Thanks for voicing this!
Some places to connect:
- Magnify Mentoring aims to support people from underrepresented groups in pursuing altruistic work. I suggest checking them out if you haven't already!
- I'm not sure how active it is, but some EAs started a Facebook group EAs from immigrant backgrounds. I know family expectations about what you do with your career and money is a very common theme among people I've talked to among EAs whose families moved from lower-income to higher-income countries.

I can speak to two of those three identities (EA and Asian). I think one possibility that took me an unusually long time to consider was that maybe my identities didn't matter and I'd still feel the same problems if I was the "default person" in society. And I was working through a lot of identities.

It's a weird way of framing things since we can't have our identities counterfactually removed. Even if we did, we wouldn't be the same person. But I think it's a framework that usually doesn't get mentioned much in mental health circles , especially on the internet. Partly because it feels invalidating, partly because most people really want contextual advice, and partly because it feels "emotionally dumb and ignorant" to downplay sociological factors.

To do some fake math on this, if we could decompose mental health problems into the triple Venn diagram of Asian-women-EA (which is 6 different things if you count up the intersectionalities!) and include stuff outside that, it's possible for the Asian-women-EA sources of stress to be maybe only 10-25%.

Basically, part of the challenge of identity is not just figuring out if it matters but also how much. And maybe that amount is ultimately a small thing. Or maybe it's not as tractable as working on the identity-less portions

I am not Asian but fit the other criteria and I really relate. It's half the battle to recognise it in yourself and then another one to do something (like more self-care, boundaries) to actually address is which is not easy! Thanks for posting about this Angel! 

interestingly i've talked to a couple of other asian women in EA who have sort of an opposite experience—we (including myself here) feel like EA ideas and communities fundamentally don't capture things that are important to us as asian women, and so that actually forces us to be more balanced and draw our values from multiple places, rather than holding ourselves to a standard of being a more-optimized EA. one very literal example someone mentioned to me is that western cultures and traditions of thought emphasize breaking down systems into discrete parts and optimizing on single goals, and eastern cultures/traditions value more holistic thinking and balance.

i can also 100% see where you're coming from, as someone who grew up in a very competitive asian/immigrant community myself—i'm sharing another experience not to discount yours, but more to highlight alternate ways of thinking about your own relating to EA that might help you find that balance!

as a former optimizer: #1 thing that helped was therapy

Great post, this one helped me get over some guilt feelings in EA, it might help others - https://replacingguilt.com/