Round One, 2025

As 2024 gives way to 2025, the cursor blinks on my screen at 3 AM, marking time like a metronome in an empty concert hall. I've written and deleted a hundred different openings, each backspace taking me further from the truth I'm trying to share. It's funny how the words flow freely in my mind during sleepless nights yet freeze solid when I try to capture them here.

I'm not alone in this midnight struggle. Each of us carries weights too heavy for daylight—words we can't speak, moments that changed everything, the constant pressure to be more than we are. Some burdens grow heavier in silence.

My moment came at five years old. My brother walked home from school like he did every other day. He was eight, still young enough to believe in forever, old enough to cross the street alone. Until a car took him from us, and everything crumbled into before and after. Grief rewrites families in different ways—some draw closer, others splinter apart. My parents chose the latter. They turned their pain into blame, sending me to my grandmother's as if distance could lighten what we carried. Success became the weight I bore in his absence—good grades, a respectable profession, traditional values—the markers of worth in a society that measures everything. While others had families to cushion these expectations, I navigated them alone, in a house where every achievement felt like an apology for surviving.

Under her indifferent watch, I learned different lessons—about silence, about shame, about the weight of carrying someone else's tragedy. Each step became a careful negotiation with shadows of what might have been. After my grandmother passed, I was forced to return to my parent's home and that suffocating atmosphere of unspoken blame. It was there that I found an unlikely escape.

My first encounter with boxing happened on the rooftop of a multi-storey carpark, where the Singapore sky pressed close, surrounded by high-rise public housing. Those first wild swings into humid air carried more hope than technique, thrown in a space time forgot. No heavy bags, no rings, no pristine equipment or watchful trainers—just raw, unfiltered enthusiasm and complete disregard for proper form. Looking back, it was probably more dangerous than brave, but something about that stripped-down, bare-bones introduction to boxing felt like freedom.

For a while, I lived in two worlds: below, the dutiful son pursuing their blueprint for redemption through perfect grades and the "right" career path. Every moment at home was subject to scrutiny, every file on my computer a potential betrayal waiting to be discovered. Above, in that rooftop sanctuary, a different self emerged with every awkward jab and clumsy cross. We claimed to capture these boxing sessions on video for technique analysis, but the truth was messier—the raw aggression held its own dark appeal, one I barely grasped at that time. These videos, meant to document my progress, would eventually become evidence of my corruption in their eyes.

The videos surfaced during one of their methodical searches through my digital life. Their words reached back through time, dredging up their verdict about my brother's death—that somehow, I was to blame. The same accusations that had exiled me to my grandmother's indifferent care now found fresh targets in these stolen glimpses of my secret life. Nothing, not even these small moments of freedom, could escape their need for control.

Their words landed like combinations I couldn't defend against—each accusation finding its mark, each reminder of blame landing clean. Living under constant surveillance taught me a different kind of footwork: the careful dance of avoiding triggers, of protecting what little freedom I had left. Each breath became an act of defiance. Everything shrank down to pure survival—no strategies, no techniques, just the raw instinct to make it through. At least in the ring you knew when it would end. This fight had no rules, no referee, no bell to signal relief. Just endless rounds of trying to stay standing.

Most boxers I know find strength in shared dreams. They train and compete with partners who understand their passion, families who celebrate their dedication and loved ones who tend to their bruises with pride rather than judgment. While they lived their truth in the open, I shadowboxed with ghosts instead, my guard up against blame that cut deeper than any counterpunch, trying to defend against the phantom weight of a brother who would never see me fight.

But here's the thing about humans—we find ways to build the support we need, even when the foundation we were given is cracked beyond repair. When my carpark sparring partner turned best friend believed in my path enough to say, "Burn the bridges that cage you," it was more than getting validation to leave. It was about understanding that while blood ties are given, survival sometimes means choosing yourself. Some people are fortunate enough to have both family and dreams. I had to choose between having a family or a future.

The choice brought months of lawsuits and unnecessarily painful litigation that drained my spirit, but through it all, my friend kept me focused on what lay ahead. "Let's join a gym," he said, and those four words changed everything. Just as I was learning to stand on my own, we left that makeshift sanctuary in the carpark for a real gym. There, my punches no longer had to hide in shadows—they could ring out clear and true, each strike an echo of my newfound freedom to exist in the open, without fear.

However, as we immersed ourselves in Singapore's commercial boxing scene, our own evolution from students to teachers revealed the cost of rapid expansion. Just as I had graduated from rooftop sessions to proper training, I watched my friend transform from sparring partner to mentor, his natural teaching ability drawing others to our corner of the gym. Together, we witnessed how gyms multiplied faster than they could develop experienced coaches, leaving packed classes under the guidance of instructors still learning themselves. While social media profiles filled with perfectly crafted marketing, the fundamental coaching of boxing suffered.

