Bagi kebanyakan individu, berdiri di hadapan cermin bukan sekadar rutin harian, tetapi satu medan pertempuran emosi yang meletihkan. Terdapat satu kepedihan eksistensial apabila melihat bayangan diri dan merasa “hodoh” atau “tidak laku” (unmarketable) di mata masyarakat—fenomena yang dalam psikologi klinikal dikenali sebagai Appearance‑Based Rejection Sensitivity (ABRS). Perasaan ini sering membawa kepada keadaan hati yang hancur, atau dalam tradisi kerohanian disebut al‑munkasira qulubuhum (mereka yang pecah hatinya).

Krisis imej diri ini berpunca daripada “lensa yang herot” (distorted lens). Kita tidak lagi melihat realiti objektif, sebaliknya terjebak dalam pemprosesan visual yang terlalu berorientasikan perincian (detail‑oriented visual processing), di mana satu cela kecil dibesarkan sehingga menenggelamkan nilai kemanusiaan kita yang utuh.

2. “Bug” dalam Sistem Otak: Memahami Kesan Horn (The Horn Effect)

Sains kognitif mendedahkan bahawa otak manusia sering menjalankan “perisian yang mempunyai pepijat” (buggy software) dalam menilai karakter berdasarkan rupa paras. Otak secara evolusi mempunyai bias negatif yang berfungsi sebagai limbic smoke detector – lebih mengutamakan kepantasan berbanding ketepatan.

Dua ralat utama

• Kesan Halo – apabila seseorang menarik secara fizikal, otak mengandaikan mereka juga pintar, baik, dan selamat; sapaan mereka diterima sebagai “hadiah.”
• Kesan Horn – seseorang yang dianggap tidak menarik secara fizikal sering dikategorikan sebagai “ancaman” atau “mencurigakan” sebelum mereka sempat berbicara.

Keadaan ini diburukkan lagi oleh Bias Konsistensi (Consistency Bias); setelah otak membuat tanggapan pertama yang buruk (Kesan Horn), ia secara aktif mencari bukti untuk menyokong naratif negatif tersebut dan mengabaikan kualiti positif.

“Kesan Horn adalah ralat dalam pemprosesan maklumat manusia di mana otak mengutamakan kecekapan kognitif berbanding ketepatan objektif.”

3. Dari Body Positivity ke Body Neutrality: Fokus kepada Fungsi, Bukan Estetik

Bagi mereka yang mengalami Gangguan Dismorfik Tubuh (Body Dysmorphic Disorder – BDD), gerakan Body Positivity yang menuntut “menyayangi setiap lemak atau parut” sering dirasakan sebagai beban mental yang tidak realistik. Body Neutrality menawarkan pendekatan yang lebih klinikal dan stabil.

Latihan “Audit Kefungsian” (Functionality Audit)

Alihkan fokus daripada “objek estetik” kepada “ejen berfungsi.” Contoh:

• “Perut saya adalah tempat badan saya menghadam makanan dan menyimpan tenaga.”
  
• “Kaki saya membolehkan saya mendaki dan bergerak.”
  

Latihan ini membantu otak beralih daripada pemprosesan “tempatan” yang kritikal kepada pemprosesan “global” yang holistik.

4. Model Nabawi: Apabila Tuhan Menjadi ‘Penyembuh Hati’ (Al‑Jabbar)

Dalam tradisi Nabawi, konsep pemulihan imej diri berpaksikan kepada nama Tuhan, Al‑Jabbar. Secara linguistik, ia berkait rapat dengan jibeera—simpai atau simen yang digunakan untuk menyatukan tulang yang patah. Allah sebagai Al‑Jabbar bertindak “menyusun semula” serpihan hati yang hancur akibat penolakan sosial.

Dua contoh sejarah

1. Zahir – seorang lelaki padang pasir yang menyifatkan dirinya damim (hodoh). Di pasar, Rasulullah (SAW) memeluknya secara bergurau dan melaungkan, “Siapa yang mahu membeli hamba ini?”
   Zahir menjawab, “Wahai Rasulullah, engkau akan mendapati aku ini barangan yang tidak laku!”
   Rasulullah membalas, “Tetapi di sisi Allah, engkau bukanlah barangan yang tidak laku! Di sisi Allah, engkau sangat berharga!”

