I turned 30 slightly over two months ago. As time ticked towards the ‘big’ milestone, I wasn’t quite sure of what to expect. In fact, I was feeling fairly sanguine about it all.
The actual day wasn’t any different, either. At the stroke of midnight, I was at a friend’s house with others after spending the evening attending a wedding. It was a fairly muted affair, and after 15 minutes the usual “happy birthday” refrain was sung to me. I smiled nervously, glancing at my friends. What are you supposed to do when people sing “happy birthday” to you anyway? I was obviously appreciative of the gesture, but I’m also generally uncomfortable being the center of attention, so I decided to also sing along with them to minimise my awkwardness.
As I internalised the reality of reaching ‘unc status’ now that I was 30, I realised that I had already done all the hand-wringing I possibly could about being 30. Every possible form of media that you see constantly pushes this idea that the 20s are the ‘prime years of your life’, that it is your peak, and that you should not waste it. If you were to speed-run a decade of your life, this was meant to be it.
Somehow in your 20s, you are supposed to solo travel, date as much as possible, hustle and grind, wake up at 5am to wash your face, journal and meditate, find a partner and BTO, and sink $100,000 into renovating your HDB to look like everyone else’s while swearing that it’s different, with the phrases “mid-century modern”, “japandi”, “minimal”, and “ikigai” inevitably flooding your IG/Pinterest/TikTok moodboard no matter how much you resist, like the venom symbiote taking over Spider-Man. Obviously I jest, but the larger point remains.
I had a conversation about this topic last November with a friend from abroad who was visiting, and I heavily disagreed with the statement. To think that the 20s are the best time of your life is to concede that you have ‘peaked’, and that is just an incredibly depressing thought to me. If anything, I consider the 20s to be the start of the rest of my life, and I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of living life as an actual adult person.
As I look back on my 20s, it was messy, confusing, frustrating, depressing and also empowering, incredible, fascinating, and hopeful. There are many things I learned along the way, and I’ve been spending the better part of 2025 just reflecting on this milestone.
BC/AC (Before and after COVID)
Chalk it up to fate, but COVID neatly split my decade right down the middle, as I turned 25 in 2020. As with most people, many things changed for me post-COVID. Besides fully developing my frontal lobe, I just became a different person. My early twenties were fraught with a lot of anxious energy as I was figuring out how to be an adult, learning to talk to women without coming across as awkward, and spending most of my weekends taking 10-hour overnight buses to Kuala Lumpur to try and win university debate tournaments that literally no one outside of the sport cares about.
In fact, the only way I could possibly get someone to care about debating then, and even now is to tell them that Sally Rooney was once a debater too and wrote a great essay1 before she became famous about her experiences in university debating, many of which mirrored my own and that of countless others (she just like me fr). But I digress. Point is, I often felt like a passenger in my own life and was just being carried by the wave of time without much concern about where I was going or what I wanted.
A difficult break-up and a pandemic later, I was 25, deeply wounded and lost. I was mentally spiraling, but thankfully past Subra had enough self-awareness to seek therapy. Years of therapy soon followed, allowing me to heal and envision an adult life beyond grief, anxiety and self-doubt.
Healing from trauma doesn’t happen neatly. I spent years prior avoiding my pain and even when I confronted it, it took some time to accept that I had been hurt, because I assumed that my mental struggles were my fault (it wasn’t).
I had to then let myself feel the pain and process it fully. The years of avoiding my feelings meant that accepting them was akin to re-opening an infectious half-healed wound, pouring salt on it, and then finally dressing and cleaning it up. I needed to shock my nervous system, and it was incredibly difficult, but with a good therapist it worked wonders for me. I’ve probably spent close to 5 figures on therapy, but it is one of the best investments I’ve made in my life.
Who am I?
As people often say, the real work in therapy starts from what you do outside of it. So I spent the second half of my twenties reconstructing my identity and deciding on which path to take as an adult. Like any good middle-class privileged Singaporean, I completed the 12 years of required education to become a valued member of Singapore Inc as I joined the workforce.
