Series of Ordinary Days

It is currently 4.24 p.m. on a Friday, and I feel as though my entire week has been wasted. I spent the week on a few days’ long experiment that culminated in nothing, and I am feeling despondent and anxious in equal parts. Meh. I guess this is life.

I believe my despondency stems from more than my failed experiment results; rather, it is the result of an incredible sense of failure that has been doggedly nagging at me the entire week. As I mentioned previously, I have been preparing my meals in bulk for the week due to my disdain for the university cafeteria food. I am not sure if it is the disposable containers that I chose to use, or the type of food I chose to prepare, but I cannot help but think that my meals look like those takeaway meals that the average Singaporean buys from the economy rice stalls from foodcourts. Browsing the Lemon8 app obviously made me feel worse, especially where there are so many people on the app who are meal prepping gorgeous looking, non-repetitive meals in glass containers, meals like japchae, soba, burger wraps, salmon bowls…while I am standing in my kitchen with boxes of repeated meals lined up in an assembly line. Heck, I thought it was already hard enough to prepare 2 different meals for the entirety of the whole week (one for lunch, one for dinner), while those girls on Lemon8 are putting together what looks like gourmet meals that are never repeated for their week.

There. Sad beige looking meals, huh. To be fair, they don’t taste half bad. But they sure don’t look like much, do they?

I know this must sound silly—letting my very average looking prepped meals affect my sense of self so, but it really isn’t just about the meals themselves. It is the fact that others out there seem to have it all together, while I am barely staying afloat. They are able to pack pretty lunches of different variety everyday while I count myself lucky to be able to make 2 types of meals slightly different from each other in bulk for the entire week. They have the mental capacity to use pretty glass lunchboxes that they have the emotional capacity to wash daily, I go for everything disposable because the thought of bringing home a dirty lunchbox that I still have to wash at the end of the day makes me want to cry. Their meals look like they are thriving while mine look like they belong to a sad, sad graduate student barely clinging onto survival. Basically, their meals look happy. Mine just look like the bare minimum.

That’s the part that stung the most, really. I know that there is nothing inherently shameful about my lunches. They are functional, they are healthy, heck, they taste pretty good, even. But when you have to go through all that trouble and effort just to produce what would probably be considered the bare minimum to others, while ’em others out there seem to be effortlessly assembling meals that are so far out of your emotional capacity to do so…truly, that stings a great deal.

Maybe the lunches are just a metaphor. Maybe they just remind me a little too sharply of what I feel like everyday standing next to others. It is yet another reminder that my utmost could simply be someone else’s bare minimum, yet another reminder of my inadequacy. Of course, the standard response to this type of feeling, were I to express it, would be “oh, don’t compare yourself to others! This isn’t a competition, everyone has their own struggles..”

I am not stupid. I know the grass is always greener on the other side. I understand that I am also in a position of which some might feel envious. But it is also understandable that I look at others who seem to have what I want with envy. I know the act of comparison is an insidious one that leaves everyone dissatisfied, but I cannot help it. For someone born and bred in Singapore where everything from my childhood felt like a massive competition, competitiveness—passive or active, casual or serious—is bred into me. I am an almost perfect (well, maybe a 75th percentile) product of the Singapore education system. I was raised, from the ages of 7 to 18, to compete heavily with my peers in school. The very way our education system is structured, based on what I was told since I was a child, is that when everyone performs well, the value of your own grade falls. If everyone scores an A in a context where an A is the criteria one must get to enter into, say, a prestigious program with limited spots, the criteria then shifts to become a high A. I cannot escape the part of me that thrives on and lives by the competition. Sure, it is a painful, painful thing when you are—from your own perspective—no longer crushing it, but when you are crushing it, well I would say it is wondrous. It almost feels like a shot of adrenaline rush when you are at the top of the world screaming at the top of your lungs, “I can do this 10 times over!”

Of course, that also means I am now, in my own dictionary, feeling like complete shit.

Obviously, I do feel foolish, letting packed lunches dictate my sense of self. The rational part of me knows very well that this is a stupid thing to feel down over, and I am self-aware enough to admit that I am going about this in a toxic manner. But then again, don’t they say that recognition of one’s flaws is the first step? At least I recognise my stupid, irrational, foolish, and honestly childish competitiveness is an inherently toxic one. But I am also not about to condemn this in myself, or at least, I am not about to renounce it as the One True Reason Why I Feel Like A Failure. See, this competitiveness is also what gets me out of bed some days. On days when I could not muster up a single atom of positivity, it is the spite of not wanting those whom I perceive as competition to get ahead of me that gets me up and going, pushing through even when every fibre of my being protests. I am not about to bite the hand that feeds me. Alright, perhaps I can politely deny it from time to time, but I am not about to renounce it a hundred percent.

Anyway, it is now Saturday, 2.29 p.m.

Time for work, I guess. Perhaps I will try putting in more effort for my meal prepping efforts this week.

Bealie