015: turning 25
on growing up frugal, sailing through the ocean tides, and not being afraid of anything at all
One of my earliest recollections of having an existential crisis was somewhere between 7 and 8 years old, playing with my mother’s red Nokia 8210 and opening the calendar. I liked checking the days under which certain dates fall under (and feeling very smug about my birthday falling on a weekend even if I am a sweet summer child) and taking a peek at what the future looked like, literally. Though in my hands was not a smartphone, it possessed enough intelligence for an option to jump to certain dates without abusing the up/down button, so I typed in 2015, a little far into the future. I began to count how old I would be by then and think of how differently life would be. I was excited and curious about the idea of university, but also slightly daunted by the idea of how much could change in a decade. Despite the fear, I went farther. I looked at the 2020s, the 2030s, all the way to the 2070s which I had a hunch would be the decade I die—not in a suicidal way, but in a factual one, as life expectancy according to my innocent calculations as a child was about 84 years old, the age my grandfather died.
The fear of dying got to me, so I decided to go back as if switching the calendar back to 2006 would literally take me back to the present moment and protect me from death. This time, I went a bit too far back. I went to the 80s and began to think of my parents, which led me to think about life in the 60s, the decade they were born. Both my parents were born on a Monday, I on a Thursday, and my younger sister on a Saturday. The counting resumed, and I looked at all the years where they were teenagers and then adults and then I found myself realizing that my parents had me in their 30s. This evoked something neurotic in me, worried about how little time I’d have with my parents still alive. This anxiety dragged on for weeks that I would spend the morning assembly in school computing how old my parents would be when I go to college, when I finish school, when I decide to get married, and I dreaded each number. I did not realize that this silly little exercise would lead to fearing change altogether.
Despite the existential anxiety I had that day, I was right: so much did change in the years between. Somewhere between 19 and 21 I stopped paying attention to my age not because it never really mattered to me, but because it was one of those worries that was easier to let go of—okay, yeah, you got me. I wouldn’t say that it was easy to let go of a worry I’d had since I was 8, but what matters is that it didn’t matter to me anymore. There was a bigger, more important knowing that my 20s would be a period of getting to know myself, making necessary mistakes, and allowing myself to be a little stupid in learning certain lessons. Some time had to be wasted for wisdom. But this year seems to beg for a little more thought and discernment compared to the previous ones, for this year I turn 25. There’s something so grown up about that number, and to be honest with you, I barely feel like an adult these days. A lot of the time I just feel like a teenager with a bit more awareness and freedom and money.
Every year it surprises me how much things can change and I realized in my teenage years, it was because once I’m comfortable with how things are, I tend to want things to stay that way forever. Unlike the cynics, forever doesn’t faze me. I am enticed by the idea of anything lasting a very long time—a loving relationship, a sturdy piece of furniture, a pen that writes well without blotching the other side of the page, a classic Nokia phone—and I am always so tempted to preserve these things at the attempt to prove that forever does exist or until I get sick of it (which almost never happens, really). This logic does not make sense with how life works, though, as I have learned in recent years that despite my desire for things to stay the same, things are changing all the time.
Stevie Nicks hit this same wall in 1973 when she wrote Landslide. Apparently she had been trying to make it in the music scene for quite some time and at 25, things weren’t going anywhere for her and Lindsey Buckingham. “I was really getting tired of being a waitress, and I was really, really getting tired of being just so poor. We could not afford to buy anything, except just enough food to eat, and that was it. And gas for our car,” Nicks recalls. The future looked so bleak for her that her father offered to send her back to school so that she could pursue a career as an English teacher which, despite its meager pay, offered a bit more stability than a struggling musician.
The fear of things changing, as well as the desire for everything to stay the same, comes from the lack of choice. Sure, it can be argued that our locus of control can only ever handle so much, and there’s a lot more that the universe or fate or circumstance is in control of. It goes without saying that the social class you were born into dictates so much more, especially how much reach your circle of control has; that growing up poor doesn’t give you much choice except to put up with the cards you were dealt with, and perhaps be smart about it. You cannot put the politics of it aside, because everyone knows how easy it is to look forward to change when you come from a place of privilege. I actually loathed developing class consciousness in my first year of university, as that led me to this belief: where you’re from and who you were in the past are factors that greatly impact where you’re headed and who you become. This shattered the most treasured piece of innocence I had that is the indomitable optimism of a Pixar character. Knowing where I stood in terms of socioeconomic status served me a heart wrenching reminder: you can dream all you want, but there is a huge chance that a lot of these dreams are just delusions because your parents don’t come from big money.
In psychology, the most evidence-based theory of personality is called the factor theory, where a bunch of nerds1—Allport, Cattell, McCrae, and Costa—found a way to properly quantify personality traits. If my memory from undergrad serves me right, prior to the big five factors of personality, psychologists used traits to describe personality—a very mighty task given that we have over thousands upon thousands of adjectives to describe people. Gordon Allport’s trait theory classified these adjectives and created a taxonomy of personality: cardinal, central, and secondary. This would be the foundation of Cattell’s version of the trait theory which summed up Allport’s thousands of traits into 16 personality factors. These 16 personality factors would then be shrunk into five factors known as OCEAN2: Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.
There is a good correlation between these five factors and one’s socioeconomic status (SES). A good chunk of literature talks about a positive correlation with higher SES and openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and agreeableness. Lower SES is positively correlated with higher levels of neuroticism, that is, the poorer you are, the less emotionally stable you might be. I digested this body of research in one sentence: living a good life depends on how well off you are. It is much more exciting to embrace ‘uncertainty’ when you have a fallback just in case things don’t work out in the best way possible. There is less to worry about in establishing meaningful relationships and making it in whatever discipline you wish to permeate when you belong to a network of people who are well-acquainted with power and authority. Change is seen as an opportunity for individuals who come from secure homes, especially households that are financially stable.
