An honest reflection of my 21 year old self

Jillian Lum
Aug 9, 2017 · 3 min read

This year I turned 25. At the age of 25, I thought that I would have been working in my dream job, hanging out with my awesome group of close friends (like the ones you see in Sex and the City and How I Met Your Mother) and made a difference in the world.

Now thinking back, I realise how naive and wrong I was about how I was living my life.

I had been living for others, rather than myself.


At the start of 2015, I stepped into a new stage of my life: full time work. 2014 had been an emotionally atrocious year with two break ups and I was ready to move onto bigger and more exciting things. The allure of full time work was the fact that I would have finally arrived at the stage of life that I had always wanted to be — adulthood. The train of life however, had a different itinerary and instead of stopping at the adult station, I was left stranded between child and adult; the young-adult station.

Growing up in an Asian household, I was taught at a very young age that if I studied hard, I would be successful in the future. This mantra fostered a false sense of security, where I convinced myself that my high marks could rid myself of all my insecurities, doubts, money issues, loneliness issues, people issues and the like. It led me to believe that my future would be secure, I would be highly sought after and paid generously for my intellect. As a result, I forced myself into a life in corporate, even if it didn’t feel quite right.

When I graduated from university, I had all of those issues listed above: insecurities about my appearance, lack of self-worth, inability to deal with loneliness, poor student issues and social anxiety just to name a few. As cliché as this sounds, I didn’t know what my identity was and I had no idea what I wanted to be. When I started full time work in corporate, I thought that my life would improve as I excelled at my job and my problems would be left behind at the child station as the train steam rolled ahead.

Soon enough, cracks started to form in my perfect picture. I struggled to maintain relationships with friends and family. I snapped at my family, was highly sarcastic towards friends and found myself struggling to make connections with new people.

I did things to impress others because I couldn’t bear to be seen as a lesser individual. I couldn’t bear to not fit in with the world. More importantly, I couldn’t bear to be seen as unintelligent.

I allowed myself to live my life governed by what others thought of me, not realising that I was crushing my soul and creativity with other people’s expectations.

I set myself up for failure by promising too much to others and not delivering; setting unrealistic goals and not achieving them. It took failure of an exam and rejection from a boy I didn’t even like to force myself to stop and think — What the hell am I doing?

Moving on from that, I packed up my self pity and dumped it onto a mental carriage. I could no longer waste time. The train stops for no one. I decided to make choices for myself and to do hard things for myself.

I decided to love myself. I decided to love others even though it was hard and I decided to allow myself to be vulnerable.

Intelligence doesn’t make you more confident. It doesn’t make you feel any less lonely and it most certainly does not build great relationships. Being vulnerable and opening up about my struggles allowed me to connect to more people and share my life with them. I don’t regret it and neither should you. I hope to share more experiences with you all.

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