the spit of sleep deprived brain

what a sentence from a dead man did on a saturday morning

originally posted on my substack page here on JUL 25, 2026

i used to say that i only get to have one week in a month to feel good. about myself, about my life, about my body. i was thinking if it’s the default that women has. and then i thought maybe it’s just me and some undiagnosed conditions in my body. on a better days, i can think of it as something that i can set. like the body clock thing that people talked about. or like the concept of reframing thought. and all that well-being advice you can get for free on the internet.

i’ve been sleep deprived for at least the past month. it’s not that i’m looking for a reason to deny my feeling. because i’m not. but maybe the lack of sleep and the recalibrating that clock in my body have a cost that i need to pay; being emotional. in the sense of simple stuff can heat up my eyes and make me cry. in the shape of huge dark cloud over my head hiding storm inside it.

this morning i woke up at 10am. not by myself. not by the alarm. but by repeated holler of my name. i had my eyes a little swollen and the bright tone of the room pinched my eyeballs. i made my coffee and enjoy a slow-late-morning. in between the gradually clean the house and doing my favorite thing on the weekend, i pick up the book a really good friend gave me as a present. The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. here’s where the roller coaster of that one week in a month thing, the sleep deprived brain, and the clock adjusting self gets her moment.

there was a line on the early pages that talked about childhood.

why didn’t i stay child forever? why didn’t i die there, in one of those moments, caught by my classmates’ mischief and the as-if-unexpected arrival of my teachers? today i can’t do this. today i only have reality that i can’t play with. (the book of disquiet, fernando pessoa)

i instantly got my eyes wet. the way he described the …sharp, useless longing gnawing at me like regret. something in me burnt. my chest felt full of something that i can’t quite name. and i decided to call my mother.

we only talked for less than ten minutes. but what i so urgently feel the need to tell her was that i learned a lot about myself lately. i unlearned a bunch too. i discovered and unfold different things about me. she smiled and said, “now that’s another part of growing up, you’re almost 34 and it’s getting better.”

when the call disconnected, i stared at the ceiling for a bit. i felt the sense of relief but i can still feel this brume—a warm kind—growing thicker inside my chest. i can feel that my heart throb differently. the flow of oxygen is not so smooth from my lungs to the sleep deprived brain. i’m happy. i’m sad. i’m fulfilled. but i believe something is still missing. too.

but it’s true. i learned a lot of new things about myself. for instance, i thought i was afraid of heights. but when i was up the trees in the middle of a forest, Pedra Amarela Campo Base in Alcabideche, Portugal, i was so light-footed and frisky. putting my one foot in front of the other, swinging on the wired logs and stairs. i walked briskly. like a little monkey whose life was always on the trees. i looked down to the ground, i was high up, and i wasn’t afraid. in fact, the sight of the distance between my head to the ground poured me with the sense of comfort.

Gladiolus Italicus, Gherardo Cibo - BL Add. Ms. 22332

what was that? finding out that you are something else when you always thought the other way around. it did something to me. the same way i found out that apparently, i love cleaning the house while i thought i was having foreboding reaction to the idea of doing chores.

is it the same with realizing that all this time you weren’t that depressed after all.

all you need is a genuine connection, the sense of community, the feeling of being welcomed and accepted where you can be yourself and not afraid of showing parts of yourself that you’ve been hiding for more than half your life?

so “one week in a month is all i can get to feel good” was a myth. i can narrate my life better in my head. i can take something dreamy that is not a part of my daily reality as part of my life too. now that i write it, organizing all of this thought, this very second, the brume inside my chest started calming down. the cloud over my head is fading away.

i hope this stays. like the memories i keep from childhood. like the warmth that i keep with me from my short time in the place i never thought i would ever step my foot at. like the grit i have engraved on my soul.

i hope you can get what i’m trying to say with this long stream of consciousness. i hope you feel what it feels like to be 34 and have a lot to learn still but genuinely being appreciative of everything.

Strangers in My Commute

I would call myself an observer. A passive observer. I watch people. I judge them in my heart. And most days than not, I feel deep sympathy for strangers. I like to narrate their life in my head. Like talking in their voice as they walk in front of me while we share the air. Providing a voice over their heads while I'm sitting on the train like now.

The sun is golden at this hour. The rays are closer to orange than red. Oftentimes, I'd romanticize life when the sky is looking this clear and the sun is being nice like this.

