I don’t hide my ‘old’ age, but I refuse to be defined by it

My mother was 40 when she had me. When I was growing up, I always saw her dressed in what I identified as “ah ma” clothes – long polyester trousers and blouses in dark-coloured prints, with a collar, short sleeves, and pockets on both sides, one for her handkerchief, the other for her purse. 

She never wore capri pants, let alone bermudas, and I never saw her in shorts, a swimsuit or exercise gear. To me back then, 50 was old, the age when life has passed you by; your own needs and desires have faded and you live largely for your children, or family, or God or some other Big Purpose.

And then I hit my 50s. I am now the age my mother was when I began to grapple with the big questions of life, purpose, identity and values.

And I realised I was wrong all along. Fifty was not old. In fact, I find myself doing things in my 50s I would never have dared to do at 30.

Age is not just a number. Age is a mindset. So while my NRIC declares my age, I have decided that that number does not have to limit what I think I can do.

First camping experience

And so last year, the month I turned 57, I challenged myself with a new adventure.

As a teenaged Girl Guide in Singapore, I had experienced “camping” in the school hall, where we learnt to pitch tents and slept in sleeping bags. We also had a campfire at the basketball court, with real fire. Although the setting was the familiar school grounds, the experience was memorable. It stirred my interest in camping.

Since moving to Perth, I have discovered to my joy that camping here is not just an aspiration, but very much a way of life. My husband and I spend a lot of time in our campervan, on road trips and day trips to the beach, cooking, chilling, sleeping in our van.

But still, I felt the lure of tent camping and wanted to experience sleeping in a tent under the stars, somewhere in the bush.

I signed up for a three-day, two-night hiking and camping trip led by a wilderness guide. I was fraught with anxiety after signing up. Would I keep up? What if I fell and had an injury? And then there were the perils of the Australian bush – extreme weather, poisonous snakes and spiders. We also had to carry our own pack, which included clothes, food, water and sleeping gear. I have been on many day hikes – but carrying a full 5kg to 6kg pack on my back while hiking? I had never done that. 

Rather than nag me or tell me to look on the bright side, my husband D encouraged me to voice my fears and asked me to imagine the worst that might happen. I said I was worried “of falling, spraining or breaking something, being bitten by spiders, and then snakes, stumbling along, unable to keep up, not having enough water or food, and shivering and starving in a tent, not able to put up the tent properly so that it collapsed on me in the rain”. As I sketched this scenario, I began to laugh and see that I was catastrophising – my fears had been blown up by my emotions, to develop a life of their own. These were projections, like shadows amplified by the light of fire. They were not real.

Instead, I could deal with the real issues. Fear of injury? Train to get fitter. Carrying a heavy pack? Pack light, get a good backpack, practise walking with it. Rain? Get good rain gear. 

And, most of all, trust. Trust in myself. Trust in my guide and the folks I would be travelling with. Trust in providence.

Armed with the right gear and the right frame of mind, I drove the three hours from Perth to the meeting point in Balingup down south, in a state of anxious anticipation. I had declined D’s offer to drive me, saying it was important that I did the journey myself.

My fellow campers were the guide, a man in his 30s, and three other women, aged in their 30s and 40s. Like me, they had had to overcome anxieties to show up for the trip. Many people who spend time on the trail have responded to the inner call of the wild. The call is personal, direct, often insistent. We respond to an invitation within, to step out beyond our comfort zone.

We seek challenge. We want to be refreshed. Perhaps get unstuck. Rekindle our creativity. Mourn a loss. Get through the end of a chapter or celebrate a new beginning. For me, it was about challenging myself and learning to believe that at 57, I had the body and the mind able to handle a wilderness camping trip.

Which I did.

The hiking was enjoyable and not too tough, even with my full pack weighing over 5kg. We were walking a stretch of the Bibbulmun Track, which is a long-distance walking trail that runs from Kalamunda, near Perth, to Albany, a 4½-hour drive south on the coast. The entire trail goes through varied landscapes of forests, granite outcrops, riverlands, beaches and coastal cliffsides. The trail we took brought us through eucalyptus groves and jarrah forests and sun-dappled clearings. 

