Success was supposed to make one immune to struggle, I thought. I had long understood that mental illness didn’t happen in high-achieving Indian American families like ours. In fact, both Yush and I had believed that part of what made us so successful was this ability to clamp down on our feelings and not let them out all the time, the way white people did so gratuitously. In my simplistic understanding of the world, it was this unfiltered outpouring of feelings that caused white families so much strife, and it was our emotional discipline that enabled us to work hard and succeed.
