soundtracks for seasons

it is the soundtrack that truly makes a drama. it is the soundtrack that encapsulates the longing, the melancholy, the joy, the anger, the catharsis, the butterflies, the nostalgia, the camaraderie of a passé world where characters lived out their glorious story arc, then rolls everything up into a ball and delivers its punch to whoever who would press play. even after the raving reviews fade and the world forgets, the soundtrack remembers and evokes the listener to remember as well. 

in the same vein, the soundtrack is the surrounding context. two saturdays ago, i walked away from the inaugural college alumni reunion with ambivalent emotions in my heart. there was warmth from meeting up with old friends, but also a lingering emptiness from conversations that i would have had, if only we had turned back the clock by six years. i felt connected - yet displaced, uplifted - yet dispirited, nostalgic yet hardened. it made me realise the gravity of context in shaping a sense of belonging and a sense of what's important in life.   

my soundtrack for that season ended in 2019. what had felt so real then came rushing back - but i had to stop myself to remember that my feelings in the present were a mirage. revisiting 2015-2019 in 2022 without its context was like visiting a house without a home. my life is happening in 2022 now, with a completely different soundtrack. what is important to me now is completely different from what was important then. the old me would have stayed for the mixer and let myself go for the night, but that's no longer who i am and what's important to me. i strode out of the campus gates alone with this sole thought in my head: "what's important to me now is going home to my husband who's waiting for me, so we can turn in together." these days, it's the prospect of our next phase of life that excites me. working towards manifesting my vision for what i envisage to be the truest, most beautiful story about my life is what makes me feel so special to get to be "me" - a "me" living in this vast world that can be harsh but will still find space to be gracious enough to me, bc it is my Giant Slayer who goes before me.  

yes i'm changing, yes i'm gone, yes i'm older, yes i'm moving on i've moved on

the language of remembrance and imagination

the routine of work often makes me forget who i am, down at my core. and then it comes back - all at once, on solitary nights when i'm armed with a chilled glass of red wine and my 2016 spotify top songs playlist reverberate in my ears. i close my eyes and give myself into the ebb and flow of the build up and subsequent post-climax catharsis - i let the massive wave of nostalgia crash over me and remember the fragments of an unfettered me from my earlier youth. this is how i remember how it feels like to be alive and brimming at my core. 

"when women write to me in the language of indoctrination - when they use words like good and should and right and wrong - i try to speak back to them in the language of imagination. we are all bilingual. we speak the language of indoctrination, but our native tongue is the language of imagination. when we use the language of indoctrination - with its should and shouldn't, right and wrong, good and bad - we are activating our minds. that's not what we're going for here. because our minds are polluted by our training. in order to get beyond our training, we need to activate our imaginations. our minds are excuse makers; our imaginations are storytellers. so instead of asking ourselves what's right or wrong, we must ask ourselves: what is true and beautiful?

...what is the truest, most beautiful story about your life you can imagine?" - untamed, glennon doyle

i've been dreaming (quite literally) about a specific person for awhile now. she appears in my dreams every once in awhile, sauntering in with her iconic red lip, jet black hair and poised, goddess-like stature. she is a female business leader i don't know personally in real life, but is actually someone whom i secretly look up to - just bc she embodies the strong career woman archetype i'd always admired and aspired towards during my college days. there are many variations of this dream, but in all of them she comes over to talk to me as if we're friends. we sit down for coffee or wine while she holds my hand and i ask her questions i can't remember when i'm awake. all i can remember is that surreal, perplexing yet warm sense of pride from intimately knowing and being valued by someone so accomplished and put on a pedestal by the rest of the world. i'm not sure what these all mean, or why i even dream of her at all. but if i could hazard a guess - i think its my subconscious telling me that despite the motivational slump that comes in seasons and the inevitable monotony of a routine 9-6 day job, there is still a part of me who aspires to become a strong, career woman like her one day. i think it's my subconscious telling me to become someone who will continue to give back and inspire younger, aspiring career women to shatter glass ceilings and steer mnc ships into newer highlands (when i make it big in the future). it also reminds me of the tangible trade-offs of pursuing a career at full-speed, perhaps at the cost of having children. which then begs the million dollar question - can i have both, to have my cake and eat it? 

