The Room You Were Born Into
How social class shaped my career before I even knew there was a game being played
I want to tell you about the room.
Not a metaphor yet. An actual room. One master bedroom in a flat in Pasir Ris that belonged to my mother's friend. Four of us lived in it. My mum, my stepdad, my younger brother, and me. I slept in the living room. We didn't have a house. We'd had a car once, and savings once, before a bad investment and a betrayal by people my parents had trusted completely dismantled the version of our life that might have been.
We were what people call sandwiched, not poor enough to qualify for help, not stable enough to feel safe. Low middle income, which in Singapore means you are exactly the wrong kind of struggling. You earn too much for the safety net and too little for the cushion. You exist in the gap and you are mostly invisible there.
My stepdad left for work before 5am. He was a prison officer. He had to do long shifts, heavy work, the kind of job that asks your body for things it doesn't give back. He'd come home around 8 or 9 at night, exhausted in a way I didn't have language for as a child, just a knowing. He ate. He rested. He got up and did it again.
He was the steadiest thing in a house that wasn't steady.
My mother is more complicated. She is still more complicated. I love her and I am still working out what it means to love someone who was often somewhere else even when she was standing right in front of you. She spent most of her nights out late, drinking, disappearing into a version of herself that had nothing to do with us. When things got bad enough, it wasn't just alcohol. We watched her fall, and then we watched her try to get up, and sometimes she did and sometimes she didn't and we were children and we absorbed all of it quietly because that is what children do.
There was love in my house. I want to say that. But love that is real and love that is stable are not always the same thing. I knew I was loved. But I was not always sure the ground would hold.
Now let me tell you about Sofia.
Sofia is not one person. She is everyone I have sat across a decision table from and tried to read like a manual. I studied the ease in her posture, the way she takes up space without apologizing for it, the way she speaks in meetings like she already knows she is allowed to be there. I have studied her the way you study a language you desperately need but were never taught.
Sofia's father was a director at a consulting firm. Sunday mornings in her house looked like this: a kitchen that smelled like coffee, a father mid-phone call, business language floating over breakfast like it was nothing. By the time she was ten, she had absorbed everything without anyone ever sitting her down to explain it. It came natural to her that authority was something you engaged with. Not something you endured.
When Sofia didn't want to finish her vegetables, she made her case. Her parents listened. Sometimes they conceded. She thought this was just family. She did not know she was being trained.
She visited her father's office before she had a word for what an office was. She shook hands with people whose names appeared on glass doors and buildings. She watched her parents walk into rooms and orient themselves without effort. Her nervous system absorbed the lesson before her mind did.
Nobody handed Sofia a manual. She grew up inside one.
Me? I grew up learning a different set of lessons. My childhood was a quiet, careful dance. I was learning how to be small so the house didn't feel so heavy. I was taught to wake up without a sound, solve the problem before it reaches a parent’s ears, handle the friction of life until your hands are calloused by it. When I didn’t finish my vegetables I was being wasteful. There is no room for negotiation. The only mentor I relied on was my survival instincts. I figured things out alone because everyone I loved was already running on empty.
The first time I walked into the office tower, the silence actually hurt. The air-con was so cold it felt expensive, and the marble floors were so polished they echoed the sharp, hollow sound of my cheap heels. I stood there, heart hammering, feeling like a glitch in the system. I didn't feel "success." I just saw a world that wasn't built for people like me. My body was coiled, waiting for a hand on my shoulder to tell me I was trespassing.
That is not nothing. As survival training, it is extraordinary. But it is not the same as being taught that the rooms you dream of are rooms you are allowed to walk into.
The thing I Didn’t Know I Was Missing
In 2003, a sociologist named Annette Lareau published research that changed how I understand my own childhood. She spent years sitting inside real families watching what parents actually did.
What she found was this: professional-class parents practised what she called concerted cultivation. They coached their children to question authority, negotiate with adults, advocate for themselves, engage with institutions as equals. Every dinner table, every disagreement, every after-school activity was quietly preparation for the rooms their children would one day need to occupy.
Working-class parents practiced natural growth. Children were loved and given freedom, but the lesson underneath everything was: respect authority. Stay out of trouble. Work hard and wait.
Neither is a wrong way to love your children. But only one of them is the native language of every gatekept institutions.
My stepdad gave me things that cannot be taught in any classroom. He showed me what it looks like to show up completely, every single day, regardless of what the day asks of you. To be the quiet constant when everything around you is noise. I carry that in how I work. In how I refuse to quit. In the part of me that gets up early and figures it out.
But Sofia's father was teaching her something else alongside the breakfast conversations. He was teaching her institutional fluency. The assumption, absorbed so early it became structural, that she belongs in rooms like this. That her voice has weight before she has proven it. She just gets to arrive.
I had to learn that feeling from scratch. As an adult. In real time. In front of people who were already watching.
