Guilt, Imposter Syndrome, and Burnout as a First-Time Asian American Father
Disclaimer: While anyone with a sense of responsibility can experience these struggles, I am specifically reflecting on my experience as a father and masculine-of-center parent. In a culture shaped by male dominance, the leeway granted to us in handling immature or self-centered midlife crises is unfairly wide. I believe the best way to honor that unearned privilege is by doing the inner work: naming our struggles, facing them head-on, and helping others do the same.
It is my hope that you, the reader, can read this without bearing or casting shame, and instead find solidarity and courage in addressing one’s own gender and parenting issues.
In the span of a few weeks, my daughter turned two, I turned thirty, and I had the honor of marrying my now wife. Reflecting on the past three years, I’m struck by how profoundly and quickly life can change. Nothing could have prepared me for the peaks and valleys of fatherhood. As I stepped into my roles as a parent and partner, it became clear that parts of me were ready to grow. I wanted to grow. And I was excited by it. But that growth demands careful and thoughtful psychological recalibration, and I wasn’t nearly as equipped for that as I had thought I was.
With the benefit of hindsight, I can now see that my struggles stemmed from a fractured system of personal goals. That fracture, left unchecked, slowly stretched into a spiral of an early midlife crisis that I couldn’t resolve alone. I kept trying to change, but I was never sure if I was changing in the right ways or if those changes were truly serving my family.
Over time, I began to identify the patterns that were holding me back. Three challenges, in particular, kept resurfacing—each one tangled in the next. Naming them was the first step toward real healing. Here are the three biggest challenges I faced during my first two years of fatherhood.
My Greatest Challenges as a First-Time Parent
Parenting Struggle #1: Guilt
Once my paternity leave ended, I began to realize how precious my time outside of my day job truly was. I wanted to spend it doing everything: keep the house spotless, focus on my editing courses, lift weights at the gym, and, most of all, be present with my family. But the more I added to my plate, the more fell from it.
Every task or activity turned into a painful tradeoff. Going to the gym meant missing time with my daughter and partner. Spending time with my family equated with putting off my work or chores. And as much as I love my job, each moment of work-related frustration became another “I’d rather be at the gym” moment. All these things that once made me feel fulfilled now made me feel guilty.
I wanted to do it all and ended up doing none of it well. I found myself jumping between responsibilities over and over, struggling to stay present in any one activity. Each time I shifted from worker to parent to partner, I questioned my worth. I was going through the motions haphazardly, stuck in my own head, ruminating about whether I was enough. Then I would feel guilty for feeling guilty! The present moment slipped through my fingers, again and again.
The way I viewed how I used my free time became black and white. Even if I felt that I had used 100 percent of my free time that day doing something meaningful, I guilted myself in the evenings that I could have used it more efficiently or optimally. Well, can you guess the number of days when I actually felt like I truly optimized my time?
Parenting Struggle #2: Imposter Syndrome
As time went on, I also found myself constantly comparing myself to others, especially while on Instagram and Youtube. I scrolled past fit dads, freelancers with polished brands, and homeowners who seemed to have it all together. With no words and only feelings, I berated myself with questions like, Why could I not be like them? What was wrong with me? My mother built her own business while raising two children in the U.S. after surviving a genocide—what’s my excuse for my shortcomings?
In this headspace, I filtered out anything positive about my own life. I focused solely on my flaws, and by doing so, I amplified them. My foundation of identity was weakening, so when things changed, like my schedule, my priorities, or my family’s needs, my sense of self shook too. Anxiety followed. I started to forget who I was.
I felt like something vital was missing. Becoming a parent made me crave purpose more urgently than ever before. That is when I turned to editing and enrolled in the Editing Program at the University of Washington. The choice was rooted in culture and in career, in healing and in privilege. Yet, I must admit that this drastic change smelled and quacked like a midlife crisis.
Editing gave me a creative outlet, and it was another reason to network and bond with other Khmericans, but it also meant leaning more heavily on my partner. That came with its own weight, fueling the cycle of guilt.
Parenting Struggle #3: Burnout
There is no escaping the fact that parenting brings enormous external changes. However, my mistake was constantly failing to reconfigure my priorities. I kept trying to do too much, frequently course-correcting without giving myself time to stabilize. I did not even notice how out of balance I had become until the kindness and patience with others and myself that I once had seemed like a distant memory.
I reached a point of burnout. And this led to a vicious, vicious cycle.
I should be doing better. I am failing my family. This is my fault because I never react the "right" way.
Notice the undertones of imposter syndrome and guilt. It seems so obvious to me now, but it was not a year ago. Each thought chipped away at my sense of self. I questioned my value, my character, even my right to claim this new path. If I wasn’t weighing myself down with guilt, I was weighing myself down with anger towards myself. In misguided attempts at not taking my family and blessings for granted, that is exactly what I was doing. I would try to both motivate and punish myself by saying, I can be better, or I will be better. But deep down, they were really just shoulds. And with shoulds came shame.
Minuscule problems in my life appeared larger than they actually were. Greater conflicts in my life only worsened the cycle. I was reaching a serious breaking point a year into parenthood and was about to bring my family down with me. Something fundamentally inside me needed to change but in a way that required outside expert help. And thankfully, I was finally ready to accept it.
How I Began to Heal
Although recognizing my unhealthy behaviors came easily, accepting them was not. It took exhaustion, conflict, and periods of deep self-doubt before I finally admitted that I could not keep going the way I was. Every wave of my internal struggle also crashed down on my partner and daughter, and denying it became harder and harder. I was not broken just yet, but I was overwhelmed, and I needed to find a better way forward.
