Untethered...with Clementine Ford
Untethered...with Clementine Ford
Untethered: YUMIKO KADOTA
***Apologies for the dodgy audio this week. I've discovered that my laptop doesn't have enough processors (?) to manage audio on Riverside, so I had to use backup audio that isn't super great! I'm upgrading this week.***
This week, I speak with the amazing YUMIKO KADOTA, author of the memoir Emotional Female (A brilliant young surgeon's journey through ambition and dedication to exploitation and burnout).
Yumiko and I discuss what happens when the drive to succeed academically and professionally turns out not only be detrimental to your health, but also the very opposite of what actually makes you happy. We also talk about the stereotypes Yumiko has faced as an Asian woman, adult life diagnoses of neurodivergence (Yumiko has AudHD - autism and ADHD) and the need to be specific with language to avoid diluting the meaning of words entirely.
As announced last week, I'm also following up each midweek episode with a weekend special featuring me giving my guests a Tarot reading! Tune in on Saturday (and subscribe so you never miss an episode) to hear me go deep with Yumiko. The reading will be particularly of interest to anyone who has spent their life masking in some way and is finally ready to break free.
***
You can purchase Yumiko's book Emotional Female here.
Follow Yumiko on social media: @dryumikokadota
Book a She Shapes History tour here
To book a Tarot reading with me, contact me on clementine.ford@gmail.com
Subscribe to my Substack: www.substack.com/@clementinef
If you're enjoying Untethered, please consider rating and reviewing the show and becoming a subscriber! New episodes every Wednesday.
Contact: untetheredpod@gmail.com
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Become a direct subscriber of Untethered here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2319318/support
Free Palestine.
Hello beautiful people. It's me, your host, clementine Ford, back with another episode of Untethered, a podcast about untethering ourselves from social expectations, social mores and ideas, maybe even in ourselves, of who we thought we should be. My guest today is the former surgeon, yumiko Kadota, who wrote the book Emotional Female, a memoir with the subtitle A Brilliant Young Surgeon's Journey Through Ambition and Dedication to Exploitation and Burnout. We had a wonderful conversation. We talked about being diagnosed with ADHD. Yumiko is also autistic, so we discussed what it means to mask untethering from ideas about who we are and what we even like, and we talked about the prevalence in communities now to misuse words, words like trauma, words like narcissism. I'm guilty of that myself. We discuss and go into that and how we need to have a little bit more grace and kindness with each other, particularly in dark time. I hope you enjoy this conversation between me and Yumiko Kodota. You can check out her memoir, emotional Female, at the liner notes of this episode and you'll also find a link to my sub stack where I have begun producing a weekly newsletter called Well Actually, which provides factual and funny takedowns of all of those ridiculous arguments that you hear from dickheads at the pub, like men built all the roads and women are the world's natural biological nurturers. Let me tell you why those things are both untrue and many, many more. I'm also producing a weekly newsletter called the Shuffle, which is for tarot enthusiasts, newbies, novices and anyone basically interested in using cards like the tarot to explore your creativity, your self-reflection and connect with other people who are just interested in creating a tarot club unlike any other. So both of those things are available to my subscribers on Substack. It basically amounts to about $14 a month, which is roughly the cost of a nice glass of wine. So if you appreciate my work, if you like this podcast and you would like to buy me a glass of wine once a month, then I would very much love to welcome you to my dear Clementine community.
Speaker 1:Speaking of tarot, the second part of this episode will be uploaded on Saturday and that will feature the in-depth tarot reading between me and Yumiko. It's a new thing that I'm doing here at Untethered we have the first straight hour of conversation dropping every Wednesday, and then on the weekends for something special a deeper conversation about life, love, spirituality, where we've come from, who we are, what we think using my beautiful, beloved tarot cards. You don't have to know tarot to listen and get something out of it. You don't have to even believe in tarot. I'm not psychic. I just like to use the cards as a tool. I'm recording this episode of Untethered today on the lands of the Wurundjeri people and remember wherever you are, know whose land you're on. Let's get untethered. Thank you, clem. It has been a trial even getting this podcast to happen just today, because we're in mercury retrograde, of course. So everything is fucked, uh. But especially I'm feeling right now.
Speaker 1:I just feel the need to like cleanse and purge in this safe space between you and me and I also feel like you will appreciate and relate to this the absolute rage that I'm feeling that something that I'm trying to make work is not working oh, oh God.
Speaker 2:yes, it's like the universe isn't your friend today?
Speaker 1:No, exactly. So I wanted to speak to you basically. I think actually even way back when I was doing the Big Sister Hotline yes, Back in lockdown I had spoken to you about potentially interviewing you then and I'm a big believer in whether or not other people believe in this or not, I'm a big believer in things happening when they're meant to happen. So it feels like maybe the reason that that didn't happen then was because it was meant to happen now.
