Episode 124: [Step 2] Failing Forward to Unexpected Success!
In this episode of the F*ck Saving Face podcast, Judy Tsuei discusses the importance of empowering mental and emotional health for Asian Americans and voices of color
She shares her personal journey of pursuing passions that defy traditional expectations, the significance of truth-telling in overcoming bullying, and the transformative power of self-discovery.
Judy emphasizes the need for bravery in following one's own path and encourages listeners to embrace their worth and seek out their unique journeys.
Takeaways
Empowerment comes from breaking through taboo topics.
Pursuing passions can defy traditional expectations.
Truth-telling is essential to combat bullying.
Failing can lead to discovering one's true path.
There are multiple ways to achieve success.
Bravery is required to follow your own path.
Self-discovery is a continuous journey.
Finding your voice is crucial for personal growth.
Embracing new paradigms can lead to fulfillment.
You are worth pursuing your dreams.
Episode Highlights
00:00 Empowering Voices and Breaking Taboos
02:49 Pursuing Passions Against Expectations
06:10 The Journey of Self-Discovery
09:04 Finding Your Voice and Career Path
11:57 Embracing New Paradigms and Personal Growth
Transcript:
Judy Tsuei (00:02.71)
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. So I had my first post go viral. It was a video I posted on TikTok about the one moment when I knew I needed to get divorced. So I've been posting content for a very long.
And I'm here to peel back the curtains and tell you a couple of different things. This week we're focusing on step two, which is fail out of math and become a yoga teacher and a writer instead, which is ultimately saying pursue your passions, even if they defy traditional expectations. And this is from my book, How to Disappoint Your Parents in 10 Shameless Steps, a Modern Asian American Guide, which I hope you will check out on Kickstarter. You can search how to disappoint your parents on Kickstarter. You can go to
bit.ly, B-I-T dot L-Y slash shameless book. And you'll be able to see what this book is all about. So currently we have 106 backers. We've raised beyond our first basic tier goal. And we're really going for these stretch goals. And I want to tell you that I went to a space tonight with some Girl Scout moms and we were hanging out. It's a new development here in Encinitas, California. And I saw a space and it's called Hatched Collective and
That is where I want to have my book launch. So they host events and it's in this beautiful glass encased space on what's ultimately like a farm. And I could just envision so many people there having a wonderful experience with like little delicate white lights all around, delicious food, some wine and beverages from
all of the women who I support and who also have businesses here in town and all around. So I hope that you will help make that dream come true by helping me reach my bigger stretch goals so that we can create this as a collective movement. We can meet in person, create community. We can have an opportunity to share stories and to hear one another's stories because the reason I brought up the viral video that I posted on TikTok
Judy Tsuei (02:19.79)
is because it showed me how many people, you can see hundreds of comments, have gone through something similar, have been an accomplished, smart, amazing woman, and have found themselves in a relationship with someone who's trying to tear them down, who's an energy vampire, who is not what they had signed up for. And yet, they stay longer than they should. They put themselves in precarious situations, financially, mentally, emotionally, physically. And I'm here to advocate
truth telling so that bullies do not get to continue being bullies and so that we can do something different together. So a long time ago, and I can't even remember where I heard this, but someone had told me a bully is just looking for someone to tell them to stop and they just keep going from person to person until someone shows them that they can stop. Now, whatever your spiritual beliefs, I like to believe ideally that we are all on this conscious evolution.
and whatever our capacity is, hopefully we will aim to fulfill that capacity. I understand that there's different types of mental illness or there are different types of trauma that happen or whatever it is. know, TikTok it seems has this new filter now where you won't see like the hater comments. You actually have to click on another button to be able to see any comments that they flagged as potentially detrimental to your mental health. And I advocate and
highly appreciate that they're doing that now, especially with understanding what social media does to young minds and to even, mean, Julia Roberts posted something where she just even posted a photo of her having a lovely time with her niece and the amount of hate that she got for it about her physical appearance. And she's like, I'm an adult. I understand what these people are trying to do. And still it really affected me. And so she's like, I can't understand what young people are going through these days where they're not fully developed. haven't gone around at the sun enough times to be able to understand that.
It could be different that there's another way. So while what I'm grateful for is that I could see other people who said, I needed to hear this today. I needed to hear this today. And that is ultimately what I hope this is all for is to provide that support that someone else needs. I was doing a podcast interview today with a woman who's going to be a podcast guest this season. And we were doing this podcast swap and there was a moment there where I realized that
Judy Tsuei (04:42.304)
She asked about a significant moment in my life. And I have a very keen memory of when I was younger, of when I had already failed out of math analysis. And up until that point, I'd been doing pretty well in math, but I couldn't figure this out. I couldn't understand tautology's truth, know, proofs. couldn't, I couldn't figure this out. So I failed. And this teacher, Mr. Kravitz, understood how difficult this class was. So he didn't give anybody anything lower than a C star.
Well, I got the C star. And so from that point, I realized, you know, this is not going to be for me, which I had already known. I, from a very young age, always leaned into wanting to do acting. I was always trying out for school plays. Nobody told me what that was about. I just naturally gravitated towards it. And in elementary school, I was not just the teacher's pet. I was the school pet. The principal will call me out of every class, you know, as I continued to go through elementary school grade by grade and asked me to help run errands for the school.
to take things from her to a certain teacher to do all these things. So I was definitely the go-to person in school and I would be in chorus and I would play the star roles and one time I even played Rosa Parks in fourth grade. But my family always told me that I walked too loud, I talked too loud, I thought too loud and that was like step one, which is figuring out how to embrace my voice and my presence. Well, as I failed out of math, I continued to try out for plays and in junior high, I tried out for a Christmas Carol.
