Winnie Lim » journal

journal/

on-going mostly unedited stream of thoughts

December 14, 2025

The other day we were at the dentist and my partner mentioned that the dentist wanted to give her a muscle relaxant but she couldn’t remember the name, excepts that it starts with the letter “a”. I immediately knew which she was talking about, and she remarked that it is incredulous I can still remember so much from my days as a clinic assistant.

I thought it would be amusing to document the unconventional jobs I have had, and how they have impacted me permanently:

clinic assistant

There was a six months break after the O’ levels, and it was common to work part-time then. One of the most accessible jobs available was a data-entry assistant. A job agency matched me with a clinic.

I started going for lunch with the clinic’s staff, and they asked if I was interested to be a part-time clinic assistant. They paid me $7/hr, which was a really good rate in the 90s. I learnt to memorise the common medicines and their properties. Till today I can still recognise them.

Only today while I was jogging I was reminded how I used to be surrounded by very sick people all the time and I hardly got sick. We did not have the culture of wearing masks back then. The body is such a mystery to me. I would not risk it with the covid virus these days though. The person I am now would think it is almost suicidal to be working maskless in a clinic.

insurance claims assistant

Once in my early 20s I got burnt out working as a designer, so in my despair I thought I would never work in design again. Instead I wanted to work in one of the most mundane jobs, a job that doesn’t require overtime or is subject to the subjective whims of people. So again I applied to be an administrative assistant through a job agency.

They matched me to one of Singapore’s leading insurance companies, and instead of a typical admin job I was expecting they taught me to calculate health insurance claims.

Inevitably I had to calculate claims for very sick people, and worse – claims for people who were very young and very sick. Till today I can still remember their bills were a few inches thick. It was a sobering job, to be in touch with mortality like that. My manager asked if I was interested in a permanent job with them. I scooted out after a month.

But once in a very long while I would still think of that thick stack of bills and how they made me feel.

manga rental shop assistant

This was my first full-time temporary job: I had to work retail hours (11am to 10pm) for 6 days a week. Because of the economics of retail space in Singapore these type of shops are now extinct, so I was glad to have had experienced it for a bit.

People can either rent manga to bring it home with them or read it there. My job was mostly to return the manga back to the shelves. It took me some time to remember where exactly they belonged.

I remember splurging on a gameboy with my first full-time paycheck, to compensate for the childhood I never had I guess.

waitressing and food delivery

These are more conventional, but I am not sure if most knowledge workers have had job experiences like these. They gave me a permanent empathy for people working in these industries. I tend to have a wide tolerance for wait staff and delivery workers now.

For example, you would think that delivering food or parcels is a straightforward point A to B job. But do you know how much time is spent transversing the different systems of office buildings (at least in Singapore) or gated residential estates? How security treats us like vermin sometimes and at some places we are only allowed to use cargo lifts (elevators), and in some estates or buildings cargo lifts are like at least another ten minute journey? A journey that that supposedly takes 20 minutes on google maps can easily take up to an hour. This affects the earnings because the delivery platforms only account for the distance, not the total time it takes to complete the job.

During my 20s I often had to quit my design job without a new one lined up which in my time (2000s) was heavily frowned upon. But my waitressing experience made me believe that if I could survive waitressing I could survive anywhere, and I could always come back to waiting on tables if I couldn’t land a new job in time. This gave me the courage to keep trying new directions in my career, and only upon hindsight all my different job experiences were invaluable (I had to endure a lot of criticism for not staying in a job forever though).

I don’t know if kids still do temporary jobs or part-time work in between school semesters these days, because now they sadly have to use their opportunities for internship wisely. But I feel like the different job experiences I had – even though most of them were decades ago enriched my life and personality in many ways. I wish our society can be a kind one that would allow people to experiment more with their lives. My jobs allowed me to walk in many different types of shoes, and it affected the way I see the world and interact with her people. Some people no matter how intelligent they may seem, lack empathy for people from different walks of life. Others think they have empathy, but it is an intellectual sort of empathy, which is different from the sort of empathy one can gather from an actual experience. These affect many decisions in our society because the types of people in leadership positions are exactly the types of people who have amazing resumes with a very specific trajectory since childhood, because our society rewards these trajectories instead.

I am glad I had these experiences. There is strength in knowing we can be resilient in different dimensions, not just the one we’re accustomed to. Also, picking up new skills must be one of the most enriching and gratifying experiences in life. I just wish we don’t dismiss learning certain types of skills simply because they are conventionally perceived to be of a lower economic and social value.

December 7, 2025

a different dimension of gratification

I think I was fortunate to have been born in the early 80s. I had my first computer at 15, a bit later than most of my peers. Before then, I had to escape boredom with analog activities: listening to music, reading, window shopping, etc. These days whenever I feel like it is impossible to go without the internet or my phone, I think back to myself then. If I could do it as a hyper-curious adhd teenager, why can’t I do it now?

