As a teenager, my mom often chided me if she caught me watching Korean Dramas or giggling on the phone with my friends. “Get serious about school”, she’d say. As a solid B student, I didn’t see a problem–school was fine, I had friends, what more could I want? But every time I was criticized, I got more and more annoyed. It seemed like the only way to appease my parents and “get serious” was to eliminate joy from my life.
As I began studying harder, I unintentionally side-lined my friends. One less hour of video games was one more hour of grinding on the SAT, right? I worked twice as hard and I cut out all frivolous activities…yet I saw no improvement in my grades the following term.
Furiously, I scoured the internet for an answer – asking my only friend Google how to increase my productivity. To which I received a lame reply: “Take a 5 minute break. Perhaps go for a walk”, spat Google. How on Earth would a walk solve anything!?
Only now, after studying human cognition, do I realize how important happiness is to work performance. Taking a break here and there is hardly self-indulgent; in fact, it can actually improve psychological and physical well-being. In order to thrive, it is not enough to eliminate negative emotions such as sadness and anger, one must also give equal consideration to positive emotions.
Dr. Barbra Fredrickson of University of Michigan, one of the pioneers of positive psychology, asserts that positive affect broadens cognition while negative affect narrows cognition. To put this into perspective, imagine getting stranded in the forest; in a confrontation with a tiger, you would call upon the specific action tendency to make a split-second decision. Of course, it would be hard to come by any other solution besides running the hell away. But, upon removing the stressor of a wild tiger, one is allowed to be creative with how to go about evading a tiger if one stared them dead in the face, like making a trap or traveling with a bow and arrow. This example illustrates how negative affect serves to narrow and sharpen your attention while positive emotions serve to broaden your scope of thoughts and actions so that you can become a more socially integrated, creative, knowledgeable person.
Positive emotions serve many purposes; it is hardly an excuse to be self-indulgent. There are many reasons to set time aside to pay attention to your happiness. Here are just a few:
Positive emotions facilitate creativity.
The current literature shows that those who experience positive emotions are more likely to be creative, flexible in thought, and efficient in breaking down information.
In one study, participants primed with a happy video were more likely to list a greater number of things they wanted to do in that moment than those who were primed with a neutral or sad video (Fredrickson & Branigan 2004).
Therefore, being in a positive state of mind can allow more ideas to flow through your mind and make you more creative.
Tip: Try it out by listening to your favorite song or watching a funny cat video before a hard problem set. You might score higher!
Positive emotions facilitate faster recovery in anxiety-inducing situations.
Being in a positive state of mind prior to anxiety-inducing situations can lighten the physical and psychological impact.
One study showed that participants who watched a happy video prior to a stressful situation exhibited faster cardiovascular recovery than those who watched a sad or neutral film. (Fredrickson & Levenson 1998)
Tip: Maybe giggle at the Subtle Asian Mental Health meme page before opening up your final grades. It might lessen the anxiety.
Positive emotions can “undo” negative emotions.
Negative emotions can be “undone” by positive emotions, like a plus and minus sign canceling out. So when you are down, hit refresh by doing something to make you happy (Fredrickson & Levenson 1998; Fredrickson et al. 2000).
Tip: Try cheering yourself up from a bad day by doing an activity you like.
Over the years, as I have slowly incorporated this philosophy into my daily practice, I’ve noticed significant changes in my happiness and my performance. While I was a high school student under careful watch by my parents, I felt like I was not “allowed” de-stress. This caused me to bottle up two types of stress: school stress and the stress about releasing that stress. Oh boy, a double whammy!
But when I finally went to college, the changes I made to my life by introducing these techniques into my life were pivotal; I didn’t have to explain to my mother why I was scrolling Facebook on my down time; I didn’t have to quickly switch tabs if I heard footsteps near my door. I was able to set my rules about how to use my time. Given that I was a new college student, I will admit that not every decision I made was the wisest. However, through trial and error, I’ve been able to identify the activities that help me maximize my operating potential and be my happiest self at the same time.