A guy standing in front of me is wearing a neat white shirt and navy pants. His bag looks heavy. He must be carrying a laptop inside. Could he be an insurance agent who just convinced a retired teacher to renew her policies? But then what is the story behind those two lines between his brows? A stress? A loud thoughts? Oh maybe he’s an over thinker who thinks that when people are whispering near him they are probably talking about the way he talks. He looks like a Rico. Yes. Let’s name him Rico. Rico might not be aware of this, but he’s a lucky guy with a nicely shaped forehead. It’s rare for a guy to have that shape that compliments their look.

I shift my gaze towards the girl standing in front of the train door. She has big headphones on. Like the size of each pad is probably one fourth the size of her head. She nods in rhythm. I look over her feet. She’s tapping it. The parachute trousers she’s wearing have an extra pocket behind the knee fold. She probably is a customer service agent working for a company that makes their way around to not give an increment this year. The girl looks like the name “Sandra” fits her. Sandra probably reads books. Maybe two books in a year because during her commute she decides to scroll on tiktok. The way her shoulder is looking tense makes me think of a financial struggle she carries. Oh. To be young and trapped in the system!

I sigh. Give my eyes a break and watch the city line moving on the window. I love to imagine how the train is standing still and the world around it is the one that’s moving. The sun has gone lower. The cumulonimbus visible behind the buildings is now grazed with thick orange that looks like the margin of a bonfire sight.

I visualize a string of light popping from on top of my head and connecting me to Sandra. “Sometimes you may envy people for not having money problems. Some of those people, well, they envy you for having money as your only problem. Remember that.” I whisper in my mind. Hoping that the string of light can relay the message to Sandra.

The train door opens. This is my stop. I close my note book where I jot down the observations and walk outside. I put my ear pod in to drown the thought that I have, that my observer could not guess.

A Dreamer’s Dream for A Dream

I’m a dreamer. Not the kind where I have a dream to build a house where I can put all my family in one place—so that I don’t have to take a flight just to spend a few days with them. I’m a dreamer in the sense that when I go to sleep, my mind will start presenting bits and pieces of my life into a sequence and roll them with some editing and choices of genre. That kind of dream.

I had all kinds of dreams; One night, I was dreaming about a cooking school that got bombed (I can’t really tell this one now because of The Last Harvest). I wrote it down in my dream journal. A few months later, I wrote an opening scene for that dream in a first person POV. I wrote it down with a mechanical pencil I just bought, in a notebook I felt like I don’t really like. So once I finished writing–probably got distracted and forgot what I was doing–and put the book down, I forgot about it until last year. That’s when I realize that this could be something, and that the story is too big to be abandoned and not being loud about.

Now I’m dreaming of making this dream into a book. I got a hundred and fifty pages in the draft now. And I’m so proud of it. But that is not the reason why I write this piece. I want to tell a story, about a story, that teaches me about some lesson.

Lesson Number 1

So the world has been crazy since the beginning of 2026 if not since the last decades. I think we as human beings, collectively are experiencing–what I would call–an unfriendly weather inside our head. Well, let me just speak for myself. I’ll rephrase that: I have been experiencing dark clouds inside my head for quite a while. And for some reason, I tend to forget that my soul needs something to channel the anger, the grief and everything else into. Which in my case, writing.

When I started working on The Last Harvest, the cloud in my head started getting thinner and a little bit of light started creeping in. It's not so dark nowadays. It’s not like the storm is brewing inside it anymore. So writing, as I knew before, and had to relearn the hard way, is the simple and cheap cure. It’s a tool. To get through commuting without breaking any windows. To get through the day without screaming good profanities to strangers on the side walk. To get through the week without feeling the pull to find the lake where all the poets went to die.

The lesson mostly is for me though. Maybe it can work for someone else too. If writing is not your cup of tea, just believe me when I say that it works all the same with whatever your tea is. Simply put, art is the way.

Lesson Number 2

I find myself rushing in everything that I do. I rush myself leaving the bed when I wake up. I rush myself to make coffee in the morning to jump start the routines. I rush producing my words when I talk. Sometimes it makes me sound blubbering. I rush at everything I know that it’s not healthy. My nerves must’ve been fried by now. I don’t know.

