Are you familiar with the spoon theory of chronic illness? I think it applies to mental health very well. So there’s this young woman and she’s trying to explain to her friend what it was like to live with chronic illness and I think she had something like lupus and then she was in a cafeteria and she was like, Alright spoons, alright ten spoons. She was like, I only have so many spoons each day. She was like, I want you to hold these spoons and then try and get through your day because everything you chose to do will cost you a spoon. So, you know, you’re getting ready for school, you know what I mean, you’re getting ready for class that’s going to cost you one spoon. And then you go to your classes and that’s going to cost you two more spoons. And now it’s lunch time and so you can either skip lunch and, you know, get whatever this, you know, paper or whatever done but that’s going to cost you three spoons or you can eat lunch and that period of time will only cost you one spoon. You know what I mean, going out to coffee with a friend, that’s another spoon. You know what I mean, by the time you get to noon you’ve already used more than half of your spoons. And so sometimes you have to choose, am I going to do the dishes or am I going to get some work done, you know what I mean. It’s a lot of, Am I going to get out of bed and go see my friends this evening, even though I know I’ll start with fewer spoons tomorrow. So it’s just being aware that sometimes when it comes to your own capacity, it’s kind of this zero sum gain and that you don’t have as many spoons to spend as everyone else.

And I think that for people with depression, people with anxiety, people who have a history of either physical, emotional, or sexual trauma, finding a way to be safely embodied is very important and I think that it’s difficult in the western model to find those therapies that help you find safety in yourself and feel like your body is a safe place to be.

And I think that Eastern models of mental health always include the body and always include, you know, being safe in the body and feeling grounded which is a lot of my work. I work with a meditation teacher.

Therapy, and I know this isn’t a perfect analogy, but therapy is like dating. You really need to find someone you can develop a rapport with, who you like, who you feel like likes you. I mean I’ve had therapist who I feel like, just don’t like me and are judging me and I might see them for a little bit because they might be useful with one thing or another, but they may not be useful in general and you also need to take into account that, like, these people are human, so they have their limitations. And so I saw a gifted therapist and we mostly did phone stuff and I remember the first time I saw her, I saw her like, literally once and we like, and she was like, here’s some bibliotherapy read these books. I went home and read them and problem solved. I started a new career and I was like, well that was terrible for your business. I saw you once and now I’m not going to see you again. I called her 6 months like, actually no, it was like a couple of years later and then I talked to her once because I was getting so anxious. It had taken me two weeks to buy a bottle of shampoo just because I was like, being greedy and stuff and chemo phobia and I just, you know, I would have this incredible decision process like, Alright, I guess my anxiety is out of control again I should call a professional. So I called a professional and maybe talked to her like, maybe twice and for 6 months again I really didn’t need to see anyone, so I really use therapy on an as-needed basis. And I recognize what each individual therapy and what each individual therapist can offer.

I violate a lot of her understandings of what it is to be a good woman and because I have always been so assertive, she finds it to be aggressive and condescending. So she would always try to keep me in my place because of the Chinese sort of dynamics of hierarchy and what you can and cannot say. And I was just like, If you wanted me to be a good Chinese daughter you should have raised me in China, because if you’re going to raise me in the United States and I’m to be successful here, I am going to take on American socialization. Especially because I didn’t know any Asian kids growing up I was literally like, there was like me and the one Jewish kid, so we would like take our turns he would show everybody dreidels and I would show everybody like, Chinese New Year, like red envelopes and give them candy like, Chinese candies and so like, that was the extent of the diversity growing up. So not being within a culture where certain statements were normalized I think was part of the damage, but also I think there are, you know, a lot of issues and I mean this, this is part of the thing, like nobody wants to bring shame on their culture, but I think a lot of East Asian cultures have, you know, very frequent physical, emotional abuse. And I think it’s something that’s commonly not addressed because the kids do really well in school and they don’t act out, so no one sees it as a problem and I think that’s incredibly damaging. I mean there’s like an entire Reddit forum, like a Reddit sub-forum that’s just called, oh what is it, Asian parent stories. And like, there are stories of people who are just like, I did it. I graduated from John’s Hopkins and I’m literally a brain surgeon and they’re still not happy and every day I want to kill myself.