So if you want to know the big secret to being successful, it’s that productivity isn’t entirely dependent on the amount of hours you put in–it matters what mood you are in too. I was skeptical of this at first, but like the phrase, “you’ve got to spend money to make money”. You have got to spend time to save time. Take a leap of faith. It won’t hurt to take some time out of your day to take that walk or bake that cake. In times of stress, just remember this: your work influences your mood as much as your mood influences your work.
Sources: Fredrickson B. L. (2004). The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 359(1449), 1367–1378. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2004.1512
Fredrickson, B. L., & Levenson, R. W. (1998). Positive Emotions Speed Recovery from the Cardiovascular Sequelae of Negative Emotions. Cognition & emotion, 12(2), 191–220. https://doi.org/10.1080/026999398379718
Fredrickson, B. L., Mancuso, R. A., Branigan, C., & Tugade, M. M. (2000). The Undoing Effect of Positive Emotions. Motivation and emotion, 24(4), 237–258. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1010796329158
About the Author
Leanna Duong
Leanna is one year from graduating from Vanderbilt University with a B.S in Cognitive Studies. Her positive experiences as a Crisis Text Line Counselor and research assistant have inspired her to pursue a career in therapy. She seeks to find her own way of shining light on the mental health struggles that come with a hyphenated identity.
Lately I’ve been reflecting a lot on culture and mental health.
There are definitely things stemmed in culture and tradition that caused me to struggle when I was a teenager all the way to when I was in University. I watched my parents work hard, physical labour jobs. I watched one come home at 10 p.m. while the other would leave for work at 10 p.m. for many years. As a result, I felt a lot of pressure early on in my life to become someone that could take care of my siblings and my family back home.
That’s what Filipinos do. We work hard for our family. It’s not necessarily a negative thing, but I did grow up thinking that I’d never get to be like my other friends at school. They planned on pursuing their dreams, travelling the world, and leaving this small city behind. Meanwhile, I felt trapped. And I was scared. What if I couldn’t become someone who could take care of my family?
I also suffered in high school and my undergraduate degree because of crippling self-doubt and self-esteem issues. This was a result of many things, including experiencing bullying and toxic relationships in junior high and high school. I had been insulted and gaslighted and abandoned by people I loved. I hated myself and struggled with suicide ideation. Yet I wasn’t able to speak up because I didn’t know how to. I didn’t know how to ask for help because I never had to — help with homework, help with university admissions, help with getting a part-time job, help with getting a scholarship — I handled it all on my own.
I handled learning about mental health and accessing therapy on my own too. I realized in order to become someone who is a good daughter, sister, and person — I have to take care of myself too. Pursuing my dreams and travelling the world is not selfish. It will help me be happy, and if I am happy, then I will have the capacity to help others be happy. I will be able to take care of the people I love.
I wanted the world to know this too. I started to speak out about my experiences with bullying, self-esteem, and depression as a youth mental health advocate. I spoke at fundraising events, I spoke to high school and university classes, and eventually I spoke on TV. And I spoke to my family about mental health.
I can definitely say that we didn’t handle the mental health talk perfectly right off the bat. We’ve all made mistakes. We’ve experienced crisis after crisis. We’ve all said things we regret. But, we are talking. We are looking out for each other. We support each other more and more each day. We’re educating ourselves. We are changing for the better.
This doesn’t apply to all Asian families or even all Filipino families. I know this. But change can happen. I am experiencing it with my family everyday. Culture is created by humans. We made it. We can change it. Try and define things in their language, in their terms. Take time, and take care.
By: Janice Ho
I was 18 when I had my first drink. Compared with my friends, I was late to the party, but I quickly made up for lost time. But let me rewind a bit and explain what had primed me to fall in love with alcohol the moment we met, and how I slipped down the insidious path of alcohol addiction.
