I sit here at the end of 2022 having faced and still facing a number of emotional hurdles in my life and I’m stuck thinking about how isolated and divisive many of us have become. I think about the tough times I had both prior to and throughout my divorce and a lot of my struggles had to do with becoming lonely and disconnected. I realize that I’ve slowly receded into my introversion and I’m flooded with a web of thoughts about how did I get to this place and how do I get out?

I see other people in my life struggling with the same questions and same isolation. As we learn to cope with covid; as companies start to encourage a return to the workplace; and as many of us emerge from our bubbles I can’t help but ask, how do we re-learn how to connect? There are a multitude of reasons we’ve all become disconnected in the past couple of decades, not just Covid, how do we address those causes, learn from our mistakes, and move forward?

I have so many swirling thoughts on this topic that I’m likely going to have a number of meandering posts just trying to get my own thoughts organized but I wanted to start with the practice of empathy.

Regardless of the many many reasons I find that I and others in my life have become isolated, the biggest thing I see lacking as we foster new relationships, or even deal with old relationships is the lack of temperance and empathy.

I’ve seen so many examples of these traits and skills lacking when I’ve seen people going through tough times. I see an enormous number of mental health and relationship posts on TikTok where the common thread is just a simple lack of people just being there for one another.

What do I mean by a lack of temperance? I mean that in so many emotional or confrontational situations we’re often quick to jump to a reaction before fully understanding what the underlying issue/cause/need is of the other people we’re dealing with. In an age of instant gratification, we’re also in an age of instant reaction. Calling someone a Karen rather than asking if there is are other underlying issues in someone’s life causing agitation. “Karens” instantly assuming ill intent rather than a simple mistake or oversight and flaring up in anger. Instantly trying to solve everyone else’s problems when sometimes that isn’t what they need.

If we all practiced even a little more temperance on both sides, just a few more seconds to be thoughtful about the situation it would give us time to begin to practice empathy. Note that I am using the word empathy rather than sympathy. Rather than explain it, this video does a much better job of it:

Often times when someone opens up about an issue or problem, the last thing they want is for someone to swoop in with sympathy, solutions, or defensiveness. In most cases words of sympathy or a long list of solutions will just come off as condescending, belittling, and/or insincere. Those will slowly push the person in distress away and defense and anger will just do it even faster.

Practicing empathy, being in the emotions and feelings with the person, just letting them know that they’re heard and validated in how they feel will often times allow the person to move past self doubts and criticisms they’re already levying on themselves and then move on to coming up with their own solutions and ways to cope. If you’re there with them, and encourage them builds trust and deepens your connection.

The situations I see where this comes up the most are with the most important connections I feel like we try to make throughout our lives: family connections and finding a partner/significant other.

Family connections are an easy set of situations to imagine from a parent child perspective and one we all fall into. It’s a common trope/theme/story – each generation feels a disconnect with their parent/children. As a parent, you spend years trying to raise and guide your children. Early on, with the combination of lack of sleep, children’s lack of vocabulary and understanding, and the desire to shield our children from the pains of the world we can’t help but end up in the situation of ”because I’m older, I know better, and I said so”.

There are literal years where we can’t explain why things are done the way they are to our children. There are literal years where they are unable to communicate their feelings. We end up ”practicing” handing out solutions without listening to the other person’s perspective. As children get older, this practiced behavior often sticks, leads to rebellious teenage years. Some are lucky and are able to break out of the habit and make meaningful connections before children go off to college and start their own lives. Some aren’t and find themselves only able to connect in their adult lives having gone through similar experiences.

On the receiving end, children get so used to parent’s just ordering them around without talking through reasoning, they stop sharing about their own experiences and feelings and the rift can grow.

For those that are not lucky and don’t have good examples of empathy, being vulnerable, and having healthy close familial relationships, this can extend into our dating lives as well as we get older. If we never learned to open up to the people we grew up with, its an uphill battle being able to open and trust another person we met along the way. On the flip side, if we were already well versed in opening up, the person we met may not be. They may take open discussions about negative emotions as a personal attack, or a problem they need to solve like their own parents just handed out solutions to them. They’ve never seen an example of being supportive in these situations and don’t know how to deal with it.

Everyone’s capacity for empathy will be different and will be shaped by all their experiences throughout their life. Often times the relationships that struggle will be the ones where these levels are drastically different and there is a discomfort and/or fear to be vulnerable and meet in the middle.

If we collectively were to try to be just a little more vulnerable and give each other the benefit of the doubt and try to understand one another we can begin to rebuild connections much more successfully. The next time you see someone that is sad, angry, hurt, or just not feeling their best, try to offer support rather than solutions, or worse, hostility.

Do as the yellow dinosaur does: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRqxJrWc/

A symptom of aiming to please each group that I’ve interacted with in my life was that I have split myself up and spread myself too thin. I’ve generated and worked in multiple personas depending on who I’m around at a given time. As a result I’ve never fully been open with anyone which has ended up as a recipe for being awkward and alone.

My Cambodian family self is separate from my American schooling self. My Martial Artists self is separate from my Video Gamer self. My Computer geek self is separate from my Car geek self. My own family self is separated from my work self. Add on top of that I have an entire very private side of myself that I’ve kept mostly closeted, and I do mean closeted – my orientation.

A big part of the crossroads I’m at is that the family self, the parenting and the maintaining of a household and marriage was a full time 24×7 responsibility. It left very little room for the other pieces and, as I struggled to enjoy those other aspects and interests, I still kept things cordoned off and separated. I burned out and worse I failed at my responsibilities and I failed to commit 100% of myself to my family.

