Pressure-Cooker Children

By my eighteenth birthday, I was convinced my entire personality was a mistake. My hobbies were hipster and obnoxious, tied to the fine arts and human culture. My goals were lofty and idealistic, invoking a life of novelty and meaning. I hated that I cared for these things despite their presumed futility in our modern (read: capitalist) world. The trendy albeit psychologically debunked Myers-Briggs Type Indicator had assigned me a personality with one of the lowest average incomes, followed by fun phrases like “most likely to have trouble in school,” and to me, this was the surest confirmation of my worthlessness.

As with any teenager experiencing angst and self-hate, my upbringing had cowritten this final scene of adolescence. The schools I attended boasted clean carpets and freshly painted lockers. Students bustled to class with their North Face backpacks during passing periods and scattered in the hallway with their MacBooks during class time.

While the high school sat desolate on weekends, many students spent their time at Karen Dillard, the West Point of PSAT/SAT/ACT Prep companies in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, and some had started these prep sessions before even stepping into a high school classroom. We had been spoon-fed the secrets to success from an early age, sculpting our résumés and talents into self-portraits impressive to any external standard.

Outside of school, my family was in various communities of other Chinese/Taiwanese American families with well-accoladed children pursuing engineering, medicine, and business—the three pillars of model minority success. As with any model minority narrative, race had everything to do with it.

Both my own parents and the parents of other children urged me to excel in math and science, subjects with objective questions that white people can’t pretend you have wrong as far as the classroom is concerned. They told me I would have to be far more competent than the white man if I were to be his coworker and colleague, and how was I to do that if my pursuits were subjective and frivolous?

After all, these were the lengths they had taken to survive. Our parents had created lives for themselves, and consequently us, by honing their technical capacities. They excelled at job functions—the “it’s not about what you know but who you know” type—white people had proven themselves inadequate at, and they did so in an alien land with neither language skills nor professional connections.

However, their well-meaning and well-founded to-do list for survival had cursed my understanding of self-worth and impeded the achievement of my values. My cultural upbringing, in all its historical validity and socioeconomic privilege, had robbed me of the golden lesson of self-worth: that failure is sometimes more indicative of luck and circumstance than effort and ability. My worldview was bombarded not only by the immigrant desire for generational wealth but also by the upper middle class conviction that such wealth is in the hands of anyone hardworking and capable enough to achieve it.

Of course, most peers had always seen me as hardworking and capable, and I knew this. Thanks to the ongoing educational support of my immigrant parents, I was doing well in subjects I not only loved but couldn’t care less for. However, at eighteen, I began to view my much larger personality outside of those traits as decorative at best and distracting at worst. I decided to shape my identity into what I believed was the cookie-cutter image of a successful person.

After all, my parents, like many first-generation Asian Americans, had created their wealth from absolute poverty and used that wealth to engineer me for greatness. How could I forgive myself for falling short of them in income, the most tangible indicator of professional success? How would I look former peers in the eye as they climbed social ladders I had carelessly fallen from? I was convinced my entire life leading up to this was a detour, even though I had plenty of reasons to think otherwise. I saw college as an opportunity to right wrongs.

Freshman year of university greeted me with a Google Calendar that scheduled my weekday by the fifteen-minute. My clothes and hair, which used to be the most meticulously planned portion of my evening routine, were always a last-minute decision, and it showed. I was so carried away by hard work that I began forgoing invitations to dinners and girls’ night outs from people who had the potential to become some of my closest friends. Although I was able to right this wrong throughout the following three years, it was a decision that would emotionally dig at me more than any subpar test score would.

Even when I had the grades to show for my grit, I would come home to the dormitory’s bathroom mirror and gaze uncomfortably into my reflection. My facial features felt marred, not from aging or some rebellious social statement, but from how I was failing to take care of myself. My figure had been shaped into a rectangular blob, not by the intentional use of sports bras or the layering of winter clothes, but from the unintentional side effect of neglect.

In the context of my highly accomplished family friends, which include the alumni of private K–12 schools more than three times as expensive as my alma mater state university, I had come to believe my conventionally attractive features were all I had. Of course, this relationship to my appearance was never healthy to being with, but it was at least something my teenage self could lean on. Without it, I was beginning to feel anchorless.

More importantly, I watched in horror as I, someone who had grown to be confident, became uncertain and withdrawn. I hadn’t changed completely, but I was certainly a black and white rendering of the person I had been before.

Of course, one could argue that everyone is a different version of themselves in any given situation, especially during their formative years. Even now, if you ask people from internships, family friend circles, and personal relationships about me, you will realize they met three distinctly different people.