My experiences of trauma began as a young girl. Although much of my childhood felt “normal”, I now realize that my family life was somewhat chaotic and my dad’s unpredictable behavior emotionally scarring. When my parents unexpectedly separated, my life took a turn for the worst. I was entering high school and already experiencing self-worth issues and depressive episodes. Now I also felt deeply betrayed and abandoned by my dad. As my mom and sister formed their own bond over a religion I couldn’t find my place within, I lost my sense of belonging with them too. I often exploded in anger, unable to make sense of or express the hurt, loneliness, and grief that plagued me, and home life became full of continuous conflict.
We had moved out on our own––my dad renting an apartment by himself––and had to go on welfare. And so began my life of working to survive, sometimes holding two part-time jobs while trying to be a normal high school student. I dated guys who would cheat, lie, manipulate, and disrespect me with their words, having learned as a young girl that my boundaries didn’t exist and that women ultimately served the needs of men. I felt unloved and unlovable.
Fast forward to my first meeting with alcohol. Growing up in downtown Toronto, I was immersed in the drinking and drug culture with my social circle of largely Asian friends and acquaintances. If I wasn’t downing shots and beers with them at nightclubs on the weekend, I was getting wasted playing drinking games at Asian karaoke bars during the week. Finally, all of the anxiety, anger, and depression that kept me locked in an unrelenting cycle of stress was put on hold as alcohol lifted me out of my miserable existence.
Or at least that was my romanticized view of it. The somber reality was that I continually found myself in questionable sexual situations with guys I barely knew and woke up to countless mornings of head-splitting hangovers. I’d find bruises on my body from falling in my drunken stupor, and blackouts in my memory of how my night had ended, leading to the morning call of shame when I’d have to fearfully ask a friend: “Did I do anything stupid?” And yet, I continued to drink.
I now understand the rational explanation behind what then seemed like nonsensical behavior. My brain had learned repeatedly that when I drank alcohol, it would experience a rush of pleasure from the abnormally high levels of dopamine that an addictive drug releases into the brain’s reward center. Chemically, my brain was being conditioned to continue seeking out this very desirable action of drinking.
However, with repeated drinking, the euphoric and relaxing effects of alcohol would diminish, and I’d have to drink larger amounts of booze just to get the same effect (tolerance). Meanwhile, my brain, in response to the unnatural and chaotic effects alcohol was subjecting it to, would attempt to bring itself back to a balanced state (homeostasis) by producing the exact opposite effects (withdrawal). As alcohol produced pleasure and relaxation, in its absence I would experience intense anxiety, insomnia, and the inability to feel pleasure, compelling my brain to reach for the only thing that would alleviate those painful feelings (craving): alcohol. This is the cycle of addiction that I had unwittingly forfeited all control to.
Back then, I didn’t know how addiction operated on a biopsychosocial level. I simply blamed myself for being fucked up and unable to make better decisions. Even now, it’s hard to know if anyone else was struggling with addiction because nobody ever talked about it. Feeling the stares of judgment thrown my way when I drank solidified in my mind that I alone had a problem. I didn’t want to keep drinking to escape my life, but I couldn’t seem to find a sense of peace anywhere else but with the bottle. Feeling disgraceful and shamed, I made countless promises to myself and others that I would never drink again––and failed every time.
When I was in my early 20s, I would endure a verbally and emotionally abusive relationship that further reinforced both my descent into addiction and the belief that I was unworthy of having anything better for my life. After our break-up, I started to drink whiskey at home alone every night to stave off my debilitating insomnia and the immense rage and helplessness I felt at the abuses my now-ex-boyfriend had inflicted upon me.
In my mid-20s, I reached my rock bottom. I didn’t know then how life would get better from there––I just knew I couldn’t live this way forever. Many of the environmental and social factors that had contributed to my propensity to drink gradually began to change. I distanced myself from my peers who were heavily immersed in the drinking and drug scene. I started dating a guy who for the first time brought stability to a relationship. I also worked hard to get accepted into a Master’s program that was my ticket out of the vicious cycle of dead-end jobs and financial insecurity I had been trapped in for years. My countless all-nighters in the library paid off: I received my acceptance letter to the Master of Criminology program at the University of Toronto in 2008.
