NYAA: September and October Update
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NYAA
September/October Progress Report
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Starting off the new year
The holidays are over, and with it brings the last leg of the NYAA. I’ve already completed the requirements for healthy living, and my final reflection for that will be at the end of this post. However, my service goal is still ongoing, and so in this post, I’ll be detailing some of the new changes as well as my reflections and reactions to them.
Service
Since the Cerebral Palsy Alliance Singapore service was cancelled, at the beginning of the year I was challenged with finding another service that aligns with my goal.
My goal: To make those with disabilities in Singapore feel more accepted by society through volunteering for them, communicating with them and building a relationship with them.
Thankfully, however, there are plenty of organisations that the school partners with that deal with this issue! Finding a new service that would apply to my goal, therefore, wasn’t very difficult, so I picked ‘Fitness with Hougang Care Centre’ as my new service. This service, through student-led fitness and wellness related activities, helps those in Singapore with mental disabilities and conditions, such as dementia or schizophrenia. (I’ve already talked about how the term disability can be applied to many many things, so it should lose its negative connotations.)
This service I feel connects to my goal because I think that wellness is also an essential part of acceptance and empowerment, which will help those at the Hougang Care Centre feel like a real, important part of society. The fact that sessions are student-led encourages communication and relationship-building skills, so I think that part of the service allows me to progress towards my goal.
And in the few meetings we’ve had, I’ve tried to get to know the service and the specific actions it takes to maximise my impact. We even had a guest speaker from the Hougang Care Centre come to one of our sessions and talk to us about what the people at the centre need, enjoy and how best we can help them – through being energetic, communicating clearly and showing our passion. I think this also connects to my goal.
However, since I am switching service, I feel a little burdened knowing that this was not what I originally intended, but bumps along the way are normal, and I’m ready to put my all into this new service.
Healthy Living
Now that I have completed the requirements for Healthy Living, I’m free to look back and reflect on how it went for me, as well as some of the things that I would like to continue with. I think that doing NYAA introduced me to a lot of new things that I can continue doing to improve my own wellbeing and quality of life.
I feel that music has really become an essential part of me since I started the goal, and I find myself turning to it whenever I am in doubt. Even though music is quite academic for me, I also found that it could be part of my leisure life. I also learned lots of ways to deal with the pressures of academic music, like finding pieces that I truly enjoyed to play and discovering my true music taste, or finding new exercises that I can do to improve my technique and therefore make me a lot more confident in my abilities, lessening my nerves. I did a lot of performance, inside and outside of school, and this has also boosted my confidence. It has shown me that I can forgive myself for making mistakes and accept that even though I made a mistake, it is definitely not the end of my path in music.
So, I think that I will continue pursuing music, whether as a hobby or a career, and take these skills that I’ve learned and continuing to use them in life, applying them to my exams as they approach as well as my career aspirations and inside service!
Conclusion
Even though the end of NYAA is approaching, I will take all the things I’ve learned from Healthy Living with me into the rest of my life, and I will continue to put my all into service as I always do. I’m looking forward to receiving the award!
-fin.-