2. Julaybib (r.a.) – namanya merupakan diminutif jalbab (pakaian), merujuk kepada saiz tubuhnya yang kerdil dan tiada nasab jelas (sosial “kematian”). Rasulullah (SAW) mengangkat maruahnya dengan menjadi wali perkahwinannya dan menyatakan selepas syahidnya: “Dia adalah dari aku, dan aku adalah dari dia.” Sentuhan fizikal serta pengiktirafan rasmi meruntuhkan hierarki sosial yang zalim.

5. Seni ‘Softmaxxing’ & Isyarat Kehangatan: Mengambil Kembali Kawalan

Psikologi gunaan mencadangkan kejuruteraan kehadiran untuk meminimumkan impak biologi Kesan Horn melalui teknik softmaxxing.

• Geometri Maskulin – gunakan pakaian yang membina siluet “V‑taper” atau “Trapezoid” (bahu lebar, pinggang kemas) untuk memberi isyarat kecergasan biologi.
  
• Peraturan 3‑3‑3 – fokus pada 3 asas dandanan (rambut kemas, kulit lembap/matte, wangian), 3 pakaian utama yang padan (tailored), dan 3 aksesori berkualiti: jam tangan analog, tali pinggang kulit, serta cermin mata atau topi berkualiti.
  
• Kejuruteraan Optik – gunakan cermin mata untuk mengimbangi proporsi wajah. Contoh: untuk mengecilkan hidung besar, pilih bingkai dengan lebar jambatan (bridge) kecil (14–16 mm) atau reka bentuk keyhole bridge.
  
• Isyarat Kehangatan (Warmth Signals) – bahasa badan yang menenangkan: kepala tilting, senyuman “crooked” yang tidak simetri, serta telapak tangan terbuka.
  
• Prinsip 8‑Pertemuan – kerana bias konsistensi, sekurang‑kira lapan interaksi positif diperlukan untuk memadam satu tanggapan pertama yang buruk. Ini strategi jangka panjang.

6. Teknik Socratic: Cara ‘Berdebat’ dengan Kritikan Dalaman

Dalam Terapi Tingkah Laku Kognitif (CBT), kita mencabar Pemikiran Negatif Automatik (ANTs) melalui inkuiri Socratic dan visualisasi “Keibubapaan Semula” (Reparenting) untuk memujuk “Kanak‑kanak yang Rentan” di dalam diri.

Soalan Socratic

1. Klarifikasi – “Apakah bukti nyata yang menyokong dakwaan bahawa saya ‘menjijikkan’?”
   
2. Mencabar Andaian – “Jika orang perasan parut ini, adakah itu bermakna saya tidak layak disayangi secara automatik? Di mana logiknya?”
   
3. Ujian Bukti – “Berapa ramai orang yang benar‑benar mentertawakan saya hari ini berbanding yang sibuk dengan urusan mereka?”
   
4. Mengambil Perspektif – “Jika sahabat saya mempunyai rupa seperti ini, adakah saya akan menghinanya? Mengapa saya memberi layanan berbeza kepada diri sendiri?”

Latihan “Carta Pai Harga Diri” (Self‑Esteem Pie

1. Lukis bulatan.
   
2. Bahagikan kepada hirisan: prinsip moral, kemahiran profesional, peranan sebagai anak/rakan, penampilan fizikal, serta Ketabahan & Pertumbuhan.
   

Hiris penampilan biasanya menjadi bahagian kecil dalam identiti yang luas.

7. Penutup: Perjalanan Menuju Penerimaan Diri Secara Holistik

Perjalanan ini adalah transisi daripada “fragmentasi”—melihat diri hanya sebagai koleksi kecacatan—kepada “integrasi”—melihat diri sebagai satu kesatuan utuh. Sejarah sains membuktikan bahawa piawaian kecantikan hanyalah trend yang berubah‑ubah; data morfometrik arca purba menunjukkan “ideal” zaman dahulu jauh berbeza dengan hari ini. Jika piawaian manusia sentiasa berubah mengikut sejarah, mengapa kita membiarkan trend hari ini menentukan harga diri kita yang abadi?

Ketahuilah bahawa nilai anda adalah anugerah Tuhan yang tidak boleh ditarik balik. Anda bukan “barangan tidak laku,” tetapi ciptaan Al‑Jabbar yang sedang dalam proses pemulihan menuju kesempurnaan hakiki.

