I went on a short road trip with a couple of friends this past week, driving down to Dumfries and Galloway in the south of Scotland. We had a few things that we hoped to do, but no set plans. It’s how I like to travel in Scotland; a lot of the time I’m just happy to be strolling down the high street of some small town or following a gentle forest path. Some people hate winter and talk of seasonal depression, but I love this season. I love the feeling of being cocooned in my puffer coat, hands in my pockets as I plod along, breathing deep. There’s something about the cold air that refreshes me. Scotland is both literally and figuratively a different climate from what I have in Singapore, and that’s just what I need.

I talk often of how much I love Scotland; how, since I first visited eleven years ago, it has become a safe place for me. I breathe easier, feel lighter, in this country. I arrive and I feel lucky to be here, surrounded by a place and people who have embraced and welcomed me from the get-go.

I’m not deluded enough to ignore the fact that I’m looking at Scotland through rose-tinted glasses. I’m extremely privileged when I come here, because I have a place to stay and am usually on “working holiday” mode, where I can spend half a day on work and the rest of it on walks or reading books or going out for tea and cake. I don’t have to worry about finding employment or paying rent or bills or mortgages in Scotland, which is why it’s so much easier to just sit back and enjoy the best bits of the country. I am more relaxed and happy in Scotland than I am in Singapore because I’m not expected to adult to the maximum here.

But this isn’t enough to discount another fact, which is that my life in Singapore has been damaging in ways that go beyond the average Singaporeans’ woes. The past year (or two, or three, or more) have been difficult, and I’m not just talking about my activism, which is always going to be challenging. It’s also been difficult emotionally and mentally, for myself and my family. There have been multiple crushing disappointments that felt like the rug had been pulled out from under us. I don’t know if it’s a matter of burn-out or age—probably both—but every time I experience such a disappointment, I feel more and more in need of a change.

I turned 35 a little more than a month ago. It’s an age I never imagined as a child, because it didn’t feel like there would be that much to imagine. I’d just assumed, with the confidence of a middle class child who’d been promised a smooth life as long as I studied hard and did well in my exams, that, by this point of my life, I’d be gainfully employed with a decent wage and married, with perhaps a kid or two running around. I hadn’t a shred of doubt that 35-year-old Kirsten would own her own home, possibly even her own car, and live a comfortable Singaporean life with holidays abroad once or twice a year.

Smol Kirsten would have been surprised to learn that, while it’s true I like kids, I much prefer them to be other people’s children, and that my role is really not to be mother, but to be that cool auntie who buys Korean fried chicken and ice cream for dinner when she babysits. I would never have expected to be married, but unable to secure a long-term visa for my spouse in my own country, or for the both of us to have Masters degrees yet worry constantly about job security. I would have been stunned to discover that, not only have I been unable to own my own home, my family can’t even figure out how to live together in the same country.

I don’t have many regrets. While unexpected, there are many parts of my life that I wouldn’t have any other way. I’ve learnt that some of the things I was told were essential aren’t actually necessary for my happiness, and that I can have different priorities from what’s considered the ‘norm’. I accept that my choices—about my work, about activism, about speaking out—come with trade-offs. But as this year draws to a close, I find myself thinking about transition and change in a way I haven’t done before.

Before, when things turned to shit, I would tell myself to press on—that no matter how hard it got, this was what I’d chosen to do and I wasn’t going to back down. I had an important epiphany in 2016, at a time when the possibility of direct state harassment and oppression suddenly came into sharp focus, even though no action had been taken against me just yet. That year, I realised that if I persisted in my civil society activity, it would only be a matter of time before I, too, would be pulled in for police investigations or face the possibility of being charged for offences or even jailed. The way I saw it then, there were two choices: quit and lie low, or accept the risk and keep going.

I obviously chose the latter, and I would do it again in a heartbeat. That’s not the change I want to make. But this year I’ve come to recognise that I have more options and ways to “keep going” than I’d previously let myself consider.

“Keep going” used to mean earnest and intense participation in a variety of civil society activities and campaigns, sometimes all at once, on top of the work I needed to do to pay the bills. “Keep going” used to mean endless pitches and a need to keep ‘hustling’ because freelancers only get paid for a fraction of the actual work that we do (and hence the need to do even more work). “Keep going” used to mean saying “yes” to almost everything, because not being involved in something would immediately trigger fears about being unneeded or irrelevant. “Keep going” used to mean wanting to put myself out there as much as possible, whether for attention or because I was (and still kind of am) constantly anxious that people would think I was lazy or unworthy if I didn’t.