That year changed everything for me. It felt––as it always had––that I had to work twice as hard as my peers to succeed, but I graduated at the top of my class. Graduating during the recession in 2009 felt like another setback, but I said yes to any work or volunteer opportunity that came my way and gradually moved up in my career. I gained access to some much-needed therapy through work benefits, and finally moved into an apartment that I could truly call home after years of constant moving and couch-surfing since leaving my family home at 19. My relationship with my family had improved over the years, and with newfound calmness and financial stability in my life, I was also able to find healing in returning to music, my childhood passion, and in simply resting my weary body and soul.
As my 30s continued, I ended what had been a beautifully grounding eight-year relationship with my boyfriend, and moved on from a rewarding eight-year career working in the criminal justice field. Both were no longer the right things for my life, nor was living in my home city. My heart longed to live more in nature. After years of going backcountry camping, I had learned that being surrounded by the trees, water, and earth was what brought me the most peace, and when I could feel like the carefree self I was never able to be. As my life became more than just about surviving, I was able to imagine and actualize these new possibilities for myself. I moved to a friend’s farm and herded sheep for eight months, and went solo traveling to the hills of Tuscany and hiking trails of Vancouver. I loved deeply in my next relationship, and after we parted I spent a few months in Central America living out another dream of mine––traveling abroad to experience life in other cultures––before COVID-19 took center stage in all of our lives.
But while much of my life had turned around, I hadn’t fully divorced myself from alcohol. I had never completely stopped drinking. I had never given my brain a chance to fully detox and heal. While it seemed that I could now better “control” my drinking because I was no longer getting wasted at clubs or drinking myself to sleep every night, I would time and time again return to using alcohol to self-medicate or drink more than I had intended to. Yet, everyone around me was still also doing it––albeit in a more sophisticated, grown-up way––and I was mostly able to pass off my drinking as unproblematic, including to myself.
As we entered self-isolation time, I felt nervous about how I might emerge in the post-COVID world after spending months alone with my trusted companion, alcohol. One night––on April 11––after days of trying to exercise the willpower to drink in moderation, I drank glass after glass until two in the morning, sobbing in my stress and loneliness. The next morning, I awoke hungover and emotionally wrecked. I knew then it was time to finally take a pause and examine the truth of my current relationship with alcohol.
I am now 97 days alcohol free, at the time of writing. I’m not entirely sure what the future will hold for my journey, but I have committed to not having another drink unless it is an intentional decision that is honest to myself. It has been empowering to better understand how alcohol has deeply impacted my brain and how I can begin to change my subconscious beliefs about drinking. And it’s also been challenging to face the painful feelings that have surfaced in my raw, sober state. There’s no hiding anymore from any of it.
But as my 38th birthday has come and gone, I reflect back on the tumultuous yet resilient life I have lived thus far. To know there is at least another 38 years left compels me to do whatever is needed to live out that time with more self-love and freedom from my traumas and self-destructive patterns. I have great hope as I hold on to the life experiences that tell me the seemingly impossible is more than achievable and to the unshakable belief that I am worth fighting for.
Janice Ho is a Korean-Canadian who was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario. She is currently a freelancer working in marketing and communications, copy editing, and qualitative research. Janice also hosts The Soul’s Work Podcast in which she shares about her current exploration of her relationship with alcohol, and other lessons learned from her self-development and healing journey. You can also connect with her on Instagram @janicehoimages or through her website www.janicehocreative.com.
Invisible
have you ever had someone look at you and not even see you?
look right through you like nothing is there— too unimportant, too inferior, too much a waste of space.
I start to notice that it’s not just me who’s invisible. other people who look like me are sometimes invisible, too.
I have been in a crowded room of White Americans, and the only people they talk to are people who look like them. maybe I’m wrong.
