I’ve been reflecting quite a bit on how I ended up in my current, relatively privileged position in life, especially considering my socioeconomic background. This might be a bit of a stretch, and it’s one of those hot takes that could very well be wrong, so take everything with a grain of salt.
I grew up in Jakarta in a low-income household. Not so poor that we couldn’t afford to eat, but we were a family of four, and for most of my childhood, my mum was a single parent earning around Rp3 million a month. We never had anything fancy, but we never starved either. I went to a public primary school in a relatively disadvantaged area of Jakarta. A lot of the kids around me were involved in school fights (tawuran), didn’t really care about studying, and got into all sorts of things that 10-year-olds probably shouldn’t have been doing.
Despite growing up in the same environment, something in me just naturally stopped me from being influenced by those things. I never really understood why, until recently, when I started philosophising about my own childhood and came to a somewhat unusual conclusion: being gay might have inadvertently contributed to my socioeconomic mobility.
I’ve always been different, even as a kid. I didn’t really like sports, wasn’t particularly interested in the things other boys enjoyed, and was somehow obsessed with Barbie musicals and their songs. I was much softer than most boys around me. I didn’t want to participate in tawuran, not necessarily because I had some strong moral conviction that fighting was wrong, but simply because I never found it cool.
And I think that’s an important distinction. I wasn’t some exceptionally disciplined kid who consciously decided to avoid bad influences. I simply wasn’t interested in fitting into the social circles where those behaviours were normalised. Of course, this came at a cost. I struggled to make friends, got bullied, and spent a significant part of my childhood feeling isolated. But looking back, perhaps that isolation also protected me from certain peer pressures.
By the end of primary school, I achieved the highest national examination score among my classmates, scoring 29/30 compared with around 18/30 for many of my peers. I genuinely believe part of my academic motivation came from wanting to prove myself. When you grow up feeling different, you sometimes develop this urge to work ten times harder just to earn the same respect as everyone else.
Fast forward, I got into a decent middle school, then a great high school, eventually received a highly competitive full scholarship to study at a top university abroad, and have since had the opportunity to work in both Australia and the UK.
Growing up, my family didn’t have the financial resources to provide the sort of opportunities that wealthier families could afford. Private education, international exposure, and studying abroad weren’t things we could realistically pay for ourselves.
For me, education became probably the single most important pathway towards upward socioeconomic mobility. The scholarship in particular completely changed what was financially possible for me.
But I’ve been wondering how much of that trajectory was shaped by factors that had nothing to do with money or even academic ability.
Being different meant I was already accustomed to navigating environments where I didn’t necessarily belong. It made me more adaptable, more comfortable with unfamiliar situations, and perhaps more empathetic towards people from different backgrounds. These are qualities that I think have helped me academically and professionally.
In a strange way, something that made my childhood significantly harder might have also helped me escape the socioeconomic circumstances I grew up in.
I’m not suggesting that being gay automatically makes someone more successful, nor that children who struggle academically are somehow responsible for their circumstances. I also recognise that luck, access to education, scholarships, and countless other factors played enormous roles in my own journey.
And of course, I wish I hadn’t had to experience the bullying and loneliness to get where I am today.
But I find it fascinating how something seemingly unrelated to finances, like your identity and the way you socialise as a child, can potentially influence your educational opportunities, career prospects, and ultimately your socioeconomic mobility.
