Yup, I'm getting married. And yes, I'm dancing on an elephant.
This is not your typical post. There’s no talk of self-realization, church-hopping, or spiritual wisdom here.
I’m simply writing this for those of you who read my posts on Culture Mutt last year and have written to me with questions about how to survive living in high-pressure cultures, dominant parents, inquisitive communities and families.
Cultures where your existence is compared to everyone else you know, including your genius brother, American Idol-talented sister, chess champion cousin, Harvard-going family friend, deceased Supreme Court grandfather, highly educated and wealthy very-distant relative who founded Google, surgeon neighbor, and television personalities (Sanjay Gupta, Fareed Zakaria, etc)
Your circumstances.
As a kid of a Tiger Mother or neurotic parents of any highly traditional, high-pressure culture, you know what family and social pressure feels like.
It doesn’t matter if you’re in elementary school, high school, college, graduate school or a working professional. If you’re Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, Persian of from any Asian country, you know that your life and decisions are not solely your own.
You’re commanded errr… encouraged to attend a particular college, pursue a specific profession which gives you titles such as M.D. or M.B.B.S., creatively introduced to your future spouse, given hints as to where you should live, what job to get, how many children to have, etc etc.
Of course, you’re never really ‘told’. Simply, asked, questioned, hinted at, barraged with a line of questions a murder suspect would get during an interrogation.
“Why don’t you go to medical school?”
“Oh…the Patel kids are both going to Yale next year. Where did you decide?” “You can go to India to study medicine, no?”
“Why did you get a B+ in history? Do you know how much we’re paying for your education?”
“He’s a nice guy from a good family. You’re not that young, you know”
“Who writes? You can become a doctor, then you’ll write up patient charts during the week and novels during the weekends”
“So, looks like we’re cursed by the God’s and our fate’s sealed. You’re not marrying and giving us 2 grandkids!”
What do you do if you don’t want to play by the rules of your culture or family?
If you’re muddled about what you should be doing with your life, feeling pressured by your parents and culture to be a professional (and by that, I mean doctor, dentist or engineer) and feel dreadful about not living up to everyone’s expectations and demands, read on:
Survive your family and your culture – 9 tips to get control of your life.
1) Forgive your family and yourself.
As hard as it may be to do, forgiveness is necessary for your mental health and sanity. You must be able to forgive your parents who are pressuring you and trying to control your life. More than likely, this is their unusual way of showing you their care and concern. And love.
When you forgive your parents or family, you show yourself that they have very little impact on you. You refuse to allow their overbearing and dominant ways to hurt you further.
Forgive them, then forgive yourself. Forgive yourself for having to disagree with and not pleasing them. Forgive yourself for choosing to live your own life. Forgive yourself so you can move on with your life, instead of being trapped by your family and culture.
2) Refuse to follow the lead of your parents and compare yourself to others.
Know that others have their own difficulties, challenges, and life-dilemmas.
Your friends getting married after law school and touring Europe may look like they have a perfect life on the outside. But you never know what’s going on with them. That very successful and got-it-together couple may be absolutely miserable internally, seeing 3 therapists or could be alcoholics – you never know.
3) Seek clarity in your life and take action.
You don’t have to have a clue as to what you’re doing with your life but you should try to seek clarity by talking to your inner circle of friends and through self-reflection.
Look at what you enjoy doing, look at your strengths, your skills and move in that direction. No matter who you are, you have certain skills, talents and strengths. Focus on those and keep moving towards mastering those parts of your life.
Stop doing those activities, professions and jobs you can’t stand.
Look for an exit.
Just take a little bit of action a day on what interests you, what inspires you and what makes you feel alive.
If you have no idea, just start. As Alexis Grant says, purpose usually finds you, not the other way around. And it finds you only after you’ve gotten started.
Start doing your hobby, your craft, your art. If you start and lose interest, then that’s not your passion. If you’re not willing to do this for 2 hours a night after a day of school or work, then it’s probably not your passion.
4) Take money, prestige and what people think out of the equation.
Be honest with yourself as far as what you enjoy doing. If you do that and do that only, you’ll find immeasurable success in the long run.
If you love teaching, like a friend of mine did, success will knock on your door. My friend’s parents tried to talk him out of a teaching career but he fought for his dream. And yes, he became the youngest state ‘teacher of the year’ a couple years back.
Unlike what your community or parents tell you, you WILL succeed in what you enjoy doing and what brings you happiness.
5) Seek confidence building activities, daily inspiration and affirmations.
