Uninhibited

A statement of faith.

This year, somewhere between watching the New Year's Eve fireworks at Tanjong Rhu and Vision Sunday at New Creation Church, I decided to live uninhibited. I was still in a relationship then, though the pull to move forward on my own was already strong.

That is not the beginning of the story though.

The beginning, maybe, was a book. Around 2017 I picked up The Missing Commandment: Love Yourself, and for the first time I caught a real glimpse of grace.

But that is not the beginning either.

I have been a Christian since 2005. I was fifteen. Nothing grand happened. My parents became Christians, and so did the rest of the family. The story of how that happened is for another day.

Here is the faith I was handed. Jesus died for my sins, and once I accepted Him as Lord and Saviour, I was saved. And from that moment, the rest of my life became a performance. The salvation was free, but I had to spend the rest of my days proving I deserved it. Walk holy to honour what was done. Live for Christ. All the cliché things Christians say. Be good, and keep being good, and never stop, because look at what was done for you.

For a person with my wiring, that was lethal.

To understand why, you have to understand the wiring.

I am resourceful. It was born of lack. We did not have much when I was young, so I learned early to optimise everything. I saved. I had coin banks. To make money I sold the cookie crumbles my mother made, to my classmates, to my teachers. To excel I aced my exams. I was a top student.

So picture the machine this builds. Someone with almost microscopic attention to detail, optimising constantly for the highest output at the lowest cost. Maximum result, minimum waste. That is the engine I run on, and as a poor, ambitious child it served me well.

Then you hand that machine a faith made of performance, and something terrible happens. It does what it always does. It optimises.

Except now the thing to maximise is holiness, and the standard is not the ten commandments. The moral law goes deeper than that. Love God above everything, and love others as yourself. Goodness. The pressure to perform. Just writing it gives me whiplash. And the resource I was spending was no longer coins. It was me.

Because loving others as the perfect Christian means putting them first, and putting them first costs more than I had. So I bridged the gap the only way I knew. I paid it myself. My time. My money. Whatever emotional energy I had left. And where I still fell short, I made it up by doing more.

The debt kept climbing. Debt against my body. My heart. My mind.

I worked full time, for money. I served at church, for the image of the perfect Christian, for my family's reputation, for my own self-esteem, because God knows I did not feel holy, and by holy I only ever meant morally good. I studied, for excellence, for the career. And do you think I was just that strong? Of course not. I broke many times. I simply could not break in front of anyone, because my family relied on me. Not only financially. Emotionally. I was the one who soothed my mother, who was her listening ear, who modelled what a good life looked like for my younger sister and brother. They could not see me breaking, or they would break too.

So I escaped. Quietly, where no one was looking.

Video games. Fanfiction. I did not understand it then, but I was refilling a tank that everything else was draining. In games I felt like I was enough, and I had communities and friends who took me as I was. In fanfiction I let myself imagine a world where I had what I needed, where I was loved and capable. It was enough to get me to the next day.

And the time for it had to come from somewhere, so it came from my sleep. I was sleep deprived for years. Light as paper. I barely ate. I was a zombie, doing so many things and achieving nothing.

Here is the part that made it a trap rather than just exhaustion. I knew. I knew that hiding in an invented world was not holy, that I was failing the very standard I was killing myself to meet, and that I was hiding the failure well. So the escape that kept me alive also made me guilty, and the guilt sent me back to the escape. Round and round.

That is what the optimiser becomes under a law it can never satisfy. Functional. Very functional. But anxious, self-conscious, desperate to be accepted, so thin-skinned that every boundary felt like a rejection. A woman auditing herself every single day, against a standard built to be failed, and failing it.

That was me for years.

Then came the first book.

The Missing Commandment: Love Yourself. For the first time I saw the possibility of being loved and accepted for who I am, not for what I produced. It led me to journalling, and journalling led me back into a childhood I had never understood, mostly fog with a few hard glimpses. (Another post, another time.)

That was a seed, and it grew slowly. I kept reading. Battlefield of the Mind. Will I Ever Be Good Enough? And eventually, Grace Revolution by Joseph Prince.

The strange thing is that I had been sitting in Pastor Prince's church, New Creation Church, the whole time. I had even served there. But I held it the way I held every church, like something I had already memorised. Jesus saved me, now I must live up to it, and the bar is higher than you think.

Grace Revolution was where the scales fell off my eyes.

I know now that this is what Paul wrote about, because it was exactly that. Something physically lifted from in front of my eyes and I could see, and the glimpse became solid ground. The truth was simpler and more enormous than anything I had let myself believe. Jesus did not only save me from the sins behind me. He saved me from the sins I am committing now, and the ones I have not committed yet.

Sit with what that does to a performance machine.

It means there is nothing left to perform. In front of Jesus I am already saved. Already perfected. I did not need. to. perform.

It means that I can fail, and keep failing, in the same way or in new ways, and it changes nothing. The failure might be large, like stealing a pumpkin, you get the idea. Or it might be small and quiet, which is where mine tend to live. Like this. I look at a stranger a second too long, in the lift on the way up to the office, and he catches me looking, and I snap my eyes to the floor. And then it begins. Why were you staring. What is wrong with you. He thinks you are a creep now. You should not have been looking at all. You are a terrible person. And none of it moves the verdict. In front of Jesus I am as spotless as ever. As perfect as Jesus Himself.

That truth did not land in one night. It landed one example at a time, over years.

I went to therapy. I kept journalling. I was supported, then, by the person I was with. I read more. And I listened to sermons, hours of them, every single day, until the thing was no longer an idea I agreed with but something tattooed on my mind and on my heart.

