My personal story
I suffer still, from those occasional bouts of emo-ness. The source of this emo-ess comes from the realisation that I belong everywhere and nowhere. I am a man without a psychological home, without a resting spot. Perhaps the journey for this 'home' has pretty much define my life.
Something about my family. I belong to a middle class family, born to my mum and dad while they were already in their mid-thirties. I'm the youngest in the family, with siblings 11, 9, and 7 years older than me. Born into such circumstances, I guess I kinda grew up faster, interacting with people way older than me.
Another thing was that I had an early interest in astronomy and geology - wondering about what space was and what the Earth was, and that pretty much led me early on into thinking about science and the world. And I guess that also led my parents early on, to invest in my education, starting with a thousand dollar investment in 3 sets of encyclopedia, that spans all the way from childhood to adulthood.
Having a bunch of friends interested in dinosaurs during primary school doesn't hurt either.
So between primary school to secondary school, I guess I had pretty much read quite a lot of stuff already, and when I reached JC,I just continued on. I guess by now I was already rather different from the rest of my peers in the neighbourhood. I was a reader. I spent my time on Orchard Road not looking at fashion by to Kinokuniya, and later on Borders, not to mention the Orchard Library. While others were reading about comics and Seventeen, I kept pushing on, reading about Richard Feynman, other physicists and scientists. And when I arrived at JC, I was mad about globalisation and Thomas Friedman.
I think one of the defining moments in my lifetime, in retrospect, was 9-11. I haven't realised it before, but now I realise that 9-11 was the event that made me think more seriously about the world, about the politics and everything in it, about how everything in the world was sort of connected together. I was 14 then, still being rather silly about the world. I guess it was a seed that got sown in my mind, the only grew when I was in JC. A few years later, sometime in 2005, there was then this media attention about poverty. That was another turning point, that led to the Big Bang in my academic life - this inflationary period of tremendous reading about the economics and inequalities of the world. Readings during this period was also centered upon human rights and genocide, reading about Rwanda, and Auschwitz. And then you gradually read about the world and how it led to these atrocities.
I was in ACJC. A neighbourhood kid in a school with the prestige of the elites. My eyes opened to the greater world out there, about the inequalities and the differences in attitudes between my social universe and the new universe that I was thrown into. Elitism became real, and al the happenings and going-ons in JC was I guess, a kind of preparation to what was to come in army and university.
By this time, I had already begin to recognise rifts between the rest of my family and me. I was, *different* - the first to go to a local university, the first to become so educated. I had adopted new attitudes and beliefs that were entirely different from the ones that my parents had grown up in. And every year, they grew older, along with it, a fixation to the things in their past. They can hardly adapt to the present place, and all I could be, was to be their guide.
I came into contact with various other ideas, and I find myself sitting on the fence between visions of different Singapores, the people who fear the degradation of moral values, and others who redefine moral values based on some other notion of rights. My English isn't bad, but the amazing thing is that I can speak my dialect passably, in contrast to my peers who can either speak English but no dialect, or who can speak dialect well but can't pass their English. I stand at the intersection of these different attributes, not knowing what to do. I can participate decently in the social interactions of these various different communities, and my personal identity is the sum of all these interactions. In other words, I have no clique - no central *core* of people to hang around with.
Even in university, I am starting to realise that the university is a place where social stereotypes become reinforced - that the notion of being in a university begins to feel exceptional, especially when one is in a programme full of elitist rhetoric. There is a sense of 'us and them' being created, right from the start when one enters a JC and further develops in university. But I am not about the 'us and them', because I know that dichotomy is false, despite all my friends belonging to their comfortable circles.
And at the end of all these, I am still, frighteningly, alone. my life so far has been about squaring into different circles, and still never quite fitting in. Not in my family, not in my church, not in my university, not even in that elitist sound programme, not even in the various social circles I hang around with.
Which is why I need God.
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