All those things sound zany but they work. You hear a lot of negativity from your parents and culture.
You have to replace it with positive self-talk.There’s online videos, meditations, affirmations, books, more. Do these activities daily to keep all the negative buzz away form you. And affirm your brilliance.
Don’t let them break you down with comparisons, criticism and insults.
6) Stomach your day job until you can actively pursue your interest, passion, art.
If you can’t make your passion into a full time job or career, then spend all your free time doing it.
If you can’t give up your law practice or medical career, then write at night, take classes in the evenings, run on the weekends, shoot photos when you’re on vacation.
Have a vision of your future. Create a vision board to make your vision a reality.
7) Use negative energy, the doubters and the haters to take action.
Use their doubt, disapproval and judgmental behavior of others to move you into action. Allow the negativity to help you become even more focused and determined about doing what you want to do.
Let the negativity motivate you to achieve more.
Allow the doubters to help you achieve your goals.
8) Actively hunt for people who will believe in you.
Spend more time with them.
You already know what to do with the negative people in your life.
9) Seek happiness daily.
Be diligent about seeking happiness. Be like a firefly seeking the light of happiness.
You don’t have to do what everyone else wants you to do but you do need to do something.
Find what makes you happy and keep doing more of that. Find happiness in the mundane and boring tasks of life. Find happiness in the job you hate. Find happiness in the profession you never wanted to pursue in the first place. There must be some aspect of your job or career that makes you happy. Focus on that.
If meeting people who compare you and humiliate makes you unhappy as it well should, avoid them. If reading makes you happy, schedule that in. If family affairs are no fun, find excuses to get out of them.
Fight for your happiness like you’re fighting in a war. Be disciplined about seeking and living in happiness daily. When you’re happy, you’ll do better work and find success.
When you’re happy, it will rub off on those around you. They soon will be happy too.
Keep seeking happiness and vigorously fight against anyone trying to steal it from you.
Protect your dreams and happiness like you’re guarding the priceless Mona Lisa.
Did your community or family insist you live your life a certain way, marry a certain person, work a certain profession? Let me know how you deal with your family or community in the comments below.
Imagine growing up as a child in an alcoholic family.
Continuously confronting people in your life who were under the influence and behaving oddly. Bouts of anger, violence and confusion in your life?
As a child, you’d probably ask yourself questions like – were you the reason your parents or alcoholic loved ones drank?
Would they stop drinking if you changed your behavior or attitude?
Were you making it worse by causing more stress in their lives?
The story she lived.
Jody Lamb, is a Michigan-based children’s book author who lived this very story. She grew up with alcoholic loved ones and was pained by the family members in her life who drank.
As a child, all she could do was try to adapt to their behavior and lifestyle. She sought understanding but felt all alone because alcoholic family members were not discussed in public. In fact, she thought she was the only one going through such experiences.
She also kept a diary during her childhood to try to come to terms with what was happening at home. She found writing as a way to help her understand what the adults in her life were doing to her and to give herself hope.
The story she wrote.
In her twenties, Jody continued to confront the behavior of her alcoholic loved ones, especially as they hit rock bottom. She also reflected on her 8-year old self, her childhood dreams and if she was doing what she really wanted to with her life.
In this midst of her “quarter-life crisis” as she calls it and by reflecting upon her childhood journals, she decided to start living her purpose and changing the world – one child at a time.
She wrote and published a children’s book, Easter Ann Peters’ Operation Cool about 12-year old Easter Ann Peters, a child of an alcoholic mother. The story is not only about how Easter survives middle school but creates her own Operation Cool to live a cool life in spite of the craziness of her home life. Her plan includes making friends, being more social around boys and standing up to bullies – especially the world’s jerkiest seventh grader, Horse Girl.
Easter’s mother spends most of the day asleep, hardly reaches out to anyone around town and has become a person Easter no longer recognizes.
The tween novel explores life living with an alcoholic loved one and trying to maintain a sense of normalcy despite all the other social pressures facing 12-year-old Easter. The story culminates with Easter’s mother being sent to rehab and restoring a sense of normalcy in Easter’s life and her relationship to her mother.
This is a story about hope triumphing over isolation, confusion and sadness written for children going through similar circumstances.
Your story.
I initially met Jody through one of my other favorite blogger’s blog, and realized that Jody was doing something remarkable in that she was taking personal pain and struggle to help others – especially children.