At night, we lay on the ground wrapped in our blankets as our guide played the didgeridoo, an Aboriginal wind instrument shaped like a hollowed-out tube. As the deep basal tones of the instrument rumbled through the land, I felt a deep contentment. It was cold. The ground was hard. The Australian bush, the smells, my travel companions – they were all alien to my southern Chinese heritage and my Singaporean sensibility. And yet at some level beneath nationality, beneath culture, beneath age or background, there was resonance. This, here, now, is where I am meant to be. Wanted to be.

That night, I slept in a tent I had learnt to pitch by myself. I inflated my own sleeping mat and pillow, and rolled into my snug sleeping bag. A fly screen covered the whole tent. Over it was a flap that would blot out the light. I left one half of the tent uncovered so I could look at the tree branches and the stars. 

In the middle of the night, I woke up to bright light around. It was not yet dawn but the forest was aglow with a silvery light. Moonlight streamed down straight onto the ground in front of my tent. Even in my half-awake state, I had the word for it. This is moonshine, I marvelled to myself. The world was wrapped in its shadowed presence. I half expected to see fairies. I wanted to take a photo, but my phone was zipped up in my pack, where I had put it away the night before so I could be present to the forest.

The next morning, I woke up to birds chirping and the light of day. Did I dream that scene, I wondered to myself, knowing too that it was real.

I never got the photo, but the imprint remains in my soul.

That weekend became one of the defining days of my 57th year. At year’s end, when D and I shared our highlights of 2025, that Bib Track camping experience ranked among my best times of the year, right up there with our beach wedding in May and our honeymoon to Santa Claus’ white wonderland in December. 

A joyous old age?

I was thrilled to have made my first real camping trip at 57, and proud that I had managed to keep pace with my fellow hikers, who were aged 31, 32 and 45.

While I would be considered a “senior” in some settings, I am trying to live as young as I feel. I don’t hide my age, but I also do not want to be defined or restricted by it.

It is limiting to view ageing through a “singular lens of vulnerability”, as Whitney Zhang wrote in a thought-provoking piece recently (“When Singapore’s Gen Z volunteers say “anything but ageing”, we have a problem”) that challenged Singaporeans to rethink ageing.

In Singapore, a rapidly greying society, we would do well to think of ageing as a natural progression in life, and as a life journey replete with meaning, dignity, freshness, and enjoyment. Too much of our rhetoric about ageing darkens our last decades of life with grimness – as a period of growing fragility, ill health, declining cognition. 

While ageing does bring all of that, we should also recognise that ageing, like middle age or young adulthood, is a process of change that includes times of joy, periods of suffering, seasonal decline, and also moments of rejuvenation and many, many, moments of challenge and happiness.

When we see that ageing is part of life’s progression for those of us fortunate to live long enough to enter it, we may start to embrace the last decades of our life with verve. Being 57 can be so joyous, if we see that at this phase of our lives, we are freed of some of the anxieties and pressures we faced when younger – the stresses of raising a family and building a career. 

And so, in my 57th year, I not only took up a camping trip, but I also decided to embrace my inner Barbie, or my inner ah lian (Singlish for street smart working-class girl with dubious fashion sense). 

These days, I schedule my hairdressing appointments with the same seriousness I used to adopt for scheduling media interviews. I make time for pedicures. I explored Korean skin care, venturing bravely into the stores and asking random salesgirls or customers half my age about the products they were trying. I learnt that after BB cream, which was considered novel back in the day, there is now CC (colour correcting) cream. I was distraught not to find any powder blusher in cosmetic stores, only to realise that the go-to products these days are multi-use sticks, liquid lip and cheek tints, and bronzers. And, while I remained adamant never to have my eyebrows tattooed, I discovered that after tattoos, there was microblading, and then an even newer technique called nano brows that uses a tiny, precise, quite pain-free, needle to create natural looking, wispy brows. Reader, I succumbed. 

Unlike my Pioneer Generation mother, I do not go around in ah ma clothes in my 50s. I am writing this in gym wear – tights, a top and a fleece vest, as it is winter here in Perth. In my wardrobe I have fire-engine red and shocking pink dresses, as well as my deep winter colours of black, grey, maroon. For my mum’s generation, raised by mothers with bound feet, wearing practical clothes and shoes that allowed them to work and move freely would be the epitome of progress and youthful ageing.

My generation, Gen X, has an opportunity to redefine ageing in a way that makes sense for us – a generation that is well-educated and well-travelled, with enough experiences and resources to let us view ageing not as an inevitable period of decline, but as another life stage to experience and enjoy to the best of our ability.