Speaker 2:I think so too. I feel like we've gotten to know each other a lot better in the last few years, because that was actually three years ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know, gosh, gosh. I feel like the whole pandemic lockdown kind of scenario, gosh, that even feels too minimal to call it that, but I was thinking about it the other day and how like we're in it's 2024 now. The pandemic obviously started January 2020. We started getting inklings of it. Four years is not a minimal amount of time, like that's a university degree. It's obviously not medicine and surgery, but that's the difference, that can be the difference in someone's life of a whole new direction.
Speaker 2:A lot of things can happen in that time, and we have seen, you know, a genocide happen, for example, and I think big world events like that can really bring people together and that it affirms common values, and I think, in that sense as well, it's nice to be having this conversation, knowing that we're on the same page for a lot of issues outside of the things that the two of us have in common.
Speaker 1:It's interesting that you mentioned that actually, because obviously you and I are both passionate supporters of Palestine and for each episode I've recorded of this podcast so far we've discussed it. You know, whoever I'm speaking with that week, whoever I'm lucky enough to speak with that week, that I think, in some ways, a certain cohort of people who are passionate about that topic and passionate about uplifting Palestinian voices and Palestinian liberation have come together. Yes, and then there's a lot of other people who are obviously very invested in kind of tearing that narrative apart. But I was speaking with someone the other night about COVID days.
Speaker 1:I know we're still in COVID days, but the lockdown days and to a degree, I mean, there were so many terrible things about that time, obviously, that it doesn't even hopefully it doesn't even need mentioning that. Of course, I'm not in support of this idea of like let's go back into lockdown because it's good for people, because there's a whole lot of people who suffered because of COVID and still are suffering. But there was an aspect then of people coming out with, I guess, some good faith and some good grace to take care of each other sort of a kind of a community spirit that I feel has at the moment we were kind of invited back into participating capitalist structures of competition and you know economic fury. We sort of lost that again.
Speaker 2:We did, but I do feel like there's more compassion for small businesses, for example, and more empathy for people who did have it harder during the lockdown, because it did affect people very, very differently, depending on even what suburb you lived in. In Sydney, for example, there was such a huge difference in how people were treated.
Speaker 1:Oh, absolutely, and same here in Melbourne. You know the kind of different liberties I think that people took as well. I think it's interesting because you come from a medical background which we're going to get into. But this sort of self-delusion I think that a lot of people lead themselves into and I'm, you know, I'm not saying that I'm, I have never done this either. I think I'm just as guilty, because I'm human, of wanting to believe the best of yourself, wanting to believe that you are more compassionate than anyone else, that you're sort of the critique that you kind of spray out against other people is not applicable to you.
Speaker 1:And I sent you, before we recorded today, I sent you a tweet or a thread, I should say, from someone who had written I'm just going to pull it up someone who had written on threads. We're all traumatized. If something happened two years ago and it still bothers you, then that's trauma. And I saw that thread because you replied to it wrong. This is why people overuse the words trauma and triggered. It dilutes the experiences of people like me who actually suffer from clinically diagnosed CPTSD. And then I shared that and I said we've got to stop oversimplifying words and concepts, as some people point out in this thread, grief is not necessarily trauma. Additionally, something bothering you might be the way a person spoke to you in a cafe, or an interaction you had online, or a date that ghosted on you. It may even be something you did that you regret calling those things traumatic.
Speaker 1:As you said, unico dilutes what trauma is.
Speaker 1:Everything is being flattened now to allow the individual to compete in a race for exceptionalism, and I wanted to start, I think, by talking about that with you, partly because, coming from you, know a highly competitive medical training world where, of course, this sort of like urge to succeed is so deeply embedded in that, but also the I'm not going to say trauma, although there is trauma related to that but the negative impacts that that has on a person. And then, looking now at this kind of you know this, as I said, this flattening of if everything's traumatic, then nothing's traumatic. And obviously that's not true because we're looking, the same time as this tweet conversation is happening, we're looking at a genocide occurring which is creating generations of chronic, not even post, trauma. They're still very much in trauma. That it feels to me like when people say, oh, that's your trauma speaking. It's like how do we, how do we progress to having conversations where we're actually very realistic about what words mean and we can acknowledge people's grief and pain and sometimes even suffering?
