Hello there,
My name is Belinda (B).
I also use my Cantonese name Kit (Wai Kit) in some settings. Like at Starbucks, or when Thai people try to ask me for a ‘shorter’ name.
About ‘AWhitePen’
I am a “child of the internet”. When I first joined the “tech revolution”, we were talking dial-up modems, floppy disks and Windows 95. (Yes kids, sis was here before the dot-com-crash.)
As a beneficiary of the Singapore Ministry of Education’s (MOE) MP1 ICT initiative, I was trained from an early age to learn beyond the standard curriculum and to draw on the internet’s collective intelligence. By age 12 – I was already tearing apart CPUs and putting them back together, guided largely by the wisdom of strangers on the internet.
I took from the internet, but I also contributed back. In the earlier days of the web, I spent much of my time on forum sites, discussing technology and current affairs — mostly with people at least 10 years older than me. Over the years, I cycled through various online monikers: “HappySoul”, “Boney”, and “WhitePen”.
WhitePen started as a description of my online behaviour: I would often write something, then tuck another layer underneath in small white text (or whatever the background colour of the site is) — a side comment, an easter egg, a hidden punchline, a trace of sarcasm for anyone curious enough to look. You’d have to highlight all my text to find these snippets. old habits die hard
It has been almost fifteen years, and I still use WhitePen. These days, it also means more to me than just an old internet habit. It has become a way of describing who I am, and perhaps who many of us are: not always the loudest voice in the room, not always the most immediately visible, but still here, still speaking, still leaving a mark. WhitePens become visible when the surrounding environment gets dark.
The internet is not really a game of fighting to be the loudest voice in the room. It is about speaking your truth, finding your people — however few — and living your life as fully as you can.
Also, I couldn’t get whitepen.com, so I added an “a”. lol. On hindsight, that may have been better. Not the WhitePen — too much ego. Just a white pen, one among many.
Why ‘keep peaking 🏔️’?
I grew up around high achievers, and I say this with full awareness of the privilege in that. I was in the same primary school class as Singapore’s top O-level scorer, and set up my first actually-profiting “bookshop” business at age 10 with someone whom I later learnt went on to do a PPE at Oxford.
Yet somehow, I kind of kept lagging behind.
At age 17, I spent so much time building on the internet (building ≠ Roblox kiddos) that I wasn’t doing well enough academically to get into a local university. Physically, I was so weak that I barely ran 2km of a 10km race.
I also came close to not completing my undergraduate degree, largely because of a principled disagreement over a certain form of “medical treatment”. I maintain today that my argument is logical, fact-based, and well-intentioned… that’s a story for another day.
But life has turned out to be longer, stranger, and less linear than that.
Today, my Garmin thinks I can run a sub-1-hour 10K. I have also somehow made my way back to a ‘local’ university and completed my master’s there. And for the first time in my life, I can farmer’s carry not one, but two 6L bottles of drinking water up to my room every week. Bonus points: I still have a full head of black hair and can probably pass for someone in my 20s, provided I do not reveal that I remember Nokia phones.
Some people peak early. That ship has sailed for me; I can only play the long game now.
belinda | keep peaking 🏔️ is the internet signature that I use for my public IG, TikTok, Threads, Mastodon, and X accounts as I continue documenting the ongoing project of one-upping my yesterday’s self.
Life is not about peaking once. It is about continuing to climb — even if you have to pause, recover, reroute, or start again.
Beacons link to my online self here: https://beacons.ai/awhitepen
Life Motto
The principles I’ve tried to live by since I was 22:
自强不息
随遇而安
扶贫除恶
Back then, I would write this down with a pen on paper every day before I headed out for work.
This only lasted 6 months 💩
Google or AI translate if you don’t read Chinese. This is the 21st century.
🧐 Still Curious?
My ex and some long-time friends would occasionally refer to me as ‘robot’, so here’s the full specification sheet: https://www.awhitepen.com/about-specs/
Apparently very INTJ according to multiple sources, including 2 exes completing the questionnaire on my behalf 🤷♀️