My best friend from home and I catch up after a long time. We talk about school, the latest updates on the intimate and personal lives of mutual friends, and eventually switch to our favorite topic – depression. “Have you been doing anything about it?” She asks me. Then we both laugh about how we are too depressed to have the energy to do something about it. At least depression is funny, we say. At least we can still laugh at ourselves, by sharing one-liners that the typical therapists dish out (“Have you tried mediation and yoga with a sprinkling of unicorn dust?”). I ask her if she has told her parents yet about wanting to go to a therapist. We laugh some more imagining their response (“What?! You need to see a therapist? Are we not enough for you?” or even “Why do you need to go to counseling? You’re not crazy.”)
Separated by an ocean, our lives are very different, yet somehow we find ourselves on the same boat, the underlying theme of our lives being isolation. She finds herself in a society that refuses to acknowledge mental health issues, branding them as necessary only in rare circumstances, such as when a person is walking clothes-free through the bazaar while brandishing an eggplant. I find myself suffering from the typical malaise of international students. I suddenly find myself in a country that is much more willing to talk about these issues, but facing the paradox of not finding someone who really understands what I am going through. Sometimes when I am talking about my issues, I see that my therapist a little confused by how ‘Asian’ in nature my problems are. There is something un-relatable about complaining about not doing ‘enough’ while also complaining about having too much to do.
My problems are not about identity, acceptance or self-love. And maybe this says a lot about my culture; that we value the material existence and ignore the self. My problems are anxiety, anxiety and more anxiety. I am worried I won’t get a job after graduation and will have to turn back home. I view education as an investment and worry about the returns. My problems are all centered around ‘failure’ and ‘achievement’. I don’t necessarily view that as a bad thing – I like to be grounded in reality. But that doesn’t change the fact that I feel isolated in a place where my therapists are so separated from me in their lived experience. Sometimes I think that there should be a word for ‘the fear of having to move back to a place which you have already uprooted yourself from, after having invested too much time, money and effort into the process of uprooting’.
And sometimes, I wonder if mental health is so taboo for us because it falls into this dichotomy of failure and achievement. To need help is to fail, and to go on while swallowing your problems is to be the hardworking and successful Asian professional. That’s why my friend and I joke about our depression. In between a place that is so repressed it is bursting at the seams, and a place that is almost suffocating in its false optimism, the only breath of life we find is in humor. If we forget to laugh about the fact that we’ve been going to class in sweatpants for a week straight, we might end up taking our problems too seriously.
