My last post was dated October 28th, 2021.

Over a year has passed since my last post and how much has changed since then? I can write many letters to all my ex-lovers and write cheesy love notes to the people who broke my heart but at the end of the day, I think I shortchanged myself more than anything.

In the last 12 months, I have been on a journey of redemption and self-worth.

What I thought was a risk-taker found me the love of my life and the courage to take Life by its throat and show who’s the boss! But whilst success in my relationships and family shone big and bright, I suspect that amongst us are peers who struggled with the similar successes.

I cannot count how many fingers on my hands that I have lost specific friendships as our values did not only align, but also because I was setting goals and standards too high that we were no longer matching our energies.

How often have I allowed myself to be treated so poorly by the company around me? How often have I forgiven people for not valuing my time and the friendship I hold dear to myself because I failed to see my self-worth? Just how often have I attempted to reconcile with friends and people that did not have their best intentions with me?

Approximately 16 months ago, I entered an association that blessed me with mentors who saw myself fit to be part of something big and greater — leaving a legacy behind for the people who shared our values. In return, the people who weren’t for me, isolated me. The friendships and relationships that I tried so hard to mend did not mend because I have people who stood behind me and taught me to be bigger and play bigger.

I will not apologise for playing big.

Playing big means something bigger for the family that I want to have and live for. Playing big means breaking the cycle. Playing big means that my family doesn’t suffer the way I did. Playing big means that my partner in life works together simultaneously towards a goal and achieve it together as a team.

I cannot imaging playing small just because it upsets a few people. I cannot imagine playing small because why am I to trade my future with my family for the sake of some that don’t have the best interests in me?

Just because they don’t like you playing big doesn’t mean you start playing small.

Having faith is seeing it before you see it.

This is for myself, whom I have shortchanged all my life as I have tried to bend to mend relationships and friendships that were not for me.

To my lover, who has stood beside me all these months growing bigger and taller as he cast a roof over our dreams and moulded our future.

To my associations, who hold the thousand pillars that make our home.

And to my family that I will become, we will never have to apologise for playing big now for the rewards that we reap later.

Over a decade ago, I must say that I came from a very sheltered household.

I say this because my parents showered me with a form of love that kept me from realising that the world was much bigger than just myself. This meant that I grew up spoiled and self-centred. I grew up thinking that the world revolved around just me, myself and I.

As I progressed up to Primary School, I was thrown into an environment where I had to learn the hard way that I was not the centre of attention. It was hard to change my whole perspective of sharing and losing when I was always given the best as the youngest child of three.

Progressing up to Secondary School (ages 13 to 16), I went through a lot of ups and downs. I found who my true friends were and made a lot of mistakes while learning. Even then, my childish dream was to fit into a category of someone that I was not. This meant staying in an environment that I was forced to be in, to be made to feel like I was inadequate and to feel like the thorn amongst the roses.

This was the start of my journey to self-development.

Lessons on people worked out in my favour with the guidance of my charismatic father who placed people over profits and he knew how to make others smile just by making them feel good about themselves.

My father was my first mentor.

I was 17 when I started self-reflecting on life. And I mean self-reflecting on a large scale that changed my whole perspective. If you’d known me 10 years ago to now, I would say that I see the biggest change in myself in intangible ways.

I slightly suffered from anxiety when I was 17, to the point where I used to think that people were looking at me. I enjoyed having every little bit of attention and I loved being the centre of attention, but at some point I would start to feel as though I was embarrassing myself and it sparked a whole great deal of anxiety inside of me that I used to cry to myself because I felt embarrassed.

I joined the emcee club to overcome those hardships but it took a turn for the worse when favouritism played up and I was once again, made to feel inadequate. I started to seclude myself from groups when I realised that I preferred to work alone. The people around me noticed the difference and while some felt sorry for me, I didn’t feel sorry for myself.

It gave me time to reflect on myself. It gave me time and an opportunity to really understand why life was the way it was. I used to think about why it was happening to me and how I could change things. I would take a two hour walk walking from one end of the city to the other end just reflecting on my day. I started people-watching — my favourite past-time now.

People-watching gave me the perfect opportunity to really learn how interactions worked. I watched how everyone impacted everyone and I learned that while I was no centre of attention, I could make significant impact on people’s lives.