I think I wanted to be the ghost of Christmas past and I didn't get it. So with all that experience in school prior to this and knowing how to talk to teachers and to basically get my way because that was the one space in my life where I got any sort of affirmation and validation, I went to go talk to the art teacher who directed this play and my friend Leonie actually got the part and I was close to Leonie and I like her a lot, but I wanted the part. So I went and talked to him and he's like, well, I'm not going to take the
roll away from Leone to give it to you, but I will give you the most important role in the play, which is to be the prompter. And the prompter meant that I had to memorize the entire play, that I would be in every single scene of the play so that I could help give someone a line if they forgot, but I would never be seen. In fact, it was imperative that I was never seen. So I remember sitting behind a couch on the stage and crouching behind the couch and having the fog machine like pointed right at me with this disgusting smelling fog.
Judy Tsuei (07:08.042)
and being in the side of the curtains or hidden behind something else. And it felt like that moment was a validation and a confirmation of everything that my parents had been telling me for so long, which is that I was too much. And so I took that as a message of it's time for me to be behind the scenes. It's time for me to no longer be seen and that I had to carry the burden of the whole entire play because I needed to know every single line that everybody said and be responsible.
for everybody's wellbeing and their performance, letting them shine. And so from that moment forward, and I think this has already been a part of me, of rooting for the underdog, wanting to represent voices that were not heard, thinking about marginalized populations, thinking about I've always had a soft spot for people with special needs and neurodivergence. That's always been something. When I was teaching yoga, I started the Karma Yoga program and one of the most longstanding programs was bringing these men from this.
residents this facility for special needs and they would come and they would do classes and the teachers would get so much fulfillment out of it. The students would get so much fulfillment out of it because it was always something near and dear to my heart. And I feel like it took me and it's still taking me so long to realize that that transition point, I interpreted it to mean something, but maybe it just meant that I didn't do well at that audition that day and that it's okay. And I could have tried out for the next play, but I didn't.
I stopped after that. So when I say fail out of math and become a yoga teacher and a writer instead, failing out of math allowed me to see that's definitely not the path for me. But then I had to figure out what was next. And so thankfully in the same junior high, I had an English teacher. His name is Mr. Provisor and he had us do long-term research papers. He called it an iSearch project. And he's just this really great guy who was very passionate about
making sure that we loved English and that we found our gifts and our voices. And I still remember him because I think that was also a turning point of me realizing how powerful language could be, how powerful writing could be, how I could turn this into something because he believed in me. And ultimately I have made an entire career about it. I actually had a friend
Judy Tsuei (09:31.978)
in college who asked me, what the hell are you going to do with an English degree coming from someone who's majoring in engineering? And in my latest newsletter, the heartbeat, which you can sign up for at my website, wildheartedwords.com, which will soon be rebranding. But for now you can go there. I talked about how the things that I've done with it. Well, I've built an entire career around it. I made hundreds of thousands of dollars in my early twenties doing this. I wrote a book.
that's distributed by Simon and Schuster. I'm working on another one via Kickstarter. I've written another kids book that was successfully funded by Kickstarter. I have created a podcast. I've traveled around the world as a travel writer. I have done any number of things because of my craft that did not look the way that I thought. I had no idea advertising and marketing existed as a career until I majored in mass communications and English at Berkeley.
and it was great. The English was a lot of traditional English, but I also got to sit in a class with Maxine Hong Kingston, who wrote The Woman Warrior. And I got to be in creative writing workshops, and I've gotten to use my words to express what someone else has also gone through and felt, but didn't know how to express. And so they feel seen and heard and liberated because of that. So I want to let you know.
that there are other paths, there are other ways, and it takes so much bravery and boldness to go against what you've been told. It takes bravery and boldness to allow yourself to feel alone in this journey when you pursue the things that you want, when you don't have anybody who's a role model, when you don't have anybody who's supporting you who ever told you that it was okay. And during this podcast interview when I was asked,
how I did this, what were the steps that I took to become a business owner with a branding and marketing agency, bringing other voices to life and other personal brands to life and working with global clients and all of the things, how I did it. I just knew I didn't want to suffer. And every time I tried to make myself fit into a box that someone else told me that I was supposed to do, it felt like suffering. It felt like I couldn't breathe and it felt like just my entire insides wanted to rebel.
Judy Tsuei (11:57.068)
And I finally decided that I could sacrifice for a certain amount of time, but I couldn't sacrifice forever. And I didn't want to, that I couldn't do anything that wasn't aligned to who I am. And I know that that's not how everyone is built. And if you want to learn how you're built, I highly encourage you to go to find out your human design. I interviewed Victoria Jane in an earlier season and you can check out that episode. She tells a lot about what human design is all about.
But it's been a blueprint and really helpful for me to know what my gifts are, how I know when I'm in alignment, how I know when I'm not. But the old paradigm is a lot of forcing and a lot of have tos. And I feel like this new paradigm is a lot of spaciousness and hope and figuring out how the world can work when we all are in our gifts and all are at peace and all are supported.
And so I hope that little by little, bit by bit, you'll follow and be aligned to what's right for you. And there are definitely people out there who the life that I cannot live is a hundred percent right for them. And I am so all about that. I celebrate that completely. I know that the way that I live my life is definitely not for a lot of people and that's okay too. So I hope that this episode, it's a shorter one, reminds you that you can find a new way and
It will involve a lot of curiosity and inquiry and you're worth it. You are absolutely worth it. So if you want more stories like this and more tips on how to apply it into your own life, then I hope you will go to Kickstarter and back my campaign. We've got about 40 more days left and every bit counts, whether you support it financially, whether you share it, whether you send good vibes my way, I will take all of it. And I'm so, so grateful. Thank you so much for listening.
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 Americans, mental health, emotional health, personal growth, self-discovery, pursuing passions, breaking taboos, empowerment, storytelling, community