A personal essay on mental illness, relationships, and the slow work of becoming.

There is a particular kind of loneliness that does not announce itself loudly. It does not arrive with sirens. It arrives as a quiet phone screen. No messages. Just targeted advertisements pretending to know you. Just the hum of a life that feels like it is happening to other people.

This is not a story about being dramatic. It is a story about what happens when a mind is wired differently, when a heart loves genuinely, and when the world — which was never really built for people like this — does not know what to do with either of those things.

The Alarm With No Fire

Schizophrenia is poorly understood, even by people who think they understand it. The public image is loud and cinematic — voices, violence, chaos. The reality is quieter and, in some ways, more disorienting.

One of the things schizophrenia can do is break threat perception. The brain fires a danger signal — physiologically convincing, felt in the chest, real as anything — but the source is not dangerous. The person standing closest to you, the one who has never hurt you, gets processed by a misfiring system as hostile. As a bully. As someone running a game.

It is like a fire alarm going off in an empty room. The alarm is real. The fire is not.

For someone living with untreated schizophrenia — especially in a context where mental health is stigmatised, where resources are hard to reach, and where people around you do not understand what is happening — this is not a minor inconvenience. It reshapes how you see every relationship. It makes safety feel suspicious. It makes calm feel like the quiet before something goes wrong.

And because the illness is invisible, because it does not look like what people expect illness to look like, the response from others is rarely compassion. It is usually blame.

They're crazy. They're unstable. They're making excuses.

There is a particular cruelty in being publicly labelled and gossiped about for symptoms of an illness you never chose and, at that point, had not yet been given the tools to manage. It is blaming someone for bleeding from a wound that nobody helped them treat.

What those people called weakness was actually an untreated medical condition. What they called manipulation was a brain sending false signals to someone who had no framework yet to question them. What they called attention-seeking was a person quietly drowning who had not yet learnt to ask for a lifebuoy in language others could hear.

The World Was Built for Someone Else

The social model of disability makes a simple but radical claim: the problem is not the disabled person. The problem is a world designed around a narrow idea of normal — neurotypical, able-bodied, financially stable, socially fluent — that pathologises everyone who falls outside it.

This is not a comfortable idea for people who benefit from that design. But it is honest.

Wanting love, family, identity, and belonging is not a disabled person wanting too much. Those are human wants. The fact that they feel perpetually out of reach for people with mental illness, neurodivergence, or chronic conditions says more about the architecture of society than it does about the people reaching for them.

The people who seem to have it together are mostly hiding their mess more effectively. Everyone is struggling with something — trauma, doubt, sin, fear, loneliness. The difference is largely visibility. Disability makes the struggle visible. That visibility gets punished in a world that rewards the performance of wellness.

And yet — the social model does not mean nothing is your responsibility. The barriers are real and external, and you still have to navigate them as best you can. Both things are true at once. The world failed you, and you still have to find a way to move through it.

Compatibility Is Built, Not Found

There is a popular idea about romantic relationships — that somewhere out there is a person perfectly compatible with you, and the work is simply to find them. Compatibility as destination. Love as a matching exercise.

This idea is probably responsible for a great deal of unnecessary heartbreak.

A more honest framing: compatibility is built. Not found. Two imperfect people, choosing each other sincerely, and voluntarily changing for good — together. Not testing each other like products on a shelf, but committing to the slow, unglamorous work of becoming better alongside someone.

This reframing matters most when you consider that even the most admired figures in human history had partnerships that were complicated, that involved betrayal, inconsistency, and failure. If perfection could not protect those relationships, then the search for a perfect match is probably not the right project.

What matters more is shared intention. Are both people facing the same direction? Are both people willing to try — genuinely, not performatively?

Treating a relationship as amanah — a trust, a responsibility — changes what you are actually doing. It is no longer about what you extract from another person. It is about how faithfully you carry your responsibility toward them. That is a harder standard than compatibility-testing. But it is closer to what lasting relationships actually require.

What BPD Looks Like From the Outside

The relationship this essay draws from, obliquely, involved someone with Borderline Personality Disorder. BPD is another condition that is widely misunderstood and disproportionately blamed on the person who has it.

