wow okay, so I'm back here again - writing.. or at least attempting to. 

It's been a while since I've written out my thoughts and emotions. Is this how it is when you grow older? You tend to lose a bit of touch with your emotions because you just simply go through the day zooming by things to check off your to-do list, and by the time you get to properly process (or attempt to) your thoughts/emotions, you're already on your bed halfway falling asleep. 

My family tends to think otherwise though - they all agree that I cry too easily. 

The last time I cried: 

1. 10 minutes ago. I was watching About Time and parent-child relationship movies get me to no end. 

2. Last Sunday night. On the plane. I was sick and had the air pressure fuck up my ears and head. It felt like death and I was in so much pain I couldn't stop crying. 

Yeah ok! I get that I might get triggered easily by these things but I meant like sitting down with a lot of my emotions and actually working through them hasn't been an easy journey for me. I feel like as I get older it's harder for me to do exactly that. I don't know if it's because I've just been comfortable and ignorant with how my mind seems to function and how it's wired or if i'm just reluctant to just dig so deep anymore. 

Takeaways From A First Job: You're Not Gonna Love It

So I've come to realise I only ever write whenever I'm faced with a huge pain in the butt, heartbroken or whenever I'm transitioning through different milestones in life. Guess this is me transitioning out of my first full-time job! Yay, maybe I should Facebook milestone this ASAP. 

Writing this because it's a useful reminder for myself (and anyone else who reads this space) about the exponential growth that you will face in your twenties, upon graduation and when you enter the workforce with your initial wide-eyed wonder and drive, and then slowly deteriorating and like a car running low on fuel. How I spent my 11 months fighting hard at work and trying to balance all the other wonderful millennial twenty-something problems I have, attempting to find purpose and meaning despite the struggles, and how I eventually learnt to let go (practically) and found another job. 

I spent 11 months as a full-time auditor in one of the big 4 audit firms and like many others, this became my first job because it was "safe", it was "something related to my field of study" because I graduated with a double major in accounting and finance, and it was honestly the only job offer I had at the point of graduation. Times are hard, man.

3 THINGS TO EXPECT FROM YOUR FIRST JOB:

1. Expect yourself to know nothing

Despite interning with the firm for about 2 months prior to joining full-time, the first few months was a huge learning curve for me. Be ready to learn, have an open mind and be super (i mean super) open to constructive criticism. If your colleagues have a better or more efficient way of working things out, never be afraid to ask them to teach you (and hopefully they'll be willing to share), but never ever think that it's embarrassing to ask "stupid" questions!! This is so important!! Throughout my 11 months I've asked pretty "stupid" questions that miiiighttt have made me look like an audit noob to some of my seniors, but I'm lucky that they're all pretty understanding and just know that a year or two ago, they were in the same shoes as I was. That makes everything seem a whole less awkward.

When I first started out, I knew nothing about excel shortcuts and basic every-day functions like vlookup and how to construct a bloody pivot table. Took me close to about 4 months of everyday excel usage to really familiarise myself with those shortcuts and formulae. It's been about 11 months but it's still safe to say on a scale of 0 being "knowing absolutely nothing" to 10 being "knowing everything", I'm probably just made it to a 1. Or maybe a solid 1.5. We'll get there.

2. Expect lots of struggle and patience (!!) is truly a virtue

What is life without its constant struggle? I read somewhere that life is really all about choosing the things and problems that you would sacrifice yourself for because let's be real, we can never live a pain-free and problem-free life.

During the 11 months doing a nature of work I was not necessarily good at was hard because as much as I tried not to overhype the thought that I will l o v e my job (just like what every movie, advertisement and instagram post tried to tell me), I couldn't let it go. Screw you social media and ridiculously inflated expecations!!! I couldn't see it in the right perspective that would make me hustle hard and see the meaning behind the work I was doing. If the work you're doing is boring/meaningless, then you just have to find a way to change your perspective in order to get by and not get too depressed, right? Right.

