Puzzling out the mystery of my fifty years of existence

Since I was young, I've been mostly a follower who finds it difficult to change my habits and what I've learnt or what I'm more familiar with. I usually try to take the easier paths as I don't have a good memory and can only process a great deal of information slowly. I can only listen to respond or understand. I have a great deal of difficulty listening to remember. Unexpected incidents or calamities sometimes happen to disrupt my peace. I attended three primary schools because my father, who had the connections, wanted me to go to a primary school where I could learn to focus on studies and be a good boy. I spent one year in Bedok Town, six months in Maha Bodhi, and joined Yu Neng in mid-Primary 2. In Yu Neng, I was disassociated from most students in class after a fall that broke my front tooth, which happened when I joined those students in a game of catching. Hence, I could focus more on studies and simple personal enjoyable activities to relax, such as playing on the swing in a playground after school. Trying to excel in table tennis at school inculcated notions of competition and fast-paced actions, which led to fast-paced answering of exam questions and other dependencies. Learning to play Chinese chess had similar effects and added strategic thinking.

Unfortunately, my secondary school, Dunman High, was horrible because it focused too much on competition and performance. Activities that were exciting for me became addictions, such as sports and computer games. I was even encouraged by a classmate to enjoy pornography and masturbation, and I used that to destress regularly. I did not do well in secondary school, partly also because there were too many subjects to study and memorise and calculate, and too little time for both addicted play and tedious memorising. The constant repetitions became cadences of procedures, which contributed to stress and anxiety because when I failed to remember, I only forced myself to do more repetitions.

My junior college and national service days were quite forgettable, because although I learnt to sing and became more fit, I'm not sure about much of what I had learnt because although I was in the science stream and taking just three A-Level subjects, I was so stupid that I had to rote learn through it, which meant more stressful memorising work. University days were similar, with the added stress of trying to get a lot of points to stay in a university hostel of my choice. Most of my rote learning was done at the last minute just before the examinations or project submissions. My Second Class (Lower) Honours degree in electrical and electronics engineering from Singapore's NTU could not get me any suitable jobs after graduating in 2001. The choir singing activity I had treasured in university was useless at work. I could not even find a suitable wife!

One year after graduating, due to the unsuitable sales job I had and influence from my boss, I decided to take up a cheap graduate diploma in marketing communications and a cheap online MBA. I did badly in both, ran out of money and had to rely on my parents, who could not really afford to support me. I also tried starting a couple of businesses, but could not reach agreement with my partners. Eventually, in 2006, I developed a mental illness, schizophrenia. I have been trying to understand this experience for the past twenty years, and now, I understand that my mental illness was spiritual evidence for a world that is not real. My parents had been praying to Guan Yin since I was born, and one day in 2006, I literally started perceiving sounds. As I only realised much later, Guan Yin in Chinese means Perceiver of Sounds. These sounds were not voices of people in distress, but actual cadences of beats of sounds in everyday life. I was finding meaning in one beat, two beats, three beats, etc. of sounds, and these meanings were usually commands to move, so I ended up travelling around Singapore. This was definitely not normal behaviour, because one cannot keep track of everything, especially when they are out of the ordinary, and still be a normal person.

After a few months of this experience, my final travelling encounters lasted three days and nights where I did not eat, drank a little by disobeying the spiritual commands, almost never urinated, never defecated, never slept, and never stopped moving. Quite surprisingly, my body still looked normal from the outside. This last period of travel actually started when I ran away from IMH, after my parents brought me there. Finally, on the last night when I was in Kaki Bukit, I decided to give up trying to unravel the mystery of all the spiritual commands and tried to hail a cab to bring me home. Then, my spectacles inexplicably vanished. I was shocked, but eventually managed to hail a cab despite not seeing clearly due to my short-sightedness. Then, when the cab neared my flat in Bedok South, my spectacles reappeared in the right pocket of my shorts, as if they had rematerialised. To me, this suggests that miracles such as transubstantiation may be possible. This was my second shock. After I had eaten at home and slept, the normal shape of my body collapsed and became shrivelled like an old or very sick man's for the next several days or more. I can't remember how I recovered, but it likely happened with rest, and my father, who was a Chinese physician, likely gave me some medicines to take.

Only in 2026 did I realise that Guan Yin means Perceiver of Sounds. I now believe this spiritual encounter was meant to show me that I rely too much on vision. Perhaps due to my lack of ability to listen well, or to listen, see, remember and think well at the same time, I can only accept this state of being.

My mental illness was medicated away by IMH, and after about one year, my psychiatrist took me off medication, and due to my continual joblessness and inability to find a suitable job, voices that condemned my lack of ability despite graduating from a university started appearing in my mind in 2011. There were constant calls to kill myself because I had proven to be a stupid or lousy person, and I eventually fell from a bird-watching tower in Pasir Ris Park. I now believe that in some way, my suicide attempt was caused by the meritocratic and hyper-competitive spirit in this country and the world.

