TMI: The melancholy and rage of the 20s

Disclaimer: This discussion is going to be TMI (waaay too much info). Recently I had a pretty dark time when I could touch the floor of the metaphorical rock bottom (it does not feel great). Life in general can get rough, but this is specifically about what I learnt from my experience with dating in the US, and perhaps more generalisable about relationships and how I grapple with a more adult understanding of it. While I hope the content of this does not feel relatable, and everyone lives their happily ever after without going through the wringer, I hope it would help someone previously in my position. I know that if I had had these conversations earlier with someone, I would be comforted in knowing that shit happens, and hopefully have avoided a lot of the problems. When everyone around me entered their 20s, there is a distinct shift in the kind of problems we are facing: heartbreak and worrying about the future have frequented our life updates more. The despair and messiness of the 20s feels universal, and I have decided to immortalise my entrance into the confusing world of adulthood on the internet because 1) I will not be ashamed of making these mistakes and hope no one will be shamed into suffering alone and 2) I really hope this is helpful to someone out there who is navigating this “miserable and magical” decade (yes Taylor Swift you got that right). Last chance to turn away before we dive into the deep end.

When it comes to relationships, I am constantly torn between “I’m a strong independent woman don’t need no man” and the deeply human desire to just want someone to care for me without having to beg and feel like I am not enough. Being in a relationship was great, being in love was even better, but there was nothing to prepare me for how to deal with the fallout of it coming to an end. I don’t think I realised how inevitable heartbreaks are and had such ill-developed muscles to cope with it. I felt very unfeminist and frankly a little guilty for being so crippled by a relationship. Melancholy was a weighted cape that trailed behind me. All I can think of is how heavy it is to always carry a stash of tears with me. Whenever the memories of being in love and having my heart broken come back unbidden to me, during a class on populism in Latin America, on the bus to get Asian groceries, having my breakfast of one boiled egg and oatmeal, the tears always come to remind me that some things will never heal fully.

Handicapped with the naivete of a first heartbreak, I went into the literal deep end of dating in the wild west of US and was obviously hurt (more than I had asked for) by not knowing the where and how of setting boundaries. Relationships are already hard, and being a late bloomer, coming from a girl’s school, growing up with expectations to not date until I reach university, I was set up for failure when I had to navigate the dating world in US. It was like going down a black diamond level trail on a kiddy bike with training wheels on – how does one reconcile the prevalence of hookup culture and situationships with the rallying cries for female sexual empowerment? I personally failed at it – and so I was constantly anxious and second-guessing, trying to gain some form of control over my fears by making fun of some of my bad date stories. I was bewildered and confused, until I thought I had met a good person and put a temporary end to the situation I found myself in. Bookmark this point because this is where things start going down.

I swallowed any doubts I had and made myself as unfussy and easy to like as possible. After a few months of dating and Christmas gifting and promises, I let my guard down. That is where the naivete comes in. The person I thought I was in a relationship with wrecked my nerves and left me anxious and insecure and almost unrecognisable to myself. Pardon my language from this point on because being brutally straightforward is my coping mechanism. The inciting incident happened when I stayed over at his place waiting for my dorm to reopen for the new semester (rookie mistake: never rely on someone to keep me from being homeless without another alternative. Never again). After a few unsuspecting days, one random evening, I was given 20 minutes to put on my clothes and pack all my belongings and was booted to the streets quite literally cum and dump style (hit it and quit it, ejac and evac, whatever variation you would like to call it). I reeled in shock over the abruptness of suddenly being “homeless”. The panic over where I was going to stay masked the insult I was supposed to feel after being just used for sex. I thought this was the worst it could get. But when this relationship immediately turned into a protracted three weeks of radio-silence and ghosting, and he held my belongings hostage (another long story), and ignored my attempts to honestly communicate my doubts, and rebuffed everything I said by accusing me of something cruel and borderline criminal that will give me intimacy issues for the near future (this is too much to share even for TMI), and I ended up lying in a hospital emergency bed for a whole day staring at the stupid IV needle in my arm because of a complication from an STI that he gave to me, all I have is this

Enormous rage.

