My Mental Health Journey Pt. 2 (Performance)

A lot of our mental health stems from our childhood experiences and in-bond temperaments, which is a fancy word for our parents raised us as a child. Depression and anxiety can tell us there’s incongruence with our internal value system and our surrounding environments. Of course it doesn’t feel good, but there’s a way to better align your internal processing with what your current situation has to offer.

TL:DR

• Intergenerational trauma ingrained a survivalist, performance mindset into me as a child
• Knowing your family narrative helps you contextualize your motivations, value set, and performance mindset
• It was well intentioned to guardrail me against things that were detrimental toward my development
• Comparison mindset can be broken down — why are you comparing?
• Processing rejections is more emotional than logical, however the painful emotions you feel are not your identity

As I mentioned in my Mental Health Journey Pt. 1, I’ve always wrestled with achievement and performance-based worth. My story stems from an immigrant household where my dad was an extremely high performer that willed himself to from China to America via higher education and provided a better life for my mom and I (pictured below).

Intergenerational Trauma

Some backdrop for my immigrant story. My dad grew up in the cultural revolution in China where much of the family business / land was stripped from his family. He was an outcast because of his previous societal status and endured persecution. His way of coping was to become stoic and absorb it and move on. Education and opportunities for a better life were scarce and he was relegated to working on a farm and all the ‘in our day’ stories ensued. Survival mode was real.

Once he was able to get out of the country side and back to school, he took full advantage of it and climbed to the top ranks. He claimed to be #1 in his class every year, even getting an opportunity to go to the Harvard of China (Tsing Hua 清华大学) but turned it down because Universities were literally JUST FORMED during that year and nobody knew the future of education at the time. (This would be my family’s biggest what if)

In contrast, much of my childhood was filled with sheltered, innocent carefree days in the suburbs being a good, obedient kid for my parents who were busy working restaurant jobs and finishing Masters programs to provide stability for me, gratefully. I was relegated to taking care of myself as an only child hence developing internal guardrails were important to my survival. Education was a highly valued pursuit and my dad really believed in hard work and intelligence carve a lane in the US as an immigrant.

I could remember how ecstatic my dad was the first time he landed his first software engineer job (pay back then was measly compared to what it is now). We celebrated our first step towards the American dream and bought a brand new 1996 Camry and rented a two-story townhouse. We were like royalty, coming a long way from their derelict city conditions in China and rural farmland upbringing. Understanding your family history and narrative is very important in healing your intergenerational trauma. My origins came from nothing where our family was trying to reclaim what we once had.

Childhood Trauma

My childhood was mixed with a balance of firm discipline and playful reward. The classic asian-immigrant family school performance adage was more subtly impressed on me. There were times when I did perform well in school and I received love, attention, and gifts. At times when I struggled or underperformed I had a scolding and a banishment from video games or toys. I remember a Saturday morning in 7th grade when I got a mix of A’s and B’s on my report card and a stern scolding from my dad to try harder and improve my grades. He claims he doesn’t remember it now as I brought it up, not as confrontation, but a retelling and reclamation of my childhood. I however had it etched in my memory and built an internal reminder to ensure this admonishment doesn’t happen again.

Personally I never had the degree of tiger parenting my friends had when they specified A’s and not A-’s, but in Asian culture, we normalize and even glorify abrasive, tough-love parenting at times. It’s definitely well intentioned to push us to the forefront of survival to ensure we will have a future as a minority in a foreign land. It may even be a reflection of achievement values our parents had, having came to a foreign land. However, this doesn’t mean it’s right nor should we perpetuate it.

As a consequence, I internalized this performance driven culture as an adult where if I wasn’t doing something productive, I would unintentionally invalidate myself. I associated my internal safety zone with achievement and advancement. Any deviation would put my mental and emotional state in a feel bad, time-out corner. At a young age, unbeknownst to me, my core identity was being formed. Performance and achievement were being ingrained into my DNA.

In the middle of my maturation process, college was challenging but I was able to build resiliency. Academically I struggled to reproduced the previous successes I had in high school taking challenging classes and picking a business school major that wasn’t intuitive for me. As a result I honestly never felt worthy or second class citizen unless I had a semester where I was killing it in school ensuring I had a bright future.

Adulthood

Fast forward to adulthood. I somehow made it through graduation and job searching and landed in NYC from Michigan. I had this preconceived notion that a good or even successful career is mostly upward mobility, increasing prestige / recognition, and earning more income — a binary up or out view of things. I had dreamed of being heralded as a hero at work solving key integral problems unlocking the full potential of the role.

Despite initial challenges, I made it work and things started turning around. I found a role with the perfect manager for my temperament and was one of the best things that happened to me. I had network of people advocating for me and my work. I focused on gaining skills and experiences as opposed to end results. I found patience with myself as I realized I was going to survive. I was going to be ok.

However, as my career progress, I wrestled with so much social comparisons with my friends that had certain titles, prestige, and ridiculous salaries. I wanted a change and tried to make a switch to Tech. The switch to a more technical role was the most challenging thing I had to overcome. After a sequence of brutal rejections, I had the sober awareness to take a step back and fill in the skillset gap through grad school.

Healing

Much of life is an open-ended question for you to define your values and make choices that align and reflect those values. I realized social comparisons were part of my internal navigation system to determine:

• Where should I be going with my career?
• How fast I should be pacing?

The first question I answered by digging deeper into my identity, interests, and passions. After solitude and deep reflection I recalled humanitarian interests back in college and that’s evolved into my calling and purpose in mental health (hence me writing this). I found my own set of values and started looking internally to the future best self of me as a role model. I was trying to conjure up 30, 35 year old me to ask for wisdom and life advice.

I’ve spent a lot of time reframing happiness as doing the things I enjoy within my control as opposed to working for the achievement and validation that was out of my control. I focused on enjoying the present moment. My internal monologue was deconstructed from:

• How am I living my best life? (which implies I’m not)
• How am I living my life the best I can?
• How am I living my life?
• How am I living?
• How am I?
• How? (jk)

The second pacing question made me re-evaluate my late 20’s timeline. I decided to invest 2–3 years towards the end to set myself up for success in my 30’s. Going to grad school to get the skillset transformation and investing in therapy and healing made the world’s difference. This is one decision I’m very proud of. I realized I was never going to catch up to my peers’ timeline given their unique circumstances so I gave up trying to live their life as a sign of validation that I’m living correctly. I just lived my own life.

In effort to heal from rejections, I remember my therapist asked me if I had worth? “Not even a little,” I replied. Does a baby had any worth? “Of course,” I replied. I’ve heard that rejection is like taking a physical punch to the gut given how much you put yourself out there to sell yourself. It’s obviously not personal, but that’s a logical argument. Processing rejection is more emotional. Rejection was like an internal flare that told me I never wanted to experience this again so do everything you can to avoid this.

The most helpful thing for me to process rejection was knowing that I was not my emotions — it was a separation of feelings from identity was key to cleanse myself of the pain in order to move forward. This feels heavy but it won’t always feel this way. It won’t swallow me whole.

My relationship with career has changed a lot too. I moved away from using my title as a way to prove my self-worth to people. If anything, I show away from talking about work unless it’s relevant. I simply want a reasonably competitive salary to fund a lifestyle, interesting work, sane teammates, and reasonable hours. It teaches me skills to use towards a greater purpose at times but it’s still mostly a job that’s separate from my identity.

All in all I hope this was helpful to read through and I hope this gives you ways to speak to your internal monologue.