About Unwritten

I believe life is a collection of quiet moments; the ones we often rush past, yet remember the most. This is my space to pause, reflect, and write about the things that shape me: leaving one home to build another, learning to carry family love across borders, and finding beauty in everyday rituals. I write the way I live with curiosity, gratitude, and an openness to change. Welcome to my corner of the internet. I hope you find something here that makes you pause, too.

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  • Distance and the Tunnel

    Lately I’ve been learning that distance isn’t just space. It’s time. It’s the six, seven, eight hours where I’m asleep and something is happening to the people I love and I don’t even know it yet. It’s finding out late. It’s finding out after.

    My mother was admitted to the hospital a few weeks ago, and there was nothing I could physically do about it. Just a screen, and trust that family back home can handle it.

    I also found out my best friend since I was 13 has been diagnosed and is battling an illness. I wasn’t there when he got the news. I wasn’t there to exist in the same room so he didn’t have to go through it alone. He was there throughout my entire life. I found out through a message too. I keep finding out through messages.

    There’s a specific kind of helplessness in loving people from a distance. Nobody’s filming it. It’s quiet. It’s checking your phone too many times. It’s doing the mental math of time zones before you even say good morning. It’s missing birthdays, weddings, the Sunday family lunches that don’t make headlines but somehow add up to a whole life you weren’t present for.

    People love to say distance doesn’t matter if the relationship is strong enough. I think that’s a kind thing to say and an incomplete one.

    I’m not writing this because I have an answer. I don’t have a neat ending or a lesson wrapped in a bow. I’m writing this because I needed to put it somewhere outside of my own head, where it’s been looping for days.

    I know there’s an end of this tunnel. I know my mother is recovering, and my friend will fight, and Paris will eventually feel less like a stranger’s apartment and more like mine. I know all of that, logically.

    I’m just not there yet. I’m still in the middle of it, still doing the math of distance and guilt and helplessness, and the other aspects of my life that require my attention.

    But I wanted to say it plainly, for once, instead of around it: this is hard. Genuinely, unglamorously hard. And I’m just trying to get through it, one day, one message, one phone call at a time, until I’m standing on the other side of all of this and can look back instead of through.

  • You Don’t Owe the Room Your Opinion

    Somewhere along the way, “having an opinion on everything” got confused with “voicing an opinion on everything.” I don’t think they’re the same thing.

    You’re allowed to form a view and keep it to yourself. You’re allowed to read a room and decide this isn’t the moment. Not every thought needs an audience. Not every audience deserves your unfiltered take.

    I’ve heard it more than once in Europe: you’re too polite/ politically correct/ you’re so Singaporean

    Bluntness isn’t honesty. It’s just bluntness. You can get a point across without bulldozing the person standing in front of you. Choosing your words isn’t softness, it’s control. It means I’ve thought about the message and the delivery, instead of just saying whatever surfaced first.

    Saying something clearly and saying something carelessly aren’t the same skill. The people who say everything that crosses their mind aren’t braver. They’re just less filtered. I don’t think there’s virtue in volume.

    So I’m keeping my politeness. Not because I’m avoiding conflict, but because I’m choosing where it matters. To me, that’s not a flaw to be corrected. It’s just how I’ve decided to move through a room.

  • Five Months in France: A Renegotiation

    Five months. Long enough to stop being a tourist. Long enough to stop excusing things as charm. Long enough to see a place not through the soft-focus lens of a romatnticed weekend getaway, but in ordinary Tuesday mornings, administrative waiting rooms, and streets that greet you with a smell no travel writer has ever had the honesty to describe accurately.

    Five months is long enough to know the difference between a city’s mythology and its reality.

    France is a country running a 21st century welfare state on a 20th century economic engine. The ambition of the social contract here is, genuinely, admirable. Healthcare, family benefits, labour unions (big boss), a commitment to the idea that the state owes its people something real. In principle, I respect it. In practice, it is a system stretched past its own capacity, patched repeatedly, propped up by mechanisms that are beginning to show their age in ways that daily life makes impossible to ignore.

    You cannot will your way through structural dysfunction. You can only learn where the cracks are and decide, daily, whether you still want to navigate them. In my case, I don’t really have a choice.

    I want to be honest about what it does to me, psychologically, to live inside systems that consistently remind you of your own powerlessness. The morning you miss an appointment because the train simply did not come. Till today, I have yet to receive my social security nor my residency card. The parcels and letters that arrived too late because the process moved at its own pace with no regard for your deadline. The moment you realize you have spent an entire afternoon at a bank on something that should have taken twenty minutes, and that this is not an exception. This is the rhythm. And the smell of the streets doesn’t help.

