celebrate women success

In many parts of Europe, multicoloured chaos reigns across the country. Crowds swaddle bouquets made of an assortment of flowers in their arms – a tableau of pink, orange and yellow hues.

The occasion is International Women’s Day and it’s celebrated by all – men and women alike give flowers to their wives, girlfriends, mothers, sisters and daughters.

When we think about inspirational women, our minds often jump to those who have achieved great things – scaling mountains and running marathons, winning awards or becoming chief executives of companies and heads of state. 

Of the inspirational women I’ve met, the ones who have left the deepest impression and most profound impact are those who have thrived despite all odds, marked by their resilience in the face of adversity.

Flourishing takes many forms, and “greatness” isn’t just measured by accolades or external validation. There are battles fought behind closed doors and there is strength in carrying on when the world isn’t watching.

It’s important that we take a moment to recognise not just women whose successes are widely celebrated, but also those whose impact is felt in ways that never make the headlines.

Finding joy despite the odds

Auntie Joanne, a close family friend, is a mother of four children, one of whom has autism. She serves as the main caregiver as her husband is often based overseas for work – cooking and doing the laundry, picking the kids up from school and ferrying them to their extracurriculars, and tending to their academic and emotional needs. 

She always goes the extra mile in making them feel loved and appreciated, be it remembering how they like their sambal chilli made, or organising a barbecue for their birthday. 

Several years ago, Auntie Joanne, who is 53, was diagnosed with a non-typical variant of myasthenia, a condition that weakens the muscles in her body and causes bouts of fatigue that leave her bedridden for days. 

Despite battling sickness, Auntie Joanne has never once begrudged her condition or wallowed in self-pity. To regain her muscle mass, she began practising pilates. Recently, she even participated in the 3km Walk of a Lifetime for charity, aimed at raising awareness about autism and to support families affected by this. “I am not a victim of life circumstances, but rather, a participant of life’s greater narrative,” she insisted.

Beyond her role as a mother, Auntie Joanne is involved in her church community, volunteering alongside her husband as marriage mentors, sharing their journey in faith with other couples. When you speak to her, she always has a smile on her face. She often shares that she wishes to be a light to the world, using her life to be a blessing to those around her. 

“Life is unpredictable and full of challenges, but I have a choice to respond with positivity and make a difference in my family and the community I live in,” she said. “I remind myself every day I am created beautiful – mind, body and soul – and I am so grateful.”

Through Auntie Joanne, I’ve realised that flourishing does not need grand gestures or elaborate acts. It means coming into your element, being content with your station in life, and finding joy despite the harsh realities and bitterness of life.

Flourishing regardless of relationship status

Despite all the progress we’ve made since women’s suffrage, there are still societies with gendered expectations of women as well as men. Women have historically understood their identities as daughters, wives and mothers, and spend much of their lives growing into these roles and fulfilling these duties.

As a result of these societal pressures to define yourself by your relational identities, there is often shame in being unpartnered. Single women past a certain age are constantly urged and prodded to get married. Sayings such as “being left on the shelf” or “past your prime” apply predominantly to women, instead of men.

Yet as younger generations of women become more educated and empowered, they are refusing to settle for anything less than an equal and emotionally attuned partnership.

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Take 35-year-old Amanda Chong, lawyer, poet and playwright. “As you get into your 30s, you gradually get the impression that there are two broad categories of women that seem to be recognised in the world – you’re either a mother with children, or you’re this hyper-successful, slightly intimidating, overachieving single lady,” she said.

”However, such polarities are unhelpful to women’s understanding of themselves, and they shrink the space for women to exist as complex human beings with a gamut of aspirations.” 

Amanda is single and believes a person’s relationship status is the least interesting thing about them. She asks: “Why is there this idea that if you are unmarried and don’t have children, you must overcompensate by being over-qualified in your career or some other dimension in life?

“Is it because society has conditioned us to base our self-worth on hitting all these ‘marks of womanhood’ and if we fail to, we must demonstrate our purpose in another way?”

Lawyer and playwright Amanda Chong with her primary school projects, including plays she and her classmates wrote and produced. ST PHOTO: GAVIN FOO

For Amanda, archetypes that we feel we have to conform to invite unhealthy comparisons. The fact is, there is no template for flourishing, because we are all such different people with unique gifts and life experiences. 

She noted there are a multitude of ways to flourish beyond being simply defined by relationship status, as many women’s lives are rich with deep friendships, close familial ties and children they nurture, such as nieces and nephews.