Having patience with yourself is so important because we always love to set unrealistic expectations for ourselves and it really takes time and effort to try to reach that realistic expectation vs your actual performance and work and realising what are the factors contributing to your performance. It's hard but also very normal to constantly benchmark yourself against others.

I'm still trying to find that right balance in making sure that I'm not lagging behind too much but also trying to be okay with my own pace when I work. It's not always good to compare though I would say a good amount of healthy competition and stress would help propel you in your performance at work.

3. Expect yourself to pick up the shit if things go south 

I don't know about you but I was so conditioned to handle problems at work almost the exact way I handled problems I faced in exams/school. It was so difficult trying to seggregate the nature of the two problems, because it was almost natural for me to go into my auto-pilot "how-to-solve-problems-when-in-school" mode.

Whenever I got stuck with a problem in an exam, we were always taught to skip it and move onto the next question. Even training myself to do that was a chore because I was always the kind of kid that refused to move onto the next question until I solved the one I was stuck on. And when the questions got harder as we moved up the educational ladder, I had to train myself to let go and move on. But you know, being students, we always had a lowkey choice as to whether or not we could: a) leave it blank b) give some sub par answer and hopefully try to score some method marks here and there c) wreck your brains out and try your freakin' hardest.

I'm an a or b kind of girl, 100% honest with you. This is also probably why I never got my first class.

Okay, back the point. Because I was so used to being okay with blatantly giving up whenever I hit a hard question or doing bare minimum enough to get me a couple of method marks here and there, this approach was the only approach I was able to come up with when I was faced with problems at work and it was naaahhhtt guuud!!! It was a struggle, man. I literally had to force myself to rewire my thought process and it really trained me not to keep giving up. All I could tell myself was that it was impossible to give up because the responsibility was mine to deliver on my part and no one else was going to pick up the shit unless I did something about it.

Shit doesn't move unless you do because you're the shit. - Rachel Tan, 2017. 

3 THINGS NOT TO EXPECT FROM YOUR FIRST JOB: 

1. Don't expect to make friends, just colleagues.

Basically, have the most open mind you can possibly have.

Coming back from Melbourne did give me a broader perspective and I was definitely more open to chat and socialise, but the problem is: I went into orientation holding the same expectation that the people there were going to do the same. Maybe I was already conditioned to think that way because many of the Singaporean friends I made in Melbourne all mostly held the same mentality that they're all away from home, so they're more open and willing to put themselves out there to strike up conversations with other people. After a relatively huge culture shock and feeling like a fish out of water throughout my 3D2N orientation program, I went home crying and completely hating everything because I was unable to "make friends" like how I used to back in Melbourne and in school. That was one misconception that I had when I entered into my first job - I expected everyone I met to be friend material where we would have that "instant click" and we'll all be BFFs having brunch and really top notch conversations. But instead, I was swamped with boring questions and lots and lots of work-related talk, "what clients are you on?" "Do you know any seniors?" "What sector are you in?" "I heard xx was a terrible client.." the list goes on. 

Ultimately, it was my first job and inevitably due to the flaws of the human mind, we're most likely to enter into a new environment with a set of ideals and expectation. That's no one's fault. And that's honestly really okay, but the lesson learnt is when your expectations and ideals are not being met (high chances that this will happen), you cannot sit down, sulk, get angry at people and the circumstance you were placed in. Instead, get back up on your feet and readjust your perspective on the situation and remember to always try to have an open mind, open heart and listening ears. Back in school, we were given the privilege to choose who we wanted to work with. But at the workplace, you can't possibly choose who you want to work with and who your colleagues are going to be and most importantly, not everyone's going to be your friend. You just have to adapt and adjust to your surroundings and the people around you. This was initially very hard for me to navigate around but I've learnt that humans are social creatures and we are all equipped with relatively strong adaptation skills. Trust in those innate skills and you'll slowly find yourself being able to adjust quickly to new surroundings and different people.  

2. Don't expect work-life balance (the way the social media makes it out to be)

Millenial shit. Instagram hypes it up too much and we forget about the daily grind that most of us goes through rather than the 2% of instagrammers with their perfect "hustle-hard-but-still-got-time-to-post-really-sick-flatlays-of-my-new-chanel-bag" posts. However, this really taught me how to prioritize my limited time to do really meaningful things. 