“Keep going” used to mean “don’t ever stop”.

This brings me back to Scotland. For many years now I have been coming here to experience a different pace of life, one where I don’t have to feel “on” all the time, where I have time for family and friends, where I can just curl up on a sofa to read or do cross-stitch without feeling guilty about skiving or ignoring a long to-do list. I used to think of this as a break to recharge, so that by the time I got back to Singapore I would be able to dive back into the intense pace at which I lived my regular life. This year, though, I want to think of my time in Scotland not as a momentary reprieve before rushing full-tilt back into battle, but as a recalibration and a period of transformation and transition into a gentler way of life.

I want to “keep going” differently. I don’t want to continue at the same frenetic pace as before; I no longer feel the overwhelming urge to be at the centre of everything. It’s taken me this long to acknowledge that, while I am passionate about the causes that I’m involved in, I have also been driven by impulses that haven’t served me very well. Now I want to work in a way that is not so coloured (at least internally) by anxiety and insecurity. I want to work in a way that allows me to contribute in the best areas that I can without overloading myself, or shifting too much of my time and attention away from the people closest and most important to me.

Shortly after our little road trip, my friend Peiying wrote this newsletter about what it means to love home—how we look at, speak of, and relate to our country. I’ve also been pondering my relationship with Singapore a lot recently, because it’s been such a major force in shaping the contours of my life, and my decisions on where to go from here will no doubt also inform and influence this relationship.

If, just a year or two ago, I was faced with the possibility of cutting back on my day-to-day activism work and taking more of a backseat role in the Transformative Justice Collective, I would probably have felt guilty, as if I was no longer as committed to the movement or the betterment of our society. I would likely have thought of myself as giving up or copping out, letting down my friends, becoming an imposter.

This self-imposed sense of guilt and shame also extended to thoughts of leaving Singapore. I’ve known for a long time that emigration is probably inevitable, given all the troubles my husband and I have had with settling in my home country. Knowing something in theory is very different from actually committing to it, though, and for a number of years I’d hoped that something would work out, that we’d figure out a way of successfully shuttling between Singapore and somewhere else so I wouldn’t actually have to leave. Again, the thought of leaving felt like abandoning my friends and colleagues, or forfeiting my ability to stay involved in Singaporean issues and causes. And, if I’m being completely honest, I was also terrified that moving abroad would reveal my absolute insignificance outside of my country; I worried that I would discover that I’d simply been a big fish in a small pond for a long time, and that I wouldn’t have what it takes to hold my own somewhere else.

There has been no lightbulb moment, but my view on this has shifted over the past year too. Not too long ago I was worried that I was still freelancing only because I wasn’t capable of working a full-time job where I would be accountable to people other than myself. Now I have a year’s experience running a quarterly literary journal—I not only survived having a full-time job, I’ve also managed the steep learning curve of working in print, on a publication very different from what I’d been familiar with. Thanks to this experience with Mekong Review, I know that my worth isn’t just confined to Singapore, and that I can survive out in the world. It’s made leaving Singapore seem much more possible, even (dare I say it) desirable. It’s much more important that things work out for my family, even if that means substantially changing the way I participate in Singapore civil society. This doesn’t mean that I’m going to pick up and leave right away—it’s really not so easy to move countries, and there are so many logistical and practical issues that we have to grapple with first—but I feel much more prepared, mentally and emotionally, than I was before.

My desire to slow down, and my making peace with the notion that I will leave someday, doesn’t mean that I care less about Singapore. It doesn’t mean that I’m no longer interested in the causes that I’ve already devoted so much time to. I will not stop caring about that humid, pressure cooker island just because I’m less heavily involved in civil society than I used to be, or because I’m physically somewhere else. That’s the difference: I will always have affection for a place like Scotland, but I will always be a Singaporean.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this blog post. Writing-wise, it feels a little unsatisfactory because I don’t have a neat conclusion to offer as closure to anyone reading this. So much of what I’ve written here is still a work in progress, more rumination than reality. I just know that, for better or worse, I am not quite the person I was when I was in my twenties, and I want some sort of change, and that’s not a bad thing.