For generations, many women have felt compelled to be in toxic and unequal relationships due to social pressure. As a society, we might be better off with women who are truly thriving regardless of their relationship status, more certain of what they want and grounded in what they stand for. These women are far more likely to enter into mutually uplifting relationships, should that be an aspiration they hold.

Boldly striding out on the path less taken

Nanyang Girls’ High, the all-girls secondary school I went to, organised a conference titled “Bold and Beyond” for its students, exploring the ways women and girls can embark on unconventional ventures and the path less travelled. It made me think about my experiences growing up as a young woman, and the occasions where I denied myself opportunities that arose because I was unsure of myself or too afraid.

This makes me in awe of women who have dared to be bold and to go beyond. One such woman is Ms Rachel Lim, co-founder of the flagship fashion brand Love Bonito, who dropped out of university and broke her teaching bond with the Government to dedicate herself to growing her business full-time. “It was scary because I was giving up something so secure, to do something so volatile,” she recalled.

Yet her leap of faith has paid dividends, turning her humble blog shop into a multimillion-dollar business and a leading brand name in Asia’s fashion industry. “I’ve taken my life as a series of experiments, while balancing the risks and rewards,” said the 38-year-old. “To me, regret weighs heavier than trying and failing. If I fall, I pick myself up and try again.” 

To Rachel, flourishing means being able to show up fully as who she is, embracing the diversity of roles that she has as an entrepreneur, a fashion maven, a wife and the mother of two children, without feeling the need to shrink or fragment herself.

“It’s about having the courage to live authentically and the discipline to grow intentionally,” she said.

Ms Rachel Lim, co-founder of fashion brand Love Bonito, dropped out of university and broke her teaching bond with the Government to dedicate herself to growing her business full-time. PHOTO: LOVE BONITO

Authenticity lies in acknowledging our dispositions, and realising our priorities may vary across the seasons in our lives. This, in turn, requires deep self-awareness and introspection.

Success propelled by passion versus success driven by expectation looks and feels distinct. “There is so much distraction around what I need to be, what I need to achieve, what I need to work as,” she mused. “We need to tune out the noise and tune into the small still voice as to what makes us feel alive, what brings us joy, what makes us truly feel fulfilled.”

As women, we should embrace our strengths and take pride in our femininity – a word that holds different meanings for different individuals. I see women as blooms – petals that spread out towards the sunlight, colours stretching across entire fields. The stories of these three women convey that flourishing takes many forms, far beyond the narrow definitions of success imposed by society.

It’s time to broaden our notions and perceptions of what a “full” and “fulfilled” life as a woman is like, and make a toast to women for their varied passions, desires and expressions of self. Let us celebrate women of all ages, shades, shapes and sizes and see them for the full spectrum of their talents.

Faye Ng Yu Ci is a junior doctor in the Singapore public healthcare system.

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change personality

I like to think that I’m a very different person now from who I was in my youth. There are still the occasional discomfiting and cringeworthy moments that catch me unaware and remind me of that younger callow self who now seems like a stranger. With the passage of time, I know I have changed, but without quite fully understanding how, when and why. I doubt if we would ever know everything about the past or anything about the future, but there are some who think artificial intelligence (AI) can predict what we will become. 

Among the expanding list of AI’s capabilities is its ability to interact and converse with us – which could even make people fall in love with chatbots. Recently, a laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created a programme called Future You. It is a web-based platform that prompts participants to answer a series of questions about themselves and then builds a version of them 20 years in the future with whom they can have a conversation. According to the official website, the lab developed this tool after being inspired by studies on “self-continuity”.

Continuers and dividers

This human phenomenon of self-continuity is the connection between who we were, who we are now, and who we expect to become. Self-continuity plays a significant role in our long-term well-being – bolstering mental health and emotional resilience. Additionally, having an idea of where we could end up years later could motivate us to shape our lives in ways that make good sense for our future. 

Studies indicate that some people – whether they realise it or not – keep very much in character throughout the different stages of their lives. These individuals are known as “continuers”. In contrast, there are “dividers”, who are “consistent in their inconsistency”. They feel they don’t have a consistent identity because they keep changing. The trajectory of their life unfolds in discrete, even fractured, segments, each defined by its own set of attitudes, circumstances and relationships.

What drives these divergent ways of living is our personality, which is, in dry academic parlance, that “complex and stable set of traits, behaviours, emotions, and thought patterns that define how an individual interacts with the world”. In psychiatry, we often encounter certain types of “continuers” – individuals with abnormal personalities whose traits have either made themselves or others miserable.

