The Architecture of a Held Breath Part 1
It starts with the teacup.
My Ah Ma’s teacup, thin-walled and translucent as a winter moon, sits on the edge of the rosewood table. It’s filled with oolong, the steam rising in a ghost-dance that fogs the windowpane overlooking the monsoon drain. My hand, slick with the humidity of a Singaporean afternoon, reaches for it. And for a fraction of a second, my fingers falter. The cup wobbles, a tiny, almost imperceptible tremor.
And in that space—the space between the wobble and the steadying—the world stops.
My breath catches in my throat, a knot of air and fear. The distant hum of the air-conditioner vanishes. The chirping of the mynah birds in the angsana tree outside goes silent. All that exists is the precarious balance of porcelain on polished wood, a universe of memory and meaning held within its delicate circumference.
This is a feeling I know well. The held breath. It is the silent, unseen scaffolding I have built my life upon. For as long as I can remember, I have been the one who doesn't drop the teacup. I am the steady hand, the calm centre, the one who absorbs the tremors of my family’s world and holds everything still.
It's a role you don't apply for; you are simply cast in it. It begins with small things. Wiping away a younger sister’s tears after a scraped knee, translating a difficult letter for a grandparent, being the quiet one at the dinner table when tensions flare, a silent anchor in a stormy sea. Over time, these small acts calcify into an identity. You become the curator of your family’s composure, the emotional architect of its peace.
My Ah Ma used to tap my forehead gently with her wrinkled finger. “Goh Ling Yong,” she’d say, her voice smelling of Tiger Balm and jasmine tea, “you think too much. You hold the world on your shoulders like it’s a sack of rice. One day, you must learn to put it down.”
I never knew how. To me, strength was the absence of cracks. It was the flawless, smooth surface of this very teacup, fired and glazed to perfection. Resilience was the ability to withstand pressure without showing a single hairline fracture. To be vulnerable was to be on the verge of shattering.
And so I learned to hold my breath.
I held it when my father lost his business, the scent of insolvency clinging to his clothes like stale smoke. I smiled, I made tea, I said, “We will be okay,” and the air in my lungs turned to stone. I held it when my sister’s marriage fell apart, her midnight sobs traveling through the thin walls of our HDB flat. I listened, I nodded, I said, “You are strong enough to get through this,” and the exhale I desperately needed receded further and further away.
Each time, I built the architecture of that held breath a little stronger, reinforcing it with duty, with love, with a desperate, unspoken need to be needed. I became so good at living in that pressurised space between inhale and exhale that I forgot what it felt like to simply breathe.
The cup is steady now. My fingers, still trembling slightly, are wrapped around its warmth. The heat seeps into my skin, a gentle comfort. The world rushes back in—the hum, the birdsong, the low murmur of the television from the living room. It was a moment, nothing more. A slip.
But it has unsettled something deep within me.
Lately, the architecture has begun to feel less like a fortress and more like a cage. The silence inside the held breath is no longer peaceful; it is screaming. I feel the weight of every unspoken fear, every swallowed tear, every reassuring lie I’ve told myself and others. They are the fine, invisible cracks spreading across the porcelain of my own composure. I look in the mirror and see a woman held together by sheer force of will, and I wonder what would happen if I ever, for just a moment, let go.
What happens when the steady hand finally shakes?
This question follows me into the evening. I sit at my writing desk, the glow of the laptop screen illuminating the tired lines around my eyes. I’m supposed to be working on a new story, but the words feel hollow, brittle. How can I write about the truth of human connection when I am living behind a carefully constructed façade?
I think about the Japanese art of kintsugi—the craft of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold. The philosophy behind it is that the piece becomes more beautiful and more valuable for having been broken. The cracks are not something to be hidden, but something to be illuminated, celebrated as part of the object’s history.
The idea is both beautiful and terrifying.
To celebrate breakage. To find beauty in the flaw. It is the antithesis of everything I have ever taught myself. My resilience has always been about prevention, about avoiding the fall, about keeping the teacup from ever reaching the edge of the table. The thought of not only letting it fall, but of finding a deeper strength in gluing the pieces back together, feels like a betrayal of my very identity.
Who am I, if not the strong one? Who am I, if not the one who holds it all together? The questions echo in the quiet of my room, and for the first time, I don't have an answer. I only have the phantom feeling of a teacup wobbling, a world pausing, a breath caught in my throat.
I close the laptop. The blank screen reflects a face I barely recognise. It is a face etched with the silent, immense effort of holding on.
I stand up and walk to the window, pushing it open to the humid night air. The scent of rain-soaked earth and night-blooming jasmine fills my lungs. Below, the streetlights cast long, golden lines on the wet pavement, like seams of kintsugi on the dark asphalt.
For years, I believed resilience was a wall you built, brick by silent brick, to keep the world out. A perfect, impenetrable thing. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe resilience isn’t the wall at all.
Maybe it’s the space between the bricks. Maybe it’s the mortar, the messy, pliable stuff that holds the pieces together after they’ve been scattered. Maybe it’s the courage not to hide the cracks, but to trace them in gold.
I lean against the cool metal of the window frame and do something I haven’t consciously done in a very long time. I let go of the breath I didn’t even realise I was holding.
The exhale is not a rush of relief. It is slow, ragged, and uncertain. It feels like a foundation shifting, like a structure groaning under a weight it was never meant to bear. It is painful. It is vulnerable.
And in the pause that follows, in that quiet, empty space before the next inhale, I feel a flicker of something new. It isn't strength as I’ve always known it. It is lighter. Softer. It is the quiet acknowledgement of the wobble. It is the beginning of a permission slip to be imperfect, to be fragile, to be human.
It is the understanding that the most important part of the breath is not the holding, but the letting go. And then, the faith that you will, inevitably, breathe in again.
Connect with Goh Ling Yong
Follow for more insights and updates:
🔗 X (Twitter)
🔗 Instagram
🔗 LinkedIn
🔗 YouTube
🔗 Soundcloud
🔗 Pinterest
Thank you for reading! If you found this helpful, please share it with others.
📖 Read on Medium
This article was originally published on Medium. You can also read it there:
If you enjoyed this article, please consider giving it a clap on Medium and following for more content!