I was one of those people who kept rolling my eyes whenever they warned about the dangers of internet addiction. I had never considered myself addicted to the internet, believing that I could always choose to do more important things if I wanted to. The way they wrote about it is as though we would start hyperventilating once the internet goes off. I felt like I was always in control: it was just a source of knowledge, connection and entertainment for me. Early on I had already switched off most of my notifications, so most of the time I’m not obsessively checking my phone for updates.

I have always loved reading and had no difficulty as a child reading 500-page novels. But I was lost, confused and lonely during my 20s, so I sought other forms of gratification. So I had to learn how to read books again. That was my first memory of having an attention span too compromised to read.

In recent years I have slowly begun to realise that in life, the things that are worth doing tend to require patience and attention. For example: cooking. It is almost impossible to eat nutritiously without cooking. But I have found cooking to be tedious and it feels like a chore. Why cook if I can order food with a few clicks?

Everything these days is within a few clicks. I used to wait 10-20 minutes for a bus, and now even waiting more than 5 minutes feels too long. My brain can no longer tolerate slowness.

So I have realised: the insidious thing about the internet and the speed it enables is not that it grabs my attention or even hoards it. It is the fact that it is always available to engage my brain when it is bored or depressed:

Once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction, Nass discovered, it’s hard to shake the addiction even when you want to concentrate. To put this more concretely: If every moment of potential boredom in your life—say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives—is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where, like the “mental wrecks” in Nass’s research, it’s not ready for deep work—even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration. – Cal Newport, Deep Work

Just like a muscle gradually losing its strength without training, our brains gradually loses its ability to be in a unstimulated state if we are constantly gratifying it with stimuli. It is like a normal life would feel intolerable to a drug addict used to the highs.

But the capacity to focus comes from being able to direct our attention onto one thing instead of a multitude of things at will. It is difficult to achieve this state if our brains are used to constantly being highly stimulated. It wants to look at a thousand things quickly not just one thing slowly and deeply. Without the capacity to focus we can only engage in shallow interactions. Why read a 500-page book when we can have multiple payoffs scrolling social media in 5 minutes?

I have gradually built an improved baseline of health over the past few years with zone 2 training and weightlifting. Due to chronic health issues I have to train slower and rest harder in order not to risk burnout. So my progress has been slow, and sometimes regresses. But once in a while I catch myself feeling a sense of stability, strength and well-being. Or I am in the middle of a run and I find myself taking slow, deep breaths instead of being unable to catch my breath. These are moments that do not deliver the kind of euphoria associated with pleasurable dopamine hits, but a deep, profound sense of satisfaction. The work has been hard, the journey has been long, but something has emerged in the process. I am reminded of an old chinese story about someone grinding an iron bar into a needle.

This is what I think of good health: it is mostly invisible, but it is the foundation to everything else in life. I used to feel fatigued all the time, and even if I had no other psychological issues the fatigue itself was chronically depressing. I would carry a grocery bag and it would tire me for the rest of the day. A 10-minute walk to the mall sounded like a trek to the himalayas. I am able to appreciate the invisible well-being I possess now because I have this contrast.

This sense of health is very gratifying, but it took a long while to get to this point. I realised this sort of gratification has a very different dimension from the type of gratification I usually seek. It is there deeply within me, and it is easy to forget it exists. I could say the same of this blog. I’ve had it for years and it has become so entrenched in my life that it is difficult to feel its meaningfulness. Maybe starting a new project will feel way more gratifying and shiny. But once in a while I could grasp a more third-party point of view and I could sense its presence in my world, a kind of presence that is only possible because it has grown up with me over these years.

I don’t know if it is ageing or a rebellion against the current world, but I feel more and more inclined to participate in deliberate slowness. I am beginning to be aware of my phone’s relationship with my capacity to tolerate slowness. What the phone does is to manufacture frustration, a frustration that would not exist if we were not used to being quickly and easily gratified.

I thought I was impatient and intolerant, but I wasn’t really aware how my phone was making it worse. Doomscrolling feels like such a lightweight activity, it is just not obvious that it slowly but thoroughly depletes my mental energy. It is ironic because I doomscroll precisely when I am tired and depressed, but the doomscrolling makes it worse by making me feel more tired and hence more depressed.

Even though I know what I would intellectually prefer to do, it is still difficult to apply it day to day. I would love to cook more for myself and eat healthier in general, but I am still very drawn to the instant dopamine hits of unhealthy food. I would like to doomscroll less and work on more slow, creative stuff, but the internet seems so full of interestingness…

Sometimes I think life is just a lifelong journey of being able to convince our selves to go in the direction we actually want to go versus simply going along with our desires and impulses. It took me more than a decade to have a positive relationship to exercise, maybe it will take me a similar amount of time to manage my attention. I feel like I don’t have control of where my attention goes now, the capacity to slow it down or direct it. But I am starting to feel connected to the part of me who now desires a deeper dimension of life versus getting cheap dopamine hits. I don’t even know what a deeper dimension of life actually means for someone like me, but I feel glimpses of it once in a while. Sometimes it can be as simple as the sense of fullness after reading a really good book, or the ability to notice the preciousness of a mundane moment. At least I know it is somewhere there.