During peak I worked non-stop and at a point in time, I was so burnt out from work that I literally spent my weekends sleeping and only headed out for meals with my family.

(hey but at least I still had my shitty humour in tact during peak period yeah.. ;-) )

I learnt that I get energy from spending time with friends and family, where I get re-energized for the week with the conversations and time I have with them. So during the peak period where I couldn't get out of bed and stayed at home all day, I was upset and the work week seemed like it dragged on continuously for 2 weeks. It felt like there wasn't a break so I decided to go out every weekend, whether or not it was to run a lame errand with my family or it was a quick catch up session with a friend. This helped my brain mark the end of a work-week and tell myself it was time to relax, even just for a bit. 

3. Don't expect everyone to have the same work ethic as you

This is still pivotal learning issue for me because I understand that different companies uphold different values and cultures. Cultures are mainly defined by the majority of the employees within the company and what they stand for and how they function as a whole. What I've learnt during my time in a large Singapore-based audit firm is that no matter how hard not to succumb to the bad mentality that the number of hours I put in at work somehow correlates to how much work is being done and ultimately reflecting whether or not I'm a "hard worker" or a "slacker".  It's probably a generalisation but this is personally what I've experienced throughout my 11 months working and maybe it's a very "Singaporean/kiasu" thing to do. I entered the work with a very Australian-laid-back-super-into-work-life-balance mindset, where I initially stood very firm on not turning on my work laptop at home, getting off from work at 6:30/7pm every day and keeping my weekends very isolated from work things. However, as time went by and evidently many of my colleagues and seniors had very different perspectives on this whole work-life balance thing, they had no qualms working till 1/2am every night and sacrificing weekends slogging out at the office (at least the office has air con on weekends, they say), it got very hard to stand by my strict work-life balance values. I've had people give me very judgmental looks when I say that I want to maintain a work-life balance, and others discouraging me from it because it comes across as if I have other things in life that are more important and that in itself was a negative connotation. Looking back, prioritising a life outside work is NOT a negative thing and it's NOT something that appears to be "slacker" or "lazy" because it just goes to show that you prioritise a life outside of work more than the other person and that is OKAY. 

What's NOT okay is the bad culture that deems you as "slacker" or "lazy" just because you don't clock in at least 4 hours of overtime and you don't work weekends. Eventually, I caved into the peer pressure and found myself routinely coming home and turning on my laptop to continue with more work and seniors would find it okay to send me emails at 1am, expecting me to read and sometimes respond to them as soon as it gets sent out. That's when I started feeling very depressed, overwhelmed and that work never ends. I no longer had the values I initially once felt so strongly about and that made me feel like I disappointed myself or lost myself in the process. This was an issue I really struggled with and spoke to a few close friends about, but eventually, the solution to this problem was really asking myself what was important and what I could do to stop feeling negative about work and how to make myself feel better. It took a huge amount of effort to consciously not turn on my laptop once I reached home and dealing with the guilt that ensued from not working when I came home was something that was a tough pickle to deal with. Logically I knew that it wasn't necessary to feel guilty for not working during after-office hours, but irrationally I felt like I was "slacking" or that "other people are still working now, and you're not, this is why you will always suck." !!! SOoo many people struggle with this in the workplace I was in, but I think what's needed is really not to give a shit about what others might think of you but at the same time be answerable to the quality and quantity of work you've done during office hours. 

OKAY!!! I'm done with this long-ass rant and I'm glad I've managed to pen my thoughts down despite it being pretty repetitive! Huge shout out to my best friends, my rock my shelter and everything else in between, and my new friends/colleagues that were the best source of strength and comfort whenever work got too hard, you guys also know who you are. It's been a hell of a ride working at the big 4 and despite it's crazy challenges like the mad working hours with crazy deadlines and sometimes difficult team mates, I have learnt so much and this experience has made me come out stronger than before (ugh cliche, I know).

