If you read part one of this month’s series (below), you know we talked about emotional hypervigilance: the nervous system response that develops when you grow up in environments where you had to scan outward to stay safe, stay loved, stay connected. We talked about how that adaptation follows us — primarily women — into romantic relationships, where it gets called maturity and thoughtfulness and ease, where we become the emotional engine of our partnerships,

This essay is the follow-up I promised: what emotional intelligence actually is. (Don’t forget that next week I will offer tools for healing, and at the end of the month I will write to your partners…)

What counts as emotional intelligence when you grew up in a culture that prioritizes interdependence rather than independence?

If I’m being honest, I went down a rabbit hole (in my head and online) about what the heck emotional intelligence is and who is deciding this and how does that even translate for those of us who live between cultures?

One of the things that has always felt incomplete to me about conversations on emotional intelligence is that they often assume there is one universal definition of what emotional health looks like. Most mainstream conversations about emotional intelligence celebrate things like expressing your feelings directly, advocating for your needs, setting boundaries, prioritizing authenticity, and speaking your truth. And to be clear, I think all of those things can be emotionally intelligent behaviors.

But they are also behaviors that tend to align with more individualistic cultural values.

As a therapist who works with children of immigrants and couples, I’ve often wondered what happens when we try to apply those definitions to our communities — to people who were raised in cultures that prioritize interdependence, family, community, and relational responsibility.

Research has consistently found that culture shapes how emotions are experienced, expressed, interpreted, and valued. (I have a whole podcast episode on this.) And, in many collectivistic cultures, emotional intelligence may include a heightened awareness of context, relationships, hierarchy, family dynamics, and the impact one’s actions have on others. Emotions are not understood as something that happens solely within an individual, but as something that happens within one or a web of relationships.

And honestly, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

Many of us were raised to think beyond ourselves. We were taught to consider our elders, our families, our communities, and the consequences of our actions. We were taught that relationships require care, responsibility, and consideration. We learned to pay attention to other people. We learned empathy. We learned how to read a room. We learned how to think about the collective, not just the individual.

The problem, then, is not that we learned those things. The problem is, instead, that many of us were also taught that understanding other people’s emotions meant becoming responsible for them. We learned that ‘reading the room’ and ‘paying attention’ and even ‘mindreading’ were essential to being in relationships and frankly, is how we can receive and gain love in return.

I think this is where so many of us — primarily women — get stuck (me included!).

In practice, many of us have not learned how to acknowledge ourselves in relationships with others. When I sit with my bicultural/multilcultural clients, I often notice something interesting. Many of them can explain their partner’s fears, insecurities, and attachment wounds. They can identify the context behind their elders’ behaviors or words. But when I ask them what they are feeling, what they need, or what they want, there is often a long pause.

And that’s because they have spent years directing the intelligence outward.

How can we understand emotional intelligence from a cross-cultural lens?

So I wanted to see what the research actually says because so much of what we see in mainstream messaging can be skewed from an individualistic lens in this country. Here’s the thing: The original research on emotional intelligence never suggested that emotionally intelligent people are responsible for everyone else’s emotions or just about prioritizing your own.

In 1995, psychologist Daniel Goleman popularized the concept of emotional intelligence (after it was coined by Peter Salovey and John Mayer) with a framework built around four core domains: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management.

Here’s what I want you to notice about this diagram: it starts with self. Self-awareness first. Social awareness and management next. He goes on to opine that the capacity to understand and work with your own emotional experience is the foundation on which everything else is built. Goleman was explicit about this and as a therapist I whole heartedly believe in this: You cannot regulate what you cannot first recognize. You cannot be genuinely attuned to others if you have no stable, grounded access to yourself.

Let me be very clear: This does not mean you should forego the values of interdependence, filial piety, loyalty, duty, collectivism or anything else that feels important to you. But you do have to make room for yourself in your relationships. Many of us are just doing it in a different — not wrong! — order. Instead of building the foundation of self first, we have built the foundation of relationships.

Let me illustrate this because I think it’s easy to turn this into a debate about what is “right.”

Sarah grew up in a family that emphasized independence and self-expression. From a young age, she was encouraged to identify her preferences, voice her opinions, advocate for her needs, and make decisions that felt right for her. As an adult, she generally has a strong sense of who she is. She knows what she likes and dislikes. She is comfortable setting boundaries and making choices that prioritize her wellbeing. But she sometimes struggles when relationships require sacrifice, compromise, or deep consideration of how her decisions affect the people around her. She has spent years learning herself and is now learning how to be part of a collective.

Miriam grew up in a South Asian immigrant family that emphasized interdependence and relational responsibility. From a young age, she was encouraged to think about how her actions affected the family, to consider the needs of others, and to understand her role within a larger system. As an adult, she is deeply empathetic. She notices when someone is struggling. She values connection, community, and showing up for the people she loves. She has spent years learning how to be in relationship. But she sometimes struggles to identify what she wants independent of everyone else’s expectations. She feels guilt when prioritizing herself and often worries that her needs will come at someone else’s expense. She has spent years learning relationships and is now learning herself.

Neither woman is wrong. Neither woman is more emotionally intelligent. They simply started in different places.

I want to note, too, that children of immigrants are more likely to be parentified than their non-immigrant origin counterparts. Children who take on emotional caregiving roles within their families often become highly attuned to other people’s emotional states. They learn to monitor moods, anticipate reactions, mediate conflict, and care for others at a young age. From the outside, these skills can look like maturity, wisdom, empathy, and emotional intelligence. But sometimes what gets praised as emotional intelligence is actually adaptation. The child is not learning how to express their emotions. They are learning how to monitor everyone else’s. (I wrote an entire essay for you guys on parentification here)

So when Western psychology tells us to “put yourself first,” it can feel jarring because it asks us to abandon skills and values that have served us in important ways. But I don’t think the goal is to move from relationships to self. We want to move into integration, yes, but we also want to challenge that we’re morally failing if we have been prioritizing relationships before our self. There’s nothing wrong with you, and if it doesn’t feel good, we must consider how we can incrementally change the way we are showing up in these relationships. We want to learn that emotional intelligence includes understanding yourself and understanding others. Honoring your needs and honoring your relationships. Valuing autonomy and valuing connection.

Not choosing one over the other, but building the capacity to hold both.

Healthy relationships — and real emotional intelligence — require us to think about other people’s feelings. They require empathy, consideration, flexibility, and care. The healthiest relationships I see are not built on radical self-focus. They are built on mutuality.

But there is a difference between being attuned to someone and becoming responsible for them. There is a difference between empathy and self-abandonment. There is a difference between consideration and chronic accommodation. There is a difference between interdependence and overfunctioning.

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This piece is an example of what paid subscribers to CE Insider receive. Moving forward some content will be paywalled to recognize the work and time that goes into researching and writing these + you can reply to this email with your questions and paid subscribers will get a video of me answering them at the end of the series!

How does trauma fit into this?

Another thing I think is important to note here: Research published in Frontiers in Psychology makes the distinction between self-surveillance and self-awareness from a neuroscience angle: trauma-induced hypervigilance and genuine emotional intelligence are actually associated with different neural adaptations. Hypervigilance is a self-preservation response — the brain scanning for threat and adjusting accordingly. Genuine emotional intelligence involves cognitive and emotional processing that is grounded and regulated, not threat-activated. They can look alike on the surface. And while parentification is not always experienced as a poor or negative thing, it has been studied as emotional neglect which is a form of childhood trauma, so it would make sense that if you were parentified you may have different neural adapations that actually lead to hyper vigilance not genuine EI.

This is the thing I most want you to understand, because I think it is the hinge on which everything else turns for so many of you.

Self-awareness — real emotional intelligence — is the ability to notice what you are feeling, name it accurately, and understand how it is influencing your thoughts and behavior. It is inward-facing. It is curious rather than corrective. It asks: what is happening inside me right now?

Self-surveillance — which is what hypervigilance produces — is the constant monitoring of your own emotional presentation in relation to how it might be received, judged, or disruptive to someone else. It is also inward-facing, but in a completely different way. It is not curious. It is controlling. It asks: how am I coming across? Is this too much? Should I soften this? Will this land badly?

The two can feel similar from the inside. Both involve paying attention to your emotions. But one is oriented toward understanding yourself and the other is oriented toward managing your impact on others. One builds self-knowledge. The other erodes it — slowly, over time, until you find yourself in the middle of a conversation you’re not even present for because you’re too busy monitoring the performance of being in it.

I talk about this a lot with specific behavior types and relational struggles I see in my clinical work in the last essay.

So what does real emotional intelligence actually feel like?

Real emotional intelligence, the grounded kind, the kind that comes from wholeness rather than fear, has a different quality to it. Here is how I have come to understand it, in myself and in the work I do with clients:

• It feels like noticing rather than monitoring. You become aware of what you’re feeling with curiosity rather than alarm. You can observe your emotional state without immediately needing to manage it, suppress it, or explain it away.

• It feels like having access to your own interiority even when you’re in relationship. You can be fully present with someone else and still know what you think, what you need, what you feel. You don’t have to disappear into them to be connected to them.

• It feels like choosing your responses rather than just surviving the situation. Because your reactions are no longer purely threat-activated, you have a moment — sometimes just a breath — between stimulus and response. That pause is where agency lives.

• It feels like being able to receive. Sitting with care rather than deflecting it. Letting someone ask how you’re doing and answering honestly. Tolerating being seen without immediately redirecting the focus.

• It feels like conflict that doesn’t end you. Because you trust that you can feel hurt, express it, have it land imperfectly, and still be okay. You don’t need to prevent rupture at all costs because you’ve learned that repair is possible.

And honestly? Sometimes it feels uncomfortable as hell. Especially at first. Because the nervous system that has been oriented outward for years does not immediately know what to do with inward attention. Turning toward yourself — really turning toward yourself — can feel foreign, even threatening, in a way that is deeply counterintuitive. You’re not alone.

Next week, we’ll get into what this actually looks like in practice… what it means to stop being the emotional manager in a relationship reflection questions for you to understand if you’re self aware or self-surveilling in relationships, and how healing moves through the body, the nervous system, and the partnership itself. (Part of this essay will be paywalled.)

If you have any questions about emotional intelligence this month, reply and ask it! I’ll be posting a recorded Q&A video answering all your questions at the end of the month!

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*Disclaimer: Culturally Enough. is not therapy, a mental health service, nor is it a substitute for mental health services of any kind. I am not showing up in this space as your therapist — I am showing up here as a curiosity-driven writer, peer, and a human. If you are looking for therapy, please consult with your local mental health resources.

Ways You Can Support My Work

• Join my other endeavor, The Bicultural Brief, a professional digest for clinicians.

• Buy my book

• Put my name in the hat for a speaking gig at your company or org!