I wrote my first post on human interactions back in 2016.

Looking At The Bigger Picture: Untold Soliloquies

I wrote this while people-watching and when I asked my father to read it, he said it was an impressive read and he was proud of me for writing something like this.

This motivated me to write more and more about human interactions, psychology and people. The more I wrote, the more I started to understand. I became more emotionally intelligent because I self-taught myself why things happened and why things were the way they were.

As time went on, my views on life started to change.

When something wasn’t going my way, I stopped crying over it and asking myself why my life sucked. Instead, I looked at it and asked myself, “What can I do to change this situation?”

This helped me react better in situations. My motto in most situations now is “If there is a solution, there is no need to panic.” This frustrated my mother a lot because her understanding differed from mine, and while there was nothing wrong with how she looked at life, it clashed with my own outlook because I knew that there were always solutions to every problem in life.

While my outlook improved, my self-esteem did not because I had still not found myself. I was still trying to be someone I was not.

This changed as I moved to Australia and my father, my first mentor, passed away. It got worse over time when I met my first boyfriend. He emotionally abused me for months and despite advice from close friends and family, I let him come back to me over and over again which caused my self-esteem to plummet down even further.

The moment I found strength to completely remove him from my life, my self-esteem skyrocketed. I started to perform at work. Within two years, I had my “glow up” in a physical and intangible sense. I got into a traditional business with my mother and it became clear that I was good at it and had a huge talent for it.

It also helped that I was a rational decision maker as a result of my emotional intelligence from my self-reflection over the years. My motto “If there is a solution, there is no need to panic” became a big influence on my decision-making and my relationships with people in business. It showed them that I was grounded and professional.

Now, I have new mentors who are ready to mentor me in life, business and relationships.

I have new obstacles to overcome and I’ve quickly identified them as I try to work it through with them. I don’t stop learning and my respect for my new mentors grow each day because of how far they’ve gotten in business and in life and they teach me to dream bigger. They teach me to manage and discipline myself and they teach me more life lessons than I could imagine myself to have.

In 10 years, I’ve seen a significant intangible change in myself.

In 10 years, I’ve gone from victim-mentality to open-minded.

In 10 years, I’ve understood that life is a lesson in itself and you never stop learning.

A look back, 10 years ago.

I’ve done a lot of soul searching in the last few years.

When I say “a lot”, I really mean a lot. It’s taken a great deal for me to find out what I’m really made for and it’s not what it seems. I thought my calling was to be a writer for my passions always pulled me closer to the edge than anything else but it wasn’t my passion that brought out the best in me; it was the one thing that I never liked doing.

Leading is apparently my forté but I never thought that it would’ve been my calling. I don’t like it as much as I thought I would because the responsibilities are far too much for my liking but I’ve completed more than what people my age — at 21 would have done. I like to think that I’m a successful woman but I am far from that and I still have much to learn from the business world.

“Don’t let it go to waste. You have a talent,” is what my mother always tells me. I tell her that I don’t like this life and she tries to convince to use this gift that I have.

I never liked business. That is a given. It was never my thing but my talents have brought me further than what most people are capable of and it is a gift that I would truly be willing to let go to waste just so I can spend it on my passions for writing.

Soul searching is an interesting term. I did a lot of that in the last few years. I started when I was 17 just starting fresh in a new school and I had isolated myself from a group of friends whom I felt were far too materialistic and unreal for me. I never felt like I could truly fit in so I isolated myself and from there, my journey to soul searching began.

I discovered my passion for reading at a very early age but my passion for writing was a whole new level — a skill that I never knew I had and I fought to improve it over the years. I first realised I had a knack for writing when I wrote a post on this very blog in 2016, when I was 18. The post is long unpublished now but it was one of my best. My father had read it and he told me that I wrote well and I had this talent that shouldn’t go to waste.

I began writing my first book then. My first, real book and it was 32 chapters long with over 100,000 words. It took me almost two years to finish it and it is still one of my proudest works. I never got it published even though I had two offers to independently publish it and I never went through with it because I wanted a traditional publisher. That was how much I wanted it to be done right.