Speaker 2:and yes, contextually, sometimes their trauma without saying that well, a breakup that just hurt your feelings, yeah, it's trauma I think that it plays into the whole oppression olympics sort of theme, where there's just no point in comparing different people's experiences because you will never win that game. There's always going to be someone who is less privileged than you and someone who is in a worse situation than you. So I think there's a balance of not kind of being positive all the time and being like well, at least you don't have this or at least you don't have that. You're still allowed to have a bad day or have experiences that are valid, without comparing yourself to someone who is less fortunate. And I think that's where sometimes we make mistakes and, you know, I even get accused of gatekeeping.
Speaker 2:What trauma is? I'm not defining what trauma is for anybody else, but what I was trying to say in that thread was that just because you're bothered by something doesn't mean that you're traumatized, and I think we need to. I guess it's hard for me because I do come from a clinical background and I do like to stick to definitions most of the time, within the limits of, you know, diagnostic manuals like the DSM, which are consistently changing. So definitions change all the time. But there's a reason why there are diagnostic criteria for certain things and that's where we get diagnoses like PTSD and you can have little T trauma or big T trauma different types of trauma. That don't necessarily mean you have the whole clinical syndrome of PTSD, but I think we trivialize what trauma actually means when we overuse it. And I think I gave you the example of missing out on Taylor Swift tickets. There were so many people like, oh my God, I sat for hours trying to get tickets and I missed out. I'm so traumatized.
Speaker 2:People just misuse words all the time, even things like oh, he or she is an arc or they're an arc.
Speaker 2:We overuse certain mental health terms and I also got into arguments about what we can call ableism, because people are so easy to say don't use this word or don't use that word, but then I won't say who, but a certain prominent disability advocate uses the word obsessed all the time, and that can be offensive to people who do actually have OCD.
Speaker 2:So I think sometimes you know the point you were making before about how all of us in the online space are competing to see who is the most morally superior is a game that no one can really win, and the sad thing about a lot of it is that when people end up fighting on these forums. They're usually people who are actually on the same side. We have the same values, but then we get too caught up in semantics, too caught up in semantics, and that's how things can get a bit hostile online when, when we look at the big picture, we're actually just similar in our values I've I've been thinking a lot and I think I'm probably guilty, as you said, of you know, overusing the word narcissist.
Speaker 1:Um, and, yeah, I'll, I'll own that. It's there is, there's a, a conceit to behavior that you're trying to nail that feels like it carries, you know, weight with this catch, all kind of phrase of narcissism, and I think people can behave narcissistically without being narcissists. I mean, obviously we can all be narcissistic at times. But I feel, even in having this conversation conversation, I have a thread of fear in me because everyone is so insistent, myself included.
Speaker 1:You get wrapped up in this kind of online space, this hyper scrutiny and this hyper vigilance that goes hand in hand that I feel like it's become almost I won't say impossible, but it's become very tricky to have conversations about what words mean, about how we express ourselves, even conversations where you may disagree on certain concepts or you may disagree on how you kind of express yourself or how you do your activism or whatever.
Speaker 1:It's really hard to have some of those conversations within that sort of context of feeling hyper scrutinized and being hyper vigilant as a response, because there is this fear that if you put one foot out of line, semantically, even if it was done with good faith, even if it was done, you know without ill intention that, oh well, you're fucked, You're a fucked person who should die in a ditch, and I'm being a little bit sort of hyperbolic there, but I do think that there is, there are a lot of people who are. I guess what I'm trying to say is that unless we can really explore ideas with each other as people, and if we can come to kind of the exploration of those ideas from an acceptance that I'm not, I'm not going to sit down and fucking explore ideas with Pauline Hanson you know, waste of time.
Speaker 1:I think that there are you know, there are things that of course we're like well, that's not an idea worth exploring because it's just bigotry or it's racism or it's transphobia or whatever it might be. But then there are some you know, there are nuances within groups who ostensibly, as you say, are fighting for the same thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're on the same team.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there can be really productive conversations to be had if we accept that while we're having them. You know, none of us come into the world with a perfect framework and to sort of disavow or discredit the fact that we are all learning along the way and we're learning from these kinds of conversations, learning from listening to people who know what they're talking about and maybe even to people who respectfully what they're talking about, who, and maybe even two people who respectfully disagree with each other. There's, there's benefit and positive things to come from that. Yet there is this sort of I don't know. I've said to, I've been saying to a few friends lately that for a community of people who hate cops you know I hate cops too, acab, et cetera, et cetera, but like we fucking love to police each other.
Speaker 2:That's so true, we're just nitpicking at each other.
Speaker 2:Why do we kind of get bogged down on the details? And I think I like the idea of giving people grace, because we all make mistakes and we don't always express ourselves perfectly. But I think that a lot of it is that we can react to things in a very similar way, like we often have visceral reactions to things, but we don't always have the language to explain what we mean. And just because someone phrases it in a way that you wouldn't use to describe something, we just need to give people a little bit more grace when they say it in the wrong way in your eyes anyway, I want to go back to your book Emotional Female, which is about your time, really, as an aspiring surgeon, a trainee doctor, being completely overworked, run ragged.