But this rushing tendency is not only for physical activities or routines. I tend to rush my stories as well. Like when I start something, I find that I can’t wait for the end product. It makes me want to do things quickly, so I abandoned the development. Most of the time. This is one of the reasons why I can never finish a whole story without getting distracted on doing another piece. I just can’t wait.

The Last Harvest is different. Maybe because I love the character so much I don’t want to ruin their arc. Maybe the story is so dear to my heart I want it to be good so that I start taking my time. I enjoy the process more. I take my reading sessions about corn as the process of writing. When I watch the storm from my apartment window and internalize the spit of rain touching the glass, I take it as a writing process too. When I mindfully sit and listen to my loved ones talking, I call it a writing process too.

The Last Harvest, my third baby, taught me something important. That writing is not all about sitting and running my fingers over the keyboard to produce ten thousands of words into pages. Writing is me. When I wake up every morning and think about Suri and her sketches, it’s writing. When I put my head on the pillow and try to sleep and the voice of Alex plays in my head, it’s writing too. Taking notes of my friend Daniel’s insights and jokes is also part of the process.

Patience, taking time, and enjoying the process, is what I believe will make The Last Harvest Better than anything I’ve ever written.

Lesson Number 3

In between my work days and the weekend, last week, I made time to listen to a podcast of a friend. A podcast where he narrates my poems and prose. It has been years since the last time I heard or read the piece. So when I heard Reza Romano pronounce every word from my poem with a little bit of music in the background, I found myself crying. I thought to myself “who wrote that?” Because it sounds so beautiful and honest. And then I remember how I felt when I wrote the words, I wasn’t proud of what I made. I thought it was a mediocre line of yearning. But after spending years away from it, I can see it from afar and remove the criticism in my head when I listen to it, from someone else’s mouth.

The lesson was, we, I, can be the worst critics of our own creation. We think we can judge and look for the worst part of something, because we think we’re not hurting ourselves in the process. We’re not being fair to ourselves about our creation. Most of the time. At least in my case.

With The Last Harvest, I try to just pour myself into the pages. I just write everything as honestly as I can and not reread everything before I put myself away for sometime. The Last Harvest, as important as it is to me, taught me that to give birth to a good piece of art, I need to separate the editor and the writer in my head. They each can have their own time to be activated.

I wrote this for me. For someone like me, who happens to find this page in the middle of a struggle making their dream come true. For someone looking for a way to bring their imagination bleeding their way into our world. So that we remember, it’s not just about the end product, it’s about the process and what it taught you. Us.

The Songs That Raised Me Still Know How to Comfort Me

Have you ever felt a choke in your throat that can only be relieved by warm drops falling from the corner of your eyes? Or do you ever experience the big lump burning inside your chest but instead of hurting, it makes your whole body feel like in that strange, graceful trance nostalgia brings?

When I decided to sit down and write this, I had this overwhelmingly good–nostalgic–warm feeling that resulted in tears shed. Not once, not twice.

Before bed, I was humming a tune and started singing, “Susan… Susan… Besok gede mau jadi apa…” and had this serious will to find the whole discography of Kak Ria Enes and Susan on music streaming platforms. I was so absurdly happy when I found Kak Ria Enes and Susan on Apple music. So then I decided to listen to my favorite song, Susan Masuk Sekolah before really trying to sleep.

Let me take you back to 12 hours before this morning (when I wrote this).

I didn’t expect that the first tune of that song would make me cry. The kind of cry that you don’t understand why. The kind of cry that makes your heart filled with this happiness but it feels far away. The kind that makes you feel full, but empty. The kind that makes you long for something, but you just couldn’t point out what specific thing is that longing for.

And then I was like, okay, maybe I’m in quite a hormonal imbalance and decided to listen to Kak Ria and Susan when I’m in a good state. I betrayed that commitment because on my way to work this morning, I listened to them. The whole Volume 3 and Susan Masuk Sekolah album. I knew this would put a lump in my throat and choke me with these feelings that I think I’m familiar with but not sure how to handle without crying like a baby.

I was probably around 2-3 years old when I first listened to Kak Ria Enes and Susan. I kept getting back to the old blue cassette when I was 5 to 7 years old. I remember how me and my older brother would sit around our old fading black Polytron tape player to listen to it and dance to Si Monod song.

