The Birthday Annual | Issue #1

- What I am thinking at the age of 19 -

Introduction to the "Birthday Annual" series

Welcome to yet another new series I am pushing out on this blog! In this series, I will be penning down some of the thoughts I am thinking about during my birthday, and find new strength within me to make myself even better for the next year of my life. This series will obviously be updated annually, since birthdays only come once a year.

In search of something meaningful to do for a birthday, I did a bit of research. At the personal level, people exchange well-wishes and do something enjoyable such as having a sumptuous meal. At the corporate level, company anniversaries usually include a company-wide dinner celebration, which includes banquets, entertainment and speeches. For the celebration of a nation's birthday, Singapore has a National Day Parade and a National Day Rally. For the rally, it is basically the Prime Minister showing his appreciation for our nation's accomplishments, explain government (and sometimes ground-up) initiatives to the masses and highlighting what we can do for the upcoming year.

No matter the scale, birthdays and anniversaries are clearly a time for appreciation and self-introspection. As such, I am inspired to use this blog and write out a post as a means of commemorating my birthday.

The to-do list for my 19th birthday:
- Recount the story of my birth
- Like-dislike survey
- Launching of this blog

How I appeared on this world

On this day, 19 years ago, in the wee hours of morning, I was born. How I know the time was because I vaguely recall the time of birth, 3 AM, being written on my Health Booklet, which was assigned to me when my parents registered a birth certificate for me.

Interestingly, my birth was not via the normal way. Somehow, I just did not want to leave the comfort of my mother's womb, even though I was due to come out about a month earlier. Through some procedure which I could not remember its name, I was forcefully pulled out of my mother's body.

There was an adage about everything being difficult at the start. It was quite true for my case, growing up, I suffered from a variety of ailments. To seek treatment, my parents had to fork out tens of thousands of dollars, which could be a considerable strain on their finances considering their salary then. I was quite sickly, but fortunately I made it out in one piece. By the time I was in school, the illnesses bothered me less and less.

Like-dislike survey

In order to improve myself, I posted two questions on my Instagram story to my followers - what they like about me, and what they dislike about me. Unfortunately, I am not making any headway because there was only one reply. That reply referred to me as smart and quirky. I think this opinion of me came about because I liked to use my brain for almost everything, and I tried to do things differently, questioning my assumptions until I know I have truly understood my doubts and the answer to them.

As I was serving National Service, I started a reflection activity for every training day I had ever since entering camp in March. The reflection has four components - positive experience, negative experience, gratitude and target. Recording what is positive and negative about my training day not only act as a simplified kind of diary for me, but it helped add more nuance in the way I see a training day. Gratitude helps me to remain happy as I count my blessings, and targets help me to keep looking forward, so that I can use my training time productively to improve myself.

Currently, I do not have enough data to build a profile of myself. However, I should be able to start doing up monthly summaries of my reflections to make the organising process easier. This will help me take stock of my progress and know what I need to do to sustain any improvement I see in myself.

Launching of the blog

I will be making the link to this blog easily accessible in all my social media platforms by the end of next week. This will hopefully help me clock up on pageviews and attract people who are interested to find out more about myself. I am confident that I will have a lot of interesting things to write about but I will need to have a keener eye for interesting things and be better that noting down my inspirations.

Pageviews are important for Blogger users because they allow them to qualify for AdSense, a program that puts advertisements for website and gain revenue from it. Competing with social media, an industry that is created to dominate our attention, will be very difficult. However, I believe that once I put some thought into my writing, no matter the length and what platform, I should still be able to capture people's hearts. I will get better at writing so that people will look forward to seeing my next blog post.