To the next chapter in life, here I come!

An attempt at science.

It's probably just all the oxytocin, dopamine, endorphins and phenylethylamine going crazy in my body. Something I've come to realise about myself is that I can't control how much to give and how much to take. Portion control. I get greedy and then I stop. I stop and then I get greedy. I let go and then I give too much of myself away. It's like I've been learning nothing from reading The Art Of Seduction (super good read, btw). The book teaches you how to be more aware, be more tactful and observant of the other party and I swore to make sure that I wouldn't make the same mistakes I always made. But it seems like I've failed again. 

It's annoying how it seems like I try to deny myself from any sort of feeling with someone, but ironically, at the slightest reciprocation of feelings and attraction, I just give myself away and I start to worry, romanticise and idealise so many situations and then I get anxious and then I draw myself away. And now we're at the last step where I probably let myself go too much, too deep and made myself a little bit more vulnerable than I should have, and now my stomach is churning and all that's running through my head is "You shouldn't have. You shouldn't have even had the slightest thought." 

I am so incapable of controlling my thoughts, my words and my actions but yet somehow still foolishly believed for a fucking moment (again) that I am able to do... this differently. But this cycle has repeated itself too many times over and I am so, so tired from this. Makes me sick thinking about it and really just, pathetic. 

It's just the oxytocin. It's just the dopamine. It's just the fucking endorphins. 

Mama.

It's odd how a body can stay so
perfectly still, at peace and
body filled with embalming fluids
lips plastered together with a pink lipgloss
she would never wear

Donned in your custom made blouse-
made in Chinatown for your 90th birthday,
Ayi Hoon said
you lost too much weight
but went quickly with your last breath on Thursday morning.

"Wah Miang" (my dear)  and "Wei seeer" (Rachel) were my names
my mama lived a fulfilling life and she left pain-free, at least,
that's what they all say
but i have seen cancer rob lives and deteriorate bodies
in both my grandparents and
it never gets easier to watch

Permanent goodbyes are always hard,
and the dead always looks too perfectly made up to leave so quickly
when your hearse went down Ceylon road today
I hope you saw your daughters, your sons, your grandchildren, your caretaker and your church kakis
All while holding gong gongs hand
up in heaven



Dedicated to my Grandmother, Kwok Sui Eng who passed away peacefully at the age of 93 on the 15th of June 2017.

not worth a post but here you go.

some people aren't worth writing about, because writing only seems to solidify my thoughts into something a bit more... tangible? I guess? I don't know anymore. 

It's 3 am and I've got sad songs on and I've been thinking sad thoughts. I feel like I've taken 1000 steps back into the past, with sixteen year old rachel being hung up over useless infatuations and always, always having thoughts catapulted into sad ones because of..... myself. Great to be back! 

Maybe I've never really tried to solve the real reason why I would always be triggered like this and over the years I've just learnt how to cope with shit like this by just denying myself from any sort of feeling that I might have felt with anyone that I was momentarily attracted to. I remember having this discussion once with my counsellor, and she asked me a question: "Do you feel like you deserve to be loved?" 

This is the question that keeps replaying in my head over and over again. Do I deserve to be loved? if I don't, then why do I keep expecting to be loved? What more by a person of such calibre? I'm stuck in this feedback loop from hell, feeling annoyed that I'm sad over this and having the same thoughts about being underserving and yet still ironically being sad because someone didn't want me the way I wanted them to. It's always so fucking inward looking that it pisses me off. 

Ian introduced me to a book and I'm going to start on it tonight just to try to get a bit of enlightenment from this annoying irrationality of my mind. This afternoon, I finally allowed myself a bit of time to just sit and wallow with my emotions. I guess working and having packed weekends is a good thing because I can never find time to be as sad as I used to be back when I was in school. But also at the same time, because I'm so busy, I never had the time to sit down and self reflect. I haven't been writing nor reading. Good conversations have been popping up here and there over the past couple of months, but I feel like I haven't been progressing the way I envisioned myself to be. 

okay. I'm going to read. and I'm going to sleep. And i'm going to be okay again tomorrow. Just for today, just for tonight, I'm not okay. 

backtrack: stories i've been meaning to write about

I've been meaning to start something like this for about close to a year, but just never found it within myself to sit down with all these stories I've heard, feelings I've felt and try to string them into coherent sentences and construct them into paragraphs and turn them into stories that I can look back on. It's hard. I haven't been writing much and I'm coming up with way too many excuses not to do this.