    You adjust. You lower certain expectations. You stop being surprised by things that would have outraged you in month one. And somewhere in that adjustment, you have to be careful not to lose the part of yourself that knows this is not normal, that knows you deserve systems that work, that knows settling is not the same as adapting.

    And yet.

    And yet, Paris.

    The idea, radical in its simplicity, that sitting still with a wine and watching the street move is a legitimate way to spend an hour. No productivity guilt. No optimizing. Just presence.

    The buzzing parks in summer. The architecture that reminds you, even on your worst administrative days, that human beings are capable of building things of extraordinary and lasting beauty.

    The pace of life here, once you stop fighting it, has something in it worth studying. A kind of permission to live at human speed. To take lunch seriously. To resist the tyranny of constant acceleration. France, for all its dysfunction, has not surrendered the slow afternoon, the belief that pleasure is a right you simply exercise.

    So here I am, five months in, eyes open, frustrations intact, affections stubbornly persistent.

    The bureaucratic maze and the boulevard at dusk. The broken escalator that remains broken for the last five months and the perfect croissant seventeen steps away from it. You are far from what I was sold. You are more complicated, more maddening, and in your better moments, more beautiful than the postcard ever managed to capture.

    I am not done with you yet.

    Consider this a renegotiation. I am willing to give this another shot, to look again with fresh eyes, to find what is genuinely worth finding beneath the frustration. Not naively. Not with the same unexamined optimism of month one.

    But willing. Still willing.

  • The Weight Was Left at My Door

    So I say what I am about to say with that full understanding in my chest.

    I swallowed more in a week more than I care to admit. Not because I was weak. Because grief, even someone else’s grief, demands a kind of deference. Because I understood that the loss in that household was real, and that pain needed somewhere to land. I chose, again and again, to let it land on me rather than detonate something irreparable.

    There is a version of this post where I detail every moment. Where I name the specific cuts and catalog the specific words. I have written that version in my head a hundred times and how it blurred my vision till it landed on my wedding veil. But the truth is, I cannot. Not because I lack the words. I am never short of words. But because the full weight of how this period affected me lives somewhere language hasn’t quite reached yet. Some wounds describe themselves only in retrospect, when enough time has passed to see their shape clearly.

    What I can say is this: I see it. I felt it. And I will not pretend it didn’t happen.

    That is not weakness. That is a particular kind of grace that cost me something.

    What I want to say, what I think needs to be said plainly, is this: No bride should have to prove her worthiness while simultaneously grieving alongside people she barely knows, for a loss she did not share in the same way, all while trying to hold her own joy with both hands without letting it slip.

    I understand you were hurting. I genuinely do.

    But I was there too. And I was hurting in ways that had no permission to exist.

  • We will never be here again

    One of the first things I realized while wandering the streets of Paris with Julian is how old the city is.

    The limestone facades, carved as early as the 1600s, have held their breath through centuries of revolutions, romances, and quiet afternoons just like this one. They were built to outlast the memory of anyone currently walking these pavements. It is a humbling, almost dizzying realization. Standing in the shadow of a monument that has stared down the same street for four hundred years, my own existence feels like a speck of dust.

    Our time here is finite. The light will shift, and the person I am at this exact second will eventually be replaced by someone else entirely. It is easy to feel small when you are surrounded by so much permanence. But there is a strange, fierce comfort in the truth: we will never be here again.

    Since moving here, I find myself tethered to a familiar weight: the low, constant hum of anxiety about what comes next. I worry about the future, the milestones I have not reached, and the life I have not quite built yet with Julian. I look at the walls that have outlived the worries of a thousand people who walked these paths before me. I realise, with a sudden, startling relief, that my current anxiety is just a guest in a timeless place. They will not matter in time to come, and neither will the source of them. If this moment is all I truly have, then holding onto this worry is such a waste of the sunlight.

    If our time here is merely a flicker against the stone, then let that flicker be bright. Let the heavy, unnecessary anxieties about the future dissolve into the architecture around you. You will never be lovelier, never more real, and never more present than you are in this very heartbeat. Go chase, fall, fall again, and try again until you reach where you want to be in this lifetime.

    After all, we will never be here again.

  • Hey English

    I grew up in Singapore, where English is not foreign. It is foundational.

