at the age of 35 i’ve now lived in 4 homes. my earliest childhood home, I don’t remember much about. I do remember some of the details of the surrounding neighborhood. I was 4 when we moved to the next house which was 2 kilometers further down along the main road, which is where I would accumulate the next 18 or so years of childhood memories. then I got married and moved out, and my parents moved out too, and I spent the next 12 years in faraway yishun– a totally different and unfamiliar neighborhood– before I just moved to pasir ris, which is closer to the region i’m familiar with from childhood (“the east”), about 10km from my parents’ old place. (google maps says my previous place in yishun was 27km from my parents old place- this is presumably the road distance, but nevertheless it does capture a sense of the distance). it’s 20km from my previous place.
why am i talking about all of this? what I really wanted to get into was… the sense of time that i’ve spent at each place. right now i can still close my eyes and visualize my parents old place. opening the main gate, then the secondary gate… the stairs that i climbed every day– i could tell which family member was coming up or down the stairs just from the sound of their footsteps. I remember my parents’ bathroom and the unusual showerhead they had. then now i’m thinking about my next place. initially the whole neighborhood was alien to me, i didn’t have any friends who lived around. when my wife and i first tried to find our place on foot from the MRT station, we got lost, and I remember that they were finally upgrading the MRT gantries at the time, from the previous version– which seemed kinda late compared to… the rest of the country? it did feel like going back in time somewhat. lots of elderly people everywhere who didn’t look like they were doing so well. now that i’m in pasir ris, i see fit old people all the time, and they make me feel like i ought to work out more.
i wanted to talk particularly about my experience of my tiny shower. my new hdb flat is bigger than my old hdb flat. it’s on a lower floor, which i actually kinda like because i get trees right in my line of sight when i look out of the window. but one minor thing that bothered me– which i knew wouldn’t bother me forever– was that my shower was tiny. i’m a tall guy with long limbs, and when i first started using the shower back in august or october 2025, i used to keep bumping into everything. i’d bump into the tempered glass on the left of me, i’d bump into the wall on the right of me, i’d feel really trapped or ‘contained’. it was mostly just annoying. but here’s the thing, it’s been a few months now, and i noticed that when i showered earlier, i didn’t bump into anything at all. what’s striking about this for me is how there was no conscious thought involved whatsoever. I mean, intellectually we know that this is how all behavioral adaptations are like. we get used to it and we don’t think much of it. when my son was born, i was extremely nervous about changing poopy diapers. not because i found poop unbearably disgusting, but because i was nervous about not wiping him properly, or not putting the new diaper on properly, stuff like that. but it only took maybe 10 or so diaper changes before it became something i did comfortably, and now 2 years in, it’s striking to me that diaper changes are basically non-events. even most big poopy diapers, I don’t really have to think about it. i’ve gotten good enough at it that i almost don’t see any poop at all– I can use the diaper itself to wipe up most of it, and then use one wipe for any remnants, and then another just to be comprehensive. I supposewhen I could say similarly for cleaning my cats’ litterbox, which i’ve now done for 10+ years. and– I’ve never actually gotten my driver’s license, but I’ve heard/read driving described like this, too. when people are learning for the first time, they get nervous and overwhelmed by every little detail. but eventually they can drive on relative ‘autopilot’, having conversations while driving, maybe turning down the radio to focus on parking.
all of this is freshly interesting to me downstream of my environment change and the personal crisis i went through. and becoming a dad. like… now more than ever, it’s really important to me to make serious changes in my life. and not just talk about it but actually do it, because the stakes are real and the consequences are real and i’m getting old.
what else can i say here to wrap up? i guess the point of the tiny shower post is to think about the other tiny showers in my life. what have i gotten acclimated to, what do i do on autopilot? most of the things don’t seem like good things. as i wrote in the previous post, a lot of it was about making excuses, rationalizing, narrativizing. i also think now about… my experience as a writer? from 2018-2022 or so, and maybe for a couple of years after that, i spent so much time tweeting that i could do it on autopilot. i would say that twitter reorganized my life and restructured the way my brain works altogether. i used to think in threads and tweets, and i would subconsciously end up prioritizing having experiences that were tweetable, which implies– i think it’s probably true, and it makes me uncomfortable to conslider, which makes it even likelier to be true– that i deprioritized anything that i couldn’t tweet about. i wrote very few word vomits during that time. i’m now trying to change this, and restart a daily or near-daily wordvomit writing habit. the point isn’t even to finish the vomits. the point is to practice writing longform daily. i got distracted several times while writing this one to open tabs. i was looking up cycling paths, pasir ris, google maps-ing around. not the worst possible distractions, but not a great use of my time. still, i wrote this and i’m going to hit publish on it, and maybe i’ll analyze the shadow sovereignty issue lurking here. also, reminder to self to re-read Introspect further.