Why doesn't the life you used to dream of feel like it’s yours anymore?

You’re stable, you’re prepared, you’ve got your head together. You have been working thoroughly for your whole life, often more than most of the people around you, delivering results consistently, and making it all look effortless. You have the job, the title, the salary that keeps you comfortable. By every external measure, you have made it.

And something is still not sitting right. You wouldn’t call it a crisis necessarily, but maybe feeling disconnected and chronically tired, and feeling like you’re going through the motions in rooms where you are, technically, succeeding. You have arrived at the destination and found yourself still waiting for the feeling that was supposed to come with it. Have you burnt out on your own goals? Is it supposed to feel different? Is this all there is?

This post is for AAPI and immigrant people navigating high stress workplaces in New York who are feeling dissatisfied and disillusioned with the very life they’ve spent years building up to.

Perfectionism as a habit and a learned behavior

Many AAPI and immigrant people in high stress work environments are proud of their ambition, their drive, and their work ethic. They’re great at managing, at compartmentalizing, at coming up with solutions to their problems.

The perfectionism that can develop from this sense of accomplishment and pride is a rational response to conditions where the stakes of being ordinary felt genuinely high. You needed to be not just good but undeniable, not just prepared but overqualified, so there was no room for anyone to question whether you belonged. That logic might still make sense to one part of you that’s keeping you coming back to work, making sure you stay “on track”. There may also be another part of you that is questioning it, wondering when you get to relax, when do you get to put your guard down, when do you get to not constantly compartmentalize and manage everything in your life.

When you arrive at the achievement and the feeling does not come, the disorientation can often feel harder than the disappointment. You did the thing, the thing is done. Why do you not feel as satisfied as you thought you would?

What are cultural burdens for AAPI and immigrant women and femmes?

Cultural burdens are expectations, systemic beliefs, and values that are shaped by the culture you exist in, and internalized throughout your life, often subconsciously. One example of a cultural burden is the value of productivity in the culture of a high stress environment: when “laziness” feels like a bad word, when slowing down feels self-indulgent, when working all the time is expected. There may be parts of you that thrive in that environment, and there also may be parts of you that really need some things to change.

For many AAPI and immigrant folks, your feelings may be impacted by several cultural burdens:

• Family expectations of success: many people talk about the message of “you have to work harder than others” being communicated and internalized very early on in their lives

• Learning trauma: in many learning environments, from childhood to graduate school to onward professional development, there can parts of you that feel pressure to perform; for immigrants in particular, there often is a layer of pressure from standardized learning environments that had no adaptability to individual needs

• The knowledge that women of color in professional environments are held to a higher standard: the same work earns less automatic assumption of competence, and you learned early that twice as prepared is the entry point

• For immigrants or children of immigrants, there can be an internalized wary relationship to risk, where taking up “too much” space or asking too many questions feels (and often can be) dangerous
  

One version of what may be happening if you find yourself resonating is that parts of you have learned to manage fears of what would happen if you weren’t perfect by constantly pushing you further. And that is okay, we need those parts too, and the goal is not to get rid of them, but to help you have a more intentional relationship with your inner world, where you are able to feel more joy and self-connection, and satisfaction about your life and your accomplishments.

What tends to shift in therapy is not always the standards themselves, but your relationship to your standards: understanding where they came from, what they were protecting, and whether you are using them or they are running you.

What is ambiguous loss and grief?

You enter a room already assessing: how am I being read right now? Am I being seen as competent or as compliant? As a team player or as someone who does not advocate for herself?  The assessment happens subconsciously before you’ve even had a chance to land in the room.