    It was the language of school, of exams, of presentations, of official forms, of essays graded in red ink. We were taught early that English was more than a subject. It was infrastructure. It connected Chinese, Malay, Indian communities at home, and connected us to the rest of the world outside it. Speak English well, and you could walk into almost any room on the planet and function. That was the promise. And for most of my life, it held true.

    Until Europe.

    Here, English still opens doors. It just doesn’t run the room.

    In professional spaces, it exists as the polite default. Everyone can use it. Everyone understands it. But the moment conversation becomes animated, layered, or emotionally charged, people return to their native languages the way birds return to thermals. Voices overlap. Jokes fly. Decisions crystallize in sentences I cannot follow. I’m connected but not included.

    It’s a strange dissonance. Back home, English was our common ground. It was how we built bridges across difference. Here, it is simply one bridge among many, and not always the one people choose to cross.

    The lesson is humbling.

    Because when you grow up fluent in a global language, you don’t notice how much power it quietly gives you. You assume participation is natural. You assume understanding is mutual. You assume your words land exactly as intended.

    Remove that advantage, and you discover how much of influence actually lives beneath language. In tone. In timing. In cultural shorthand. In shared history.

    Even at family gatherings on my husband’s side, German flows the way memory does. Effortless. Intimate. Full of references that existed long before I did. I can hear warmth, but not always meaning. I can feel belonging, but not always access.

    English didn’t fail me.

    It just revealed its jurisdiction.

    And maybe that’s the real shift. Singapore taught me English so I could speak to the world. Europe is teaching me that if I want the world to speak back fully, I’ll have to learn its languages too.

  • Still a guest here

    Week three in Paris is, unexpectedly, the hardest.

    Week one is adrenaline. Everything is charming because it is new. Even the confusion feels cinematic. I was wide-eyed, jet-lagged, waking up at 3 a.m., and puffed up with the belief that I could master this city with enough sightseeing and courage.

    Week two is performance. You start to believe you have found a rhythm. You know which metro exit leads closest to your office. You know exactly how many turns and traffic lights it takes to get home from the station, and the four-digit code plus five-digit code at each entrance of your building before you can finally reach the 1×1 sqm lift that carries you up. You order baguettes as une baguette, and without pointing. You think, maybe, you are getting the hang of this.

    Week three humbles you.

    Your French vocabulary stretches only as far as politeness. Bonjour opens doors but does not always carry you through conversations. You cannot help but feel bad when you see your colleagues struggling to find the right English words to explain things to you, meetings that start in English but drift into French later. You sometimes stand there smiling like a decorative plant while words fly past you. You nod and try to piece together meaning from gestures, and context clues like a detective.

    And then there is the morning RER platform.

    Every day, without fail, there is that smell. That unmistakable, nose-wrinkling, why-is-this-legal scent of stale urine rising from the corners of the station. It greets you before the train does. You try to ignore it. You fail. Not far from it, you catch sight of someone carrying everything he owns on his shoulders, without shoes, in two-degree cold, stepping out of the metro. It is a difficult sight to hold, and you wish you had a few euros on you to spare.

    Here, the contrast is sharp. Paris is breathtakingly beautiful and unapologetically messy at the same time. Ornate balconies above, dog poop on the pavement below.

    Week three is when the honeymoon phase ends and the real relationship with a city begins. This is when you stop seeing a postcard and start seeing a place. The charm remains, but it shares space with small daily negotiations with the question, Pourquoi es-tu ici?

    Adaptation is not a straight line. It is a series of tiny negotiations between who you were, where you came from, and where you are standing now. You carry your habits with you, your standards, your senses, your idea of normal. A new city does not erase them. It gently challenges them.

    So yes, week three is hard. Harder than week one. Harder than week two. Because it is the week illusions fall away and truth walks in.

    But it is also the week you begin to grow. You start smoothing the wrinkles. You notice the small wins. You hold on to moments of goodness and learn to steady your emotions.

    You’ve got this.

  • Day 5 in Paris

    I’m here now.
    In Paris.
    Not for a holiday but actually living here.

    Even writing that feels strange. Surreal, in the quiet way that only sinks in when you’re doing very normal things, like unpacking or waiting for a lift that may or may not fit two people. I’m here with my husband, Julian, and our pet rabbit, Xia. Yes, all three of us. A full household, relocated.