Speaker 1:And it's about you, but it's also about the flaws of the system and just rather than me explaining it to people. Tell me about your book.
Speaker 2:My book is basically about what it was like as a junior doctor, and when I first started writing it, I thought it was going to be about burnout, because that's essentially what made me leave ultimately. But while I was writing and it did take me two years to write, which is quite a long time these days A lot of people churn out books a lot quicker than that but it took me a long time and I think that was a good thing for me because it made me reflect on what made me burn out. And since then I have and I'm sure we'll talk about it soon but I've since been diagnosed with autism and ADHD and I'm reading about things like ADHD burnout and autistic burnout, because we have extra vulnerability factors that make us more likely to burn out. But at the time I didn't know that I had those things. All I knew was that I was a woman trying to enter surgery and other people were like oh, do you think the fact that you are Japanese had anything to do with that?
Speaker 2:And that's something that I never would have thought of, because I'm sure you have experienced. People say, oh, you're playing the gender card again, and I didn't want people to be like oh, you're playing the gender card again. And I didn't want people to be like, oh, you're playing the race card. So I never really considered the fact that me being Asian could have had anything to do with my career progression. But the more you read about it, the more you realize that those layers do exist and they're invisible. You hear about things like the bamboo ceiling as well as the glass ceiling, so I guess I had a hybrid bamboo glass ceiling that I had to shutter and how that manifested day by day, and it's something that I never would have thought about and I don't think I would have entered this kind of activist space if it weren't for reflecting on my time in surgery space, if it weren't for reflecting on my time in surgery.
Speaker 1:I think it's interesting that you know people, the people who say things like you're playing the race card, you're playing the gender card, et cetera, are always people who come from the dominant position on the hierarchy.
Speaker 1:So men, usually white men, will say to women you're playing the gender card, and it's usually white people like me who will say don't play the race card, when actually we play those cards all the time we hold provenance over those cards and I mean we play them obviously and just in terms of like our invisible dominance and reinforcing those invisible dominances.
Speaker 1:But, as you said, people look at you and they see a Japanese woman and they see a Japanese doctor and the race card that they play is well, you are, you know. It's like the Baltimore mayor recently, you know, has been subject to incredible racism, like incredibly high levels of racism, because he's black. He's a young black man in Baltimore, which is a predominantly black city, and racists are saying, oh, it's the DEI mayor, the diversity, equality or equity and inclusion, and it's like that's the race card. The race card is when white people play it against people of colour or people from non-white backgrounds and say, oh well, you only got there because of X, y, z. So I just find it interesting that that's another additional kind of barrier that you have to face as well.
Speaker 2:It's proving yourself against the cards that we play against you and a lot of people twist the argument to say that people of colour are more privileged because we get special access, we have scholarships and things you know. And I think, why do you think we need quarters and scholarships to start with? And people somehow think and they also play the meritocracy argument as well saying like you know, you didn't get in because of your merit, you got in because there's a female quota or there's always some sort of reason why someone from a marginalized or minority group ends up succeeding. But in my case I guess I'm part of the model minority myth in that when people look at Asians they think, oh yeah, they're going to end up being doctors or accountants. They must be good at masks because they're Asian.
Speaker 2:So I guess when I was at uni the majority of people in my grade were Asians. But then by the time you end up in the hospital system and go towards more leadership positions or head of unit sort of positions, you stop seeing Asians, which is wild because there were so many of us at uni. But then as we get higher and higher, we're not getting promoted and I guess it comes down to stereotypes about what Asian people are like. They expect us to be more submissive. They don't think that we aspire to hold leadership positions because we've kind of been pigeonholed into a certain kind of personality trait or character trait, so that plays a part.
Speaker 1:And it's also, I think, across the board in any kind of system of hierarchy, people, it's not just necessarily that there is this gross stereotype about submissiveness, which I want to talk to you about, talk with you about in a second as well, but also, if white people decide that we make better authorities, then that's just how the system will be.
Speaker 1:If men decide that they make better leaders and they are in the position to be able to facilitate that because they've closed the door on every other person who's tried to bust their way in, then that's what will happen. It's like in a similar way not to sort of say that it's exactly the same, but in a similar way the education industry is dominated by women as teachers, but the upper echelons of education management, the principals, the people who sit on educational boards, et cetera, that's all men. Because it's this acceptance that we're very comfortable with a certain kind of person being the leader. They don't actually have to prove themselves along the way. No one ever says that. When they see a white man promoted into a job, well, how do we know that he didn't just get it because he's a white man? Because it's just the merit of the situation, which may be and often is, I'm sure, extremely lacking, is just assumed.
