I believe I am at a turning point in my life. I came to this land seeking adventure and a quest to learn things I may not have known. Now, four years later, I have a degree in Psychology, Culture, and Childhood Studies from Hampshire College 😳 . I have done so many things I never thought I would have done or imagined were possible. I danced with many forms of art my first year of college, discovered American Sign Language, and solidified my passion for listening, studying, observing, interacting, learning from and with people. This curiosity for people led me through multiple hoops: seriously considering the teaching profession, special education, a career as a speech language pathologist, an occupational therapist, and a social worker, a constant love for art and many questions about culture, prejudice, and inequity—all while getting more and more confused about where I was in this East-West life, studying in the US and carrying my Malaysian heart with me.
A sophomore summer in a magical place called W became what has been life changing and largely responsible for the current path I am taking in becoming a clinician. W was a residential summer therapeutic program for children and adolescents affected by complex trauma in their lives such as abuse, neglect, broken households, manifesting in different challenges in regulating emotion, anger, behaviour, learning, post-traumatic stress, and relationships. What started out as a summer internship as a dance activity instructor and residential counselor, my first summer at W became the most difficult, draining, testing, and frustrating experience I had in my life. And yet, I am almost certain that that was the point in my college life that I discovered love. There I was reentering the real world with a truck load of bittersweet memories of my kids, ugly and scary body bruises from doing restraints and holds with one of the most physically aggressive cabins that summer, an irreplaceable team bond, and exhausted out. of. my. life. Yet, there was this weird indescribable feeling that I wanted to do it again. I could have just been out. of. my. mind. to relive what was a summer of blood, sweat, tears, and pain, but I guess I weirdly think that pain is part of the love we give and receive. It's not the difficult times that we seek, but rather, it is the love we believe is worth fighting for. In this case, it was my love in the work the kids and I had done—working on regulating their emotions, anger, behaviours, and relationships so that they were empowered to live healthier lives. All of this good work, I believed, was not finished. There was still and will always be more work to be done, if not for the same kids, for others who need a little nudge down the line.
Exactly halfway through my undergraduate life, I began my climb up the ladder of a helping profession that, I still believe, strives to empower people—empowering people to better understand what is within them, the communities around them, to learn from triumphs and failures, and to keep growing. Somewhere in the thick of this, I also kept at my job as an Emergency Medical Technician, responding to emergency calls around campus for more than two years. For similar reasons, I found a lot of joy and satisfaction in this line of service work. The next two years of undergrad saw myself sucking up as much knowledge as I could about what I needed to do to become a clinician, with particular interest in the field of clinical psychology. I returned a second time to W. I dived headfirst into research and found myself happily and curiously swimming in research on perfectionism, internalising child psychopathology, its intersections with culture, and the strengths of mixing quantitative and qualitative ways of collecting research data.
All of this culminated in my first love project: my Division III, also known as my honours thesis. My big goal was to better understand the role that culture played in the relationship between perfectionism and anxiety and depressive symptoms among youth who had grown up in Asian countries. The intensity in which I pursued my first love project swallowed my final year in college, literally sweeping me off my feet. As a result, I learnt so much about healthy and unhealthy ways to love. I can confidently say that my last year of college was the most difficult and stressful time in my life (thus far). It was also one of the most emotionally and mentally unhealthy periods of my life. Not only was I unhealthily devoting my 24/7 to my first love project, the line between work and personal time was further blurred as a lot of my research hit so close to my own life. In the midst of my coursework, I was inundated with much anxiety over getting a job, the pressure of needing to sell myself in an unexpectedly cutthroat post-baccalaureate job market, and my uncertain future in America thanks to the travel ban and visa issues introduced by the new President of the United States.
These stressors were layered by the obscurity of my relationship with home, or lack of it (as my pessimism at that point in time would add). The longer I spent in the US, the more I grew as a person, and the more my thoughts, opinions, and outlook of the world grew with me. I believe that the way I made sense of God, friendship, romantic relationships, family, and life had grown more nuanced, open, critical, objective, and complex. While I think this imparted a sense of maturity, intersectionality, and intrigue to find genuine parts of myself (relationally, emotionally, spiritually, and culturally), I also felt like nobody really understood me. As I continued to immerse myself in how saving face impacts mental health, I became critical of maintaining a self image in social media. Social media became more upsetting as scrolling through the newsfeed intensified feeling left out from the life happenings of friends in Malaysia, whether by acts of their omission, commission, or nothing at all. Overall, it reached a point that I no longer found any joy, happiness, or purpose on Facebook. Instead, it became a place that brought me a lot of hurt, pain, sadness, cynicism, jealousy, stress, and doubts of my self-worth and life.
So, I left.
I attempted to reconfigure the separation between work and personal life by keeping my first love project as work. I stepped down from the job I loved very much as an EMT A-Pack and finally understood what it meant to love something so much that you let it go. In my last semester, I worked with veterans at an acute psychiatric ward and did clinical work with an incarcerated inmate. Though seemingly overwhelming, I surprisingly needed that to remind me of my love for working with people in the midst of research.
Several breakdowns and crying episodes later, FaceTiming my family to get through the mornings became a religious lifeline and sincere support from one or two friends helped immensely. Korean dramas, for some magical reason, whether it be the food, family, and faces that reminded me of home or the life messages conveyed through their storylines, was a form of escape for me. Mint chocolate chip ice cream, Milo, and Horlicks were also good reminders of childhood comforts that helped. Perhaps I didn't talk with God as much as it would have helped me but I was (and still am) in a working relationship with Him, a very personal journey and story for another post when the time is right. But I will always be grateful for the milestones I conquered even in this incredulous year—winning my first outstanding research poster award in the first conference I attended (ever!) 😱, gaining several grants to fund my research, successfully getting a huge research sample size, pulling off my first study of this scale with significant findings, and having the opportunity to present my work to a whole slew of people in various conferences.
In spite of the past and coming turbulences in my journey, I wanted and needed to write all of this down to acknowledge this amazing, albeit poop-filled, adventure that I have taken in the past four years. I am grateful for being able to study and pursue what I truly love to do and have the support and strength from two of the most important people in my life, my parents. I am grateful that my family was able to see me graduate and that we were able to ring the bell together. I am grateful for the full state scholarship I attained in bestowing me so much freedom to pursue my undergraduate studies anywhere and in anything. And after giving up multiple times, I received an official job offer letter to work as a Research Coordinator in the Psychiatry Department at Emory University's School of Medicine.
I want to remind myself of all that I can be grateful for.
Even though I am still recovering from this wild ride God must have mistakenly thought I could endure, I want to take a breath at this turning point to simply acknowledge that I would not have made it this far without the Man upstairs, my mommy, papa, and myself.
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