I’ve been living in a kind of quiet uncertainty — starting from last year, and carrying on until January this year.
I was in my final semester, from October 2024 to March 2025.
On paper, it looked short. But in my heart, it felt heavier than anything before.
This semester was supposed to be the last stretch: clinical practice, clinical examination, and my final year project.
The project — the one I’ve been working on about the association between falls risk and depression among older people with and without low back pain in Pasir Gudang — felt like an impossible climb.
I needed to collect 371 samples.
That number haunted me. I tried to look for easier ways, shortcuts, or just something that could make it feel lighter — but it never worked.
Sometimes, when my supervisor texted me for updates, I left the message unopened.
Not because I didn’t care — but because I couldn’t face it.
To soothe the guilt, I put my effort into other courses, clinical practice, everything else I could still control.
But the real, nagging part never truly went away.
All this while, life still went on.
Almost every Sunday, my family and I went out together.
Simple outings, but they meant everything.
Maybe, deep down, I was trying to quiet the emptiness I’ve carried since my mother passed away in 2023.
After she left, I stopped reading, stopped listening to music, stopped baking — and at some point, I felt like I stopped being myself.
And then came the most unbearable two weeks.
I was so sure I couldn’t complete the project. Deep inside, I thought, “Fine. Let’s just drag this to next semester.”
But my supervisor wouldn’t let me go that easily.
She pushed as hard as she could: “Let’s conclude it this semester. Tell me the numbers you are able to gather so far.”
At that moment, I decided to hide one truth:
One day, the online survey responses I had gathered were simply… gone.
The Google Form, the data — everything disappeared.
I was devastated.
But instead of telling her, I gave her a number:
“I’m able to collect 60 data. It’s far from what I had predicted earlier.”
And she replied, calmly but firmly:
“That’s enough. Let’s recalculate using another method, see if we can reach to that number.”
Those words flipped something inside me.
For the whole day, I recalculated and recalculated, read and wrote, and re-wrote the whole paper.
I used every possible way — including asking ChatGPT to guide me using G*Power, trying to see what could be justified statistically.
I worked like mad: transferred raw data from physical paper into SPSS, ran analyses, checked and re-checked every single number.
For the next five days, I refined everything: tables, discussions, references, every detail that could be fixed.
On 19 February 2025, I stood there and presented my poster — heart racing, but somehow calm inside.
And on 21 February 2025, I submitted my final thesis.
Earlier than the deadline we were told.
The results came out in March 2025.
It wasn’t graceful.
It wasn’t neat.
But it was mine.
It doesn’t erase the grief or the quiet emptiness — but it adds something beside them: a gentle, stubborn pride.
Not loud celebration, but a quiet knowing that despite everything — the doubt, the fear, the lost data, the exhaustion, and the pushes that I once resisted — I finished.
Now, when I look back, I see the days when I felt lost, the Sundays that kept me whole, the supervisor’s words that pushed me when I couldn’t move, and the five mad days that turned everything around.
And beside all that, I see the person who kept walking.
This isn’t the end of my story.
But for now, it’s enough to say:
I made it. I finished. I’m still here.
And quietly — I hope to keep moving, slowly, honestly, and still holding on to what matters.
