- Every person deserves a portrait.
We all live lives worthy of art.
My name's Nicola Russell, and this is my portrait of Sahaj.
- [Sahaj] I really, really value language,
the ways we articulate our feelings and our experiences.
It is the one thing that allows us
to really, really connect with other humans.
My name is Sahaj Kaur Kohli.
I am a writer, a therapist in training in Washington, DC,
and founder of Brown Girl Therapy,
a mental health community for children of immigrants.
Growing up, it was really just me and my parents.
We moved a lot before I was 10.
We lived in three different houses.
I have two older siblings who are much older than I am.
Both my brother and my sister were born in India.
And so, I was kind of living those adolescent years
in America as the first in my family to be born in the West.
I was kind of navigating all of these bi-cultural struggles
on my own without really knowing that that's what they were.
I learned to entertain myself.
I learned to try to deal with my emotions
and my problems by my myself or through watching TV,
like shows that I watched and kind of turned to
for the family support that I didn't necessarily have,
to no fault of my parents
but because they were working like crazy
to provide for a family of five,
trying to figure out their own lives in a new country.
(soft music)
I know I struggled in childhood,
but I didn't have the language around it,
so it just felt normal to me.
And then I got to college and everything changed for me
because I was struggling with the independence
of being out of my parents' house,
what classes I wanted to take versus what's expected of me.
It was just a combination of things for me
that led me to realize
that life is a lot more like spontaneous
than I had ever given it permission to be.
Moving to New York for me was kind of the moment for me
where I was like, "I wanna kind of take the reins
and see what happens when I take the pen from my parents
and decide for myself the kind of life I wanna write,
and see if I can do it."
Living in New York, I had met my now husband.
I am the first in my family
to marry outside of race and culture.
And I know that my parents were going to kind of approach it
from a fear-based perspective
as they have kind of approached a lot of things in my life,
including my mental healthcare.
And I remember telling my parents, and for a long time,
they didn't believe it was real.
Something that's very common
for a lot of children of immigrants
is kind of having to prove,
prove that you are committed to something
to like not give up on it.
I do feel very grateful that my parents and I
were able to get to a point
where they have fully accepted my husband,
but there was a whole few years there
where it was really hard for me.
The one thing that grounds me on a day to day basis
is journaling and writing.
Doesn't feel overwhelming that it's a blank page,
but it also feels like enough space for me
to kind of track my moods or talk about my day
or externalize something that happened.
Working in journalism and being able to help writers
share their own identity driven essays
was the first time I really got an understanding
of how to use writing as a practice for mental healthcare.
And so over the years,
I think I was already building this love for mental health.
I chose a career in mental health
for many different reasons.
I myself had gone through my own struggles growing up.
Specifically when I was in college,
I went through something traumatic
that kind of started my journey
towards wanting to advocate for mental health
within my community,
but I wanted to work with people more closely
and more intimately to really get more time with them
to talk about their story.
I'm very curious about how people become who they are.
I really, really value language,
the ways we articulate our feelings and our experiences.
It is the one thing that allows us
to really, really connect with other humans.
So I started the social media page, Brown Girl Therapy.
Initially it was for South Asian women,
but it very quickly grew into a platform
for children of immigrants.
And it resonated so quickly with people.
So I felt like all of my different identities as a writer,
as a mental health advocate,
as a child of immigrants, as a Sikh therapist in training,
as a wife in an interracial marriage,
all of these parts of me were kind of coming together
through my creation of Brown Girl Therapy
to kind of just heal myself, honestly.
And that has been the beauty of being able
to share that knowledge and democratize mental health
and say, "Here's what I'm learning."
It's easy to have a path and a dream and work towards that.
And then when you reach that, sometimes it can feel
like really hard to know what happens next.
So I think it's important for me to remind myself
that I'm not a project and that I don't always need
to be chasing growth or personal development.
That's sometimes just existing, and being,
and enjoying the moment can be enough,
and that that should be enough.
(soft music)