Tag Archives: immigrant

Healing my inner child II

Opportunity. That’s all we need to showcase our superpower and spread our caged wings.  You cannot expect one to soar in life without giving them the opportunity and the choice to show you their worth. This was brought up at a recent panel where the folks up front were speaking on the challenges of decolonisingContinue reading “Healing my inner child II”

Healing my inner child

“Healing your inner child”… I heard this term very recently and I haven’t been able to shrug it off. I never imagined my inner child as a different being which probably explains why I have always refused to answer the question: “If you could say something to 10-year-old Shawn right now, what would you say?”Continue reading “Healing my inner child”

The boy loves Barbies

Where I grew up, a real boy was preoccupied with cricket or other contact sport, was uninterested in anything remotely creative, and was outside with the other boys in the blistering heat while the girls played wedding inside the house during family parties.  I was the oldest cousin on both sides of my family. IContinue reading “The boy loves Barbies”

Finding Identity

I am not sure if most of you readers have kept up with the recent addition to this world’s extensive list of crises, the plummeting of the already fragile Sri Lankan economy. Being a 16-hour plane journey away from where your roots first saw light brings a very complicated relationship with finding one’s identity (well forContinue reading “Finding Identity”

BOOTS the house down

Alright, let’s do an activity… go to your closet, dresser, shoe rack, or even bathroom cabinet. Now pick out an item from there that you save for those feel-good moments, where when you put it on you feel on top of your game and subsequently on top of the mother-tucking world. I don’t know aboutContinue reading “BOOTS the house down”

March 2019

Trigger warning: terrorism  This week marked three years since the Christchurch terrorist attack in Aotearoa New Zealand. Words cannot describe (and certainly won’t be able to for decades to come)  the ripple this appalling act has caused the families whose loved ones were stripped from, their wider Islamic community and also to the minority communitiesContinue reading “March 2019”

Purgatory

A common thread in my self-discovery has been my relationship with religion. I was raised almost conservatively Christian, and those values and traditions still dictate my everyday routine. I guess it was all I knew. I say almost because my childhood was based in a society where the Western World was esteemed as the pinnacleContinue reading “Purgatory”

Daydreaming

Below is a wee snippet of my Master’s thesis I submitted a couple of years ago. During these very challenging couple of years completing my project for the submission, I was confronted with a series of very emotional changes in myself. Now by changes, I do not mean physically, but more changes with some veryContinue reading “Daydreaming”

Atlas II

Let’s journey back to where I was headed at the beginning of my last post… Now please don’t get me wrong, to this very day I hold no grudge or animosity toward my great-aunts, they are merely a product of their own generation and echo chambers. We are all on this boundless expedition of unlearning,Continue reading “Atlas II”