A classic example of the latter is narcissistic personality disorder. Individuals with this disorder have an exaggerated sense of self-importance, considering themselves special and expecting admiration and special treatment. They easily become enraged when others seem to have the temerity to criticise them, often turning vindictive and vengeful. They crave success, status and power at any cost, displaying what we call the “triple E”: entitlement, exploitation, and a lack of empathy. Due to their lack of self-awareness, they are unlikely to seek help. Instead, it is the people living with them who suffer and sometimes end up seeking our help – as in the instance of a middle-aged woman who sought treatment for depression after years of an unhappy marriage to a man who appeared to be a textbook case of a narcissist. He disdainfully refused to consider couple therapy and insisted his wife “sort out” her own problems. 

After undergoing months of psychotherapy to clarify her thoughts and feelings about the relationship, she decided to leave her husband. When I saw her some time after her separation from him, it was like meeting a new person who had emerged from a metamorphosis. She regretted not having done it earlier, but she wasn’t brave enough or clear-eyed enough back then to see how her marriage had been harming her as a person. She was grateful that the therapy made her a different person with a different life.

Most of us, at some point in our imperfect lives, would wish to change something about ourselves. Unhappy, embarrassed, burdened, or corralled by who we are, we want a transformation – to be better, more respected, more courageous, and be less miserable if not happier. Social psychologist Roy Baumeister described these desires arising from dissatisfaction as “crystallisation of discontent” – when the realisation of our shortcomings pushes us to adjust some of our core values and priorities. Implicit is the hope that we can change some aspects of our personality. But how mutable is our personality?

According to Professor Brent Roberts, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an expert on personality change, personality is not “set like plaster” as the 19th-century psychologist William James asserted, but rather it can change in many ways over time. He has shown that with committed effort, it could be possible to nudge our personality in a direction that we desire.

Prof Roberts and others found in several studies that personality traits can be modified, sometimes within just a few weeks. For example, students who dedicated more effort to their coursework exhibited increased conscientiousness, and those who strategically selected extracurricular activities developed some semblance of leadership qualities. While these findings seem promising, their effects were modest. The changes that occurred over the short course of a semester led to measurable but not dramatic changes in personality. What is also not known is whether these changes are enduring.

In fact, many individuals struggle to achieve their goals of changing because they think it will be fast and easy. They often set overly ambitious targets and want a fast fix. Just as thought patterns, emotions and behaviours take years to form, changing them is a glacial and difficult process, not something that can be achieved quickly like completing a college project. It also requires a questioning consciousness as we navigate our life with certain priorities in mind, asking ourselves why we are doing it, what we should do, and who we should do it with. The process can be spurred by life’s challenges, and suffering losses and heartbreaks.

A different life

Who I am today has been the result of accruing different experiences and relationships in my life to this point. In that sense, I suppose I am more of a “divider” who can be changed by circumstances, people and the choices I’ve made. And as I advance in age, I am expecting further changes. 

Recent research suggests that our personality continues to evolve well into later adulthood, with notable shifts occurring as people reach and move beyond their 60s. On average, older adults tend to become less open to experiences while anxiety increases, particularly in advanced old age. One possible explanation for this is the ageing brain and its accompanying changes, such as cognitive decline and the onset of dementia, though they are probably not the main factors. Health and social support may play a more significant role in shaping personality changes.

As a doctor and researcher, I am familiar with the age-associated declines in cognitive functioning, particularly in mental processing speed, problem-solving, and short- and long-term memory (generally, memory functions begin to decline in our 30s and continue to fade into old age). Conversely, one can become more distracted in old age and we cannot focus on and stay with a mental task as keenly as we could when we were young. Our worries about the risks of falling and facing accidents can also make us more anxious and timorous. Understandably, this can lead to a constriction of social activities, isolating us and making us feel lonely.

But maybe that’s too pessimistic and gloomy. It could simply be that we change because we recalibrate our goals and prioritise what is most meaningful. Perhaps we are less open to seeking new experiences because we enjoy and appreciate familiar routines. It’s possible that we reduce social engagement because we are content with our existing relationships. These adjustments may stem from adapting to the inevitable physical and mental limitations that come with age and do not indicate a degraded quality of life – just a different one that can still be equally satisfactory.

I certainly hope that’s how it will be for me. I do not want to rage against the light, but neither do I want to go whimpering. And it is tempting to have a chat with my Future You character and see if he is as wise, equanimous and unafraid as I would like to be.

Professor Chong Siow Ann is a senior consultant psychiatrist at the Institute of Mental Health.

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