This realization became our catalyst. After three years of learning, teaching, and growing together, our shared hunger for authenticity pushed us beyond simply training. We became business partners, opening our own gym in early 2022 as Singapore woke up from the pandemic. We stripped away the commercial frills to focus on what mattered—proper technique, genuine progression, real boxing. In building our own space, we created what we wished we'd found at the start: a gym where wisdom passed through shared sweat and struggle, where progress meant pushing past yesterday's limits rather than chasing social media glory.

For two years, our gym hummed with the kind of energy money couldn't manufacture. The sharp crack of mitt work, the whip of jump ropes, the raw grunt of fists meeting concrete walls—these sounds filled spaces in me I'd forgotten were empty. Apart from developing fighters, we created a refuge for people searching for something real in a city obsessed with instant results. Every person who walked through our door brought their own battles, and together, we forged a community that understood the difference between fighting for show and fighting for growth.

The universe, with its cruel sense of timing, had already started the count. Weeks before the closure, sudden hearing loss in my right ear landed like a sucker punch—no warning, no chance to slip or block. When our gym closed abruptly after those two brief but brilliant years, I experienced its final weeks through a distorted soundscape: the familiar rhythm of mitt work and jump ropes now muffled and distant, as if the world itself was pulling away. In the end, my partial deafness seemed fitting—a physical echo of how something vital had been torn away, leaving me disconnected from the world we'd created.

The deepest cut came later, watching those who had used our gym as a stepping stone close ranks, excluding me from the world we had helped them enter. It felt like losing family all over again—a pattern I knew too well but never grew numb to. When sudden hearing loss struck, it added another layer to the isolation. Each conversation became a struggle, and each missed word was another reminder of what was lost. The eventual return of my hearing felt like a small mercy in this sea of isolation—my body healing even as the distances between people remained.

Weeks passed, and I tried other gyms, seeking that same electric combination of freedom and belonging, but you can't recreate lightning in a bottle. Just like those commercial gyms we'd once navigated together, these spaces felt hollow, but now I faced that emptiness alone. Each new gym felt like another room in my grandmother's house—spaces where I existed but never belonged.

Between rounds in these new spaces, the loss hit hardest: that specific alchemy of mentorship, friendship, and shared belief in possibility. How do you replace someone who taught you not just to punch but to stand up for your right to exist? In quiet moments, my mind would drift back to that rooftop carpark where it all began—where my punches were messy, but my will to live was pure.

Every lesson from those early days hits home like combinations on a heavy bag, each impact revealing a different face of support. Sometimes it's a voice saying "burn the bridges." Sometimes it's a concrete rooftop where you can throw your first awkward punches. Sometimes it's the quiet understanding that survival itself is an act of courage. And sometimes, it's finding the strength to begin again after loss—whether that loss wears the face of a brother, a parent's love, a community you built with your own hands, or the simple ability to hear the world in stereo.

Now, as another year turns, I find myself thinking about cycles of loss and renewal. The hearing in my right ear returned in late 2024, yes, but more importantly, I've learned that healing isn't just about recovery—it's about reconstruction. Building something new from the pieces of what was lost. The gym's closure six months ago left a void, but it also created space for what comes next. That's the thing about new years—they remind us that endings and beginnings are really just different names for the same moment.

These narratives aren't a victory speech. They're not even a particularly graceful beginning. Think of them instead as a darkroom where negatives slowly develop—where raw experience meets artistic expression, where movement becomes memory. This is an invitation to explore the spaces between punches thrown and moments captured, between technical precision and raw vulnerability. Where we can examine how creativity emerges from discipline, how art flows from struggle, and how authentic growth often means standing alone before finding your tribe.

While we don't choose our blood ties, we can decide where we find genuine support. All we need is the courage to look. As 2025 unfolds, this blog will explore the intersections I've lived: between combat sports and creativity, between technical precision and raw vulnerability, between losing community and building it anew. Each post will be another round in this ongoing fight to create something authentic in a world that often settles for less.

But tonight, in these first hours of the new year, I'm starting with this story because it's mine, and it's real. It's messy and unfinished, like those first punches I threw on that rooftop. But I've learned that waiting for perfection is just another way of staying silent. So here's to the concrete slabs that became our rings, the friends who saw us clearer than we saw ourselves, and all the fights ahead that we don't see coming yet.