The only problem was, it soon became clear to me that I was not entirely satisfied with my life. I think lots of people in general grow up with various structured notions of how their adulthood is supposed to turn out, and it often becomes a checkbox exercise. Graduate at 25, marry at 28, house at 30, kid at 32, and so on. I’ve obviously bypassed this timeline now, but in those immediate post-COVID years I was worrying about this. COVID already felt like it stole 2 years from me, and now I was stuck in an existential rut. Were the life goals that I set for myself really my goals, or was I living my life based on what others expected of me?
Sometimes these expectations are so deeply embedded in your subconscious that you’ve successfully duped yourself into thinking this is the way to your happiness. But your true, actual self doesn’t give up so easily, at least in the initial throes of adulthood. Like the man at the bottom of the well, you can hear him whisper amidst the noise that this is not what you really want, that you can break out of this self-imposed mind prison. You can either choose to listen to this man’s whispers by giving him rope to climb and reach safety, or treat his whispers as the mutterings of an invalid and carry on with your life uncritically, the consequences of which you won’t feel until one day you’re 50 and you realise that this is not the life you wanted but stumbled into because you were so afraid of doing anything out of the ordinary, and you wish you listened to that whisper, but it’s too late because the man at the bottom of the well has become mute and now there is only silence where there once was hope. I chose to listen to the man in the well, and he told me to quit my job and move to New Zealand.
“Then he made one last effort to search in his heart for the place where his affection had rotted away, and he could not find it.” – Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
The Year of Magical Thinking (and living)
New Zealand was a blissful exercise in learning to live freely. I spent over half a year living as a hobbit working the best job of my life, meeting some incredible people along the way. I then had three months living out of my car as I drove down the country from North to South without any semblance of a plan, choosing to stop and continue my journey as I wished. And I capped off the year by doing a thru-hike which gave me some of the best days of my 20s.
The year abroad nourished my childhood self who read all those stories of explorers and travellers, wishing that he too would one day get to embark on a special journey of his own. Most of all, it made me realise that I can just do things. I went to NZ alone without a plan, drove for the first time in my life in a foreign country (I still have yet to drive more than 5 minutes in Singapore), stepped out of my comfort zone innumerable times, and let myself be awed by the magic of the outdoors. I will probably write a separate post on how my sabbatical changed me permanently, but this was the final gift I gave to my 20-something self. Dream big, and dream audaciously, because you will be rewarded with gifts beyond your wildest comprehensions.
Where do I put all this love?
At this point I am incredibly comfortable being alone, and to a certain extent I have always been that way. But the human experience will always crave connection and companionship, and I am no different. There have been many nights of self-doubt and self-flagellation, wondering why I am still single and if I am truly deserving of love. I have tried knocking on the door of love over the years in my 20s, through online dating and by trying to organically meet people (if any of my friends know women that likes short kings please put me out of the misery of swiping on dating apps). But this room remains locked, and the key to this room continues to evade my grasp. Better people than I have written ad nauseam about this state of affairs and I still struggle to be kind to myself.
That’s not to say that my life is devoid of love. I don’t know when this state of affairs will end, but in the meantime, I choose to pour my love into my friends and family instead. The veins in my body containing romantic love remain unpricked, waiting for the day its blood can be transfused with another. But I cannot put my life on hold waiting for that to happen, and I have to continue living my life regardless of whether it eventually occurs or not. Vaguely amusing that it is currently Valentine’s Day as I write this portion of my post.
So what now?
It is not good form to end on such a sad note, so rest assured reader, I still am incredibly satisfied with my life at the moment. I choose not to mourn my 20s, but instead celebrate my bygone decade as one that taught me to tear open and put myself back together into a person that I am proud of. In the final analysis of life, 30 is shockingly young, and I am genuinely excited for the coming years. My goals for the next decade? Continue trying new things, meeting new people, keeping myself curious, and choosing to live life on my terms. Subra, you’re doing just fine.
- https://archive.is/Xob1u ↩︎
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