People with BPD often struggle with identity consistency, emotional intensity, and a profound fear of abandonment. They can experience faith, love, and commitment deeply and sincerely — and then lose access to that feeling entirely, not because they were lying, but because the disorder disrupts the continuity of self that most people take for granted.

Watching someone you love cycle through that is painful and confusing. It is easy to feel like the closeness was never real. It is easy to feel gaslit — not because the person intended to deceive you, but because their internal experience genuinely shifted in ways they could not always control or explain.

Extending compassion to that, seeing the genuine intention underneath the inconsistency, is not the same as excusing harm. It is recognising that a person struggling with a disorder is not purely or simply their disorder. Deep inside the cycles and the shutdowns, there is usually someone who genuinely wanted something real.

Intentions matter. In Islamic tradition, the Hadith is clear: actions are by intentions, and every person will have what they intended. Whatever was genuine in that relationship — the shared hope, the agreement to walk toward God together — that intention was real. The disorder that disrupted its expression did not erase it.

The Day After the Breakup

There is a detail worth sitting with.

The day after — or close to it — after the relationship ended, the person this essay quietly describes walked into a GP clinic for the first time. Accompanied by a younger sister. Reached out for mental health support for the first time in their life.

That is not a small thing.

The relationship ending broke something open that needed to be broken open. The grief cracked a door that had been closed for years. And instead of retreating, instead of collapsing entirely, something moved — toward help, toward honesty, toward accountability.

Out of that appointment came a referral. Out of that referral came a psychiatrist. Out of that psychiatrist came, eventually, a diagnosis. Schizophrenia. Finally named. Finally something to work with instead of something formless and confusing that everyone around you kept calling a character flaw.

This is not a redemption story with a clean ending. Diagnosis is not cure. Awareness does not immediately fix what the illness disrupted. But naming something is the beginning of being able to work with it rather than being worked over by it.

The relationship went wrong. It also, indirectly, started something important.

Both things are true.

On Grief and Antidepressants

Grief is not the same as depression, though they can coexist.

When numbness lifts — when medication starts to recalibrate the brain's chemistry enough that emotions can actually move through you again — grief can feel like it is getting worse. Suddenly you can cry. Suddenly the loss is felt rather than just registered. Suddenly missing someone is not an abstract fact but a physical sensation.

That is not the antidepressants failing. That is the emotional system coming back online. The pain feels more acute because you are finally feeling it rather than being blocked from it.

Crying about something that mattered is healthy. It means the thing was real. It means you are not permanently disconnected from your own experience. It means the medication is doing something, even if what it is doing, in the short term, is allowing the grief to actually grieve.

Let it.

What Remains

Here is what does not disappear just because a relationship ends, or because someone says you are no longer part of their life:

The sincerity with which you loved. The compassion with which you tried to understand someone whose condition made her hard to understand. The honesty with which you named your own beliefs and boundaries, even when that naming had a cost. The courage it took to walk into a clinic, heartbroken, and ask for help for the first time.

None of that is cancelled by an ending.

You do not need to be remembered by the person you loved in order for what you did to have mattered. Memory and meaning are not the same thing. She does not have to acknowledge it for it to have been real. Your experience does not require her validation to be true.

The mistakes were real too. The patterns learnt from a world that taught you love was a game — those patterns caused damage. Acknowledging that is not self-punishment. It is clarity. And clarity, paired with genuine repentance and the intention to do differently, is what growth actually looks like. Not perfection. Not the absence of failure. Just the honest reckoning with it, and the slow turn toward something better.

A Note on Mental Health Stigma

Mental illness is not a moral failing. It is not something a person deserves to suffer from, to be mocked for, to be gossiped about, or to be excluded over. The structural failures that make treatment hard to access — the stigma that surrounds diagnosis, the healthcare gaps, the communities that respond to difference with cruelty — these are the things worth being angry about.

The person with untreated schizophrenia who acted strangely before they had any framework for understanding their own mind was not a bad person. They were an unwell person in a world that did not help them and then blamed them for the symptoms of the help they were not given.

That framing matters. Not as an excuse for everything. But as a more accurate account of what actually happened.

Still Here

A flat life after an intense one does not mean a finished life. It means a life in transition. The middle of something always feels like the whole thing. It is not.