It turned inwards into pure self-hatred for allowing this to happen to me. What am I godamn doing, letting myself be walked all over, dealing with my distraught nerves and picking up after someone else’s mess, sitting alone like a stuffed roasted chicken in this gynaecologist chair in this faraway land. The rage was dripping all over my fingers, hands, arms, like a terrible accident someone just dumped into my unready embrace. I felt like screaming at my hands helplessly like a child who made a mess and cannot do anything about it because I have these stupid sticky undexterous fingers that are no good for cleaning up. I felt like I understood why the popstars of the early 2000s all have public breakdowns, because it must be a relief to revel in being gross and let people judge all they want. The rage was so much that any reason to unleash it seems valid (no, it in fact is not valid, because that would create more problems). From there, many things started to unravel.

The melancholy of putting a timer on and lying in bed staring at the ceiling, alone with my thoughts, wanting to throw the hefty pressure at the white blank wall is astounding. I was surprised I could wallow in so much melancholy and be paralysed over trivial things. I don’t ever snooze my alarms but here I am snoozing the timer on my scheduled breakdowns. Sometimes I go to my sink – which is nicely at hip height so I can hold myself up on it – and stare at myself in the mirror. In the mirror, I notice how my lips twitch like a child’s. How the tears follow a set path like some amusement park ride. And I stare at myself dead in the eyes, and pep-talk myself – well, what the hell are you doing to yourself. I have to pull myself together. But each time I would be sucked back into the sinkhole of my thoughts.

To season the dumpster fire with more trash, while all of this was happening, another man had confessed over the phone hoping to be in a relationship. This man was 37. And also happens to be my dance partner. He asked that we act normal and pretend like everything is fine, because of course the onus was on me, the college girl who has to live with the ick of body contact with a man who does everything in his upmost to not act normal. I thought I might lose my mind. Yet he sulks at my coldness, or demands justification for my discomfort, and I want to throw something at the wall and scream. Why are you sulking? Who gave you the right to act like a child? Do I really need to deal with this right now on top of everything? Why am I the only one dragging the appearance of normal daily life on

and on

and on.

I was angry at the state of intimacy I was suffering from. How was I supposed to articulate my desire to be loved, but not like that, not in a way that only filled me with dread and disgust? How the hell did we get here? Why must we demand to be loved but receive the exact opposite of what we ask for? Why is nothing ever enough? Why do we lose so much dignity when we hit our 20s? I wonder if it’s possible for anyone out there to carry so much negative energy around. I don’t want to be so down, and I wish I could help myself from feeling like that – for the sake of my health, and for the sake of not worrying those who care about me.

These were moments in time where the melancholy and rage really took shape and I can verbalise them clearly, write about them, pinpoint as evidence, but more often than not the anxiety and grief just hung around my life like a weird barbeque smell in my hair. Writing about them feels easy, but when I read them back, it is difficult to swallow because I did not know what to make of what I was reading. Parsing through the emotional debris to get to my point is difficult, and I had to edit this piece so many times to get the tone right (it still probably isn’t) because I cannot communicate how debilitating the experience was without making this some grotesque exhibitionist display of pain. I had redacted so much of the story because I didn’t want this to be just me screaming into the void of the Internet.

I wish I knew more to say whether relationships in Singapore, governed by the culture of conservatism, is less complicated. But this much is true: I have entered my 20s grossly underestimating what it means to be in a relationship and failed to meaningfully engage with how to build a healthy one beyond the superficial tiktok advice of “avoid red flags” and “love yourself”. Literally saw a tiktok about how trying to “intellectualise” your emotions is not healthy (ie. Exactly what I’m doing). When I was really going through the rock-bottom, my coping mechanism was to watch those r/reddit videos of relationship nightmares and cheating stories as a way to assure myself that terrible stuff happens to everyone, and it reaffirmed my disenchanted view of the modern dating world. It felt like everyone had a painful story to tell, and it was a race to the bottom to tell the most grotesque horror story. I didn’t want to do the same, where it’s just me providing some entertainment or shock value by recounting my bad experience. The only real way to move on from getting stuck in the bleak outlook on relationships is to reflect and grow from those experiences. So, let me try to break down what I have learnt from these terrible paragraphs-long expose.

Firstly, on the anatomy of loneliness.

