Lessons - How a Doctor Prescribes Joy to Transform Lives | Tiffany Moon - Anesthesiologist & Author of "Joy Prescriptions"

In this lessons episode, discover how cultural expectations shape identity and how breaking free from the good Asian daughter's script can be both painful and liberating. Learn how unspoken family pressures affect career and personal relationships, explore the cost of high achievement without boundaries, and understand how reclaiming joy begins with setting limits and finding balance beyond the checklist. You broke out of this good Asian daughter script. So what is the good Asian daughter script? That's what I was alluding to before. Like I always find it interesting how your parents are such a big impression on you, but then also there's a point where you have to break out of their model of who you are, their version of who you are. So was there a version of who you are, this good Asian daughter? What does that mean and how did you break out of it or why? Oh, I was the perfect Asian daughter. I never talked back to my parents. I made straight A's. I always did the extra credit assignment. I was teacher's pet. I never got into any trouble. I never had a boyfriend. I helped with the dishes at home. I actually swept and vacuumed the floors on the weekends. I just like if you could have a model child that was just one level above robot, that was the kind of child that I was. I just I did everything my parents wanted me to because I felt so beholden to them that they had sacrificed their life in China to bring me to America so that I could have a better life. And they told me this. This was not insinuated. They said to me, if it were not for you, we would have just stayed in China. We came to America so that you could have the opportunity for a better life. And look at us. We don't know the language here. We speak with an accent. People make fun of us. We have lesser jobs here than we do in China. I mean, my dad was the manager of a factory in China that employed over 200 workers. So he was like, you know, head honcho like floor boss. And then here in America, you know, his, his English skills are very poor. He speaks with a heavy accent and he's a computer programmer. He actually came to America to study business management. But because his English was so bad, he changed his major to computer science so that he wouldn't have to talk to people. That's not fair for them to put that on you. But, but I didn't know that that wasn't fair. I internalized, you know, the words that they said. And to me, in my, you know, six-year-old, eight-year-old, 12-year-old mind, I was beholden to them. Wow, look at everything, mommy and daddy sacrifice so that I could have a better life. I should be better. I should not make a B. I should help clean the dishes after dinner. I should vacuum the floor. I should never talk back. Like I just, I, I was in constant fear of disappointing my parents. My dad, especially, he is just very difficult to please would be putting it nicely. Talk to me about sort of early career, separating a little bit from your parents, how that impacted you, how it impacted like life decisions, any of that. Yeah, I think the thing, the next thing that my dad was really upset with was when I brought home a Korean boyfriend. I'm Chinese. So he's very strict. Yes, and Korean, you know, like Asians are the most racist against other Asians. Like Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, like to American people, it's all like, oh yeah, they're the same. They eat lots of rice, have strict parents, right? Like it's all the same. No, like Chinese people don't like Koreans and Japanese. Japanese people don't like anybody, but Japanese. Koreans think they're at the top of the total. Everyone thinks they're at the top. It's crazy. It's crazy. And I don't understand where this comes from. But all I know is that when I brought home a Korean boyfriend to my Chinese dad, he was pissed. What age was this? This was 2324. Okay. It was the year I graduated from medical school that I met my now husband. And I was 23 when I graduated from medical school. So it must have been around that time. And it's not like I'm some like, you know, 16-year-old prom date. Like, daddy, this is, you know, Brad, I'm a freaking doctor. I'm 23 years old. I have an MD behind my name. And I'm like, dad, I want to tell you something. Like, I kind of been seeing this guy. And then they were super pissed because he had been previously married with two kids from that marriage and was a decade older than me. And my dad just lost it. You know. What do you think? Okay. So all these interactions with your family. And I think they cause like all these little traumas. I think they, I think they cause little traumas like carry through your life. And you have to be super careful. If you, if you don't address them, then it can impact everything. It can impact relationship with your husband, with your, with your wife, with your kids. So I, I don't love that he keeps pushing you like, your dad keeps pushing you farther and farther away. But you're not going to change your life. You're going to keep building your life regardless. But what's the point when you sort of reconcile those differences or in the meantime, when your dad pushes you away, how does that impact your relationship? How does that impact your career? Does it at all? Career, not so much because I'm doing exactly what he wanted me to do. You know, he wants to brag to all his friends that I'm a successful anesthesiologist. He's always pimping me out. His friends, kids who want to go into medical school. So now I'm taking phone calls with like 18-year-olds that want to know how to apply to go to medical school. And I'm like, don't you have a guidance counselor? Like, why are you calling me? And then all his friends, like not long ago, his friend got diagnosed with liver cancer. So then he text me asking for a same day appointment with an oncologist that I know, the week