But returning to it at 32, on a bus to work, felt different. And I’m not sure if this will work the same way with other 90s kids, but for me, my Susan moment was so therapeutic in the most nostalgic way. It lights up my drained exhausted soul. It sparks my sleeping hope back to life. It gives me this euphoric feeling because I smiled from ear to ear from the lyrics and Susan’s behavior. It makes me feel calm through Kak Ria’s soothing voice.

And then when I stopped, it brings me to this conclusion:

Listening to your childhood songs as an adult is another way to get in touch with your inner child. And when you can make a good reflection while in that state, you heal another part of that scared little kid inside of you. In my case, I get to see something in life, from the perspective of a brave–full of energy–little me. At least for the whole duration of Punya Cita-cita song.

Now I’m about to turn 33 in a week. And I think I will get back to Kak Ria and Susan once in a while for every time I feel like the world has given me too much stuff to think about. Because it will take me back to that time; the time when I don’t really understand how the world works that it makes everything possible in my mind and because of that I get to dream of every little dream I might have without the fear of losing it in a blink of an eye.

Oh to be a kid and not knowing. To be a kid, and believe that the world is gonna treat you right. To be a kid, and think you’re going to make it when you’re old enough. To be a kid, inside a 33 years old body and still have that faith–that everything is going to work out in my favor.

The Grief of An Indonesian

I am a nobody. Not in the sense of not having a name or identity or existence, like the Face-less cult's No One in the Game of Thrones world. But, yes, I am a nobody. Still, with all of this nothingness, I'm entitled to have an overwhelming feeling—a compilation of anger, disappointment, hopelessness, sadness, and all kinds of them.

This is a ranting piece. It's a morning page I should just keep to myself, but I believe someone out there might have similar thoughts.

A funny quiz, sobering reality…

For starters, a couple of years ago, I found a random tweet from the good old Twitter before that petty man took over the platform. It was just a funny one about counting your privilege points. You started with 1,000 points, and from each aspect, you got a minus score. For example, being a woman took out 200 points, being the oldest daughter took out another 200, being born into a non-rich family took another, and so on. There was this one aspect that I thought would take a lot of points, but it didn't. Instead, what made the final score minus 3,000 was being an Indonesian. I laughed.

I was taking the quiz as a random thing you do to pass the time because I wasn't taking it seriously. But now, with everything that's happening in my country, I can't help but think back to that score.

The pull of home

God, I love my country. I love Indonesia. I can't even begin to describe how I always cry during the independence day ceremony and when the anthem plays. I love my country so much that it feels natural to compare everything I find outside of it with what we have back home.

I haven't really traveled far or to many places, but as much as I enjoyed a quick trip to Penang, my head kept comparing the sand on their beach with our beaches on the west coast of Indonesia. The food? Don't even get me started. Nowhere in this world would we have food as amazing as what we have in Indonesia.

I love Indonesia. No matter how far I go to roam the earth and experience a lot of things, I still dream of spending my old days there. I dream of the small town where I grew up with its beautiful rows of hills and mountains, with the lake behind my grandma's place, and the beach with pine trees and white sand. I dream of the local market that has everything fresh.

I love my country, even in this current situation where I don't even know if it's going to get better or if we're doomed to have it worse. So here I am, with the cost of having this feeling: a different kind of broken heart.

Broken hearted but different

A few days ago, I was talking with someone about this situation. We agreed that we have a strange feeling that somehow feels like being heartbroken, but different. It almost feels like grief, but there's a peck of anger hiding in between. It's like a part of you is hurting, and you don't realize it has been affecting the whole system in your body until it's too big of a mess.

A collective ache

Now, in response to that specific part, I have a theory that has been playing in my mind all this time. Someone has probably said this somewhere, and I'm just here being inside my bubble, thinking it's a new thought. But here it is: No matter where we are, we all have this invisible thread from our feet connecting us to our motherland. Of course we're feeling this way lately because our homeland is hurting, our people are suffering, and they are all part of our system.

But I'm a nobody. What I say or do isn't going to make a big change. Hence, all I can do is keep an eye out for updates and news from my country and share the good information as much as I can. No matter how much my brain hates the news and how badly it has been impacting my well-being, my heart keeps wanting to be fed with these things because I care a lot.

