Why I’m attending CIIS
My autobiographical statement
In January I will be starting the MA in East-West Psychology at California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). I will be in that program for two years, and for my third year I will be in the accelerated MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Writing program. I’m really excited about this. It is perfect for my interests and the way I view education.
When applying, I had to write an autobiographical statement explaining what led me to be interested in the program. I decided to be honest about my mental health journey, as I knew that my lived experience has given me much to offer to the world. That the admissions staff and the faculty reviewers appreciated such honesty confirmed for me that this school and program was the right fit.
Below is the autobiographical essay I wrote for the application. Those of you who have been subscribing to my newsletter for a while will find several parts of this story familiar, but there are other parts that I haven’t written about before, or wrote about here in a new way.
When I was in eleventh grade, my AP English teacher had everyone in class choose three words that described who they were and write them on a name tag. This activity was inspired by Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, stating that she was a “reader, writer, and teacher.” Many of my classmates wrote that they were things like a “soccer player” or a “violinist.” The three words I wrote down were “philosopher, artist, awakener.”
It was the first time I strung those words together in describing myself, but from that day, the triad took root in my spirit and became a motto for who I was and wanted to become. Philosopher, as in a person who seeks wisdom, who practices the courage to explore thorny issues to unearth complex truths. Artist, as in a person who creates, not just with paints and melodies, but with spirit itself, living as a composer of life. Awakener, as in a person who awakens themself and others, always in the process of growth and enlightenment.
All of these are ways of being rooted in introspection, in understanding the world by first understanding oneself. All of these are practices of the spirit-worker, the holistic psychologist, the citizen of the Earth.
I can trace back my interest in psychology to when I was in fifth grade and read the book The Gifted Teen’s Survival Guide. This book explored in-depth the thorny topic of what are giftedness and intelligence and provided guidance on school and life for students considered as “gifted” in some way. I was labeled “gifted” as a student, so I became obsessed with trying to understand what that meant for me and my experience in school and elsewhere. I identified with the concept of “intensities” or “overexcitabilities,” which are sensitivities and intense experiences that many gifted people experience. Without the language of neurodivergence, I delved into the idea of intensities in an attempt to explain my social and emotional differences. But eventually, I became frustrated with the concept of giftedness and how elitist it had caused me to become.
Yet still I wanted to understand myself and the people around me. So in the next few years, especially in middle school, I became passionate and curious about psychology in all its forms. I read Scientific American Mind and other popular science literature, watched National Geographic’s TV show Brain Games, and listened to NPR’s podcast Hidden Brain. Fascinated by psychoanalysis, I read Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents and Frankl’s The Will to Meaning in eighth grade and tried to understand the dynamics of my neurotic family. I learned about the DSM, as well as its critiques, wondering if I was actually lucky to not be labeled with a diagnosis at an early age, even as I knew that I needed support. Frustrated at the ineffective pedagogies of some of my teachers, I studied concepts of educational psychology, dreaming of perhaps becoming a teacher myself one day.
Given my passion for psychology, why did I not study it in college, choosing to double major in music and mathematics instead? I did not even take a psychology course in high school, rather choosing to just take the AP Psychology exam and getting a 5 on it without even studying that much because I already knew most of the material. In part, my choice of undergraduate studies had to do with feeling like I was held back in my musical and mathematical interests as a pre-college student. I wanted to compose music, but had no access to a composition teacher; I wanted more challenging, proof-oriented maths courses, but was forced to take courses that were too easy. So I wanted to study these subjects in college to catch up to where I should have been if I had had the freedom to decide my own education. But also, the psychology department at my college was focused on the experimental science of psychology, and my interests were starting to lean towards more of a humanities-based perspective. Western psychology frustrated me in how it attempted to prove things that were true about everyone but only could be demonstrated as true in WEIRD societies. The replication crisis also concerned me, and I became irritated at how the juiciest, most important research questions were often the hardest to rigorously study. So I ran away from psychology, academically. But soon, my personal life returned me to matters of human.
I began my sophomore year of college in the fall of 2020, after months of quarantine due to the pandemic. Despite the solemn circumstances, I was ecstatic. I had recently come out as non-binary, and now that I was away from home again, I could express myself fully and create a vibrant new self. I also was taking really interesting courses that semester: two challenging maths courses, a music composition seminar, and the introductory course on education and community-building. I was so excited, I was beyond myself. I wasn’t sure of it at the time, but this was likely my first experience of hypomania.