    Months ago, my relocation team reached out after reading my description of what I was hoping for. I spent some time carefully choosing an apartment from photos, trying to imagine a life inside rectangles on a screen. Eventually, I picked one in the 16th arrondissement. My friends told me it’s a bourgeois estate, the kind of neighbourhood you’re advised to “enjoy while it lasts.” I only have this apartment for two months, so I’m taking that advice seriously.

    It’s close to the Arc de Triomphe, which I still can’t pronounce properly in French, no matter how many times I hear it said around me. The building was built in the 1920s. To get in, you pass through at least two electronic security points via a courtyard before reaching the main entrance. Honestly, perfect for my Singaporean timidness. Layers of safety feel familiar. The lift is tiny. It could barely fit two people. Three would be a crime. We were greeted by an agent from Move In Paris when we arrived, clearly unimpressed that we showed up two hours late thanks to a cargo baggage delay.

    When we finally stepped into the apartment, the first thing that greeted us was the creaky wooden floor. Sixty-two square metres. Surprisingly spacious for two humans and one little rat (affectionate term). The space felt old and lived-in. From the living room window, we can see about one-third of the Eiffel Tower. Just enough. At night, when it lights up, it’s actually quite spectacular compared to the 7,000 metric tons of puddling iron you see in the day.

    It’s day five now. The fridge is nicely stocked with fresh groceries. I’m sitting on the floor typing this, having just finished a bowl of salad. The apartment already feels lived-in, even if some things are still unsettled. Every panel button on my induction stove is filled with the letter E. I have no idea what that means yet, and according to my agent, there’s no ETA on how long it will take to be fixed. Julian is already on day three of work, and I’m finally meeting my team tomorrow.

    We still haven’t gotten our French phone numbers, and some parcels have gone missing. It’s a bumpy start, but we’re hopeful things will eventually get better. Overthinking on good thoughts only. The universe will balance out the energy. Stay true.

  • 02:57 am

    How did it ever occur to anyone that time seems to move faster and faster each year? It is strange, especially when every year is still made up of the same number of days and hours. Nothing has changed on the calendar, yet everything feels more compressed.

    Maybe time itself is not speeding up. Maybe our lives are. The fuller our days become, the more we stack commitments on top of one another, the less space there is between moments. Weeks blur into months, months slip quietly into years, and suddenly we are asking where the time went.

    For the last four to five years, I have been deeply involved in the local volunteering and charity space. When people asked why, I often said it was a calling. And it was, in many ways. But over time, I also realised that part of me was filling a void. Filling extra time. Responding to an increasing awareness of the very real and pressing situations around us. Once you see certain realities, it is hard to look away.

    Doing life more purposefully, I am learning, is not always about adding meaning. Sometimes it is about choosing where to place it. Not every moment needs to be optimised. Not every capacity needs to be filled. Purpose can be quiet. It can be intentional.

    As I move into the next chapter of my life, I know I need to step back and recalibrate. To ask what I really want to achieve, who truly matters, and what deserves my energy. To silence the noise, both external and self imposed.

    Perhaps time only feels fast when we lose authorship over how we live. And maybe purpose is less about keeping up, and more about choosing, again and again, how we want our days to feel.

  • Hello 2026

    Julian and I just got back to Singapore from our two week year end holiday, where we spent Christmas with his family in Germany and Austria. There is something about being in cold weather during the holidays that slows everything down. Sitting by the fire oven, listening to dry firewood crackle, wrapped in a soft sweater, drinking something warm under dim lights, and picking up a book has quietly become one of my favourite ways to rest. The only thing missing was hotpot. Some things are simply too good to leave behind.

    Coming home took more out of us than expected. The long flights, jet lag, and sudden shift from minus ten to thirty degrees weighed on our bodies. I have been awake in the early hours and only falling asleep just before the sky starts to brighten. Starting 2026 with a body that still feels like it is stuck in 2025 was not part of the plan.

    And yet, being home helps. Eating familiar food, being around family, and hearing English all around felt like a quiet relief.

    This month is going to be a full one. Relocation arrangements, our Chinese wedding tea ceremony in two weeks, and the goodbyes that come with closing one chapter and opening another. It has been emotionally heavy at times, especially with a growing to do list that occasionally sits uncomfortably in my stomach. I am really looking forward to settling down and finding my way back into a routine.

    2025 has been an amazing year. Full, generous, and life changing in ways I am still unpacking. As 2026 begins, I am trying to stay grounded. Excited, yes, but also present. One step at a time feels like the right way forward.