October 10, 2021
In the wee hours of October 10th, 2019, a burglar broke into my car parked in the driveway of my family’s humble abode. Our privileged bubble of suburban safety burst at the seams, giving my family a small taste of the unsafety many Angelinos face on a far more frequent basis. We caught the burglar on tape, a lanky figure moving swiftly in the shadows, but the police couldn’t do much other than taking a report. The next few days were hectic, shoring up our home security and taking measures to prevent identity theft. More important was re-establishing safety for my four-year old son who was freaked by the incident and no longer felt safe being alone in his own home.
My emotional experience of the incident was one of fear, anger, and dejection. Vengeful fantasies entered my mind of the burglar getting caught and punished for their crime. Among the items stolen was my laptop which contained years of work that I foolishly had not backed up. My aggression turned inward, while I rarely keep valuables in my car, I beat myself up for leaving my laptop out of fatigue and forgetfulness. When it first hit me that I had lost my data for good, I broke down in tears, feeling self-pity and grief for losing work I had tirelessly toiled for several years.
I’ve learned to take the good with the bad in life, and there were several silver linings from this incident. First, amidst the scramble of that day, my wife was my solid ground, and I remember her forcing me to take a break and took me a local mom-and-pop coffee shop. I wasn’t in the mood but went along. There, we were welcomed by a kind and perceptive store owner who recognized my distress and offered some free pastries along with our order. We shared our story of the burglary, and the owner listened with a compassionate heart and wished us luck. This random act of kindness was a bright spot in an otherwise dark day, and restored back some faith in humanity. While brief, the comfort I felt in that moment has stayed with me. Like Maya Angelou says, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
A second silver lining would not reveal itself until months later in the form of a ripple effect that would forever change the course of my career. Burnt out from years of overworking, I had been contemplating stepping down from a coordinator position that came with a lot of responsibilities. Among the files I lost was a monster-sized, near-complete report that involved me going into office on weekends and working evenings to compile. The mere thought of reconstructing the report overwhelmed me with panic attacks that had me hyperventilating and feeling faint and exhausted to the point of paralysis. This loss was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, and I knew without a doubt I needed to step down. After years of indecisively going back and forth, the universe gave me my answer in the most direct way, a person literally came out of nowhere to take my burden away.
Stepping down from my position went against the public image my work place had of me: a “yes” man which was how my Director described me when I was awarded Employee of the Year earlier that same year. Without the distinction of my coordinator position, the social capital I had accumulated at my work gradually diminished. I no longer had access to important people or meetings, my opinions seem to have less influence, and even my office got physically chopped in half. While it was my choice to step down, I felt dispensable and forgotten seeing how easily my replacement was found. I experienced role confusion and felt lost and directionless. Letting go of my role also meant stepping off a career ladder that I had invested so much in but no longer had the energy to climb further.
Being mindful of the fallacy of sunk costs, the incident provided an opportunity to cut my losses. Coming from an immigrant family, I have always been inspired by stories of immigrants losing their homeland, and rebuilding their lives in a culture foreign to them. Like many times before, I embraced the changing tides and unbound myself from depending on my workplace for my career mobility. During this period of confusion, I set an intention of disrupting my usual patterns by engaging in something new, different, and interesting on a regular basis. I got out of my comfort zone and roamed Los Angeles, taking in the sights and sounds, as if I was a tourist in my own city. Some unique and bizarre experiences were had, one of which was coming across a piece of street art on Abbot Kinney, with the words inscribed, “push this button to RESET the world.” Mirroring my intention for a new start, I pressed the button which served as a symbolic expression of my deep desire for change.
And with unbelievable coincidence, the world turned upside down just a few months later in the form of the COVID-19 outbreak. Like many others, my family hunkered down at home per quarantine mandates, scrambled to acquire essentials like toilet paper and masks, prioritized health and safety of our vulnerable loved ones, kept tabs of infection and death rates, and watched in horror as society broke apart along political, racial, and economic fault-lines. Work from home became the new norm. The separation from my physical work environment gave me the space to reflect on what’s truly important. Spending more time with family motivated me to set limits at work, and place a greater value on work-life balance. And letting go of the career ladder afforded me a “nothing to lose” attitude that made it easier to take risks.
With the uncertainty of the pandemic, I recognized the need to build my strength to face whatever challenges lay ahead. I’ve learned that sometimes when one area of life is not going well, we need to find strength in another area. With this intention, I took every opportunity to go on challenging mountain hikes that both strengthened my body and brought peace of mind. Reaching the summits provided a sense of accomplishment and confidence. I regained autonomy over myself, and became more attuned to my body. The wonders of nature inspired me to look at life from a more expansive and congruent perspective. I was reminded again of how big the world is, and realized that the workplace tensions that I would get caught up in were not what really mattered to me. Like an investment portfolio, I realized the value of diversifying my emotional investments and not putting all my “eggs” in the career basket.
Feeling restored, I was ready to take on a new challenge. During my treks into nature, my soul whispered thoughts of starting a private practice, and these whispers eventually turned into a voluminous calling that provided a sense of direction and purpose. Vivid images of me sitting across private clients entered my mind as if I was seeing into the future. I had always dreamed of starting my own therapy practice, but it never seemed like the right time until now, with there being a shortage of therapists to meet the demand for mental health issues that skyrocketed during the pandemic. Furthermore, COVID-19 normalized telehealth, presenting an opportunity to start a telehealth practice that came with less overhead.