November 30, 2025

imperfect notes & my second subconscious

For more than a decade I’ve been trying to keep notes somewhere. I think it started with the appearance of Evernote. I loved the the idea that we can keep our thoughts and learnings permanently somewhere, and they will never be lost again. Since Evernote countless note-taking apps have come and gone in my life: simplenote, google keep, notion, apple notes, roam, etc. I’ve never been a successful note-keeper until a couple of years ago when I started to use Obsidian.

Why? Some of the reasons are due to the software itself and some of them are due to internal changes within myself. I’ll start with the software first:

it syncs everywhere

Even if apple notes become the best digital note-taking app it still wouldn’t be my app of choice because I need it to sync to my android-based eink devices. I also have a couple of windows-based devices. I pay for obsidian sync, but it worked fine with icloud or dropbox sync if you don’t need it on android.

This is also the reason why I settled for digital notes vs a paper notebook even though I actually prefer the experience of a paper notebook: one day I found myself really needing to refer to my paper notebook but it was not with me. My phone however, is almost always with me.

dataview the plugin

Obsidian is trying to replace it with its own native database capability but I prefer using inline fields over yaml so I continued using dataview. This plugin allows us to make database queries using text fields.

markdown format

It stores files in markdown format so the files are technically readable in any text editor. More importantly to me, it also means I can have a local copy and back it up anywhere and anytime, compared to say notion which uses a proprietary format and makes us beholden to their cloud servers.

readwise sync

This is really important for me. I sync my book (or article) highlights to readwise and it syncs it to obsidian.

apple shortcuts

I can use apple shortcuts to make quick notes. For example, I configured my iphone’s action button to prompt me with a input screen so I can quickly log what I am doing or thinking. Apple shortcuts allow me to automatically include date and time stamps, and it can even append to an existing note.

thriving community plugin ecosystem

There are a multitude of ways to customise obsidian and use it in ways so complex that it is too difficult for my brain to comprehend. Still, I could customise it to a very specific way I want.

changed the way I think about notes

the worthiness of our notes

The truth is the most perfect note-taking app will not make any practical difference if I don’t possess the mindset of a note-taker. The most important mindset change in my opinion is that we have to truly think the notes are truly worth taking. If we really believe that we are never going to refer back to the notes ever again, then what is the point? To have notes, one must believe the notes are worth making the effort for. Because writing notes take effort, and to design a system so we can retrieve them again also takes effort.

I don’t know why but for me my mind tricks me into believing that my thoughts will always be there in my mind somewhere. So say I am jogging and the meditative nature of it makes me have a sudden insight: I would just somehow think I’ll remember it later. I don’t. I have so many of these fleeting insights and they just disappear into a blackhole. The worst feeling is to know that I actually had an insightful moment an hour ago but I couldn’t remember what was it about.

recognising noteworthy moments

So first of all I needed to recognise these insightful moments. Because it is just so easy to dismiss our own thoughts.

timely response to that recognition

This took me constant practice: making sure I took the effort to take down the note every time I wanted to note down something. It seems so easy: just opening an app to write something down. But because it seems easy, it is also easy to dismiss it for later.

embrace imperfection

People like me tend to always want to design the perfect system before we start to use it. Or somehow there is an internal gauge of a completeness of a note: each note has to seem complete or else we cannot move forward. This is not sustainable because if we try to aim for completeness each time it will simply tire us out because it is just too much effort. The most important change to my mindset is to simply embrace writing imperfect notes and storing them imperfectly. We should not see them as permanent structures but rather as something organic – they are constantly in flux and we can edit or prune them later. Embrace partially written notes, breadcrumbs, even poorly written notes. As human beings we will change, so our notes will change too – the changes themselves are interesting to observe. A half-assed note is also a form of information. I used to think I need to tag every note, but now I only tag them when I am compelled to.

don’t obsess about the retrieval

Because of my personality I tend to solve for the whole before wanting to do something. For years I wanted to figure out how I could retrieve the notes in a meaningful manner before I committed to making them. If I cannot remember I had made the note, did the note really exist?

But after a couple of years of just making notes in Obsidian, I realised there is some serendipity to notes. The software makes it easier by letting us see unlinked mentions, having a good text search etc. We can’t fully predict how our future selves would think or what they would need. Sometimes our future selves may be in a better position to decide how they want to retrieve the notes.

some of the type of notes I take

daily notes: one highlight of the day, my mood, health, the food i eat, sometimes even blood pressure readings, etc. I’ve set up a template so a new daily note just opens with all the fields to be filled. If I am in the mood, I do a timelog of the things i’ve done – I use apple shortcuts to make it easier for me.
book notes: reading notes of the books I’ve read
shopping lists: i find them interesting to look back at when some time has passed. What did my old selves want?
financial notes: information on my current home loan – I used to have to search my gmail whenever I wanted to know its terms so I will know if and when I have to refinance. Now I can just open the note – sounds so simple but why didn’t I do this earlier?
medical research: for my chronic illnesses. Includes properties of supplements and herbs etc.
weird things I learnt: like the electrical system of our apartment
travel itineraries
insights