Everything was in their neat little boxes, until the house of cards just came tumbling down. I now ask myself, why did I keep everything in those boxes? Cowardice? Fear of not being accepted or fear of being judged by any one of those groups? Laziness for not putting in the effort to put all of those aspects of myself on the table with everyone I met?

Sure the fear might have made sense in the days when folks still made jokes about “other people” but those times have passed for the most part, despite the social divide that we face today. The laziness is admittedly a character flaw. Perhaps it was pride, in each of the boxes I had one or two things I was really good at, I suck at taking praise, but fear showing weaknesses lest they detract from the accomplishments.

No good reasons at all for spreading myself too thin, so now I’m writing this to try to figure out a path forward. Suck up the effort and put it all on the table. Realize that I need people in my life that care about me no matter what and, if any of it is offputting, then those aren’t the people I need in my life.

So, to lay out the cards good/bad/TMI in order to stop the split and the burnout:

• A Cambodian American, the firstborn of my family in this country
• A person struggling to be socially and professionally functional with no example, rulebook, or guidance on how to navigate American society and norms from my predecessors.
• Emotionally intelligent from all of the experiences of introspection and self-consciousness over the years; if I want to be accepted for my idiosyncrasies, I damn well should be open to accepting and empathizing with those of others.
• A brain hardwired for engineering that includes overanalyzing and a need to optimize everything, even things that you just can’t optimize.
• An incessant need to improve myself and the things around me, computers, electronics, home renovations, woodworking, martial arts, cars, my view of the world, the list goes on…
• …but only able to focus on a few at a time
• A person that tries to put others before himself to a detriment.
• A person that doesn’t subscribe to one person being better than another as a whole. There may be aspects where one person can be more talented than another, but there are likely just as many aspects where that is reversed.
• Anxious in social situations with a reasonable amount of desire to run away
• Confident in my individual abilities
• A fan of anime and manga stemming from a misguided youth of trying to find anything Asian related for me to make a connection with
• Proud that I’m a black belt and ashamed I don’t still actively practice
• [heterosexual]——————————–[bi]—————————–[homosexual]
  |——————–queer?———————-|
• [masculine]————————————————————–[feminine]
  |——–here?———|
• Likely watch too much pornography because of repressing the prior two bullets.
• Desensitized to just about everything, not much can be offputting to me other than closed-mindedness
• I’ll try just about anything once
• I think anything can be healthy with the key being moderation.
• Avid Video Gamer as an escape
• Self-conscious that many of my interests betray my age and what my maturity level should be

I’m sitting here at a major crossroad in my life I never expected to be at left wondering, how did I get here? I feel like I’ve worked so hard to have a decent career, have a good income, provide for my family, and generally not do evil. How is it that I’ve ended up separated for a year, searching for a divorce mediator, and questioning so many aspects of my life?

I think the answer lies in questioning why have I done everything I’ve done up until now? Why did I work so hard to have a decent career? Why was income important to me? Why did I work so hard to be a family man when I’m realizing there are aspects of it I was just not in lockstep with my partner for?

Fundamentally, much of it was the pressures I was feeling from outside of myself. I am the child of an immigrant family. A family uprooted and thrust into a society they knew very little about, refugees from a civil upheaval in their home country. Escaping a situation where one could be killed simply for being well educated, or even just wearing glasses for that matter. I can only imagine that at the forefront of adjusting to a new country with two young children that their main concern was that everyone fit in, didn’t stand out, didn’t make waves.

As such those values of “fitting in” were ingrained in me from the start and all throughout my life. But what is fitting in? When I was split between my life outside of the house, just trying to keep lockstep with my peers as an American and my home life, expected to fulfill familial duties and expectations I was never even exposed to. What is fitting in, when you’re told not to stand out, but in order to succeed in corporate America, you have to stand out from your peers as having something they don’t?

In today’s context, how do I promote and live by an ethos of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice when I come from a background of fitting in and not standing out? I don’t feel it’s a scenario unique to myself, but likely shared with anyone that feels like an “other” to varying degrees. And just as everyone is unique, so too is their approach to handling their situation.

For me, up until this point in my life, I’ve chosen the path of least resistance. I have tried to fit in with what I perceive as social norms. Get good grades, get a decent job, have a wife and kids, buy a house. I’ve done all of those things and I’ve been lucky to have had that opportunity. But again as I sit here going through a divorce, no longer in that house I worked so hard for, not being a part of my children’s lives in the way I always saw myself as being, and I can only blame myself.

I realized that I’ve failed at all of those because I’ve never allowed myself to just be myself. I’ve invested so much into trying to check all the boxes I never asked, are those the boxes I really wanted to check? How do I invest myself in anything when I don’t even know what it is I have to invest?

I have been extremely privileged to have had the opportunities to achieve what I have. I have no regrets that I met, married, and still continue to have an extremely intelligent, diligent, and honest best friend. No regrets that I have two extremely intelligent, happy, and charismatic children. The regret I do have is that I have not been able to give them 100% of myself, 100% of what they deserve.

So, now at this crossroad of a major regret, I’m trying to flip the script. I am no longer concerning myself with what is normal, what is expected, what is fitting in. I’m taking the time to truly figure out what will make me happy and who am I as a person. To take the harder path because I already know that I may be met with resistance and criticism, possibly from some of my own family. But, there are a handful of people that I want to always be a part of my life and to be a part of theirs. The very least I can give them at this point is 100% honesty, and that starts with figuring out and being honest with myself.