Episode 132: [Step 6] Breaking the Rules to Rewrite Your Life
In this episode of the F*ck Saving Face podcast, Judy Tsuei shares her personal journey of embracing unconventional choices, from getting pregnant on purpose before marriage to living in a camper van and navigating divorce.
Judy discusses the challenges of breaking cultural expectations, redefining family dynamics, and finding authenticity in life’s toughest moments. Judy offers insights on emotional resilience, self-love, and the courage to rewrite your own script, reminding listeners that they are enough just as they are.
Sound Bites
"You don’t have to follow a script. You’re here to write your own."
"The path to self-love and authenticity is never a straight line, but it is yours."
"Sometimes breaking cultural expectations is the bravest thing you can do for yourself."
"You are enough just as you are, and you deserve to make choices that feel right for you."
Takeaways
Live a life true to your values, not societal expectations.
Ending relationships can be a sign of growth, not failure.
Ending relationships can be a sign of growth, not failure.
Breaking cultural traditions can lead to authenticity.
You are enough, and your choices matter.
Surround yourself with people who empower your true self.
Episode Highlights
00:00 Opening reflections on the season’s powerful guests and the importance of breaking societal norms.
01:00 Personal story of navigating divorce and adjusting parenting plans during the holidays.
02:30 Challenging societal and cultural expectations with courage.
04:00 Judy shares her decision to get pregnant before marriage and the unconventional path that followed.
06:00 Choosing authenticity over staying in an unhealthy marriage.
08:00 Reflections on camper van living, minimalism, and the importance of new experiences.
10:00 Redefining relationship success and knowing when to walk away from unhealthy dynamics.
11:30 Closing encouragement to rewrite your own script, trust yourself, and embrace your unique path.
Transcript:
Judy Tsuei (00:02.679)
Welcome to the F*ck Saving Face podcast where we're empowering mental and emotional health for Asian Americans and voices of color by breaking through taboo topics. Life may not always be pretty, but it is indeed beautiful. Make your story beautiful today. This week's episode is an interview and here we are in Spain.
So this week is step six, which is to go ahead and do something like get pregnant on purpose and then go live in a camper van with your daughter and then get divorced from your husband, all of which are super taboo in my family of origin. This entire podcast is about throwing out the rule book on what society culture as one of my upcoming guests tells you Susan Liu about, you know, f*ck the should
all of the things that we have been told that we are supposed to do because those are the standards and the norms and that there's so much power in refining our core values and defining what is truly aligned for us as well as making space for others in your life who may or may not ever understand. And that's a difficult, huge lesson. As we are getting into the holidays,
It is what I call heartbreak holidays. I think the holidays are difficult for so many of us, but when you're a divorced parent, there are a lot of elements of grief that just kind of hit out of the blue. And so this year, my ex has been asked for us to change our parenting plan because it had been over the last six years that we've been divorced, five or six years, that our daughter would see one of us on Christmas Eve and one of us on Christmas day. And so he asked, can we
not do that anymore. Can one of the parents have her for both Christmas Eve and Christmas day and then alternate year by year? And my first response was hesitation. I don't want to give up any time with my daughter that I have. And yet I understood that maybe it would make things easier. So my daughter and I had a conversation about it and we realized the pros and cons of both of those scenarios. We came to a compromise where she would FaceTime me.
Judy Tsuei (02:27.532)
the same way that she FaceTimed her dad this Thanksgiving. And in an ideal world, my daughter wants everyone together. Her dad, her stepmom, me, my partner, his kids, all of us celebrating together. And I was speaking with my partner and this statement came up of, don't know if I'm ever gonna get used to the holidays like this. And it's true. There's just so much of life that I think unfolds.
unexpectedly when we have to make hard choices that are aligned to the things that are right for us and our souls. That calling, I knew very early on that I should not have gotten married. I knew very early on that I should have gotten divorced. And those are really, really difficult choices to make because there was so much societal influence about what makes a quote unquote healthy family and so much cultural influence as well. And yet,
I'm grateful that my three younger siblings who all grew up in the same household that I did said, please don't do what mom and dad did. Please don't stay together just for the sake of staying together. So I want you to know that I think if you look at any iconoclast, anybody who navigated a direction of creativity or the world, a way of being that hadn't been done before required so much bravery and courage and moxie and moving into the unknown and dealing with so much judgment.
And step six I write in the book is get pregnant on purpose before getting married, then live in a van and get divorced. And it's easy to raise an eyebrow at that. I want to break it down and let you know that potentially there's a script that's been given to you that's running and operating in your unconscious mind. As a neuro-linguistic programming coach, I can see so clearly how many of our beliefs, how much baggage we have that gets replicated over and over again.
opportunities for us to heal and to resolve things, but it's sometimes difficult to parse and parcel out. And from the moment we're born, society gives us a script. When we're supposed to graduate, get a job, fall in love, get married, have kids. And there's this timeline that we're expected to follow. But what if the timeline doesn't work for us? What if some of us are just operating at a different pace?
Judy Tsuei (04:46.95)
And sometimes that's a faster pace and sometimes it's a slower pace or who is even to say if that is fast or slow. I think, especially when you come from cultures of color and from immigrant parents, this can feel even more intense. There are cultural expectations of roles we're supposed to play. And in my culture, being Chinese American, we were taught to be obedient and follow traditions, even if they didn't serve us.
