social work academicians would argue that after educating, then the choice if up to the client. But for me, as an advocate for the client, we do not just defend his rights if threatened by other parties, we defend his own social functioning too if threatened by "his own self." But of course before all this, we have to be scientifically and personally sure that some options are the best for the young man, and that these options are also the conclusion of his own opinions and feedback too. 


Social workers are not working for the clients, they're working with the clients. They're not the clients' slaves, but their partners. So as much as the clients' opinions are valuable and should be taken into account, the social workers' are too.

Love

Last night, my friends and I were talking about how the past love life can make someone's current love life right now as how it is. Many of my friends are now settling down with a stable partner whom they will spend the rest of their life with (Ameen!). But one common factor that brings all of them to where they are right now is they have all been hurt.

I watched Raising Hope, episode 18 where Maw Maw, one resident of the house who has Alzheimer's disease, said to her grandchild,

"They wouldn't call it falling in love if you didn't get hurt sometimes."

That is true. That is a spot-on statement about love. And that message made me smile and hopeful about everyone's love life. Where in the world can you actually find a person who settles down with their first love? Even if there are, there must be some obstacles that this couple has to overcome. There must have been ups and downs. There must have been hurt. But then, all these challenges taught them a lesson and matured them. Although it was painful to bear the tears and sadness, but you most likely right now would just look back with a smile.

So, a message for everyone out there, if you guys feel lonely, if you feel like you are not succeeding in your love life, if you feel like it is a lot of work, remember, always remember, it is now. There will be a time in the future (God's willing) where the pain you feel right now is a distant memory in the future.

Just keep holding on.

Sometimes, We're Trying So Hard Not to Be Judgmental

Several days ago, I had an academic debate with one of my friends. The proposition was as follows: "Should social worker just comply to what the client WANTS?"

My friend was a supporter of the notion that social workers should respect everything that the client wishes to do and if possible, to help the client to get it too. The example topic that we discussed was a man who had a high blood pressure but still wanted to eat red meat. So, my friend said that it is a social worker's responsibility to present to the client the pros and cons of every option and decision and after that, it is up to the client on what he or she wishes to choose. Even if he chose to still eat red meat, then social worker needs to respect that.

And I am a believer of the notion that sometimes, you have to tell the client that some of what he or she wants is not good for herself. So, even if the client still wanted to eat red meat, the social worker's task is to do whatever he or she could to try to prevent it (in ethical manner of course).

You see, I think both my friend and I were somehow true in our arguments. My friend was arguing on the basis of avoiding judgment getting in the way of intervention, because when the social worker tries to prevent the client from eating red meat, that might be just purely the social worker's own belief about what is right and what is wrong. While I was arguing on the ground that advocates on his social functioning. That eating red meat might hinder him from being healthy, which might affect the dynamics of his family, his work and whatever else effect health issue had on the client's life.

What I can observe is that, Social Work has values that can be so extreme (which is caused by the social workers themselves). These values, at one point, can be contradictory to each other. In one hand, we are asked not to be judgmental and not to exercise our own belief and judgment about what is right and what is wrong in the interventions we are developing for our clients. On the other, we are asked to ensure that our intervention is solely on the purpose of attending to the client's need and ensure that the client's social functioning is enhanced, or restored.

So, the question here, are we trying so hard not to be judgmental? Are we trying so hard not to let the personal value comes in until we're completely detached from the practice itself? For me, personal value can be useful in certain degree.

1) When a social worker has personal values, it means the social workers has experienced moral development that can help him or her see the right and wrong thing in general. Of course, by doing this, the social worker needs to be scientific and backs up the argument with scientific support. The social worker must have the knowledge about what red meat might do to a person with a high blood pressure. So, his personal value is that red meat is bad for the client. So, consulting a doctor, the social worker develops an intervention that has something to do with a healthier diet. Then, one of the responsibilities of the social worker is that to prevent the client from further harming himself with the red meat diet.

2) Personal values are somewhat the end result of professionalism. Without the ability to store a moral memory, then how do the social workers understand the importance of professionalism in the first place? Personal values can be beneficial in practice, because for me, if you really want to help your client, you must have compassion, and compassion is a personal value. Therefore, what I can conclude here is that what the literature has said about how personal values can hinder from professional practice is the ones that involve biasness in decision making like when you have revenge on the client, or even when, for me, you are indifferent with the client. So, let's ask ourselves, if you have to be indifferent with your clients, how do you actually help them? So, at the end of the day, you still need to be compassionate and passionate with what you're doing right? Isn't that a personal value?

So, for me, an extreme form of everything is bad. So, extremely being non-judgmental, and extremely relying on your personal value can be bad equally. If you really want to be in a helping profession, then make sure you check that your moral compass is in a healthy level. And of course, all this is based on my personal thoughts.

You Are Not Superior When You Forgive

Do you notice a lot of people feel superior at the event of forgiving and their counterpart apologizing? Without being too scientific, when a person forgives and feels that forgiving means he or she is on the "right" side, this actually backfires and can ruin the newly fixed relationship.

