Becoming an adult in a foreign land

Hello, it's me.

526 days. That's how long it's been since I last blogged. In that time, I got engaged, married, moved to Malaysia, and moved us to a new apartment that finally feels like home. As I take a moment to reflect, I'm surprised to find a new sense of steadiness and confidence that wasn't there before. It feels like somewhere in those 526 days, I grew up and became an... adult.

There's something about physically leaving your home that finalizes the end of your adolescence. The break is even cleaner in my instance as I moved out of the country. On my first visit back to Singapore, we had trouble finding a place to stay. As I drifted in and out of sleep on the sofa in a place that used to be so familiar to me, I knew then that I didn't belong here any more. If there was no place to rest and to just be, then this is not my home anymore.

So we started building our home in Selangor, where neither of us grew up and where we had no kin here. Everything is a little bit more difficult because we are not known here. We had no reputation and no one to vouch for us. It made me realize how many of the opportunities I had in the past came because of a good reputation. In church, I was my father's daughter. Though the other adults didn't know me, they are likely to take a chance on me because they knew my father and the kind of man he is. In school and the workforce, the recruiters gave me a chance because my school had a good name and branding. But here, my past and pedigree meant nothing. I was Joseph's wife and had to live off the reputation he had painstakingly built for himself in the past 3 years. Both the good and the bad.

Yet at every difficult turn in this foreign land, we were met by lots of kindness and grace from strangers and friends. We expected nothing from these folks and were extremely touched by their generosity and friendship. It has been an honour for me to have had deep and very personal conversations with several precious souls who took the time to learn my story.

5 months in, I've learnt to embrace this place as my home now. We just moved to a new place that I help picked and furnished according to our taste and preference. It's filled with nice things that we enjoy and can afford. In 2 weeks, I'll be starting a new job and finally have a semblance of normality here.

Coming from a generation of trolls and memes, I thought I'll never really know how to 'adult'. It's almost like a fear or desire to never grow up. But what seemed so impossible in the past is now within my reach. There's still so much more to learn and experience I know, but for now at least I'm doing okay. Everything's gonna be okay.

Elizabeth chirped at 4:54 PM | No comments