Speaker 1:I want to tell you a great story that I heard about a woman named Fanny Finch and she was I heard this on the she Shapes History tour in Canberra, which is run by these incredible young people who basically take people on walking tours of Canberra, which is run by these incredible young people who basically take people on walking tours of Canberra and tell them amazing stories about women in politics. But Fanny Finch was a single mother in like mid-1800s sometime. I'm not going to check my phone to double check that, but you know, people can go and look her up. Fanny Finch was a woman of color who had come to australia, um, on a boat. She ended up a single mother of four kids. She left her husband, presumably for every reason you can imagine. They lived in south australia at the time. She made her way to victoria and in victoria she ran a pub and she ran a pub in the gold fields. So not only was she a woman running the pub, running a pub, but she was also a mixed race woman of color and obviously this earned her a particular kind of backlash from the men in the in the town. So fanny fitch.
Speaker 1:Fanny finch was sick and tired of basically the shit that men in her immediate environment were giving her and she ended up writing a letter to the newspaper and saying basically, all of you fuck off. I'm just a woman trying to take care of her shit. I'm just trying to pay my bills like the rest of you. Leave me the fuck alone. And that didn't go down well with the township, or with the men, I should say specifically. So Fanny Finch found a loophole in the system that basically said if you were a ratepayer, then you had a vote in the council elections. And there was one person who she was allied with in the town, this guy who was running for the council, and she was like I'm going to give that guy my vote and she technically was not. Women weren't allowed to vote but she was like well, I'm a rate payer.
Speaker 1:So she marched into the town hall or wherever they had the elections that day. She marched in to cast it. She said I'm Fanny Finch and I'm here to cast my vote.
Speaker 2:And they were like oh, you can't vote.
Speaker 1:You are but a woman, you know, and not any kind of woman like a woman of colour. So we're like doubling down on the oppression here. And she said well, the town's legislature says that a ratepayer gets a vote, and I'm a ratepayer, so I'm casting my vote. And so she cast her vote for this one vote she cast for this council guy. So, technically speaking, fanny Finch, this young, single mother, woman of colour, was the first woman to cast a vote in Australia.
Speaker 1:And do you know what they did? Wow, this is a really. I know it's a long story to get to this point, but this is kind of illustrating what you're talking about. The men who were aggrieved and outraged that Fannie had found a way to game their system, retconned the legislature so that she cast her vote. They cast it out. The next day they rewrote the legislation to say male ratepayer. So it's a long-winded way of kind of saying that when people say, well, it should be about merit, or women aren't trying hard enough, or minorities aren't trying hard enough, or well, maybe there's not enough, maybe there's not that many Asian people in you know the higher structures of the hospital because they're just not really interested in leadership or whatever kind of like fabricated bullshit people want to say.
Speaker 1:It's actually because at every point in history we see and can find these very obvious historical examples of whoever has the power. When they see some people might be figuring out how to get around it, using their collective energy and strength to shut the door on them and keep them out.
Speaker 2:And it's like why are you so threatened? And also, how do you think Asian countries govern themselves? Don't you think we have leaders among us?
Speaker 1:So you can unpick all of these arguments, but oftentimes it's too difficult because when you're outnumbered, especially at the top, it is hard to to be heard in the introduction to your book you say I was a doctor, I am a doctor, I am a recovering doctor and I think that's really interesting in the context of untethered being this sort of conceit of this podcast is how do we untether ourselves from ideas, from expectations, social mores, even those moments where we're like I feel uncomfortably untethered from who I thought I was To me?
Speaker 1:when you say I am a recovering doctor, that feels to me like you've really untethered from some ideas and I'd love for you to talk about that.
Speaker 2:I always say that medicine is what I do, not who I am, and I think a lot of these ideas came from yoga philosophy. So I did my Eat, pray, love thing after I quit my job and I ended up doing yoga teacher training in Bali and I was such a basic bitch choice. I went to Bali and also did a course in Byron as well. So, and I loved it and I, you know, I say the term basic bitch in a very affectionate way because, like, people like to label us as that, but I I reclaim that term because, um, they think that the things that women are interested in are silly, but there's nothing wrong with enjoying things like yoga, you, you know and singing and chanting and all that sort of stuff. So I say that in an affectionate way and I fully enjoyed my time learning how to be a yoga teacher, and part of learning is not just, you know, the Instagram yoga poses, but the philosophy of yoga, and that has a really deep history in Hinduism and there was one concept called aparigraha, which is detaching yourself from external things, and so reading a lot these yoga texts really helped me kind of separate myself, because when you're in medicine, there's this idea that you have to see medicine as a calling and it's a little bit like that toxic idea of like the people you work with is your work family and as a way of kind of pressuring people to be more committed to the jobs than they need to be. And so I kind of reject this idea that the people you work with have to be your family and that what you do every day as a job has to be some sort of like spiritual calling.
