The One Step Story

It’s been slightly more than a month now. Slightly over a month since I made the most difficult decision of my life.

I had so many people text me to ask me whether I am okay, asking me why I made this decision, why this happened. On the surface, to people who didn’t know the back story, to people who weren’t me, this was an immensely rash decision. We launched a new arm of One Step on Wednesday and announced that we were shutting down with immediate effect on Friday.

It’s been more than a month since this entire chapter of my life came to a temporary close, and I genuinely thought that it would be so much easier to write about, but boy am I wrong. This post is more difficult to write than I thought it would be, but let’s just try and let’s see how it goes.

So let’s dive into this story shall we.

This part of the story, many of you would know. One Step started of as a little idea I was interning in school being a school teacher, but also doing a little freelance promoter work. However, this promoter job happened at a time when the COVID situation was getting worse day by day. So, I was working at Takashimaya, a place where human traffic was supposed to be good, but because of the pandemic, Takashimaya was comparable to a ghost town. There were barely any customers, and the people I saw most were fellow promoters. This wasn’t great because I wanted to see what it was like to promote items and sell them, but it also left me with a lot of free time to think.

I started thinking about how I could keep in touch with my students after I finished my internship. You see, I was falling in love with being a teacher in school. Interacting with my students energised me and I loved seeing the spark in their eyes when they finally understood a concept. I loved bantering with them, even chasing them for homework.

Being with them everyday also prompted me to think back about my own school journey. They were memories that I buried deeply within me, I mean i wasn’t even really thinking much about school since I graduated. But then I remembered. I remembered all those frustrating nights I spent pouring over pages of notes and worked examples, trying to find some parallel and to figure out how exactly to solve the problem in front of me. I remembered crying for an hour the night before my physics paper, having a meltdown because of how much I was lacking in confidence. I remembered all that pain and I thought about how my beloved students might just be going through the same thing as I was, and that killed a little on the inside.

And that was the inspiration for the birth of One Step. I was blessed to be in this teaching internship with four other passionate souls. The core team literally came onboard the moment I pitched them the initial rough idea. I had no details, but they came onboard amidst talks about hello panda pyramids and how we were decorating our desks in school. And I an eternally grateful to them for it.

Just like that, the five of us came together. We didn’t have zoom premium then, so we Skyped every week. I still remember our very first meeting. I had just finished Lifesaving training and I was on the way home. I Skyped them on the bus and we started talking about the project, ironing out details, recruiting more of our friends. And that was just the beginning.

As we started to push out publicity material and as we started to write our stories, so many people came onboard. At our peak we had more than 30 volunteers, that was more than 30 people who had the heart to serve the student community.

I’ve said this so many times and I’ll say it again. One Step was not a Home-Based Learning initiative, but I’m glad we got on track in time to support the students when HBL started.

When Circuit Breaker came, I remember that that marked the period when I had the most interrupted sleep. I had no reason to get up early, so I tended to sleep in. But questions sometimes came in at 7 or 8am, so I got used to rolling over to check out the question, acknowledging the message, and getting the process of connecting a volunteer to the student started. My sleep had never been more interrupted, but I never slept better, knowing that despite my interrupted sleep, out there was a student who didn’t have to face the kind of frustration I faced because they found someone to help them.

One Step gave me the opportunity to reach out to so many other students. Students who were facing problems with their friends and needed some advice or a listening ear. Running the project was, no is, still is one of the most fulfilling things I have ever done. Sure I was exhausted, chasing down people for content, chasing down people for response, looking at rows and rows of data, figuring out what other content we can and need to push out, analysing every conversation to help our volunteers improve in their skillset, dealing with difficult students. Sure I was exhausted, but that exhaustion meant something. I saw the impact we were making and it wasn’t like I was doing it alone. I had the best team I could ever ask for.

We launched the project in March and the next three quarters of the year was so immensely enriching for me. We had no funding, no organisational support, but we made it. We had episodes of people wanting to collaborate with us. We were small and new, we had minimal media presence and we had offers from organisations that looked like collaborations that ended up feeling more like we were going to be subsumed. We had collaborations with individuals that lasted less than a week because they couldn’t handle the intensity. But we made it. The waves were rough at times, but with a team so fantastic, we kept our little sampan stable for our students.

I know what this sounds like, it sounded like a really rosy picture. Everything seems to be going great, so why is One Step closed down? Hang in there, this is where shit started to go down. I have made every effort to not name the individuals involved, but if for whatever reason you know who this is referring to, or if you are the one reading this, then sure. I make no apologies for what I write. This is what it was like to me. If you want to have a conversation about this, I am open, but also know that this is not a fully healed scar. It will take a lot out of me to talk about this to you, so just give me advanced notice so that I can prepare myself.

Part of One Step’s long term vision was to be a sustainable project. This meant that the core team envisioned that the initiative should be able to carry on running without us. For me, One Step is more than a project, an initiative. One Step is a brand. I wanted to be able to venture out into more things, diversify the One Step story, but that meant handing our flagship operations over to a new team to manage. So that was what we did. In December, we interviewed and interviewed people who were interested in joining our little family. Eventually we found our top 6 candidates. Three of them had experience running their own initiative, and the team genuinely thought that that put them in a good place to carry on writing the One Step story. All 6 did well at interviews, giving me promises and painting me rosy pictures.