The helplessness of distance

As a nobody, I'm also entitled to feel irrelevant rage about all of this. For example, how the price of a short flight to my hometown is skyrocketing so much that I might have to cancel my plan to be with my family in this time of crisis. I am a nobody, remember? A crazy number outside of my affordability isn't going to work with my situation. But who can make it work? All of these people, who decided that this is the right time to travel to Indonesia because it's a cheap country to travel to, and the currency will make them feel like kings and queens, resulting in an illogical price for the flight.

A simple hope

Oh, God, it's so bad. I wanted to write this as a letter to whoever has the power to fix things in my country because somehow, one day, it will reach them. But then I remember, if thousands of people were marching, hundreds of people were speaking out, and dozens died, yet nothing was done, what would this long rant do?

This nobody, at the end of the day, can only hope. Not that much hope, just a simple one: that we who are connected with this invisible thread on our feet can survive this time and heal together as time will answer that one question: Will our country ever get better?

The Tax of Getting By: What Does a Flawed World Demand of Us?

What is the cost of living in a world with a faulty system?

Sanity? If that's the price, no wonder you see so many people losing it even before they hit 30.

Kindness? If that's another cost, then it totally clicks why so many folks are being jerks.

Excitement? If that's part of the bill, it explains why I'm losing interest in the little things, like getting hyped about new movies or wanting to go do stuff outside.

This is why an extra day off for the weekend like today is so precious to me. Because I get to be away from the crazies outside. I get to be away from having to deal with mean people all over the town, and I get to be on my own in my own place, doing the thing that I want to be doing but never really have time to do.

Gosh, did I just take a super long break from writing, like actually sit my ass down to rant about something in the forms of written words? And what does it take for me to really start writing again? Weeks of being exhausted with so many questions that need to be answered?

Here's some serious questions: aren't all of you starting to feel it? The exhaustion that you can't understand, and when you try to fix it, you can't even figure out where that came from? Is it physical? Or is it what's in your mind?

Those people who party all the time, who have all the energy to hang out and talk to people, who travel a lot, who go to the mall every day, who—I don't know, everything that you do that I don't—aren't you tired?

And if you don't, please tell me how you do that, because man, I have been tired for the last couple of months, and I don't know if traveling or a full day spa could fix it.

It's 2025, and the unsettling truth is that many of us feel the world is designed to set us up to fail, leaving us drained and too exhausted to pursue anything beyond basic survival. This feeling is starkly illustrated by the limited time we actually have. Consider this: a 40-hour work week, combined with a daily one-hour commute and seven hours of sleep, leaves only eight hours. Subtract another hour for meals and an hour for essential personal care, and we're down to six. Within that six-hour window, we must still find time to connect with loved ones, maintain our homes, prepare food, and handle other necessities, leaving, at best, a mere four hours for ourselves.

Some people can use that 4 hours to go to the gym, to run, to prepare healthier food, to make art, to do a community-based project, to plan a trip, to hang out with their friends, to go above and beyond to find a place to be in nature, or even to do a side hustle. And for that, I really have a genuine and humble question: how do you do that? How do you have all that energy?

Because in my case, I keep dreaming of living in a remote place, owning a huge land to just farm and grow my own food far from the city, far from the world, so I can live in a hush, without all the rush. And if I'm the only one that feels this way, I refuse to believe that it's a me problem because there must have been something that I have been missing about the secret of going through everything in the world that is controlled by the people who ruin everything.

So, tell me, if there's a way to shake off this perpetual exhaustion, I'm all ears. Because how can one truly feel vibrant and alive when the world stage is riddled with conflict? How can one feel at peace while navigating a capitalist system that constantly whispers of inadequacy and the threat of being swept under?

But if it's not just me, then maybe I have something to say about this being totally wiped out —God, I just want to sleep —state. Because if we can't force ourselves to have that energy those party people or gym buddies have, we can just be couch potatoes and rot in bed if we want.

If we don't have the time to make our art, if we can't get ourselves to run or cook a healthy meal, we can just order takeout and count our usual steps as our exercise. If we feel like we don't want to be around people or we just can't stand being in public space because hearing all those noises makes our brain glitching, we can just be in our own space and put on our favorite music—because we still have to go to work to pay those bills that keep going up—while we're out. If we feel like we can only do so much and go so far, then so be it.

Like Katie Gavin said, "some days you do your best, some days you do what gets you out of bed," and I think that sums up everything I've been trying to write and figure out with all these questions.