My brain is constantly holding scattered bits of information so it is just better to offload them somewhere in one place. I think the main difference is I don’t see obsidian as my second brain, I see it as my second subconscious. Things are just stored there somewhere, and perhaps some day they will surface. I feel like seeing it as my second brain is somewhat stressful because it feels like I have to manage it well or it will just become another doom pile. But seeing it as a second subconscious makes me feel like I can keep storing stuff in it and it becomes an enriched source of power in my life – something I can draw upon just by merely knowing it is there. To an extent, perhaps I don’t even need to retrieve the information, just the act of noting down something and thinking it is noteworthy is an act of rebellion in a world where bits of our selves and lives are so easily dismissed.

November 23, 2025

random scenes from tokyo, and some thoughts on online publishing

I had a plan to publish these photos today for my weekly post, but I had found myself wondering what is the point of it all. What is the point of taking a camera to the streets to snap these photos, and what is the point of publishing them? And recently, I cannot help but wonder what is the point of sharing my thoughts online in a world where the internet is no longer a safe space.

When I was younger I desired to publish my thoughts online because I couldn’t do it offline. It was an outlet. These days I have started wondering if it is better to keep my thoughts to myself, and I find myself less and less interested in online connections. Actually, I just find myself less interested in human connections overall. I think the pandemic has changed me. If I was cynical before, I am worse now.

I still do it anyway with mechanical efficiency. There is no negotiation: one post every week, usually on a sunday. I am not sure if I enjoy it still, or perhaps as a whole I don’t enjoy anything anymore. I do it like it is my responsibility, though I am unsure for what exactly. Maybe this is the only thin thread connecting me to the outer world.

What is the point of bringing a camera and snapping photos? This world is flooded with media.

But I have to say: cold-hearted as I have become – frames are beautiful. I cannot articulate why but there is just something beautiful about capturing a moment in its stillness forever. Videos are everywhere, we cannot stop to breathe and think. But a photo makes us pause. We cannot consume photos without pausing, even if it is for a intangible split-second.

photo of a passerby looking at a person taking a selfie

photo of a random guy waiting at a crossing

photo of people picking out stuff at a street market

photo of a person looking at their phone on a roadside kerb

photo of a couple sharing an umbrella on a car-free street

Street photography is weird. I cannot explain why I curated these set of photos. I also don’t imagine that you’ll think they are any good. I don’t publish them because I think they are good – whatever good means. I publish them simply because there is something in me that compels me to. Unlike many artists the desire to create and share something is no longer very strong in me. It is like a dying flame, like my ageing body. It is really difficult for a person like me to convince myself that creative activities are important when I no longer see much hope for this world. But there is still a tiny, dying spirit in me who is still going through the motions of publishing this post. As long as it is still alive, I guess I should honour it?

Artists render reality in their art, no matter how terrible the times were. I don’t have that much life force in me to make much art, so instead I render myself on this website instead – with as much accuracy as possible. It is not objective truth I am attempting to share, nor am I concerned about being right. Rather I guess the only thing I can do is to render myself in a way that is the closest to how I am experiencing reality, myself, and my mind.

Is there a point? Maybe there is none, except for now I believe a dying flame is still a flame.

November 16, 2025

waiting for my self to grow up

I had Atul Gawande’s “Being mortal” in my kindle library for a long while now but I’ve only read it a couple of weeks ago. I wasn’t even sure what is it about, and only remembered that it was really talked about online when it was first released, along with “When breath becomes air” (which I read back then and loved). I have read my fair share of depressing books and books on mortality, so death is not necessarily a topic I shy from, but somehow I just didn’t feel compelled to read it.

Until now. Overall, it is a truly depressing book. It is one thing to read about death, another thing to read about the potential long suffering that may come with age – the period when death is definitely imminent but we just do not know when, when we start to slowly lose control of our bodily functions and even our sense of self as our brain starts deteriorating.

I have a deep fear of having to face the ageing of my loved ones, and reading this book definitely didn’t lessen it. But there is an inarticulable effect of being closer to the topic. It is like having skeletons in the closet: there is a fear of the actual skeletons and then there is the fear of opening it. Because I am afraid to open it, I avoid it. The more I avoid it, the more the fear haunts me in the background.

I realised that I actually bought the book in 2019. I don’t remember why. But it is interesting that it took me 6 years to feel like reading it. I think I finally read it because I have become the person who is capable of reading it.

Most of the time, I still feel like a child. I think ironically being forced to grow up fast in many ways stunted my emotional growth. There is chronic trauma of having to endure things that a child is not equipped to deal with, so my innate response is to develop an avoidant personality. I was made to cope with so much that I don’t want to cope with anything. My life just seems like a never-ending journey of coping.