It's one thing not to want to forgive because you feel you've done nothing wrong (which is a form of superiority), then when you actually forgive, you feel like the whole relationship should be adjusted to the way you want it to be. You set conditions, and expecting that the conditions are fulfilled without any possibility of amending. I knew this one person, who after forgave her friend, set a condition, "I'm glad that we're okay now, but we can't be like before, at least not now." Try to deeply analyze this sentence. Upon hearing this, I wonder why does she have to preset the condition? Why can't she let it be as it is? When I usually made amends with my friends, I know I can just let it be, as in if we can't feel close yet, so we can't feel close yet, if we can rekindle already, so we will rekindle. Why do I want to set it to "no rekindling and feeling close like before yet" no matter if it's possible or not? Do you see my point?

You see, if you feel like you're "more noble" than the other person because you're forgiving, then don't. Don't forgive at all. Don't bother to think about "finally replying your friend's apology message because it's time for you to forgive". There is no time for you to forgive, it's now. If you think you should be the one who set the time, then, again, don't bother.

Just my message to superior-feeling pricks in the world, especially in Malaysia. I hope I do not belong in this category and I hope my dear friends who color my life currently, do not belong in this category too.

The Inevitable Bitterness

Oh my, this past few days, I really really can't stop Take That's The Flood from going around my mind serenading to my recent experience. Well, as I said, it might be due to the fact that the song fits perfectly well to what is happening to me right now. I lost a good friend, to simply put. What I really don't understand is how each day both of us become bitter and bitter. Everything happened between us. Well, she forged questionnaires of a research that we both supposedly had to work together. We tried so hard to hurt each other. I tried so hard to make sure that she got the point I had been making all this while. I decided to hurt her even more by reporting her to the supervisor of ours. Yes, we did all that. We did all the bitterness. We were the epitome of true cat-and-dog kind of fight who can't seem to forgive each other. Everything, except one. Except sit and talk. Just sit and talk.

You see, when I think about the evolution of our friendship - from close and good friends to two bitter nemeses who keep trying to prove a point - I realize something, I did not do what I preach. If you remember my entry, Contact Hypothesis, where I advocated the point where one person can find his prejudice and unreasonable disliking diminished by simply having an interpersonal contact with that hate target. It takes knowing - or reknowing - that person we dislike in order to be able to open up for a friendship, or forgiveness in my case.

What both my friend and I did all this time was avoid significant contact with each other and make sure that if there was anything to refer to, we made it as brief as possible. So, this was the disease that prolonged the bitterness all the way. I also contributed the part where the nemesis of mine felt as if there was no hope so a reconciliation, by my own behaviors.

So, I'm preaching again here. Take this as a lesson. Do not let fear obscure your goal to achieve good relationship with people.Do not let ego in your way of forgiveness. If you, my nemesis, happen to read this, please be assured that I am genuinely sorry for all the hurt and harm that I've done. Forgive me as I have forgiven you. If God wills, I hope we can be able to see each other in the eyes again and smile...

A List of Songs That Inspire Me

Ok, my whole life I have been listening to songs. Some are bad, some are listenable, and some others just stand the hell out and put themselves in the favorite songs folder that I have. These songs are not just amazing melodically, they inspire me, which is an important characteristic for me to stick to listening a song for a long time, perhaps for the rest of my life. By the way, these is the list that pick me up when I am down.

1) Kelly Clarkson - Breakaway

From my own interpretation of the song, it tells a story of a girl who couldn't wait to break out from the shell and go out and explore the world. She was a nobody until she achieved something and a lot of people respected her for that. It basically tells us that you just need to keep doing it until you "reach the sky".

2) OneRepublic - Marchin' On

This song compares the life journey that never gets exhausted (well, except death of course) to a marching squad. The whole song is embellished with the sound of foot marching forward, hence the point of this song. From what I understand, this song tells us that no matter how crappy our past is, no matter how many mistakes we made, no matter how big or small they are, we are still here, moving forward. More than likely, we'll look back and smile.

3) Outlandish - Try Not To Cry

This songs captures my feelings of the war between countries in the world so perfectly that in some occasions, tears are shed. What makes me relate to this song is the one verse it says in the lyrics, "How can it be? Has the whole world turned blind? Or is it just 'cause it only affected my kind?" And I, the writer of this blog, belong to the kind that it said in the song.

4) Coldplay - Fix You

The vocal of this band, Chris Martin, originally wrote this song because of his wife's, Gwyneth, father's passing. The song basically tells the listener that the singer will always be there for her forever. What attracts me to the song is the anthemic characteristic of the song that penetrates straight to my heart. It tells the listeners that don't give up because "lights will guide you home".

5) OneRepublic - All Fall Down

What's so inspiring about this song is that it is very realistic. What it is trying to tell the audience is that, if you ever fall down, don't lose hope because well, everyone falls down. It is true actually. Who in the world has tasted a lifelong happiness? Noone! Whatever we feel, whatever we experience, it'll last so long. But the important thing is, to find someone whose should you can rely on when you fall down to help you stand up again.

6) Take That - The Flood

Take that has struck me as a band who always tries to be inspirational in their songs. This is especially tells us to keep going although challenges never get out of our ways. This is another song that sounds anthemic and it gives you the goosebumps which rarely occurs to me.

There are a lot of other songs that make me feel good and inspired, however, this is what I remember now. I hope all of you who are reading can benefit from them just how I do everytime I listen.