“Employees from lower socio-economic backgrounds take 19% longer to progress through grades, a larger disparity than those linked to gender, ethnicity, or disability. This study, covering 16,500 staff, identified socio-economic background as the strongest barrier to career progression.”
When I first read that statistic, something in me exhaled. Because for a long time, I thought I was just slower. Less ready. Still catching up. I was taking a structural gap and wearing it as a personal failing.
It was the room I was born into.
The Rules Nobody Told Me
Let me be specific. Because I think specificity is where this stops being an essay and starts being useful.
Humility can work against you.
I was raised to be grateful for what I had and quiet about what I wanted. It was a survival skill rooted in my culture. In a home where the emotional weather could change without warning, making yourself small was often the safest option. Don't “show off”. Don't add to the noise. Let your work speak.
I carried that silence into every performance review, every pitch, every conversation with someone senior. When I won, I called it "luck." I thought I was being charming.I thought I was being easy to be around. I didn't realize that in their world, my modesty looked like a lack of ownership. My seniors just saw someone who didn't understand the magnitude of what she’d built.
The little girl sleeping in the living room learns to take up as little space as possible. But the woman building a legacy in these glass towers has to unlearn every inch of that training.
Today I say: "I built the strategy. It returned X%. Here's how."
I had to rewire my nervous system to accept that stating a fact is not the same as being arrogant. It is simply knowing your worth. You need that clarity especially in rooms where decisions are being made about your future while you aren't there to defend it.
The salary I didn't negotiate.
I accepted my first offer without a word. It felt generous. I was grateful. I didn't know that the number on the table was an opening position, not a final answer. I didn't know the person sitting across from me was genuinely expecting me to push back.
When you grow up in a house where money is anxiety and asking for more of anything feels dangerous, you do not negotiate. You accept. You are relieved. You say thank you.
Sofia countered. She had watched her father negotiate since she was old enough to follow a conversation. She knew it was part of the process. She asked for more. She got it.
That gap, the one opened by not knowing you are allowed to ask, does not close. It compounds. Quietly, across decades, into something enormous. And it starts with one conversation where you didn't know you had permission to speak.
Networking felt like begging in business casual.
For most of my early career, it did. Walking into a room full of people who had things and performing friendliness until they gave some of those things to you. In my world, you don't trouble people. You earn your own way. The whole practice felt, if I'm honest, a little shameful.
What I eventually understood is that framing was entirely wrong.
I was looking for people who could help each other grow. I had spent years building a career in the belly of these institutions, proving I could navigate their systems as a dedicated professional who outworked the room. But I realized that my value goes deeper than my output. It goes deep into my roots.
When I walk into a room as a Malay woman with deep, lived insight into communities that the people in that boardroom will never meaningfully reach, I take up space. I am bringing a professional record backed by a perspective that can’t be bought, taught, or faked. I don’t need to beg for a seat at their table. I am building a table of my own, a circle of collaborators for a mission they don’t yet realize they need.
That reframe changed everything. But I had to arrive at it alone, and late. After years of walking into the wrong rooms with the wrong story about why I was there.
An estimated 70 to 80% of jobs are filled before they are ever publicly listed — through referrals, informal conversations, and networks built over years of proximity.
I spent so much of my early career refreshing job portals and wondering why applications disappeared into silence. Sofia was having coffee with people who already knew her name. We were not playing the same game. I didn't even know there were two different games.
The Part That Lives In Your Chest
There is a specific exhaustion that comes from having built stability out of instability. From having made it into rooms your childhood gave you no map for, and then spending every moment in those rooms managing the distance between who you are and what the room expects.
I have sat at work dinners, my pulse steady but my mind doing frantic calculations. Which fork to use. How to hold an intelligent conversation about the market while secretly monitoring the grip on my wine glass. I’ve laughed at references I didn't understand because, in that world, asking feels like a confession. It feels like exposing a gap I was supposed to have filled years ago.
I have watched myself disappear in real-time. I’ve adjusted my voice without even deciding to, making it slightly slower, slightly more careful, scrubbing of the rhythm of home. I only realize I’ve done it on the bus back, sitting in the dark, replaying the evening and wondering whose voice was coming out of my mouth.
That is the part that lives in your chest. The constant, quiet labor of translating yourself so you don't get lost in the transition.
Code-switching. Researchers have a name for it. It is the energy you spend translating yourself into the language of the room before you have spent a single unit of it on the actual work.
While I was managing how I came across, Sofia was focused entirely on getting ahead. She didn't know there was a gap to manage. It had never occurred to her that she might need to translate herself.
And then you go home. And the gap is there too. Just reversed. You earn differently now. You move differently in certain rooms. You have grown in ways that are real and difficult to explain to people who knew you before all of this. You are not fully at work and not fully at home, and there is a loneliness in that in-between space that nobody warns you is coming.
Researchers call it class identity dissonance. I call it the tax of moving up.
