oftentimes it doesn't work, you know, because you're just not in a position to be able to, like what those, I guess, kind of idealized models of living are supported by like access to resources and privileges, that we're not able to, you know, we're not able to apprehend a lot of the time, you know, and, and that was my experience in graduate school to where, you know, the majority of my, you know, friends and colleagues who are coming from, you know, similar backgrounds as yours and mine, you know, they were first gen or there are, you know, racialized folks, you know, women of color queer folks, a combination of, you know, some or all of the above, you know, and I just noticed that, like most of us had just more demands on our time and energy, we're supporting families with there's other obligations in our communities that we have. We're obviously trying to handle the excess burden of racial, you know, racism related, and, you know, minority stress, you know, that it kind of manifests in just various forms, you know. And the other thing I was talking to a friend of mine about Stephanie Mendes, you know, who's a psychologist, and woman of color, she's in the LA area. One of the things that we were talking about is, how are we supposed to respond to a circumstance or maybe, in some ways, like, we're ahead of the curve when it comes to, let's say, competencies, you know, in, you know, as a PE defines it, you know, when it comes to maybe like areas of strengths and talents that we've been able to cultivate, just by sheer virtue of surviving oppression, you know, and also just the talents and maybe gifts that people bring that, in many ways, were recruited for those exact reasons, you know, but then, you know, then those have to, but then we feel as though, you know, like, our merits, you know, are only kind of valued and deemed worthy, you know, if we permit ourselves to be subordinated to whatever other interests of like, let's say, the system or folks or war in power, and kind of so other kind of other, like us motivations, then kind of cultivating ourselves as scholars or, you know, clinicians, right. And so, all those are very stressful. I mean, it's really, there's a lot of wear and tear, you know, and, like, allostatic load, and like, racial battle fatigue, they're not metaphors is what I've learned, you know, it's like, they're not like, these, like nice terms that psychologists, you know, we kind of developed to like, concretely and concisely to, and it's like, you know, and, and I, I mean, speaking of kind of, like, other kind of conditions of approval, too, you know, I, I think this is also during the pandemic. And I see I'm seeing it also more now, during this like tech kind of layoff that we're seeing. And so I have a number of colleagues and, you know, folks in my network who are like Asian creatives, you know, like creatives and like, techies, and whatever, right. And a lot of them are getting laid off, you know, and, and the story that I've been hearing is, goes something like as follows, you know, where, you know, they sort of took on that kind of, they really sort of drank from the well the Kool Aid of model minority, you know, we're gonna just, we're going to be the good kids on the playground and follow all the rules and be a teacher's pet, you know, to all the authority figures of like the white supremacist, hetero patriarchal society that we live in, right. And I'm gonna get like this nice kind of well paying tech job, you know, it's respectable in my community, you know, there's, you know, presumably, especially for a lot of us, millennials were like, you know, we grew up with the tech boom, right, especially, you know, with, like, social media. And with the layoffs, you know, I'm hearing a lot of like, those, like, pre midlife crises that we were just talking about where they're, like, I am made aware, in ways that I can't articulate how much of myself I was sacrificing, and I have no idea how to deal with those feelings. Because like, the rug is being pulled completely underneath my feet, you know, and it's like, the social contract of like, oh, like, as an Asian immigrant, I'm doing all this I'm, and there's a distinction that I have to make between sacrificing time and resources and sacrificing yourself. Right? I have sacrificed a lot on myself, you know, and my personal values and interests, you know, my autonomy, my values, you know, my sense of integrity or kind of identity in exchange, you know, for x y&z and that's been taken away. And so then I don't know what I'm doing with myself. Right. And, and it really reminded me of, I can't think of the exact quote, but you know, Audrey Lorde talks about how it's so important for us to have, you know, Masters tools, you know, like, we like, we're not going to, like, we're not going to solve the problem by going into the lab going in and participating in the problem. You know, and, and I talked to folks about how it's so important to have your own independence, kind of, kind of internal sort of condition of approval, and how risky it is so hard that, I guess, outsource to like a system outside of you. And we're seduced all the time, you know, like, by, you know, it could be academia, it could be, you know, corporations, it could be, you know, whatever, but there's something that feels so crucial about having your own, like, internal sense of worthiness that is not reliant on kind of the sort of gold stars that you get, you know, by any sort of, like other kind of, you know, system outside of you. And that's the one thing that really kind of strikes home for me right now, you know, is, you know, whether you're a graduate student or in academia or industry, like, it's, I guess, it's a kind of double consciousness also nothing a metaphor, right? Like, you have to have your own like, personal consciousness of like, where you draw your sense of worth and esteem that, of course, hopefully can be consonant with like the work that you do, because I do think it's important for us to feel valued and be valued in our workplaces and all that stuff, right. But at the same time, like, do we have like a pretty robust sort of like internal sort of reinforcement mechanism that is relatively ended? pendant or a separate from, you know, whatever work that we're doing for you know, in or for a particular purpose or particular system?