what is the truest, most beautiful story about my life that i can imagine? 

i can imagine a life where i am both a career woman and a young mother of two beautiful, kind and intelligent children. three is nice but two is good too. it is finally the weekend. we're at the mall and i'm clasping the tiny palm of our little baby girl, while m is carrying our precious baby boy on his shoulders. even trips to the supermarket have become family adventures now. we're making pesto for dinner tonight and so we're on the hunt for some basil leaves, linguine and kiddy juice boxes. the cashier exclaims in benign surprise that we look too young to be parents. we smile and say "thank you, we get that alot". i take in the scene of what has now become my world - our baby girl sleepily snuggling her nose into m's chest while our boy's peskily tugging at m's trousers, the corners of his mouth turning downwards into an adorable pout from the lack of attention received. life now is an amalgamation of quiet moments and sheer havoc. we ricochet between the two extreme ends. sometimes the incredulity of it all makes us want to cry and laugh at the same time, but in an ironic sense it is also the havoc that completes us and we wouldn't have it any other way. 

i think to myself in quiet affirmation: "hard work is what makes rest days truly so restful". work is challenging but it is also incredibly meaningful. i am still in the industry of my dreams. i am needed, seen, heard and respected by everyone around me. work makes me feel alive and in my zone, bringing me back to that feeling of "flying" that i used to feel during my yirpa college days. the work that i do is so uniquely "me": it fits the value proposition i have to give to the world like the glove i have always been meant to wear. i have finally found my niche - one that sits at the perfect intersection of business needs and what i naturally gravitate towards. my enthusiasm and sense of purpose are infectious. i am so efficacious at producing the right outcomes which move the needle towards the larger, existential purpose of the company that no one can ignore me even if they ever wanted to. nothing fazes me anymore - not even customer calls with angry c-level executives, bc i know that i can easily win them over. i am exactly where i need and aspire to be in this stage of my life. i've earned my seat at the table and i'm lifting others up to sit alongside the table with me. i truly believe that the world is abundant and enough for everyone. 

i remember that god is the giver of all good things and i am only able to do the good work that i do bc it is Him who empowers me with the gifts and talents i possess. i no longer feel the temptation of pushing god to the peripheries. instead, i wake up everyday with inexplicable peace and joy brimming in my heart bc i am immovably grounded in Him. the people around me wonder what my secret sauce is (they speculate: "there is something so distinctive about denise that sets her apart from the rest in this cut-throat, corporate world but i can't put a finger to it"), and finally arrive at their own conclusion that it is bc of my faith. (and this is why i do the work that i do - to glorify Him in all that i do, that people may turn towards Him on their own accord). despite the busyness of work and life, m and i have made a conscious commitment as a family unit to give back to our church community. we have a new spiritual community that we're plugged into and it feels like we've known them for a lifetime. we give back in every little way we can - including opening our home to bless our newfound spiritual family. our cup overflows beyond all that we can ever ask for or imagine. 

this is the life i see when i close my eyes and use the language of imagination. in this world i have my cake and eat it, only bc god is embedded in the language of both imagination and truth. 

pendulum narrative

do i want certain things bc i truly want them for their own sake, or bc i've fallen in love with the idea of having them and its ensuing pride from feeling as if i've beaten the curve early in the game? do i truly believe in the values i espouse or is that actually a sham if i dig deeper inside, merely words and thoughts filtrated pure from its original, impure form of consciousness? 

i am inherently not a super competitive person - i would like to win but most of the time i don't need to win, particularly if it's at something of minuscule importance. i am innately a secure person - i dislike participating in water cooler gossip (particularly if the subject is not someone i have worked or interacted with before) and i always try to focus my energies on carving out my own path ahead instead. i tell myself i am a kind person - in thoughts, words and actions i try to practice authentic empathy and stand up for what i believe is right and just. 

so why do i have instinctive thoughts in my head that run counter-intuitive to the intrinsic narratives i tell myself?

