I can’t remember when I first felt it slipping—the control I had held so tightly over my life. There’s no single fracture, no dramatic collapse to point to. Instead, it came quietly, like water seeping into a foundation, eroding what I thought was solid until I was left standing on something that no longer held me.

Renegade, the boxing gym I once owned, was my fragile fortress. I built it to contain something I couldn’t name—a restlessness that gnawed at the edges of my identity. More than just a business, it became my way of shaping chaos into something I could call ambition, a structure I could hold onto when everything else felt untethered.

Boxing, despite its brutality, has always been a way of building something out of nothing. The sweet science was my act of defiance, a declaration to myself: I am more than my failures. Renegade became the physical embodiment of that defiance—a space where chaos could be transformed into purpose, where coaching and training pieced together the parts of me that felt broken.

But even as I ran the gym, I often trained in isolation—not by choice, but out of fear of being a burden to others. My introversion and discomfort with asking for help built walls around me in a sport designed to tear them down. The gym’s mirrors bore silent witness as I shadowboxed alone, repeating drills that felt endless and insufficient. My reflection became my harshest sparring partner, its unwavering gaze a reminder that I was hiding from something deeper.

Before a few fights, I even stepped into the cage without a single round of sparring—a recklessness that should have been unthinkable. And yet, some part of me craved the test: the audacity of daring my body to keep pace with my will. Competition became less about triumph and more about proving to myself that I could face the abyss without flinching, even if it swallowed me whole.

For all the adrenaline and glory boxing promises, the fight is lonelier than anyone admits. The crowd’s roar fades. The bell rings. And there, under the lights, it’s just you and your opponent. That isolation, paradoxically, became my freedom. It stripped everything down to a primal simplicity: survive or don’t.

But nothing lasts. What had been my sanctuary began to erode—not in one decisive blow, but through the slow grind of time, fatigue, and responsibilities I hadn’t anticipated. Running the gym consumed me. It stopped being a place of growth and became a machine demanding more than I could give.

When the gym shuttered, I lost the scaffolding of my identity, the illusion that sheer effort could stave off the emptiness creeping in. Closing its doors felt like turning the key on my own sense of purpose. The air that had once been sharp and alive with the sounds of gloves meeting pads, of bodies pushed beyond their limits, fell silent.

Without it, I was hollow, like a cathedral abandoned to time, its purpose lost and its silence overwhelming. It reminded me of the ruins I would later see—crumbling churches and castles, their walls weathered by centuries, still standing but emptied of life. They were relics of something once sacred, now only echoes of what they had been. Like those ruins, I, too, felt like a shell of my former self, haunted by the absence of what had once given me meaning.

My hearing returned eventually—a small mercy in a sea of sorrow. It came back slowly, first as faint clarity amid the noise, then fuller, restoring the sounds of the world I had missed. But even as I regained that physical sense, the loss of everything else—the life I had built within those walls—remained. Recovery brought a flicker of relief, but it was like a single candle struggling against the vast darkness of my shame. The silence I once dreaded was replaced by the noise of my own embarrassment, a hum that followed me everywhere, pushing me to run—not toward anything, but away from what I couldn’t face.

So, I ran. I wandered through Ireland, drawn to places as empty as I felt—hiking along cliffs and coastlines in an attempt to fill the hollow space inside me. The cliffs of Slieve League stood like ancient sentinels, a wall of stone and wind and silence. There’s a seduction in standing at the edge, staring into the void below—a siren call to end the ache of existence. The cliffs, indifferent and eternal, seemed to whisper promises of silence, as if the weight that dragged me down could dissolve with one step into nothingness.

That moment, though fleeting, became a confrontation with mortality. More than the allure of falling, it was the realization of how small I was against the vastness of the cliffs and sea. There was a strange comfort in that insignificance, as if shedding my burdens might be as simple as stepping into the void.

*I watch from the sidelines, a ghost tethered to a memory, as the echoes of my own struggle play out in other lives.*

Later, in Japan, I climbed the volcanic mountains of Kyushu with friends. The peaks rose sharply, carved by time and fire, yet softened by the laughter of those around me. For a while, the familiar weight inside me lifted, replaced by the warmth of camaraderie and the sense of sharing a journey that didn’t feel solely my own.

The ancient, scarred mountains mirrored my own worn but resilient self. Yet my friends climbed them with ease, unburdened by the shadows that clung to me. They had homes to return to, ambitions that stretched far beyond the act of survival. When they moved on, drawn back to their own lives, I lingered. The sulfuric scent of the earth rose from the craggy ground as I stood, rooted in place, unable to follow—unsure of how to define what came next.

I couldn’t keep running, and returning to Singapore felt like stepping into a tomb. The city had borne witness to my rise and fall, its streets and buildings unchanged yet unrecognizable—estranged from me as I was from myself.

In Singapore, success is a straight path—a tightly controlled march through well-lit milestones. Each step is a glide into the mould of achievement: study, excel, secure a career, rise through the ranks, collect accolades like tokens of validation. Any deviation from this path feels like rebellion, a transgression against the city-state’s mantra of order and progress.

Boxing was my departure from that scripted life, a defiance that made me feel raw, exposed—a blemish on Singapore’s polished image of success. Here, success is clean, linear. And here I am, tracing a jagged path that seems to lead nowhere. Family, friends, even acquaintances look at me as if I’ve chosen chaos over sanity, as if rejecting that script makes me disposable.

My own family disowned me long before the gym closed, unable—or unwilling—to accept that I would trade their expectations for something as volatile and unstructured as boxing. To them, I became a stranger, untethered from the path they believed I was meant to follow.

As if that isolation weren’t enough, I carry another mark, one even my psychologist views with discomfort, a scarlet letter that hangs above me: agonophilia. It’s not a word you hear often, but for me, accepting that I am wired this way is a form of clarity—a deep need to find meaning in struggle, in resistance, in physicality itself. To others, it seems strange, aberrant, as though this drive for conflict makes me defective. But for me, it is neither a flaw nor a pathology. It is who I am.

Perhaps that’s why boxing resonated so deeply—it allowed me to reconcile that need for resistance with the desire for connection. In the ring, every action is an unspoken dialogue. It’s raw and immediate, stripping away pretence. And yet, for all its honesty, it also leaves scars—sometimes on the body, mostly on the soul.

For years, I controlled who saw beyond the veneer, handpicking those I thought could grasp the real me. But that control, that carefully measured trust, has brought only disappointment. Sharing parts of myself with those I trusted taught me a brutal lesson: vulnerability can be weaponized. That lesson sits heavy, a reminder of the cost of selective openness.

Still, hiding has cost me more than I can bear.

Maybe that’s why I’m debuting my blog with this—not expecting understanding but because pretending has become exhausting. My darkness, my struggles—they are mine. And though I may never escape their weight, I won’t hide them anymore.

To struggle is to feel alive—a rebellion against the void, even when the world dismisses it as futile or strange. The gym may be gone, along with the illusion of control it gave me, but what remains is the echo of the struggle itself. I’ve learned that peace can sometimes feel like surrender—a softening of the edges that make life vivid, raw, and real.

What I hold onto now is the weight of this fight. It is unyielding, cold, and feral, yet it is mine to carry. In bearing it, I do not find peace, but I find movement—and in that movement, perhaps, a reason to keep going.

Don’t Die Redefining Success

The Burden of Becoming