This letter is written to Xinyan's younger self from sometime in the middle of 2018, who she will name, "young me".
Dear young me,
What time is it over there as you read this? Sometime in July I hope, time travelling is still an attractive concept that isn't all that well thought-out yet.
At this time you should be travelling around the UK, Germany and Italy. It is your first time in Europe and you sure had the balls to do it solo. Just a while earlier, you completed your first year at law school and received a considerably strong set of results. As summer started, you trained up to 13 hours a week with nuschoir and juggled an internship towards the end of the practice season. It was your first law internship and at one of the biggest law firms in Singapore. Oh, Congratulations on Choir of the World, that was so sick! Never in your life you would have imagined going on a choir competition in the western world, let alone winning the competition. Every day would also bring a dizzying excitement because - have you realised yet? - you were falling in love. It was the first time you were really attracted to someone ever since you got more mature and all. Supposedly both of you spent a while being confused about where this would go, but it is now obvious that feelings are mutual. As you two are in the same timezone somehow, through a little phone screen, it doesn't feel that both of you are that far apart. It would be an understatement to say that life has been treating you well so far.
So how and where do I begin? I hate being the bearer of bad news. Also this is going to sound morbid, but here goes -
You died. I know, this sounds ridiculous, and if you were really reading this you will probably just laugh at this piece of paper and then scrunch it up into a ball (and then get really paranoid by nightfall). I mean, you aren't going to die die, only figuratively. Also it would make this letter really freaking creepy. It's just that the downhill ride that life would take you on this point onward would start killing parts of your being, bit by bit.
When you get to Rome, you will meet two acquaintances whom you have never spoken to at school, but you thought it wouldn't hurt to meet people who were more familiar with this city. They bring you to a student bar that they frequented, and against your better judgement you drink more liquor than you could hold. The next thing you know, you were pinned under him. It will be a while before it finally registers in your head that he took advantage of you that night, that the default position with respect to certain guys is that you cannot trust them because they cannot control themselves.
And then the love you experienced will fall short of what you thought was potential. It will be the first time you experience a heartbreak that really destroys you. You will end the relationship feeling like he played with your feelings. The impasse between what you thought in your head and what you feel in your heart would take up more time than you expect. In fact, you would be so stubborn that you can get over it yourself, that you exactly do nothing about it except tell varied, incomplete perspectives to some of your friends. You also stopped after a while as you didn't want to bother them with your woes. You thought you were always independent and could cope by yourself. Time and again, he reminds you over the year that you were hurting.
Here's the kicker: while all these are happening, you will not realise that you are slipping into downward spiral.
This denial is dangerous, of course. You never really clutched yourself out of it until a year later, confronting your problems head on with your faculty's student advisor and finally acknowledging you were suffering alone.
You would go through the motions of studying, slavishly turn up for lecture (while texting Xin Hui "eh save seat for me pls" every Monday at 9.55am as you briskwalk through botans), book a spot in the study room, and then your mind wanders everywhere except on the work that you were supposed to be doing. You have absolutely no interest in all the commitments you have in Tembusu but you were too much of a pussy to renege on them or to be an asshole in general. You quit choir after singing for Beethoven's 9th with them. You would think with all these free time you would put it to good use studying, especially when you really needed to catch up on the work at the earlier parts of the semester. You just spent all your time missing an asshole who broke your heart i.e. completely wasted your time. You should just take it from me that you are wired to dabble in everything which catches your interest and you perform better when you're forced to manage your time well.
And, you would display all these red flags which you should tell your friends to take note in future. You read your old chat message all the time. You will also finally find the guts to delete your old conversation 10 months later, which is 10 months too late. Sometimes you just lie on your bed doing absolutely nothing. Become way more dispassionate about everything. You start to have no standards for the work you are producing, taking on a more "heck care" approach to your academics (take for example, simply conceding that "you have shitty profs" when you used to be a firm believer that there are no shit profs, only shit students). In this vein, feeling like you have changed. Receiving remarks such as "you know, that wasn't your stance" or "you never used to say this", when you knew you were a person with a strong sense of self-belief. Once, hanging out with a choir senior before watching this year's concert, and she says, "why do I feel that you've become sadder?"
The worst is when you changed into the person you would never imagine you would become. Before he left, he asked for an one-off, no feelings, no emotions, just physical enjoyment. You gave it to him and it broke you. You would end up making out with an exchanger at the club and absolutely surprise yourself with your trashiness. Ironically there was an upside, which was that it did temporarily or otherwise satisfy some sort of a craving for intimacy, made you forget about how much you missed him, and you finally focused on your studies. Except it was late March and too fucking late. You had straight Cs for the entire year. If there was a most deproved student award you would have won it without a doubt.
