Between Seasons: Why Are Immigrant Daughters So Tired?

Between Seasons: Notes From an Immigrant Daughter.

Season One may be officially over but Dr. Phebe is not leaving you hanging! Enjoy these notes as she prepares for the upcoming season of the podcast. Have a topic you’d like covered in the upcoming season? Send an email to consult@phebebrakolmft.com!

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Transcript

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And in all of this, too, you become everyone's emergency contact, right? You start carrying things that nobody asked you to carry. And then one day you wake up or you look up and you realize you are exhausted. And not that you're weak, but it's because you have been functioning as an entire support system. It's like you were meant to be the mouse, but then you have ended up being the screen, you've ended up being the CPU, you've ended up being the desk, the chair, the everything. And as a therapist, I really see this pattern constantly, not just in others, but also in myself. Many of us immigrant daughters have become high achievers, right? We we become the doctors, the executives, the lawyers, the therapists, the entrepreneurs, and all of that. And underneath all of that success, there's a quiet fear. I am your host with the most. Dr. Phoebe Braco, therapist, immigrant, mother of three, business owner, and apparently the designated family help desk for anyone who can find my phone number. Today's episode, right? It's it's a question that a lot of immigrant daughters around the world have been asking very silently. Asking themselves, asking their close-knit, the people that are in the onion, and also people that they they feel can see them and understand them. And it's the question of why am I so tired? Now, I'm not really addressing the angle of the sleepy tired, right? I'm not talking just about, oh, I didn't sleep well or I didn't get enough sleep kind of thing. I'm not talking about the I stayed up too late watching TV or watching Netflix tired, you know. Y'all know those shows, right? I've recently gotten into some Apple TV shows and OMG. And um, as if I don't have enough to do, right? I am I'm not talking about those kinds of tired. I am talking about soul tired. I'm referring to being calendar tired. I'm talking about decision tired, people needing things from me, kind of tired. Now, if you've ever found yourself sitting in your parked car for five extra minutes because it's the only quiet place that you've had all day, this episode is for you. I gotta say, my mom lives with me and she's lived with me for for years, and I would get back home from work. This was, I would say, pre-COVID, and just park. And her room was right above the garage. So she would hear my car pulling in, and I would sit in the car just quietly trying to decompress before I walked in the door. Because as soon as I walked in the door, I knew what I was going to meet. Her coming at me with all the questions of how was your day? Did you see this? Did you watch this YouTube video? Did you hear this on the news? All this stuff. And I'm just like, I don't need this, right? And so that quiet car time is like one of the best things that you can experience as an adult, and especially as a mom. And she used to see me pulling in, and then at some point she started texting me, What are you doing in the car? And I had to have a conversation with her eventually, right? At some point I was just ignoring her. Sorry, mom. And I finally had a conversation with her, and I told her, Those minutes in the car are very precious to me. This is where I decompress, this is where I breathe, and all that. Come to find out that she was also doing the same, but just like, you know, up the street or something like that. You know what I'm saying? Unless she really needed to like use a bathroom when she got home. But it is such a it's such a moment where I don't know, I don't have the words to even describe it, right? Where you know you've had a rough day, you've gone through the commute, you've probably sat in traffic for a while, depending on where you live, and then you've come and you're sitting down in your car, just waiting for your heart, your heartbeat to like just your heart rate to just go down, or something like that. And um, if you're relating to this and you're nodding your head, like, oh yeah, Phoebe, you get it, then you know this is definitely for you. So the other day I was also thinking about all of the the jobs that immigrant daughters tend to have, right? We are we're daughters, but we're also translators, we are appointment schedulers. I my lovely assistant has come to appreciate my calendar, but in the beginning she hated it because there were so many different calendars and so many different colors, so many different codes. And it was because I manage the calendar not only for myself, but for my teaching schedule. Uh, so that means, you know, for my students, I also have a calendar for my kids. And I have a calendar for, you know, all the fun things that I do outside of work because I'm also a person and I deserve fun. And I also have the appointment calendar for my parents as well. So all of these, just imagine. I mean, if I could show you what my calendar looked like, you'd probably like laugh a little bit. It looks better these days because boundaries. I'm learning to be better, right? I'm practicing what I preach also. But not only are we doing all of the appointment scheduling, we're the tech support as well. Just yesterday, my mom was having an issue with an app, and she's, you know, hey, I'm sorry to bother you. Can you take a look at this? Right. Mind you, we have a tech person in the in the family, but apparently he wasn't available at that time. So you're you're doing the tech support. You're also the family historian. And I truly am the family historian because I have been keeping all of the photos. My friend and