i tell myself that everyone has their own stories and that may mean they're predisposed to project the lives they've only ever known on the people around them - that the only way they know how to be loved is the way they've been loved, and the only way they know how to overcome is the way they had overcome in the past. and yet - at times i still find myself judging the quality of advice i don't resonate with with latent contempt - contempt that slowly wraps and wraps itself around my heart in a chokehold until it negates whatever kindness and empathy that were originally present. and i bottle everything up until a conversation triggers me to open up on my thoughts and then there's this voice in my head that eggs me on to spill and incite discourse - not for the purpose of furthering logic, but for the end goal of getting the person on the other side to agree with my point of view and validate this contempt i have shoven deep into the recesses of my indignant heart. in doing so, i put myself on my own pedestal and end up doing exactly the same thing that the other person was doing - projecting my own thoughts and ideas on someone else, just bc they feel valid to me. why do i feel i need to be right in situations like these? we are all entitled to our own point of view, but sometimes i just find it hard to let the need to be validated as "right" go. 

i tell myself different people have different finishing lines, and yet i derive happiness from feeling as if i'm ahead of the curve and conversely get incredibly discouraged when i feel i've been left behind. i tell myself that i am lazer-focused on forging my own path ahead but i still get envious when i hear about peers moving on to greener pastures. i tell myself that the world is abundant and there is more than enough for everyone, but i still fear the prospect of competition and i do feel wistfully piqued when someone whom i view as a "mentee" outperforms me, as if these are not tell-tale signs of a latent insecurity that's festering within me. it is almost as if i'm playing a game of hypocrite with myself and hiding how i truly feel with self pep talk and confident smiles on the outside. 

this should end on a good note but my eyelids are drooping and i can't think straight - all i can conclude is that i am painfully self-aware of how unaware i can get on bad days, and i need to dig even deeper into uncovering what my true "i want" statement is - an "i want" statement free from vanity, pride and contempt. 

2022 already?

every january i find myself in denial of the dawn of a new year - to me, january seems to nullify the hard work of the previous year, and 2021 was a year where i - no, we - worked so hard that when we could finally rest the year was already reaching its twilight. to me, it seems almost cruel to let go of a year without feeling sufficiently rested entering into the new one, you feel? 

maybe i'm also nostalgic that way - every year i feel like i'm peaking and i become so reluctant to let it go, but the next year rolls along and it surpasses the previous in an alternative dimension and an alternative high. every year was special in its own way: 

in 2014 i remember resisting the onset of 2015 with every fibre of my being - reasoning that we had worked too hard while battling the mighty a-level giant and was left feeling utterly spent. but 2015 rolled along and after a long series of hot tears/being angry at god for making me wait for the promised land, i matriculated into the college of my dreams (the one i had a post-it of in front of my desk while studying for a-levels) and got to embark on a new life different from one i had hitherto known - living with new friends, suite partying, greek literature, dining hall conversations about the philosophy of living and the ultimatum - witnessing the picturesque backdrop of the snow-capped, himalayan peak in the quaint town of mussoorie on an all-expenses paid, learning journey trip overseas. 2015 was also the year i finally felt the vertigo of falling for someone who was reciprocating my feelings to a certain extent and it was so beautifully intriguing (as much as it was the eventual downfall of my heart). 

in 2015 going on 2016 i remember wondering what 2016 would hold - hopefully no more heartache? nope, 2016 was a year of solid heartache, loneliness and emptiness from crashing, burning and feeling played to varying degrees after a multitude of experimental pushing of zhuangzi-esque, personal boundaries - but it was also a year where my personal growth was off the charts. it was the year i got to spend 3 months alone in new york city, and that adventure of a lifetime sparked something in me that has since changed my outlook on life completely. those angry nights in the gym culminated in my resolve to remain unabashedly proud of who i am as an individual, so as long as kindness remained my key value. "love will come when it comes, & i will wait for it - but i am done pursuing it" were my famous last words.

on the last day of 2016 i remember thinking it'll be difficult to beat a year like 2016 - a year where i got to experience what it felt like to be incandescently alive. 2016's new york sojourn primed me well for the solitary sojourns of 2017 in alicante and seoul respectively, where i had to push myself in foreign countries i hardly spoke the language of. and most of all - 2017 was the year i felt another dimension of aliveness that i had never felt before in my life - falling in love, period. for the bulk of the year i found myself glowing in our new found infatuation that gradually developed into love. 2017 was the year where it became easy to imagine myself as the protagonist of my very own korean drama - after years of drooling over characters falling in love but never quite believing i was ever going to get to that stage, i was finally the star of my own episode.

