The first company that I worked for after college was hiring a new content person at the time. After three months of probation with tricky briefs and sleepless nights, this Monday was something of a heavenly reward that I had long awaited. Every single student in my college would have died for this opportunity.
Monday morning came, and I went to the meeting room. The HR manager came in and gave me the employment contract.
“Sarah, let’s discuss salary,” she said. “Five. That is the unspoken rule for the fresh graduate. We can only pay you five.”
I quickly picked up the contract and read it. I knew they weren’t going to go beyond 5. But I wanted 7. Should I ask?
I spent the next twenty minutes sitting at the table, with the employment contract in front of me, torn over what to say next. I did not know how soon I was supposed to bring up the thing – if I was supposed to bring it up at all. If I should wait until a few months from then to mention it or say nothing. Because maybe she would reject it. But I had no way of knowing if she would reject it. I would have to ask.
· What would the HR manager think of me if I asked for a higher salary?
· What if she rejects it?
· What if everyone thinks I’m greedy?
· What if she rejects it?
That was what was running through my head. My gut and my brain were in a never-ending battle. Once or twice, I almost spoke up, but then shut my mouth again.
After thirty minutes, when I was sure that I would not be able to draw enough courage to ask for a higher salary, I quietly signed the contract, smiled, got up from the table, and gently walked out of the room, cursing myself.
I spent the next 24 hours thinking what was wrong with me. What kind of fear could be going on in my head, preventing me from asking for a higher salary?
You would think that it looks like normal shyness, but it is much more severe.
I remind myself that I’m not obligated to share this with the world. It’s no one’s business. I’ve never once claimed to be “qualified” by anyone’s definition to share any mental health information, nor would I.
Still, what I do know is that once I can put my mind and emotion under control, I’ll write about it. Not because I’m a writer. But because I know there are other people who will feel all the same things I’m struggling to unpack at this moment.
I’m 29, a writer and marketer, but I’ve been dealing with a deep fear of being negatively judged (social anxiety) in one way or another for most of my life.
The irony is that in a year where we talked more than ever about anxiety and the symptoms that might point at it, it still creeped up on me the same way age has – slowly and completely out of nowhere. The anxiety was rooted at childhood, and like a nasty weed, grew and took over everything else in my life.
Before you read on, just a disclaimer that everything that follows is based on my own life experiences. I by no means have the audacity to say that I speak for a speck of the population, let alone society as a whole. Instead, what I’m hoping this will be, is one out of the ten-something million stories that create the collective Asian voice.
In today’s world, where I’m living now, I would like to think social norms have (thankfully) become so passé. As we’ve started on the path of evolution, it’s easy to forget what things were like for people only a few decades ago, and easier to forget there are still a lot of places where social norms still cast a huge shadow on society.
Asian millennials have been on the receiving end of a lot of verbal criticisms over the years, which are usually the courtesy of our highly disapproving parents and those senior to us. I don’t blame them. Unlike me, who was lucky to have roofs over my head, three meals a day, and navigate puberty during a time when the outside world was stable and comfortable enough for me to focus on my internal world, my parents lived through incredibly tough times. And here I’m talking about being a part of shaping the national identity — the massive cultural change and life-changing shift that they fought for. From the post-war era to independence, the events they went through spoke to things that were far more important than self — survival, respect for authority, and obligation to family, and therefore, they were the night to my day.
Rewind all the way back to my childhood. It should come as no surprise that being the youngest child in a traditional Vietnamese household was never easy. When I was a kid, I was generally pretty happy, because I was living very much in the moment, without any thought of how it should be with my personal delusions and expectations. I had no goals and no sense of time pressure. I was essentially just reacting on my instincts. I was immersed in what I would call the real world. I would just do things. I never thought to myself, “What are the relative merits of learning badminton versus swimming?” I just ran around the playground, played badminton, built sand castles, and looked for bugs. Nobody told me to do it, I just did it. I was led merely by my curiosity and excitement. And the beautiful thing was, if I hated swimming, I just stopped doing it. There was no guilt involved. There was no arguing or debate. I either liked it or I didn’t. There was nothing in between.
Growing up, everything I was told to do was for no other purpose than to fit in and gain the approval of others. You don’t want to offend people, and you don’t want to look stupid. Follow the rules. Think before speaking. Get good grades. Take extra classes. Do well on tests and exams. When I think back to my own education, so much of it was, “Sit down.” “Shut up.” “Raise your hand to go to the bathroom.” “No, you must memorize this, even though it doesn’t make sense to you right now.”