• Forward this newsletter with someone you think would benefit from reading it.

• Download and review the podcast

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If you’re here, you probably know what it’s like to feel like too much in one room and not enough in another. To hold more than one language, more than one set of expectations, more than one version of yourself — and wonder which one is really you. To carry a constant tension between who you are and who you were raised to be.

Welcome to Culturally Enough. You found your people. Culturally Enough is a community for people living between cultures, to find belonging, own their story, and practice community care.

This is where we figure it all out together.

👋🏽 I’m Sahaj Kaur Kohli, an award-winning therapist, author, and the founder of Brown Girl Therapy. I’m also a daughter of Indian immigrants, a granddaughter of refugees, and someone who has spent her life moving between multiple cultures never quite feeling enough in any community or environment.

I started Culturally Enough because I wanted a space to go deeper and write more honestly and start (and have) deeper, nuanced conversations alongside you.

What we talk about here

We talk about the things that don’t always have language, but shape your life anyway. Things like:

• How communication styles look different across cultures

• That it’s okay to resent your immigrant parents (even if you love them tenderly)

• How cultural factors reinforce that scarcity mindset you struggle with

• What it means to be both parentified and infantilized

• What exactly bicultural confidence is (and how to build it)

• The act of villaging (and how to actually build community)

And so, so much more.

If you want to go deeper

You can learn specifically about the difference between paid vs free and the purpose of this space by reading the About page. But here’s a brief breakdown of what to expect:

Free subscribers receive

• Occasional free essays or resources on bicultural identity, mental health, and the in-between

• Partial content of deeper conversations and community activations

• First access to community events and announcements

We understand that paid is not accessible to everyone and as such there are other free or low-cost resources available on Brown Girl Therapy, the So We’ve Been Told podcast, my book But What Will People Say? and YouTube.

CE Insiders (paid) also receive

• Access to the private community space and a contained home for real dialogue that has scaffolding to allow for sustainability and privacy/safety

• At least one structured paid offering per month: extended dialogues, expert conversations, guided exercises, or resource-intensive guides

• Community activations: reflection threads, AMAs, audio. notes, and/or Zoom gatherings to meet each other

• Exclusive bonus content from the So We’ve Been Told podcast

Paid content is notable for its containment, structure, and additional resources. In short, this allows our team reciprocity to do this work with care while working to protect privacy and safety as we navigate deeper, and more nuanced, conversations with one another.

Paid subscribers can expect a slower and more intentional rhythm: thoughtful essays, deeper reflections, occasional resources or audio notes, and community touchpoints that allow us to engage with one another around the themes being explored. Some months may include live conversations or guest discussions, while others may center more around writing and asynchronous dialogue. Rather than trying to recreate a highly programmed membership space, I want Culturally Enough to feel like a thoughtful corner of the internet rooted in honesty, nuance, curiosity, and connection. Thank you for being here as this next chapter takes shape.

Community Guidelines

1. Respect personal boundaries: Respect that people will share what feels safe and appropriate for them. Do not pressure other community members, moderators, or Sahaj to disclose more than they deem appropriate.

2. Respect diversity: The bicultural experience is not a monolith. Culturally Enough does not claim to speak for all bicultural individuals, and we hold space for multiple perspectives. We ask that all community participants do the same, and recognize that there is no “correct” way to experience or process culture. Additionally, shy away from making broad statements about communities and groups of people.

3. Protect privacy: We ask that you maintain confidentiality when discussing personal matters and other individuals. We each have to do our part to maintain this corner of the internet as a safe and protective space.

4. No harassment or bullying: It goes without saying that discriminatory language, aggression toward other community members, abusive language, and harmful speech (including, but not limited to racism, sexism, ableism, transphobia, and more) will be removed and community members are subject to ejection.

5. Remember: This is not a crisis support space: Culturally Enough is not a space for formal clinical inquiries or crisis outreach. If someone indicates that they are in immediate distress, they will be directed toward the appropriate resources. We welcome sharing resources and suggestions, but ask members to avoid diagnosis, clinical advice or using this space as a replacement of professional care. Additionally, we recognize that traumatic experiences are nuanced and deeply personal. While we respect individuals’ desire to share openly, this community is not a space for active trauma processing. We ask that you are mindful of what you post in this forum — being mindful of operating with boundaries as you do so — and refrain from oversharing publicly.

Find me elsewhere

• Brown Girl Therapy on Instagram

• Linkedin

• YouTube

• Join my other endeavor, The Bicultural Brief, a professional digest for clinicians.

• Buy my book, But What Will People Say?

• Listen to my podcast, So We’ve Been Told

• Apply to Boldly Bicultural, my community program led by me alongside an intimate group of community members

As a disclaimer, this community is not meant to be a replacement of therapy or professional health care. With that said, I hope it’s healing and transformative.

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The responses came in fast. And they were — as your responses always are — both heartbreaking and clarifying:

• “I became so good at understanding others that I forgot to ask for what I needed.”

• “Anticipating their needs to the point I resent when they can’t anticipate mine.”

• “Being the one to self-regulate others’ emotions and put my own emotions aside.”

• “I feel like I have to be 10 steps ahead of my partner and figure everything out.”

• “Having big emotional reactions because I feel safe for once.”

I am building a four-part series here on Culturally Enough from those responses, from what I see in my couples therapy practice, and from my own unlearning. Here’s the breakdown:

Parts of this series will be paywalled to recognize the work and time that goes into researching and writing these + you can reply to this email with your questions and paid subscribers will get a video of me answering them at the end of the series!

So let’s start at the beginning… with how we learned what we learned, and what it cost us to bring it into love.

Where did the “emotional awareness” come from?

You are thoughtful, empathetic, perceptive, and deeply caring. But what I see so often in my work as a couples and individual psychotherapist is that these traits were not formed in a vacuum. They were shaped inside systems where emotional attunement became a survival strategy.

And I want to be careful here, because sometimes that is true. Many of us did develop deep emotional insight. We learned to notice nuance, hold complexity, translate other people’s emotional states with real precision and care. But I also think we have to ask: where did that awareness come from?

I know because I was praised for these things too. Many of us were. Especially as daughters. Especially as daughters of immigrants. Especially in homes where our parents were carrying enormous stress, sacrifice, instability, grief, cultural displacement, or emotional burdens they themselves had never been taught how to process.

For many of us, emotional intelligence did not develop in emotionally safe environments.

You learn quickly in those environments that emotions have consequences. Maybe anger created distance. Maybe sadness overwhelmed your parents. Maybe your needs felt small compared to what your family had survived. Maybe your role in the family became the peacemaker, the helper, the achiever, the “easy child,” the emotionally stable one. And slowly, without realizing it, you become incredibly skilled at scanning outward before ever looking inward.

You learned to notice everything: tone, nonverbal shifts, energy, the particular quality of a silence. And you learned to monitor your own expression because “talking back,” or even just ‘having a face,’ was punishable.

You learned to anticipate everyone’s needs before they voiced them, because a need voiced too late became your failure.

You learned to adjust yourself to keep the peace. To explain yourself thoroughly (and then over-explain) because being misunderstood felt dangerous.

You learned that love and approval could be conditional. And that your job was to manage the conditions.

This is not emotional intelligence. Not exactly. Or rather, it is, but it is emotional intelligence born of necessity, forged in environments where you were in emotional survival. So instead, this is emotional hypervigilance. And it is what many of us have been carrying into every relationship since.

And sadly, it’s often what causes many of us to disappear in our relationships.

What hypervigilance actually is

Hypervigilance is a nervous system response. It is what happens when your body learns that the environment is unpredictable, that love or safety might be withdrawn without warning, and that your job is to prevent that from happening.

The nervous system is practical. It learned what it learned because that learning protected you (you feel me?). It scanned so you didn’t get caught off guard. It adjusted so you didn’t lose connection. It anticipated so you didn’t disappoint.

And now, here you are, in a relationship with someone who is not your parent, in a dynamic that is not your childhood home, and your nervous system is still doing all of that.

What does that look like from the inside? I asked, and you told me:

• “You know how someone will react to something before it even happens.”

• “Did I say too much? Was that rude? Should I have known they were upset? Do they think I’m selfish? Are they mad at me? Did I disappoint them? Should I fix this before it becomes a problem?”

• “I shut down during conflict. I’m not good at apologies.”

• “I had to learn not to jump to yelling at my partner when I have feelings I can’t name.”

• “I’m quick to give the benefit of the doubt because it was never given to me.”

You were the one who could do the emotional labor, so you were put into the role to do it. (And many of us learned to identify ourselves in this role — more on this later, but I want to name this because there’s a lot of shock and grief with unlearning this role). But before we unlearn it, I want to highlight how this emotional labor is showing up today. Your responses covered it:

• “I still have to be the emotionally intelligent one in the dynamic.”

• “Being ultra-responsible and thinking my partner isn’t by comparison — and resenting that.”

• “Parenting my partner, then being resentful about it.”

• “Being consistently accountable even when there’s silence or lack of effort from others.”

• “Having to extend that to others. Being all of that for others.”

The adaptation that helped you survive and avoid criticism, stay connected, keep the peace, become the “good” daughter… it has followed you and it has stayed with you in your current relationships. It has become so automatic that it doesn’t even feel like a choice anymore.

This often follows women directly into romantic relationships

I want to be careful here, because I don’t think any of us are just one thing, and I am not interested in making you feel pathologized. But I do see patterns and relational architectures that women who grew up this way tend to move through. To clarify and be explicit: They are not flaws; they are adaptations that made complete sense and now need to evolve. Pause if you see yourself here, and remember, there is nothing wrong with you.

Eventually, many of us realize we are not simply participating in emotional intimacy… we are actually managing it. And what makes this dynamic so painful is that many women do not even realize how much they are overfunctioning because overfunctioning feels normal to them. I see this all the time in my work.

You learn to make yourself palatable so you edit your feelings and needs. You learned that your value is tied to your usefulness, so you make yourself indispensable through emotional labor and caregiving.

I cannot tell you how many women I sit with who say some version of: “I just feel alone in this relationship.” And often, they feel guilty even saying it because their partner is not necessarily cruel or malicious. Sometimes their partner loves them deeply. Sometimes their partner is trying. But love alone does not erase imbalance. And emotional loneliness can exist even inside loving relationships when one person becomes responsible for noticing, initiating, processing, soothing, repairing, and carrying the emotional life of the partnership.

I also think many emotionally hypervigilant women unconsciously enter familiar relational archetypes because familiar dynamics feel emotionally true to the nervous system. One common dynamic is the emotionally unavailable partner. This is the relationship where she becomes the emotional engine, working tirelessly to create closeness while the other person remains emotionally distant, avoidant, inconsistent, or shut down. And because she learned early that connection required effort, she often interprets this imbalance as something she simply needs to work harder at. If she explains herself better, becomes softer, asks differently, gives more grace, becomes less “reactive,” maybe intimacy will finally arrive. Sound familiar?

