How my parents gave me an anxiety disorder.

Ever since I can remember, my parents praised me for being smart. Among their three children, my older brother was the athletic one, I was the brainy one, and my younger sister was a little bit of both. Because of that, my parents made an unspoken agreement to pressure me to do well in school. They also reserved praise for when I succeeded.

Don’t get me wrong: my parents put plenty of academic pressure on all three of us. My brother got a lot of serious talks and exaggerated lectures about the dangers of neglecting his studies. But I was always going to be the breadwinner of the family, the highest educated, the one to financially take care of my parents when they retire.

My parents often reminded me that I have a better life than they or their parents did. They made sure I knew that I come from generations of poor and uneducated family and that I had to be the one to break the cycle. If I didn’t, all those generations of suffering would be for nothing.

I was fine with the pressure and the selective allotment of love because I was good at school. I was placed in the highest math level every year. I played four musical instruments. I finished high school with a 4.67 GPA. And it was all worth it because every time I came home with an A, my mom would give me a big hug and tell me she was proud of me.

Starting in my second year at UCLA, things got a little less fine. I was at an elite school where the competition was intense. Even worse, my Economics major was curved to a B-, so to get the A’s my parents wanted, I couldn’t simply perform above average—I had to excel. I begged my parents to let me switch to an easier major, but their answer was always the same, “you must major in something practical.”

I feel the pressure immensely. If I failed at having a better life, then all my parents’ hard work and suffering was in vain. How could they forgive me?

It was at that time that I started to get panic attacks. I’m talking about the kind of panic attacks where time slows, the room dissolves, and it feels like you're going to die because you can’t get a single breath in. The kind that lasts for 20 minutes and takes hours to recover from.

At the time, I didn’t realize why I had suddenly started getting these panic attacks. There were no rational thoughts going on in my head when they were happening—it felt purely physical. I was powerless and weaponless whenever they came.

It wasn’t until I started learning more about mental health from friends that I realized I was in a pressure cooker. Years and years of ignoring the amount of pressure I felt allowed it to grow to an insurmountable level. I was so tightly wound by the fear of failing academically that I literally thought I would die if it happened.

The anxiety became unbearable. I couldn’t get myself to pick up my textbook to study because I was so afraid that I wouldn’t understand the writing on the page. My grades tanked. Ironically, that was the push to get me to finally admit that I needed help. 

I’ll never forget my parents’ reaction when I told them I wanted to start therapy. The guilt was immediate: “You think we’re bad parents?” My dad encouraged me to try to tough it out: “Your generation is so soft these days.”

I was diagnosed with a rather serious anxiety disorder. I don’t blame my parents for the way they pressured me to succeed academically. They just wanted the best for me. There’s also something to be said about how maybe it worked: my brother became a software engineer, I’m on track to become a lawyer, and my sister is applying to medical school.

Something that helps me a lot is knowing I’m not some kind of inferior anomaly who still needed help despite having a “better life” than my family before me. Studies show that Asian/Pacific Islander and Latino children of immigrants have significantly higher rates of mental illness than children of non-immigrant parents. Asian Americans are also the least likely to seek help for their mental illness. For me, this struggle is amplified because I am also first generation.

Seeing these statistics, I am proud of how I handled my mental illness. I mean, I still struggle with anxiety every day, but I think a lot of people who went through what I did might have dropped out (not that I would blame them). I'm just hoping that I can hold it together through law school, with at least a little bit of my sanity left.