Many of my experiences are tinged with the obviously female tirade against the patriarchy we live in. However, craving for love isn’t a gendered thing and perhaps the root of my problem is more generalisable. It is precisely my incomplete understanding of loneliness that rushed me into a relationship and spiralled me down this very bad path. Sometimes I miss being enveloped by the ignorance of a child – aromantic, self-centered, untortured – and I wonder when and why I am overcome with this desire for romantic relationships (and the problems that come with it). The frequent emphasis on self-love as the solution to our complicated feelings towards singlehood has its wisdom (cue Flowers by Miley Cyrus), but I can’t help but feel like it’s a non-answer to our loneliness. We can have a great relationship with ourselves independent of our ability to form a connection with someone else, so to me at least, I don’t think one type of love is able to replace our desire for another. I can’t #girlboss my way through life and to me, different types of love are inherently linked and can reinforce one another. In some ways, at the heart of my loneliness is a desire to see the best versions of myself brought out by other people. The 20s as a decade of self-definition and ambition feels terribly melancholic when it has also shown me the very worst that could be brought out.

I oscillated between the despair that I was unlovable and the intense entitlement that I was a good person who is worth a loving relationship. I walked away from my first heartbreak feeling like there was something I did not do enough, and that deep inside I was unlovable. That was a false conclusion, which I had reflected upon a few blogposts ago. PSA: Being single is not an insult. I think about the ‘involuntary’ part of the term in-cel and realise, aren’t all of us involuntary to some degree and don’t have much choice when it comes to finding the right person? As much as we would like the reassurance of having someone affirm our romantic potential, that’s not something within our personal power to change. The best explanation I have for this came from my cybersecurity class. The professor explained to us how the Internet worked by giving each of us a paper with someone’s name that we were supposed to pass around so that it reaches the right person – the catch is that we cannot move or ask around, and all we can do is pass along what is not for us in the opposite direction of where it came from. It’s so nerdy to think of relationships like the Internet, but I want to believe that somewhere out there someone has a paper with my name (and I bet you my name is probably misspelled lol), and it’s just being passed along to me. All I have in my power to do is to courier and do the same for the people who pass through my life. I wish I had some uplifting message, but the conclusion is that waiting sucks when you can see others around you receive their sheet of paper.

Loneliness does creep in and impact your self-worth, it happens to all of us. Loneliness had made me easy. I was putting on this cool girl persona: No questions asked, no needy demands, acting as though I was totally alright with the casualness of sex. Caveat that I don’t have any religious beliefs, nor do I think that hookups are inherently bad or shameful IF (that’s a big IF) one is able to avoid seeing it as a transaction of intimacy. I simply discovered it’s not for me. This particular set of problems is very typical of tinder stories – loitering in the strange purgatory of situationships, looking for something fun while hoping for something serious. I felt like I wasn’t supposed to ask for anything serious on the apps because everyone knows that it’s just looking to be hurt, but truthfully it was simply my own inability to enforce boundaries being projected on some biased view of modern dating (too little space to talk about dating apps but TLDR I don’t want to believe it’s just doom and gloom, I’ve heard of people getting married off of it and I will take any good news). That craving to fill the shape of a relationship made me people-please hoping that that would make me easy to want, and I made so many excuses for them even when it was clearly not reciprocal. What I was getting wasn’t affection, because affection should make us soft, not harden us with bitterness and anxiety.

When I’m not wallowing in the feeling of being unlovable, I had swung to the other end of the spectrum, where I was fired up by the sense of injustice of being under-appreciated for my worth. This is very much the reaction of many black pill communities that swerve away from relationships due to bad experiences (again, I don’t have the bandwidth or space to delve into what that means but it’s worth a quick research). When I had finally worked up the courage to demand for an answer to what exactly I was in a relationship, the guy who mutilated me with anxiety had said that despite dating for months, I was not a girlfriend who would be introduced to friends and families. I have also learnt that words are dirt cheap and not worth the excuses I make for someone. I had assumed that we had shifted from dating into a proper relationship because he had talked about wanting to meet my friends (and you know, that should be a two-way street) and possibly emigrating to Singapore, making these big bold promises I thought no one would say if it wasn’t “serious”; I had assumed that it was monogamous because he always referenced how we were seeing each other and had repeatedly resisted using a condom and I thought that no one in their right minds would expose themselves to the risks if it was not safe (this whole thing we will revisit later on). There were some signs that I had chosen to ignore – other girls’ texts asking for hookups appearing on his phone when we used it to watch movies, obvious traces left in the apartment – and I had ignored them because I felt like I was above being jealous and asking for exclusivity. I thought to myself that if I was as good of a person as I think I am, I should be confident that eventually he would choose me without having to demand for anything. Do you follow this logic? Because I don’t – the amount of mental gymnastics and manipulation going on here is insane. It costs people absolutely nothing to say the things I want to hear, and yet it took so much out of me to repress the anxiety and perform the mental gymnastics.