Yet there are many things that I do now which I had found impossible to do in my younger days. I think my psychological capacity has widened considerably, though it is still relatively small. I am more willing to face certain realities, but I still have a ton of escapist tendencies. I am aware I am escaping though, so that awareness increases my subconscious psychological burden.

I can’t help but feel like I will always feel like a child. That I would never be capable of growing up. But finishing the book made me realise that I did grow somewhat. It gave me hope that I would somehow continue to grow, so I will be able to cope with grief, loss and regret when the days come. I would also like to become more compassionate, because resentment is causing a large part of my suffering. There are some relationships in my life that could be better if I am a better person, but I know I simply can’t at this point. Just like we can’t will plants to grow faster, I can’t will my psyche to transform. This is one of the hardest things I had to accept: that I can’t instantly be the person I wish to be. I have tried, and it just doesn’t work that way. What we cannot contain would eventually bubble up in hideous ways.

Understanding this has made it slightly easier for me to understand other people. We can only be who we are capable of being at that moment. I can only put myself in conditions I think will be beneficial for my inner-growth, and then hope for the best. But even that is limited to my self-knowledge, and to the stimuli I am exposed to.

I think this is why I like exercise. Something that was previously unendurable becomes endurable over progressive training. Just like we can slowly train our bodies to lift heavier weights, would my psyche be the same? That one day it will slowly be capable to carry all the weight I have been avoiding so far? Will it be too late by then?

One can only hope.

November 9, 2025

my strange relationship with drawing

This morning I was watching a youtube video on a famous comic artist’s sketchbook, and I caught myself thinking that I have such a weird relationship to drawing. Here I was: fascinated with someone’s analysis of someone else’s sketchbook – but why? I have an obsession with sketchbooks/sketches. I like looking at them, I obsessively collect books on them, I envy people who can fill up theirs. But I personally don’t enjoy drawing.

Me being me, I can’t help but psychoanalyse my own behaviour. I don’t enjoy looking at all types of visual art. I am fond of sketches or ugly drawings in particular. The more refined an illustration is, the less connected I feel. Sketches in sketchbooks are in its own genre. They are a window to the artist’s psyche in that point in time. I mean all art is, but there is a rawness of sketchbooks that draws me in.

Maybe I envy and desire what I cannot have. I sketch occasionally, in concentrated bouts and then I stop for a long while. It doesn’t come easy to me, I have to practically force myself to do it. I see it more as a zen practice than a hobby or something that I enjoy. I do it because I dislike it. I wish I enjoy it though. But why? We don’t have to practice the art we enjoy consuming. Just because I enjoy looking at good cinematography doesn’t mean I aspire to be a cinematographer. I enjoy watching people play the violin, but I have zero desire to learn it. What is it about drawing that provokes this deep sense of envy?

I can only guess? I *think* for me, drawing connects us to something very primal and raw in our subconscious. It requires imagination and spontaneity, and it is a form of play. When I look at people’s sketchbooks I sense their connection to their imagination and their ability to be spontaneous – the capacity to readily access something deep inside them in order to express the material on a sketchbook. That ease. Wow, what would I do to gain that ease.

Despite my constant vomitting of words on this website, I see myself as someone who is very creatively blocked. This sounds weird coming from a former designer I know. But the type of problem solving that is required from a designer is very different from the spontaneous creativity of a filled sketchbook. Most of the time in design, there is an obvious problem to solve. Art however, is not a problem. It is attempting to access something that is not of this material world. It is also an internal process of freeing our selves. It is letting ourselves play.

I am terrible at playing. Once my therapist asked me to roleplay, and I was like NOPE over my dead body. I hate that sort of thing. I also dislike any form of games in a group. I also really dislike listening to any type of festive songs. The list goes on and on.

I just wish I am that sort of person who is able to fill up a sketchbook and enjoy the process of doing it. I can fill up a sketchbook if I really put myself to it, I am really good at forcing myself to practice a routine if I believed it enriched me. But it would be a torture. And each time I complete a spread, I feel utterly exhausted.

Is this something that is out of reach for me? I don’t know. I do think a lot of it is due to practice. Drawing perhaps can become enjoyable once we hit a skill level threshold. But I feel like there are people who enjoy even the difficulties of learning something, and my pathological demand avoidance just makes it difficult for me to want to do anything hard. It feels like a mountain I can never climb and I can only gaze longingly at it.

Apart from practice I think there is a neurological growth component to it, at least for me. I am slowly getting better at doing things that require patience and repetition, but I think I am still not at a point where I can enjoy the slowing down drawing requires. But who knows about the future? I think it is better to keep it in my peripheral vision than to assume I am simply not that person and can never be that person. I have learnt it is a mistake to judge our future based on the knowledge of our past.

I tend to hyperfocus on my interests and then one day I’ll just lose interest as quickly as I gained them (thinking about at my untouched cooking books). But somehow this obsession with drawing seem to be lasting quite a while. I think I’ve never had such a challenging relationship with something I am interested in. How strange is this.