Another common dynamic is the relationship built on potential. These women are often deeply compassionate people who can see the woundedness in others very clearly. But many were also conditioned to confuse understanding someone with being safe with them. They stay because they can empathize with why someone struggles. They understand the trauma. They understand the fear. They understand the avoidance. And sometimes that empathy keeps them emotionally invested long after the relationship has stopped being emotionally nourishing.

And then there is the “easy” woman. The woman who prides herself on not asking for much. The woman who adapts constantly. The woman who says “it’s fine” when it isn’t. The woman who minimizes her hurt because she fears becoming difficult. The woman who becomes deeply loved for how little space she takes up. Until one day she realizes the relationship only worked because she never fully existed inside it.

So now what?

We must acknowledge the grief of realizing we were rewarded for disappearing. Realizing people praised us for being emotionally low-maintenance when often we were emotionally self-erasing. Realizing we became so good at understanding everyone else that we lost connection to ourselves in the process (or never learned how to connect with ourselves in the first place).

These archetypes are not mutually exclusive, and to be very clear again: they are adaptive. They made sense somewhere. They just don’t serve us now.

The conditions that shaped our hypervigilance are complex, and many of them are real expressions of love operating under real constraints. This is not about deciding that being emotionally aware is bad. It is extraordinary. It is a gift. I genuinely believe that. I see so many of you every day in my work who have so much to give, and you are tired. Lost. Scared. Numb.

Being emotionally intelligent and being emotionally hypervigilant can look identical from the outside but they feel completely different on the inside. It’s important to start to notice the difference. What are you compensating for? What impulse do you follow? What would happen if you stopped…or at the very least were met halfway?

In part two, we’ll go deeper into what emotional intelligence actually is — and what it is not (with research and resources!). I’ll help you explore what it looks like when it’s rooted in genuine self-awareness rather than self-monitoring, and why so many of us have confused the two for most of our lives.

We will then move into part three on healing and what it means to actually un-play the emotional manager in your relationships, followed by a bonus essay on “if you love the emotionally intelligent daughter” (you can send to your loved ones!).

And if you were praised for disappearing so gracefully that everyone called it maturity, I want you to know that you are not alone.

If you have any questions about this topic this month, just reply and ask it! I will be creating a short video rounding up all your questions and answering them all and sharing it here at the end of the series (for paid subscribers)

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*Disclaimer: Culturally Enough. is not therapy, a mental health service, nor is it a substitute for mental health services of any kind. I am not showing up in this space as your therapist — I am showing up here as a curiosity-driven writer, peer, and a human. If you are looking for therapy, please consult with your local mental health resources.

Ways You Can Support My Work

• Join my other endeavor, The Bicultural Brief, a professional digest for clinicians.

• Buy my book

• Put my name in the hat for a speaking gig at your company or org!

• Forward this newsletter with someone you think would benefit from reading it.

• Download and review the podcast

Find me elsewhere:

• Instagram

• Linkedin

• YouTube

Share Culturally Enough.

Culturally Enough has always been more than a newsletter to me. It’s been a place for language, reflection, cultural nuance, community gathering, and the kinds of conversations many of us haven’t had room for elsewhere. As this community has grown, I’ve been thinking carefully about how to protect that depth while also building something that can continue long-term without burning out the people holding it.

Part of that process has been rethinking what community, care, and support actually look like behind the scenes. I have been working hard with a strategist and my team to think through a sustainable action plan moving forward but…. I need support.

So I’m opening applications for a Community Manager for Culturally Enough.

I’m looking for someone thoughtful, culturally grounded, emotionally intelligent, and collaborative. Someone who understands that this is not just a growth role, but a role rooted in tone, discernment, and care. Someone who can help support the community and shape systems that make this space feel more intentional and sustainable over time. Someone who cares about this existing and wants to be a part of something innovative.

This is a part-time freelance role (10–15 hrs/month, remote/flexible) at $60/hour.

If you’ve been part of this community and feel aligned with the vision of what we’re building here, I’d love to hear from you.

Here’s the application with more details on what we are looking for.

Applications close May 16 and interviews will be offered on a rolling basis.

I am not looking for high-volumes of apps, but rather the right person who sees this and understands the importance of this work and wants to help shape this community and it’s activity.

And thank you, genuinely, for continuing to be here as this space evolves. I have heard from so many of you who are awaiting the paid community to return. I’m trying to build this slowly, thoughtfully, and in a way that preserves what makes this community feel meaningful in the first place.

I look forward to hearing from you, and if you have any questions just reply to this email!

Grateful,

Sahaj

I’ve been thinking a lot about abundance lately — what it means to have more space, more ease, more choice — and how unexpectedly uncomfortable that can feel, especially in today’s climate.

I recently shared a video on Instagram about moving to a new city and how disorienting it’s been to sit in something that is, objectively, good. My husband and I moved to a bigger place where we have a backyard! An extra few rooms! Nothing about this may surprise or be crazy to some of you but the fact there’s more room, more possibility, more comfort, and more quiet…. instead of just feeling grateful or settled, I’ve found myself feeling unsettled. Like I need to fill it. Or earn it. Or make it make sense quickly so I can feel like I’m “doing it right.”

And I don’t think that’s just about the move.

I am deeply uncomfortable by abundance in so many ways. I have felt this way when I got my major book deal, when a loved one is very, very kind or generous out of nowhere. I feel it about Brown Girl Therapy and having this space and community to share my voice and work so openly and so widely. I feel it when others want to champion and collaborate with me — sometimes this voice in my head asks, What will this cost me? What are you trying to take from me? I’m not proud of it, but I am working on it.

To be clear, when I talk about abundance, I’m not just talking about things. I’m also talking about the abundance mindset or the belief that there is plenty for everyone and that resources, opportunities, and success are limitless, rather than finite.

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Types of abundance that can feel uncomfortable

Here are some examples of abundance that can feel uncomfortable (count how many you relate to):

• Being on the receiving end of love, generosity or support

• Financial security can feel like abundance (add in having more that you “need” and it can be overwhelming)

• Degrees, milestones like getting a book published, and social status that surpasses what parents have had

• Travel, hobbies, rest, skincare and freedom to spend time and money in joy and “luxury”

• Having free time or flexibility in your schedule and not making it “productive”

• Having a slower pace of life than you’re used to and choosing a lifestyle different from what was expected of you

• Being able to make decisions that prioritize you

• Having options (even when all of them are “good”)

• Being in rooms your family didn’t have access to

• Having more physical space than you’re used to or living in a place that feels peaceful or quiet

• Feeling safe in your environment

• Having “little luxuries” that make your life easier — ie in-home laundry, dishwasher, a car, etc etc

• Being cheered on and championed without strings attached

I think many of us learned to exist in environments where space, ease, or choice weren’t always available, or these things simply didn’t feel stable enough to trust. Even more, for a lot of children of immigrants, abundance can feel like more responsibility. And sure, in some ways it is but in other ways, we’ve learned to turn it into something heavier than it needs to be.

We grow up with an awareness of sacrifice and of what it took for our families to get here. We understand (and may even be reminded) of what was given up, left behind, or endured in our families, and that awareness shapes how we relate to what we have now.

So maybe you relate and more doesn’t just mean more. Instead, it can mean:

• What do I owe this?

• How do I use this well?

• Who am I to deserve this?

• How do I hold on to this and when will it disappear?

• Am I allowed to have this when others don’t?

So instead of receiving abundance, we manage it and optimize it and question it. I asked you all on Instagram what happens to you when you start to experience abundance and here were the most common replies:

• “I feel grateful and sad at the same time.”

• “I get a little scared and think one day I will have nothing and I will look back on this day.”

• “I feel guilty and even more pressure to give back”

• “I worry it’s a fluke and the other shoe will drop.”

• “I don’t feel like I deserve it.”

• I anticipate the end of said abundance”

Basically, when you are uncomfortable with abundance, you might: over-schedule your time so empty space doesn’t exist, feel pressure to “use” every room / opportunity / resource, turn rest into a task (“I’ll relax after I finish this one thing”), research or second-guess decisions you’ve already made, feel like you need to document or justify enjoyment.

Reflect: what does abundance feel like in your body? Many of you may say, restlessness, tightness, inability to relax, urge to move/do/fix

Abundance can also disrupt identity in ways we don’t always expect.

When your life expands, it often changes things that once felt familiar: your routines, your relationships, your proximity to certain versions of yourself. And even if those changes are chosen — even if they are aligned — they can still feel like a loss.

I always identified with this version of myself that was hustling to get some level of comfort. And I am definitely still hustling, but I am also more comfortable, and I don’t know how to accept that. I don’t think we talk enough about how confusing it can be to hold that grief alongside genuine joy. I’ve thought, if I’m not working toward something, who am I? Again, it’s not like I’m not working, I’m just more at ease than I have been 🧿

Even more, I find that I am no longer having to be in survival mode or have scarcity mindset even if it was handed down to me. Leaning into building generational wealth (that was quite frankly started at the hands of my parents and grandparents) is such a privilege and… let’s be honest, there are so many White, European folks who accept this so freely. Why is this more normalized for some groups while the rest of us have to question it? For many of us, ease doesn’t just feel unfamiliar, it feels undeserved.

I don’t want to be someone who feels like I don’t deserve abundance. That I have to always work at it. That I have to worry it’s not safe. Haven’t our people and lineage suffered enough? Isn’t this what our ancestors would want for us? Ease in ways to then really give more to the things that are important — the community, the relationships, the activism?

And then there’s the world we are living in.

It’s hard to talk about abundance without acknowledging how unevenly it exists. How many people are navigating instability, loss, or harm in ways that make “having more” feel complicated.

So your personal expansion doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens alongside a broader awareness of what’s happening around you. Which can bring up its own set of questions. And for many of us, guilt becomes the bridge. A way of staying connected. A way of not letting ourselves feel too comfortable.

But guilt doesn’t actually deepen connection. It often just makes it harder to receive what’s already here.

So what do we do with all of this?

I don’t think the answer is to force ourselves to feel grateful, or to “fix” the discomfort. If anything, I think it starts with recognizing that this discomfort makes sense. That difficulty receiving abundance isn’t a personal failure, but maybe instead, it’s often a reflection of the environments, expectations, and emotional conditions we were shaped by.

It might look like:

• Noticing when you start trying to earn what you already have

• Letting yourself move more slowly in something new, without rushing to feel settled

• Allowing joy and grief to exist together, without trying to resolve them

• Questioning the idea that you have to use everything “well” for it to be valid

• Redefining and seeing rest, ease and time as your lineage’s momentum

• And maybe, over time, practicing something that can feel unfamiliar: Letting something be good… without immediately turning it into something you have to prove or questioning it altogether

I mean I definitely don’t have it figured out but I’d like to hear what you are thinking about in the comments!

