I'm a curious, nerdy, native Blind person from Malaysia. Happy in company, equally happy alone. People fascinate me. Animals, earth sciences, life sciences, the whole living world. Books fascinate me. Voracious reader. Lazy reader. Both, honestly.
I contain multitudes and I know I can overwhelm people with that. I'm secretive and open at the same time, brave and anxious at the same time, loving and fearful at the same time. When I get too excited, my body shakes. Uncontrollably. I no longer try to stop it. I open up easily. I see rules for their spirit, not their letter. I don't want to disagree too deeply or agree too religiously.
My mottos: seek joy everywhere. Love in the most difficult circumstances. Befriend my shadow sides, don't hide them.
Life has been generous. People have been kind. Tension, conflict, grief, disappointment: these are the pathways, not the interruptions. I am so fortunate to have been born blind and to have lived this wonderful, tasteful life. I want that for everyone. I want to do what I can to make that real.
Being blind
Being Blind with a capital B is not a medical fact or health condition alone. It's a culture, a community. Braille, TTS, screen readers at speeds that alarm sighted people, voices and their textures and rhythms, accessibility and all its contradictions. I have stimming habits: head shaking, spinning, the body doing what it needs. Not problems to fix. Just me. I also have a very good voice. People have fallen in love with it. I will neither confirm nor deny.
I'm a proud lifetime member of ACB BITS, the American Council of the Blind's Blindness Information Technology Specialists. Online learning is my fascination and ACB BITS feeds it. I take their courses and contribute where I can. I want more courses built the way Sara Soueidan builds Practical Accessibility: well-structured, accessibility-first, purchasing power parity built in. I'm looking at the Paciello Group's web accessibility resources too. After I finish the DHS Trusted Tester course, and I will finish it this time, back to Deque.
Conversation and inner life
I'm a conversationalist. Socratic questioning, the art of dialogue, frameworks for difficult conversations: all of this fascinates me. One reason psychoanalysis pulls me in is that the analytic process is, when you strip it back, a free-range conversation. Structured wandering. I hope to sit in long sessions of psychoanalysis one day, the real unhurried kind. I've done therapy before. It didn't surpass my expectations. Maybe I was too ambitious, maybe I was idealising my therapist. Either way, I haven't given up.
I've done the 36 Questions for Love with many people. Mind-flourishing, heart-deepening, every time. I recommend it without reservation.
I love commonplace books, reading diaries, journals. Writing as a way of waking up: I've explored this through Mark Matousek's journaling courses and his Seekers Forum. I took a journaling course with Linda too, have more planned. Maria Popova and the way she builds meaning across disciplines and decades. Facts collections: the human body, the earth, planets, consciousness, the undergrowth, plants, planktons. How different cultures built life hacks to understand the world. Vedic mathematics, cooking traditions, how dialects are invented, how places of worship show you a culture's beauty.
I love non-religious texts that reveal the beauty of cultures: the Tao Te Ching, the Thirukkural, Sufi texts. Sufi philosophy pulls me in: the poetry, the dissolving of the self into something larger, the way love becomes a metaphysical practice. I keep thinking about how to read religious texts like the Quran, the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita as literature, as anthropology, as mirrors of human longing.
The body, culture, and the strange
Anthropology fascinates me: how humans can be understood in so many facets. Human and animal body parts interest me as objects of curiosity and meaning. BDSM culture fascinates me, not as spectacle but as structure: the rituals, the negotiation, the ethics, the way power and care sit together. Rituals generally are a portal. They tell you what a culture values and fears.
Movement fascinates me too. Dances, martial arts traditions, physical cultures from around the world. I can't see them and I want to learn about them anyway. Tai Chi, Qigong: contemplative movement as a way of turning inward through the body. I want to explore that with my own body, especially as I prepare to rebuild physically in Singapore after ten years of diabetes and the muscle loss that came with it.