The capacity to love genuinely, to extend compassion to someone whose disorder made her difficult to love consistently, to walk toward God quietly and sincerely without coercion or performance — that capacity does not disappear. It waits.

It waits for the grief to finish its work. It waits for the signals to recalibrate. It waits for the right conditions, the right person, the right moment when the door opens again.

Two imperfect people. Choosing each other. Sincerely. Voluntarily changing for good.

That is still possible.

It is still worth wanting.

Written from lived experience. Some details are deliberately generalised to protect privacy.

A personal essay for young Malaysians who feel this too

By a young Malaysian from Sabah — IT student, disability activist, ordinary human

Estimated reading time: 20–25 minutes

I. The First Thought of the Morning

Before I check my phone. Before I hear the birds or the fan or the morning traffic outside. Before I even fully remember what day it is — it arrives.

The thought.

Not an intrusive thought in the clinical, scary sense. Just a quiet, heavy one. A kind of emotional gravity that pulls downward before the day has even started. It sounds something like: I am alone. I woke up alone again. Nobody is here.

It is not dramatic. It does not announce itself. It simply sits there, in the first few seconds of consciousness, like something that never left from the night before. And I lie there for a moment, aware of the space around me — the empty side of wherever I am sleeping, the silence that has no voice in it but mine — and I feel it.

Then the day starts. I get up. I go to class. I work on my projects. I eat. I scroll. I sleep. And the next morning, it is there again.

If you are a young Malaysian reading this and you recognise this feeling — the specific, quiet weight of waking up single every single day — then this essay is for you. Not to fix you. Not to give you a self-help roadmap. But because I think we deserve to understand what is actually happening to us, and why, and who is responsible for it.

Spoiler: it is not entirely our fault.

II. What Is Actually Happening in Your Head

Let me explain the psychology first, because I think it helps to name it.

When you wake up, your brain is in what researchers describe as a hypnagogic transitional state — the fog between sleep and full wakefulness. In this state, your cognitive defences are down. You have not yet picked up your phone, loaded your task list, or distracted yourself with anything. Your mind, in that raw unguarded moment, defaults to whatever emotional material it has not resolved.

For many of us, that unresolved material is loneliness.

What follows — the looping, the re-feeling, the way the thought comes back during idle moments between classes, or late at night when there is nothing left to do — has a clinical name. It is called rumination. Rumination is when your mind circles a painful or unresolved thought repeatedly, not to solve it, but because it does not know how else to process something it cannot yet change.

The problem with ruminating about being single is that no amount of thinking about it produces a partner. The thought loop offers no resolution because the resolution is not something your mind can generate on its own. So it keeps running. It surfaces at breakfast, at the back of the lecture hall, during loading screens, during prayer, during that moment when you put your phone down and there is no notification waiting. Your brain fills every available silence with its loudest unanswered question: when will I stop being alone?

This is not a character flaw. This is not you being weak or obsessive or broken. This is what happens when a genuine human need goes unmet for a long time, and your nervous system has not figured out how to stop searching for it.

There is also something called touch starvation — or skin hunger — that rarely gets talked about in Malaysian public conversation, but is very real. Human beings are wired for physical affection. Not just sex. Physical presence. A hand on a shoulder. A hug that lasts long enough to actually mean something. Being held when you are sad. These are neurological needs, not luxuries. When you go without physical affection for extended periods, your body registers it as a form of deprivation. Studies have found that touch starvation is associated with increased anxiety, depression, difficulty sleeping, and a weakened immune response.

Think about that. Your body is literally registering the absence of affection as a health condition.

When I think about the number of young Malaysians — especially young men, who are rarely given spaces to talk about needing warmth and closeness — walking around in a state of chronic touch starvation, I feel something between sadness and anger. Because this is a need we have pathologised. We have made it embarrassing to admit. A man who says “I just want someone to hold me” is treated as weak, or desperate, or creepy. So he stays quiet. He wakes up with the weight of it. He carries it to class. He never says it out loud.

I am saying it out loud now.

III. The System Did This

Here is where I want to be clear about something: the loneliness epidemic among young Malaysians is not primarily a personal failure. It is a structural one.

Let me walk you through what we have been handed.

