Welcome back to ONOFFBEAT! I took a little break as work projects came to a close and new ones began. New ideas for posts began taking shape with more travel stories to tell, and I hope they’re something to look forward to.
Fan Pier, Boston
Earlier last month, I made my first transatlantic trip from London to Boston, something I’ve always wanted to do, because of all the stories and histories I’ve read about this particular journey and how it has affected writers and figures of the New Age especially. My life basically revolves around the things I read, so it only made sense that this journey would be one I’d have to undertake at some point in my life.
At some point when I’m in this country, I always get to the place where I realize that I don’t see it very clearly, because it is very exhausting ... so that I suppose I’ll keep going away and coming back.
James Baldwin, 1961
Having done my undergrad in Boston and masters in London (how lucky, really), I’d been wanting to return to Boston for a while, mostly with the intent of visiting a place that I had once inhabited for ‘old time’s sake’. Moreso, my patience with London had been wearing thin, and being in this constant debacle of US v/s UK (a fascinating question in itself), I was kind of in the mindset that maybe my London days were over, and it was time to head back to the US and find some answers there - after all, it is the home of New York City - every English major’s dream besides London. To be honest, I have no clear idea why I left America in the first place, but I do know that I wanted to live in London when I was in Boston…so there’s no taking that back after some 18 months here now.
Anyway, to make sense of all these complicated feelings, I pulled up one of my favourite essays as the flight was about to take off from Heathrow, the seminal thing that had set me off on this journey to write, and explore world cities and the way they help us navigate our identities: Joan Didion’s Goodbye To All That. It’s a piece that has truly changed my life, not only bringing the literary world of Didion into my life, but also shaping a lot of my own writing style and goals, and introducing me to the ‘Essay’ genre, which has made for some of the most profound reads I’ve come across in my life.
Didion’s essay focuses on her 8-year relationship with New York City in the 1960s, a time which I only know of vaguely, but more or less speaks to that special quality that NYC has to all those it attracts, especially people from a place so vastly different - Didion’s California, and my Singapore. While Didion recalls her NYC-inspired youth in all its vivid glory, she also touches on its ups and downs, the promises and pitfalls of this inspiring city, and how it’s a survival game - almost a mirror to how I feel about London and living out my mid-20s here.
As Didion became older and the excitement of her 20s had worn off, she grows more weary of The Big Apple, and it’s perhaps one of the reasons that made me seek out London rather than New York instead - the sheer intimidating nature of the latter, compared to a place that felt more open and familiar, and where I had family, a community and some semblance of a network. So London it was, and sometimes I wonder where those days of me eagerly packing my suitcase and awaiting something new went, as life caught on and the torrid reality of my 20s and this crazy city hit me full force in the face.
Ever the cynic, I thought firmly upon reading Goodbye To All That that my time in London was about to run its course, even though it hadn’t been two years yet - my initial goal. Quarter life crisis or whatever you may call it, the world at this point, when everything feels so uncertain, so small and large at the same time, really has just given me more headaches and trepidations about growing up than not. More than that, London is not an easy place to live in, and I shudder to think of the naive me who was so confident that things would be easy. And before you tell me that nothing in life ever is - I know - but that really is not helpful advice. So off I went in search of some truth and meaning, but mostly to spend time with Mum who was already in the States then.
***
It’s funny how even when you go with no intention, you lean into a part of yourself raised by your subconscious. Being in Boston made me look back at my youth (I know I’m still young), especially on days when I was going to cafes to do office work rather than write seminar papers. As I scrambled to put together lists of names to invite for my firm’s corporate events, I couldn’t help but think: what the hell am I doing right now?
I’d gone to Boston (and America) for the first time in my life to (re)start my college journey in September 2019, two months before I was to turn 21. It was an exciting point in my life - I had officially dropped out of my previous university after taking a gap year, done the SATs, successfully transferred to an American uni from the UK, and was to start as a sophomore in the States. Forget colonialism, cultural imperialism, or whatever you may call it - studying in America was one of my biggest childhood dreams, and often I think of what a great life I’ve had just because I was able to live one of those dreams out.
Intentionality came to be the word of the trip, as I began to question why Boston in the first place, the purpose with which I went, my journey up until now, and the kind of life I’d wanted to live when I was in Boston - as opposed to the me right now amid her kidult-ing crisis, that only stresses about bills, paying rent, having a social life, and getting a job that can sustain it all. I had even thought about what it would be like if I had kids, and a house to pay off - which has never been in the life plan! I wondered why I was thinking these things, because it felt akin to a performance - a role I never intended to play.