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I am hearing from so many of you – clients, community members, and even friends – on how you’re functioning, doing what you need to do, showing up… but also carrying so much under the surface. Not to mention how this weight is compounded by your identities as a bicultural person, first- or second-gen, or just someone living between worlds.

I know it’s not just your stuff either. You’re dragging with your family expectations, cultural pressure, old roles you never consciously chose, survival skills that aren’t actually helping you right now.

And most of the time, there isn’t a place to talk about that honestly without having to over-explain or soften it so others feel comfortable.

That’s really why Boldly Bicultural – my three month community program for adult children of immigrants – exists.

So many of you are navigating spaces and relationships right now where you constantly have to ask yourself: who gets to feel safe, heard, and whole? You don’t have spaces where you can show up truly, honestly, radically as yourself – confused, angry, emboldened, grieving, hopeful, curious, and more… all at once!

Boldly Bicultural isn’t a program to “fix” or rush your healing. It’s a container where you can slow down and be real about what you’re carrying with people who actually understand the context. Across past cohorts, I’ve watched people begin to trust themselves more. They stop second-guessing every boundary. They feel less alone in the grief, guilt, anger, and love they’re holding at the same time. And again and again, I hear: “Oh… it’s not just me.”

In Boldly Bicultural, we don’t pretend healing happens in a vacuum. We talk about family, culture, power, history, and context – all at once. We make space for both love and harm, for pride and grief, and for wanting change without having to burn everything down.

Healing doesn’t mean disengaging from the world. It means learning how to live in it without disappearing. And there’s something deeply regulating about being in a space where you don’t have to translate yourself… or justify why things feel hard.

Community, language, and shared meaning are not luxuries in times like these. They’re stabilizers.

It’s a weird time to be promoting something but I was encouraged and pushed by past particpants who felt like this community was exactly what they needed to meet the current moment in a way that felt good and right.

If you’ve been feeling like: “I’ve done a lot of work already, but something still feels unresolved,” or “I’m tired of carrying this quietly,” or even “I don’t know exactly what I need, I just know I can’t keep doing this alone,” This might be the right time to join this community. I also know that investing in yourself can feel like a big ask, especially right now.

So for this upcoming cohort, I’m offering $250 off enrollment as a way to make this feel a little more accessible and supported.

I’d love to hold space with you,

Sahaj Kaur Kohli

Sign up for Boldly Bicultural

P.S: If you’re noticing guilt about spending on yourself, especially right now, you’re not alone. Many children of immigrants were taught that investing in ourselves is selfish or indulgent, and that our needs should come after everyone else’s. I want to gently offer that tending to your inner world, especially in a moment like this, isn’t a betrayal of your values. In fact, it’s part of how you stay resourced enough to keep showing up.

And I just want to remind you that doing SOMETHING is not all-or-nothing.

Look, I know that we all have different risk-tolerance, and this might be arguable to some of you — but that is okay! That doesn’t mean you can’t do anything.

Power is cumulative and relational. You have power. Here’s a list of 35 things that you could commit to RIGHT now:

1. Go out and protest

2. Amplify voices and stories from those on the ground on your platforms

3. Don’t look away. Stay informed, with intention and in a way that you can metabolize, of course. This means macro news, but also local news.

4. Read and educate yourself on how problems around the world (Venezuala, Palestine, MN, etc, are connected)

5. Pay attention to who you extend empathy to easily and who you struggle to humanize

6. Donate as much as you can – monthly or once – to mutual aid funds

7. Divest from companies who stand against your ethics and values

8. Support immigrant-owned businesses

9. Talk to your family members (kids, elders, etc) about what is happening and what to do in certain situations that may arise

10. Correct misinformation or disrupt a harmful joke in your group chats or feeds in real time

11. Challenge your own flattening narratives of “resilience”

12. Check in on immigrant friends, neighbors, community and/or offer a specific kind of help where you can (childcare, groceries, accompany them, etc)

13. Translate resources for folks

14. Call your reps

15. Have local phone numbers handy (local legal aid, mental health, community defense, hotline, etc)

16. Practice staying present with discomfort instead of rushing to certainty or hot takes

17. Notice where you’re tempted to outsource responsibility to “someone more powerful”

18. Share one verified resource in your circles

19. Prepare an emergency kit (have paperwork, cash, etc)

20. Attend one training (know-your-rights, de-escalation, bystander intervention, tech support for safety)

21. Tend to your nervous system to help you stay grounded so you can continue to sustainbaly show up

22. Simply name what is happening out loud

23. Don’t harden, but don’t avoid either

24. Let yourself grieve without immediately trying to make it productive

25. Offer a specific type of help to your community (volunteer time, offer free services of your speciality, cook meals, etc)

26. Support different types of grief rituals right now

27. Print or screenshot “Know Your Rights” info for offline access

28. Offer to be a buffer (sit with someone while they make a call, read an email, go with them somewhere)

29. Ask your workplace/school/place of worship what their plan is if agents show up

30. Share one specific ask instead of general outrage

31. Let people cancel or change plans for safety reasons without guilt

32. Be a witness when safe (stay nearby, don’t let people be isolated)

33. Write down what you’d say if someone needed help so you’re not improvising in crisis

34. Name what this is bringing up from your own history (immigration, policing, surveillance, state power, loss)

35. Let solidarity be imperfect and ongoing, not clean or complete

BONUS: Share or comment on this post!

I’m sure there’s so much more I can add, but throw it in the comment so we can crowdsource!

You can choose one lane instead of all of them. Choose anything, seriously. Again, it’s not all-or-nothing. Just do something.

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Ways You Can Support My Work

• Join my other endeavor, The Bicultural Brief, a professional digest for clinicians.

• Buy my book

• Put my name in the hat for a speaking gig at your company or org!

• Forward this newsletter with someone you think would benefit from reading it.

• Download and review the podcast

Find me elsewhere:

• Instagram

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My grief has become whimsical. And I am realizing so have others’. I’ve been having a lot of sessions with therapy clients who are riding this pendulum between trying to be hopeful and find joy and purpose while continuously being outraged and consumed by grief.

I have been calling this a whimsical grief. How can grief and whimsy coexist, you ask. They do, they must.

Whimsical grief is fantastical — it’s real and not real and how the f* can this be real… It’s odd, and erratic, and impulsive and surreal.

Whimsical grief slips in sideways. It shows up while we’re laughing, while we’re buying groceries, while we’re scrolling past another headline that makes our chest tighten.

Whimsical grief doesn’t announce itself with a single loss. It hums in the background of daily life, threading itself through moments that are otherwise ordinary, even joyful. It’s the strange sensation of feeling deeply alive and deeply sad at the same time.

Lately, it’s impossible to ignore what’s feeding it.

There are ICE raids happening across the country — families pulled apart in the early morning hours, parents disappearing on the way to work, children coming home to silence where their lives used to be. There is the steady churn of political violence, the normalization of cruelty as policy, the way certain lives are framed as expendable for the sake of order or power. There are wars unfolding globally, images of devastation folded into our feeds alongside outfit photos, recipes, vacation reels. There is climate grief, economic precarity, and the dread of knowing things are not stable — and scarily, may not be for a long time.

And still, life goes on.

I still drink my coffee in the morning. I still find things funny. I still feel joy when the sun hits my face just right or when someone I love texts me something mundane and sweet. This is where the grief becomes confusing… because in reality, nothing has “stopped.” There has been no collective pause to mourn. No real reckoning. Just a demand to keep moving, keep functioning, keep adapting.

Whimsical grief is what happens when sorrow has nowhere obvious to land. We are meant to process grief but right now we are just bearing it just enough so it doesn’t consume us. Because what then would happen?

This is the grief that has lived within us as we witness harm we cannot stop, mourning people we may never meet, carrying fear for futures that feel increasingly fragile. It’s the grief of realizing that the world keeps asking us to metabolize unbearable information while still being good workers, good partners, good parents, good citizens.

So the grief shape-shifts.

It becomes nostalgia for 2016 — because things felt a little easier back then. It becomes themes and messages to pursue a soft life — because why choose hard when the world is hardening you anyway. It becomes romanticization and sentimentality in a world that is cruel. It becomes crying at a song you’ve heard a hundred times. It becomes seeking human connection, real human connection through creativity, arts, mutual aid, collective rituals. It becomes the ache you can’t quite explain when someone says, “How are you?” and you answer, “Fine,” because anything else feels too big to unpack.

All my emails and texts have some version of “I hope you’re doing okay.” “I hope you are holding on.” “I hope you haven’t lost your humanity.” “I hope you know you’re not alone.”

What makes whimsical grief especially difficult is that it doesn’t look like what we’ve been taught grief should look like. It’s not “dramatic” enough to justify slowing down because then the whole world would have to stop. It’s not tied to one singular event that we can collectively mourn and move forward from. There’s no funeral for a sense of safety. There’s no official mourning period for the erosion of trust in our systems, for the steady loss of dignity, for the terror many communities live with every day.

So we experience cognitive dissonance. This “going on as normal” when literally nothing is normal! We explore the physical and communal spaces we occupy and how we can find some symbiosis between the values we hold and the values we are being told to ignore.

And so I see so many people start to second-guess themselves. They tell themselves they should be grateful. That others have it worse. That joy means grief must not be real — or that grief means joy is inappropriate. We try to pick one emotion and perform it correctly, as if there’s a right way to feel while the world is unraveling.

But what if this strange, tender, whimsical grief isn’t a failure of resilience? What if it’s evidence of care?

Whimsical grief may be what happens when we refuse to fully numb ourselves and when we stay porous in a world that rewards detachment. Whimsical grief is how we cope as we allow ourselves to feel horror and beauty without insisting that one cancels out the other.

Because joy hasn’t disappeared; it’s just become more deliberate. It’s about finding meaning in connection, art, food, touch, protests, even when the larger systems feel hostile and broken and unresponsive. This doesn’t mean ignoring what’s happening — oh of course not! It doesn’t mean spiritual bypassing or pretending everything is fine — how could it be? It means refusing the false binary that says you must either be crushed by grief or untouched by it. It means accepting that sorrow and delight can coexist in the same body, on the same day, sometimes in the same moment.

I don’t think this kind of grief is meant to be resolved, at least not right now. I think it’s meant to be witnessed and named and shared and held with compassion. I think this grief is meant to exist alongside laughter, creativity, desire, and hope, because my God what would we have left if we don’t try to find the breadcrumbs of humanity in a world on fire?

This world keeps asking us to endure the unbearable while acting like nothing has changed, so maybe, just maybe, whimsical grief may simply be the most radical thing we can experience right now — without forcing ourselves to harden and without giving up our capacity for joy.