You are a young Malaysian. You want to marry someday. You want a companion, a home, a stable life with someone who knows you. These are reasonable, human, ancient desires. Across every culture and religion and century, people have wanted this. It is not asking too much.

But here is what you need, according to the culture around you, before you are considered ready to even begin:

A car. Ideally your own, ideally not too old.

A house, or at least a serious plan to own one.

A stable income — not just enough to survive, but enough to “provide.”

A wedding. Not a small quiet ceremony between two people and their close family. A wedding. A hall. Hundreds of guests. Catering. A photographer. A videographer. Door gifts. A bersanding, a reception, possibly two receptions — one for each family. Hantaran that signals respect and seriousness. A dress. A suit. Decorations.

The estimated cost of a modest Malaysian wedding sits somewhere between RM20,000 and RM50,000. For many families, it climbs far higher. And this is considered normal. This is considered the minimum threshold for beginning a life with someone you love.

Now look at the economic reality sitting next to that expectation.

Median household income in Malaysia hovers around RM5,000–6,000 per month — and that is household income, meaning two earners combined in many cases. Fresh graduates enter the workforce earning RM2,000–2,500 in many sectors. Property prices in urban centres have risen so far beyond wage growth that home ownership for young Malaysians under 35 is increasingly a generational impossibility rather than a delayed milestone. Kuala Lumpur. Kota Kinabalu. Penang. Johor Bahru. Across the country, the gap between what young people earn and what a “respectable” life requires has widened into something that looks less like a gap and more like a cliff.

You are being asked to stand at the bottom of that cliff and jump.

And when you cannot make the jump, the culture does not ask whether the cliff is too high. It asks what is wrong with you.

IV. The Marriage Checklist Nobody Voted For

Let us talk specifically about the inflated expectations around marriage, because I think this is where a lot of young Malaysian men in particular are being quietly crushed.

There is an unwritten rule — transmitted through family conversations, through social media, through the way women are advised by their mothers and aunties — that a man must be financially established before he deserves to be considered a life partner. He must have a car. He must be buying or have bought a house. He must have a career trajectory that looks stable. He must be able to “support a family.”

This rule did not come from nowhere. It came from a generation where one income genuinely could support a family, where a man at 25 could reasonably be expected to own a car and be saving for a house, where the economics of family formation were actually achievable. That world no longer exists. But the expectations it produced are still with us, now sitting on top of an economy that has made them structurally impossible for most people.

So what happens?

Men delay. They tell themselves they are not ready yet. They set internal benchmarks — when I have RM50,000 saved, when I get promoted, when I own a car outright — and those benchmarks keep moving because the economy keeps moving. They hit 25, then 27, then 30, still telling themselves they are not ready. The standard was never realistic. But they keep trying to meet it.

Women, on the other side, receive a different but equally damaging set of messages. They are told not to settle. They are told their standards should be high. They are told a man who cannot provide is a man who does not respect them. This is framed as self-worth, but in practice it functions as a filtering mechanism that excludes a large percentage of genuinely good, caring men whose only crime is being young and poor in a system that has made young people poor.

The result is a standoff that nobody consciously chose. Two groups of people who want the same thing — companionship, warmth, a life shared with someone — standing on opposite sides of a wall that the economy and culture built between them, wondering why they cannot seem to connect.

And then there is the wedding itself.

I want to be specific about this because I think the performative nature of Malaysian weddings deserves direct criticism. The large wedding — the hundreds of guests, the elaborate setup, the documentation of every moment — is not primarily about the couple. It is a social performance for the extended family and community. It is about what the family looks like to other families. It is about the parents' reputation, the community's approval, the visible signal that a family has done things properly.

The couple getting married is almost secondary.

This is not unique to Malaysia. It happens across many cultures. But in Malaysia, the social pressure to perform the wedding correctly is intense enough that young couples and their families go into significant debt to fund it. RM50,000 on a single day. For two people who are just trying to start their life together.

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said — and I say this not to impose a religious framework but because it is genuinely good advice regardless of your faith — that the most blessed marriage is the one with the least burden. The ease of marriage was considered virtuous. The making-it-hard was considered a problem. Somewhere between that wisdom and what Malaysian wedding culture has become, something went very wrong.

V. Sabah, and the Weight We Carry Here

I want to say something specifically about those of us in Sabah, because our experience of being young and struggling carries layers that peninsular Malaysians do not always have to carry.