As the semester progressed, things started to fall apart. I began to have periodic panic about my gender identity, worrying that somehow I was “faking it.” Eventually, when winter break came, I fell into a depressive episode, fully believing now that I had been a gender fraud. I began psychiatric treatment, having already been seeing a therapist through my college. When the first days of spring weather came, I became vibrant again, my confidence in my non-binary gender having returned. But then I’d lose it again, then regain it, then lose it yet again. At the start of May, this oscillating distress escalated into crisis, and I was hospitalized for the first time.
It was at this time when I was officially diagnosed with bipolar 1. In hindsight, my oscillating gender struggle was partly influenced by my changing moods. As I experienced both gender and mood as relating to the yin and yang energies within me, whenever I was manic or hypomanic, I found it easier to identify as masculine or androgynous, and whenever I was depressed, it was easier to consider myself as feminine or a woman. But this took a long while to fully figure out. A new college therapist, a queer person of color herself, helped me through my junior year to feel more secure in my non-binary gender identity. But although I was hospitalized a second time in the fall of my junior year, it wasn’t clear to either my therapist or me that my struggles fit the diagnosis of bipolar. Was I experiencing ultrarapid cycling, or was I just a creative person with frequent highs and lows? It was only when, after I had graduated from college, I was hospitalized three more times between Oct. 2023 and Feb. 2024, that I finally began to accept the bipolar label and commit myself to regularly taking my medications, which have now moved me to a much more stable place.
Though I struggled with mental illness and executive dysfunction in college, I chose not to take a gap semester or year because the environment at college was more conducive to my health than my home environment. This meant that I was thinking about the nature of my struggles while immersed in student activist circles that spoke the language of social critical theory. I learned about gender studies and disability and Mad studies. I began to think about what accommodations I needed as a person with a psychiatric disability and a neurodevelopmental difference. In the past year, since graduating from college, I have developed a certain Mad Pride in having bipolar, while also grasping the dangers of letting my Madness run wild. Having just recently been also diagnosed with autism and ADHD, I now view my mixed neurodivergence as a not-so-hidden power. My bipolar imbues me with intense spirituality and creativity; my AuDHD makes me sensitive and idealistic, eager to break free from social norms and instead pursue authenticity.
Years ago, my father told me to avoid careers that involve working with people, as he believed that my social skills were lacking. Today I know that that is misleading. I have social and emotional differences that I can cultivate into gifts to give to the world. My experiences with distress and crisis inform my compassionate approach to people and my understanding that our world needs urgently to heal, in community.
Since I was a teen, I’ve had an interest in alternative forms of education, such as unschooling and types of schools that value community and self-directed learning. During my pre-college years, I did not have a choice in what kind of schooling I received, due to my close-minded parents; even when I applied for undergrad, my parents limited my choice of colleges to those that ranked highly and thus had prestige. I felt very lucky to have ended up at a college that, though in many ways a traditional liberal arts college, had an exceptionally caring culture and, very importantly, offered unlimited free therapy and psychiatry for students, as for some time I had to seek mental healthcare completely independently from my misunderstanding parents. But for graduate school, I finally have a chance to decide for myself my educational path. And what is most important for me in my education is my personal growth, as I believe that if I am able to become the person I want to be, then in whatever I choose to do career-wise I will be more successful and fulfilled.
When I was in high school, I was interested in potentially becoming a teacher with a social justice mission, perhaps working at a non-traditional school with a non-hierarchical learning community. When I was in college, having begun to engage in Quaker circles, I became interested in the idea of community itself and how to healthfully live in community even when challenges inevitably arise. The work that I want to do in this world is to build community in some way, whether it is a learning community, an interfaith worship community, a peer-led respite for people experiencing Madness, or whatever else calls to me. I want to be thoroughly anti-oppressive in my work, as well as to reach back into my ancestral Chinese heritage for liberatory ways of being. I already in my artistic practice express myself through the Chinese concept of yin and yang, and since learning about Buddhism at age 11, my sense of morality has been influenced by the main principles of that religion. So I want to delve deeper into what Asian as well as indigenous cultures say about the human condition and have that shape the course of my life.
The years since I started college have been full of rapid psychological change and growth. I hope that the MA in East-West Psychology and the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Writing will help me to continue to grow in my capability to care for myself and others and make a difference in this world.