Above is a poem I wrote during one of my darkest times, and also during a time when I started focusing on my mental health. For many years, I’ve felt inferior and invisible among White people. I went to a mostly White high school, and in college, I joined a mostly White sorority which I now have left to focus on my mental health. In my life, I have never truly felt like I belonged. I was born in Vietnam and spent my elementary school years there, and then moved to Texas in middle school. I’ve always felt like I was stuck in limbo; too Asian for the Americans here, but too American for my Vietnamese family back in Vietnam. This caused me to be very insecure with my identity, leading to feelings of alienation, feeling unsure of myself, and self-isolation.
So, when did I start to focus on my mental health? In college, I finally felt like I found my place and started to become surer of myself with the help of friends who made me feel very accepted, and mental health counselors at the college. However, I still faced challenges that led me to spiral, become depressed and anxious.
During my sophomore year of college, I was denied an opportunity to an organization because one of its members mistook me for another girl who had bullied her. I was falsely berated, only then to later find out that they had the wrong person.
And during my junior year, I did a study abroad program. I applied for the program alone, with none of my other friends applying. I knew it was something that I wanted to do and I was willing to face any obstacles for the program. My worst fears came true in the few weeks. I had a hard time adjusting. I was lonely. I was not okay. I had left my whole life back at Babson–my friends, community, clubs and orgs, boyfriend–to go on this program, and now, I was miserable.
This was when I started taking my mental health very seriously. Over those few months, I found a local therapist who helped me through the transition period, and I started to self-reflect and build up my self worth a lot more. I started writing a lot. I wrote poetry, I journaled, I wrote all my thoughts and emotions down.
One day, I realized that I had so much writing material. I wanted to do something that would be bigger than me and be a big accomplishment that I could be proud of. The next step of my mental health journey: I started compiling all my stories into a book. I found an independent publisher, and together over the course of a year, we worked together to compile and polish up all the writing that I had done about my experiences as an Asian, woman, immigrant in the United States.
When my book finally published, I would say I was mentally healthy. I had kept up regularly going to therapy and also kept working on the thing that I loved and had passion for. So, this is the story of how I focused on my mental health :).
TW: r*pe, emotional abuse, grief
A major catalyst for both my life’s work and my own mental health journey was being r*ped twice within one year both abroad in Hong Kong and in Illinois. Two different people within the Asian diasporic community had harmed me; these two events within months of each other affected my everyday life still to this day. For months on end, I felt numb when it came to my own emotions. I was in a very deep, dark fog for a while because of the emotional abuse that my abuser put me through. For a while, certain Facebook groups didn’t feel safe because this person was there. I thought I had deserved this; goodness felt odd, well to be honest holding goodness still feels strange to me. I felt shame around the fact that others had harmed me twice. I blamed myself for months on end; I even had trouble telling my college best friend about both instances where I was violated. I self-sabotaged myself and my connections till I got help last July. Last July, I had clicked with a queer East Asian American woman therapist, who has been by my side since.
Within the two cultures I live between, silence remains a commonality. From unpacking my own survivorhood, I realize our families not only tend to have silence around mental health, but also sexual violence. From these experiences, I also understood how intra-community harm creates silence especially as I didn’t want to hold these people accountable at first because they’re part of my community. I was afraid to hold them accountable because of the stigma of coming out as survivor, the shame of the harm itself, and not being believed. This complicated feelings around my own community for such a long period of time, but I think in the long run transformative justice work will hold our community accountable.
I live with CPTSD, anxiety, and depression; quarantine has been far from easy for me as a survivor. I still have shame around how my abuser manipulated me, how my unchecked trauma spilled out into other meaningful connections I have, and affected the ones I hold close to my heart. Honestly, I grieve the parts of myself that are now transforming into something that serves me best. Lately, I’ve been addressing my own internalized ableism, the shame I still hold in regards to my own unchecked trauma, and internalized messages of “not being good enough” that I had grown up with. The silver lining in the harm that happened to me is that now I get to empower other Asian American Pacific Islander women and femme survivors to take space for themselves, voice the harms they’ve been through, and move forward in ways that serve them best. I envision API women and femmes no longer biting their lips if they wish to disclose who harmed them, transformative justice work for survivors if they choose to engage, and trauma-informed folks. By transforming ourselves, we transform our homes and communities.
