twenty-five, halfway
through the chapter that is and will be
my defining decade.
the glass is merely half full,
but my cup has already overflown.
twenty - the beginning of my exponential personal growth journey. it was my first time being alone in a foreign city, 15.3km away from home. i went from zero to hundred - from a petite girl who had never travelled without her parents to the same girl who even had a job to show up for. i surprised myself - three months alone in a foreign country and i ended up making friends from all over the world, even making time for two tinder dates with american strangers in hopes of a brief summer fling that didn't materialise (twenty year old denise was so ballsy, i kind of miss her). personal growth became my crutch. i buried myself in organising political conferences at college, sleeping little outside of school work. everyone seemed to be cruising with the academic rigour of the common curriculum but i was struggling to keep afloat - quantitative reasoning and chemistry were giving me traumatic flashbacks of when i would blank out in rg exams. i thought humanities were my saving grace but somehow my grades failed to reflect that belief. it was truly the world's way of telling me i wasn't good enough once again - the same narrative i'd impressed upon myself ever since i became a small fish in a big pond at the age of thirteen. i took that anger to the treadmill of the gym. with one foot placed in front of the other to the tune of oh my muu's "expression", i stared myself down in the mirror and changed the narrative i fed myself: "believe in yourself bc no one else would. invest in yourself bc no one else would. sell yourself bc no one else would." this time i would define success on my own terms: i was en route towards building a solid resume early in my college life and that made me feel more empowered than i'd ever felt in my life.
in love, i was utterly lost - jumping from one adrenaline rush personified to another, addicted to the feeling of butterflies in my stomach, unable to break out of how i'd ricochet between feeling incandescently alive and numbly broken. twenty year old me was quite the pusher. i pushed God to the peripheries, instead chasing after making my own fate - "hey do you want to grab lunch in the dining hall?" became my seasonal catchphrase. i pushed boundaries i had hitherto known - entering a zhuangzi-esque phase where touch could exist without love, where the body and soul could function as separate beings. or so i thought. i ended the year by crash landing, wholly broken, wholly exhausted - numb to the bone.
twenty-one was a continuation of this personal discovery, this time with God going before and not in retrospect. it was the moment i completely let go of control that God came through. i was twenty-one when i finally believed that love exists. my first, and God forbid my last - in a divine encounter on the day i swore to delete that very dating app. i remember guarding my heart and telling myself not to get my hopes up, thinking he was going to be like all those who had gone before. we fell deeply into infatuation that carried us through the most demanding days (and his most demanding hospital posting). i was the kite, he was the reel - my homecoming as i soared through the streets of spain - alone and lovesick, forced to speak a language i had only mastered the basics for but was now my 24/7 default. for that reason, alicante will forever have a special place in my heart. it was a challenge i posed to myself - i had conquered living alone in a city i spoke the first language of, would i survive in a city i barely spoke the language of? i didn't only survive, i thrived - navigating through complex conversations with my host about corruption, politics and notions of love. i flew back to singapore with that rising feeling in my chest - a no-rest summer'17 with a two-month internship at the beauty giant of my dreams, followed shortly by another four months in seoul. i spent my college semester abroad living in an airbnb apartment with an ahjumma who could not speak a word of english, and me - only piecemeal korean picked up from binging on kdramas during the winter holidays. i wanted a truly organic experience where i could experience life as a local. i truly did. it was hard not to, when others lived in university hostels surrounded by english signs while i lived in a heartlandish neighbhourhood where no one spoke a word of english at all - not even the young people. i still remember i had the crappiest first day in seoul (on bae's birthday), where i was utterly exhausted from the journey but the odds were stacked against me - i couldn't get an active phone line (foreigners had to purchase a special sim card from a specific telco store in town) and therefore had no mobile data for navigation; i had my lunch at dinner time and tried to order chicken soup but got clam seafood soup instead (i dislike clams, so i barely ate); i subsequently got caught in the rain with two big bags of groceries while losing my way back to my apartment in the evening. i remember being so horribly miserable that night i called bae over whatsapp and started bawling while i tucked myself under a warm blanket, extremely homesick on day one. i learned that unlike in korean dramas, there was no poetry in riding a bus - only jaded bus uncles, just like in sg. there was, however, immense comfort in bubbling hot beef rib soup and cheesy jjimdak with my dear yonsei-exchange partner in crime lilith. and a hot cup of chai at my favourite korean-spanish cafe where i would spend my days ramping up on google analytics and excel, even carving out time to reach out to recruiters via cold-mail for opportunities in the upcoming summer. (it was winter). planning ahead was the only way i could make sense of the disillusionment i had felt with this city. it paid off.
