How do I feel? That is hard.
Everyone is on this constant journey
to find out who they are their entire life.
You won’t even know when you’re dying or you’re dead
because we are changing all the time.
I mean, I’ve changed so much.
You don’t even know what you’re having for lunch tomorrow.
So how are you going to know what you’re going to be,
what you’re going to feel.
And I have no idea who I am.
That’s the most honest answer I can give you.
Since I was a kid, people would tell me that I’m different.
But I was like, why?
To me I’m very normal.
What is the standard of normal?
No one knows what the standard of normal is.
In the recent few years
I’ve realised that that is what makes me different...
that I say what I like and I do what I like.
And I have no restraint.
I’ve always been honest with myself.
So I never knew that it was difficult
or ‘normal’ for other people to not be honest
with other people and themselves.
You can be completely honest with yourself
but still be unhappy with what you’re doing.
I feel I have all these moments where I blame myself so hard
for really small things.
And I think it’s something from childhood.
As a Singaporean Chinese person,
we are so desperate for parental approval.
We just want to be praised or validated
by our parents all the time, since we were young.
And I have no idea why, but it is just the way it is.
In my case it was mostly my mum
because I really, really love my mum.
And when I do something to upset her
or I do something that she doesn’t agree with
then it makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong.
I disliked myself for a very long time.
And it’s very difficult to get rid of such feelings.
From the time when I was 11, I started to be very aware
of these feelings of being very unhappy with myself.
Everything I did, I felt like I wasn’t enough.
And I just couldn’t find a way of fitting in.
And I think it just made me feel really lousy.
When you’re younger and you don’t like yourself
you act out against other people.
But actually you are just really unhappy with yourself.
You’re hurt and that’s why you hurt other people.
But if you care for the people around you
you will realise how pointless the action is.
I think I like myself better now than I did in the past.
And I think I got closer to it because I met my partner.
He always says,
‘It’s so hurtful to me when you hurt yourself’.
So when he says things like that it makes me realise
that I shouldn’t do this to myself.
And I think it took me a really, really long time
to get over that and to try and work on myself.
Because that’s the only way you can like yourself more,
is by working on yourself
so you become a version of yourself that you like.
You have to start to live with yourself because
this is who you’re going to be for the rest of your life.
There’s this quote that I like, from a book by Donna Tartt,
called ‘The Secret History’.
It’s a quote right at the start, a really long one,
but there’s this part that says,
‘We realise all of our pains are our own’
‘including our skinned knees’.
Whether it’s physical pain or psychological pain,
you can always express them and people can say they relate.
But you can’t actually experience it on behalf of someone else.
Trying to like yourself more
is a personal struggle that no one else can help with.
We can try our best to help them understand our world.
But you can’t go through your entire life
waiting for the validation of one person...
unless you don’t want to be yourself.
You can take advice, you can listen to a lot of people,
but if you don’t want to start doing it, it will never happen.
And it’s all about wanting to do it...
making yourself give yourself a chance.
There are many times, especially now in modern society,
that we’re surrounded by people but we still feel very lonely.
Sometimes I’m on social media, texting ten friends,
but I feel so lonely because I feel not understood.
And I think the ‘not understood’ feeling results in loneliness.
I’m very aware of this fact, that we are all alone in a way.
But that doesn’t mean we have to feel lonely all the time.
And I actually feel like I’m least lonely
when I’m alone but happy with who I am.
When I’m truly listening to who I am inside,
when inside and outside become one,
I think that’s when loneliness will totally be out of my being.
I feel like a lot of people are not aware of who they are.
You don’t have to say everything you think, of course,
but you need to have the ability to think it in the first place.
Because if you’re not allowing yourself to listen to yourself
you won’t know what you really are.
My advice is... get more lost.
Do something completely unfamiliar and go on your own.
That’s the only way you can discover
a little bit of who you are inside...
when you are out of your comfort zone.
If you’re putting yourself in a new situation
you are forced to react.
You are forced to bring out parts of yourself
you didn’t know you had.
And there’s no way that someone who is lost
puts themselves in a situation like that
and doesn’t discover who they are.
If I had a wish for the world, it’s for everyone to pause
and listen to themselves more.
That is what I aspire to do.
That is a good life.