the personal growth experiences of 2017 made me feel afraid that i was peaking in my youth - but 2018 held other plans for me. with hard work and alittle bit of luck i abruptly found myself knee-deep in a 6-months stint at a tech giant of my wildest dreams by the grace of god. i got to travel to tokyo on company payroll for the first time and marvelled as i saw mt. fuji peaking out from the office's window. i made so many good colleague-friends from a different age group and realised it was absolutely possible to begin my career in tech even as a global affairs major. i closed off 2018 in celebratory shock for having pulled off a crazy 28mc semester i never knew i was capable of. i know i always find myself proud of the hard work i'd put in every year - but completing my first 28mc semester in senior year while getting my driver's license was unfathomable and it still remains one of my most incredible feelings of accomplishments i've ever experienced. it taught me that i could accomplish even the craziest feat as long as i had a razor sharp focus and god going before me. 

at the tail end of 2018, i vividly remember wondering out loud with annie at a cute little cafe in penang: "this time next year, i wonder where we'll be". our time in college was coming to a close and the future ahead felt hopeful yet nail-bitingly uncertain. 2019 felt disorientating - in one moment i found myself drowning in capstone and the anxiety of looming unemployment in an already taxing 28mc semester, and in the next moment i found myself in bangkok for the first time, feeling like a fish out of water as i tagged along on my first official customer meeting with a big bank in thailand. the transition from school to adulting was stark but the inauguration into "adulthood" was also empowering - it felt nice to finally have money and channel effort into more tangible forms of output that had real world implications. 

in all honesty - 2020 would have been the only year where i felt like i was plateauing. travel was not in the cards and lockdowns (both full and partial) became normalised across the globe. but feeling is not fact - to do myself justice and not belittle my accomplishments i remember (for the most part) sticking through the 10-month professional development plan i had laid out for myself and baiting myself by withholding korean dramas as the carrot to complete yet another certification. 2020 was the year i studied my way through to build a product niche at work so that i could stem that persistent feeling of imposter syndrome as i sat in meetings. 2020 was the year i found out value-adding constitutes a huge personal value of mine. and just when i thought 2020 was going to fizzle out like old champagne bubbles, a surprise proposal threw me off guard and ended the year on an eventful note - 

and 2021 was the year where we doubled down and hustled to build something out of nothing together: i don't quite know how to quantify the amount of work we invested outside of our day jobs that went into both the wedding and the house. for the wedding our planning went down to the detail of timing my walk down the aisle so that we could cut our wedding entrance tune (with final cut pro) to make my grand entrance sync with the instrumental chorus. with regards to the house, it gets even more incredulous - it is hard for me to name a single furniture/appliance/hardware that we did not personally shortlist and/ buy - down to our folding toilet doors, tiles, carpentry and even our kitchen basin. every single nook and cranny in our house was handpicked and exists for a reason - even the position of our power plugs for future proofing. 

2021 was exhausting on many levels and i don't feel quite ready to start sprinting again. 2021 was such a defining year - it played a huge role in tangibly framing life as i know of now. 

but who knows how 2022 will look like? hopefully still kind and once again crazy, in a good way. 

towards my own finishing line

 "action cures fear. indecision, postponement, on the other hand, fertilise fear" - david j. schwartz.

it has always been my dream to be a career woman and a young mum at the same time. i think the family planning facet only grew much bigger and became more tangible to me after marriage. in my head lives on a scale balancing what seems to be two dichotomous aspects of my life's priorities  - the ambition to push myself towards what scares me and pursue growth on one end, and on the other - the desire to start a family with the person i love in the prime of my youth. for the longest of time i had been hovering on the sidelines, favouring indecision over decision, fearful of making the choice that i'm scared will result in regret years down the road. but indecision didn't help - it just fertilised more fear, envy and insecurity. 

i had always prided myself on my self-security, but my inability to decide as i sat on the sidelines made me falter. i would watch on, green with envy, as peers of (what i perceive as) my calibre sprinted on towards their own finishing lines. i would feel almost angry at the thought that the corporate world had left me behind while i busied on sorting out the gazillion things that were happening in my personal life. 