And as it sank in, my life rearranged itself around it.

I started eating. Sleeping. My work changed, and I came off the twelve hour shifts that flipped from day to night and back every two weeks. I put on some flesh. I looked like a person again. The IBS stopped, the hyperacidity, the migraines. My cycle became regular, and the pain that used to come with it left.

And it was not only my body. I started talking to people, and opening up to them. I let my aunt hold me through the storm of a breaking family relationship. I made real friends. I stopped obsessing over every wrong thing I might have said, and the silence that left behind turned out to be room. Room to actually hear other people. Room to connect. And I came alive in it.

I stopped performing for the church. I quit social media for a while, to process everything. And more recently, I found I no longer needed the gaming community to hold me together, because I was no longer falling apart. (I write about that part of my life here.)

I do not have the right word for what happened. I did not get fixed. I think I got freed, a little at a time, in my body and my mind and my heart.

Which brings me back to this year, and the fireworks.

Standing at Tanjong Rhu, I decided to step out past what I already knew. To step out in faith. Live uninhibited. That is just how it arrived, like a small flame that was already burning and someone poured gasoline on it.

It took weeks to understand what it meant, because I do not mean wild, and I do not mean carnal. The deepest inhibitions, the ones that actually run a life, are in the mind. So what I mean is to live uninhibited by other people's opinions, and by my own fears.

And here is what I eventually noticed about those two. They say the same thing.

My fears tell me, you cannot do this, you are not that big a deal, there are smarter people, better suited people. And other people's opinions, when I am honest about the voice I imagine, say it word for word. Who do you think you are. You are not that big a deal. There are smarter people, better suited people.

It is one accusation, coming from inside and outside at once. To live uninhibited is to stop letting it set the terms, and to start living under the real ones. The terms of the good news. That I am righteous in Christ. Perfected. Accepted. That in the only verdict that counts, I can do no wrong. And that even when I do, even then, the consequences are turned for my good.

Recently, the meaning of living uninhibited widened again.

I thought I was already free. I had named the accusation and stopped letting it set the terms, and I was living more in the open than I ever had. But I was still holding on to things. Quietly, without quite admitting it. So I went looking for what was actually holding me, and I traced every anxiety I had back to its root. Something at work I could not control. A future I wanted so badly it ached. My pride, and the fear of being made smaller than I knew I was. Different fears on the surface. But underneath every one of them I found the same thing. An image of the future, and my hands wrapped tightly around it.

And then I recognised the grip. It was the optimiser again. The same girl with the coin banks, except now she was trying to optimise outcomes she cannot see, control a future that was never hers to hold, get the result exactly right so nothing could go wrong.

And I want to be careful here, because this is the part I used to apologise for, and I have stopped. The optimising is not the disease. It is just who I am. So of course I turn it on my faith too. I want to maximise it. I want to know God all the way to the end, to take in every last bit of light there is.

Here is the picture that came to me. God is the sun. My faith is the window. The light I get is the size of my window.

And because I min-max, a bigger window was never going to be enough.

I do not want a wider window. I want out of the house. I want to stand in the open with nothing between me and the sun. Nothing limiting me, including myself.

But to stand out there, I have to give up the one thing I have always trusted. My own control. And that brings a fear of its own, a real one, not just a feeling. If I am not optimising every decision, weighing every choice to get it right, then where does the wisdom come from? Will I not just choose wrong, and ruin my life?

And the answer had come to me only recently, in a single sermon I happened to hear just as I was turning this exact question over. I am always asking God what to do. His answer has always been about who I have become.

The wisdom is not something I manufacture by worrying correctly the night before. It comes with who I already am. From the righteousness God gave me in Christ, not from the quality of my fretting. My security was never going to be in choosing perfectly. It is in being already perfect, already His, before I choose anything at all.

And so even the wrong choice loses its teeth. Because even if I choose wrong, He stays. The way real family stands up for each other, no clause, no condition. He loves me, and He is strong enough to take a wrong decision and turn it into something good for me, and fit it into a plan He has already seen the end of. He went ahead. He already knows how my life turns out. A wrong turn cannot frighten someone whose destination is already settled.

Let me show you how small this gets, because it is in the small things that I feel it most.

I am on the bus. I glance at a stranger through the window, and the whisper comes. You are only looking because he is white. Gold digger. That is the culture that raised you. And I look away on purpose, ashamed.

That look-away is the whole thing. That is the bondage. That is the anxiety wearing the mask of holiness.

The freedom is that I can look at a stranger and simply find his face pleasant. And if the culture I grew up in shaped that impulse, then sure, maybe it did. And that is okay. This is the kind of small wrong I used to torment myself over. Except it is not even wrong. And even if it were, it has no bearing on who I have already become.

That is what living uninhibited has come to mean, at least for now. Not doing whatever I want. Being so secure in who I already am that nothing has the standing to threaten me. Not a glance. Not a mistake. Not a future I cannot control. I know this is not the whole of it. There is more to learn, and the meaning will widen again, the way it already has. When it does, I will be ready, with my eyes open.

And the strangest grace in all of it is what happened to the wiring. The optimiser that nearly killed me under the law is the same one that finally walked me out into the open. Followed all the way to its end, my instinct to maximise did not stop at a bigger window. It wanted no walls at all. Pointed at a debt I could never repay, it destroyed me. Pointed at a gift already given, it set me free.

I spent twenty years performing for a God who had already finished the work. I am only now learning to put the performance down.

So here is the question I keep asking myself, and I will leave it with you. What are you still performing for? And who would you be, if you already knew you were loved all the way through, and could never do wrong in the eyes of the One who matters?

Out of the house. Under the open sun.