When you grow up with any form of instability, change is a threat, because it comes with risks. And risks hurt when you have nothing to protect you. You are taught to fear change because when anything is disrupted in daily routine, this often means having to exhaust all other resources to preserve whatever still feels stable, which lessens as more things change. For instance, if a child gets accepted into a prestigious but expensive university, savings for retirement are touched, monthly expenses are reduced, and some family members have to work more hours and take more jobs to fund the child’s education. Fear becomes the impetus of a household that stands on shaky grounds: if we want to maintain whatever semblance of stability we have, all that we do must be accounted for. We can only ever spend this much, we can only ever dream this much, and we can only ever enjoy this much if we don’t want to lose what we have so little of.
I was lucky to have had a good childhood, but financial troubles came our way when I was in high school and this went on until I graduated university and got employed, where I felt like it was finally time to give back and temporarily take on the role of the breadwinner. I said I’d give it a year, but then the pandemic hit and it became two, and then three. The numbers in my mother’s Nokia 8210 began to pass. Every birthday of mine, my parents turned older, too, and I think they grew comfortable having me keep their fear of change at bay, not realizing that this brewed a lot of resentment from my end.
In the same interview, Stevie Nicks talked about how fear holds us back, especially in relationships. “Fear never helps relationships,” she went on to say, “and when you are kind of scared about where your next money is coming from, or really, how are you gonna keep this whole boat afloat? It’s really nerve-wracking.”
This has been the highlight of the last year for me, trying to navigate and cope with what changes. My good friend and fellow writer Mar talked about this with me a few months back. Last time I saw her was in 2019 when I was a few weeks into dating this guy that I really liked and would eventually fall in love with, whereas she was hoeing it out despite the fresh heartbreak like the Sagittarius that she is—so this catchup was really important to me and her. We filled each other in on what we missed out on in the last three years, gushing about how we’ve literally witnessed each other grow up3 and become the women that we are now. Somewhere along the conversation, Mar brought it up, how things are always changing, and how beautiful it is to know that so much can change and happen in a year.
“Aren’t you scared, though?” I asked her. “Because if there are things that change, that means there are also things that stay the same?” We both looked at each other in a panic. I forgot how we resolved it, probably because we were never able to address that. Right now, though, I think that I have an answer. Not a good one, but one that I can live with.
As I was trying to look for studies that supported the correlation between high SES and the ‘positive’ factors in the big 5, I stumbled upon one study4 in 2021 that challenges what we already know. It turns out that there is growing research on how the correlation between socioeconomic status and certain big 5 factors is not as strong as we were made to believe. Interesting data was found in the age trends, as the study writes:
Agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness increased with age; neuroticism decreased; and extraversion was relatively flat. Of these findings, only the age trend for openness was at odds with previous cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, in which openness is typically either flat or decreasing (Roberts et al., 2006; Srivastava et al., 2003). We do not have a clear explanation for this pattern, but if the observed interaction between age and education is a true effect then it might be explained by differences in education levels of the samples.
I used to be so afraid of not knowing which parts of me will change and which parts I will be given the chance to keep, because for a very long time I held on to this belief that how my life turns out is a mystery of the universe that would reveal itself to me in time whether I liked it or not. But last year I’d finally grown tired of simply accepting all the punches and learned to slowly fight back with trembling hands. At the height of my depression mid-2022, I felt so sick of being lethargic that I pushed myself to get out of bed and start planning how I wanted my life to go. I wrote down to a T what I needed to get there, and tried to achieve as much as I could.
Eventually things began to pick up again, although very slowly. What could have sped it up was believing that I could get out of this rut, since humans are wired to seek information and evidence that prove our core beliefs right, especially the ones we hold close to our hearts. Had I known sooner that realizing you have nothing to lose is not a death sentence, but rather a potential driving force, I would have stopped beating myself up so much. I would have sought opportunities despite my fear of rejection and I would have just done absolutely anything that I could to start building the kind of life I don’t have to constantly run away from.
I’ve been trying to be a more active participant in my life these days. I’ve been saying yes to more experiences while trying to be a little more financially responsible than yesterday. I’ve been monitoring my mood through a cry log. I’ve been journaling as often as I can. I’ve been faithful to my morning routine where I do skincare and recite my affirmations in the mirror: I am so excited that things are working out for me, I am becoming the best version of myself, and the space I take up matters tremendously. I’ve been learning not to pick a fight with my parents anymore in the hope of being able to forgive them one day. I’ve been trying real hard this time, actually putting in the work, yet I am still surprised by how this leads to change that doesn’t induce an existential crisis. How beautiful it is to find out that when you change who you are for the better, you learn to look at yourself with more loving eyes.
This Sunday, I turn the same age as Stevie Nicks in 1973 when she wrote the theme song of my mid-20s, and I find so much comfort in never having had an original experience. At my big age, I know that I’m supposed to be thinking about how to secure a good life in retirement and provide for everyone and be An Actual Adult, but that is jumping too far into the calendar of the future which will just take me back to the past and feel resentful of all the decisions that led to the birth of my problems. In some ways, not much has changed about me. I’m still stubborn and scared shitless and sometimes angry at the world. But in bigger, more important ways, things are a lot different now: because this time around, I’m getting older and bolder, and I’m not afraid of it anymore.
I say this in the most loving way possible.
I was wondering why this felt so familiar to write about for the blog, then I remembered that I’d already talked about the big 5 in a post last year which you can read here.
Mar and I met through One Direction where we both submitted a spinoff for this One Direction fanfic that the 1DPH Street Team wrote LOL.