Unlearning the "Good Girl": A Journey to Becoming a Good Person

For most of my life, I was taught to be a "good girl", be kind, be understanding, and not be selfish.

Whenever I felt misunderstood, I'd always feel a hot flash, followed by anger and tears. In the past, I'd usually be overcome with intense emotions that I would never be able to effectively vocalise and communicate - even when the anger, sadness or frustration was valid. I would only be told that I was making a fuss, and that I should try to stand in the other party's shoes to understand their circumstances and perspective.

I was often made to feel selfish for even having the thought of speaking up about unfairness. Sometimes, I only grasped the concept of unfairness precisely because objective criteria were set for us, for example when it was a school assignment, a job appraisal, or even simply the probation period of an employment contract.

After being shut down so many times, I eventually learned to just be angry and frustrated mostly behind closed doors because I was told time and time again that I had to control my emotions, that it wasn't good to cause a scene, and that I should manage myself.

For a period of time, before the age of social media, I kept those pent-up emotions in, only expressing myself in lengthy handwritten notes, which I would then discard. Somehow, there was an element of shame in expressing my true feelings or views because they did not align with what was socially acceptable. Perhaps I should have been controlling my emotions; however, if they were always invalidated due to my age, gender, position in society, or a job, then when would I ever learn the tools to control them other than keeping them in and erupting only when I could no longer hold it in?

I realise now, as an adult well into her mid-30s that, that it was such an unhealthy, unproductive, vicious cycle that did nothing for me in terms of growth.

Eventually, perhaps as it came with age, life experiences, widening my perspective as I met more people, and information (and therefore possibilities) became so readily - maybe sometimes overly - available, I started learning how to become a better person (note: not a 'friendly' or 'nice' person, but a good person).

I have to credit a lot of it to my husband, who I have been with since 2011 and married since 2018. I know no one is perfect, but he is probably the most patient and loving person in my life. Prior to my relationship with him, I was taught that blood relations meant everything. But then I realised that old-fashioned, closed-minded thinking regarding what the term 'family' meant is actually the underlying reason for many conflicts - relationships based on DNA rather than a genuine human connection built on repetitive, small but important building blocks of daily life, shared events, going through hardships together, or just merely being there when we are struggling, or even being happy for someone else's success.

It is especially precious precisely because they didn't 'have to' out of obligation based on blood relations; it is because through time and shared stories, we chose and continue to choose each other, over and over again.

Eventually, I started evolving as a person through my art practice and in my studio as an educator as well. It started out merely as a hobby, maybe a passion, maybe something I was quite good at, and I didn't hate it so much even on the worst days. Slowly, Petals by You became a safe haven for me.

I have always wondered, as someone who has been and is still known for being short-tempered and not easy to get along with, and extremely emotional, how could I get all these students to review my teaching as 'patient'?

Then I realised that, just as how I set the tone, the rules, and how everyone is treated at my studio - whether as a student, my staff or collaboration partners - I can be equally as empowered to set the rules on how I choose to live my life. I can nurture my relationships and set my personal or professional boundaries so that I do not exhaust myself with all the 'meant to be's' or 'should be's', and slowly live a life that I want while learning ways to not be so overly forward (or rude) when expressing my feelings.

Even when I was under immense pressure to turn something I always create as art - meaning I took my time and honoured every detail - into a large scale (yet still handmade) commercial project where my team of 12 part-timers and I handcrafted 600 individual crepe paper flowers over 9 intense days, I still treated every one of them with respect.

Now, reflecting back on that period, I think the aspect that I am most proud of was not the fact that we achieved that milestone as a team, or the amount of money we made, or even the fact that we maintained the quality of Petals by You despite running it on a production-style schedule and quantity. I am actually most proud of how I treated every single one of my teammates, no matter their roles, with respect. In those 9 days, I was able to work and behave according to the rules that I have slowly written for myself, for my studio, which is exactly why Petals by You was and still is a safe haven for me personally.

However, the reality of how the world operate is often a very bitter pill to swallow. Whether it is through reading or watching how the international events are unfolding - politically, environmentally, or even in terms of community (a term so commonly used these days by businesses) - everything just seems so transactional. I get it; at the very least, all of us need to pay our bills, it is a concept of survival. And that is exactly why I find it so hard to understand and see the world the more I think and learn about how everything works, because all of us are supposed to be in a similar boat, yet, the world doesn't always run on reciprocity. I only feel a handful of really genuine connections; otherwise, the majority of it feels like it runs on transactions.

It is especially difficult for me to comprehend because, on one hand, I have been taught over and over again, to manage myself and hold onto the empathy of "we don't know what the other person is going through". But on the other hand, it has gradually become painfully clear that this grace or empathy is rarely genuinely reciprocated without commitment or an underlying transactional expectation. Honestly it becomes dizzying and a painful mental loop. I don't want to allow myself to fall back immediately into being the angry, rebellious teenager or the young adult with a frontal lobe that isn't fully developed; I don't want to allow myself to undo all these years of work and growth simply because "the world is unfair". But it is incredibly difficult at times, when it is made clear through the actions or inaction of others that they rarely seem to care to understand what I am going through.

In the case of an independent artist and small business owners, it feels like we are often expected to absorb everyone else's chaos, their excuses of being "too busy", and their lack of basic respect for our time, all while maintaining a polite, accommodating smile as a customer-facing artist/owner, or even simply as a human being trying her best to keep progressing in the management of her own emotions.

Sometimes, it really feels so deeply and fundamentally unfair. It is exhausting to watch the world seemingly reward the wrong behaviours and prioritise extracting value over building mutual respect.

More often than not, I come to a conclusion that I am actually too naive to expect so much from this world.

And then came my solo exhibition, SEASONS.

Standing in the gallery space everyday, looking at years of my life mounted on the walls, and interacting with visitors, actually gave me a glimmer of hope.

Yes, there are systemic and structural unfairness in place that makes it so difficult to see textbook respect and genuine connections in the majority of dealings or relationships in society at large, especially since the loudest and most popular ones continue to gain traction. But speaking with and sharing stories with visitors to my solo exhibition, showed me that people still crave authenticity and genuine connections that aren't based on what we can do for each other.

Reflecting upon this, with only three months shy of my 36th birthday, I am accepting that yes, the world is often unfair.

But I actually no longer have to be the "good girl". Speaking up about unfairness or just vocalising my feelings - even if they can be considered too forward, unfriendly, or rude initially - are exactly the small learning milestones I have to go through to become a good person, a better person, a kind person. It is better than unrealistically trying to absorb that unfairness in silence.

I am also learning the immense value of my own boundaries. I can allow myself to gradually expand my capacity for empathy without diminishing myself or having my values stepped on as a doormat for someone else's transactional ways.

It still feels challenging, if not more now that I am accepting that the world is like this, but I am choosing to expand my safe haven beyond my studio doors and my art practice, slowly. Setting the tone, the rules, the boundaries. I am finally allowing myself to stop hiding behind hundreds of petals, to honour the full spectrum of my emotions, and to just bravely bloom and to brave the different, maybe harsh conditions in order to make at least my life worth living and worth fighting for.