at twenty-two i found myself baffled as it dawned on me: here i was, halfway through my six-month stint at a tech giant at the forefront of innovation - the industry leader for cloud computing, all without any prior tech experience. it was a formative moment. it was then that i realised - it takes more than just astronauts to make it to space. in the same vein, tech is so much more than being able to code. leaping into a semester off college was a gamble i took with myself by following the undeniable palpitations in my heart - palpitations filled with a good kind of fear, the kind of fear that is both growing and maturing. i made a promise with myself from the onset that i would - by the grace of God, have my cake and eat it. it was there that i met three "work-mums", two "work-uncles" (including one who would walk by and push my chair exclaiming: "zha bor! lim teh, let's go!"), one of my closest friends in life 'til date and a ton of work buddies who were the collective reason why i had the best of time. i also took my first work trip to tokyo and then taipei, purely because of the kindness of my "work-mums" - my two bosses who had so much faith in me and treated me not as an intern but almost like their own daughters. i returned to college feeling empty, as if i had left the real world behind only to be mired in a sham one. one where i abruptly found myself drowning in a 28mc workload avalanche, in my busiest and most stressful year yet.
there is no other word beyond "insane" that encapsulates the sheer insanity of it all. while my peers underloaded by 2 modules, i overloaded by 2 modules - all while juggling my personal capstone which set out to discover corruption's relationship with electoral margins of victory's in 10k words (half the time i had no idea what i was doing, it was all trial and error), getting a driver's license and finding a job in the tech industry that i can still say is as close to a dream first job in the industry of my dreams. at the tail end of being twenty-two i learned: with a compelling goal i will somehow make it, even if everyone else calls me crazy. my grades for my final year were also my personal best. by blocking out all the white noise, focusing only on carving time for those i loved, dropping everything else i'd considered a luxury (or a bore), chugging through tubes of vitamin c and recharging on daily twenty minute naps - i graduated, finalmente, with a bachelor of arts with honours in global affairs. it was through Him that i was able. it was through Him that i was favoured and blessed, with the best capstone advisor and bae prof who was my constant voice of clarity and who cared more about me finding a job than the capstone she supervised. i was also immensely blessed by the GA faculty and peers - people who made me feel less lonely through this arduous rite of passage that was capstone. it was through Him that i found favour with the panel of four business leaders during my case presentation such that i could finally put my job search to rest - one and a half months before graduation. no one talks about the senior year anxiety of having to find a job before graduation, but it was so helplessly real while it lasted - some days i could not do anything but pray that the anxiety of it all would not swallow me whole. it really didn't help that my close circle of friends were set on finance/consulting from junior year, and so most of them were already employed by the end of the first semester of senior year. i knew i was on my own path - i was bent on getting into big tech, but i remember it being so tough holding my ground bc getting into such a niche and coveted industry as a fresh graduate was such an uphill climb. it was a climb that paid off, and i'm so thankful i refused to compromise even when the going got hard.
i spent day one of being twenty three in bled, slovenia with my mum, on a well deserved mummy-daughter tour of eastern europe. it was a breath of fresh air being able to take a breather after a year of consistent hustling. i was physically, mentally and emotionally spent after having my cake and eating it. i remember our hotel room balcony opened to a majestic view of lake bled - a dream like mirage with the faint chiming of church bells in the background (except that it was real). it was immensely peaceful - aptly reflecting the anchoring sense of peace i felt in my heart there and then. i could finally cast every anxious thought i had about graduation and job-hunting into the wind. here i was - done and dusted with college, on a two-month vacation break before my official parachute into working life - past a finish line i couldn't envisage crossing while in the thick of it. i also capitalised on the new-found freedom i had to frolic in japan with bae - we ate to our heart's content and took long night walks along the streets of osaka and kyoto, consistently succumbing to the smell of takoyaki or the sight of a convenience store on our way back to our apartment. those nights remain some of my favourite nights in my personal collection of memories - nights spent pigging out on piping hot takoyaki and japanese omelette while we cuddled and binge-watched on a kdrama with a lead actor whom i absolutely adored (cornily bc his eye mole reminded me of none other than bae).