November 2, 2025

our memories belong together

Yesterday I checked-in on swarm (yes I still use that app) at Loft, and the app reminded me that I was last there in 2018 with my partner:

I had zero recollection that I had ever been there. What was immediately poignant was that there is data of my partner’s presence with me, all the way back in 2018. 2018 feels like eons ago, yet in some ways it still feels recent. Like many people, 2020-2023 just felt like a black hole.

In 2018 we were in tokyo for just a night while enroute to kyoto. Out of curiosity I went to look at the photos I took:

There we were, still fresh faced and somewhat carrying some innocence. We’ve been talking a lot about ageing lately: from our worsening eyesight to our fluctuating body temperatures in perimenopause. How the pandemic has changed the both of us. How we took it slow in kyoto back then because we felt like we had time, how every trip now is frenetic because we have no idea when our world is going to change dramatically again.

Even back then in 2018 I felt the urgency of impermanence, so I kept trying to tick off my bucket list while I could. Kyoto was one of those place I felt we had to go. Only on hindsight in 2025 I am glad we made it then. Now we can no longer feel as free, the weight on both of our souls have dramatically shifted, and we can no longer eat indoors (I love to eat, so this is a huge loss for me).

For adhd people there is a concept called body doubling, where just getting another person present with us will make completing tasks much easier. Having my partner is like being in permanent body doubling mode. Life and existence are both difficult for me. My partner makes everything more tolerable. There are many things that are easy for other people to do but difficult for me. She understands this and supports me in the ways she can. Early on in our relationship I told her I want to spend my prime years travelling as much as I can because I am not sure how long I would live or when I’ll be called to fulfil other responsibilities. Hence she has just been here with me: going to places I want to go, doing the things I wish to do. She knows what I lack and she is the only person in this world that not only does not hold this lack against me, she holds and nourishes it. I have been living like a person on a borrowed timeline, and again she is the only person who honours it instead of mocking or dismissing it.

photo of us in Hiroshima 2023 — Hiroshima 2023

Seeing the pop-up from swarm, it occurred to me the extensive amount of memories we have built together. Wherever I have been, she was there with me. My memories are essentially hers and vice versa. We are able to fill gaps in each other’s memories. My life is basically hers. It isn’t all sunshine and unicorns of course. We annoy each other with our own quirks. We remember all the terrible things about each other. There is a ton of intimate information we have of each other that can be weaponised against the other. A relationship is a continuous elaborate dance between two people. Sometimes it feels like how can it be so easy! Other days it feels like this is impossible.

Yet like some miracle, after 114 months we are still together. Because our younger selves treated our time together as precious, we took a ton of photos and documented a ton of our time together. 114 months later with the knowledge I’ve acquired between then and now, I am so glad that my younger self was able to see ahead of time, sensing the sacredness of impermanence. That was how and why we are able to build this repository of memories, and it serves as such a deep reserve for our ongoing relationship, and for enduring future times.

What a wonderful thing it is to be known so deeply and widely, to remember and to be remembered so intimately – all in the process of ageing together.

October 26, 2025

memorable experiences in jeju

I think jeju has become one of my favourite places to visit. I thought I’ll share some of my favourite memories and things:

friendly forest trails

So the story goes: we tried to do a “beginner-friendly” hike at Khao Yai National Park – we barely lasted fifteen minutes before my partner grew uncomfortable with some sensations on her legs. Turns out she was getting bitten by leeches…she wore pants and shoes and the leeches still managed to get up to her calf. We ran out of the trail and acknowledged that we are just not hikers.

Until jeju, I guess. They have a few of these forests with boardwalks. Some parts of these are even wheelchair friendly. We do have boardwalks in Singapore but the ones in jeju lasted the entire trail.

olle trails

The olle trails are my favourite thing in jeju. They circle the entire island. I just love seeing them and their hikers so much. The story of how they began is even more amazing. A journalist hiked the road to santiago, and felt like her hometown should have a trail as well. It is incredible this amazing well-run trail network was founded by a citizen, and she is a woman.

oreums

Oreums are found everywhere in jeju. They are less easy to hike, but still doable. Some parts can be really steep, and I felt like I almost had to crawl on all fours. There are many amazing views to be had along the way, and on top.

tangerine trees

Tangerine trees, tangerines, and tangerine-themed souvenirs/food are everywhere in jeju. We saw countless farms while driving, and stayed in an airbnb surrounded by tangerine trees.

persimmon trees

Persimmon trees are rarer, but when I see them it is like living in storybook.

green tea fields

It was a must to visit Osulloc tea museum as a matcha latte fan, but I would honestly say: go for the views, not the matcha latte. However Innisfree next door is worth visiting for affordable skincare and I really enjoyed a ham sandwich with peanut cream.

coffee with a sea view

There are plenty of cafes around jeju that has a pretty seaview. Many were gimmicky, but I enjoyed them nonetheless. It still feels incredible to be sipping warm coffee right at the beach.

