British | Thai
My Mum is from Thailand and my Dad is from the UK. They met in a pizza restaurant in Bangkok in the 80s.
I grew up in a small village in Oxfordshire, where I'm pretty sure we were the only non-White family in the area. My sister and I had to leave our local village primary school because of racist bullying. My parents brought it up with the headteacher, but she wasn't willing to do anything about it, so we had to move to a school 30 minutes away. I think this made me feel shame around being mixed, and I'm sure I subconsciously tried to minimise my Thai-ness. It wasn't until I got the chance to move to Thailand at 15 with my Dad that I could more fully start to embrace this part of my identity. Going to school in Thailand, even for just a year, was incredibly eye-opening in terms of seeing so many other mixed people, with the same or similar mix, too.
As a child, I looked a lot more South-East Asian, but I'm more White-passing as an adult. On the one hand, as an adult, I'm afforded many privileges being White-passing, especially given that I also have a reasonably posh accent. On the other hand, I think that people can miss a fundamental part of who I am, which is disheartening as I feel compelled to clarify my identity.
I recently started training to be a therapist, and as part of the training, I have to be in therapy myself. I was surprised that even in London, where I live, I couldn't find a mixed therapist as it's a mainly White-dominated industry, and my coursemates are also mostly White. I'm confident in calling people out on their racism and homophobia, but it's been more difficult than I imagined to educate my peers in this sense. Having to sit in other people's ignorance and white fragility has been painful. Still, I'm optimistic that it will ultimately make me even more resilient and hopefully help some of my peers become less ignorant.
The lack of representation in psychotherapy worries me because I fear it will further alienate people of colour, who already have a higher risk of experiencing mental health problems and being less likely to access help. It's also an inaccessible industry for people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds because there isn't much funding and the training is expensive. So even though I am mixed and queer, being able to train as a psychotherapist is a huge privilege.
I hope access to training and mental health services in general improves, but it's going to take time. I hope that when I finish training, it might bring some kind of comfort for mixed people looking for therapy to find a mixed therapist. Even though, similarly to the queer experience, there is no single mixed experience.
My understanding of myself has deepened a lot since starting to train as a therapist. I've come to understand my experience that being mixed was the first way I felt othered by society as a child, and then discovering I was queer in my teenage years was a second othering layered on top of the first. Before, I had tended to view my mixed heritage and queerness as strong but separate parts of my identity, and I've since realised that they're much more interlinked than this. It feels really empowering and revitalising to understand more about myself, and I'm excited about what else I will learn over the next five years of my training.