As a forty-year old guy who's on dating apps and Twitter to a pathological degree, I find the concept of seeking help with one’s mental health a surprisingly pervasive part of my life. “Men would rather ____ than go to therapy,” as the Twitter joke goes, with any combination of delusion, denial, and destruction (comma, self) filling in the blank.
Even before I went, I was completely in agreement with this line of thinking—other men really did need therapy. But not me.
Sure, I had a raft of coping mechanisms—drinking, ignoring my problems, and, if things were really going bad, shaving my head. And if this feels like some classic Man Who Thinks He’s Sensitive Avoiding Processing His Negative Feelings shit, then, yes, you’re right.
The beginning and end of my thoughts about mental health for my first four decades on earth could be summed up as: Chinese people don’t fuck with therapy. If I need “someone to talk to,” I have my friends.
I remember a time in high school when my sister and I called our aunt to ask for advice on what to do about one of our relatives, who was routinely drinking himself to sleep while playing Go on the computer. Her response was “Well, depression probably runs in our family, but he’ll never get help. We don’t really do that sort of thing.” As with many conversations with that generation, when my aunt said we, she meant Chinese people.
We’re about to get to the part where I confirm some stereotypes. Racists, don’t take this out of context. But, truly, there’s a strong cultural taboo against talking about mental health among Asian people, and in Asian American men, this is exacerbated by the model-minority myth that creates a fiction that we must be perfect, attacks on our masculinity that make it harder for us to show weakness, and, for some, language barriers that make it harder to communicate with the people who nurture us.
I won’t pretend to know about all Asian folks’ experiences, but for me, this is exemplified by the fact that, of the little Chinese that I know, the only phrase that speaks to someone’s state of mind is shen jing bing.
Shen jing bing literally translates into “nerve disease” or “mental disease,” but as a phrase it works the way that crazy works in English—it can be silly or it can be heavily derogatory. But as far as my family went, the brain was a perfectly simple organ with exactly two possible states: You were either Normal or shen jing bing.
This hit home when I realized my parents would routinely talk shit about the kids of their coworkers or some of my white classmates who were getting help for things like depression by using that phrase and writing them off. To them, anything atypical about your mind might as well be a death sentence.
So while I have happily inherited my parents’ penchant for talking shit about children behind their backs, it hadn’t occurred to me that I’d also inherited their inability or unwillingness to talk about my emotions without it feeling like an admission that something was Deeply and Permanently Wrong with Andrew.
In college, I majored in neuroscience, merging an interest in human behavior with my belief that everything can be understood on a scientific level. I remember learning about Freud and the other early psychologists as people who were largely full of shit and thinking it was weird that this could form the basis of a modern medical practice. If everything in the brain can be explained by chemistry and computational models, then isn’t therapy basically the equivalent of using leeches or blaming humours for illness?
My twenties and thirties only served to intensify this alienation. I lived in New York and Los Angeles and, unlike in Michigan, where I grew up, encountered more people than ever who went to therapy. But rather than normalizing the practice, their experiences and vocabulary only served to make me feel as if therapy were for other people, specifically white people, and not participating was something that helped me feel more Asian.
This article appears in the April/May 2021 issue of Esquire.
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That’s right. If you’re curious what kind of deeply stupid person I am, I’d managed to rationalize a cultural pathology of Asian people, our stigmatization of mental illness, and turn it into a point of pride.
This pride continued into 2020—my fortieth year and one I was looking forward to. My career was going well, and I felt like I was going to have the best year of my life.
And I was right!
No, obviously the world very much went to hell, and my life was no exception. But I somehow found a place of superiority within all of the sadness of Covid and rising racist violence. I was resilient. I was holding on.
Until I wasn’t. Early in November, I got crushed with grief. I was still extremely sad about a months-old breakup. I’d done what I’d always done—buried those feelings. I was living in the various elections, and ironically, once those went well, there was nothing else. So on the Saturday that people were dancing in the streets as news outlets called the defeat of Donald Trump, I distilled my unhealthy behaviors into the platonic ideal of Andrew Not Dealing With Shit—I got extremely drunk, went on Hinge, and had a one-night stand. Normally, this would be not great, but during a pandemic, for a middle-aged man with underlying conditions, this was self-destructive.
So yeah, I was starting to realize I was fucked up. This was enough to break through my decades of inertia and seek help. I realized I could use my powers of rationalization for my own good—by drawing an analogy between therapy and sports medicine.
In my thirties, I’d had knee surgery as a result of a childhood injury that was worsened by my insistence that a dude with a bad knee could totally study Brazilian jiu-jitsu. And for months after, I was going to rehab for my knee. To me, physical therapy and let’s call it brain therapy (I refuse to learn what therapy is properly called) have a lot in common—they seem like a bunch of childishly simple exercises under the care of someone operating on anecdotal evidence with large gray areas and huge margins for error.
They also fucking work. Months of tiny, unnoticeable steps, where you feel as though nothing could be happening, work. And even though half the time the physical therapist’s logic and reasoning seemed incorrect to me, letting go of that part of my brain that has to be right got me to a result that I wanted.
And that’s what I’ve found therapy to be. The nearly imperceptible work of setting aside time to talk about what is going on in my head has really helped me learn that I don’t have to let all the negative things that happen to me take on their own life. I can confront them on my terms, or at the very least try. Because like working on any other part of the body, building these skills takes lots of slow, repetitive practice. Over and over again. Forever.
Because otherwise I’d let that skill atrophy. Turns out, shaving one’s head doesn’t actually make you feel all that much better.
So despite the fact that I find some of the underlying theory of mental-health practice to be questionable (because I’m an overconfident, undereducated asshole), it’s clear that these practices work enough of the time to make them worth doing. Talking about my feelings. Thinking about what I “want.” Trying not to lie to myself. Recognizing that looking for my hair clippers is a sign of an emotional low point. And articulating that to another human. All that? That’s good.
So perhaps the biggest lesson that middle age has taught me is that, after decades of living my life needing to be right, I’ve finally become the type of person who would rather be happy.