I were just talking about the fact that we don't have photo albums these days and everything's in our phones. And I just decided, no, I'm gonna start printing pictures all over again and I'm going to have a photo album. And when you come to my house, you're going to see the photo album on the table and you get to look at our lives instead of trying to be on the phone, right? You're not only the family historian, you're also the emotional support human, right? And sometimes you're the financial advisor because your parents might not understand some of these terms that we have over here in the US or overseas. And they're going to need a translator, right? Sometimes your aunties just don't understand some of these immigration concepts and all that. You're you're having to mediate relationship things going on with your family members, your brother and his wife, or your sister and her husband, and all of these different things. And somehow, with all of this, we are also expected to have careers. They want us to have relationships, they want us to have hobbies, and we're also expected to function, right? And also have functioning nervous systems. Can you imagine that? Really? Like, how are we supposed to do all of that? It's a lot. And what makes it complicated is that most of us we don't resent helping our families. As a matter of fact, we are very proud of it. We're incredibly proud of it. We love our families. We we respect their sacrifices. We know that they gave up a lot for us. We know that, you know, it's it's part of our role, right? And some of us have existed because some of some of our family members have played that role, which allowed for us to have the lives that we have. But some somewhere along the way, many immigrant daughters learned a very dangerous lesson. And the lesson is that my value comes from being useful. It's not about being loved, it's not about being enough, it's from being useful. And once that lesson gets planted, I'm telling you, it shows up everywhere. Everywhere. It's gonna show up at school, it's gonna show up at work, it's gonna show up in your friendships, it's gonna show up where you're up late at night answering emails because that's how you see yourself, right? That's how you you exist. You you struggle to say no. You feel guilty when you're arresting or you put your feet up, you're overcommitting. Your schedule looks like mine. Yes, I'm calling myself out. Call myself out, okay. And in all of this, too, you become everyone's emergency contact, right? You start carrying things that nobody asked you to carry. And then one day you wake up or you look up and you realize you are exhausted. And not that you're weak, but it's because you have been functioning as an entire support system. It's like you were meant to be the mouse, but then you have ended up being the screen, you've ended up being the CPU, you've ended up being the desk, the chair, the everything. And as a therapist, I really see this pattern constantly, not just in others, but also in myself. Many of us immigrant daughters have become high achievers, right? We we become the doctors, the executives, the lawyers, the therapists, the entrepreneurs, and all of that. And underneath all of that success, there's a quiet fear. What is going to happen if I stop performing? What happens if I disappoint people? What happens if I choose myself? And the answer is usually less catastrophic than we we we imagine, right? Most of the time the world doesn't collapse. Our family survives, people adjust, and we finally get the room to breathe. I recently had a conversation with a a consult client, and we were talking about values, and they were asking me about values and how they can show up in their in their work, right, in their business. And I said to her, especially for those of us who are of the global majority, sometimes we forget that self is also a value, right? And we don't realize that for some of our other values, like social justice, like patience, like um, like charity, like community, for those things to exist, self has to exist also. Right? Self has to be first. And and it's it's kind of scary to even say that out loud. But people adjust, right? And we do get the room to breathe. We get the room to to just exist and just be ourselves and just like give ourselves a chance to just be, right? And so here's the thing, parents, ask your child, if you're if you're watching or you're listening to this, right? This is my tip for you. Ask your child, what responsibility can I take off your plate this week? Right. And for those of us who are adult children, I want you to practice saying the sentence, I would love to help, but I can't do that today, right? There's no apology, right? There's no five-page explanation, there's no PowerPoint presentation, there's no slide deck. It's just a boundary. Okay. So if this episode resonated with you, I want you to think about an immigrant daughter in your life who is carrying so much and much more than you know everyone else probably in your life, right? Someone who is carrying more than anybody realizes, right? And send them this episode, send them this reminder, okay? Send them this message to let them know one, that you're thinking about them, two, that you see them, three, that you understand. And even if you don't understand, maybe this could be an invitation for them to think a little bit more about how they can communicate what it is that's going on with them. So, until next time, remember that you were born into a family. You were not hired to run it. Take care of yourself. So, guess what? We are opening up some slides for a sponsorship. If you've been watching or listening to this podcast and you've been enjoying it as much as we have been enjoying recording it, I would love to invite you to consider uh sponsoring us. You can reach out to me at console. We have a wireless audience, and we would love for our audience to hear about you.