From loss and loneliness to love and acceptance: Model-actress Sheila Sim opens up to The Assembly
On The Assembly’s season finale, Sheila Sim bares her soul as she revisits the emotional scars from modelling, her brother’s death and how she has had to overcome years of self-doubt.
Model turned actress Sheila Sim recalling her earlier years, which were punctuated by heartbreak and hardship, on The Assembly’s season finale.
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SINGAPORE: One green apple a day — that was all Sheila Sim once ate for two weeks until she fainted.
She was 16 then and had signed up as a model when her agent told her to “go on a diet” as she was “too fat”.
“I lost a lot of weight, but I looked terrible,” recalled Sim, now 41. “I had no strength. I just couldn’t perform what I needed to do. … That was the end of my diet.
“I was clearly not fat, but it was just the cruelty of the modelling industry.”
The top Singaporean model, actress and life coach was speaking on as she opened up to its neurodivergent team about her body image struggles, childhood pains and her path to love and self-acceptance.
While her modelling career has taken her from Singapore to Hong Kong, Japan and Milan, self-doubt followed her everywhere and “affected basically every aspect” of her life.
“At the peak of my modelling career, I still felt very, very insecure, simply because in modelling, there’s an ideal … standard of what beauty looks like,” she said. “If I couldn’t fit into a dress, I’d blame myself.”
Endless auditions deepened that doubt. “Sometimes we go for 10 auditions, and you don’t even get any of the jobs,” she shared.
“It was only … in the last couple of years that I’ve started finding confidence and started feeling secure about myself.”
Her story struck a chord with one of the participants, Jireh Ko. The 34-year-old told her: “Only recently have I (become) more confident … in my own body.”
Having survived those years of modelling made a difference for her when she entered showbiz around the age of 30.
“I’d built a lot more confidence by the time I entered showbiz, which is also why I’m not very concerned with the kind of feedback or … comments that are sometimes presented to us,” she said.
“It can sometimes be very hurtful because they’re things that we can’t control.”
Things like aunties in the hawker centre telling her she looks fat on television but skinny in person.
A TURBULENT CHILDHOOD
As the conversation turned to her childhood, Sim recalled the constant arguments between her parents back then. “They’d argue about money, … where to go (and) what to eat — just everything,” she shared.
“(There) was a lot of unhappiness within my family at that point in time.”
WATCH: Sheila Sim on turbulent childhood and brother’s death with neurodiverse interviewers (26:53)
While her parents’ fights got physical sometimes, she stressed that “they never hurt us”. But she lived “in fear” and often cried. “I don’t think I coped very well,” she said.
She was thankful she spent a lot of time at her grandmother’s house, where “it felt safe”. And the two of them remain “very close”.
Her turbulent past, however, affected her long afterwards and even when surrounded by other people. “For a very, very big part of my life, I felt alone,” she said.
Her parents divorced when she was 12, and the court granted custody to her father — not that it was her choice then. “I struggled a lot,” she said, recalling how she was going through puberty and many hormonal changes.
One memory, however, still makes her laugh. The first time she had to buy sanitary pads, she was so shy that she asked her father for help.
“I’m sure he was very shy also,” she said, as her dad was a “tough, manly man”.
To go to a supermarket and to explore ‘wings or no wings’ (and) ‘how many centimetres’ (in length) he needed to buy, I’m sure … was all very confusing for him.”
But she “wouldn’t have it any other way”. Growing up with him has made her who she is — “more objective” and even “very masculine” in the way she talks.
“I’m also quite a handy girl. I’d fix electric bulbs. I’d like to fix my own Ikea stuff,” she said. “I have a really good relationship with my dad.”
Their close bond between them, however, complicated her relationship with his new wife. “You guys have read so much about me,” Sim said with a laugh when asked what made her accept her stepmother after 10 years.
“My stepmum is from China, … and back then, there were a lot of articles about how Chinese women would come to Singapore to scam the men,” recalled Sim, who was a “judgemental young child” thinking of her stepmother as such.
They often fought, and her father was “always kind of trapped” between them, she said. “What eventually made me accept her was the test of time. They’re still together, and she takes such good care of my dad.”
HER BIGGEST REGRET
The tone turned sombre when Josiah Yeap, who has global developmental delay, asked about Sim’s brother, Cedear, who died aged 14 from leukaemia when she was nine.
The family had discovered his leukaemia when she was seven and “too young to understand what cancer was”, she said. “I just didn’t understand why I was always going to the hospital to visit him.”
As the only match in the family, she donated her bone marrow when his condition worsened. “I was again in the hospital all the time,” she recalled.
But she was not in hospital when he breathed his last. And she “will always have regrets for that”, she said, her voice trembling, her eyes tearing up.
When his condition had become critical, the whole family was at his bedside, and her parents were discussing what outfit to prepare for his funeral wake.
“He loved LA Gear (shoes). But we didn’t have the money to buy (them) when he was alive,” she recounted, dabbing her eyes with a tissue. “So my father decided that we were going to get him LA Gear.
“I immediately volunteered because I just wanted to be out of the hospital, and so I went. And when I came back, he wasn’t there any more. … This will always be my biggest regret in life.
“I’d never know what he would’ve wanted to tell me, and I also didn’t get to say my goodbye.”
When Durkeswaran Krishnan, 19, who has cerebral palsy, asked what she would have told Cedear, she replied through her tears: “That I’m sorry for all the fights that we had.
“That he’s very brave to have put up a very, very, very courageous fight against leukaemia. And that I love him very much, and I’m sorry I never got the chance to show it or to say it when he was healthy.”
SWIPING RIGHT TO FIND LOVE
Tears turned into laughter when the topic of Sim’s love life came up. “You met your husband, Deon (Woo), on a dating app,” said Prithviraj Kumar Basu, 27, who has autism. “Were you desperate?”
She was “quite desperate”, came the amused reply. “It’s not that I didn’t get to meet people — I was always at work and … when I met people, I was usually very dressed up,” she said.
“I wanted to connect with someone on a very organic level first. And so I thought a dating app was great because then they don’t see me in person first.”
She hit it off with Woo, and things “progressed very quickly”. “The next day, we started talking on WhatsApp,” she recounted. “One week later, we met.
“Three months later, he got a ring, and then six months later, he proposed. And then one year later, we got married. It was very, very fast.”
They wed in January 2018 and have two children now. When Jacob Tan, 30, another participant with autism, asked how she knew Woo, now 44, was the one, she quipped: “I’m still not sure.”
But she knew on their first trip together — while climbing Indonesia’s Mount Rinjani. As she was underdressed for the climb, she was “freezing to death” halfway up the volcano.
“Throughout the whole trip, he was just so concerned about me, making sure that I was warm. He took off his jacket, he let me wear it, and he was carrying my bag,” she recounted.
“So that was the trip (when) I knew this was the man I’d marry.”
At the end of the session, Sim thanked her interlocutors. “(For) a lot of the questions, I think some of my friends may … not even know that part of me,” she said.
“All of you were here to just allow me to be vulnerable, to just be me and to just let my emotions flow. I really appreciate that.”
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