When we did our internal handover with them, they gave us a pitch in return. They pitched to us a project they were working on, and described plans of which One Step could collaborate with the new project. Again, it was a subsumption masked as a collaboration. December was a difficult time for me personally. I knew that if we handed over One Step to these people to manage, there would be no more One Step. But I so wanted to believe that they were the best people to take over and to bring One Step to new heights. I wanted to spend 2021 expanding One Step and I wanted to live out the One Step vision of handing over. It was a lot of painful days, a lot of painful conversations, even an emergency meeting with my mentor to figure out what I was feeling and why I was feeling, but we eventually decided to kick those three people out of the team. My new team of 6 was then a team of 3.

We believed in the team of 3, trusting that they could handle it, so we proceeded to merge some departments and to carry on with the handover as planned. I though we had a close shave with the 3 who wanted to join the team for all the wrong reasons, and I thought that things could only get better from then on, but little did I know, this was only the start of my nightmares.

One Step welcomed the new year with a new team managing her. But the new team really just was not ready to manage her. Despite our somewhat frequent check ins with the new team, content just wasn’t being pushed out. Volunteers were not being activated because there were no questions. The main goal of One Step was never to push out content, but pushing out content helped our students to know that we were there, and that we were not a dead Instagram page. Actively posting content helped our students know that we are actively managing the account and that encouraged them to ask us questions. This was something the new team either couldn’t understand, or couldn’t handle. In the three months that they managed One Step, they released a total of 2 content posts, the third was only released close to a month after they handed One Step back to me. From my perspective, there was no ownership. They wanted to take over One Step and call the project theirs, but there was no ownership. They didn’t believe that it would continue to be a success and when that intrinsic believe is not there, the only thing that can happen is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So towards the end of March, I decided to take over operations of One Step once again. I watched as content bottlenecked for months and every week, I watched our follower count drop. I cannot emphasise this enough, but my concern wasn’t that we were losing followers. I was concerned because that indicated to me that our students were starting to think that we were a dead and inactive page, and that’s why they started to unfollow. When you lose your audience, then who is your initiative for?

Taking over once again was a whole other challenge in itself. I first had to find people with the skillsets I needed, and more importantly, with the heart I needed. My original team were occupied with other aspects of their lives and they couldn’t come back to save our baby, and I understood. In December, we were prepared to hand over and not have to do what we did in 2020 in 2021, and I understand.

But jump starting a momentum that had been non-existent for three months was so much more challenging than I thought it would be. Despite my best efforts, the team morale had already been affected. The lack of pushing on the new team’s end was like a poison that had already spread to the rest of the team. Deadlines were never met, even when they were set in consultation with the ones in charge of the task. It was also a challenging time because the team didn’t share my heart for the initiative. They couldn’t understand why I pushed so hard for new arms to be rolled out and I guess, in their eyes, I was rushing through it and pushing out half solid information.

At some point, it genuinely felt like I was dragging a dead horse.

Like I said in my post on my personal account, I acknowledge and believe that life will always be full of suffering, and it is just a matter of what you are willing to suffer for. I never doubted my willingness to suffer for One Step, but something had to come out of the suffering. The problem One Step was facing, the ditch she was in, it was something that I could not manage on my own. I needed a team with the same heart I had, but I didn’t. The problem was that to bring One Step back to life, it was a challenge that was bigger than me and there was only me.

So the decision to close down One Step was not a rash one, although it might look like it. It was half a year of things not going well, half a year of things not looking like it’ll do well anytime soon. If I’m being honest, One Step should have shut down in December, she should not have seen 2021. But I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to her then. I still had big plans and an idealistic hope that the people we chose could handle what she was. I was wrong. She had grown into something bigger than what they could handle, what I could handle.

In the days following the big announcement, I received messages from people in the team wondering why this decision was made, I received messages from people who used to manage One Step hoping for the inside scoop, I received messages from our students thanking us for the past year or so of us being there for them.

The first 2 types of messages I hated. The first type I didn’t know how to answer. These are people who aren’t in the know of what was going on, so how was I going to explain it all to them. The second type, I also didn’t know how to answer. I made my peace with the fact that they ruined the momentum, but how do you explain to someone the role they play in the demise of your child. One Step was my child.

The third group of messages broke me. I questioned whether I made the right decision. I questioned whether things would have gotten better if I just pushed on a little more. I questioned, because hearing from our students how we have helped them made me think about how much more we could have helped if we continued on.

Everyone was asking me why One Step closed, but what they didn’t know was that when One Step shut down, so did a part of me. Summer break was a time filled with many camps and orientation activities. No matter what I was facing in my personal life, I had to put on my OGL/facilitator face every morning and bring my participants through the camp. They shouldn’t have a subpar experience just because my personal life was a mess. So with that, I numbed myself with activities and meetings throughout summer, and I only really started to feel the brunt of the emotions this past week, when life finally calmed down.

The past week had me lying in bed, not wanting to get up. It had me scrolling mindlessly on Tik Tok. It had me questioning what I am doing with my life. The previous post was a glimpse of what my past week was, it was feeling empty, like I lost my purpose in life. I didn’t feel like doing anything, binging Netflix shows, talking to people, even writing, what usually gets me out of my slump, I didn’t feel like doing that. I experienced random bursts of highs and energy, but that quickly crashed into feeling an overwhelming sense of nothingness.

Today, as I ride on this ‘high’ and force myself to detail out the One Step story, as I force myself to process what happened, I hope to get started on my journey to reclaiming my purpose in life. I might have lost my spark again, but that’s just scatterbrained me. I’ve lost it before, I’ve found it, and I will find it again. One day, I will find something that will make me want to sit in bed at 4am to look at data again, and it will not be because I have to finish an assignment for school.