I was offended on my own behalf that I was condemned to situationship status despite everything I had done, and instead received the attention of a predatory older man as though that was all I was worth. I think to myself: seriously, I know I deserve more than this bs. It’s difficult in the modern world to find the right balance of knowing my self-worth and being too picky. I felt that this intense loneliness that made me aloof, as though I was better than all the people who had hurt me, and that lead to despair at the prospect that there will never be someone who will not find me too much, and maybe I was the problem after all. I am sure that all these doubts are repercussions of me rushing into a bad relationship and that is why I stress again (I cross my heart and promise that this much is true) that while enduring loneliness is difficult, it is a thousand times better than the psychic damage and toxic fallout of rushing into one bad relationship.

Secondly, on how to enforce boundaries.

The unfortunate fact was that I didn’t know my boundaries until they were repeatedly transgressed. It is also an unfortunate fact that I would never have the courage to enforce these boundaries if not for being pushed this far. I realise that no matter what I share, the information will only be helpful up to a point where your rationality can control. As I’m writing many of these things down, they sound familiar because they were advice my mother had given me in her diagnosis of her relationship. Is it not cruel that despite all the warnings, we still have to come out with scars ourselves? I despair at the thought that perhaps every one of my friends will have to learn this for themselves, and that makes me so angry that our 20s would be filled with inevitable hurt.

Learning my own boundaries meant specifically knowing what I want, and what I will unapologetically demand, and most importantly how much I give. I made the mistake of being too willing to do too much, but never finding the courage to expect anything in return. If I revisited the point where I was kicked out to the streets, I was doing the cooking, dishes, cleaning (heck, I was even mending clothes using needle and thread like I’m some kind of medieval wife, I’m embarrassed to even expose myself like that), I was being unproblematic about finances and always paid my share, offering emotional support and checking in, for almost nothing in return (only good thing to have emerged from this is that I now can make an amazing prawn noodle/laksa/bak kut teh from scratch). I need to learn when to stop giving. I am someone who plunges in readily because I’m not a fan of tit-for-tat calculation, giving as much as they are “earning”, because I believe that all relationships are fundamentally unequal in the short-term, what matters more is establishing trust for the long run. I know that I’m someone who has always been taken advantage of for giving too much. It is on me for setting terrible boundaries despite knowing all of this about myself. My biggest learning point is to learn to stop giving away future me’s time based on assumptions. I had kept my weekends free, had started planning how to introduce this relationship to my friends, had even kept all the planned web pages bookmarked for valentine’s day hoping I would be able to share this surprise with him when he eventually stops ghosting me, even after I was booted to the streets and ignored. Oh my naïve self – for what did I plan so far ahead when I didn’t even feel safe enough to ask him whether I was a serious relationship. That is no longer going to happen without having a proper conversation and making future commitments together. Controlling only what I can give presently limits how much I go out of the way to get taken advantage of.

Setting these boundaries sounds trivial but it would have saved me from so much emotional duress. It would have reduced the intensity of feeling taken advantage of, and most importantly minimised the self-hatred I had for being my own worst advocate. It still drives me mad thinking about how despite my best efforts, I was somehow wrong to assume that I was in a relationship, and I wasn’t even good enough to be shown to friends and family. It clearly wasn’t an issue with timing – it had been months since we met – and neither was it because I wasn’t committed. I didn’t ask for anything in return because “cool girl” doesn’t need anything. I was just so wrong to assume that it would be exclusive and that my body was safe with another person – only after I kept prodding, pushed through the criminal accusations, then did he confess that he was also seeing this other person from even before he met me. There’re so many meaningless lines drawn in the sand, and I am like an animal made to jump through multiple hoops of a game to reach what I wanted. When I finally communicated some of these grievances, the response I had was: oh you used to never be the kind of person who needed to talk things out, and could just operate on implicit understanding. The guy even had the audacity to assume that after the shitshow, I would be interested in getting back with him. I cannot describe how enraged this makes me (my palms are sweating so much my keyboard is damp). The audacity! But even more infuriating was the fact that I was partly responsible for this humiliating outcome. This is what I get for not knowing how to enforce my boundaries and establishing that I am pushover from the start. Backpedalling on the “implicit understanding” and having to go back to the basics of what I want up front is an almost impossible task for me, someone who already chickened out of boundary setting in the first place.