If we dared question anything, we were seen as rebellious, ungrateful, or a disappointment. And so what do we do when that is the case? I chose to get pregnant.
before I got married, I've told people over and over again that I'm so grateful that my daughter made it very obvious she wanted to come into being. So we were living on Kauai. I had met my soon to be husband and within two weeks of knowing each other, we consciously chose to conceive. And by three weeks of knowing each other, I was pregnant. And this wasn't a biological clock ticking. It was a palpable force we could feel wanting to come into being. And she is still by far the greatest thing that I've ever said yes to. I did not get married first and then have kids. The conventional order just didn't feel right. And
In fact, when he proposed, every fiber of my being was telling me to say no, but he didn't in a very public way. So I didn't feel like I had the ability to say no. I didn't have the voice. And I was also so sick from suffering from hypermesis gravidarm where I was just projected vomiting and nauseous 24 seven. And I wasn't raised to create disharmony. I was raised to create harmony. And when you do something so publicly, not just in front of people that he
knew and loved but on a beach in Hawaii with so many other people watching. It just felt like this monumental pressure. I got caught in what it meant to have a proper family and when we moved to Austin after we got off of our camper van adventure just day in and day out I woke up with such severe sadness. One of my friends is going through a very hard time right now and she texted me and asked when you were getting divorced did you just feel this the sadness that you didn't know would ever go away?
Judy Tsuei (06:55.994)
And I said, yes, absolutely, all the time. And this morning I sent her this emotional guidance scale where if you follow Abraham Hicks or if you watch The Secret, maybe you've seen it, where different emotions have different vibrations and at the top is love and at the bottom is powerlessness. And so I think so many times we are told to like just muscle through it and get to the highest of emotions. But in fact, if you can just get to the one emotion above the one that you're feeling,
anger, guilt, shame above powerlessness, those are more powerful than feeling powerless. And so you try to get to the next one and then maybe sometimes you jump up a couple and maybe sometimes you slide back. But that's progress to know that you've made it through the lowest steps just to get to the next rung of that next emotion. And so when you brave a path that's all your own, sometimes that's what it entails.
sliding down the slope and then clawing your way back up and figuring it out. If you asked me if I would ever live in a van again, I absolutely would. My dad actually bought a camper van and he cannot wait to just drive around and be in it and live in it for long periods of time. I loved it. I loved being able to explore unexpectedly. It was exhausting. It was exhausting to figure out, you know, where we were going to get food from, where we were going to spend the night, all of that. But I would do it again.
and not jam all of my problems into a 24 foot space with someone who I knew that I did not want to be with. I at the time was also on crutches in a boot because my tendon detached in my foot and I spent nine months dealing in nine out of 10 pain until I got it resolved and had to take care of an infant toddler with that. So I liked minimalism. I liked just exploring. I have what I learned from a friend.
when I took my daughter to the Philippines, is I'm a sensory seeker. I want to experience new things. I don't care if it's driving down a different road. just, I want to see new things. It makes me feel alive. And that at the time, you know, that camper van living was becoming increasingly popular. You're going to hear in an interview about how sometimes we can muscle through the things that we want and maybe miss the boat, miss the message that maybe the timing wasn't right. So maybe the timing just wasn't right for me to do that then.
Judy Tsuei (09:21.938)
but I'm glad that I got a taste of it and I'm glad to see my dad doing it. And in a way it makes me feel connected and understand that the things that make us happy are our own. And finally, divorce. I'm very, very grateful that one of my friends who's a child therapist says that we need to redefine what we view as success in a relationship. Success is also knowing when to call it done and complete. And
I tried really hard. We went to couples counseling. A couples therapist fired us. He did not think that he wasn't going to be able to do anything for us. My ex-husband walked out during a couple session when he was being challenged about his behavior and his allegiance to his mother over the marriage. All of these things are going to be in the book. But I remember I used to look at my daughter when she was sleeping at night while we were living in Austin and just feel like such a failure.
silently crying and just apologizing to her, knowing what was gonna come that she had no idea about, but that I had to do because I could not be in this unhealthy, emotionally abusive marriage anymore. It had gotten actually to a point where it was potentially going to become physically abusive and that's when I called it quits. So this is your life and this is your journey and you are allowed to make choices that feel right for you even if they don't make sense to the world around you.
And the path to self love and fulfillment and authenticity is never a straight line, but it is yours. Sometimes I think about Harold and the purple crayon and just drawing and figuring it out as you go. And sometimes things can be scary, but you can draw them differently. And sometimes things can be promising it seems, but then they don't turn out. So go ahead, do the thing that's right for you. You don't have to follow a script. You're here to write your own and make sure that you have healthy support all around you. You are enough just as you are.
And I appreciate you joining me today for this episode of the FxSavingFace Podcast. I hope that you will be bold and stay true to yourself and understand that you know more than you probably give yourself credit for. If today's episode resonated with you, I would love to hear your thoughts. You can email me hello at judycsoy.com or share this episode with a friend who maybe needs to hear it. As always, keep living authentically. Remember that
Judy Tsuei (11:44.924)
from the beginning of time ever after there will never ever be another you. Be wildly you. I'll see you in the next episode.
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. If you'd like to support me and this show, please go to iTunes and leave your review. It means so much to me and it'll help others find this podcast. I'll catch you in the next episode. And if you'd like to stay in touch between now and then, please visit wildheartedwords.com and sign up for my weekly newsletter. I've had people share with me that it's the best thing to arrive in their inbox all week. Aloha.
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Keywords: Asian American, mental health, emotional health, Rewrite your life script, breaking societal norms, challenging cultural expectations, redefining success, navigating divorce, living authentically, camper van lifestyle, self-love and authenticity, breaking taboos, unconventional life choices