Not only through her books and writing but also through her advocacy, like this video here she filmed for Children of Alcoholic’s week:
Jody reminds all of us that we too can take our stories of pain and hurt and turn it into something positive and uplifting.
1) We all have stories of heart-break, pain and suffering from different parts of our lives. If you have journals from your younger days or when you were going through difficult times, reflect upon them.
2) What lessons did you learn? How did you become stronger, smarter or wiser from those lessons?
3) What are you willing to do with your story? Can you share it with others? Can you write about it? Can you send it into publishers, even if you get rejected 30 times? Can you make a public service announcement? Talk to a community group? Share it in a blog post?
4) Can you start an advocacy group or join one which talks about the issue? Are you willing to raise public awareness and public dialogue about what you experienced? Talk to the media so you can help others facing similar situations?
5) Are you willing to embrace your vulnerabilities?Some of the stories of our past and our struggles are sad and embarrassing. We don’t want others to know about the unpleasant and prickly pieces of our life. The defeats and low points.
They say a diamond is a just a piece of charcoal that handled stress exceptionally well. We want to shine as the diamond and stuff the charcoal pieces into a drawer no one will ever see.
Do you have the courage to tell us who you are?
6) Are you ready for the world to accept you as you truly are? Are you ready to allow your personal story to help, embrace, and uplift others?
Jody’s story truly inspires me and hopefully, you, to talk about the things that matter in your life. You never know who’s out there who needs to hear you.
You may be the one person who someone in pain or struggling can benefit from. It may be a child, someone being abused, someone in fear or in a vulnerable place.
Who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down?
“Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.” Oprah
Need more friends in your life?
No, you don’t!
What!!?? How could you say that V?
Well, I can say that, dear friend and blog reader of mine, because if you’re anything like me, you have an abundance of friends in your life. Or maybe HAD?
From our school and university days to our work days, we make friends. We are regularly around folks who are initially suspecting strangers, then mildly warm acquaintances to finally being best buds we want to spend every minute of our time with. (Well, not every minute – that might make you a stalker!)
Some of us might actually need more friends in our lives. If you don’t have any, yes, you need one.
If you have some (friends that is), you should strive to nurture those friendships instead of finding new ones.
Why friendship matters?
During three critical periods in my life, friends were there for me. And helped save my life. Ok, my sanity, at least.
When I was in my final year of high school in Northern California and my family moved back to Malaysia, I moved in with family friends. Along with them, many of my friends from secondary was how I was able to keep a sense of normalcy in my life. I was 17-years-old and found myself completely alone during the most important year of school. Friends were there for companionship, advice and help.
During college, I again found myself in a new city, living in a college dorm. I didn’t know a single person on campus when I arrived during what was probably one of the rockier years of my life. Getting adjusted to college life and complete responsibility for myself would have been tough if I didn’t have the help of room-mates, dorm-mates and friends.
Most recently, after my divorce, friends were the people in my life that I could most rely on for objective advice, non-judgment and understanding. As painful as divorce was, one of the many positive results were the unbending friendships which only became stronger.
Friends are there through the rough and smooth patches of travel. They are there to celebrate the dazzling moments but really are there when you crash, fall down, or fall apart.
A friend can share advice, change your perspective or even be a shoulder to lean on.
A friend in a moment of need can help you through the most prickly of life circumstances and salvage your well-being.
If they can uplift you perspective, rejuvenate your life, mend your soul, rally your drive – aren’t they changing you life? And your outlook on the world?
How do you keep your best friends forever (bff’s) instead of making new ones every 6months?
You don’t need new friends. You don’t need a lot of friends.
Value the ones you do have. Strengthen the friendship in your life.
How you ask?
Visit my guest post over at Mary Jaksch’s blog and find ten simple ways to strengthen your friendships (Please leave me a comment over there and let me know about the rock-solid friendships in your life and what you’ve done to sustain them)
What happened to that Swedish dude on his gap year? Bjorn? Oh..Bjorn?
My friend Bjorn is a culture mutt. So much so that he even named his blog that. He’s originally from Sweden, lived in Europe, married a funny Filipina girl (from Los Angeles – where else?) and now lives in Thailand of course.
Today, he tells you about some bad decisions he made earlier in his life and how he turned it around. Take it away vän!
Never before had I tasted failure of such epic proportion.
I was so depressed that I left the booth at the volunteer activity I was helping with and lay down in a nearby field feeling the weight of months of loneliness and confusion as a 16 year-old, far from home. The gap year experience I had so been looking forward to had proven to be a total disaster. As I looked up at the Philippine sky I was tortured by the agonizing question: how had I gotten here?