Gross, weird, underappreciated things. Human body waste, animal waste, what we can learn from what's overlooked. Mary Roach, Philip Ball, Ologies. Small histories: the kind that trace a hundred ordinary objects and find the whole world inside each one. Obscure ideas, obscure cultures, Coast to Coast AM-style conspiracies. I may not believe them. I cannot stop being fascinated by them.
Knowledge, curation, and the open web
Lifelong learning and other people's experiences are my natural habitat. I'm a Wikipedian and a proud member of WikipediaMY, the Malaysian Wikipedians group. I love other wikis too, fandoms, Harry Potter, all of it. Subscribed to thousands of subreddits just to get a little madder. Equally addicted to Substack: thousands of newsletters, most unread, all loved. The Browser is a curation treasure. Syllabus is on my list. Ghost and Buttondown eventually. My curation lives messily across Mastodon, Twitter, and occasionally Facebook. That's the garden, and it has no fence.
I'm a researcher at heart. Bibliographies, citations, the architecture of knowledge: I think mostly in citations. Maria Popova is a kindred spirit. Philosophy Without Any Gaps is a treasure. History in all its forms. I'd buy every Great Courses title if I had the money. I'd listen to all of them if I had the time. Working on both. Gumroad and Udemy are my regular haunts.
Personality and self-understanding
Personality frameworks fascinate me: the Enneagram, MBTI, the Big Five. Enneagram Type 2. Rational Optimist according to ClearerThinking. ENFP. Anxiously attached. I've been exploring the Big Five Aspect Scale through UnderstandMyself.com. What I love is finding the connecting lines between frameworks: the consensus, the disagreements, where they diverge, where they quietly agree. Not looking for the correct one. Looking for what each one can see that the others miss.
Learning, education, and building knowledge
I think a lot about learning and teaching. Talking to people makes me more honest about what I actually think. Conversation sharpens me. I'm fascinated by direct and explicit instruction, inquiry-based learning, and most recently, through Brandon's Learning Tools Substack, Kieran Egan's work. The homeschooling paradigm intrigues me.
Laura Gibbs introduced me to the Learning in Depth cohort. I met her through Jeremy Lent's Principles and Practices of Deep Transformation course. She brought me into folktales, into Nasruddin, into her Tiny Tales project, into Wikipedia devotion, into the OER movement. From there I found the open educational resources world, Archive.org, the open knowledge commons. Grateful for that thread.
The Learning in Depth immersion cracked something open. I'm still grasping the concepts. Egan's work let me appreciate ways of knowing: participatory, perspectival, others, and how learning and knowing work together. D&D and games as world building tools. How gamified concepts reach people in ways conventional pedagogy doesn't. I'm interested in chess: whether I can learn it, play it, inhabit it. Can I learn new languages? Can I learn music formally? I don't know. I intend to find out.
Linking Your Thinking (LyT) is in my orbit. I want to build a proper digital garden one day, and for that I'm learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I want to learn Python well enough to contribute to the NVDA screen reader codebase. Bash and regex are on the list. Not chores. Forms of participation in something I love.
Archivist, hoarder, maker
I'm an archivist. Old podcasts, text files, help documentation, half-forgotten corners of the internet. Zlibrary, Anna's Archive, and Libgen opened doors for me to learn and contribute in ways I otherwise couldn't. People who love languages, small webs, digital gardens, constructed languages: these are my people. Collectors, archivist, fascinators, interesters, curiositors.
Programming, the fundamentals of good design, how things are built and how they accommodate people on the margins: this pulls me. I love messiness and I love data structures and both coexist loudly in me. Practical Python, Jeff Bishop's HTML course, and I carry the habits of someone who learned JAWS scripting as a teenager just to solve their own problems. I'm disorganised. How the NUS people chose me for their PhD program, I genuinely have no idea.
Mad data hoarder. Help files, iFixit-style documentation, anything that can be preserved. I occasionally lose all of it because I don't back things up. Games, audio games, world building, how people gamify concepts to aid learning: all of this excites me.