photo of a tray of coffee and pastry with a sea view

ridiculously large cafes

My camera doesn’t have a wide enough angle to capture how large are these cafes, or maybe I am just a bad photographer. Most of them are just there for instagram photos, but we had a great meal at one.

ridiculously cheap seafood

I love abalones, and they are very expensive in Singapore. In jeju however, I had abalone pasta like any common dish, and these five grilled abalones cost less then S$30. In Singapore we get them mostly canned, so it was such a treat to have them fresh.

mackerel sashimi

Apparently it is not easy to eat mackerel sashimi because it is prone to spoilage, and jeju is one of the few places to eat it. I am not a fish person but I have been curious about korean sashimi for a very long time. Surprisingly this wasn’t fishy. I would love to try more korean sashimi if I have the chance.

amazing bagels

I never thought I would eat a bagel in jeju and proclaim to my partner: “best bagel in the world!”. Maybe it is just my personal taste. These bagels are baked in a pizza oven, and they are so soft and chewy.

haenyeo

I am a long-time admirer of haenyeos. It was a surprise to spot one in the wild, though it made me sad to witness an elderly woman dive around for seafood. It isn’t common for haenyeos to dive alone due to the potential danger, so I don’t really know what was going on. She did seem to be communicating to someone on land.

I am not sure if I’ve covered them all – I did this in a rush because it is sunday (my writing day) and I was out the entire day today. However I think sometimes it is just better to do rushed things than to lose momentum. Feelings are still fresh because I have just left jeju, so I wanted to share them as soon as possible without dragging it out.

October 19, 2025

what does it take to hang on

[tw: suicide] Saw from an acquaintance’s feed that the author Baek Se-hee had passed away at the age of 35. The cause of death was not published, but considering her history and that she’s korean (due to copycats the korean media doesn’t mention the word) – the internet public made their own consensus.

The first moment I came across her book “I want to die but I want to eat tteokbokki”, I knew I had to read it. I remember thinking to myself: how can such a book title exist (as a society we are usually too hesitant to publish such a string of words), and how can it feel so resonant? I too, want to die but I still want to love my partner, see the world and eat a ton of good food. Maybe it is a good(?) thing I still have some hedonistic desires, and that I am still capable of love. It is an extremely dissonant state, to still want to do a ton of things and yet perpetually feel that desire to cease. I often feel like a hypocrite, but I am beginning to accept that I contain multiple selves.

I thought it was a poignant that I was in korea when this happened. Somehow: being surrounded by the culture and the land of tteokbokki. I have been feeling very disturbed after knowing the news. I tend to be disturbed whenever this happens, because of how close it hits. One of us, one of us.

I cannot help but wish she could have hung on a little more. 35 is an age when we begin to psychologically mature. There are a lot of things that can feel unbearable in our 30s but may become insignificant when we enter our 40s and beyond. Yet I too get upset when people tell me to hang on. I’ve done so much hanging on that sometimes just the thought of hanging on for another second feels completely exhausting. It is easy to tell someone to hang on when we are simply not that person. We do not inhabit their brains and bodies and do not know how much they are actually suffering. I can try to articulate my feelings as much as I can in words, but it is essentially a very lonely journey. Even as a chronically depressed and suicidal person, I cannot pretend to understand someone else’s journey and suffering.

What I can write and say for myself is: this is a condition that has no end. Just when I think I am getting better I spiral into a different, deeper hole. The only way to survive this is to completely and truly accept that I have to co-exist with this pain and sadness. But the thought of having to endure this for the rest of my lifetime is so oppressive. I cannot detach from my brain even for a single second. It feels claustrophobic.

I wouldn’t lie or pretend. One of the reasons why I spend so much time travelling as much as I can possibly do so, is so that I can escape my mind. Even just for a few moments. I get mesmerised by new experiences. I am granted relief just for a bit. But that bit makes all the difference. But just because I am able to seek such relief doesn’t mean that other people can too. Maybe for some people there is just no escape.

I often think that without my partner I may not be here today. It makes a significant difference to have just one person who tries to understand. At least she understands enough to tell me she would never want to inhabit my brain. But I must acknowledge meeting love is a rare thing in this world. For others it can be difficult to endure this lonely existentially painful journey.

These few days I had found myself wondering hypothetically: what if I was born in a tribe in a remote place where everybody was sullen? Would I still feel depressed? How much of this existential pain is caused by feeling alone, odd and helpless – that everyone else seems to be coping and thriving, except you?

I wonder if it would feel easier to exist if this is something that can be openly shared and discussed without fear of negative repercussions and judgement. Is there a world where a painful existence can be worth enduring for? How can we make it less existentially lonely? Was there anything that could have been done to lessen Baek Se-hee’s pain?

What pushed her to the brink? After all she wrote two books about her decade-long journey in therapy. But maybe this is the thing. We tend to believe there must be a trigger. Yet perhaps the accumulative exhaustion of having to endure this is enough of a reason. I wish there can be ways that we can take mental breaks from our selves (I guess in some places some chemicals may help). I myself often joke with my partner that I wish I can shut myself down for a couple of days. Sometimes what I want is not a complete end but just a respite. People get sent to dark places when they cannot even get a single second of respite.