“Nearly 60% of working adults in Singapore have experienced imposter feelings, particularly among younger professionals and women.”
In elite institutions, the friction of being working-class, Malay, and female is cumulative. It creates a redundancy of effort: where Sofia simply exists, I must architect my presence, managing a complex matrix of cultural codes and systemic filters just to reach the baseline of participation
I was not imagining it. I was not being weak. The data had a name for what I was carrying. And I had been picking it up every morning and calling it my own fault.
What I Know Now
I want to say something clearly before I go any further.
Sofia's advantage is not her fault. She didn't choose her dining table or her father's title or the ease with which rooms opened before she'd earned anything. Having privilege is not a character flaw. Not knowing it exists is.
And I am not a victim of my upbringing. My stepdad showed me what it looks like to be a person of complete integrity when the circumstances give you every reason not to be. My mother, complicated and human and still mine, taught me by contrast what I refused to become and that refusal shaped me as much as anything else. The chaos gave me a hunger for stability that has driven every good financial decision I have ever made. I built because I had seen what it cost not to.
The room I was born into was hard. It also made me.
But I do wish someone had handed me the map earlier. So here it is.
Your background is not your ceiling.
The room you were born into shaped your first language, your first understanding of what people like you are allowed to want. It is a starting point, not a sentence. The gap in your knowledge is not a gap in your worth.
Learn the language of the rooms you want to be in.
Not to lose yourself. But to become fluent enough to move through them without spending everything on translation. There are people who actually transcend class. You don’t need to perfectly imitate the people who are already there. You just have to learn the code well enough to hack it, and then show up so fully, so distinctly you, that the room has no choice but to make space.
Build the network before you're hungry for it.
Find the people two or three steps ahead of where you want to be. Be genuinely useful before you need anything. And find the other first-generation professionals in your field. The ones who also learned the rules by breaking them, who also know what it costs to be between worlds. They will not need you to explain yourself. They already know.
Be kinder to yourself about how long this takes.
You are learning the game while playing it. That is harder. It takes longer. The 19% is not a measure of your ability. It is a measure of your starting position. You are not behind. You are running a different race on a different track, without the training Sofia received before she even knew she was being trained.
Do not confuse where you started with how far you can go.
The Room We All Deserve
Today, I’m where I’m at. Not because I was exceptional, but because I was so afraid of the alternative. I knew what it felt like to have no ground under my feet, so I became tactical about building it. The chaos did that. My stepdad’s 5am shifts did that. Learning from my parents’ mistakes did that.
I still code-switch sometimes. I still feel the friction of entering rooms that weren’t built with me in mind, that slight sense of wearing clothes that almost fit but not quite. I still carry things I am only now learning to put down.
But I know something now that I didn’t know when I was a child making herself small in someone else’s house.
The barriers were real. They had names. I wasn’t imagining the gap or being dramatic or making excuses. I was navigating something genuinely hard with fewer tools than the person sitting next to me, inside a home that was not steady, and I did it anyway.
If you recognize yourself in this, if you have ever felt the weight of a gap you couldn't name.
I need you to hear this:
You are not behind. You are not less. You are not broken.
You are learning the map a little later than some people did. And that is okay. The map still works, even when you had to draw it yourself in the dark.
So reach back when you get further along. Do not just walk through the door; dismantle the lock. Be the strategic leverage you never had.
Because this was never just about the titles we negotiate or the rooms we finally occupy. It’s about the signal we send back to the ones still in the chaos. For the children perfecting the art of staying invisible. For the ones on living room floors, absorbing the silence, quietly deciding they will find another way.
They need to know the map exists. They need to know that ambition is not a transgression.
We were born into different rooms. We will not die in them. And we will leave the lights on for everyone coming after us.
SOURCES
1. The Sociological Framework
Lareau, A. (2003). Unequal childhoods: Class, race, and family life. University of California Press.
2. The Economic Data (The "Class Pay Gap")
KPMG, & The Bridge Group. (2022). Social mobility progression report: Mind the gap. https://socialmobilitycommission.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Mind-the-gap-KPMG-Social-Mobility-Progression-Report.pdf
3. The Psychological Landscape (Singapore Context)
Well-Being Champions Network. (2023). Imposter syndrome in the Singapore workplace: Addressing the internal and external barriers to professional growth.
4. The Hidden Market Data
Fisher, J. F. (2019, December 27). How to get a job often comes down to one elite personal asset, and many people still don’t realize it. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/27/how-to-get-a-job-often-comes-down-to-one-elite-personal-asset.html
5. The Cognitive Tax (HBR Research)
McCluney, C. L., Robotham, K., Lee, S., Smith, R., & Durkee, M. (2019, November 15). The costs of code-switching. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-costs-of-code-switching
If this hit you somewhere real , share it. Send it to someone who needed it. These conversations are how the map spreads.
I'm Syainda. My last piece about buying a home at 21 started a lot of conversations. This is where we keep going.