But tonight, over dinner with my mother and my paternal grandmother (supposedly nai nai, but we've been calling her popo ever since we could speak and none of the adults bothered correcting us so.. popo it is), I learnt something new again about my grandparents and managed to have a little sneak peak into my father's childhood. I believe that there's always a little magic behind listening to childhood stories of your parents and grandparents. Taking a few minutes to listen to your grandma talk about how she met your grandpa, how they were struggling to make it through tough times with three young kids etc etc.

I'd say that discovering how your family came about and how they were brought up is sort of introspective? It causes you to self-examine and perhaps get a bit more clarity as to why your parents react to things in a certain way etc. I'm a relatively strong believer in the whole "how your parents were brought up inevitably has a sort of effect on how the kids get brought up" thing. So listening to stories from popo tonight just sparked that feeling of warmth and as cheesy as it sounds, grounding me and my understanding about myself and my family a little bit more.

I spent a majority of my early childhood days growing up in my paternal grandparents' flat at kim kiat. That flat still brings back a massive wave of nostalgia every time I visit it - but that's another story on its own. What I'm trying to drive at is that when I used to visit my grandparents, at the corner right before we enter the kitchen, there were two huge fish tanks. Yes, we're talking about fishes for a bit. I never liked fishes.

There was always this huge scary looking fish on living in the top fish tank, I say scary because my grandpa always warned us to never stick our hands in there because it'll bite our fingers off. The other tank at the bottom usually had the smaller, prettier looking fishes. For the longest time, one of the things my cousins and I would line up to do was to reach out for the red-frozen-worms-in-a-cube thingum from the freezer to feed the fierce fish, let's just call him Bob. It was always so fascinating, we'd glue our eyes to the tank watching the cube slowly disintegrate into little red strings, and Bob would swallow it one by one (sometimes Bob gets a little impatient and just swallows the whole cube before it even disintegrates). I never knew where the fishes came from, but all I knew was that the smaller fishes were always dying but somehow gong gong managed to constantly have new ones in the tank, and bob still reigned the top tank for the longest time.

Gong gong used to work at the police force as a car mechanic. I learnt that civil servants could retire at the age of 55 and it never occurred to me to ask the question: so what did gong gong work as after 55? Did he even work? He was always just a grandfather to me, and I say it in the most passive way because I never took the initiative to bother about what he did after retirement. I only remembered him taking us out to play, buying us food (paos, longans and chee kueh) and shoving dollar notes into our hands when our parents weren't looking and saying, "go buy something nice for yourselves." I have so many regrets because I was ignorant and self centered when I was a kid (aren't we all a little, though?), and I never took the effort to ask him or find out how he spent his days after being a car mechanic, besides playing the role of my grandfather.

So what I found out tonight was that, after retiring as a car mechanic, my dad convinced gong gong to find something else to do with his time instead of idling around, because he might get too addicted to gambling (I learnt what 4D and TOTO was when I was a kid thanks to gong gong, because he'd always be flipping the newspapers to the winning page), so gong gong did.

popo: your gong gong knew some people and he got himself a job in a fish farm!

me: was it nearby home?

popo: no. It was in Jurong, but there was always a pickup truck that picked him up from our house. He used to work in the cold room, where a lot of the fishes were stored.

mum: ya, he had to wear a coat and boots in and out of the cold room.

me: and he was old.. but working in a cold room.

popo: your gong gong enjoyed it and that's why he got to bring back so many fishes!

me: the ones that we always saw in the fish tanks?!

popo: yes! but your gong gong left after a while because he was getting older and he could not tahan the cold room anymore.

me: then what did he do after working at the fish farm?