Stories, mythology, and the trickster
My grandmother told me mythology: ancient stories, the kind that carry the world inside them. My mother read to me from the 365 Bedtime Stories books, in English and in Malay, night after night. That's where it began. The tricksters, the archetypes, the comparative mythology, Joseph Campbell, Laura Gibbs, Nasruddin: all of it has roots in those voices in the dark before sleep.
Tricksters especially. The ones who break rules to reveal deeper truths. Neither good nor evil but something more honest than both. They feel like kin.
Stories, folktales, psychoanalysis, psychology, meaning and life: I think about these constantly. I love poetry that lives in you long after the page. I've been a radical atheist, a radical social modelist, a human rights addict, a social justice warrior. Getting more fluid as I age, less radical, but all of it is still in me. Reading a lot of Jungian work lately, working through the dream interpretation course from This Jungian Life. Still struggling to get through the materials. Hope to explore that further.
Philosophy
Philosophy is where things get weird for me. Andrew Davis's Whitehead's Universe: five weeks into Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy, where reality is a web of events always becoming, not a collection of things. I'm drawn to nondualism and have been circling Ken Wilber's integral framework. Lenses I try on and refuse to take off too quickly.
Ecology, systems, and living with the world
What it means to live with the world rather than on it: this question pulls me. Common Earth long-semester training and earth literacy courses led me to the Journey of the Universe, Thomas Berry's religious naturalism, Fritjof Capra's systems thinking. Got to join his long course on The Systems View of Life. Found the Active Hope movement and Joanna Macy's work. Been part of the Earth Regenerators community with Joe Brewer. Joined the Deep Transformation Network and participated in Jeremy Lent's Principles and Practices of Deep Transformation.
Through Advaya I found Sofia Strand, joined the Kinship course, participated in Alexander Biner's Way of Knowing course. One theme was "lost": I talked about how being lost as a blind person is both fun and perplexing in ways sighted people rarely consider. I also helped the STR epistemology team develop their course, giving inputs and beta testing materials. The Slow Synthesizer course was a delight.
Communities and happiness
Communities have shaped me. The Nearness community, the Art of Difficult Conversations course by Authentic Revolution: because being good at conversation means knowing the actual moves when you're messing up and need to recalibrate. The Nearness 12-week Certificate in Happiness Studies immersion. The Happiness Study Academy. David Brooks's Art and Science of Happiness course. The Alex Howard Superconference. The Nervous System Mastery course by Jonny Miller. Matt Karamazov's time mastery work.
Rick Hanson's work has been central to my learning. I took Neurodharma and Grief and Loss with him, and I'm currently working through Rewire Your Anxious Brain. His neuroscience-based approach to well-being hits different for me.
One week in the Nearness reflective contemplative course I chose hair as my component of nature and talked about hair and its life ecosystem for seven whole minutes. That's who I am.
Going forward, I want to seek and contribute to various communities, more education, more experiments, more experiences that enrich my soul. I want to do couple therapy eventually: two to three years of it, before or during a relationship, to understand a partner and be understood in return. I want to explore psychoanalysis in its long unhurried form. Keep doing the 36 Questions for Love with anyone willing. Keep deepening.
Love, intimacy, and sexuality
I'm exploring what it means to love well and to be loved. Conscious Loving course, Rick Hanson's attachment work, Pleasure Mechanics, Gottman Connect materials: intimacy as both a science and an art. I love partner work more than working alone. Anxiously attached, I know it, sitting with that honestly, still looking for someone who wants to go to the deeper places together.
On sexuality: I'll say this plainly because not enough people do. I love phone sex. I use dating apps and explore consensual intimacy however I can find it. Access to sexuality is not equal for blind people and pretending otherwise helps nobody. The barriers are real. Sighted peers navigate Tinder and hook-up culture with an ease not available to someone who looks Blind first to most people before anything else. I have paid for company I shouldn't have had to pay for. I mourn a platform called Inclusive Planet: a social media space for disabled people around 2010 to 2012, one of the rare places where blind sexuality and community could breathe. I say this not for sympathy but for honesty.