of Christmas. And I'm like, this is an unreasonable request, father. And he's like, well, he's got cancer. And you know, liver cancer grows quickly. And I was like, oh, it does, I didn't know that. Thank you for educating me about cancer, father. I didn't learn that in medical school. And he's like, you better call and get him an appointment. And I'm like, it's not, I don't even know this, this your friend. Why don't you call and get an appointment? So he always like leverages my relationships and expertise to help his friends, which I'm happy to do. But it comes with a side of like, you better do this for me. It's not what he's asking necessarily, but the way in which he does it, like, I owe him something. So does that still go on to this day? Yeah, you know, I've done a lot. I keep asking you if you fix the relationship, but it still sounds like it's not fixed. It's not fixed. And I just had lunch recently with my mother. And I kind of told her, I said, you know, I went on a women's retreat not too long ago. And we did a lot of work on boundary setting. Like boundaries is like a very, you know, in thing right now. And I was like, you know, why I have no boundaries? Because they were never modeled to me as a child. My parents, they have no boundaries. They work all the time and they don't have boundaries with each other. They don't have social boundaries. And I'm like, I'm really going to work this year on on setting some boundaries. And one of them is distancing myself from him a little bit. Because every time we interact, I leave the interaction feeling not good enough, pissed off, emotionally drained. And all those childhood traumas just flood me again. In spite of that, how do you find joy? How did you find joy? How did you overcome these traumas? How did you not let it impact your relationship with your husband, your relationship with people in your life? You know, I think I'm good at compartmentalizing. You know, I'm able to put things in salads, which is also great for work. Because I work at a level one trauma hospital. I see people shooting stab each other all the time. And you know, if I wasn't able to compartmentalize that I would probably come home a sobbing mess every day. So I think I've compartmentalized my relationship with my father and put it here so that it doesn't affect my relationship with my husband or with my mother even. Because she's still with him. And I have a close relationship with her. And I'll tell her things like, you know, it hurts my feelings when he says this or he's constantly comparing my twins. And I don't like it when he compares them in front of them that, you know, one runs faster than the other. And my mom will be like, oh, you know how daddy is. And, you know, she makes excuses for him or whatever. So I've decided to just put that relationship in a little bucket over here so that the fumes from it don't, you know, see through like carbon monoxide and poison everything else. You know, it's interesting, though, because so I think that that relationship, it turns you into like a high performance individual in everything in your life. Because that's sort of what was that was model. It was like work, work, work, work, work. So throughout sort of your life, you've realized the certain points that even high performance is always the best path forward. I think that now you have more balance in your life. I mean, there was one point where you were sleeping in your car between your shifts and you realized things like that weren't sustainable. So talk to me about sort of your attitude towards work about high performance, about accomplishment because you were, you know, you're going to, you graduated med school at 24, mostly for only finishing their undergrad. So obviously like you keep pushing yourself, but there's a time when that doesn't serve you anymore. Yeah, that, that was a hard pill to swallow. So I moved to America when I was six years old. I learned English, I went to the early college entrance program when I was 15, graduated from Cornell. When I was 19, graduated from medical school at the top of my class at the age of 23 and then proceeded on to the best anesthesia residency program in the country at UCSF. Then got married and had twins by the time I was 30. And so I just felt like my whole life. It's like these boxes had been, like a to-do list. And I was like, check, go to college early, check. Ivy League check, you know, and my mom was like, there's no way you're going to be able to get married and have kids by the time you're 30 and for whatever reason, you know, in the Chinese anti folklore. If you're not, that's the expiration date. You know, if you're not married by 30, it's like, oh, what's wrong with her. And then I got married and had twins. And so I was like, clocked in right at 30. So I felt like I completed the checklist. Yeah. And then I sat down one day and I was like, shit, I'm tired. Also, what am I doing? Like I've done everything the people told me to. But why do I feel unfulfilled? I have no creativity in my life. All I do is work. I have very little laughter in my life. And very little joy. And at that time, I was like, what is joy? You know, there's happiness, there's joy. I'm like, I like shopping, that brings me joy. You know, but does it? Do your material possessions bring me joy? You know, does this Birken keep me warm at night? No, it does not. So that's when I had my midlife crisis as my husband likes to call it. And I started going to therapy, listen to so many self-help podcasts. I have a Kindle Library full of self-help books. Like if you name a top self-help happiness book, I have it in my Kindle Library. And what I kind of figured out is that like, you can't live life by a checklist. And then joy is not like a destination. It's not like something you're gonna get to. Like the joy is in the journey, but my stupid ass was running so fast that I didn't get to enjoy the journey. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.