The Dawn

This one isn’t polished, and maybe not complete — but here it is anyway.

Kindness, warmth and love, no matter how tiny they might be, can reach a broken soul in its faraway night, becoming the first dawn after endless darkness.

I truly wished the past decade could be better, filled with hope and joy. Instead, it unfolded through challenges, sadness, and misunderstanding. Many times, past failures held me in place, unable to move forward. The first step was the reconciliation with myself, acknowledging these experiences rather than trying to erase their existence. Just as good memories deserve to be kept, even the bad and painful ones also ask to be seen, not abandoned.

Looking back, I realise that this reconciliation didn’t happen suddenly, it had been slowly unfolding for years.

Long before I understood what reconciliation meant, dreams were already carrying me forward. When the forum collapsed during my time in Singapore, something essential broke—but something else quietly began. That dream became a dawn, leading me to Sydney, through years of study, persistence, and uncertainty. I graduated, and in August 2020, I finally stepped into working life. At the time, it felt like arrival. Now, I see it as continuation.

For many of us, this moment arrives earlier than expected. Mine came when I was fifteen. In October 2013, the forum that meant everything to me shut down. Not long after, in June 2014, my closest—and only—friend left Singapore. Within a year, the world I understood had quietly disappeared. I wasn’t happy, and I didn’t know how to move forward.

What remained were dreams. Fragile, imperfect, but persistent. They carried me through long nights of confusion and pain—dreams of programming, of learning Japanese, of staying connected to a culture and a language that reminded me of someone I cared about. I didn’t know where these dreams would lead. I only knew that they kept me alive and moving.

In December 2022, another dawn appeared quietly. Large language models and AI surfaced, and I had no idea then how deeply they would shape the years ahead. Over time, they became companions in thinking—helping me organize ideas, explore possibilities, and move faster where I had once been stuck. Three years later, I can see clearly: they did not replace effort or purpose, but amplified both.

That night in 2023, after my most significant trading loss, I believed I was defeated. Yet something unexpected happened. At the moment I was consumed by darkness, a strange but gentle warmth surfaced from deep within me, quiet, steady, and calm. The despair I anticipated never arrived.

At the time, I didn’t understand what it meant. Only two years later did I realise that the warmth was not a form of protection, but something real, coming from life itself. It was the first dawn of a change that took nearly a decade to arrive.

Around July 2024, my body gave me another warning. My VO₂ max dropped below 38, then further to 35.5, and my watch quietly told me something was wrong. A month later, without much confidence and expectation, I joined the 14 KM City2Surf run. It was my first time running that distance, and my first return to sustained movement after years of inactivity.

That day, I didn’t just finish, I surpassed myself. Physically and mentally, I was stronger than I had believed possible. I didn’t know at the time whether I could keep running, only that I had run. Over time, my health followed quietly. My weight fell naturally, strength returned, and my body grew stronger than it had been in years.

The past decade felt like a long lasting vivid dream, but I have been waking up slowly, since November, after my trip to Melbourne & Tassie. 2025 was a typical hero’s journey, started with pursuing my ultimate dream but ended with a decade late reconciliation. Where and how should I go from now?

Barista was something I started and managed to get my certificates. This is honestly a new thing after many years. In 2026, I want to try out photography. Well, I do take weird photos, but does it matter? Anything new is good to me. I can probably try something new every year from now on, you never know what you truly enjoy. The experience is quite real now.

After the forum shutdown, I felt like something very important dead inside me, I didn’t know what to do next and how to continue. Eventually, I left Singapore, but I never let go. Everyday, I was in my past shadow. I didn’t have the courage anymore and escaped until last year.