Curators, communities, and kindred spirits
Anne-Laure Le Cunff's Ness Labs community for a year. Curiosity Collective experience, Tiny Experiments. The Latticework: Blas Moros's community for connecting big ideas across disciplines. The Seekers Forum: Mark Matousek's community for self-inquiry through writing and conversation. I want to be part of Inter Intellect one day, not yet. I somehow found myself in something called The Parallax View and I honestly don't know how I got there, which feels appropriate.
Podcast Brunch Club virtual chapters, learning from Adilia and others about appreciating podcasts more slowly and deliberately. Alex Blumberg's Power Your Podcast with Storytelling on CreativeLive. Ryan Holiday's Daily Stoic. His monthly book club mailing list. TED Talks chapters when they were running virtually. The How to Give a TED Talk course. There's something particular about making friends as an adult through structured conversations with strangers: I want more of that.
Yan Kek's icebreaking course and a lot learned about virtual facilitation: how to gather people well.
Sound, language, and music
Sound and language are things I think about a lot. The various strands of Indian classical and folk music pull me: the Carnatic tradition, the Hindustani lineage, how they meet and diverge. How different cultures build harmonies and melodies. The mixing of Western, Eastern, and Arabic sounds. How different languages converge and diverge in rules and sounds and experience. How language expands cognition and meaning. Oral storytelling and what it can actually do for human civilization: I don't think we have a real grasp on this yet.
Tamil is my native language and it is a universe, not just a tongue. The Sangam poetry tradition holds me: Akananuru, Kuruthogai, ancient love poems that feel shockingly alive. I love Tamil lyricists who are also poets. I listen to Bava Chalathurai, Jayamohan, and SRA to learn about Tamil literary fiction and I read their Tamil blogs too. And then there is Ilaiyaraaja. I was once a complete fanatic and I am still devoted. His music: the complexity, the deep harmonic weave, the fusion of Western and Eastern in ways nobody else has quite managed. Music lets me imagine myself as a loving person, as a composer. I want to be a composer even though I don't play an instrument or formally know music. That has never seemed like a reason not to want it.
Books and the life of the mind
Sci-fi, hard sciences, books that compile deeply, define carefully, explore widely, love radically. Literary fiction should live a long life. Prose in nonfiction should be collected. Listicles, learning resources, idea collections: think edge.org. Curator of curiosity. You can't predict what I'll like. I'm fascinated by everything I interact with. If you love wood, I will too.
Death, courtship, and David Attenborough
Death and how it makes us love life more. Death across the animal kingdom. Getting old, falling ill, being a baby, playing voraciously, loving devotionally. Courtship: I haven't seen it and I hope David Attenborough lives forever. I am training my voice to sound like his.
Voiceover: not the iPhone feature, but the artist. The craft of it.
Relationships and the open door
Exploring what it means to have a good romantic relationship, including multiracial love. Relationships are how we come to know and refine ourselves.
If you want to know about me, ask. I'm open to chat: calls welcome too.
How animals live their lives. How sex can be both fun and divine. How religion brings humans together. How we might understand folktales and myths the way Joseph Campbell did and go further. These fascinate me.
Professional life
LLB and MCJ from University of Malaya. Research Assistant at Monash University, conducting sensitive interviews with family members of death row inmates as part of a project on the neglected victims of death row: work alongside researcher Reyaneh that cracked something open in me permanently. At HAYAT, Project Officer and Researcher: reports for UN stakeholders on disabled individuals on death row, legal research on sentencing guidelines, advocacy materials. At ADPAN, knowledge bases on disability rights in the Malaysian criminal justice system, working through complex international legal frameworks into accessible resources. The complexity of criminal justice, the way victims' stories contain entire systems inside them: this is what drew me here and keeps me here. Digital Accessibility Training, Gender Disability Intersection Program, and Strategic Advocacy Training with NCBM and UNESCAP from 2021 to 2022. Through the Youth Advocacy Academy on Freedom of Expression at MCCHR Pusat Rakyat, I deepened my understanding of human rights through collective knowing and solidarity. I do accessibility testing for web and documents here and there: quiet ongoing work I care about.
