Who am I?
I think it is a question that comes up so often in our twenties. As the years go by, I increasingly find that there’s always things to learn, both in our present and in our past. I’m still discovering the traumas and privileges I was gifted as a child and how they’ve shaped the way I see the world.
When I was in the fourth grade, my parents divorced and my single dad was left to care for me and my younger brother. He worked three jobs to provide for us and was often absent - he wasn’t able to make it out to any of my track races or graduations growing up. Juggling puberty, translation duties for my immigrant father and being a mother, I was more concerned with survival, understanding abandonment and self awareness than my peers. We grew up in a small apartment in an upper middle class suburb in the Bay Area where kids my age were more concerned with the prestige of the college they wanted to attend and the brand of the car they would get from their parents when they turned sixteen. I had to grow up incredibly fast and sometimes, that resentment from my lost childhood was projected out in rebellion.
I struggled with that resentment and pain for a lot of my adolescence, through high school, college and today I still have moments when I lose my way and wonder if my fear of abandonment will ever go away and if I will ever feel like I am good enough, just as I am.
At the same time, the same treacherous winding road that got me here today is ultimately what made me who I am, and for that I wouldn’t change it for the world. Because of it all, I realized early how rewarding it was to guide others that were in my shoes, to understand how important people were. I have compassion for youth who don’t have a champion in their own lives and a drive to make the world a better place for them, to empower them to forge their own paths. I couldn’t find a better example of win / win in this life. The world gave me challenges for a reason.
(Growth requires discomfort.
Discomfort in standing on your own, discomfort in being brutally honest with where that position in life is, discomfort in acknowledging when and where you’ve benefited from society and when and where you can be a benefit to society. It means coming to terms with the multiple facets of your identity, whether you are part of the dominant or minority group in every aspect and how to raise people up and promote tolerance, diversity and understanding.
I am a woman of color, growing up in a lower middle class, single parent Buddhist household and face discrimination and challenges on that front as a minority. On the other hand, I am also considered part of the “model minority”, heteronormative, and able-bodied – both are part of my identities and collectively provide me with benefits and inequalities in life.
No one in this world is perfect, free from biases, stereotypes, mistakes. But I would argue that no one in this world is imperfect either. Everyone is just different and each person is the one and only soul that exists on this earth. We can’t control how people will act or react, but what we can do as fellow coexisting humans, is to try and understand where people come from, why they think the way they do. For us ourselves to be forgiving when we’re treated poorly, to let things go when they’re negative and to give more love to this world.
At the end of the day no matter what industry, what role people play, what their positionality is, somewhere at their core, every single person strives for human connection. Fulfillment isn’t about our own possessions, woes, stories, egos. It’s about the people and the relationships we form and spreading goodwill in a way that inspires others to realize what life has and will always be about. Each other.)
Lately I’ve been more concerned not with the question of who I am, but where I am going. Who can I uplift to go there with me?