Speaking to my parents and sister, an attempt to control and a lack of warmth are things you still see – emotions and praise re not things to be talked about, and if there’s anything bothering you, the solution is always to judge yourself first, keep your head down and chug along because it’s all about the greater good. For whatever reason, no matter how it is normalized or rationalized, whether as a way to (over)protect me, toughen me up, allow them to minimize guilt or responsibility for a negative outcome, or just because it was culture, this additional pressure to act or look a certain way led me to feel at odds with myself, since I was already struggling to define and discover who I was under all the noise.
Amazingly enough, there is one important thing school taught me during 18 years without me even realizing it. Take entrance exams for example, each exam required thousands of hours of rote memorization in preparation, and they were all notoriously competitive. I got only one shot and if I screwed it up, I would get a bad grade and it would be over. What message was a young girl taking away from this? Especially when I was viewed as a loser because I could not get a slot at a top high school? If this taught me anything, it was how shameful and unacceptable being wrong was. The more tournaments I had to go through, the more I was afraid of failure and rejection. To be honest, I was crying about everything at that point. A presentation that I was convinced didn’t go as well as it should have. A test that I tried to do well but didn’t make it. An exam that I should have just passed but for some reason didn’t.
At school, and in class, I lost track of the number of times I heard the complaint, “This is pointless. Why do I have to learn this?”, but not the long sigh accompanied each time I replied.
During my 18 years of school life, I never saw any active class discussion between teacher and students. Nobody, including me, ever spoke up to ask or answer questions for fear of looking silly or being judged. But we still looked around to check the show of hands. Sometimes there was one or two, of course. But most of the time, the teacher continued her lesson as if she was talking to herself. Everyone basically just sat there and listened. We often discussed among ourselves or looked it up on the Internet if there was any confusion.
I’ve lived my whole life learning to internalize all of these messages. The concept of fitting in and getting it right is something that was ingrained in my operating system as the child of a relatively conservative family and the product of conventional school, and the operating system stays intact even as you put different programs through it. The lessons I learned in childhood stay with me as an adult. Some of these learnings are helpful — but others…not so much. I lacked the capacity to approve of myself when it was demonstrating others’ disapproval. I was convinced that others’ recognition mattered to my self worth. I felt like I either needed to excel or rebel as I craved the freedom to be accountable to no one but myself.
When adulthood came along, so came the onset of desire. Little did I know that an obsession born from my teenage angst would make for one of the biggest personal challenges that I constantly grappled with as I ventured into my 20s and attempted to get what I want.
Soon after college, I felt lost and reached my lowest point mentally, physically, and financially. As someone who had taken great pride in living independently over the previous few years, the fact that college seemed more like another standard that society and family imposed on me and that I was living with no purpose just irritated me to no end. My degree sat mainly untouched and forgotten since I earned it in 2014. It was hardly the topic of any conversation and it was certainly not a point of pride. So, I started thinking a lot and building an identity to get what I want — becoming a life strategist and marketer. This is all normal and healthy – it’s all part of being a human, but it somehow got out of control, and I was constantly voicing the thoughts I had in my head. Since it had started with my family, it made it harder for me to dismiss “signs” or “messages” from strangers or other people.
Whenever I saw someone whispering or pointing at me, I immediately felt emotionally punched in the gut. I could not simply, “shrug it off”. I constantly talked about it, and then tried to justify my actions – something that felt almost like I owed people an explanation for what I had done, and would never just let it go.
When I think about the day I talked with the HR manager, I know I dodged a bullet, but I also wonder what would have happened if I had asked her for a higher salary. Friends were quick to say that I had missed a good opportunity, and they were right. Yet might something good have come from me asking? Perhaps.
If I had mentioned a higher salary, the HR manager would have negotiated down, and I might have still ended up with a salary offer I felt comfortable accepting. Even if she were to reject it afterward, just to be able to speak my mind would have been valuable.
One thing none of the people around me will consider — the impact of social anxiety. In fact, researchers have found out for a long time that chronic stress negatively impacts health and all areas of our life in every possible way. Holding our tongue as an adult can be detrimental to our mental health, our character, and the trajectory of our career. Spending all my time living in delusions that I have for things that I probably should not care that much about just adds more anxiety to my life, pulls me out of reality, and literally keeps me from incredible experiences and opportunities. And when I turned 29, I realized that I had worried all the way to 29, and yet everything turned out OK, even if it didn’t go according to the original plan.