I know joy doesn’t fix anything. It doesn’t stop raids or reverse policy or protect the people I worry about most. But it does allow us to stay open. It gives the nervous system a place to rest. It refuels us in small, human ways.

As a therapist, I am struggling too. I hold space for grief all day and then come home and carry my own. I sit with clients who are afraid for their families, their bodies, and their futures (and kids’ futures).

Joy, for me, has become less about happiness and more about preservation, about choosing moments of softness so that I don’t harden. Right now, joy is about letting laughter move through me so despair doesn’t calcify. And it’s about remembering that tenderness is not a liability in a burning world… it is actually one of the few things that keeps us capable of care and keeps us activated.

Don’t stop being outraged. Don’t stop grieving. Don’t stop believing in something better for us. I beg of you.

Ways You Can Support My Work

• Join my other endeavor, The Bicultural Brief, a professional digest for clinicians.

• Buy my book

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We’re lonely and disconnected. We’re hyperconnected with access to so many people all the time, and yet we are relationally under-nourshied. And that’s exactly why I hosted a free community event IRL earlier this week. I wanted there to be a space, for just a few hours, where people could walk in and immediately feel a part of something, and feel connected to others.

This post and the reflections are inspired by the conversations that were had at this event. It was truly spectacular and special.

We keep saying we’re lonely, but what many of us are really grieving is the absence of a village. Not just people around us, but people who know us, hold us, remember us, and show up when we don’t know how to ask. For so many children of immigrants, the idea of a village was something we were told we had — family, community, culture — even when what we actually experienced was obligation without support, closeness without safety, and togetherness without emotional care.

I will always be a believer that our immigrant parents and elders can teach us so much about a community care and yet with my second- and third-gen clients, I hear time and time again that they are still struggling to find that community for themselves. I think a big part of this is because we are not only looking at cultural or religious spaces as the give-in for making friends.

The act of villaging is choosing to create the kind of community that is values-based and quality, not just about quantity. It means not waiting for connection to magically happen, and not assuming that needing people makes us weak. It means treating belonging as something we practice, not something we earn.

Ask yourself: What do I value in a friendship? Am I living by those values? Are the friends I have right now doing so?

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For a long time, many of us learned that love was transactional. Be helpful and you get approval. Be easy and you get closeness. Be quiet and you get to stay. So we became very good at showing up for others, anticipating their needs, managing their emotions, and holding their pain. But we were rarely taught how to let someone hold us in return. The act of villaging — consiously — asks us to unlearn that. It invites us to receive care without feeling guilty, to let someone make us soup, to accept a check-in, to say yes when someone offers to stay.

One of the hardest parts of villaging is learning to be transparent and earnest. Many of us were raised in environments where saying what you actually felt was unsafe or inconvenient. So we learned to hint (and hope they’d just get it!), to downplay (I don’t want to burden anyone!), and often, to swallow our own needs. But real community cannot be built on guesswork.

The act of villaging requires us to name what we need out loud. It sounds like saying, “I’m struggling this week,” or “I don’t want to be alone tonight,” or “I need support, not advice.” That kind of clarity isn’t demanding. It is what makes connection possible. And on the flip side, it’s about imposing on our loved ones at least once — earnestly — to show our love and care.

And remember, asking for help is only step one… the harder step in my opinion is actually receiving the care when it is offered.

Ask yourself: Am I good at asking for help? Am I good at helping? Am I good at receiving care when it is offered?

Villaging is also about reciprocity, not transactions. In a village, no one is keeping score. Some seasons you give more, some seasons you need more. There’s a sense of trust and safety that it all evens itself out because the care is there and it flows in both directions over time.

Many of us — especially children and daughters of immigrants — are used to being the emotional glue in our relationships… the one who remembers, who reaches out, who holds space. That role often came from growing up in families where we had to be emotionally attuned to survive or take on more than was developmentally appropriate. But sustainable community cannot be built on one person always carrying everyone else. Villaging asks for shared responsibility. It asks us to let others show up for us too.

Ask yourself: In which relationships do I consistently carry more emotional labor and how could I do this 10% less?

A village is not just made of big moments. It is built through rituals. The weekly walk. The standing dinner. The connection over the mundane — picking up kids from school, grocery shopping, walking the dog. The voice note that says, “I was thinking of you.” The text that arrives without a crisis attached. These small, repeatable gestures are how people become woven into our lives. For children of immigrants especially, rituals are how love has always been expressed — through shared meals, routines, and showing up. We are not asking for more plans. We are often asking for more remembering.

Ask yourself: Where are there real pockets and ways I can be more connected to people who feed my soul — even if in micro moments?

Villaging also means staying when things get uncomfortable. Real community is not conflict-free. It requires repair to be sustainable over different phases of life. It requires a mutual willingness to talk about hurt, to apologize, to try again instead of disappearing. What I have learned is that losing friendships can be one of the most painful heartaches we navigate. And many times these lost friendships are not because something went wrong, but because one or both people didn’t know how to stay when it did. A village is built by people who don’t run the first time things get messy. And as someone who has, in the past, avoided discomfort or accountability, I know how hard this can be.

Ask yourself: What hard conversation or truth am I avoiding in a friendship right now? How can I be more vulnerable?

And finally, villaging means choosing values over convenience. We are no longer just looking for people who are available. We are looking for people who are aligned, who respect boundaries, who understand culture and context, who know how to hold grief, joy, and complexity without turning away. Community today is less about who is around us and more about how we are treated.

For so many of us, this work feels tender because we are learning to unlearn what we’ve been taught about relationships and our role in them, and we are learning to ask and receive.

You deserve to have spaces where you don’t have to perform, or prove yourself constantly, or make yourself small. This starts with being honest with yourself about how you show up as a friend, and being honest with yourself about who you are friends with right now.

Ask yourself: Who has shown they are here for me and has shown up, but I haven’t noticed or appreciated it because I may be focused more on the relationships that hurt or show up less?

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• Download and review the podcast

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I’m moving out of the city soon, which means this will be the last Brown Girl Therapy NYC event for the foreseeable future. So if you’ve ever wanted to come to a Brown Girl Therapy event, meet others in the community, or simply sit in a room where collective care is centered, this is that moment

The event will be on Monday, January 12, 2026, from 6pm-8pm. (No RSVP needed, show up!)

This night is about bringing us together in real life. Something I think many of us need and are craving right now.

What to expect:

• Time and space to meet each other and make new friends

• Dinner, snacks, and drinks available for purchase (I’ll absolutely be eating, Tera Mera is so good)

• A short, heartfelt conversation between me and my friend, fellow author and therapist Saumya Dave on building a culture of care in your personal life and mental health

• Limited books available for purchase and signing (or bring your own to get signed)

I really can’t wait to meet you!

With so much love,
Sahaj

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But here’s what I do know:

Obedience won’t keep us safe.

Many of us were taught that if we stayed agreeable enough, respectful enough, small enough, we would be protected. That if we followed the rules, didn’t talk back, didn’t cause discomfort, didn’t ask for too much, we could avoid harm.

But obedience has never been a guarantee of safety. It has only ever been a strategy for survival in systems that were already unsafe.

History and present-day situations keep showing us the same truth: Obedience has never guaranteed safety. Not for families. Not for communities. Not for people who are already being watched more closely or treated as disposable. And not for everyday folks just living their lives.

You can follow every rule and still be targeted. You can comply and still be harmed. You can be scared for your life while still being lawful – and still be seen as a threat. Obedience does not stop systems that are built on control, fear, or punishment. It only creates the illusion of protection.

The myth of obedience teaches us to override our instincts, silence our discomfort, and tolerate harm in the name of peace. It teaches us to accept injustice, hoping that if we don’t resist, it won’t reach us.

But silence has never saved us. Silence will not save us. Respectability is not a shield.

Real safety comes from agency. From collective care. From knowing your rights. From being able to question, resist, and refuse when something is wrong – without being told you are ungrateful or dangerous for doing so.

If obedience once helped you survive, that makes sense. Many of us didn’t have other options, but survival strategies are not the same as truth. You are allowed to question what you were taught about “goodness,” and I encourage you to do so.

You are not reckless for wanting dignity; and you are not disloyal for refusing to believe that your silence is what keeps you alive. Obedience won’t keep us safe. We need awareness, solidarity, and to recognize our anger as valid!

Anger, grief, and fear are not signs that something is wrong with you, but rather, they are signals that something around you is wrong.

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Every year, I always hear most of the folks I work with say some variation of: Maybe this year will be different. Maybe this year the comment won’t sting. Maybe this year the dynamic will soften. Maybe this year I’ll finally feel understood, seen, or met halfway.

And it usually doesn’t happen.

So when I say “stop lying to yourself,” I don’t mean this harshly. I mean it gently, and with care because I know the lie is protective, but it also keeps you in a state of hopefulness. And hope without realism has a cost.

I know there is a particular kind of grief that comes from expecting something different — and being disappointed again. It looks like:

• Feeling crushed by comments you’ve heard a hundred times before

• Leaving gatherings emotionally wrecked and wondering why

• Replaying moments and asking yourself what you could have done differently

• Feeling foolish for “falling for it” again

Trust me, I know. I have spent years of my life wanting things to be different within my family system. And not only did this keep me stuck in a state of resentment and anxiety, it also stopped me from being able to explore my agency and options within a situation and dynamic that exists (as it is).

Now, I see so many of you stuck in this place, too.

Acceptance is not giving up

Let’s be clear about what acceptance is not. Acceptance is not approval. Acceptance is not forgiveness. Acceptance is not saying what happened was okay. Acceptance is acknowledging what is likely to happen—so you can stop hurting yourself with unrealistic expectations. For many children of immigrants, acceptance is an act of self-protection and it’s also a liberating It sounds like:

• This person is unlikely to show up differently this year.

• This dynamic has a pattern, and I don’t need to be surprised by it.

• I can grieve this instead of re-entering it with hope that hurts me.

Acceptance is not about being resigned to the fact that nothing will change. Rather, it’s about liberating yourself from the expectation that you have to receive something from someone else in order to find peace or calm. It’s about you focusing on your agency and control in the dynamic.

Try asking yourself:

• How do I protect myself from being hurt in the same way again?

• What support will I need afterward?

• What usually happens here, and how can I prepare for that instead of being surprised by it?

• What boundary would protect me before I’m already overwhelmed?

• What is within my control in this dynamic, and what isn’t?

• If I stop waiting for this to feel different, what choice becomes available to me?