You see, everything's a little bit new to me. I knew very little about gong gong and the last few memories I have of him are ones of him being very sick, very angry and cancer was just devouring every spark of joy within him. I struggle a bit to recall memories of him but one thing's for sure- everyone tells me that I was his favourite and I can remember all the small actions of love he had showed me and I guess that's why now whenever I listen to stories of him, I get a little bit emotional about it.


Shortly after gong gong left the fish farm, he started to work as a part time toilet cleaner at the SAFRA opposite his place. That's another story for the next time. If I ever get to it.

Just thought I'd get it out on this platform before I regret and forget. Those two things are the worst.

Till the next, to whoever's reading this. You too, future Rachel.

Retox

It has been a hot minute since I last wrote. But it's pretty amazing that I've been keeping a journal/blog since I was 7. Cheers to sustaining something for so long!

Now that I've graduated from school, I realised I've sort of lost a form of structure in my life  I mean the nature of my work is definitely more structured than a lot of other jobs out there. But what I mean is that, after graduating, I don't seem to have a very solid and certain plan for the next few years, let alone this year. Back in school there was always the next semester to provide as an excuse to not think about the "future" ie post grad life. Now that post grad life is here and I'm actually living/relishing in it, I really haven't been enriching it in ways that I would like to.

So after a really hectic weekend and after swearing off from nights out and excessive consumption of alcohol- (god damn it rachel you are 22 please get your shit together), at 1am on my bed last night regretting everything, I deliriously typed out a note on m phone. It goes a bit like this:

(Insert pic here because my phone can't seem to upload it) 

I mean everyone literally says your twenties will pass by in a blink of an eye and why the fuck would I want to spend my youth being depressed and anxious and lost!! Yknow, I've had enough of that shit the last few years cheers. 

Let's see how this goes huehue 

1st Peak.

it's been a strenuous few days, because, "start of peak" they all say. It's been real shit. My balances don't tie up, throw in a 6 hour long meeting with the client, working till past 12 midnight consecutively for 2 nights, RIP complexion, gaining all the office weight because lunch and dinner + barely any cardio done... 

It's been a real trying week. 

Last night I got choked up on my stress and inability to get shit progressing as much as I would like to and found myself coming home at 1am, sitting by my mother's bedside with the simple intention of just wanting to see her. (At this point I haven't seen my mother in 2 days, she's always asleep when I come home) 

"Mummy," she stirred in her sleep and sensed that something was amidst after hearing my wavering voice. 

I ended up full on sobbing in front of her because I was suddenly overwhelmed by all these emotions- anger, sadness, the thought of quitting, the fact that I suck at this job etc etc etc. Thoughts that I've been trying so hard not to entertain bubbled up to the surface last night when I just simply wanted to see my sleeping mother. 

I cried so damn uglily, until I could hear the helplessness in my mother's voice, "so how... what do you want to do?" She didn't mean it in an angry manner. She truly meant it when she asked me, because all I could repeat in between my sobs was how much I wanted to quit this shit job. 

It was a good 15 minutes of crying and then I proceeded into my room to dry my hair, and nearly caught a panic attack because I was crying that hard and I couldn't find it within me to take slow deep breaths. I snuggled up in bed crying so helplessly and pathetically and my mother crawled out of bed and walked into my room. 

"Let's pray."

I've got to say, my main man Jesus got some skills up there. When I'm pushed to the limit with my own capabilities, He really took the wheel today. My senior found it within her to help me restructure my whole excel sheet and made the figures balance in about 2 hours - something that I have been working on the past 2 days. And after that, the financial director of the client came in asking if we had prepared that particular section's work and if we could share it with her. I was so so so soso sso so so saved by the grace of God because if my senior did not help me with that excel in the morning, things would not have moved an inch and I would still be caught up going in circles, and when the FD came to ask for the document, I wouldn't have been able to produce it. 

It's been a hectic week but through these small things I've learnt to be thankful for the small things where God has shown himself to me. 

I just can't wait to sleep my weekend away.