I have always been a happy go lucky type of guy. Everyone would describe me as enthusiastic, optimistic, and radiant, so I have always ignorantly thought it would be impossible for me to suddenly fall into the hands of mental illness. This all changed when I got into an accident that almost took my life.
After the accident, I would have constant panic attacks every day. These would go upward from seven to eight anxiety attacks a day. I would freeze up and time would stop. My mind would go down a rabbit hole on how I would die. My positive inner voice disappeared and I was left with his other friend. All my negative thoughts were amplified.
Indulging myself in self help content has always been a hobby of mine because I felt like there was something wrong with me. I have never focused on that negative voice, but it was still prevalent now and then. After the accident however, it was almost non-negotiable having my negative thoughts around. I felt like I lost myself. I knew the only way to find myself again is to double down on self development. I began to meditate and read self help books and binge watched motivational videos.
Eight months after the accident, all the self development started to kick in. I had a sudden realisation and the determination to take responsibility for everything that happened. I was tired of everything that was happening in my life. All the meditation allowed me to the deepest darkest parts of my memories and confronted them. This led me to uncover the trauma I have experienced in my childhood. This also led me to the beginning of my healing process.
The biggest thing that has helped me through this process has been documenting and filming my process. This allowed me to internalize my thoughts and watch my own thoughts like a movie. It allowed me to be present with myself. Instead of keeping all the negativity inside me, I gave myself a safe place to experience my darkest thoughts and feelings just so I can let them go. I continue to make videos and share my story because that is my way to heal, but ultimately, it is also to provide perspective and share how I developed my mindset to overcome something I once thought I wasn’t able to.
In this process, I learned three major things:
I am not my thoughts, but I am a vessel of infinite thoughts. Infinite perspectives, thoughts, and feelings exist, but they are not alive. In order for these things to be alive, it needs an observer. I can’t control my thoughts, but I can control my focus. I have the power to give thoughts and feelings life.
Everyone is living life with the best resources they have. I have resented my mom for 21 years for all the abuse. I finally found the courage to confront her, then take full responsibility for everything that happened even though it wasn’t my fault. “What was the reason I resented her?” I asked. I really just wanted her to notice me and acknowledge I have feelings and I am hurt.
Lastly, I am responsible for everything in my life. My responsibility is my ability to respond. Things may not be my fault, but I get to choose how I respond to it. My mom owes me nothing. No one owes me anything, but I do owe it to myself to love myself and find my own self-worth.
In order to begin the healing process, it’s important to accept your feelings and thoughts, and allow yourself to experience what is meant to be felt. Sometimes, some things are just not meant to be understood. Allow yourself to feel. Only you can choose when you want to begin the journey of healing! Healing is just one way of doing it. Let’s choose to be the best you you want to live with! Thank you for reading.
Welcome to the Mental Health Mukbang, a videocast by the Asian Mental Health Collective. We’re so excited to begin this journey to explore and destigmatize Asian mental health with all of you. In our first episode, we explore some of our host’s experiences and definitions of Asian mental health. We hope you’ll join us again next week as we explore food, Asian culture, and why we chose to use a mukbang as a way to talk about mental health.
AMHC content (including this video) may include information provided by mental health professionals, but watching this video does not establish a therapist-client relationship. The views and thoughts expressed by the individuals are solely their own and do not reflect those of AMHC. Reliance on any information through the AMHC content is solely at your own risk. The information in this video is provided on an “as is” basis. This information should not be interpreted as professional medical or mental health advice. Please consult with your health care providers such as your physician or therapist if you have any questions about the topics being discussed.