Sabah is one of the richest states in terms of natural resources in Malaysia. We have oil. We have timber. We have some of the most biodiverse land and sea in the world. We have agricultural output. And yet we consistently rank among the poorest states in terms of human development, income, and infrastructure. The roads are not what they should be. The hospitals are stretched. The salaries are lower. The cost of imported goods is higher because everything has to come from further away.

This is not an accident. This is the consequence of MA63 — the Malaysia Agreement 1963 — being systematically hollowed out over decades. The agreement that brought Sabah and Sarawak into Malaysia came with protections, with promised autonomy, with a share of resources. Much of that has been eroded. Sabahans and Sarawakians have watched their land's wealth flow outward while the people on the ground remain underserved.

When I talk about young Malaysians struggling to build lives, struggling to afford marriage, struggling to find stability — I am talking about all young Malaysians. But I am especially talking about those of us in Sabah, where structural injustice is not just economic theory but daily lived reality. Where indigenous land rights are contested. Where the promises of federation were made and then quietly broken. Where young people leave — to KL, to Singapore, to wherever the opportunity is — because staying often means stagnating.

To be young, single, and Sabahan is to carry not just personal loneliness but a kind of collective one. The loneliness of a place that has been overlooked. The loneliness of belonging to communities whose histories and languages and land systems are still fighting for recognition. The loneliness of knowing your home is beautiful and rich and worthy, and watching the systems around it fail to honour that.

I carry that too. In the same chest where I carry the longing for someone to hold me.

VI. Those Who Seem Fine

Here is something that used to bother me.

I would look at other people my age — especially the ones who were single, who did not seem to be in any rush, who appeared to just be living without that constant background hum of longing — and I would feel a strange mix of admiration and alienation. How are you okay with this? How do you wake up and just get on with your day without feeling it?

I have come to understand that there are actually a few different things happening with people who seem fine being single.

Some genuinely are. They have either resolved the need through other sources of connection — deep friendships, close family, a rich community life — or they have, through temperament or experience, genuinely made peace with their solitude and found it nourishing rather than depleting. These people are real and we should not dismiss them.

Some have numbed themselves. Years of unmet longing, combined with repeated disappointments or societal pressure, have produced a kind of emotional callus. They are not fine. They have just stopped admitting, even to themselves, that they are not fine. This is a coping mechanism. It works in the short term. It costs something in the long term.

Some are performing. Social media has produced an entire aesthetic of the contented single person — the solo traveller, the person who “loves their own company,” the girlboss or the self-made man who does not need anyone. Some of this is genuine. A lot of it is armour. People post the brunch for one and do not post the 2am when they wished someone was there.

And some — perhaps more than we acknowledge — are rationally opting out. They have looked at the cost of marriage in this country, in this economy, in this cultural climate, and they have decided the price is too high for what is being offered. This is not cynicism. This is a rational response to an irrational system. When the entry cost to a relationship is a RM30,000 wedding, a car, a house, and the performance of financial success — and the divorce rate is still rising anyway — some people decide they would rather not play.

I understand all of these positions. I am not judging any of them.

But I also know that wanting someone is not something to be ashamed of. The desire for companionship, for physical warmth, for a person who is genuinely for you — this is not weakness. It is one of the most honest things a human being can feel.

VII. The Idle Moment Problem

There is a specific texture to this kind of loneliness that I want to describe accurately.

It is not constant. That is the strange thing. When I am busy — genuinely engaged with something, in a class I care about, building something on my computer, involved in a conversation that matters — I do not feel it. The longing does not dominate. There is enough other signal that the background noise recedes.

It is in the gaps that it returns.

The ten minutes between tasks. The bus ride. The time after dinner when there is nothing scheduled. The moment when I put my phone down and there is no next thing immediately demanding my attention. The seconds before sleep. The first seconds of waking.

The brain, it turns out, does not like unstructured silence when it has unresolved material. In the absence of external input, it defaults to its most emotionally charged open questions. And if your most charged open question is why am I alone and when will that change — then every idle moment becomes an opportunity for that question to run.

Researchers who study this call it the “default mode network” — the neural circuitry that activates when you are not focused on external tasks. It is the part of your brain that processes self-referential thinking, past experiences, future concerns, and social relationships. For many people, this network, when left to run unchecked, gravitates toward worry and longing rather than peace and contentment.

