I Built This on One Song

There's a song I've had on repeat for longer than I'd like to admit.

Not background music. Not a playlist filler. I mean the kind of repeat where you finish it and immediately start it again because you're not done with it yet — or maybe it's not done with you.

Perseverance (in the face of grief) by Hindia.

The verses are in Malay. They say: I will break through hellfire just to look at your eyes today. Thunderstorms above my head but God, thank you for today. Surrounded by complete darkness but proud to have made it through with you today. Deaf to the curses and insults, ready to fight them all for you today.

What gets me every time is the word hari ini. Today.

Not "I will get through this eventually." Not "one day things will be better." Just — today. I made it through today. That's the whole victory. That's enough.

I think I needed permission to measure things that small.

Built in the Dark

I started building this website during a period I'm still not fully ready to name. Not a breakdown. Not a breakthrough. Somewhere in that grey space in between — where you're functional enough to write code but hollow enough to wonder why you're writing it at all.

Most people build portfolios to show what they've done. I built this one trying to figure out who I still was.

Every design decision was a small act of stubbornness. The whitespace wasn't laziness — it was breathing room I was giving myself. The articles weren't content strategy — they were things I needed to say out loud to see if they were true. The builds page calls projects questions because that's what they were. I wasn't building answers. I was building proof that I was still asking.

When the Voice Changes

Then the chorus arrives and the voice changes.

Something in me breaks open every time.

Because suddenly the song isn't about fighting through darkness alone. It's about carrying someone's belief in you when you've temporarily run out of your own. The person you were breaking through hellfire for becomes the one handing you the instructions to keep going.

I think about who handed me mine.

I think about the VC who called me "daughter of the university" — and how I walked into that room as a student and walked out feeling like I was allowed to take up space. I think about the people I've advocated for, the systems I've tried to make more human, the colleagues I've watched struggle with tools that were never designed with them in mind. I think about everyone who, at some point, said something that kept me going without knowing they did.

Grief and gratitude live in the same chest. That's what this song knows.

What the Website Became

There's a section in this website — the contact page — that ends with a quiet postscript. Something I put there almost without thinking. I read it back later and realized it sounded like someone reaching out rather than showing off.

I think that's who I am right now. Someone reaching out.

Not from a place of desperation. From a place of hari ini — today I made it through, today I built something, today I'm still here and still asking — and I'd like to connect with someone who might understand that.

Perseverance doesn't look like triumph. It looks like a portfolio built in the dark, shipped anyway.