at twenty three i turned the page and dived into a new chapter of my life. i got inaugurated as a working adult by society's standards. it felt weird knowing i had a job to show up for day after day - this time without an end date in sight. it was a completely new environment but i was and remain so lucky to have had ten other new friends from the graduate program by my side. i cannot imagine having to navigate through a 180 degree pivot without a trusted community to weather through the good and bad with. we laboured through obtaining five of our industry certifications together (they were compulsory), sharing notes, knowledge and going out of our way to help one another. the corporate life was supposed to be one of competition but mine was one filled with love, laughter and kindness. covid-19 was not a thing in 2019 yet and so we got to experience bootcamp in san francisco together, where we had the privilege of meeting with one of the company's co-founders face to face. "my name is parker harris, and this is my story", was the title of his presentation (i still have chills when i think about that moment - what a story it must have been to grow a company from 4 founders to 60k+ employees). there is a honeymoon phase as with all beginnings. we were starry eyed and drunk from drinking the kool-aid as we revelled in the city that was almost synonymous with the company. the real work started once we flew back to singapore and were ushered into our business teams. i remember battling with so much ambiguity from the onset - how did good look like in the role, particularly for a graduate? i had chosen this place in order to learn how to speak with enterprise customers, but why did i feel utterly lacking in experience and substance every time i opened my mouth to speak? work was a completely different ball game from the experience i had accumulated in college - my customers were the biggest banks in thailand and i was working with a director who had sixteen years of industry experience before me. it was foolish of me to compare but self-comparison was inevitable - all i could see was the huge gulf between what i could bring to the table versus what he could offer. and then things abruptly took a turn. at twenty three, i watched helplessly as the work mentors closest to me got let go by the company overnight. in my first job and within my first year with the company, i witnessed a third of my immediate team disappear overnight due to what they termed cordially as "reshaping" (but was in reality brutal restructuring). it was a defining moment in framing my perception of work: the scales fell from my eyes and i realised that companies, irrespective of how good the values they espoused, were at the end of the day still companies motivated by profit and loss. i witnessed how senior leadership failed to bat an eyelid as they did away with entire pillars of the business - irrespective of performance or how hard their employees worked. it was a sobering episode with an important lesson: i will always be dispensable to a company unlike my relationships with the people i love and as such, the way that i spend my time should always reflect that concept. i should uphold my strong work ethic but not compromise on the quality of my interactions with the people who are my ride or die.
i celebrated my twenty fourth birthday at home in an unprecedented lockdown that ironically pushed me towards deeper introspection. at twenty four i discovered and penned into words what (still continues) to make me tick and channeled those strengths into building my personal brand in the marketplace. i also capitalised on the opportunity of staying home to buckle down on improving my functional knowledge so that i could build my niche at work. i rediscovered my love for creating as a form of self-expression in more ways than one. at twenty four i graduated yet again, this time together with ten other colleagues whom i consider wholeheartedly as friends. but the defining moment of being twenty four would have to be opening the door (literally) to the gorgeous backdrop of warm fairy lights and a fluorescent "marry me" sign. it was the day my first love got down on one knee in the centre of a heart shape framed by and filled with faux rose petals and asked to become my last love. it was the day i felt - for the first time - the weight of a diamond ring enclosed on my ring finger. and with that, life moved me along to the next phase.
and so we began keeping tabs on property guru and coming up with our own qualification rubrics on week nights, while touring houses on the weekends. pasir ris. yishun. circuit road. mcnair. bishan. sin ming. serangoon. we shortlisted our top picks (mostly close to) the central parts of singapore but life is funny and God was probably having His own comedy night in heaven. after thirteen home tours over the span of two and a half months, we laid our eyes on a cbd-fringe house that was never on our original radar and snuck into the unvacated, loosely gated house on chinese new year's 初一 (we called it our very own "home visiting"). we left the seller's agent flabbergasted when we called him on that auspicious day and told him we were offering for a home we had (in his view) not seen. at the tail end of being twenty four, i signed the papers for home ownership and became the co-interior designer for our very first house together.
we ushered in my twenty-fifth birthday together in a hotel room at ascott - a last minute staycation attempt as the government abruptly announced absolute dining-in restrictions a few days prior. we ordered in steak and had a bottle of red wine to go along as we "fine-dined" in our pajamas. at twenty five, i collected the (letter box) keys to what will be our first home, and rose up the membership tier of adulting with monthly home mortgage payments and night after night of intensive wedding planning sessions in the lead up to the big day.
and this is where i currently am. still twenty five and with exactly a month to go before my surname will change in the eyes of the law. it has always been my dream to settle down early and become a kickass career woman and young mother. it has always been my aspiration to have my cake and eat it.
my name is denise, i'm halfway through my defining decade and i think eighteen year old me would have been really proud of present day me. present day me is proud of me too.