Speaker 2:A lot of people do think of medicine as that calling and when you're invested in it and when you care a lot about people, you're really in it and you can really love your job and you can really care about the patients that you look after. But I reject this idea that it's everything that you stand for because you're allowed to have a life outside of medicine. But you, from a very, very early stage of medical school, get this idea that wanting a balanced lifestyle is a dirty concept and they think that rest is for the weak. It's very kind of bro culture, lad culture. It's like a you know my dick's bigger than your sort of contest a lot of the time in medicine and who can.
Speaker 1:Who can sacrifice the most? Yeah?
Speaker 2:it's almost like a competition, like, oh, I've done this many days without a break. Oh, I had this many phone calls when I was on call last week. This is what I it's like, a competition of numbers, and that's where we find validation in ourselves and value in ourselves. But I had to try and ignore all of that. And it's hard because I was a self-confessed workaholic and I did subscribe to that hustle culture because that's all I knew. So to learn how to relax was really hard.
Speaker 2:And now that I've been diagnosed with ADHD, I'm like oh yeah that's one of the reasons why I don't know how to relax, but some of it is also the social structure that I was a part of as well. So I think, yeah, as I get older I don't know whether you feel the same way as well Sometimes you're like is it because I have ADHD or is it because I was kind of socialised to think this way?
Speaker 1:It's probably a mixture of both, but it's been quite illuminating to look back on that time with a very, very different lens of how my brain actually works. Yeah, I mean, for me, I don't think that I would have been capable of the commitment required to study medicine and surgery in particular, and also I didn't get the marks. I mean I did pretty well at school. But is it funny as well that I feel the need to say I did pretty well at school, even though I don't care that I didn't get, you know, quite enough to get into law or medicine? There's still this sort of productivity, I think, when you're.
Speaker 1:What probably I do relate to with what you're saying is that when you have ADHD and you're a girl in particular and you've masked well at school by kind of covering up, you know that school, school might be in some ways easy for you if you're doing the things that you're interested in, because then you care about learning about them as opposed to being a slog, which it is for many other neurodivergent people that you still, then sort of part of the masking is covering up all the ways that you feel like you're drowning through school and through everything that demands of you, because you can still perform the role of the smart girl.
Speaker 1:You can still perform that kind of like, you know, you can still say, well, I achieved, I achieved, I'm a high achiever and I think for a lot of women who grew up as girls with, you know, later stage diagnosed ADHD or, in your case, adhd and autism, I think that that high achiever is very familiar, that sense of like, well, if I just am good at everything I try to do, then no one will know that inside my head I'm completely flailing.
Speaker 1:You know, like in my case I've got you mentioned OCD before. I've got OCD and ADHD and the OCD presented itself at 12 in a way that was sort of obvious to me because I was doing things like, you know, very pattern oriented and control oriented and light switches and hand washing and stuff like that. So I knew then that these are sort of the traits of OCD not that I got any treatment for it or went and spoke to anyone about it, cause I was also really scared, that I was crazy and I didn't want anyone to know that I had this weird thing that went on in my head or that I, my brain, was like fucked up, the ADHD I didn't know anything about and then later on even it's like well, that's just a thing that boys get.
Speaker 2:Even even remember like 10 years ago people thought that only boys could be autistic, which is just, that's right, insane um, and even a few years ago you couldn't get a diagnosis of both autism and ADHD because one was in the exclusion criteria for the other. So it's only in the last few years where we've got the new version of the DSM, which is the Diagnostic Statistic Manual. Now we can diagnose the two together, but we're just still discovering different things about it. And, as you say, girls were very good at masking all of these traits. And do you know what?
Speaker 2:Like, we've both written books, but I actually hated reading just growing up. So my mom was like it's hilarious that someone who hates reading end up writing a book. But I just couldn't concentrate. I've actually never finished a single book that I had to read for English at school. But you, you learned how to write essays. You learned, um, about the key quotes from the book that you had to include to make your argument. So you had to kind of work around the fact that I didn't have the concentration span to finish an entire book when I was growing up.
Speaker 1:I did love reading when I was growing up, but I yeah, I've always done pretty well at the things that I care about and the things that interest me, and then the things that don't interest me. I find it. It's almost enraging. It's like something. It's like there is something sharp in the back of my neck squeezing me or scratching down my spine, scratching down my nervous system, just trying to like wrap my head around something that I cannot understand, and this might sound bizarre to people who don't have adhd or don't have that kind of neurodivergent um challenge. But if, if you're a neurotypical and you're like well, this you're just over exaggerating or whatever, oh, you're just exaggerating.