This might look like:

• Lowering expectations before you arrive

• Spending less time in triggering spaces

• Leaving earlier, without waiting for a breaking point

• Planning something grounding afterward

• Letting the holiday end without processing everything immediately

• Deciding ahead of time which conversations you won’t engage in

• Taking breaks before you’re dysregulated, not after

• Letting yourself be quieter, less responsive, or less present than usual

• Choosing logistics (time, space, duration) as boundaries when emotional ones aren’t respected

You’re not wrong for wanting things to be different. But you don’t have to keep lying to yourself to pretend things aren’t just as they are. Of course, this will mean letting yourself feel the grief of what isn’t. And that’s often why we avoid acceptance — because it’s painful and complex.

This season, you’re allowed to stop hoping in ways that hurt, and start protecting yourself in ways that heal.

Ways You Can Support My Work

• Download and review the podcast

• Buy my book

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If this is you, you’re not alone.

This isn’t because you’re necessarily doing something wrong or “not healed enough.” It’s because understanding a pattern doesn’t automatically tell the nervous system that it’s safe. For many of us, intellectualizing became a way to stay in control and survive complex environments, but safety isn’t an idea the body reasons its way into…it’s something the body has to actually experience.

You might notice your tension or stress this time of year as a tight chest, shallow breathing, a jaw that won’t unclench, or a constant urge to scan the room. You might feel alert even while sitting at the table, or restless even when everyone else seems at ease.

Hypervigilance is learned protection

For many of you, the body learned early that safety required attentiveness.

• Being alert meant noticing mood shifts before they escalated

• Scanning meant anticipating conflict or a problem before it broke out

• Staying “on” meant keeping things stable

Over time, the nervous system adapted. So, the problem isn’t that your body hasn’t “learned to relax”; rather, it’s that your body remembers contexts where relaxing wasn’t safe.

The holidays, being around your family members, or being in environments that weren’t always safe can bring those contexts back online. Your body remembers, even if your mind is trying to understand and forget.

So what can you do to work with your nervous system?

No matter how hard you try, you cannot force yourself to be calm and relaxed. Regulation will not come from pressure, but rather support.

Here are a few gentle ways to work with your nervous system instead of against it while you’re holidaying or gathering:

1. Orient to your environment
Take a moment, when you’re in the moment, to notice where you are. Name five things you can see, notice and name the different shades of blue in the room, or close your eyes and name the scents and sounds you hear. This helps remind your nervous system that you are here, not back then.

2. Sit strategically
Choose a seat near an exit, window, or wall. Having a clear way out often reduces the need to stay on high alert and allows your body to feel in control and prepared without having to stay vigilant.

3. Use a physical anchor
I always urge clients to take things home that can feel comforting and tactile. This might be a ring, scarf, stone, or even your feet on the floor. Touching something grounding can help your body remember that you’re supported. Even more, doing something with your hands can be grounding even in a chaotic environment — like coloring, puzzling, cleaning, doing dishes, and so on.

4. Take micro-breaks
Step outside. Go to the bathroom. Sit quietly for a few minutes. “Go to sleep” earlier so you can be alone in your room. Offer to go to the coffee shop or grocery story to run the errand. Give yourself permission to take moments of relief so your body can un-tense.

5. Soften instead of suppress
If you notice that you’re feeling tense, try relaxing one small area, like your shoulders, your jaw, your breath, rather than forcing your whole body to calm down (because it won’t work).

Your body has learned how to keep you safe in complex environments. And while those strategies may not be needed in the same way anymore, they don’t disappear just because we ask them to.

If you are still struggling to listen to your body or pay attention to your nervous system, ask yourself these questions:

• What is my body asking for right now, not later?

• Where do I feel tension, and what would soften it even slightly?

• What feels safest to do in this moment?

• What would make this 10% easier on my body?

• Am I pushing through out of habit, or choosing this intentionally?

• What signal have I been ignoring because it feels inconvenient?

• Do I need less stimulation, less conversation, or less time here?

• If I didn’t judge this sensation, what might it be telling me?

• What would it look like to support myself instead of overriding myself?

• What small action would help me feel more grounded in the next five minutes?

This holiday season, instead of asking your body to relax, try asking it what would help it feel supported.

You’re doing great!

Ways You Can Support My Work

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Many of you are going into the holidays thinking about how you’ll clarify your choices, defend your boundaries, and correct the assumptions you know are coming about your lives, your values, your relationships, or who you’ve become.

You feel a good amount of pressure to make sure the story others have about you is the right one. But here’s the permission I want to offer this season: you don’t have to correct every narrative about you.

If you look at most children of immigrant resumes, you’ll see something none of us asked for: narrative control. I named my book But What Will People Say? because so many of us have been taught to worry — and stress — over how you’ll be perceived by others.

Of course, this was a survival mechanism for our elders and in a society where others’ opinions could be the determining factor for safety, stability, and security.

Many of us learned to:

• Adjust our tone, words, or presence depending on the audience

• Justify rest, distance, or difference

• Preempt judgment by offering context

• Make ourselves understandable at the expense of being at ease

• Translate not just language, but intention

• Smooth misunderstandings between cultures and generations

• Explain ourselves to reduce conflict or judgment

• Represent our families well to the outside world

Over the holidays, this narrative management can be intensified when you’re around community or extended family. Suddenly, you’re managing assumptions and judgment about why you live where you live, why you’re not married yet, whether you will have kids, why you’re doing something differently, and even why, oh why, do you need rest, boundaries, or space!

And it’s exhausting!

But many of us do not need to be in survival mode anymore. Sure, caring about what our loved ones think is not a bad thing; but caring about what every person thinks about us can be a Sisyphean task. It’s just not a reality no matter how hard you try. People will talk one way or the other so why not protect yourself where you can.

Here’s the reframe that can bring relief (but I know that it takes a long time to internalize it, for now — just remind yourself of this with self-compassion): You can be misinterpreted and at peace. You can be misunderstood and grounded in your choices.

Sometimes, the work is practicing discernment between who needs the whole truth, or even clarification/justification. This does not mean you are being dishonest; it means you are being honest with yourself about where and with who it’s actually safe to be more forthcoming. Not everyone needs to know everything.

Letting the narrative stand (ie the aunty who will gossip about your living situation, etc) means choosing where your energy goes. Here are some ways this can show up during the holidays:

• Allowing a relative to hold an incomplete story about your life

• Letting a comment pass without clarifying or defending

• Responding briefly instead of elaborating (decide how much to share!)

• Changing the subject without circling back

• Physically removing yourself from conversations that require too much explanation

A simple question to ground you

When you feel the urge to correct, pause and ask: “Is this explanation for my peace — or for their comfort?” If it’s not serving you, you’re allowed to stop.

This is where tip #1 can be really helpful — just choose one moment to let misunderstanding exist can make the holidays feel lighter. And tip #2 can remind you to focus on what you do, not what you can say.

Peace doesn’t always come from being known. Sometimes it comes from no longer needing to be explained. This holiday season, you’re allowed to step out of the role of narrator, translator, and defender of your life.

You’re doing great!

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• If I explain myself clearly enough, they’ll understand.

• If I find the right language, this won’t happen again.

• If I say it kindly, they’ll respect it.

This isn’t inherently bad. Preparation can help you manage anxiety and feel a sense of agency of how you’ll handle a situation.

But here’s the hard and relieving truth: most of the time, the stress isn’t coming from what you haven’t said. It’s coming from what you keep doing.

Words alone rarely change long-standing dynamics, especially in families where roles, hierarchy, and collectivist are deeply ingrained. And when we rely only on language, we often end up over-explaining, re-negotiating the same boundaries every year, feeling drained and unseen.

Even more, in collectivist families, we don’t communicate directly or explicitly… most of our conversations are based on context. That’s why there needs to be a shift in how you set boundaries or advocate for yourself. (Now I’m not saying words don’t matter, they just may not be as useful in some situations).

The Shift: Behavioral Boundaries Over Verbal Ones

Choosing action over explanation can feel deeply uncomfortable, I know, but behavioral boundaries don’t mean you don’t care. What I see often is one of you will try to set a verbal boundary then laugh when it’s crossed, or stop repeating yourself, or get frustrated that your nervous system starts to shut down.

Here’s the reframe that can change how the holidays feel: Consider if boundaries are not what you say, but rather what you do. Instead of focusing on the perfect sentence, consider one small behavioral shift:

• Leaving earlier instead of explaining why you’re overwhelmed

• Changing the subject instead of defending yourself

• Not responding to a comment instead of correcting it

• Focusing on a third party (a child or pet) or an activity (a game, or doing the dishes) to minimize deeper conversation

• Sitting next to a calmer person or near an exit

• Taking breaks outside instead of pushing through discomfort

• Having a book, or an activity for your hands or brain when you need to distract and focus your nervous system away from the environment

I have an entire podcast episode on boundaries, low contact and estrangement. Listen here for more tips and even hear from others in this community who have tried to set boundaries — and what worked and didn’t

Here’s a simple question you can return to: “What can I do differently, even if I don’t say anything?” Then choose one behavior you can control:

• Time (arriving later, leaving earlier)

• Space (sitting near exits, taking breaks)

• Engagement (redirecting, disengaging)

• Energy (being quieter, not performing)

You don’t need to announce these changes, and you don’t need to justify them. This holiday season, focus on what you can do—not what you need to say. Relief often comes not from being better understood, but from acting in ways that protect your nervous system.

You’re doing great.

Ways You Can Support My Work

• Download and review the podcast

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First, thanks for your patience these last several months. As you all know, I went through something really hard this summer and needed to take time away from some of my outlets and work. With that said, I have been working hard behind the scenes with building this space in a more community-led and oriented framework. I can’t wait to roll this out in 2026. But I wanted to say thank you and that I see you.

Now, to this mini series I wanted to offer you: While the holidays are often framed as joyful, cozy, and restorative, many children of immigrants enter this season already bracing & mentally preparing for the emotional labor we know is coming. There is a familiar tightening in the body, and an unspoken checklist running in the background: Whose feelings do I need to manage? What topics should I avoid? How do I keep this from escalating?

The holidays often concentrate these roles so many of us were taught – mediator, fixer, translator, emotional regulator, etc. When family gathers, old dynamics resurface. And cultural expectations around respect, gratitude, and togetherness intensify.

Even when there is love, there is often labor. These co-exist for many of you.

I hear this every year in my work: I want to enjoy the holidays, but I feel exhausted before they even begin.

This kind of invisible labor doesn’t show up in family photos or holiday traditions, but it lives in the body. It can look like:
→ Feeling exhausted before the holidays even begin
→ Being “on edge” during gatherings without knowing why
→ Struggling to relax, even in moments that are supposed to be enjoyable
→ Feeling guilt when you want space, quiet, or boundaries
→ Needing significant recovery time afterward

If the holidays feel heavy for you, I want to start by saying this: you’re not imagining it, and you’re not alone. You are responding to a system that taught you to prioritize everyone else’s emotional needs before your own. And when you finally do need or take space, it can feel deeply uncomfortable. Choosing yourself may trigger guilt, shame, or fear of being seen as selfish or ungrateful. So here is your permission slip...