I think as a society we are sorely lacking in giving people the psychological support they need. We cannot even express these thoughts without being judged. Therapy is expensive, and it is challenging to actually find a good compatible therapist. There is no infrastructure to deal with people’s psychological issues. We have to stop labelling people with psychological health issues as weak, and see psychological health as essential as physical health.

We are really not there yet, as a species. I am not sure if we would ever be, looking at the state of the world today. But perhaps at the very least, what we can do individually is to acknowledge our own struggles with our psychological health, so we can learn to acknowledge others’ too.

October 12, 2025

meeting a place where it is

I’ve written before that I tend to be an over-optimiser: I think a lot of it is due to existential anxiety – that the time is running out hence I should fully maximise whatever opportunities I have in the present. Travelling particularly triggers this desire for optimisation. The effort taken to fly over to a new location is tedious these days because we take quite a number of covid precautions, the time is limited in that place, who knows if we’ll be able to visit it again considering mortality and impermanence (my favourite two words these days) – so I want to do whatever I can to maximise the things I want to do while travelling.

Unfortunately even for travelling the outcome is the same. Trying to optimise too much will lead to a sub-optimal experience. I do know it intellectually but I cannot help myself.

Jeju has been one of our bucket list items for a long while. We are korean tv fans, so we want to visit a place where it has been so heavily featured in their media culture. We chose to come at the beginning of october because it is supposed to be perfect weather.

Sadly due to climate change it is now middle october and 28 degrees celsius. 28 degrees celsius in singapore is actually cool weather, but over here it is searing hot. The weather app says it is 6 degrees above the average daily high. I have learnt from this experience that in future I should check the trends for the specific past few years instead of the past decade or so.

I realised for me travelling is really a continuous test for equanimity. I can try to make the perfect plan in my head, but reality tends to have other plans for me. I could get very frustrated, or just focus on experiencing the present. I should meet a place where it is, instead of wondering why is it not adhering to some fantasy in my head.

Thankfully jeju is a place that makes it easy to be present. I saw a tangerine tree for the first time in my life, and it was such a wonderful experience.

photo of a closeup of a tangerine on a tangerine tree

I remember being so amazed seeing a giant turtle in hawaii once, and a friend who lives there was amazed that I was so amazed, because to him he sees them all the time. But we hardly have turtles or fruit trees in singapore, so in some ways we are lucky because we experience wonderment a lot when we travel. There are so many things the locals take for granted which we would go gaga over. I guess we take many things in singapore for granted too, but I would like to believe that seeing a tangerine tree evokes some primordial profound feelings versus experiencing the clean and efficient state of singapore.

Apart from the searing hot weather we also accidentally stumbled upon Chuseok season in jeju. It was not only chuseok, there were public holidays before and after, so for roughly 10ish days jeju was swarming with people. Again I tried to look at it from a different perspective: that being able to witness what chuseok is like in jeju is also an experience in itself.

Still we were able to find pockets of moments and trails where there was virtually nobody around. In fact I was glad to see another human appear in the horizon because I tend to ironically feel claustrophobic when I cannot spot anyone else.

photo of a valley on one of the olle trails

Once in a while I am able to position my camera fast but not fast enough to capture something like this:

Again we don’t really spot large birds in singapore or at least it is not easy to spot one in our very urban environment so I was awed. I am glad that despite my chronic existential depression I can still experience some awe.

Despite the weather we were still able to do some hikes that were relatively sheltered. Hiking in singapore is almost always a hot and humid experience. But with forest shade coupled with 25 degree celsius weather made the hike feel rather cool. People were wearing long sleeves, pants and sweaters. I guess jeju takes the concept of forest bathing quite seriously, because there were loungers peppered everywhere for people to soak in the atmosphere:

photo of someone forest bathing at seogwipo healing forest

We were forced to purchase socks to complement our teva sandals because apparently there are snakes??

photo of us wearing enforced socks with our sandals

We see a ton of people hiking in this hot weather nonetheless, some walking the long olle trails that can be 20km long. It is quite fascinating to bump into fellow hikers in a remote location because we are all walking the same trail. I have this huge fascination with the olle trails, but I’ll probably leave it for another post.

This wasn’t the trip that I’ve imagined, and I can still be caught occasionally lamenting to my partner how we should have arrived just a couple of weeks later. I know, I am just a chronic grouch. But it is still a deeply enriching experience, especially if I could manage to be more mindful and experience what it is really in the moment. I feel like I am on a continuous life lesson: there is just something about travelling that makes the experience more provocative, I guess we can’t help but be on auto-pilot when we are in a familiar environment.

Maybe when I can finally meet a place where it is, I can also meet myself where I am. I am still pretty far off on that journey though. I guess it is precisely that I am again lamenting that I am pretty far off from where I want to be is evidence that I am still unable to meet myself where I am. Yet I continue to walk, and it is through this willingness to move that brings me closer to knowing myself as a person.