Speaker 1:I feel that way with forms like if I have to fill out a form, particularly if it's a form online, that I have to figure out how to like get it from PDF to whatever, like some people be like. Yeah, well, everyone finds forms annoying, but what they don't understand is it's a difference between finding a form annoying and finding a form and the challenge of like figuring out how to fill out a form physically painful, like a physical thing. That is, like scraping down, as I said, scraping down your nervous system, and so I think that's one of the reasons why a lot of people, a lot of women in particular, with ADHD I can't speak to the autism, because I don't have autism, as far as I know. My psychiatrist doesn't think so though, but I think that that speaks to why so many of us, you know, have such terrible financial.
Speaker 1:Oh god, because yeah, we don't fucking know how to do our taxes. I mean, I've recently done in the last couple of years I did eight years worth of taxes because I finally went to an accountant and I was like I just can't do this, I need you to do it. But I think of all these people that are like what if you can't afford an accountant? What if you can't?
Speaker 2:We just sort of this.
Speaker 1:Probably you'll relate to this and anyone listening who has this experience too. You see a form, or you see a bill, or you see an official-looking letter and you go right back to being a child who is scared of being in trouble you think you're in trouble.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, yeah, you think you're in trouble and I think that feeling of like feeling, like you know, we started this conversation by talking about the overuse of words like trauma, and I'm not going to use the word trauma to describe this, because I don't think that it's accurate but there's some sort of some word or some low level panic, breathlessness, whatever that comes from. Having had that experience growing up and feeling now as an adult I'm 42. I'm not sure how old you are exactly, but always feeling like you're in trouble.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm turning 37 this year and my parents still treat me like I'm the bad kid among the three of us and that's never left. Like when I go back to Japan to visit them, like I'm not allowed a key to their home. Like I'm not trusted to even have access to their apartment so I have to come back before they go to bed. I'm not allowed out without somebody else with me. Like I'm always the bad kid and I don't think I'll ever shake that off. I don't know why, but that was always me. I was always the naughty kid.
Speaker 2:Because I don't think they had this concept of what neurodivergence actually is. Because I think Japanese society is so based on rules and politeness that the idea of being different is not really accepted. When I asked my, the funny thing is I actually thought my sister was autistic, not me and I started reading a book on women with autism. And that's when I realized it was actually describing me. I'm like oh, this is actually describing me. But anyway, I asked my mother like like, I think my sister's got autism. What do you think?
Speaker 2:like, and I asked her about autism in Japan and she actually didn't know what the word for autism was in Japanese, because and that's how of how much of a foreign concept it is, because we, like in our language, we change the phrase depending on who we speak to. There's so many rules, like how you speak to your friend is different to how you speak to your parents, grandparents, and then, like the emperor, it can be the same line. You can just be saying hello, how are you? But the way you say it is different depending on who you talk to. So it's a culture that's based on so many different rules and we all learn to follow those rules, and that's probably what helped me mask, because we all have to follow the rules, so we are all the same. So you don't really stand out if you're a little bit different in how you think, because everyone has to behave a certain way and parents are so strict.
Speaker 1:I'd love to ask you a little bit more about, I guess, for you to go further into that. I don't have. I lived in Japan for one year in 2003, and it wasn't really Japan, it was Okinawa and the reason I say that is because in Okinawa Okinawans like we're not really Japan, we are Okinawa.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know because obviously historical kind of yeah, you know, because obviously historical kind of I don't know too much about the history confidently to say it to you, but but a distinct we are Okinawan, we are Ryuku, we're not Japanese, but my, my memory from that time so I say that to sort of say, ok, I have this very tiny little glimpse and I would never say well, lived in here for a year, so obviously I'm an expert because I'm not at all, but my, my memory of that time and again 20 years ago, was this very sort of fascinating cultural um paradox between a group of people who and you know in Okinawa as well, okinawans were like well, well, we're like on island time, we're like laid back, laid back in a very rules-oriented society, it's all relative.
Speaker 2:It's not quite the same as Fiji time, but it's island time to the rest of Japan. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:I remember thinking that it was really interesting how there were just these rules that I was just told about. You know that, just like that's just the Japanese way, like you don't eat on the street, you don't walk down the street eating something, and you know. So I would try and observe as much as I could what I understood, but it seems to me that there were other contradictions as well that I found interesting. Like this was around the time when, you know, we didn't have smartphones or anything like that. It's because it's 2003.