Finding (the Right Kind of) Balance and Relieving Guilt
Prior to becoming a parent, I had always taken pride in feeling well-rounded as a person. The difference now that I am no longer a bachelor is that I needed to be much more strategic about how I stayed well-rounded.
Being a good parent does not mean doing everything every day with the exact same schedule. It just means doing something meaningful beyond the daily routine most days, at some point in the day, and letting that be enough. I stopped trying to live my life like a movie montage. I focused on consistency over quantity. Just ten to fifteen minutes of presence, five days a week, in different parts of my life: editing, exercise, parenting, being a partner, resting. As long as it progressed me further to my goals beyond the everyday routine, it was enough. This was better than trying to go all in and burning out over and over again. Logging my activity each day (just a daily single-line entry) also made it easier for me to view my time more objectively and convert my feelings of guilt into feelings of accomplishment.
The shift in mindset was pivotal for me in seeing that my desire for perfectionism was not healthy. Hyper-consistency is often just black-and-white thinking in disguise. Emphasis on hyper. Unfortunately, the fantasy of a rigid routine leading me to success was holding me back from finding the right type of balance in my life.
Instead of attempting to balance all the things I wanted to do in my free time, I compared how much of my free time was spent doing something that brought positive energy into my life versus doing things that would not (when I was about to do them). If I wanted to tidy up instead of go to the gym, I tidied up, knowing well that my progress in the gym will plateau and even decline until I am ready to commit more effort into lifting weights. The consistency I was building was not really about exercising or cleaning. The habit was about feeling good while using my free time productively and to stop idolizing hyper-consistency.
I no longer saw being well-rounded as being exceptional in many different areas of concentration. Being well-rounded, to me, being well-rounded meant being able to be focused and emotionally present regardless of how many different things I want to do or enjoy. This became my new benchmark.
To be clear, long-term sustainability and progress does require considerable frequent action across all of one’s goals. At some point, my time and energy should be able to fill a pie chart evenly and with clean cuts. For now, getting out of the mental fog of “I need to be doing everything all the time and am great at nothing” was the priority.
Addressing Imposter Syndrome
Imposter syndrome is incredibly common among Asian Americans, and I myself was not immune. I felt the weight of it every day. Still, it took time and help for me to even recognize just how deeply this psychological phenomenon had rooted itself within me.
Therapy was the key to me confronting this on a metacognitive level. My therapist taught me to identify and take ownership of my cognitive distortion. I had to remind myself that my story mattered, even if it did not look like anyone else’s. And more importantly, I matter regardless of my faults. Or my career and financial status. Or my intergenerational trauma.
Many of the lessons shared in this blog I learned through opening up to my therapist. He helped me help myself in finding a clearer path. Working with a therapist is probably the number one proactive thing you can do for your own mental health. Sign up for therapy before life feels too much. Burnout begins long before one realizes it, especially since the fatigue and stress of having a kid for the first time is expected.
On days where I was emotionally fatigued and reluctant to participate in my therapy session, I just kept telling myself, “I may not want to go to therapy, but that is not why I enrolled.” The more resistance I felt to going, the more important the session turned out to be. I learned to commit to at least a half session. Almost always, I ended up wishing the session extended to the full hour. My therapist coached me through not only lowering the resistance I had to showing up, but also the internal changes I was needed to make. He worked with me to develop a game plan to support my wellness week by week and it carried over to the wellness of my family. I'm proud to share that I graduated from therapy after approximately five months, and taking advantage of therapy-adjacent benefits through my workplace in the near future is now on my to-do list.
Curing and Preventing Burnout
My burnout stemmed from my inability to give myself permission to be flawed without judging myself for it. Once my therapist and I began to unravel the roots of my guilt and imposter syndrome, the roots of my burnout began to untangle as well.
Identifying one’s internal struggles during therapy is only the first step to uprooting them; the real work occurs outside of the office visits. My primary outlet for this work was, and still is, through journaling and writing. Rather than simply summarizing the negative components of my day or week and my surface-level feelings about them, I would journal in a way that could almost be read as a conversation with myself. I would ask myself questions like, Was I slipping into all-or-nothing thinking? Was I letting small setbacks define my worth? I reminded myself on paper that my job as a parent is not to be perfect—it is to model self-awareness. To teach my daughter how to name her emotions, understand her limits, and accept herself. To identify my own schema and then help my daughter identify her own. To let her experience things without being defined by them.
I had to unravel my high expectations from my unrealistic ones. I practiced identifying my cognitive distortions and then reason with myself about why my line of thinking was not always grounded in reality. To pause when I was overwhelmed because I now knew that some of my judgment was clouded by the old threads of my imposter syndrome.
Cutting back on social media also played a part in my success. Replacing late-night scrolling with my healthier evening habits (journaling, editing, and reading) was harder than I care to admit, but just like most behavioral changes, getting over the hump was worth the trek. I still do mindlessly scroll from time to time, but my relationship with social media has vastly improved.
The most difficult thing I had to learn was to forgive myself. For my short-sightedness. For my mistakes. For my predispositions. To this day, I am still amazed that being kind to myself feels like such a radical act. In a culture where masculinity is described by toughness and dominance, even a nonbinary person such as me can forget the consequences of normalizing emotional suppression and self-punishment. Being cruel to myself is easy. Being kind to myself is not. But it does make learning my from my mistakes much easier.
I do not have everything figured out. There are things I still need to commit to in order to nurture my family. But I am no longer spiraling. I am no longer ashamed. And I am finally starting to believe that who I am—as a father, a partner, a person—is enough.
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