Introduction

Hi, I’m Jenny and I’m glad you have come to take a look at my website!

I feel compelled to share a little bit about myself before immediately jumping into abstract ideas. I have been wanting to start something like a blog or a podcast for the longest time and have wasted a bunch of time mulling over about it. (This is probably common, I know.) Something about linking words together and creating a succinct, readable, and refreshing idea really halts the process like no other! Plus the fact that I majored in math in college gives a part of me ammo to be like “You were never a good writer!” and “You dealt more with numbers than with words. You’re not going to be a compelling writer!”.

But alas, I cannot deny myself from putting my shitty ideas out into the ether any longer! They are coming out whether I want them to or not!

To begin, I come from a Chinese immigrant household. We lived in a suburb probably like any other WASP place in the United States circa 2007. There was a Kroger, a Walmart, a McDonald’s, a Chick-fil-A, and a Costco all on the same street. That street would eventually turn into a small road which was where I grew up, in a cookie cutter, Pulte, 3-bed, 3-bath little house in the middle of nowhere. Okay, too much detail. You’re like “Whoa! When she said ‘she’s going to share a little bit about herself’, she really meant SHE WAS GONNA SHARE TOO MUCH…”

In this kind of environment with an immigrant family, perhaps you can already imagine the landscape. Success in academics was paramount. There was so much pressure to achieve and do things for that college transcript that it became unclear why I was doing it and it became confusing to try to figure out who I was. Things like playing tennis, volunteering for nonprofits, and playing violin were all a means to an end. They were so entwined with my identity that I couldn’t even answer the simple question of do I like them or not. It wasn’t even a question that I thought about because the fear of quitting and not having anything to write on that transcript put me right back in my place.

I have heard numerous stories of my parents’ journey to get here. They are shaped by their remarkable experiences and I’m certain their relationship with risk is one that makes them gravitate towards security in the United States and so, that equates to a high-paying job for their child as well. Their goal in this country is survival and they unknowingly raised their child in a similar underlying tone. The child grows up not in an politically unstable country and doesn’t only have 3 dollars to their name. They grow up in suburbia — trying to navigate looking different than everyone else and Homecoming. But I still felt like “succeeding” was life or death. I felt like I couldn’t rest until I obtained my goal. I respect and admire my parents’ tenacity and their struggle but the same logic and values may not work for their children’s life, which looks vastly different from theirs. I think if this type of survivalist thinking was tempered with some emotional resilience, some present moment play, and some understanding of what it means to be human, I think I would have been in a much better place going into my 20’s.

Let me be the first one to say, I am privileged to have been born in this country and my parents have met my physical needs above and beyond anything they could have ever imagined. The opportunities and ways to succeed are boundless here. But I just want to share my experience and provide nuance to living in this period as a 2nd generation immigrant.

This type of thinking, where everything becomes a goal and needs to be achieved, leads to burnout fast. Which is what I learned after getting my first white-collar corporate job and quitting it 3 years later. I came upon Anne Helen Peterson’s book called Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. This book painted a backdrop of how I grew up. It explained:

Millennials became the first generation to fully conceptualize themselves as walking college resumes. With assistance from our parents, society, and educators, we came to understand ourselves, consciously or not, as “human capital”: subjects to be optimized for better performance in the economy.

That pressure to achieve wouldn’t have existed without the notion that college, no matter the cost, would provide a path to middle-class prosperity and stability. But as millions of overeducated, underemployed, and student-debt-laden millennials will tell you, just because everyone around you believes in the gospel doesn’t mean it’s necessarily true.

College didn’t alleviate the economic anxiety of our parents. It didn’t even guarantee our position in the middle class, or, in many cases, actually prepare us for the job market. But the preparation for college taught us a valuable, lingering lesson: how to orient our entire lives around the idea that hard work brings success and fulfillment, no matter how many times we’re confronted with proof to the contrary.

and:

[Millennials] spent a ton of time with adults, and learned the external markings of performing adulthood, but lack the independence and strong sense of self that accompanies a less surveilled and protected childhood.

These passages hit home for me. They give language and nuance to what I was already feeling for a long time, that this push for success and performance in our children sometimes ironically leads to what parents fear — burnout and failure.

Holly Whitaker in her book, Quit Like a Woman, also writes about similar feelings of disillusionment and fatigue:

The more I worked and excelled, the more I hated what I did, how it consumed me, and how it never ended. I didn’t know how to turn off or how to be less than perfect or how to not want to be better than every single person I worked with. I felt as if I had stepped onto a hamster wheel directly out of school, a life with a never-ending to-do list, credit card debt that followed me from college and somehow outpaced my raises, an inability to feel like anything was ever enough. I started out not being able to keep up with what I was supposed to be, and that feeling never really went away, no matter how great my title sounded or how much money I made. (Whitaker, 2021)

I relate so much to this picture that Whitaker paints. Although some of the details are different, it is the same feeling that is felt.

The point is, I built the life they told me I should build (they being, in the words of bell hooks, the “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” which I didn’t have words for at the time, so let’s just say every piece of media and advertising I’d consumed since I’d grown ears and eyes), and all I could do was plot to escape that life.

It never occurred to me that I could just stop, that I could step off the hamster wheel, that I could walk away at any time, that I could stop running so furiously and desperately toward a future I prayed would save me. What occurred to me was that I was unlike normal people, those people who seemed to be able to do what I couldn’t, which was not make messes of everything they touched. …

And: It wasn’t as if I wasn’t trying to make it, or be healthier, or live like everyone else seemed to be living. I’d been doing yoga for a decade. I ate kale before kale was Kale. I’d done the Master Cleanse and all the other cleanses. … I had it in my mind that if I just ate cleaner, worked out more, drank less, smoked less, lost more weight, made more money, saved more money, stopped spilling my bed wine on those monogrammed sheets — if I could just get more discipline or be more perfect — then it would all work out. (Whitaker, 2021)

My first thought is a question. Is this cliché? Does everyone go through some sort of similar process in figuring themselves out? I’m not sure but I’ve certainly felt everything described in the above passage: the confusion of doing everything to get to a well paying job but it was the last thing you wanted, the realization that if you were to step off the hamster wheel, what else could you do?, the fatigue of trying everything under the sun to “fix” you. It hadn’t occurred to me until much later that the “hustle” and the “fixing” were just the opposite sides of the same coin, even when the things under the “fixing” seemed like “good” things to do. That’s why the “good” things you do under the same mindset will lead to even more heartache.

The harder I tried to be more perfect — the more cleanses, the more books I bought, and budgets I made, the more things I bought to cover up and paint over the mess that was my life — the harder it became to keep it together. The attempts to fix me only added more chaos, the chaos added more pain, and so I added more wine. And pot. And cigarettes. And food. And clothes. I was a monster who couldn’t stop consuming things I thought would make me the human I was supposed to be. (Whitaker, 2021)

After having many conflicting thoughts in my head about what my career path was going to be, I felt like enough was enough. I have tried again and again to be in this box of educated college student and then white-collar employee and it’s just not working for me. Not only for me, but also for the coworkers around me. I realized that someone who was really succeeding in the environment that I was in wouldn’t be dragging their feet on projects and would be curious to learn about new branches of the company. Those are the markers of someone who deserved to be there and who would ultimately thrive in the role. Me, I was not that at all.

I decided that there must be a different way of thinking about my predicament and a different way of living. I needed to figure out what that was. And thus begins this blog………………………………………

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Whitaker, H. (2021). Quit like a woman : the radical choice to not drink in a culture obsessed with alcohol. The Dial Press.