The older I get, the more I realize I’ve let my desire and what others think eat at me and control my mind until I feel absolutely sick. I don’t trust that I am making the right decisions and cannot control all the possible outcomes; that is a mental box that I no longer deserve to be in.
“You seriously need to stop caring too much what other people think,” a former co-worker once told me. But the thing is, I wish it were just that easy. “Just tell me how!” I wish I’d said back then.
While I recognize the tough times my parents went through and the fact that focusing on blind obedience over competence is a vestige of our history, I personally think that social norms have to be challenged, overturned, and be forward-looking, and it’s our duty to question those norms. As a society, and as a generation who talk about embracing individuality, we need to truly embrace and accept that everyone has a different take on their own personality and perspective.
Recently, I remembered what my best friend asked me years ago when I told her how useless I felt, “Will people always think about what you’ve done when they wake up, they eat, they bathe, they use the toilet, for the rest of their life?”
This question hit me like a train. Because she was right. I never put myself in others’ position to know the fact that no one is really thinking about me at all. People are far less interested in me than I thought they were. When I’ve come to realize how unimportant I am to people and how important they are to them, their thinking has lost weight. When I’ve figured out their behavior is merely the reflection of their state of being, I’ve stopped taking everything personally.
Nothing other people do is because of me. So, why would I be afraid to be embarrassed for a few seconds to gain something that would be useful for a long time? I was always afraid of “What if I do it?” when I should be afraid of “What if I don’t do it?”.
This is the first lesson I unlearned as an adult and a professional who wanted to be forward-moving and progressive. From time to time, it’s valuable to pause and consider what deeply ingrained beliefs of ours are preventing us from unlocking our full potential.
In the end, I made a promise to myself, the next time, when something comes up, I will stop thinking and just ask for it without hesitation. Forget about the outcome; just ask!
Months after I talked with the HR manager, my boss explained a particularly tricky brief to my team. I did not understand a word of what he was saying. I looked around. Everybody seemed satisfied. Should I ask the boss to explain again? The same dilemma recurred in my mind, but I stopped playing back little movies in my mind of what may happen next. Forget about the outcome, just ask!
I raised my hand. The boss looked at me as if I were from the moon. That did not stop me. I asked him to explain again. He started laughing. The entire room joined in. He wanted to make fun of me further. So, he asked a senior co-worker to explain the brief to me. The senior went silent. He could not explain. He had not understood either. No one in the room had. Yet, no one had dared to ask. I was happy I did.
The boss had to explain the whole brief again!
Yet, I think fondly back on that day for a simple reminder: It is completely up to me how I define my value. People will love me, people will hate me, and none of it will have anything to do with me. I may not be able to lead myself to fulfillment, but I can lead myself out of stress. I need to turn off my mind and trust that I am doing the best I can with what I have today. Only when I stop trying to be right, can I find the freedom and beauty in being myself. And when it comes to asking questions? It’s definitely more efficient to ask a stupid question and get a decent answer than to spend the time wondering whether it would have been a stupid question. Everything will turn out all right after all.
There have been many instances in my life where I’ve struggled to muster the courage to ask for something I wanted, fearing that my request would be refused, or that I would embarrass myself for even asking. Yet, in many of those instances, because I asked, the outcome turned out to be very positive. I’ve never found anyone who said “No” or hung up the phone when I called. I just asked. And when people ask me, I try to be responsive to pay that debt of gratitude back. I learned as an adult to make unfavorable comments with a kind delivery. You don’t have to hold your perspective back! Just be sure your delivery has impact followed by action.
It astonishes me when I think of the time I lost waiting to be called upon, as a student in the classroom, terrified to raise my hand. This continued as an employee, around tables, in conversations, waiting to be given the next opportunity — and as a writer and marketer, waiting for a ‘yes’, one post from viral, one application from award-winning. It took me way too long to understand no one else will make my future their priority. No one but me!
Most people never pick up the phone and call. Most people never ask. And that’s what separates sometimes the people that do things from the people that just dream about them. You need to act, you need to be willing to fail, and you need to be willing to crash and burn, with people, with starting a company, or whatever.
To those of you who like me to dive into the idea of anxiety, if you’re not feeling the best, there’s probably something behind it so maybe, think about being a bit nicer to yourself.
Honestly though, the anxiety is still there – after all, and I still regularly fight the gremlins in my brain, but at least said brain now has the energy to try to keep them at bay for the most part. I’ve made peace with the fact that they will always be there, and to some extent are what makes me better, but it’s definitely not a loving relationship.