The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

Excerpt from This is Water by David Foster Wallace

Blind certainty: a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.

2011. Eagan, Minnesota.

“Where have you been? Living under a rock?”

A slight affront.

This was my coworker’s response after I admitted that I didn’t know what she was talking about. She was about my age, but more confident, blonde, and with deep, Midwestern roots.

Sure. That “rock” you speak of is the shelter my parents bought with their blood, sweat and tears. And I don’t mean that only figuratively. They left behind everything they knew, along with deceased family members that they were never able to commemorate, to give us a better life. That meant acclimating to a new culture. It meant beginning anew as displaced members of society. But we were safe, and we had opportunity, and that’s what mattered.

I became quiet and slowly saw myself out — a subtle exit for one unprepared to deal with shame.

Though trivial, even trivial instances add up, especially a lifetime of them.

Esteem is a fragile thing. It’s the voice in our heads that suggest how we should estimate ourselves, manifesting at every turn. Founded in pride, it pushes us to move forward. Founded in shame, it pulls us to retreat.

Like you, my esteem is shaped by my upbringing, my environment, my (re)actions, my collective experience.

Like you, it is influenced by what I do on my downtime — indulging in books, television and film — relating to characters and comparing their experiences against my own, because this is how I draw inspiration, dialogue (/monologue), clarity and meaning.

But perhaps unlike you, I didn’t know how it felt to be represented as the central character. It’s as though I’m not even the center of my own universe—someone else is, and I am just that somebody’s someone. Because in the absence of Asian-Americans at the forefront of film, it becomes ridiculously easy to heed that voice that tells us to retreat. 

I knew this was a problem, but it was one to which I became unwittingly desensitized, because there were few things in my life that gave me clarity in my heritage.

Fortunately, I’m lucky to know other Asian-Americans who did NOT retreat, showing me what was possible and leading by an example that I now determinedly follow. Not everyone is that fortunate though.

I suppose there’s a silver lining in all this. Without example, one can choose to create their own. This requires discipline, intention, and an awareness of what it’d otherwise be like to remain on autopilot. Perhaps, though, one must be lucky enough, privileged enough, to be afforded the opportunities that build on these traits—opportunities that teach a person how to think critically, act strategically, and ultimately, become an empowered individual.

This is why Crazy, Rich Asians struck a chord with me.

It felt oddly comforting to be wholly represented — oddly, because it was entirely new to me; what I had been missing, all these years, suddenly became palpable.