I jokingly and lovingly call my father a "tiger dad" (based off of Amy Chua's "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom"... interesting book, and people should read it) as I like to equate his crazy and stereotypical jewish father antics with the stereotypical chinese mother antics. I know he does this out of love, but there were endless screaming matches in high school over how hard he could push me which resulted in me supposedly being "rebellious." But rebellious in that I don't want to be a doctor or a lawyer, except I still have this deep seeded desire that I must be successful; and by successful, I mean a 6 figure job, living in a wealthy neighborhood, where I can send my kids to private school, and perpetuate the same cycle. Despite the fact that on the surface I like to think that I don't agree with my father and that I want to deviate from the path that I am "supposed" to travel on, all the unconscious conditioning throughout my life has caused me to be unconsciously manipulated. I am not saying this is technically a bad thing, I realize that I am extremely lucky and eternally grateful, I just didn't realize that all my dad's "techniques" were more ingrained in me then I thought.
This conditioning starts at young age where I was always told that smart people read a lot and smart people are successful. I doubt that I even understood what success was but I remember feeling like a failure when people were on high reading level books than me in first grade. I also wanted to be a doctor ever since 9. I had decided that I would even specify it to Orthopedic surgery. But after I hated Chem my sophomore year in high school, I couldn't even acknowledge to myself, let alone my father, that this wasn't the career path for me because I honestly didn't know what else I could do. The fact that I was so career driven (and arguably still am) speaks volumes about the society that we grow up in. When I registered today I thought a lot about what classes will help me in the future, which is pretty stupid because I don't know what I want, I just know to avoid what classes my Dad has told me are stupid and a waste of time. To be fair, my Dad has told me repeatedly that I can do anything I wanted even if that's drop out of school and become a starving musician, but I have grown up in a society where that is not a option, and that conditioning has worked.
Who knows what will happen in the future, but I am coming to terms with finding things that I generally enjoy (and set me up for "success") because my new definition of success (that I came up with in Sarah Jilling's exercises) has much more to do with redefining success in terms of what will make me happiest than solely focusing on my early definition above. But I am sure that will change as well...
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