However, that distinction was a personal choice. During my early years of college, I became a muted version of myself even when I didn’t want to be, and I now know it’s because I was beginning to lose myself. At the time, I simply thought I had gotten myself wrong the first time.

It wasn’t until I was weeks into my sophomore year, having successfully shaped my commitments and personality into what I thought they needed to be, that I realized something was wrong. My life, thanks to my own manipulation, was empty of almost everything I lived for.

I now know the strongest indication of my unhappiness was that I, in the words of a dear friend, was “constantly in a super crisis that wasn’t actually a super crisis”. My mental state brewed with an uncertainty of the future, a fear of failure, and a strong conviction that I had already failed. Even after I realigned my actions with my values, through my lifestyle and eventually my professional ambitions, this characteristic was proving slow to change.

It was then, after reading Google search results for “how to complain and worry less” (yes, those exact words) that I started journaling.

My first college journal was a gift from a mentor staff writer at a campus magazine. The notebook was a bold shade of blue, and a cartoon airplane rested on its front cover. I started writing in it almost every day, a habit I keep up with. In a painstaking attempt to keep the journal consistent, I ensured every entry filled its last page so that I could start the next entry on a fresh page without wasting space. Even in self-therapy, I had failed to grasp the concept of being easier on myself, but it was a start.

I saw results almost immediately. Thoughts that used to tumble endlessly in my brain and aimlessly out my mouth sat on paper with satisfying finality. I found closure in things that had bothered me for years, and I did so without emotionally overloading my friends the way I had done before.

The semester afterward, I studied abroad. However, this was no ordinary study abroad. This was four months in my heritage country, which made me unsure if going was even a good idea. I knew some classmates would think I took an easy way out by studying my heritage language. I feared many natives would treat me with less respect and leniency than my more foreign-looking peers.

These fears would prove themselves to be true. However, studying abroad was also a socially acceptable reason to spend time with people who not only shared my values but lived by them. I finally had a taste of what I had deprived myself of for years.

During one of my weekends abroad, a few friends and I journeyed to a popular tourist attraction. It was a mountain so grounded in its significance and attention that stairs had been paved into it for hikers. Tens of flights of stairs into our climb, we stood at a rest area with hiking sticks next to us and mist-covered mountains before us.

The mountain, as with many of its famous counterparts, was the tallest in its range. As a result, we found ourselves eye to eye with the surrounding mountain peaks. We stared into a forest that must’ve known we were foreign but didn’t seem to care. The sun was beginning to set, and I finally understood that it would’ve done so whether I’d sat in the visitor center or climbed my way to the top, and it would rise the next day with or without me even being there.

I felt small, as if nothing I’d been doing before this moment really mattered, but no longer in a way that was self-imposed or demeaning. It was as comforting, validating, and foreign as the ground I was standing on.

I’d been a bit wary of climbing this mountain, guilty of not prioritizing my physical health, along with other important aspects of my life, as much as I should have. Of course, my youth had completely saved me here. I was young enough to barely feel sore the next morning, much less incapable of hiking my way down. Three years after deciding my adolescent interests had ruined everything, I realized I’d been young enough to get away with life’s biggest mistakes.

However, I knew my time for that gamble was running out, and I left that mountain determined to change my lifestyle. It would take over a year for that conviction to find a solid place in my regular routine, but my shifting priorities were beginning to emerge.

Months later, after finally allowing myself to feel the productivity breaks my body had so desperately longed for, I realized I’d always been innately capable of finding peace and purpose in my future goals and former failings. My misgivings had failed to take this ability away from me as much as forcefully changing myself had failed to tap into its potential.

My remaining college years were fueled by a newfound dedication to self-reflection and work-life balance. As with anyone, this involved progress that was often frustrating and rarely linear.

However, I now understood that the life I wanted for myself was the one I deserved. I knew that many of my desires would prove out of reach, but I no longer felt the need to change my identity in anticipation. I knew that who I was and who I wanted to be was destined to evolve, but I no longer felt the urge to redirect those changes out of fear.  

My eighteen-year-old self would have thought such personal progress was as frivolous as the personality she would later discard. My only regret is that I don’t have the superhuman ability to contact her and tell her differently.

Of course, in our current reality of unpaid internships and over-glorified side hustles (just call them what they are: second jobs, an indication that our first jobs have failed to feed either the mouth or the soul), the lesson that productivity is not only harmful in overabundance but also socially constructed is one most have to learn the hard way. However, if I could only tell the eighteen-year-old me that she’d eventually grow the backbone it takes to find refuge within that pressure-cooker economy, I know she would feel all the better.

-Grace Lu

Grace Lu is a Texas native and recent graduate who enjoys reading and listening to podcasts.