It’s been almost three years since I’ve finished that book and even to this day, it still lays somewhere on the internet, unheard and unpublished. I wait for the right time when I finally get to see it on the shelves and I pray for an opportunity such as that everyday.

I have immense knowledge and skill in many categories and some may think that I’m sucking my own tit but I am talented in more ways than one. Even to my small, 5’0 body, I can accomplish more things than people older than me could but the thing is, I don’t want to hold that much power and responsibility.

Being good at everything means nothing but expectations and failures. Being good at everything means that the whole world looks to you for an answer even when you don’t have one. You’re bestowed this power and you don’t want it.

I can’t describe the number of times I’ve thought about death. It’s the one few times that I spend my days alone and I just think about what if I just disappeared. My mind reels at how everything would fall apart because everything depends on me as a person and all I am is a 21 year old girl who wants to live her best life and be a person on my own. But with these responsibilities and people looking to me for answers, I feel a sort of suffocation that I shouldn’t have to feel at my age.

But I do.

My passion is writing. It is a sole activity that one completes on their own but my talent for leadership and my skills are needed and sometimes, having too much feels like too much. Sometimes I think about death not only to imagine life without me but also to end this feeling of suffocation that I relieve everyday of my life.

I don’t brag. People around me know that but this is the truth about myself. I searched my soul deep enough to discover the truth about my own life and it is that I’m a leader with these skills that I don’t want and these expectations on me when I just want to live and survive on my own.

I think about how I never got a proper, normal dating life until my father died and it was one of my worst experiences of my life. I was 18 when I had my first boyfriend and I wish I’d never met him because of the pain and trauma he caused me. I had to grow up after that.

My gifts may be beyond what an average person would have but they do still stop somewhere because I could never unlearn the abusive behaviour that my first boyfriend showed me and it has impacted my life greatly to a point that it affected the rest of my relationships. I’m still learning to heal but two years is far too long for me to try and understand what love truly is when it’s not pain and hurt.

The only time my soul connected with someone was once last year with someone I barely knew and even then, I wanted to marry him. But all good things come to an end and I spent the last nine months trying to connect with someone else to no avail, and only with my last unsuccessful attempt to date someone did I realise my true problem.

My insecurities and failure to put my trust in someone had affected my ability to love someone. I wanted to deny that I was damaged but I was far more damaged than my partner was and he had gone through so much more than I did. But while he learned to heal over the years, I was learning to project myself onto him.

It was toxic behaviour and it hurt when I learned that I was a toxic being in his life but nine months later and I’m still learning. Slowly but surely, I try to understand. Slowly but surely, I find my true calling.

I am a natural born leader and I know what I bring to the table. Boys may be afraid of that but I know that if people like him existed then there would be someone else who would be willing to hold my hand while I lead. My worth was taken away from me several times throughout my life by people who didn’t know my potential but I see what I bring to the table and I see what I can achieve.

My love life has been a failure but like I said before — my talents stop somewhere and love is where it stops.

But I know somewhere in my soul searching that I’ll find the answers. I’ve found my calling and who’s to say that I won’t find the answers to love.

One day.

I was 19 in 2017 when I first got hired at Cotton On.

My manager at the time was young and my sister’s age. She was a bit quiet and sometimes, we worked in silence because I just didn’t know what to say to her but she was “cool” in a lot of ways. She wasn’t very authoritarian and was chill with her staff because she knew their abilities and rarely had to work us down.

She had a lot of nice things to say to me. One of those was that she was easily impressed by how meticulous I was with working and cleaning the store. She was the one who hired me based on my merit and experience working in a bigger-chain retail store during my time in Singapore so she did what she thought best and hired me.

She left a little while later to move interstate and there, we were unmanaged for a long time. My regional manager who was living in Cairns at the time frequently flew interstate to visit our store and he placed a wonderful Portuguese lady in our charge for a few months. I worked often because I was in university and had more time off but in April 2018, I flew back home to Singapore in lieu of my father’s death.

I stayed off work for a month and proceeded to come back later on working full-time hours for another month. The Portuguese lady resigned after getting a full-time job and I worked 35 hours then, managing most of the things in the store and the only things that I didn’t do were the rosters and visual merchandising. They were handled by another proper manager from a neighbouring store.