How did I get here? If I were to compare me from then and me now, the former was full of zest and had a curious mind, whereas the me now is someone who goes to pubs too much with her friends to complain about how shitty life is, and is thinking about settling down…? Something just didn’t add up.
I’d been living with these thoughts for about 5-6 months, and questions from family, friends, and random people at events and parties, only made me buckle under the pressure as I struggled to find an answer to what would often feel like interrogations about my life. My way out of it all was to literally leave the city - what has now become a rather unhealthy obsession with travel. Although I see travel as a good thing - it is after all what has helped me write this - I’ve been moored by this quote from the Netflix series One Day. In the first episode, as Emma and Dex get to know one another, Emma asks the latter: “What do you want to do when you’re 40?” Dex looks shaken by the question even though it’s graduation day and he should at least have a vague idea (right?), and instead coolly replies, “I want to be rich.” Funny in the moment, it turned to be the complete opposite as we see Dex’s life go up and down, as he begins to test the limits of where his privilege and nonchalance can afford him, and I was fearful of my life becoming exactly that.
In spite of my similarities to Emma on paper, I saw more commonalities with Dex. I began to realise how little drive I currently had in my life, and how in recent months, I’d become a shell of myself, a fractured version of the person I used to be and have always wanted to be, as life in London went from a green garden to a cold hail. I don’t think I’m one to take things for granted, but the pressure of how things ought to be is a constant demon I battle and is apparently a facet of my personality type - INFJ. Every day I asked myself, what do I want to do? And all I did was come up with some lame excuse that didn’t really get to the heart of the question. This kind of game gets tiring really fast, let me tell you that. I wanted to stop asking myself questions and break the noise, to start doing, but first I felt needed to have this dialogue with myself to think about what, and so it’s back to the past - to Boston - that I felt would hold some answers.
***
And so I arrived in Logan Airport with my detective glasses on, feeling the fresh air engulf my senses as I made my way to my first port for cues: an Airbnb apartment in Allston, a neighbourhood I had grown especially fond of during my student days. Work and nostalgia for Boston aside, I spent the whole week in time-travel mode, thinking about London, myself at 17, at 19, at 21 when I had first arrived, and me now.
I always think I left a part of myself back in America when I decided to move back to Singapore, and then to the UK. It was still the middle of the pandemic, and my college journey had been disrupted with me spending a little over a year in Singapore on American frequency. So much happened in that time, and the closer I got to my family, my life in Singapore, and the fact that I can have chicken rice everyday… maybe Singapore was where I was meant to be after all. While I loved every minute of life in Boston and had grown up so much during my uni journey, I wasn’t able to spend too much time to firmly plant my feet in the ground there and start over. Although time might have helped, I had no interest in exploring Boston further during my senior year - yet on graduation day at Nickerson Field, as I smiled through the lovely speeches and celebrations, I felt that everything that had helped build me up to the person I wanted to be, instead became things I was burying into the ground. It felt like a sharp U-turn, and I’ve been feeling the whiplash ever since.
Looking back, I was never the same when I returned to Singapore after the US. I had my blissful days, but I was in a perpetual state of anxiety and because plans for law school weren’t realised, I sought a new avenue - London, and SOAS. I don’t regret it at all; this road was one I was propelled to take and is something that has made my life all the better. But once student days came to a close (again), the same anxiety returned, and I could only see my life through thorns as I questioned again and again my life’s value and purpose, and what it was I even came to do in the first place.
Just like me thinking that my London days were gone, I think this anxiety speaks to a deeper fear in my heart, of never being able to survive anywhere outside of Singapore and of not being good enough for anything. Although my whole life I’d wanted to study overseas, when I did leave home for the first time, all of these feelings fell apart as I entered a space that was well and truly outside of my comfort zone, and began to feel out of place with everyone, even other Singaporeans who I thought I could connect with a bit - perhaps for not having gone to local school (and being a Chinese girl for that matter). I had no idea how to connect with other Asians or Westerners, who couldn’t quite place me. My only real friend was my neighbour, a British-Indian girl who was older than the rest of our flatmates, where we bonded over our shared love of K-pop, Bollywood, and the quintessential ‘Brown girl’ experience. Most days though, I retreated into myself, holed up in my room or at the cafe doing work, and hated myself constantly for not being the version of myself I had envisaged when coming to uni.
