Open to celebrate your neurodiverent AAPI friend ๐
Hint: It's me, Journey - like the word or the band ๐ฅ
After a cry about capitalism last week ๐ญ , I realized that May is the month that celebrates two of my favorite things: AAPI Heritage and Mental Health Awareness ๐ โฆ and the beginning of the month-long countdown to Pride Month ๐ณ๏ธโ๐. Excited to celebrate three parts of who I am forces me to confront exactly all of those facets to who I am.
When I visualize my life as a something tangible, I see it as a piece of mixed media art, woven so slowly that you barely can see any progress with the thinnest fibers that hold the emotional value of every moment. Sometimes I get so overwhelmed by the current thread being woven in that I forget about the larger piece of artwork that is my life. In this season of life (and with some plant medicine support), I am able to deconstruct the past and rediscover the value and impact it has had to get me to where I am today.
So, I invite you to take this deep dive into the complexities of being me in hopes that this will inspire you to dig deeper into your past to heal for the future ๐ฆ
When Veronica Mars came out on UPN, I remember watching and feeling excited for Kristen Bellโs representation ofโฆ people who were short and sassy. As I type that right now, those two parts of my identity that are such small pieces of who I am as a whole, but it felt so incredibly good to be seen at that time.
Until then, there were only two people I can recall that I felt were relatable:
Min: the one Asian girl who was on Barney and Friends.
Michelle Kwan โธ๏ธ
Honestly, they were only relatable based on them being Asian women of relevance in the late 90s. There were two worlds that I straddled between when I attended a local two-building school for K-8 kids with no AAPI representation but myself and my brother while attending a weekly Friday evening Chinese school about an hourโs drive away for seven long years. Looking back, I see that both of the spaces that Iโve traversed through never quite felt like my own. I saw myself as too Chinese at my regular school, easily alienated since I was very driven academically just out of sheer excitement to learn. When I was at Chinese school, it felt impossible to excel with the fact that so many of my classmates spoke Mandarin Chinese with their immigrant parents while I spoke a mix of predominantly English and broken Cantonese as a 4th generation Chinese American on my dadโs side.
Instead of any fear of the unknown, my spirit held so much excitement for the future and โadulthoodโ as I began attending UCLA for my undergraduate degree ๐ as a pre-med math major.
Clearly, Iโve never been one to shy away from a challenge.
It wasnโt that I wanted to be a cardiologist but more than I wanted to lean into my passion for Greyโs Anatomy at the time and I really enjoyed my AP Calculus classes. I spent so many years of my life so focused on getting into a university that I never questioned what I actually wanted to do or get out of life ๐คทโโ๏ธ
Beyond being overwhelmed with the โfreedomโ of initial adulthood, I found my mental health being challenged in ways I never could have anticipated in high school. After being diagnosed with ADHD and depression in my first year, it became even more challenging to keep up with the pace of academia and forced me to really figure out how to push forward to get my degree. As I discovered my love for sociology and pursued job opportunities in digital media and marketing, I also figured out ways to get creative in learning despite my own neurodivergence - with tips I still use today.
But no one showed me the intersectionality of my own experience. I shouldered both the combination of feeling lost in my own AAPI identity without community and the shame of mental illness. And with no one in popular culture to reference and remind me that Iโm not alone, I felt exactly thatโฆ alone.
The wound of loneliness was reopened during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, as I sat in my apartment unemployed and scrolling on Instagram and realizing that while this was years after my college experience, I felt the same lack of representation in my life.
Over time, the solution clear to me that I needed to be the representation I wanted to see in the world and suddenly, I felt like my lifeโs purpose, or at least that of this lifetime, is to authentically share who I am and create spaces for people who look like me, feel like me, or resonates with my stories to open up and share what itโs like to be them.
So here I am within a month that celebrates two major facets of who I am, ripping my heart open and vigorously typing to remind you to celebrate everything that makes you who you are not just this month but every month, every day, and every moment in this short life.
The human experience is meant to be shared, so hereโs your sign/call-to-action. Leave me a comment ๐ฌ and share something.
Iโll get us started, so here are the things Iโve been loving: