‘I can’t keep this all in my head anymore’: Singaporean, 24, seeks help amid family crisis
Woman crying in her bedroom
SINGAPORE: A 24-year-old Singaporean, on the verge of mental and physical breakdown, turned to the internet for guidance, asking fellow locals what she could do to pull herself together and turn her life around.
Posting on the r/askSingapore forum, the woman described how every part of her life seems to be unravelling. Her family is not financially secure, their home remains unpaid for, the household's primary earner has been diagnosed with cancer, and her other parent has been dragging the whole family down.
"It has been mentally, emotionally, and financially hard, and a major shift in the house," she said. “The other parent is useless. Hasn't worked for years, refuses to do anything, screams and shouts a lot, argues, and overall just makes the environment at home miserable. I genuinely cannot stand it.”
“I can't keep this all in my head anymore, I'm exhausted, and I feel myself crumbling.”
In their house, no one does the chores either. The woman said she alone has been doing all the cooking and cleaning. “If something spills, it stays there. That's the kind of family it is. I'm never comfortable in the house.”
Her career has also struggled to move forward since she dropped out of polytechnic around six years ago.
“It's my biggest and heaviest regret that I carry with me every day. I've been out of the education system for 6 years and have been working part-time on and off since.”
She had planned to return to school in the upcoming admission cycle in hopes of getting her life back on track.
However, doing so would come with its own set of challenges. She would still need to work part-time to cover her school fees and contribute to the family's expenses, take care of the household chores, figure out how to manage the home loan, and continue dealing with the parent she has a strained relationship with.
All of this, she said, would leave her tied down for the next three years.
“It's all so heavy on me; I feel like I have the weight of the world on my shoulders, and I know I'll be absolutely miserable. I'm mentally at my strongest, but I don't know how much more I can take,” she wrote.
“And to make matters worse, I only have an interest in the arts field, which I'm aware is not a ‘smart’ decision. The industry has no job security, and it feels like I'm setting myself up for failure, especially if I'm going to work so hard to put myself back in the education system.”
Hoping that others might be able to offer some perspective and help her see a way forward, she turned to the community for advice.
“Does anyone have any advice for me? Something I'm not seeing, or being naive about? What am I doing wrong? How do I fix everything?”
“I'm sure a part of me knows that I'm in a 'too bad' situation. All I can do is suck it up, work hard and go back to study and figure it out from there. If that's the case, do I study something ‘smarter’? I appreciate all the responses in advance, and apologise if there is anything on this post that I'm being dumb about. I'm a mess at the moment.”
‘Be selfish. Live for yourself.’
The woman received an outpouring of advice from Singaporean Redditors.
One commenter pointed out that she was attempting to tackle too many problems at once.
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One said, “You are trying to solve your entire life at once, and that's why it feels impossible. You don't need to fix your family, education, career, finances, and future all at the same time. Stabilise what you can, get some help with the caregiving burden, and then tackle the next problem.”
Another echoed this advice, writing, “First off, just breathe. Secure a full-time job that will help you finance a helper/caretaker that can manage the household chores while you bring in some steady income. Use the resources provided by the govt for cancer treatment. While all this is going on, take your time to figure out what education you'd want to pick up, and then consider remote learning that you can do at your own pace.”
A third Redditor suggested that she could also consider walking away from everything. “Sometimes, it's healthier for you to just drop it all and walk away. Be selfish. Live for yourself.”
“Move away, change your number, be uncontactable to your old life, rent outside, and survive yourself, then hopefully thrive. Rebuild your own family; forget about your original family. Sometimes it's just necessary to be like that.”/TISG