but i momentarily forgot (or rather, refused to acknowledge) that everyone has their own finishing line, and that everyone has a different definition of what achieving their goal in life looks like. the family planning desire i had in me felt like a liability as i wrestled with the obvious - why must the woman be the one to sacrifice her career and bear the child? it just felt unfair that i couldn't have my cake and eat it - no, not when i wanted to have the family aspect in the near future as well. and then it struck me - having a child in itself will eventually be the craziest personal growth journey i'll ever have (in god's timing). pursuing growth and starting a family are not zero-sum but actually complementary - growth does not have to be manifested in mere career terminologies - it is so much bigger than what i had boxed it into. and it isn't as if i have to give up my career in its entirety to pursue the quest of childbearing - i will still have my career as i know it now. 

and so, i have made up my mind. i will no longer allow myself to waver, but instead focus my efforts on making my decision the right one for me. looking back, i have always been carving out my own path from the conventional and refusing to succumb to the fear of missing out. from interning in nyc straight out of freshman year to taking a gap semester for 6-months with a tech giant in junior year (and overloading by 28mcs throughout senior year to graduate on schedule), to refusing to settle for any less than the tech industry for my first job despite (what had seemed like) impending unemployment post-graduation, to even getting married and buying our own house at 25 - my best and most secure self is one who pulls heavenly strings while keeping my eyes fixated on my very own north star. these few days i have been pivoting towards taking care of my body and health once again: i've been taking the necessary vitamins, adding an additional meal at night to get my bmi out of the underweight category and finding a feasible workout routine that i can stick to after work. it's been liberating knowing that i'm beginning to invest in myself again, and slowly working towards my new personal goal in this new season of my life. 

the first reflection from home in my truest sense

it's been twenty four days since we uttered our vows, bound each other with our matching rings before the eyes of God and walked down the aisle as one. 

"...i pledge to love you in sickness and in health, in poverty and in wealth, in sorrow and in joy, and i will always be true to you by God's grace, til death do us apart."

i think i am still reeling from the collective madness of everything that has transpired and i am still struggling to process how everything came together and came to be the reality as i know of now. 2021 felt like a year where we hustled so much, got lost in the minuscule details of choosing between grey and cream coloured tiles and consolidating guest covid p.e.t. lists in the marathon that didn't seem to end, and as abruptly as it started we find ourselves past the finish line - victorious with the fruits of our labour served on a platter to us all at once. i write this with our wedding ring on my finger and from the beautiful house that we now call our home for two - a cosy home that is warm particularly because we designed it and brought it to life together. a home that we are so proud of because it screams the marriage of our personalities and tastes. a home that has been showered with the blessings of the Most High. 

and yet i am human: inherently greedy; always wanting to have my cake and eat it. despite having my cup overflow in the most important facet of my life, i still feel discontentment with myself for not investing sufficiently in my career throughout this year. in the most logically absurd way i can't really fathom or put a finger to, a part of me still feels like i've let myself go (even though i know i hadn't - given that i have gained so much more in other aspects of my life). i watch on wistfully (and in all honesty - envy) as i witness my peers take the leap of faith to tread on different, "higher" paths - higher in the senses of pay grade and growth - both personal and professional. internally i start having my own self-pity party as i lament indignantly that it was me who had been voicing out consistently that x role was my desired role - as if verbalising it meant i were entitled to it. in that pity party i sing tunes that my other self finds hard to condone in others, including harbouring a sense of entitlement despite standing on the sidelines and refusing to push boundaries i am scared of. i frustrate myself bc i truly believe that the only way to actualise a desire is to work for it, and simultaneously i know that my peers are absolutely deserving of the fruits of their hard work - in the same way i feel deserving of mine. there is enough for everyone in this world - at the end of the day, i want to show up for my friends and celebrate their wins as if they were mine. i want to choose faith over fear bc i know that no man will be able to close the doors that He opens for me. i want to invest in myself without insecurity rearing its ugly head and whispering negative comments about the people around me. 

and so tonight i choose to fix my eyes upwards. i'll remember that all good things have come and will continue to come from You. i'll remember that i am merely a steward of good things and that my career will only mean something if it points the people around me to You, however that may look like. i choose to be thankful for everything that You have richly blessed me with, and i choose to believe that there is enough for everyone bc You are more than enough. 

first half of my defining decade

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.