QUID PRO QUO

I am constantly growing and learning. I must be lenient towards myself, and towards everyone else, while they are growing and learning. Life is chess, not checkers. I like the person I am even if it is difficult, even when times are difficult and my life is difficult and even as I struggle. I like it, and I do not want it to end, despite my unending tiredness. There are a myriad of layers to my person and nobody else can be me better than I can. When I was much younger, I believed wholesale in what the government would tell me, things like prisons keep society safe, and then I realised I had close family members in jail, and that the odds are stacked, that sometimes it's so hard to make ends meet, even when you put in the same or more effort as anyone else but are not guaranteed the same results, that you turn to a life of crime, anyway. I mean, of course, if the system fails you even though you play by the rules, you will lose faith in the system. I used to believe in the concept of virginity, then I realised if anyone judges you based on what you do with your body, whether you sleep around or are a sex worker or you dress like a different gender from the one you were assigned at birth, then the person judging you needs to grow, because you are much more than your body, much more than just whether you touch someone's hand or kiss their mouth or allow their penis into your body. You are what your heart does and feels. I used to believe that some part of me must be a golddigger of some sort, because I heard tropes of Asian women going out with white men for their money. Then I realised, if I, as an Asian woman, have been brought up by people who still control what I wear at 28, who still tell me not to stay over at a man's place at night, if my best friends and most of my social circles get told the same thing, then no matter how much Asian men deny it, they have been brought up with very similar values, at least those in Singapore. And if my best friends and family members don't question these things, then chances are, neither do the men. Only I break out of this mold, because I'm tired of this. I'm tired of living in a country that tells its society it is ungrateful to be displeased, when there is no minimum wage in Singapore, when there is a government that raised the retirement age by 10 years to 65, meaning the 20% of our income that goes to them (the CPF) every month, will still never belong to its people, that means that its citizens will have to work forever, and never be able to spend and enjoy what is rightfully theirs, in their prime ages. I'm tired, I'm tired, I'm tired.