This story is part of a photo-essay miniseries that I took the lead on while at RICE Media, Unexpected Adulthood.
Adulthood doesn’t come with age—it hits when life leaves you no choice. In this series, Singaporeans revisit the moments that forced them to grow up, ready or not.
The Unexpected Adulthood That Comes When You Lose Both Parents at 20
For Jess, adulthood arrived not with a milestone, but with loss. Both her parents passed away in 2014 when she was just 20, at the start of her third year in university. She was their only child, studying in Singapore while they remained based in Kuala Lumpur.
The Unexpected Adulthood of a Sudden Drug Trafficking Charge at 24
At the age of 24, Nicholas’s cold plunge into adulthood arrived not with a milestone, but with a sobering fight for his own life in the court of law. He was facing potential charges for possession, consumption and trafficking of a CBD-based pain relief cream. He bought the cream from a US-based company to help manage worsening chronic pain from an injury sustained during his national service days after having little success with over-the-counter options in Singapore.