2014 had been a ride.

I have not been back home (to Malaysia) this year, focusing most of my energy in work and recovering from a breakup.

In hindsight, perhaps it has been tough – the 60-hour work weeks and returning home feeling all on my own. But I asked myself to live through every moment of exhaustion and heartaches, of fear and panic attacks, of making decisions that I didn’t fully understand and mending mistakes that came shortly afterwards, of loneliness and building new relationships, of being confused and angry, and of doing them again, and again, and again.

Before this, I thought I knew myself well enough – and boy how much more that I’ve actually learnt! Or was it simply that I changed to become someone else through this process? Perhaps it was what they say, “still growing”?

Who knows, people, who knows? All we could do, is do it first, make sense later.

This year / particular period of my life, I call it: “Trying to be an entrepreneur”, because I was thrown into the deep end to be one.

My biography as an entrepreneur will never start with a story that goes like this: “When I was young, I bought sweets for 20p a bag and sold them for 50p each.” I was too optimistic and had too much gratitude for life to feel that I want to or can change the world; I was embedded in the beauty of art and rainbows enough to feel that money and politics were least of my concern. I thought, even till September 2014, that entrepreneurship was not in my bones.

Now we are three weeks away from 2015, and I began to wonder: maybe, just maybe, what needed to pull me through the past 49 weeks was exactly what would make me an entrepreneur. I’m far from being an instinctive one, but there was something in me that made me live through this journey with no regrets.

Sometimes I think about the only two times I learnt to surf. There were the unforgiving waves, the vastness of the ocean, and the disappointment of easily being washed onto the shore. I remember how small I felt and the fear when looking at the 2-3 metre high waves came crushing down; the glimpse of a mini rainbow right in front of me a second before the waves hit me and I went tumbling around; and how I just kept paddling out with only one thought in my head: “I will ride this wave.”

I truly loved that moment of purity – just all forces of nature, my physical self and my determination. Nothing else mattered.

2014 felt that same: amongst all the things that could engulf / had engulfed me, there was this little me with a stupid stubborness to keep paddling out, knowing that one day, through practice and experience, the fearful forces will become my best friend.

One day near future, I will be riding waves.