In the end, after my boundaries were trampled all over, I did start to grasp how to enforce them. I managed to get all my hostaged belongings back and performed my duty of informing the guy of the STI he had very kindly passed along (I know I said relationships are like the Internet passing packets around – quite unfortunately even STIs seem to align with that metaphor). And I did it all in person too, under less than 5 sentences. It was an amount of stress that paralysed me in bed for hours each morning in the week leading up to and after that. However, not having proper closure, not being able to express my ball of rage in an argument, made this much more infuriating because I still feel like I am the biggest loser up till the end. Call it pettiness, but I don’t think anyone should be able to get away with whatever he has done to me and carry on undisturbed. So, I kept expecting that I would get a text or a call with an apology of some sorts, and maybe that would pacify my rage. However, the anger is so consuming that I think I’m leaving behind trails of vengeful spirits. I decided that I had enough of being held emotionally hostage despite reclaiming my physical property, and in my very first act of enforcing some sort of boundary, I blocked off all contact with him. So what if I don’t get the apology or the last word, I told myself that I had waited for 3 anxious weeks already and I was not going to let myself fall into the habit of waiting longer and grovelling for one more day, and one more day, and maybe just one more. I found it necessary in helping me get out of the spiral of being at someone else’s mercy. However, it brings me no joy to say that as empowering as blocking off all contact is, it took away any closure I could have – even now I’m still hosting the parasite of rage and a whole load of trust issues, especially when I come up with entire verses worth of incisive arguments I could have had if I had popped off. The bright side is that I didn’t, because inflicting pain and lashing out in anger is never a valid response. Now I know for sure the importance of enforcing my personal boundaries and I will be caught dead before this happens to me again.

Despite that theoretical knowledge though, enforcing boundaries can still be uncomfortable. Boundaries feel the most uncomfortable when the other person is “nice” because it feels like we’re being mean. Here’s the thing though, the majority of the people we interact with are nice harmless people, and the boundaries are meant not for the malicious bullies but to safeguard us from the casual way these nice people hurt us. For all the terrible things that happened to me, I do believe that this man who disrupted my life is still a nice person and friends and co-workers like him. Nonetheless, nice people have so much potential to wreak havoc and I happened to be a major casualty. The 37-year-old man who had the gall to expect a relationship from me though, he preyed upon this guilt of hurting nice people. He constantly whined about how I was “being so mean” and that I should “be nice to him”. Those words made me want to deep clean my toilet, but when it came to speaking up against him and finally telling him I was uncomfortable with dancing together, I was terrified. I rehearsed what I would say, where I would look, all the potential reactions and contingencies, so many times in my head sometimes that is all I thought about as I walked between classes. I made up rules in my head – I would maintain more than 80% of eye contact, I would not apologise, I would not raise my voice …

My only advice for those struggling to enforce their boundaries is to take inspiration from what my parents did to me as a kid (and I feel like this might have been a universal Asian experience): count yourself down to do easy things. I would hear my mother’s voice telling me I had three seconds to get moving and leave the store and stop my tantrum, except this was me, pressuring myself to open my mouth on the count of three, and then on the next count of three, make some kind of noise (clear my throat, sigh, ummm, uhhh, fillers, whatever it is to warm my voice up so it doesn’t falter), and the next count of three, look up and hold eye contact… Start practicing these things from small events in life and it will make speaking up easier when it comes to huge relationship conflicts. I was a shy child (still am) who did not want to order at MacDonalds, or ask the banker to explain the terms of the bank account he had set up for me, or tell the waitress that I had in fact gotten served something I did not order. There is no explanation for why I find it so hard to say what I want. But I think practicing in these limited situations make it easier to be compelled into action by the countdown in my head and to ultimately do things that are difficult but necessary. I underestimated how much courage it takes to be in a relationship – in the first sense of having to put myself out there to meet new people, and in the second more important sense of having to stand up for myself even when it is uncomfortable.