Mental health, like many, has always been an elusive topic growing up. Being raised in Los Angeles by Taiwanese immigrants, I was always bouncing between Asian and Western culture. Trying to navigate those spaces and have a balance between those identities was only a distraction for a deeper struggle I faced. I am a transgender man.
For as long as I can remember, I always went through life seeing myself as boy, or now, a man. I dreamt as man. I envisioned my life as man. My birthday wishes were always to wake up as a man. That little voice inside my head? A man. I just never had the knowledge, resources, or words to express my experiences. This confusion and cultural messages I received about mental health was ultimately suppressed as I entered elementary school. Presenting myself in boyish clothes were only met with “that’s not appropriate,” “you would look cuter in a dress,” “girls shouldn’t act like that,” and my personal favorite, “it’s only a phase.” I didn’t know back then, but how I dressed was how I expressed myself and a cry for help. Unfortunately, it was just a lost cry for help. I gave up on this dream due to fear and the negative messages surrounding the LGBTQIA community. I preoccupied myself with my Taiwanese American identity and blamed my self-hatred on that one identity. I was suffocating under the pressure and messages to behave a certain way and achieve a certain level of success. I saw college as a way to escape and explore what I want and who I want to be.
As a first-generation college student, I was completely lost on where to even begin the process of applying to schools. However, my determination to leave home forced me to do my own research and motivated me to do well in school. As I entered undergrad with the mindset that I would immediately “find myself” and figure out what I wanted to do, I was met with complete disappointment. Instead, I just put more pressure on myself to answer the questions brewing inside. I wouldn’t find the answers to the questions I was so desperately trying to answer until the last quarter of my last year in undergrad.
It was the last quarter and I was graduating in a couple weeks. Everything seemed to have lined up as I was closing this chapter of my life. I found a major that I loved, enjoyed all that university life had to offer, I was traveling every week of the quarter, I lined up a job after graduation, and I was graduating. Then it just hit me out of nowhere. The timing felt right to finally accept that I am transgender. Everything after that realization fell into place and a huge relief was lift. I scrambled to get appointments lined up to start transitioning hormonally. My first shot was a day before graduation, June 15, 2018.
And here I am now, 24 years old, living my dream, thriving, traveling, and eating tons of amazing food along the way. In Asian culture, it seems as mental health problems are synonymous with “weakness.” I’m sure like other fellow Asians, the message that weakness is not to be accepted was hammered into our mindset. However, I strive every day to break this toxic message and remind myself to be kinder to others and myself. There is no shame in seeking help. We shouldn’t feel guilty about our wants and needs. And we shouldn’t have to go through those experiences alone.
I’ve always considered myself a mentally healthy person.
Being the first-born son in an Asian family certainly helped with that; revered by my parents as the golden child, I was “the” role model for my younger brother in all the expected ways – academically, athletically, behaviorally -, and had so much taken care of for me. In fact, I am still fortunate in a lot of ways, but this current quarantine has given me time to reflect on myself, and my mental health, which had never really been a consideration up until recently.
Growing up I had a lot of self-confidence – I always liked the way I looked, I performed excellently in class, and I made it a point to try and get along with everybody. To this day I am still very much a people-pleaser; life is best when I am interacting with others and making them laugh, or supporting them in their creative endeavors.
But when stay-at-home orders were put in place, so many engagements were taken away; for me, my daily face-to-face with my coworkers ceased, and all the conventions I was looking forward to throughout the year slowly dropped or ultimately canceled. I haven’t stepped outside in two months, and have had to look to other means for spending time with friends. Thankfully, my main hobby has translated easily to digital, and we are lucky enough to live in an age where social media can keep us more connected than any time before. But this isolation has forced me to look at myself the past couple years through a different lens.
All the way through university my schedule was so full I never took the time to reflect on how I was feeling; I spent a fifth year pursuing my degree because of an intercollege transfer, and tried to make up the lost time with odd jobs around campus upon graduation, picking up every shift I could. I loved spontaneous plans when everything was walkable within a few blocks and living in those moments, but I never really knew what a mental vacation was to really appreciate where I was as a whole: so much of my formative years in life had been pursuing “the next thing” that this quiet we are now in was uncomfortable at first.