Here is what that can look like in practice:

• Spending twenty minutes before a meeting deciding whether to address the comment from last week, calculating the professional risk of naming it against the personal cost of letting it go for the fifth time

• Having your idea passed over in a meeting, then heard again five minutes later from a colleague and credited to them, and running the calculation of whether this is the moment to say something

• Being invited to the diversity panel but not the strategy meeting: visible as a representative, absent as a decision-maker

• Colleagues expressing surprise when you push back, as if your compliance was so assumed that having a direct opinion reads as aggressive

• Leaving a day that looked successful on paper feeling hollowed out emotionally

 Over time, these experiences combined produce a persistent split in how it feels to occupy your own professional life. Part of you is present, contributing, doing the work. Another part is watching, managing, adjusting. Both of those parts do not get to rest. The exhaustion of managing perception while working hard, simultaneously, year after year, tends to build to grief and disappointment surrounding the things you used to dream of.

Some gentle invitations

Write down the thing you did not say. The comment you let pass, or the idea that got credited to a colleague, or the feedback you absorbed without responding to. Write it down somewhere private, not to send anywhere, just to give it a place outside your body. Notice what bodily sensations and what emotions come up for you as you allow yourself to sit with it for a couple minutes. Notice how you feel towards what comes up.

Find one moment where you are not performing. Have a conversation with someone who knew you before your career, or set a firm boundary on “no talk about work” for a day. Allow yourself to learn a new skill and be a beginner at it: have you ever made pasta from scratch and failed? Have you ever tried to propagate succulents and had to come back time and time again to see if they have rooted? Or maybe, to take an art therapy technique, what if you try to make a bad drawing, a thing that is meant to be destroyed? See what you feel drawn to.

Ask whose standard you are meeting. When the perfectionism surfaces, the extra revision, the inability to submit something as finished, ask: whose voice is this? Is this what I believe is necessary, or is this the internalized standard of an environment that has always required more from me than from others? You do not have to change the behavior yet. Creating some distance between the habit and your identity is enough to start.

Name what success would feel like if no one could see it. Not the promotion or the recognition, but what would feel like enough, internally, if there were no external confirmation at all? This is often the hardest question for AAPI high achievers to answer. The fact that it is hard is itself useful information.

How can therapy help AAPI and immigrant high achievers?

What comes up most consistently in the therapy room is the gap between the external narrative and the internal experience. Your achievements and your competence and your success are still real and valid. And, simultaneously, your internal experience is valid too: there are ways of reconnecting to your creative self and your inner sense of purpose.

The work I do with AAPI and immigrant people navigating these dynamics in New York draws on IFS, EMDR, and art therapy, because together they can address different layers of what tends to be operating.

With IFS, we work directly with the parts that organized around achievement and perfectionism: the part that learned ordinary was not acceptable, the part still monitoring the room, the part that takes care of everyone and has almost no practice being cared for. We get curious about what those parts believe, what they are protecting, and what they might do differently if they felt safe enough to try. Many clients describe this as the first time therapy has reached the thing underneath the pattern, rather than the pattern itself.

With EMDR, we address specific experiences that trained the nervous system's current operating assumptions: the performance review that landed wrong and never got processed, the early experience that made ordinary feel genuinely dangerous, the moment you were passed over and did not let yourself react. EMDR works not by analyzing those experiences but by helping the nervous system update what it concluded from them.

With art therapy, we access what is hard to reach through language alone. For people whose professional identity is built on precision and argument, making something with no goal, no audience, and no evaluation is disorienting in a way that is also revealing. What is present when the performing, monitoring, achieving parts are given something to do that carries no stakes? That question often opens territory that talk therapy alone does not.

This work is longer-term and symptom-focused. For the AAPI person who has already been in therapy, understood their patterns clearly, and found that understanding those patterns did not change them, this is often the level at which something structurally shifts.

If you are an AAPI or immigrant person in New York navigating a professional life that looks right from the outside and feels more complicated from within, I would be glad to talk.

Leila Zhanybekova (they/she) is a licensed and board-certified creative arts therapist (LCAT, ATR-BC) with nine years of post-graduate experience providing psychotherapy to adults in NYC. Leila offers virtual EMDR, Internal Family Systems (IFS parts work), and art therapy to immigrants and adult children of immigrants, BIPOC and AAPI communities, LGBTQIA+ and gender diverse people, and high achievers navigating burnout, perfectionism, and complex trauma. Leila works in English and Russian and sees clients across New York State.