You are allowed to make the holidays smaller, quieter, or more contained than what you were taught they should be. You are allowed to arrive later, leave earlier, share less, skip certain conversations, excuse yourself, or opt out entirely – without turning that choice into a moral failure. You are allowed to prioritize regulation over performance.

This is why I’m sharing this short series: Five Days of Support for the Holidays, written specifically for children of immigrants who want this season to feel a little less stressful and a little more humane.

Over the next five days, I am going to give you 5 tips I use with clients

Over the next 5 days (including today), I am going to shoot you a brief email with a tip a day to help you make this holiday season a little easier, a little more joyful, and give you a little more agency. I know how hard this work can be, and I want you to know that you are doing great.

We finished the second cohort of Boldly Bicultural on family and intergenerational healing and it was phenomenal. I led 30ish folks through three months of workshops, small group discussions, and community care. If you are interested in something like this, sign up for the waitlist because we are running the same program in Feb and applications will open soon and those on the waitlist get first dibs!

Tip #1: The 10% Rule

Just remember: The goal is not to try to make the holidays perfect; after all, that’s not actually possible. Instead, let’s work on how you can make them 10% easier.

For many children of immigrants, the advice we see online can feel unrealistic or unsafe. “Just say no.” “Protect your peace.” Those suggestions often ignore the cultural, relational, and emotional realities many of you are navigating. On top of that, when I work with our community, so many folks struggle with this black and white thinking. Well, I have to change everything, or I can’t do anything. And that is such a debilitating thought process. That’s why the 10% rule is important and helpful.

This 10% rule offers a different approach. It asks:

• What is one small shift that would make this experience slightly more tolerable for my body?

• What is one small boundary I can set while being kind?

• What am I not available for, even if I don’t say it out loud?

• How could I stop managing this moment just a little less?

• What does listening to myself look like at 10%, not 100%?

• What does 90% “enough” look like for me today instead of 100%?

• What would make today 10% easier?

Practically, this may look like changing the subject, saying no to one event over the holiday season, leaving a little earlier, scheduling some breaks with friends or a call to your therapist/support system, and being more intentional about how you speak to yourself.

Small changes matter, especially when you’ve spent years enduring rather than choosing. You don’t need anyone else’s permission to ask these questions, and you don’t need to justify the answers.

I’m glad you’re here. And I hope this mini series offers you a little more steadiness in a season that often asks too much.

Ways You Can Support My Work

• Download and review the podcast

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I love this time of year and this time of year is wrapped up with so much angst. Dread of whether there will be any fights or tension. Pressure to make it feel happy and perfect. Guilt for wanting to do things differently than what’s expected of me.

I know I’m not alone! Every year, as the holidays approach, many children of immigrants start to feel a familiar heaviness. It can look like all of the above plus this hope that maybe this year will be different. Because holidays in immigrant families aren’t always rest-and-joy; they can also be obligation, emotional labor, unspoken expectations, and being pulled between cultures, identities, and roles.

And many of us navigate all of that alone. We don’t want to upset anyone. We don’t want to seem ungrateful. We don’t want to admit how triggering certain dynamics are. We don’t want to disappoint our parents, or partners, or extended family. So we shrink. We push through. We collect tiny hurts like lint in our pockets. We pretend it’s fine because “it’s just a few days.” We tell ourselves: I just need to survive this.

Even when we’re grown and building new lives or new boundaries. Even when things should feel better by now. There’s so much that still feels stuck and isolating.

This is why I want to introduce The Support Triangle.

When navigating the emotional load of family gatherings, I encourage clients and folks to build a triangle of three people who can support you in different ways:

1. One person outside of your cultural or relational context

Someone you can text before or after the family event and say: “I’m bracing myself.” Or, “Can you hype me up?” Or even just, “Can I vent about something silly.” This person doesn’t need cultural or relational context. They just need to be in your corner. For some people it’s a peer, a best friend, a roommate, or even a partner. This person knows you outside of your family and lets your nervous system feel accompanied. This person gives perspective, neutrality, and grounding.

2. One person inside of your cultural or relational context

Someone who gets the culture and dynamics at play. Someone who understands the layered expectations. Someone who grew up with similar scripts and can validate your experience without you having to translate it. Someone who can be on your side and with you in it throughout. Maybe it’s an aunt, a sibling or cousin, someone in this community😉, or a family friend who is going to the same events as you. Maybe they can tell you: “Yeah, they’ve always been like this, it’s not you.” Or, “Here’s how I navigate that uncle.” Or even, “You’re not wrong for wanting space.” This person helps ground you in cultural context — not to excuse the behavior, but to help you feel less crazy inside it. This person gives culturally attuned validation, and support.

3. One person who is trained or emotionally steady

Then you want someone who can offer regulated support. Someone who can help you learn skills for when the guilt resurfaces, the part of you that overfunctions or shrinks, or the trauma responses that come up in different holiday-related environments and dynamics. This is a therapist, a counselor, a coach, a religious or spiritual leader, or any other healing practitioner you go to. This is the person you get to process what is yours and what is cultural conditioning. You get tools. You get boundaries. You get language. You get clarity. This person gives structure, emotional regulation, and skills.

The Support Triangle gives you: multiple sources of grounding, relational diversity, accountability, witnessing, and permission to not go through it alone. It also reflects the collectivist idea of shared support, but in a healthier, self-chosen way.

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How to build your triangle before the holidays

Try these reflection prompts:

• Who is one friend I can text the day of a family gathering for grounding?

• Which cousin/sibling/friend understands my family dynamics in a way that makes me feel seen?

• What might I want support around this year: boundaries, emotional regulation, guilt, overstimulation, or pressure?

• What past holiday patterns am I afraid will repeat?

• Which part of me gets activated when I’m home and how can I manage this?

• What would it feel like to let myself not be the strong one this year?

Support is a strategy, not a weakness. You deserve a network of people who help you stay connected to yourself, especially during seasons that pull you away from who you’re becoming.

What if you don’t have support?

Many children of immigrants grew up being the emotional anchor for everyone around them — but never learned what it feels like to lean, ask, receive, or depend. If you’re reading this and thinking: “I don’t have a triangle. I barely have a line,” you’re not alone.

Here are 5 tips for your season:

1. Start with “micro-support,” not a full triangle. Support doesn’t have to be deep, intimate, or years-long. It can begin with one micro-connection:

• The one coworker you feel most at ease with

• The acquaintance who always feels warm

• The cousin you only talk to twice a year, but who “gets” the culture

• The peer in a hobby club

• The friend-of-a-friend who feels steady

You’re not looking for a person who holds everything. You’re looking for a person who holds one thing. That is enough to begin.

2. Borrow support temporarily. You don’t have to build a lifelong support system today. You can borrow stability from places that are meant to be temporary — like a support group, a hotline, office hours with a professor, a community healing circle. Temporary support is still support.

3. Understand why it’s been hard to have support. For children of immigrants, there are reasons support is scarce:

• You were the supporter, not the supported.

• You were raised to be self-sufficient.

• Vulnerability had consequences.

• You learned to hide anything that might “worry” the family.

• You feared judgment or gossip.

• You weren’t modeled healthy emotional closeness.

• You feel guilty needing anyone at all.

Naming these truths is part of healing.

4. Let self-support be the first anchor. If your triangle feels empty, you become the grounding point while you slowly build the other edges. This can look like preparing scripts before the holiday (“If they ask about my relationship, here’s what I’ll say.”), giving yourself permission to leave the room when you’re overwhelmed, journaling after interactions instead of holding things in your body, setting time limits on how long you’ll stay at a gathering or affirming yourself before, during, and after family events

5. Reach for “one step more supported” — not perfect support. Ask yourself:
What is one step I can take that would help me feel a little more held this season? This might look like:

• Texting one friend the morning of a family gathering

• Scheduling one counseling session

• Asking a cousin if they’ll sit with you during dinner

• Practicing one grounding exercise before entering your parents’ home

• DM’ing someone you trust a tiny piece of your truth

I just want you to know that support exists for you — even if you’re still learning how to let it in.

Tips for leaning into support — even when it feels uncomfortable

For many children of immigrants, support doesn’t come naturally. Not because we don’t want it, but because we were raised to survive, not to lean Here’s how to build and accept support even when your whole body wants to retreat:

• Name your discomfort without judging it. You want to try reminding yourself: “This is new, not dangerous.” “My body is learning another way to belong.” Or, “It makes sense this feels scary — and I can still try.”

• Start with one small disclosure, not the whole story. Children of immigrants often feel like support = a full emotional dump. It doesn’t. Instead, start tiny. Try: “I’m feeling anxious about going home.” “I could use a little distraction right now.” “Can I share one thing that’s been on my mind?”

• Use structured conversations if open-ended ones feel too vulnerable. Not everyone feels comfortable calling someone and saying “I’m struggling.” Give the interaction a job because structure can create safety:

  • The One-Thing Check-In: “Can I tell you one thing I’m anxious about today?”

  • The Pre/Post Plan: “I have a family dinner tonight — can I send you a quick text before and after?”

  • The Contained Ask: “Do you have 10 minutes to help me think something through?”

• Identify what kind of support you actually want. Before you reach out, ask yourself: Do I want someone to listen? Ground me” Validate me? Give me perspective or advice? Then communicate it.

• Let support be imperfect. Many immigrant kids avoid leaning on others because they fear being misunderstood or the person not responding “right.” But imperfect support is still support.

• Ground support in cultural values you already know. Support doesn’t have to feel like abandoning your culture — it can feel like expanding it. For instance, you can reframe feeling like a burden as “My people believe in shared burdens. This is that.” Or, “The healthiest parts of my culture thrive in connection.” Or even, “Letting someone in honors the relationship.” You’re not betraying your roots — you’re practicing the best parts of them.

• Build support in layers, not leaps. You don’t need a best friend tomorrow. You don’t need to suddenly trust someone with everything. You don’t need to force intimacy. Support can grow in layers:

  • Layer 1: shared presence (study buddy, coworker, classmate)

  • Layer 2: shared moments (vent text, quick check-ins)

  • Layer 3: shared vulnerability (one meaningful disclosure)

  • Layer 4: shared care (being open with needs)

  • Layer 5: shared support (mutual leaning)

Last but not least: Give yourself permission to be held. This is the hardest one. Immigrant kids are trained to be the strong one, the reliable one, the one who holds everything together. But you deserve to be supported. You deserve softness. You deserve to have a network that lifts you back up. The moment you give yourself permission to be held — even awkwardly, even imperfectly — everything begins to shift.

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Ways You Can Support My Work

• Download and review the podcast

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Help Make Culturally Enough. Even Better!