The whole world was rocked when quarantine stripped away normalcy, and I was furloughed from my job as the situation escalated. Like many others who found themselves in a similar position I’m sure, I took advantage of my new availability to consume all the entertainment I couldn’t with a regular schedule. But eventually that grew stale. A couple weeks ago I was informed that my department was let go, and now I spend too much time feverishly checking apps to find some kind of conversation.
This probably stems from the biggest thing lacking at home: communication. My family never really took time to discuss or process emotions together – the only thing that came up at the dinner table was the news or neighborhood gossip between my parents. Then everyone would break apart to our own spaces for our own responsibilities/activities – homework, games, TV, etc. There was always a distance, or fear, that bringing up anything remotely more meaningful than trivialities would be received with disinterest, or that we would be dismissed for being too sensitive, even though statistically this deliberate time together should bring us closer.
I do not believe that any of this was intentional, and it is very possible I may have felt something that wasn’t entirely there. I could have tried to lead those conversations. But expression was not a familiar concept, I imagine because the households my parents grew up in were the same. Lack of understanding sometimes reared itself when cases of depression or transgenderism surfaced and they simply didn’t know how to process these things. To their credit, those topics were completely foreign to them and not anything they had ever had to navigate before, and they have gotten much better about everything in the last few years. But that is why I value friends, whom I can talk with about anything, and from them learn so much more about the world.
Getting through 2020 has been made so much easier for me because I have people I know I can relate to, and feel like I can be heard by. People I can share insights, exchange perspectives, and trade laughs with. I’ve learned through them that everyone has their lifetime of experiences before I was ever in the picture, and to accept that. That there is no need for special sensationalism and to simply treat everyone as a person. And that bonding over even the smallest things is a gateway to understanding them, and myself, better.
Having always considered myself an extrovert, this time of social distancing has shown me that I can get along on my own better than I thought. Though I miss congregating in the same place as my family and friends, I have realized how much more I have enjoyed physical and mental space to myself and doing things on my own time than before. Setting boundaries and registering that nobody owes me anything has been a tough lesson for me to learn, but ultimately one in the right direction.
This journey into mental health is ongoing – and not just my own but how to respect others’ as well. Empathy is without a doubt my biggest area to improve, because there are plenty I cannot relate to. But surrounding myself with people who have experiences different from mine, and being open to hearing and learning from them, has been instrumental in better grasping how I respond to the world and how I should best respond in turn. There is no playbook of easy answers for any given situation, no prescribed code of conduct, but I have learned best from example, by observing and internalizing the ways people I admire manage.
These are some things that have worked for me, and I don’t want to pretend that they are the only way to master mental health; far from it. In fact, after all these ramblings, I think it is obvious how new I am to it, but I am okay with that; there is plenty to discover, both about myself and others, and finding new ways for keeping myself well excites me. Perhaps the most hopeful part of all is that how we take care of ourselves, and communicate it to others, will grow and change with us; though the future may not always be kind to us, we certainly can be kind to each other.
I had always been numb. I felt like a machine that devoured knowledge and produced perfect grades. And absolutely nothing else, including my happiness, had the space to exist.
For the longest time, I felt that sharing my emotions, my struggles, and my real feelings is unwanted and off-putting. I worked hard, crushed my goals, and bothered no one in my life. I had it together, but I was not happy.
It took a long time but gradually I learned how to be nice and kind to myself. I valued my own emotions, imperfections, and struggles. I took time to care for my happiness and spiritual pursuits. I started to have courage to let the genuine and true me shine through. Surprisingly, I found that my life actually became better with acknowledgement of my messy emotions and imperfections.
It is not easy and it takes a long time. Wherever you are with your own journey and continuum, know that you are already good, brave, and valuable enough!