This is why advice like “just stop thinking about it” does not work. You cannot instruct your default mode network to choose different content. What you can do is give it less opportunity to dominate — through meaningful occupation, through physical movement, through practices like prayer and reflection that redirect the network's energy toward something larger than your own unresolved wants.

This is not suppression. It is redirection. There is a difference.

The longing does not disappear. It gets placed. You acknowledge it — yes, I want this, the wanting is real and valid — and then you set it aside not by denying it but by choosing to be present in the moment that is actually happening, rather than the future moment where the longing might be resolved.

This is easier said than done. I am not going to pretend otherwise. But it is a real skill and it can be built.

VIII. What We Actually Need

I want to be honest about what I think young Malaysians like me actually need, because I think the conversation usually goes wrong at this point by offering either false hope or useless advice.

We do not need to be told to “love ourselves first.” This is not wrong exactly, but it is incomplete, and it is often deployed as a way of telling people to stop wanting connection — as if wanting a partner is a sign of insufficient self-love rather than a sign of being a normal human being with normal human needs.

We do not need to be told to “focus on your career.” Many of us are already doing that. The career is not a substitute for companionship. It is a different thing. You can be professionally capable and personally lonely at the same time. Many people are.

We do not need to be told that “the right person will come when you stop looking.” This is statistically not how relationships form. Relationships form through proximity, through repeated contact, through social contexts where people meet and interact. Passivity is not a strategy.

What we actually need is more honest than any of that.

We need the financial and housing conditions that make early family formation possible again. We need wages to catch up with reality. We need affordable housing that does not require a decade of saving before you can even think about starting a life. We need policy that treats young people as citizens with futures rather than economic units with productivity metrics.

We need a wedding culture that stops performing wealth and starts honouring connection. A quiet nikah attended by the people who actually matter is not a lesser wedding. It is, arguably, a more honest one.

We need social spaces — real ones, not just apps — where people can meet organically, without the transactional pressure of dating culture. Community spaces. Third places. Neighbourhood life. The kind of infrastructure of ordinary human gathering that urbanisation and screen culture have steadily dismantled.

And we need — perhaps most urgently — the permission to talk about this honestly. The permission for young men to say “I am lonely and I want to be held” without being shamed. The permission for young women to admit that the checklist they were given is making them lonelier too. The permission to name the system's failure without internalising it as personal failure.

IX. This Is Not the End of the Essay, It Is the Middle of the Story

I want to close with something that is not a resolution, because I do not have a resolution. I am still single. I still wake up some mornings with the weight of it. I still feel it in the idle moments. I still look at the numbers — the cost of weddings, the price of houses, the wages of fresh graduates — and feel the gap between what I want and what the system makes possible.

But I have also come to understand a few things that help me carry it differently.

The wanting is not the problem. The wanting is honest. The wanting is human. I want someone to know me and choose me and be present with me. That is a good want. That is the kind of want that, when it finds its object, produces genuine lives of shared meaning. I am not wrong for having it.

The system is the problem. Not entirely — human complexity means relationships are never purely about economics or policy. But the barriers between young Malaysians and the stable, connected lives they deserve are largely structural. They were built by specific decisions, specific failures of governance, specific cultural distortions of what marriage is supposed to be. They can, in principle, be dismantled. Not by individuals — but by communities, by political will, by the kind of honest public conversation that names the problem accurately.

And the present is still real. I have work I care about. I have communities I belong to. I have a mind that can build things and write things and understand things. I have a faith that is slowly becoming my own, not inherited but chosen, which means it means more. I have a place — Sabah, Borneo, the land that made me — that is worth fighting for. I have a life that is happening right now, not waiting to begin when the longing gets resolved.

The longing is part of the life. Not a waiting room outside of it.

If you are reading this on some morning when the weight arrived before you were ready for it — before the coffee, before the day started, before you had the defences to carry it lightly — I want you to know that I understand exactly what that feels like. And I want you to know that it does not mean something is wrong with you.

It means you are alive, and honest, and still hoping.

That is not nothing.

That is, actually, quite a lot.

Written somewhere in Sabah, Malaysia, by a young person who is still figuring it out.

If this landed for you — share it with someone who might need to read it.