The truth is, back then, I felt enormous pressure to do a well-to-do degree, and go to a good uni that would reflect well on me back home. I was obsessed with rankings, money and status, and because I wasn’t in the US - my initial goal - I tried to make it work in the UK, but the two places are so different that I just could not, nor did I have the cultural acumen to realise such. To make things worse, I was a pretty stubborn and introverted 18/19 year old and wanted to do things the way I thought best. So when chaos ensued the first week of being in my UK uni - getting dropped off at the wrong end of campus with 8 bags of groceries, breaking my phone, being unable to open a bank account - I felt I was in the middle of doomsday, and that pretty much was the theme for the rest of my first year.
I didn’t know how to make friends or socialise, which is so key to a happy uni life. A memoir I read recently about a writer’s own college life and his introvertedness echoed many of my sentiments from then: I was a “cultural snob” who looked down on anyone who partied too much and had no interest in making “meaningful” connections - I was too into my work, my literary conquests, my love for art…but all of that really boiled down to a mindset of rejecting people before they could reject me. I’ve lived with these feelings ever since then, and even though I’ve made steps to not be like this - when it came to making friends at least - this mindset still affected so much of my self-perception, and my constant desire to be in control. It’s a strange paradox: I want to conform to a life of normalcy and expectations, but at the same time I’m so sick of them, and frankly, I don’t fit the ‘standard’. So why had I been living my life, if not for myself?
These last seven years, nothing has been normal. If anything, it showed me just how attached to my past, my childhood identity, and notions of success I am, and how they continue to haunt me to this day as I wonder whether I’ve done anything right or not. I asked my mum during this trip whether me leaving the UK - which I often pinpoint as the turning point - was the right decision, and she ever so wisely told me that I shouln’t treat it as such, because I was unhappy there, I decided to make a change, and that I’m here now all the better for it. Reflecting on her words, I thought that had it not been for me leaving and all that followed after, I perhaps might not be here asking that question. I learned, I made mistakes, I grew. But the fact that I continued to be deeply rooted in a time that was so long gone made me think, what’s not changed?
Fear, fear, fear - that’s all it ever really was.
***
Living in fear of myself, of others, of the future, has never answered any of the questions I had for my own life and purpose. I thought back to how in spite of my dissatisfaction in my first year, how that was the one and only time I’ve truly been ‘free’ as I disregarded everyone else’s criticisms and fought my way out to find something better for myself. That better place was Boston - a space where I actually felt the most alive and driven - and made me think to the better past version of me - even going all the way back to secondary school, where I had kind of conquered a lot of my internal demons and had the confidence to actually live outside of social norms, and had been so eager to leave Singapore. I was so over the cultural, societal, and economical expectations that were on me, I was eager to explore new cultures and meet new people, and I was looking forward to enriching my mind and living out the uni days I’d always wanted. I used to pin up pictures of Harvard, Yale, New York City on my whiteboard - they were goals, but I also realised that was all I ever drove myself towards. I guess once that goal - a US education - was fulfilled, and I had to start all over, that’s where everything sort of went topsy-turvy.
Your college days are meant to be about finding your purpose, and growing into the version of yourself you want to be. I was lucky enough to not have to additionally think too much about my expenses and tuition, and I am immensely thankful and in awe of all the privileges I’ve been afforded in my life, to be able to think about what comes next. Yet the weight of the future is imminent, and being constantly reprimanded by others who aren’t even financing me about me taking things for granted, only made me feel shit for not being the successful (insert job title) that I ought to have been. Yes, I do want to pay it all back, but if I live in the shadow of all these things, and the weight of “having it all by 25”, I find that I’ll never be able to.
My London days became exactly that, me feeling like I was in mental and literal debt, and that my inability to find a stable job - and more - was a reflection of my failures as a person. I was a cripple of my own thoughts and emotions, and I was not happy. But just like me who had made the decision to go the UK at 18, I was living through the pressure of other people’s words and my own false narrative - and once again I thought back to my freed self/state, and tried to place myself in the middle for once, to think of what would satisfy me instead.
I’m so lucky to have a family who understands this, who lets me go through all my phases of uncertainty, drama, and nonsense - and supports me through it all. Being thankful is something I’ve been trying to incorporate more of into my life, and it has made me stop questioning so many things, and start taking in everything that already is in my life. Perhaps it’s because as a woman, I felt like I had to justify my sense of existence, where growing up in Singapore as a minority girl, who didn’t go to RGS or ACSI, made me inherently worthless in the eyes of the toxic meritocracy in Singapore, that privileges hard work and tells you that the harder you work, the more successful you’ll be. But really, that’s only one aspect, because good grades aside…what do we end up actually living for?
