Category: Awareness

  • You always have a choice

    Preparing for a scary future

    Growing up, I have always been a scrawny kid who wasn’t fit and wasn’t naturally good at sports. I failed all my NAPFA tests… so as a Singaporean male (or young boy, at the time), the thought of NS (National Service — Singapore’s active conscription system) absolutely terrified me. Two years of tough physical training and regimentation sounded like hell to me.

    So when it came time to choose a CCA in secondary school when I was 13, I decided to join a uniformed group, specifically NPCC, to prepare myself for the inevitable. That was six full years before NS by the way… do you see how scared I was?

    Unsurprisingly, I dreaded early Saturday mornings (our NPCC training day), which were filled with exhausting physical exercises, group punishment push ups, marching drills under the hot sun, and getting shouted at by our commanders. It wasn’t fun. I’m not sure what exactly kept me going, but I persevered. Maybe going through hardships with my fellow NPCC mates helped. Maybe I deeply wanted to get stronger through this experience.

    And luckily for me, those four years in NPCC worked. When NS finally came, all the drills, punishments, shouting… didn’t shock me. I realised that I could manage, even if I still didn’t enjoy it.

    Paying attention to what mattered to me

    That dislike for the regimental lifestyle also gave me clarity. I knew I didn’t want to be a leader, or take on more responsibilities as a specialist or officer. During BMT, I told my commander honestly during one of those required interview sessions that I preferred to just be a “man” (i.e. a regular soldier). He seemed to understand and took note.

    After BMT, I got what I wanted and was sent to a unit as a “man” and assigned a role. I didn’t love the work, but I did it dutifully.

    Over time, something else started catching my attention. I noticed how many things in my unit camp were, well, badly designed. Slides, posters, videos, certificates… you name it. As someone trained in design (and who loves designing), it really bothered me. One day, not sure what got into me, I decided to approach my commander and express my desire to work on and help improve our unit’s visual materials. 

    After some consideration, he said yes, on the condition that I kept up with my assigned duties. I gave him my word.

    From that moment, the way I experienced NS began to shift. Design work requests started coming in from all over camp. At first, I used a shared desktop to do the work. Later, the workload became so heavy that I was even provided my own laptop so I could use a proper design software and have internet access. That kind of access to resources was unheard of for a regular soldier, by the way!

    Since they couldn’t offer me more pay, commanders occasionally gave me off days in recognition of my work. That was an amazing bonus, because it meant I could do what I love in camp and also spend less time in camp! That made a huge difference. I was still doing the army-related work, and yet I had more autonomy and freedom than I could ever imagine.

    With more free time, I also kept working on my fitness and eventually scored my first Gold in IPPT. That was a milestone I never thought I’d hit.

    By the end of NS, I wasn’t just surviving. I was thriving in my own way by focusing on what mattered to me.

    Awareness leads to choice

    The biggest lesson I took away from this is that no matter what happens, you always have a choice. Even in a situation like NS where so much feels out of your hands, you can still choose how you respond, how you show up, and how you shape your experience.

    I chose to prepare for NS in advance, when I joined NPCC.

    I chose to be honest about not wanting to lead at the beginning of NS.

    I chose to offer my design skills and take initiative to contribute in a way that felt aligned during NS.

    But none of that would have been possible without self-awareness. Before we can make meaningful choices, we need to know what we want, what we don’t want, what energises us, and what drains us. That awareness is what makes choice possible.

    Of course, things could have gone differently. But I’m proud that I tried. If I hadn’t, I might have spent those two years miserable, bitter, and resigned. And that would have been a choice too.

    So, what choice are you making today?

    This post was first published on Substack.

  • The pain we don’t see

    A film about pain

    I recently watched Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain (which I highly recommend), and it stuck with me. Not just because of the film itself, but because of what it revealed about how we experience pain, both in ourselves and others.

    The story follows David and Benji, two cousins who couldn’t be more different. David is reserved, structured, disciplined, and always planning ahead, trying to keep life neat and predictable. Benji is the opposite. He’s raw, warm, expressive, spontaneous, leaning fully into his emotions without much of a roadmap. On the surface, they seem completely incompatible, constantly clashing, misunderstanding each other at every turn. Yet they also see in each other what they lack, and secretly want to be like the other person.

    As the film unfolds, something becomes clear: both of them are in pain. David’s anxiety is fueled by a fear of losing control or falling short of expectations. Benji’s pain comes from feeling lonely and unseen, like he’s always one step away from being truly understood. They just express it differently. 

    That got me thinking. It’s so easy to judge people whose struggles look different from ours. We write them off as “too emotional” or “too sensitive” or “too rigid” or “too full of themselves” without considering what’s beneath the surface. We get caught up in how someone expresses their pain instead of recognising that they’re in pain.

    Seeing the invisible, but real, pain in us

    Later that night, I saw this play out in real life. Walking home past a supermarket, I saw an elderly woman trip and fall. She was bleeding. Instantly, strangers (including me) rushed to offer help. No hesitation. No overthinking. We all just acted. Because physical pain is obvious. It demands a response.

    But what about emotional pain? When someone stumbles internally (when they’re overwhelmed, lonely, anxious) why isn’t our instinct to rush forward in the same way? Maybe because emotional pain is quieter, buried under layers of social norms, expectations, obligations, self-protection, and unspoken rules about “holding it together.”

    And that got me asking myself harder questions.

    How often have I dismissed someone’s struggle because it wasn’t immediately visible? 

    How many times have I ignored my own pain because it didn’t seem “serious enough” to warrant care? 

    How many times have I resented someone for being “selfish” or “drama” when, deep down, I had just gotten used to neglecting my own needs, suppressing my own truth, and denying my difficult emotions?

    The truth is, we all carry some form of invisible pain. Anxiety about the future. Regret about the past. Loneliness in a crowded room. The longing to be fully seen. None of it is insignificant. And maybe real compassion starts when we stop measuring pain against the arbitrary standards we’ve set in our own minds — when we stop deciding which struggles are “valid” and which ones aren’t.

    Learning to see, to hold, and to love our pain

    So here’s the challenge I’m sitting with: 

    How can we get better at seeing each other’s invisible struggles? 

    How do we create space for pain, even when it’s messy, even when it doesn’t look like ours? 

    And maybe most importantly, how do we start offering that same compassion to ourselves, to allow our pain and ourselves to be truly seen?

    No neat answers here. Just an invitation to notice. To pause before judging. To lean toward understanding. Maybe that’s how we turn everyday interactions into moments of real connection. Maybe that’s how we make space for each other in a world that so often rushes past unseen pain.

    This post was first published on Substack.