What happened when I turned twenty

I turned twenty and I didn’t feel any different. Why would I want to? It had barely been a month since my best stage performance yet and I was living in its glory, I loved my classes and the school I was in, my health condition was finally on an upwards slope after more than a year and my heart woke up happy and bubbly every day. I was satisfied and content with things as they were, and that was probably my biggest mistake.

Fast forward one month and I had started to notice each of these things going downhill. But it was fine, it always had to be because that’s who I am and so I pretended it was. Fast forward another month and I had no motivation or energy to dance, I barely went to my classes, I’d lost just about all of my hair within a span of three weeks and I couldn’t talk to the guy I loved without getting angry or upset. So I cut everyone off, didn’t meet and barely spoke to them, because that was the easiest way to pretend I was okay.

I had been counting down the days and I finally was home after forcing myself to push through the remainder of the semester. But something was different. I was agitated, uneasy and irritable towards my closest people. I had no control over my emotions and I would stay silent, keeping my thoughts in my head. And that was my second mistake: forcing myself into loneliness.

I looked at myself in the mirror and realised that I was nothing that I wanted to be. So I vowed to never let myself be in that position again. I wrote down who I wanted to be: I wanted to feel amazing, be strong, and keep nothing but happiness and love in my life. I decided to put myself first in every way possible and that was the first, biggest, most important and hardest step I needed to take: wanting to help myself.

I started to treat each day as an adventure and left the bad days out, putting my pretending skills to good use. I met friends almost everyday, cooked and ate the things I loved, went on road trips to new places and started scaring myself. What do I mean by this? I did the one thing that scared me the most: I made myself vulnerable.

I began a mission to be open and confident about my health condition, I started putting together a dance production without any experience and no clue as to how I was going to carry it out, and I started taking antidepressants despite reservations from my closest people. And those were the three best moves I made.

Of course it wasn’t just smooth sailing from there. But every time something happened that I thought was awful, I would counter it by doing something that scared me. I took classes at NUS and had no idea how I was going to juggle them with my production work, I moved to London the day after my production with eight people I didn’t know, I did interviews, went for runs, wrote articles and I made new friends and stayed out with them until 4.30am and then somehow managed to make it to class in the morning.

I learned that I couldn’t feel amazing if I lost my momentum and stopped surprising myself, I couldn’t be strong without letting myself be vulnerable and I couldn’t keep love and happiness in my life by simply avoiding the toxic. I still have situations that I definitely need to figure out and work on, but even when I do, I will make sure that I am not simply content. I need to be more. After all, my mum always told me that the world is my oyster and my dad taught me to dream big and achieve bigger.