I'm accepted into a PhD in Law (Full-Time) at NUS Faculty of Law, commencing August 2026. Thesis: "Visible Walls, Invisible Chains: A Comparative Socio-Legal Study of Disabled Prisoners' Lives in Malaysia and Singapore." Excited and terrified about migrating. Ten years of diabetes and the muscle loss that came with it. Singapore is where I plan to rebuild, physically and otherwise. I'm not very independent as a blind person and I want that to change. Cooking, grooming, washing clothes, navigating a new city alone: small things I want to learn courage in. I'll miss Ipoh's certainty, its uniformity, its comfort. I know I need to grow beyond what comfort allows.
Everything I learn, I want to bring back: to Malaysia, to the Blind community, to the people who have been generous to me along the way.
Accessibility work and training
I love knowing how blind people travel and navigate the world. Total geek about podcasting: tell me what you like and I'll recommend books, podcasts, resources. That's the service.
Web Accessibility Specialist course from Deque University in 2017. Document Accessibility course from WebAIM in 2024. Digital Accessibility, Gender Disability Intersection, and Strategic Advocacy training through NCBM and UNESCAP. Currently working through the DHS Trusted Tester course, about two years now, haha. Maybe this time I'll actually finish. After that, back to Deque. Sara Soueidan's Practical Accessibility is on my list: I appreciate that she offers purchasing power parity pricing. Every.to does too for their AI and coding courses, and that matters. The Circling Institute wanted a scholarship I couldn't get: they don't offer them for people from developing countries. That stings and I note it. Web accessibility people, I'd love to connect. Also eyeing the WebAIM web accessibility course and the Wikidata query course.
Origin story
A teenager in Ipoh, around 15, JAWS booming on my screen, Skype connecting me to blind friends across India and North America and the Western world. That's how I found the CAVI courses in Australia: HTML in 2013, audio editing in 2015. From there I learned JAWS scripting and made my own scripts to enhance my productivity. Newsletters like Top Tech Tidbits and podcasts like FSCast and the Tech Doctor podcast were my guiding lights. They planted something that never left.
I've joined so many online courses I've lost count. Recently stopped just to breathe. Need to start again.
The unanswered questions
Multipotentialite or polymath? Let me live a few more lives to find out.
Free, libre, open-source movements: I believe in them. Not financially strong enough to support them the way I'd like but I do what I can to promote them. Free knowledge is what keeps the world intact.
Tamil, Malay, and English fluently. Tamil is native, Malay is second, English I'm learning as I type: literally. I want to learn more languages. I want to learn music formally. I want to play chess. Not idle wants. Questions I'm walking toward.
I have a nuanced relationship with AI. I make plenty of spelling mistakes, as you can probably already tell. Claude helps me polish while preserving my voice. That's what AI should do: not swallow your writing and regurgitate itself.
I follow people I disagree with closely, to learn from them and shift my perspective. I love rules, maxims, words, phrases.
The endless list
John Vervaeke, the Dialogos 12-week immersion. Karl Popper's philosophy. The Art of Accomplishment. Mark Manson-esque self-development. Rick Hanson is among the greatest humans alive. Waking Up is the best meditation app. Ten Percent Happier, now just Happier, is cool too. Dan Harris deserves more respect than he gets.
I want to learn ethical hacking and web scraping.
ENFP. Enneagram Type 2. Rational Optimist per ClearerThinking. Anxiously attached. Want to explore astrology the Chani Nicholas way.
Oh, and I love phone sex.
Anything else I didn't say? Questions? Tensions? Let's explore.
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