Year 2 was a disaster, whose early warning signals were all to be missed by shitty forecasting, and its effects too daunting with non-existent mitigation or response measures.
You would recount all these to your advisor and feel for the first time how pathetic your entire year had been. It was absolutely ridiculous to lose so much over a guy. "I don't even think this is the worst shit I will experience in this life," you would admit.
And then she will ask you if there is anyone in your life you would trust to recognise your signs of distress. Who would kick you so damn hard if he or she saw the 'you' of today?
This is why I'm writing to you, young me.
With her prompting, I recounted the last time I was truly happy in my life. It was when I saw more As than I had ever seen in my life on the day I collected my A level results, and enjoying the sweet taste of knowing all your hard work paid off. That you thought As were everything and suddenly it was the most trivial thing on earth. Validating your beliefs that you were always smart in your own way, and can be as good as your classmates who had consistently strong showing in their academics. That you were nervous about uni admissions, but by and large dealt with it by not overthinking and simply doing your best. All that pays off and you spent your first year selling your soul to school, choir, Tembusu also fulfilling your personal wish for school to be more than academics, and emerge with a pretty alright set of results while doing nothing more than your "best". Feeling like you could achieve any damn thing in the world.
young me, if I could, I will give you a hug right now and tell you how precious you are. Granted, young me was brazen, a little reckless sometimes. But, young me was also a daring girl, full of conviction and scarily independent. The paths she charted was wide enough only for herself but she would sprint down it if she needed to.
I hope you would hug me back, because I really need a hug right now. I need you to kick me in my face too, but first, hug.
Now, if an outsider reads this, they will surely tell you that I am crazy. Huh, same person what, refer to you in third person for what. I'll tell you for what.
Because I am no longer you.
All that transpired in the past year has killed your spirit. Something about sexual awakening and other mental distress that makes you lose a lot of innocence and idealism, I guess. I have this very weird out-of-body awareness now that I am no longer a kid, not that I ever consciously thought of myself as a kid, but that I am way more cautious nowadays.
I am now scared of doing absolutely anything, because I feel extremely disappointed in myself to have been rattled by all things... emotional. Academically, my confidence has taken a hit and I feel like a fraud whose year one results were a fluke. Even as I recover and am trying to move on, I feel a strong sense of inertia because I perhaps, objectively think I am not capable of that. I become very calculative of my chances of future success, significantly shortchanging myself in the whole process.
I am no longer you. This is why I want to keep us separate. Because while I so desperately need your courage, faith and attitude, your naivety was your pitfall. Thinking back, I have been feeling distressed by a lot of figures (way more than the two boys) who turned out to be way more different than my naive self had so easily trusted initially. I used to be naive but I think I can no longer afford to remain as open. Moving forward, if I were to provide so selflessly as a friend and lover, then I ought to be careful about who I let into my life and give my affections to.
When you walked out of my life, I relied heavily on my independence and thought I must shut down all my ability to feel, but that was a fatal move because I am actually, a very emotional being. There, I said it. young me, I feel a strange sense of relief washing over me to admit that because I think I spent my entire life believing it was a weakness to be emotional, and denied it to the ends of the earth. Your coping mechanism throughout two years of A levels was crying and then feeling aggravated by how you're "feeling sad over dumbass grades", remember? During then, Mrs Bok already told you that you were emotional, that you should embrace it but take heed of your triggers. You promptly forget this lesson once life "got better". You always got upset when people were not as empathetic as you expected them to be. People will tell you that there is a logical basis to the development of your emotions, that you feel deeply, and you should accept it. But you don't listen, you never took heed of these signs.
So young me, please do. Spare me the later turmoil. This is why you care about the feelings of those about you, this is why you have always been so self-aware, this is why your sense of intutition is strong, this is why you were not capable of having a no-strings attached relationship, this is why when you stop any emotional inlets, you will lose the very essence of who you are. You are because you feel. I am sorry, I spent the past year trying to tell you to feel nothing, trampling all over your feelings until they turn into dust.
When the ability to feel is so important, and so lacking in the world, that you can definitely use it to be the best you can.
I want to let you into my life again. Come hang out with me, a bit older, hopefully a little wiser, much more tired and less hopeful. Sorry for being an unattractive hang buddy but I'll buy you green milk tea.
Would you please come back?
Love,
Xinyan
