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Well, my post has been up for over a week now, and no response from any­one. Hmm … the power of words wasn’t strong enough I guess. Really, I can’t com­plain. I’m seri­ously not try­ing to fish for com­ments at all. In fact, the rea­son I started to blog was more to get all these intense feel­ings and emo­tions out into the world. And in doing so, I do admit it feels good.

So why am I still feel­ing alone? Well, after post­ing my lat­est ram­blings last week, I hap­pened to stum­ble upon an arti­cle at work that helped explain a lit­tle about why I con­tinue to feel the way I do. And now I’m shar­ing this infor­ma­tion with who­ever wishes to read on.

The arti­cle dis­cussed the reluc­tance of Asian-​​Americans to seek or use men­tal health ser­vices. It even goes on to cite that when Asian Amer­i­cans and Pacific Islanders even­tu­ally seek pro­fes­sional help, the sever­ity of their prob­lems tend to be high, most likely because of the delay in seek­ing treat­ment until their prob­lems reach cri­sis proportions.

It also states that Asians are not used to meet­ing with strangers and dis­cussing their prob­lems because many of their cul­tural beliefs go against this. Tra­di­tion­ally, Asians with men­tal health prob­lems tend to speak first with a fam­ily mem­ber and then maybe with a close friend about their issues. Only after that might they con­sider involv­ing some­one out­side their net­work­ing com­mu­nity. While talk­ing to a ther­a­pist would be more accepted by a second-​​generation Asian per­son, many of the tra­di­tional val­ues of their cul­ture, such as seek­ing help from an “out­side source,” still per­me­ate their belief systems.

The rea­son, as the arti­cle states, that many Asian cul­tures asso­ciate seek­ing men­tal health ser­vices as a “weak­ness” is largely from the fact that these cul­tures stress “sav­ing face.” Accord­ing to the arti­cle, if a per­son was found to be talk­ing to a ther­a­pist about issues that can­not be solved amongst fam­ily or close friends, this would be con­sid­ered “los­ing face.” Once a per­son “loses face”, they can no longer func­tion in his or her social net­work and are there­fore not con­sid­ered use­ful in cer­tain situations.

The find­ings in this arti­cle aren’t any­thing com­pletely reveal­ing to me, a second-​​generation Filipino-​​American. I have always, in some way, known that “sav­ing face” was always some­thing that our cul­ture did. Grow­ing up in the Fil­ipino cul­ture in the US, I have wit­nessed some sit­u­a­tions where fam­ily or friends have had to “save face,” but I never had the “oppor­tu­nity” to expe­ri­ence it myself. That is, until now … as I con­tinue to strug­gle with infertility.

To give you a lit­tle more back­ground, my hus­band and I are both Fil­ipino. We both grew up in a typ­i­cal Mid­west sub­urb, met each other in high school, and mar­ried shortly after col­lege. We started try­ing to start our fam­ily within a year of after get­ting mar­ried with (obvi­ously) no suc­cess. Two to three years into our mar­riage, I was already on Clo­mid and doing the whole ovu­la­tion chart­ing. We didn’t tell any­one about our prob­lems because we fig­ured that it was only a mat­ter of time. And I’ll admit it now, we also didn’t say any­thing because, well … frankly, we didn’t want to “lose face.” For a while, it wasn’t a big deal with our par­ents that we were hav­ing “issues” until other fam­ily friends started to ask them when my hus­band and I were going to make them “grand­par­ents.” And well, I can’t imag­ine what it was (or still is) like to have to try and “save face” for them.

Now the Fil­ipino cul­ture, like many other Asian cul­tures, places empha­sis on fam­ily and on being a par­ent. Women, par­tic­u­larly, are seen as the nurturer’s in the fam­ily and are expected to man­age the house­hold and raise the chil­dren. The woman can still have a very suc­cess­ful career or work out­side the home, but the expec­ta­tion is that she is still the pri­mary care­giver for the children.

If infer­til­ity gets thrown into this mix­ture, many times it is “hush-​​hushed” because it isn’t an issue that: #1 other peo­ple, let alone Fil­ipinos want to talk about, and #2 it’s a mat­ter of being able to “save face.” If we don’t talk about it, it doesn’t exist and there­fore those affected by infer­til­ity can still be con­nected to their social networks.

Now “sav­ing face,” in my own per­sonal expe­ri­ence, only works for a period of time until there’s a feel­ing of los­ing con­trol. When no one talks about the prob­lem, then the feel­ing of anx­i­ety increases until lone­li­ness starts to set­tle in. Ques­tions like “Why am I going through this?” and “Am I the only one that has this issue?” sud­denly become “I’m so alone” and “no one under­stands what I’m going through.”

For lack of bet­ter words, there is no sup­port. There’s no one there to talk to about such issues and no one to empathize with what I’m going through. And it’s mainly because no one wants to talk about infer­til­ity. It’s a dis­ease that no one, espe­cially those who have a strong cul­tural upbring­ing such as Asians, can get a firm grasp on. I seem to think it’s because lit­er­ally … there is noth­ing to grasp on to, as a per­son going through infer­til­ity isn’t visu­ally sick. And that’s cer­tainly dif­fer­ent then, let’s say, my nephew Liam who is still in the NICU, or some­one who is suf­fer­ing from cancer.

Please don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to belit­tle any of these health prob­lems because they cer­tainly are life-​​altering events. These just hap­pen to be health issues that peo­ple can read­ily under­stand and empathize why some­one can be sad or depressed over. Infer­til­ity is not.

So this is another rea­son why I’ve been feel­ing alone in this jour­ney. My hus­band and I do talk about these issues quite often and he cer­tainly con­tin­ues to pro­vide me with much sup­port. But some­times it’s nice to be able to talk to some­one other than my won­der­ful hus­band about these things.