I have to say, No. All the time I have to say, No I can’t come see your show, no I can’t get coffee today, no I can’t do that project, no I can’t do that job, no I can’t volunteer for that program, no I can’t stay out late, no I need to go home, no I need to rest, no I can’t do the dishes, no I can’t comfort myself today, no I can’t go to the store. Or if I do go to the store, that’s literally the only thing I do all day, like when I was really sick it was just like, Wow, that was my major accomplishment for this week, was being able to go to the store and get all the groceries into the house and so that’s been one of the most difficult things for me to be the person that does literally everything at an amazing level, well not an amazing level, but a very high level. It’s impressive that I did all of that at a high level to be a person that’s just like, Cool, I carried groceries upstairs and didn’t leave any of them in the car for my partner to carry up later. So that’s been my biggest struggle.

By the time I was in high school, I started having trouble just functioning. I was just breaking down sobbing all the time. I mean like, in a ball shaking and that would happen at school. And so I spent a great deal of time in the in the counselor’s office and around my sophomore year, I mean, I was I don’t know if it’s fair to say, intellectually suicidal. I wasn’t going to take any active steps, but I did have a lot of suicidal thinking and I had very clearly all the signs of depression to anyone who really cared to notice.

And I tried to seek like help. I was just like, I need to see a psychologist. Like, I’m having problems. Because all of a sudden I had gone from being a straight A student or not a straight A student but an A/B student to, I went from having like having an 89 percent in my statistics class to having a 16, because I just wasn’t able to function.

I sort of hung out with the, sort of like, the free thinker, misfit, creator types. There’s actually just like a dorm where it’s sort of like all of those kids, so you just take all of like the musicians and the drama kids and the gay kids and we’re just like one dorm [laughter]. And I hung out with mostly kids that just hung out in that dorm. So I want to say that mental health issues is almost a given with almost everybody I know, the severity and the variety is very different. A lot of people just have, I don’t want to say just have, because it can be debilitating, but a lot of people have like a couple things like OCD, but it doesn’t seriously impair their function, they’re just kind of quirky. Other people have had very serious psychotic breaks that have seriously impaired their lives. I have many friends who have been hospitalized for mental health reasons many times. So I don’t imagine that anyone didn’t know I had depressions, it’s just something that all of us dealt with. In fact, I have had conversations with people who are like, You know, I don’t really trust anyone who has never been through really dark periods.

But I think that it’s very difficult to reduce people to one aspect of their identity and I see that a lot with identity politics like, Oh look gay people. As if that’s suddenly the most important thing about them is who they do or do not want to love or have sex with and I think that being able to be like, Oh this person is gay and they love guns and country music, is, is a thing. There are gay people who love music, you know, there are nuns who are pro-abortion, you know what I mean. Many people live in this grey area and I think that being able to not pigeon hole yourself into any one identity so you don’t have to be like, Oh I am a depressed person. Or like, Oh this is an autistic person. Or, Oh this. You know, I think that, that’s unfair and I think that denies you, your the totality of your humanity.

I would have to say probably as far back as I can remember, I at least had pretty significant anxiety. I remember when I was really little if someone was late for something I would have this really bad catastrophic reaction like, Oh no, like, they got in a car accident or they are never coming home, or something like that. I remember being very scared to be in a room by myself, I had, you know, I had this feeling that just around the corner somebody was going to leap out and get me and pretty much I had that feeling almost all of the time.

By the time I got into high school I was pretty good at masking my feelings. I’m fairly good at sort of keeping up an upbeat persona regardless of how depressed I am, even when I am fairly nonfunctional. If you see me out and about most people see me as pretty confidant and pretty well adapted and they’re like, Oh, you know, you’re such an optimistic person and you’ve got it all together, and stuff like that. And I think a lot of that for me comes from the fact that we have a fairly insincere culture when it comes to emotions. I mean, especially if you work in something like service. I mean, service with a smile. And foreigners a lot of times comment on how, how strangely friendly everyone in the states is and sort of how we have this sort of culturally mandated exuberance, you know, we can’t just be like, Oh, you know, things are ok, they’ve been kind of tough lately. Everyone is supposed to say, Great, everything. It’s going to be the best day it’s ever been and it’s going to be the most beautiful and so successful. And so I’ve sort of taken that on which I think can make it difficult sometimes because people don’t recognize that you’re suffering, especially when you are able to sort of meet your obligations that it can be harder for people to identify you as someone that has depression.