The Dream
It had been the dream of my adolescent life: finish secondary school in England and work abroad for a year with an international volunteer organization. At first all had gone smoothly. The organization had waved the rule that you had to be 18 to join. I finished secondary school and within weeks I flew from London to Manila, riding the high of adventure-fueled adrenaline.
At first I loved my new life. Palm trees, the warm weather, Filipino food and great new friends. I cruised through a month of training at the end of which would come the big announcement of where each trained volunteer would be sent to work for 11 months.
Bad News
When the announcement came I had mixed feelings. I was being sent to a little fishing village in Western Pangasinan (in the northern part of the Philippines). That was fine. But the bad part was that I didn’t at all know the two other guys that I was being sent out with. The friends I had made during training were all being sent elsewhere. I was being sent on a remote work assignment with total strangers.
Hasty preparations were made for our trip out and before I knew it, I was on a bus with my two new workmates and huge cultural and language barriers to boot. My workmates spoke some English but the nuance that you could communicate to someone back home in England was nearly impossible to get across.
Even Worse News
Cultural problems came up quickly. Although both my workmates were Filipino, they were from different areas and only one spoke the local dialect, Ilocano. The Ilocano then decided that the other guy was lazy, that he was not pulling his weight. There was a lot of passive aggression and then a fight. It was ugly. Instead of doing something positive for our community it seemed we were crumbling from within.
My own private frustrations were building as I was quickly discovering that the only role that I could find to lead was that of a children’s activities coordinator where games and songs required less in the way of my speaking Ilocano. And even that wasn’t going well. The kids were acting up. An old man made fun of me. I was running out of material.
Mr. Lonely
Then the intense loneliness sank in. I had never missed home and my family so much. I knew I was not doing well when I could look out at the warm ocean, a minute’s walk from our house, and not even want to jump in and enjoy it. I felt all alone.
I couldn’t really communicate with anyone.
It was 1997 and the closest phone that I could feasibly use to call home was a 30-minute jeepney (an open-backed truck of sorts) ride away. Contact with home was sparse. When a letter would come in the mail it was always a really huge deal. I read the letter excitedly and then often re-read it. But then there would be nothing for days, sometimes weeks.
As my thoughts snapped back to the present, the realization that I had been massively under-prepared for this year abroad struck like a sledge hammer. I lay in the field feeling the horrible mix of regret at what had clearly been a bad life decision to leave home at such a young age, blended with utter angst about how I could possibly get out of this mess.
No More
It was one of the few periods of my life where I genuinely dreaded every day. I couldn’t take anymore of this. I had to put a stop to it. The agony had to end.
It was this realization, this line in the sand where I vowed that I would do anything to change my life situation, that was the genesis of what I can now look back on as one of the greatest comebacks of my life.
The realization that my life was pure hell forced action. I contacted my supervisors at headquarters and pushed for relocation as soon as possible. It was uncomfortable but it worked. I was reassigned to an English teaching assignment near Manila with my best friend from my training days. Two months later even better news came. I had landed a completely different volunteer position in Northern Sweden to complete the second half of my gap year. I would be leading out in children and youth activities in a little town near the arctic circle.
Transformation
Things were automatically 10 times better. I got to see my family on the trip to Sweden and as soon as I arrived at my new service post I met great friends. A large family practically adopted me. They had me over to their house to eat, play sports and watch movies practically every weekend.
As my physical and social environment improved and as I basked in the joy of new friendship, the pain of loneliness and adolescent angst lifted. I was so much happier. I felt like myself again. And I was able to do work that I am still proud of today.
Time passed a lot quicker now that I was enjoying life and before I knew it, I was saying goodbye to a huge crowd of new friends that had gathered to send me off in style. As I finished the year at a summer camp in Southern Sweden there was plenty of time to reflect on the year that had passed.
Lessons
What started as a catastrophe had turned into one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life.
Key to this change had been my acknowledging I had made a poor life decision with massive consequences. Even more importantly, I had realized that despite the fact that I had made a bad decision in embarking on a very difficult journey without the necessary emotional and overall life maturity, I had the power to make far better decisions to turn my life around completely.
I’m in my 30s now but the clarity I experienced about the power of decision making is burned into my memory for life. It took a fishing village for me but the details do not matter. We all have the power to turn failures into successes with the power of careful decision making.
Do you have a similar experience where the power of good decisions became crystal clear in your life? I would love to hear about it in the comments.