My regional manager was extremely supportive of me, viewing me as strong-willed for working as hard as I did just a month after my father died. He had high expectations from me and often told me, “You are a winner and I know how amazing you do your job.”

The month after, my mother told me to go back to university.

So I settled for working a good bunch of hours as I did before my father died while I went to university at the same time. They had a stand-in manager from the neighbouring store to work at ours and she frequently told me that she hated the store because of how anxious it made her and I agreed. We were small, cluttered and messy.

A few months later, she moved interstate and we were yet again, unmanaged.

In September 2018, they finally hired a manager for us.

She had zero experience in retail and was the security guard at the same shopping centre. She had no sense of urgency, extremely lazy and incompetent, played favourites and was the worst choice for a manager. She rarely unpacked any new stock and was always doing something that was not necessary or important, later blaming the staff for not doing their jobs when our regional manager came to visit and was shocked by the number of stock boxes still not unpacked.

I had a stellar amount of respect at first when she tried to tell me how to do my job properly and I was like sure, it was my fault. But I soon came to realise that this lady did not deserve my respect when she did not take her job seriously. She always screwed up the rosters by missing breaks and was generally bad at everything. She laughed her mistakes off while being extremely irritated by the mistakes of the rest of the staff.

The last straw for me came when I had done two full days on Sunday and Monday. Our regional manager was visiting the coming week and my manager had given me a list of things to do, including unpacking new visual merchandising stock on a Sunday which we generally never did because it was a short working day and we usually focused on cleaning up the store. I came in the following Monday and found that there were 7 visual merchandising stock boxes on the trolley to unpack so I did what I could and cleaned the rest of the store at the end of the day.

The next day, my store manager came in and told another staff that she had stuffed another four boxes of VM stock boxes under the table for me to do but “apparently Sophie had other plans.”

Eventually, I picked a fight with her but we made up and after a while, she quit the next month.

Following that month in November, we had a new area manager who was going to stay in our city permanently and look after all 5 stores under her. Our regional manager was going to stay where he was based and wouldn’t have to fly in every five weeks to check on us.

She was the worst area manager I had ever seen. She was rude, played favourites and was bad at her job.

I didn’t have much chance to work with her in the first few weeks as it was Christmas and I had gone home to Singapore for a holiday. When I came back, she had significantly reduced my hours per week from an average of 18 hours to 3-6 hours. Instead, she rostered other staff from other stores on in my store as though they worked there.

She frequently berated a lot of staff, telling them in their faces that she didn’t like them and they did not deserve to work in the store while telling other staff that “I think you’re an amazing team member and should work in my favourite store.”

She made another store manager of our neighbouring store burst into tears and resign. She made uncalled for comments and demanded that she did the rosters for all the stores, only rostering staff that she had favourites and giving other staff like myself from zero hours to the minimum of three hours a week. She could hardly do visual merchandising and messed up the store while doing so and when HR received a complaint from a customer with regards to the unsightly store, she placed the blame on the staff.

Not long after, everyone had enough of her and sent in a complaint to HR who eventually sent her to another state or fired her.

However, we were unmanaged without a store manager again and manager of our neighbouring store was sent to us to manage us.

She was nice to me.

Or at least, in front of me.

For the next six months, I was put on the rosters for three hours a week, every Friday night for closing. It was the one day in the week where we would be open until 9pm and all the stores know that late-night Friday shifts are to be alternated between the staff but I was made to do late night Friday shifts every week for the next six months with no explanation.

My manager was in many ways, lazy, incompetent and a liar.

She frequently stood behind the counter doing nothing and was always on her phone. She never went to get change for the tills and the money tills were always left with $50s, $100s and at one point, it was completely void of coins and this frequently happened during weekends when banks would be closed to get change and she wouldn’t be working and be affected by her own laziness. She never threw the rubbish out from over the week and would let it accumulate to the point that the weekend staff or Friday night staff like myself had to make two to three trips to the bin outside. She never cleared up the small bin behind the counter and it was always filled with her food containers which she ate over the week. She never cleaned the store. She was lazy and tried several ways to avoid coming to work and to leave work earlier, giving excuses that she had gastro or that she had to leave two hours early due to a house inspection that she had to attend. She would wait for staff to come to cover her breaks and leave for two hours instead of the one-hour break that she was supposed to have. Many times, if someone fell sick, she wouldn’t bother finding them a cover and would force a staff to work by themselves on a weekend even though it was her job as a manager to come in even if she was not rostered on.