Please consider filling out this survey to help contribute to making this community what you want and need! At the end of the year, 5 people will be chosen at random to get 6 months of the paid subscription in 2026 (and as you see in the survey, it will be an exciting year)! This is also where you can throw your hat in the ring to get more involved!

• Survey: Culturally Enough Revamp 2026

The Bicultural Brief

I am so excited to share my newest resource for clinicians. I want to help you turn cultural awareness into culturally responsive care. Coming soon! And if you want to be a part of both paid, we are going to offer discounts for that soon so stay tuned!

YouTube Channel Launch

I’m excited to share that I’ve officially launched a YouTube channel! This is where you’ll find longer-form episodes — deeper dives into the kinds of topics we’ve been unpacking together here. If you’ve ever wanted more nuance, more storytelling, and more space for these conversations, this will be the place. I’d love your support as I get it off the ground. Subscribe here to catch the newest episodes.

Malala Book Club Giveaway

I have had the honor of receiving 10 books from Malala’s team to do a giveaway. As a note, we will skip December for holidays, and we will be reading her book, Finding My Way, as the January 2026 book club! Stay tuned for a separate post about this exciting giveaway!

Book Club Link

We are going to be discussing You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat on Monday at 6pm ET. This is a first come first served open book club!

The link is below to join:

Time: Oct 27, 2025 06:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84768471528?pwd=XtsKBCDhhNthTivTOW9NjQuskjH3U8.1

Meeting ID: 847 6847 1528

Passcode: 780265

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We’re Collectively Grieving a Loss of Moral Clarity

Lately, it feels like the world has stopped making sense. Everywhere we look, harm is happening in real time — and many of us are realizing that the moral rules we were taught don’t seem to apply anymore.

For a lot of people, this moment feels confusing and heavy. But confusion doesn’t mean apathy. It means you’re grieving.

• You’re grieving the belief that goodness is rewarded

• You’re grieving the safety that came from certainty

• You’re grieving the comfort of thinking that justice would always prevail

• You’re grieving for your loved ones who operate in survival and it still doesn’t keep them safe

In therapy, I call this moral injury — the pain that happens when what we believe to be right collides with what’s actually happening around us. It can sound like: “I don’t know what to believe anymore.” “I feel guilty for being okay when others are suffering.” “I want to speak up, but I’m afraid of saying the wrong thing.”

It can look like doomscrolling, checking out, or feeling guilty for having a normal day. It can feel like helplessness, anger, or shame for not doing enough.

For many children of immigrants, this grief runs deep. We grew up being taught that morality was tied to survival: be good, be polite, be grateful, be quiet. Our families learned that obedience kept them safe. We inherited that fear — but we live in a world where silence no longer feels like safety.

Now we’re caught between worlds:

• Between wanting to do something and not knowing what’s enough

• Between wanting to rest and feeling guilty for not doing more

• Between wanting to speak and worrying who we’ll disappoint

Here are 11 things I’ve said in sessions as a therapist to clients who want to talk about global injustice. Take what you need:

1. Caring deeply will always cost something, but numbness costs more

2. There’s a difference between feeling helpless and being powerless. Helplessness is a feeling; powerlessness is a story. You can’t stop bombs or might not be able to make executive-level decisions, but you can talk about it, donate, pray, protest, educate, or comfort. There’s always something within reach — even if it’s small, it matters.

3. Therapy should be a place where you can talk about this.

4. You might be grieving the loss of moral clarity. You grew up believing goodness would protect you and justice would prevail. Now you’re seeing a world where suffering continues despite truth.

5. You can’t pour endlessly from a nervous system in survival mode. So what does caring for you look like today — not forever, just today?

6. How are you metabolizing what you’re consuming? If you’re reading, scrolling, watching... are you also letting your body process it?

7. Your ancestors knew what it was like to witness/experience harm and survive. You come from people who have known displacement, war, loss, silence — and still created life, love, art, and laughter. How does that inform your role as an advocate or ally?

8. Who can you talk to about this without needing to explain everything? What does collective care look like in your world?

9. What does it look like for you to bear witness in the ways your capacity allows?

10. Can you locate one thing that still feels good or alive or hopeful right now?

11. What if we didn’t talk about it right now and we just took some time to sit in it and feel it in your body?

Reflection Prompts

• What belief about goodness or justice have you started to question lately?

• Where does moral grief show up in your body — and what might that part need?

• Which values still feel steady for you, even in uncertainty?

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Ways You Can Support My Work

• Download and review the podcast

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• Forward this newsletter with someone you think would benefit from reading it.

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Wow, what a summer it has been. I needed more time than anticipated away to get life back on track, and I’m so grateful for your patience. During this pause, I wanted to make sure things were fair, so I kept paid subscriptions on hold. This break has reminded me how much I value this community and the work we do together here. It also taught me something important: in order to make this sustainable, I can’t do it alone. I’ll be expanding ways for more community involvement moving forward but don’t worry, you’ll still receive essays from me, and paid subscribers will continue to have access to me through various formats. With that said, I also want to build spaces where more of your voices can be part of the conversation.

Bear with me as I continue to figure out how I want to grow this space and recalibrate from a rough summer.

In this newsletter you’ll find details for helping me grow this space, other ways to join community events, more resources, and an essay at the end!

Help Make Culturally Enough. Even Better!

Please consider filling out this survey to help contribute to making this community what you want and need! At the end of the year, 5 people will be chosen at random to get 6 months of the paid subscription in 2026 (and as you see in the survey, it will be an exciting year)! This is also where you can throw your hat in the ring to get more involved!

• Survey: Culturally Enough Revamp 2026

Boldly Bicultural Program Cohort 2: Apps close this weekend!

The second cohort of Boldly Bicultural is here, and applications are open—but not for long. This 3-month community program is designed to help you unpack family scripts, heal intergenerational patterns, and feel more at home in yourself while reimagining belonging in your relationships and family. It’s part workshop, part community circle, and part guided self-reflection. If you’ve been considering joining, now’s the time as applications close this weekend, and I’m offering $100 off enrollment as a thank you to paid subscribers (just be sure to mark yourself as paid in the application when it asks).

• Boldly Bicultural Details and Applications close this weekend

• The program starts October 16

YouTube Channel Launch

I’m excited to share that I’ve officially launched a YouTube channel! This is where you’ll find longer-form episodes — deeper dives into the kinds of topics we’ve been unpacking together here. If you’ve ever wanted more nuance, more storytelling, and more space for these conversations, this will be the place. I’d love your support as I get it off the ground. Subscribe here to catch the newest episodes.

Malala Book Club Giveaway

I have had the honor of receiving 10 books from Malala’s team to do a giveaway. As a note, we will skip December for holidays, and we will be reading her book, Finding My Way, as the January 2026 book club! Stay tuned for a separate post about this exciting giveaway!

When September still feels like back to school

Even if you’re not a student anymore, this time of year can stir something familiar in your body. The air cools down, the stationery aisles fill with fresh notebooks, and somehow — suddenly! — you feel the need to take stock of your life. What am I doing with my time? Am I where I should be? Do I have enough to show for myself?

For many children of immigrants, September doesn’t just signal the end of summer. It can reawaken the pressures of achievement that were stitched into us early on. The feeling of “back to school” wasn’t just about classes and new teachers. It was about proving ourselves. Report cards weren’t just for us, but rather, they were a reassurance to our families that their sacrifices were paying off. We found comfort and solace in being able to tangibly show that their choices were worth it, that their investment in us has been worth it.

That pressure doesn’t disappear once we’ve left the classroom. As adults, we may notice a quiet, persistent script: I should be further along. I should have more to show. I should be making my parents proud. The seasonal rhythm of September can make us feel like we’re still standing in front of the class, waiting to be graded…not by teachers anymore, but by society, by family, and sometimes (and worst of all) by ourselves.

This is why September can feel so heavy. It’s not just nostalgia. It’s our nervous system remembering. It’s our bodies bracing for expectations, timelines, and comparisons that shaped us for so long. It’s a reminder of what we haven’t done yet, what we were supposed to, and what we have ahead of us.

But here’s the truth I keep reminding myself, and maybe you need it too: we are not report cards anymore. Our worth is not measured in milestones, degrees, or productivity. We are not behind because someone else’s script says we should be married, promoted, or parenting by now.

This season doesn’t have to be about pressure; it can be about renewal. It can be about slowing down, reflecting, and even — if we embrace it — reclaiming September as a time to nurture yourself instead of performing for others.

If September feels overwhelming, know you’re not alone. The back-to-school anxiety we carry is deeply tied to culture, family, and belonging. And yet, we can choose new ways to move through this season. We can honor where we come from while also letting ourselves breathe.

You don’t have to prove anything this fall. You just have to be here.

Let me repeat: You don’t have to prove anything this fall. You just have to be here. <3

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Ways You Can Support My Work

• Download and review the podcast

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Scroll down for the Zoom link for Sunday’s book club starting at 12pm ET.

I am so excited for our fourth bimonthly, community led, book club! Every other month we will read a book about identity and/or mental health (fiction and nonfiction) and chat about it together. I firmly believe in the power of reading and books and storytelling to help us understand ourselves better and heal together.

We have a team of community volunteers running these book clubs, and I will also (when I can!) be joining as a peer member who loves to read and talk all things books.

With that said, here are some guidelines:

• We may reserve this space for paid subscribers down the road, but want to keep it open for everyone for a few months. So this is your chance to join and see what this is about!

• To ensure comfort and intimacy, we are capping attendance at 30 people so it’s first come first served.

• People will not be allowed in after the 20 minute mark so the host and the group are not disturbed and can be present in the conversation and community discussion.

• You can join even if you haven’t read the book but there will be spoilers!

Other disclaimers:

We all have to do our part to create a judgement-free and respectful space. Please keep in mind that we all identify as immigrants, children of immigrants or bicultural/multicultural. But we are not a monolith and we should all be mindful that there are people present with differing identities, differing relationships to those identities, and differing experiences. Please be kind and judgment-free as we share and discuss the book. We also want to be mindful of any content warnings as we have this discussion and be mindful of how we discuss sensitive topics.

No one will be mandated to share anything they do not openly offer to the group on their own; however this is a community meeting and so I hope you will participate! Video is not mandatory, but strongly encouraged for maximum participation and connection.

This is not a structured event! I may have a couple of discussion questions to get us started, but this is a COMMUNITY event, so it’s up to each of us to make it what we want! Think of it as a meetup in the park…

Finally, all book club hosts retain the right to mute a participant's audio and ask them to leave for being distracting, disrespectful, rude, or hateful.

Zoom link for 12pm ET, August 31

Sahaj Kohli (she/her) is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: CE Book Club: The Lucky Ones

Time: Aug 31, 2025 12:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86908554939?pwd=YedvoUV6BjlSrPxlmKCvUlUE3a7UP2.1

Meeting ID: 869 0855 4939

Passcode: 320980