To learn more about the hilarious man known as Bjorn or to find out more about international travel, doing good around the world and living a James Bond life-style, visit www.culturemutt.com.
Welcome to my friend and guest post contributor, Galen Pearl:
Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself. –Rumi
“Arab Spring”is the term often used to describe an ongoing series of protests and wars spreading through the Arab world in the last two years. The term sounds promising and full of hope, although the conflicts themselves, regardless of the outcome, have caused a great deal of suffering.
I read that one slogan of the demonstrators has been Ash-shab yurid isqat an-nizam, “the people want to bring down the regime.” Many of us can understand this sentiment, whether in support of people seeking more freedom in other countries, or wanting change in our own country, or just change in our own lives.
In the United States, there has been much talk bringing down the regime (American style). But what is the regime and what does bringing it down look like? The rhetoric from the last campaign and the subsequent fiscal cliff fiasco make it hard to distinguish the regime holder from the challenger. While the two sides argue about which way to paddle, the canoe sweeps ever faster toward the rapids and the falls.
Make love, not war.
Personally, I think we had it right back in the 60s with the slogan Make love, not war. True, we were naive and had no clue about how to live that slogan in any sort of socially productive way. But I think we had the right idea in that we understood the truth of Buddha’s teaching that “Hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is healed.”
Even so, we succumbed to the same mistake as those we sought to replace, by thinking that we could change things by changing others. I was like that, too. I thought I had the answer to any question about what our country should look like, and I was angry and dismissive towards anyone who disagreed with me. Make love, not war, you idiots! Hmm.
Changing ourselves is how we change the world.
Gandhi encouraged us to “be the change we want to see in the world.” Making love instead of war means being love. Vishnu understands this. His tagline for this blog is “Change yourself. Change the world.” Those aren’t two separate acts. Changing ourselves is how we change the world. In fact, it’s the only way to change the world.
So we start with bringing down our own regime, experiencing our own Inner Spring.
My Inner Spring began years ago when I knew I needed to change my life. My regime was based on fear and governed by threats. If I didn’t control my world, meaning everything and everyone outside of myself, then disaster was sure to happen. I don’t know that I brought down my regime as much as it sort of fell down by itself. It was not sustainable and began to crumble in spite of my frantic efforts to maintain it.
I finally surrendered to the inevitable, and only then, in the relinquishment of force, did I discover the lightness of being, our natural state of joy. I’ve since learned that the way we bring down our regime and experience our Inner Spring is by practicing the qualities we want to see in our world. As the bumper sticker says, compassion is revolution. So is joy, forgiveness, kindness, gratitude. And as we manifest our Inner Spring, World Spring is sure to follow.
Galen Pearl is one of my favorite bloggers and a wise teacher. She regularly posts though-invoking reflections on her blog, 10 Steps to Finding Your Happy Place. Her practical and relevant book on happiness can be found here. I’ve found it to be a life-changer. * Photo credit.
What about you? What does you current regime look like? Is there anything in it that you want to bring down or transform? Are you living your Inner Spring? What would that look like?
I'm dazin'but check out Vishnu's guest post on Brazen
Once upon a time, I used to practice law.
Yes, if you needed a lawyer to help you immigrate to the U.S. or get the hell out, I was your man. I ran an online immigration law firm advising clients from all over the world. It was the most fun I’ve ever had helping people achieve their American dream.
The part I loved about the work was helping my clients immigrate to America, reunite with loved ones and defending them when the American government tried to kick them out. The part I found challenging was running a full-scale business. My first one.
Anyway, it was a humbling experience running a practice, operating a business and fighting for my clients.
After a couple years with this struggling business, I realized I had to close shop and move on from a venture I had put my heart and soul into.
I learned so much from having run this law firm. Even though I had to close it down, I never regretted this business for a minute. It taught me profound lessons about business, marketing and law.
To learn more about my journey and find out how to turn failures into success, visit my my guest post on the Brazen Careerist blog. A special thanks to editor, Alexis Grant, for publishing this post.
Please leave me a comment on the Brazen Careerist blog and let me know if you’ve failed before. How did you make your comeback?
If you’ve never failed and don’t want to succeed ha! no worries. Enjoy some photos below from the San Francisco Zen Center. If you’re in the San Francisco, California area, drop in to zen out.
I help people overcome their devastating breakups and divorces and find love again. Instead of visiting the Himalayas, sign up below and join me. I am taking a writing break but will be back soon.
This guide is free. A ticket to the Himalayas is $2000. Your move.