I was told by her many times that “I can see you’re a good worker” but I later found out from another staff that she had told the latter that “Sophie is always on her phone and that’s why I’ve put her on for three hours and she doesn’t do her job.”

I was made to work three hours closing shifts on a Friday night with barely any customers for six months and was frequently told by her that I was a “good worker” but yet, she was talking about me behind my back. I felt that I was never always on my phone and would complete my tasks when I had any and I would have preferred for her to come straight to me and address my excessive phone usage during work hours but she had instead lied to me and blamed our original regional manager who had not been our regional manager since the year before about being made to roster me on for only three hours a week.

During stocktake, she had asked everyone if we were good to work from 4pm to 8pm that day and I agreed as I had classes from 9am to 12pm and stocktake would not clash.

When she posted the roster for that week, I was made to do opening despite her knowing that I had class that day. She claimed to not have known that I had class but I had told her multiple times that I had class and I was the only staff in the whole store who went to school.

She later admitted to another staff that she purposely put me on for the opening shift that day because “Sophie scans slow and shouldn’t be on for stocktake.”

I’ve never done stocktake with her before and didn’t know where she would have known that I was “slow” at scanning for stocktake.

The store manager of our sister store in the city was often also angry with her work ethics but he also had favouritsm and I was not one of his favourites.

In Cotton On, as staff, almost everyone uses their own staff discount codes or their friends’ staff discount codes to buy something for themselves. They are not allowed to do so but because many of the staff are always rostered by themselves for the whole day with the exception of a three-hour cover that is split with a one-hour break for the full-day staff and another two hours of hard work for the store, they tend to do what they do.

I was one of the staff who did so.

I had the permission of another staff who told me that it was fine for me to use her staff discount if I was alone to buy something for myself as I remembered her code by heart and I bought something for myself one day.

The store manager for the sister store came to visit and did a “random” bag check on me just as I was leaving the store to go to the bank and deposit our money claiming that he was going to start doing bag checks on every staff leaving the store and found the item in my bag with a receipt, demanding to know who had completed the transaction for me and I told him that I did so myself.

He never checked the bags of other staff ever again and reported the incident to HR for using another staff’s discount code.

A representative of HR called me three weeks later and interrogated me on the incident.

Claiming that “this is just part of my investigation”, she demanded to know why I completed my own transaction and I told her that I had bought a shirt because the item that I had worn to work was see-through that morning and I had also bought a bottle of water and a pack of tissues to increase our KPI sales.

She then tried to coerce me into admitting that I had bought a fourth item because “that’s what it shows on the receipt.”

I told her I didn’t buy a fourth item and she repeated herself, “That’s not what I’m seeing and I’m going to ask you again what else did you buy because this is all part of my investigation of this incident.”

I repeated myself that I didn’t buy a fourth item.

She “looked” at the receipt she had on her computer again and later admitted that it was a void item and that I didn’t buy it.

I will not forget how a HR representative tried to coerce me into admitting a crime that I didn’t do. If I had bought more items, my punishment would have been heavier.

For someone who continuously repeated that it was all “part of her investigation”, she had a lot of trouble distinguishing a void item and a sale item and I had no respect for someone who wanted to tell me how to do my job while being incompetent in her own.

And in this case, I quit as I had enough of what was happening in the store and how I was continuously disrespected.

I found that I hated those in managing positions who liked to flaunt their positions and tell others what to do while being unable to do their own jobs. The only ones that I thoroughly respected in their respective managing positions was my original store manager who hired me and my original regional manager who was based in Cairns as they were both amazing at their jobs while being humble with their position in the workplace.

This was the worst workplace that I had ever worked in with a fascist employer who spoke highly of their own authority but refused to correct their own behaviour and a toxic group of management team. In their desperation to find staff in managing positions, they had hired the most incompetent, laziest people to work and had caused the downfall of the workplace environment.

And this is the truth of working for a fascist, toxic employer and never again will I stoop so low to allow myself to be treated like this by people who were quick to spew orders while being unable to do their own jobs.