The Immigrant’s Guide to Self-Care

A look at something that is often ignored in certain immigrant cultures: self-care

“Self care for children of immigrants can look different. It’s learning to differentiate between what is good for you & what looks good to others. It’s learning that your independence & choices won’t actually kill your parents or family members, no matter how much they say it will… It’s learning to manage expectations & holding our own hands. Self-care is loving our family, but also recognizing what’s toxic…Self care for first gens is knowing that most of the time when you choose you, you’ll be reprimanded. Self care is choosing you anyway, and learning to manage the guilt of feeling like a bad daughter/son.”

To say this tweet by Sahaj Kohli, senior editor at Huffington Post and founder of Brown Girl Therapy, hit me deep would be an understatement.

As a third culture kid, the issues we face on a daily basis have been covered by more than enough writers. Be it the “where would I call home?” confusions, the “identity” confusions or the “international accent” confusions, these come part and parcel with the term “Third culture kid”

How tired are you all of these questions?

“Where are you from?”
“But really, where are you REALLY from?”
“Where’s that accent from?”
“Where would you call home”

As an Indian born and brought up in Kuwait, these are all questions I have faced. What makes it even more annoying is the fact that Kuwait, like most other countries in the Middle East, does not give out passports to expats. Even if you were born there, even if your parents were born then, even if your grandparents were born there. They just consider you to be an expat that lived there a REALLY long time.

This means that they can kick you out at any point.

How do you call a country that can kick you out at anytime home? No matter how many years you’ve lived there.

On the other hand, how do you call a country that you’ve never lived in home? The only connection you have with it are the summers spent there, the culture your parents taught you and your passport.

These are some of the more obvious issues we deal with as a Third Culture Kid.

The not so obvious issues we deal with however, are a little more subtle but a lot more damaging. It’s the constant fight we face between our cultural values and our individual values.

Cultural values vs. Individual values

Cultural values are the traditions and the customs taught to you by your parents and the society, whereas the individual values are the ones you have picked up from your exposure to the world and helps mould you into the person you become.

In some cases, the cultural values and your individual values complement each other. If this sounds like you, you’re one of the lucky few and I am glad.

For a lot of us however, our cultural values and our individual values tend to clash. A lot. This is because the culture we live and the culture our parents lived in tends to be very different.

I am not saying that every third culture kid may relate to this, it depends on how strong your family clings to their “cultural” values.

As someone whose family places a lot of importance on “cultural” values which contradicts heavily with my individual values, I’ve always found myself at this end of the spectrum.

So I learned to deal with it.

The problem is that my way of dealing with it was to develop a split-personality. I was the cultural, familial girl from India in front of family and relatives, and otherwise I was everything I wanted to be: adventurous, free-spirited and ambitious.

This worked out well for a while, especially when I lived abroad, but the older I grew I kept finding it difficult to maintain both facades. The clashes kept increasing, to the point where I started spiraling down a self-identity crisis.

It became more and more difficult to explain to my family my side of things, when they weren’t even aware about that side of my life.

If this sounds anything like you, STOP.

As easy as it made my life when I was younger, keeping this up as I grew older became a challenge in itself. I started realizing that all I was doing was putting a band-aid on a much more serious underlying issue. It was nothing other than a temporary fix.

If this sounds like you, all I can tell you is stop hiding yourself. Even if it’s just one aspect of you. It may seem like an easier solution to not hurt anyone now, but in the future, this is only going to spiral downwards and hurt you…and them for that matter

You need to set limits and learn when to say no.

This can be difficult for some of us. How can you say no to the man and woman who brought you into this world and made you the person you are today?

This is why you also need to know how to say no.

When dealing with parents or close family, saying no is a sensitive topic. You need to do it in a way that they can understand why you are saying no. It’s your responsibility to make them understand where you are coming from and why this is important to you. This is a new area for them and it’s your role to introduce them to it.

Bring them to the 21st century

Teach them to manage expectations. Teach them when enough’s enough. Teach them where your threshold lies. You know about the sacrifices they’ve made. Tell them about the sacrifices you’ve made.

I am not saying that the sacrifices are always the same, but in immigrant culture emotional sacrifices are not given the same importance as physical sacrifices. So teach them about it.

Tell them your everyday struggles. Tell them how you want to be the perfect balance of the child they raised and the person you’ve become. Ask for their help to become that person.

If you don’t involve them in all aspects of your life early on, it just becomes more and more difficult to do so at a later stage. So start early, start now.

We can break our familial toxic patterns if we try, but we need to try. We need to be the one to get our family and our culture to embrace change. If we don’t even try, then how can we blame them for not understanding?

So start today by trying to speak to them. Take the time to make them understand things that are important to you, whether it’s about your career, your friends or your interests.

Putting yourself first is not you being selfish. You need to take care of yourself before you can take care of someone else and that’s something we tend to forget.

At the very least try, before you are forced to ask yourself the question “Do I think about my happiness or my parents?”