I used to hate the phrase “dah takdir.” It always arrived too early in the sentence, like someone closing a door before you’ve even tried the handle. “Dah takdir,” they say. It is what it is. Meant to be. Already written. And I would sit there thinking—no. Don’t do that. Don’t give the universe credit for things people stopped trying to fix. Because most of the time, when people say takdir, they are not talking about fate. They are talking about exhaustion. Or avoidance. Or the polite way of saying: I don’t want to deal with this anymore. And sometimes worse—they are talking about someone else’s failure as if it came pre-packaged by the sky. As if poverty is scheduled. As if laziness is cosmically assigned. As if effort is optional, and outcome is divine mood. No. I never liked that.
There is a kind of comfort in rejecting takdir. It gives you something sharp to hold. Agency. Choice. Responsibility. If things go wrong, it is not written. It is built. Or neglected. Or delayed. Or mishandled. It means you can still do something. Even if it’s messy. Even if it’s late. Even if it’s small. I liked that version of the world. A world where effort mattered more than interpretation. Where sweat meant something. Where nothing was already decided before you entered the room.
Then Toastmasters happened. Not dramatically. Not like a film with swelling music. More like a series of small rooms, chairs in a circle, people practicing sentences like they were learning how to breathe in public. Table Topics. Impromptu speaking. No script. Just you, a question, and time that suddenly feels very loud. I started entering competitions. One round. Then another. Then another. Club level. Area level. Division level. Each time, I told myself: just treat it as practice. But secretly, I wanted to win. Not in an abstract way. In a very physical way. The handshake. The certificate. The small moment where someone says your name as the best answer to a question you didn’t prepare for. There is something intoxicating about that. Being good at something that is supposed to be unpredictable.
I remember the rhythm of those weeks. Three hours minimum per contest. Sometimes more. Practicing alone in a room, speaking to walls like they owed me feedback. Recording myself. Deleting recordings. Trying again. Rewriting openings. Cutting endings. Removing jokes that didn’t land even when no one was there to hear them land badly. And then showing up. Sitting in rooms with strangers who were also trying to sound like they weren’t trying too hard. Smiling too calmly. Listening too carefully. Waiting for a topic like it might define your entire personality for two minutes. And somehow—I kept winning. Club level. Area level. Division level. Each time, a small disbelief. Each time, a quiet recalibration of ego. Not confidence. Something more fragile than that. A sense that maybe this was working. That effort had a direction. That repetition was not pointless. That discipline was not just an aesthetic.
Then district level came. The bigger room. The bigger stage. The bigger version of the same idea. I prepared the same way. Maybe more. There is always a point where preparation stops being about improvement and starts being about control. I was there. Trying to control tone, timing, silence, the shape of spontaneity. Which is ironic, because spontaneity does not like to be held. And then work called. Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Just a message. A last-minute activation. Something urgent enough that you don’t argue with it, you just move. I remember reading it twice, as if the second reading might soften it. It didn’t. District level was no longer an option. I had to pull out. Just like that. No speech. No stage. No chance to see how far this version of me could go. Only a quiet administrative exit that doesn’t even echo.
Disappointment is strange in moments like that. It doesn’t arrive loudly. It sits down beside you like it already lives there. It doesn’t ask permission. It just stays. I remember thinking: this is ridiculous. I did everything. I showed up. I trained. I won my way here. And then—nothing. Not failure. Not loss. Just removal. A door opened, and then another door closed behind it before I could walk through. When I told my partner, I tried to sound neutral, like I was reporting weather. “Can’t go. Work came in.” But my voice betrayed me somewhere between the sentences because disappointment has a texture even when you try to flatten it. My partner listened, paused, and then said it. One word, soft but certain. “Takdir.” It is meant to be.
I didn’t respond immediately. Because that word again. That old word standing there like it had never left the room. I wanted to reject it, instinctively, like I always did. But I didn’t fully, because I was tired in a different way—not the tiredness of preparation, but the tiredness of accumulation. Of effort meeting interruption one too many times. I thought about the hours. Three hours per contest, multiplied by rounds, multiplied by rehearsals, multiplied by small invisible decisions to show up instead of rest. And then subtract district level. Not because of failure, but because of timing. External timing. Unnegotiated timing. The kind of timing that doesn’t care about readiness.
So what is takdir here? Is it the idea that I was never supposed to reach district level, that the effort was only meant to carry me so far and no further, that the story ends exactly where it ends and no earlier version of me could have changed it? Or is takdir just the name we give to everything we cannot retroactively influence? I don’t know. And I still don’t like how easily people use it, because it risks erasing everything that came before it—work, discipline, intention—as if it was decorative, as if it was always going to be overwritten. But I also cannot fully reject it anymore. Not the way I used to. Because there is something undeniably true about what happened. I did not fail. I did not underperform. I did not quit. I was interrupted by something larger than the contest, something outside the frame, and no amount of preparation could have negotiated with that moment.
So where does that leave effort? If effort does not guarantee continuation, if discipline does not guarantee completion, if even success can be paused by something unrelated, what is effort then? Just a habit? Just a ritual? Just a performance of control? I keep returning to that space between belief and resistance. I still do not like the casual use of takdir, I still think it is sometimes used too quickly, too cleanly, to explain away things that deserve complexity. But I also see now that rejecting it entirely is its own kind of simplification, because not everything bends to effort and not everything is negotiable. Some things just arrive and interrupt and leave.
Maybe takdir is not about erasing agency. Maybe it is about limits. Not moral limits. Not punishment. Just structural limits. The reminder that effort exists inside systems, inside timing, inside things we cannot see from the inside of our own planning. Still, I think about that stage, that district level room I never entered. I imagine it sometimes, unfairly, my speech fully formed, the audience reaction I never measured, the version of me that completed the arc. It is a useless imagination, but it appears anyway, like an echo that doesn’t need permission. And then I come back to the actual thing that happened—the message, the withdrawal, the silence after. No applause, no ending line, just continuation of work, of days, of other responsibilities waiting.
My partner still says it sometimes, lightly. “Takdir.” And I still don’t fully agree, but I don’t fully disagree either, which is probably the most honest place to be. Not resolution, not clarity, just tension. Maybe that is the real shape of it—not “meant to be” as comfort, not “meaningless effort” as despair, but something in between, a recognition that effort matters deeply and still does not control the final edit. I think I am learning to sit with that contradiction, not to solve it, not to choose a side, just to let it exist without turning it into an answer, because life keeps refusing to behave like a thesis statement. It keeps interrupting its own arguments, just like my contest did.
So when people say takdir now, I hear two things at once. A surrender, and a limit. A closing, and a framing. Sometimes I still reject it, sometimes I still resist it, sometimes I just nod because I understand the impulse even if I don’t agree with the execution. And maybe that is where I am left—between three hours of preparation and one unexpected message, between winning and not arriving, between effort and interruption, between what I did and what I could not continue. Dah takdir, maybe. But also—I was there. I worked. I spoke. I won. And I almost went further.
Written by: Adi Jamaludin
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