The idea of starting a private practice reinvigorated me. My current position restricted my ability to provide long-term therapy due to the sheer number of clients needing to be seen. Furthermore, my center was restructured and subsumed under a large medical system, shifting the focus towards a behavioral health/medical model that didn’t leave much room for in-depth, psycho-dynamic work. Lastly, a private practice would afford me the autonomy and freedom to innovate my approach to psychotherapy, whereas my current setting prioritized pre-established policies and procedures over clinical intuition and individual style.
Furthermore, a private practice presented an opportunity to take care of unfinished business. Years prior, I collaborated with a small team of talented colleagues to create a “Stress Relief Clinic” that employed a strength-based and holistic approach to promoting positive mental health and well-being by offering services such as mindfulness, yoga, and biofeedback. We got the clinic off the ground, and it did well according to the positive feedback we got from clients. Unfortunately, the clinic got lost in the mix when the center got restructured, and I failed to steward the clinic beyond this point. However, I never lost sight of the vision and continued build it out in my mind, waiting for the right conditions to revive it from the ashes.
In many ways, Park LA is version 2.0 of this clinic recreated from the ground up. All the materials from the old clinic were lost in the burglary, but the ideas, memories, and values were stored safely away in my mind. Starting the practice from scratch felt like the beginnings of a mountain hike. Looking up at the uphill battle was daunting. However, I’ve learned that new challenges seem worse in anticipation compared to when actually facing them. With each step, I gained momentum and got into a flow. I focused on taking one step at a time in sync with my body’s natural pace, and began to enjoy the process. I became more present with the experience rather than fixating on the outcome. Like the steps taken to climb a mountain, I’ve learned that small pieces of work here and there accumulated into surprising amount of progress in no time. Like Lao Tze says, “a journey of a thousand miles starts with one step.”
In the spirit of Juen Hwa We Bok, I aimed to open my practice on October 10th, 2020, exactly one year to the date of the incident that pushed everything into motion. However, October 10th came and went like any other day. What was supposed to be a grandiose day was spent on my knees, covered in dust and grime, re-caulking my mother’s shower. Another example of “Man plans, God laughs.” On the surface, what prevented me from opening on time was not meeting certain business deadlines; however, the deeper reason was my fear of failure that delayed progress. Around this time, I remember engaging in a thought experiment of imagining myself ten years from now in the same job. Immediately, my foresight revealed how miserable I would be. I realized at that point that fear itself was not the problem, it was that I was fearing the wrong thing. Fearing failure had me procrastinating and playing it safe. What I needed to fear was something greater, the fear of dying a meaningless life. And it was this fear that pushed me forward.
This realization was reminiscent of the scene from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, where Bruce Wayne, stripped of his mask and armor, is trapped in an underground pit with fellow prisoners who had given up hope of ever escaping. One needed to scale the walls to escape, and a single misstep would mean falling to ones death. A wise prisoner asks Bruce what he fears, Bruce arrogantly responds that he is not afraid and trains his body thinking that physical strength is what is needed to escape. Bruce attempts the climb using a rope that would catch him if he fell, and fall he does becoming demoralized like the other prisoners. Humbled, Bruce speaks to the wise prisoner again and is told that he fails because he does not fear death, which is inherent to ones will to live and survive, a force not to be underestimated. Bruce accepts his fear, and learns in that moment he must attempt the climb without the safety of the rope. Facing his fear of death, he takes the leap of faith and makes it out alive.
On the deepest level, it was this fear of a meaningless life that drove me to take the final leap of faith, and on November 28th, I quietly opened my practice for business. Since opening, there has been plenty of setbacks and growth has been slow. The further I proceed, the more exposed become my areas of growth, especially on the business side of things. It took a few months just to get my first client and weeks until the next and so on. Familiar feelings of fear, doubt, and insecurity returned; imposter syndrome all over again. At times I get entangled with these feelings, but I stay the course in the face of fear not without. I anchor myself to my sense of purpose, and a growth mindset that reminds me that I need to be patient with the process. Failures force me to see my limitations, and humility makes it easier to reach out for help. And like the kind coffee shop owner, colleagues welcomed me to the world of private practice and helped me learn the ropes. Measured in blood, sweat, and tears, the struggle has allowed me to experience any success, even the small ones, as incredibly rewarding.
The mountain top for my vision for Park LA looms far ahead. In fact, I am just getting started and excited for the journey ahead. I genuinely love all my private clients, and feel so grateful, humbled, and honored that they have entrusted me with their care. And it is for these clients, I must keep climbing. Looking back, this whole process was put into motion by a disruption that turned my life upside down and back up again. The ensuing chaos unraveled stuck patterns and paved a new way forward. Sometimes we need to hit the reset button and allow life to get messy and reshuffle itself. How else do we get unstuck? And in this shuffling, a misfortune becomes a blessing, a falling becomes a rising, and what is lost becomes found.
Posted October 10th, 2021 by Y. Sue Park.