If I had 3 mere seconds to grab one thing from any part of my house, either because it’d been a victim of a deflagration or supposedly you wanted to build a mauli character in GTA6, there is only one thing you would grab, and you’d grab it with absolute certainty, the pile of papers shabilly stashed toward the right corner of my whiteboard. My sole property, capturing the essence of who I was, who I am, and a gist of who I will become. No, they aren’t neatly cut A4 sized sheets, with essays scribbled in the cursive im used to writing in, rather they’re scraps of paper, fragments of my thoughts, some yellowing in the edges, tainted with coffee stains, half-cut half crumpled from the sheer frustration of being unable to put my thoughts into words, arrows sprawled all over the sheets, flowers and mandala drawn towards the margins, pages torn from the mermaid notebook that rarely left my side when I was an overly expressive eight-year-old, oh and the thousands of other pages that’d take me forever to list. But for time’s sake, and yours I’ll save you the trouble. Together, these sheets make up several years of my life. If you sat with the nearly thousands of papers occupying the matter there, you’d be able to build me, as if I were a character from your favourite video game. Let’s suppose you rummage through it, the initial paper you’d meet isn’t me sitting with my thoughts, attempting to journal my day, trying to figure out what I learnt, or what I could do better that day, or how I was devastated that my friends weren’t talking to me. You’d probably be met with either a whopping 2 sentences rambling about whatever I was rambling about then or the other extreme, 50 pages of knee deep research into why the law refuses to claim refugees as refugees. 

Come on. Let’s take a journey through some of my most profound thoughts, or perhaps the stupidest ideas mankind has ever witnessed. I’ll let you decide which is which.

A triangular scrap of paper, asymmetrically folded and marked with a blotch of the soupy Maggi I’d scarfed down that afternoon. Across the front, in hurried handwriting, it read: “Fun fact: if you make a 30-minute mug cake in the microwave, the humming sounds suspiciously like the melody to Summer by Calvin Harris.” I must have been thoroughly convinced of this groundbreaking discovery, because I had deemed it worthy of immortalising on paper. Unfortunately, the theory didn’t survive very long. It turned out the melody wasn’t coming from the microwave at all, it was coming from the fact that my microwave was broken.

The next sheet is softer. Folded in half, the creases permanently etched into it from being opened and closed one too many times. Across the top is a date from years ago, and beneath it, in handwriting far neater than mine is today, a sentence that simply reads, “Today was horrible.” The page goes on to chronicle a friendship that ended over something I can no longer remember, an exam I thought I’d failed, and the dramatic certainty that the world had somehow chosen that Tuesday to collapse. Reading it now is almost embarrassing. Not because I was emotional, but because the catastrophe that consumed me has faded into complete insignificance. Yet tucked into the final line is a lesson I unknowingly wrote to my future self: Tomorrow exists. It is perhaps the earliest proof that I have always been learning long before I realised I was.

Somewhere underneath is a page that isn’t really a page at all. It’s the back of an old tuition worksheet, covered with a running schedule that had been rewritten so many times the pencil had begun carving grooves into the paper. Beside “Monday – 2 km” is a shaky tick, beside Tuesday an aggressively scribbled “gave up halfway,” and beneath Friday, written in darker ink, “just don’t stop.” Discipline was something I accumulated one slow kilometre at a time, one morning where I wanted to quit but laced my shoes anyway.

Another sheet is almost laughably ordinary: a page of bullet points, names crossed out, speech ideas abandoned halfway through, reminders to smile, breathe, and somehow not trip over my own feet. It was written the night before the Head Girl elections. At the time it looked insignificant, another scrap destined to disappear into the pile. Looking at it now, I realise it captured the final evening before an entirely new chapter of my life began. Funny how life’s biggest turning points rarely announce themselves with fireworks. Sometimes they arrive disguised as untidy handwriting on printer paper.

A few pages later, the paper changes entirely. Glitter still clings stubbornly to the corners, the ink is brighter, the folds more careful. Birthday letters. Some from friends I still cannot imagine life without, others from people who quietly drifted into memories. They speak of different versions of me: the loud one, the dependable one, the girl who never stopped talking, the one who always carried snacks, the one who somehow made difficult days easier. Beside them sits another page, torn straight from a mermaid notebook with tiny seashells decorating the border. It is a letter written by an overly expressive eight-year-old me to my future self. The spelling is questionable, the grammar is even worse, but one sentence survives every reread: “I hope you’re still brave.” Every now and then, when I begin doubting myself, I realise the person I owe an explanation to isn’t anyone around me. It’s the little girl who believed I could become absolutely anything.

Then there’s the project my teacher never even bothered reading. The corners are still stapled together, every page painstakingly researched, every heading carefully chosen. It was returned almost immediately because my handwriting was too messy. I realise the ideas inside it mattered far more than the presentation ever did. Ironically, those same messy thoughts would eventually become essays, blogs, research papers and speeches that people actually wanted to read.

Wedged between birthday cards and old journal entries is a faded prescription slip for my first pair of glasses. To anyone else it’s just numbers and measurements. To me, it’s the day the trees stopped being green blobs, the classroom clock finally had hands instead of circles, and I learnt that sometimes the world doesn’t become clearer because it changes, it becomes clearer because you do.

Buried much deeper is a stack that couldn’t be more different. Fifty pages, meticulously highlighted, corners dog-eared from countless revisions, each one consumed by refugee law, international conventions, climate migration, and humanitarian policy. They were born on the day I was entrusted with chairing my first Model United Nations conference. Somewhere between researching legal frameworks and drafting committee guides, I stopped pretending to be someone who merely enjoyed writing and became someone who understood what writing could do. It could inform. It could persuade. It could give shape to ideas complicated enough to change the way people saw the world. A few inches away lies a printed copy of one of my earliest blog posts. Reading it beside my recent work is almost like comparing two strangers. The words have grown steadier. The questions have grown larger. But the curiosity that began the sentence all those years ago never disappeared.

Ultimately, if you spread every page across the floor, you’d watch a person assemble herself. You’d meet the girl who changed schools and counted the days until someone knew her name. You’d watch her become confident enough to chair the same conferences that once intimidated her. You’d see opinions appear, disappear, and return in different forms. You’d notice that almost every milestone in my life first existed as handwriting before it became reality.