I was told that I was found by someone from Riverlife Church, and was brought to CGH in an ambulance. I was eventually moved to St Andrew's Community Hospital and stayed there for a few months to recover. I was baptised and confirmed at St Andrew's Community Chapel in 2012. Although I had been agnostic for most of my earlier life, I accepted Christ because I had visited churches many times and remembered the musical version of the Lord's Prayer from St Andrew's Cathedral. Even though I was saved, I was still mostly jobless until a Christian and government-linked friend got me a data entry job in his friend's company in 2015. I stayed until 2020. During my tenure there, I changed from worshipping at a church to worshipping in the homes of Riverlife cell group members. When I first joined Riverlife, I was blessed because one of the elders then was an engineering professor from NTU, so he helped me to connect faith to science and technology through his sermons, which were available online. The Saturday afternoon cell group meetings also helped me make the transition.

Miraculously for me, I was terminated from my job in 2020 before COVID became full-blown in Singapore, and after I was warded in IMH for a few days for observation. Seven months after this, I got my best job as an assistant research engineer at SMU to learn and work remotely from home on an older form of AI called expert systems. My abilities were deemed to be too lousy to contribute directly to the AI portion, but I helped with web programming. I was eventually terminated in 2023 soon after ChatGPT arrived. I believe I was let go partly because I had become too supportive of and had got too much help from this new form of AI, which is a direct competitor and alternative to the AI we were developing.

Except for a part-time remote admin job in 2025 where I was terminated after nine months, I have been mostly jobless since 2023. This is likely because I can only work remotely from home, part-time and with flexible hours, mostly due to medications disrupting and changing my sleeping and waking patterns, and causing diarrhoea at unpredictable times. I currently don't take my medications at fixed times, but approximate times. For example, for my mental health medications for schizophrenia, depression and anxiety, if I take them at 8am and 8pm, I may fall asleep for a few hours immediately or a few hours after taking the medications. For my medications for chronic constipation, I take them once every two days currently at about 3.30pm. Then, my bowels may move between 8pm and 12pm the next day. This 20-hour period may sometimes stretch to 24 hours or more for unknown reasons. The bowel movements are usually diarrhoea. Hence, I can only try to work between 2pm and 5pm or 6pm on weekdays or weekends, but these times conflict with the times for evening Mass at Catholic churches, or late-afternoon services at St Andrew's Cathedral. I'm also currently on a low-residue diet on my doctor's recommendation, and can eat only very little plant-based food, because, in my case, eating fibre worsens my constipation. I occasionally have insomnia for unknown reasons as well.

I currently try to be a small version of Jonah, the reluctant prophet, through my blogs. I am trying to find a common ground among free thinkers, Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists in terms of beliefs, so that there can be more peace in the world, but I understand also that as long as the global human population keeps growing and intermingling, there will be poverty, hunger, conflicts and wars due to fractious relationships resulting from differences in individual aptitudes and beliefs, group economics and competition. Throughout most of my more than twenty years of working life, I was mostly unemployed, and although I had joined many companies, I was usually terminated or left within a few days, weeks or months. I was fortunate that because of my disability due to my mental-illness-related suicide attempt, I was awarded some compensation from my insurance company, and I'm now living off that along with my mother's CPF, as well as some donations from relatives and a very caring Christian friend. My father, who passed away on Palm Sunday 2026, became a Christian before he died, while he was living with dementia, and my mother also became a Christian. Both my parents were Chinese-educated. I have a younger brother who is a professor of theoretical physics, and a Muslim, but he can't find a suitable job in Singapore and has had to travel overseas to look for work. Sometimes, if he can't find a suitable job anywhere, he'll come back to Singapore to stay with us until he gets his next job offer.

In October 2026, after realising the futility of chasing after jobs that would never come to a PWD (person with a disability), who only has a very limited period of time each day available to work, I decided to spend more time at church instead. I have been going mostly to the Church of Divine Mercy, which is near my home in Pasir Ris. I also attend St Andrew's Cathedral once a week, mainly for the Mandarin service. I have visited Sultan Mosque, Masjid Al-Falah, Darul Arqam and the Palelai Buddhist Temple once each. I have also been to the Church of the Holy Family a few times to attend Brother Andrew Goh's RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults). The Church of the Holy Family is a special place for me, because before I was disabled, I had attended their Sunday morning Mass several times without knowing what was going on, just to be blessed. Around that time, I also attended services at St Hilda’s Church and Bethesda Pasir Ris Mission Church.