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My relationship with ‘striving’ and ‘Singaporean-ness’ is kind of awkward. I don’t consider myself a typical Singaporean striver (there’s a type), but somehow I think I’ve ended up out-striving the worst of them.

Partly, it’s that I knew from a very young age that as a not rich queer child there, I would have to go above and beyond to get myself the opportunities to live a queer life somewhere else some day.

But once I got that, it’s hard to turn off. What’s the next thing to attain? It’s rarely material things for me, but it’s hard to turn off that need to just achieve the next thing, even when I feel and know I no longer have to. Because that early striving saved my life, and it feels safe, and it feels weird to not do that.

I’m doing a lot of work to learn to give myself permission to stop.