Thirdly, on the terrible state of sex-ed in Singapore.

I cannot name you one thing it did for me besides the horrific fear-mongering photos of STIs being blasted on projector screens during our school-wide sex-ed assemblies. They only fuelled my anxiety and annihilated the few strands my mental health was hanging on by. I know it might have been difficult for conservative adults to have this conversation with us, and maybe there is no need to in a generally more conservative Singapore, but I wish I knew how to enforce having safe sex beyond the ineffectual acronyms I was taught. Abstinence first, and condom if all else fails. What do you do when someone ignores condoms, or takes it out halfway, or makes you feel like it’s wrong to “pressure” them into using it because it challenges the assumptions of trust? I wish I knew exactly what the signs and symptoms were to look out for instead of trawling through the Internet’s fear-mongering sewage and deciding mine’s not that bad and could be solved by expensive suppositories that are supposed to “rid intimate areas of embarrassing smells”. Also, how does one even begin the conversation with someone about having STI testing before sexual intimacy? How does one even get STI testing? I had a pretty alright gynaecologist experience because my doctor was super nice, yet even then I cannot describe to you how shitty it feels having to deal with this alone with my most vulnerable parts. When asked why I was here getting the test and I had to tough it out and explain that my assumed partner was unfaithful, when getting a phone call and the doctor had to wince breaking the news to me and check whether I was alright delivering the news to my sexual partner by myself, when I had to explain the whole story again to the ER doctor and nurses on why I was there lying in their emergency bed, I wanted so badly to blame someone and it frustrated me that I was the only person within reach who was responsible for the plight I was in.

As a freshly 20-year-old adult, I can guarantee you that most of us know rationally what the theoretical right thing to do is but are still soft with the uncertainty of teenagehood that it is hard to enforce these right things when someone just pushes it a little. Let’s go TMI a little further with my example. I brought up the condom usage multiple times, but it was not his default expectation, and when I had to repeatedly remind and demand and deal with that resistance, it created fatigue in enforcing it. I am partially responsibility for not protecting myself, so now I will grab anyone by their shoulders and shake it to emphasise this: you really don’t want to find out how it feels like to regret a stupid risk (there are some things in life you don’t have to experience, such as the guessing roulette of whether an STI or pregnancy is worse). As a side note, I must emphasise that anyone who transgresses on boundaries meant to protect your sexual health is a huge red flag. I should not have to be the only one worrying about protection because it speaks massively about the level of irresponsibility and carelessness. Let me take it even further by saying that this man did not ask or know about what sort of birth control I was on. The fact that men don’t worry about birth control pisses me off because it shows just how little responsibility they feel towards the potential consequence of a child, and the bare minimum of wearing a condom is something that once again falls on me. That is as much as I will immortalise on the Internet because even TMI has a line. However, if anyone needs help when you’re afraid to have these conversations and get judged, I’m putting it out there that I’m here to listen because America has made me open-minded and these are facts of life that everyone needs to learn without having to make those mistakes themselves.

So, what now after all that? I think I am out of the worst of the ordeal and have recovered physically. I can sleep better now. I don’t need to cry when I stare at the ceiling. I don’t feel overwhelmed by an anger that makes me want to punch a hole in the wall. Yet the process to melt down the scabs of bitterness to become soft and loving again is a slow one. Relationships fall apart all the time and I not an exception, so I want this to not define me. I want to remain a hopeful romantic. I don’t want to learn that being hurt is the biggest takeaway of being in a relationship; I don’t want to learn that trusting and vulnerability is a weakness. Yet, I feel like I was set back on every single step I have made to recover from the heartbreak.

Here’s my current coping mechanism: I think back to my first love fondly as a reminder that it’s not all just doom and gloom. I am also going to take a relationship detox to find the courage to stick to my boundaries and recover from the jaded worldview. I will admit a little shamefully that I rely on youtube tarot card readings about the future to remain hopeful that there is a good ending (it’s gotten to a point where the algorithm knows I am a Gemini. I know, I am a willing victim of pseudoscience and bs). I will forgive myself for making a mistake in judging someone’s character. I will learn to let go of this melancholy and hurt of being in my dumb immature 20s, and I hope everyone else will not find this relatable, and eventually we all will stumble upon the magic in this new decade of our lives.