Growing up in Singapore, the formula was, good PSLE score = good secondary school = good O-Level/IB grades = good uni = good job back home = get married = have kids = be rich = retire = die.
For me though, it was bust from the get-go. Yet the me who loves to conform, always thought, ‘I can always work harder, be better,’…and when I did finally achieve those things, I felt everything deflate. Marriage and kids aside, my life doesn’t look like many of my friends’ back home, and never have I wanted it to. It’s why I’m here in London, and why it’s uncomfortable. But writing this now, I’m glad I feel the discomfort, and am forced to reckon with these fragments and piece back the version of myself that existed beneath the academic and social pressures - the me who had naturally evolved, as opposed to the poster image I constantly seek to present to others.
I’m a deeply ambitious individual, and always have things I want to do, but never do because of the self-rejection I impose on myself, that has also been informed by past rejections and traumas. But seriously, it gets damn boring after a while - the self-pity and insecurity talk. It’s the same reason I applied to BU instead of Harvard, because I thought I wasn’t good enough. I don’t think it’s altogether a me problem - I think society, gender, class, and my own negative experiences of all this growing up has its role to play - but as I mentioned before, I wouldn’t be where I am now questioning all these things if not for the life I’ve had. I spent my first days in Boston wishing I was in Harvard instead because I wanted to be better, but BU was just as meaningful and was the place for me then. And as much as I was un-feeling London, London is the place for me now.
***
My penultimate day in Boston was spent in Cambridge, where Harvard is. Rather than mourn what could have been, I decided to instead look to the future, and think that maybe this is somewhere I can be later on. Or not - but rather than cry over spilled milk, I decided to look up to the skies instead. After a week of long walks along the Back Bay, excess amounts of coffee and great meals, and surrounding myself in the university city, the true takeaway was that I am in control of my narrative, and that fear is never the answer if I ever want to write my own story.
And so I packed my bags, and returned to London thinking it was time to stop running away, and committed to staying a full month at least without leaving, and with a new mindset. To prolong this newfound mental peace, I decided to take an Uber back to my flat from Paddington Station instead of the Tube (with a 23kg suitcase). The ride back was immensely peaceful, as my ride meandered through Regent’s and Primrose Hill, which made me look at the city properly, perhaps for the first time since I’ve come here, without the tinted lens of an escapist student, but now as an individual out here to live her life.
Unlike Didion, I had not been living in London, although I’ve physically been here for almost 2 years now. Once I decided to though, things became a lot better. It’s the same logic that made me hate my first year in the UK, and made me love Boston. One can only truly grow weary of the place if they’ve become tired of life (Johnson 1777) - but I’ve no reason to yet. I’m only 25, and yes my whole meaning for existing went away once uni was over, but there’s only up from here. When nothing is certain, everything is possible.
It’s been almost three weeks since I’ve returned, and I won’t lie - not everything has been daisies and sunshine (though literally speaking, there is more of it now, thankfully). But I feel myself more at ease being back in London, and taking a moment to appreciate it all rather than react, has helped stretch out my capacity for megacity life as the words I say to it, about life here, and to myself have become kinder and more patient.
To end, I really just want to say that, the words we say to others and ourselves have so much more impact than what seems on the surface. Understanding is always key, and I definitely want to bring more of what it’s like growing up as a brown girl in Singapore - and no I’m not complaining, it’s a problem - into the conversation because life as a woman…is just unnecessarily difficult sometimes.
This was a long one, but if you made it to the end, thanks for reading.
Until the next
— Giana
I read right up to the end- a brave,
Introspective piece. Thanks for sharing your thoughts as you journey physically,
Mentally and spiritually. In the end as cliched as it may sound, the journey of discovery is more important and interesting than the destination.
It is good that you have unearthed the master narrative that has been haunting you- the story of not being enough and the self sabotaging that many of is do, discounting ourselves and looking backwards all the time to see who is disapproving of us. Then there is the voice which I name “Aunt Aggie” - the critical voice in our head that undermines what we do.
In my own journey I have found it very helpful to talk to a coach to unearth more of these master narratives and to question their validity. Instead of ducking, by facing these voices with the help of a coach, I have been able to start a new train of thought whenever these voices strike.