Speaker 1:So if you wanted to send an email, you had to go to an internet cafe. But of course, because I was there working and I wasn't on like a super high salary, I was teaching English part-time I didn't want to go to a paid internet cafe all the time. And so there were some, you know, phone shops, and these phone shops were unlike in Australia, they were like so advanced because they'd have internet access in the phone shop so I would go there to check my emails. And I remember seeing, quite often, young men looking up porn on these internet computers, like freely accessible, like visible, you could see it.
Speaker 2:It wasn't like they were in a booth or anything like that and I remember thinking it's so interesting.
Speaker 1:But there's this one thing of like well, we don't walk down the street eating, and if you'd sort of ask any kind of like cultural thing, you'd say, oh, can you tell me more about that? That's just the Japanese way. You'd be told, that's just how it is in Japan. You're like, okay, cool, I can accept that. And yet at the same time it's like well, is it just the? Was it is it just? I know I know from my brief time there that this idea of shame was so deeply feared, like to bring shame on yourself or to be shamed. Was it just you wouldn't say to the guys looking at the porn on the computers that's inappropriate in the middle of the day, in full view, because it would be like naming the thing would bring shame? I'm not sure. I'm asking you like what? What? Yeah?
Speaker 2:thoughts uh, japan and porn is very fascinating. I don't know why it's so accepted, but you know the hentai culture. Hentai means you're basically a pervert is accepted Like men are just pervs, it's like. And men can cheat on their wives. There's a popular thing on TikTok at the moment where men are being interviewed on the streets about whether seeing a prostitute counts as cheating and a lot of them are like no, it doesn't count because it's transactional, you're paying them, kind of thing. And even cartoons of porn all these like anime there's like naughty mangas are acceptable. People literally stand and read these kind of dirty comics in a bookshop and it seems to be perfectly normal. And even buying used undies from a vending machine. It's just. It's so extreme where on one end you've got very, very polite society and on the other end it's so dirty and it's. I don't quite understand those extremes, to be honest. But but if a woman was watching porn, she would be shamed for sure.
Speaker 1:The reason why men can do it is because it's okay for them to do it in Japan so do you think, because of that kind of um, I guess, hyper politeness or conformity in some respects? Do you think then, that, going back to this idea of you being autistic and you having adhd and this kind of um, maybe not even unwillingness, but an inability to see that or identify that, or an ease with which you could mask, because you know what the rules are, the rules of engagement exactly I just learned what was normal and what was expected of me.
Speaker 2:But now that I know that that's what I've got, it's been so liberating because I'm like wow, I don't actually have to behave like that. Even something simple like emails. You know how women are taught to email like men. Just to get straight to the point keep it professional, don't be like, oh, please do this if it's okay with you or no, worries if not. You know all those memes about how women write emails compared to men. I feel like I don't really need to write emails like a you know, like a woman anymore. I can just be like here you go, here's the file you asked for, that's it. But then, of course, when I'm completely unmasked, people think I'm rude sometimes because I come across as blunt. But I'm just to the point and I like to be efficient. But I also am aware that they're just not used to women talking like that. So when I'm being completely myself, I'm very aware of the fact that some people do think that I'm rude and blunt.
Speaker 1:Well, I don't think it's even just the woman thing I mean. Earlier on in our messages today, we talked about the sort of expectation that Asian women in particular are submissive, but that they're also hypersexualized. So it's not just that you're a woman, it's that you, as an asian woman and and you know a young, uh, asian woman who would still be within that kind of like sexualized scope you're not supposed to be rude and blunt that's right, like there are all these racist stereotypes of what an asian woman needs to be.
Speaker 2:We're meant to be submissive, we're not meant to be ambitious, all of these things. And we're meant to be cute, you know, and especially Japanese women, the whole hello cutie thing, exactly the kawaii culture. You're meant to be cute and if you're not cute, then you're not really a girl.
Speaker 1:So I want to. We've got probably about 10 minutes left, and then we're going to say goodbye for this episode, but we, of course, will be doing our tarot reading, which will be released this weekend. It's our little bonus episode. Uh, we can go a bit deeper into who you are as a person and your soul, etc. Etc. But I wanted to ask you how was in writing a book like this?
Speaker 1:you're kind of really blowing the lid not just on productivity culture, not just on the hospital system, but also on what you know, what it means for individuals who are being burnt out by you know. We can maintain this pretense that we care about the caregivers, but if everything is about who stays the longest at work, who is the most renegade of the surgeons, then that leads to mistakes and that leads to trouble down the line. What was the reaction to you in releasing this book? Because I can imagine that there were at least a few people who were very threatened by you kind of exposing the industry.
Speaker 2:There still are. The other day, someone asked me whether my book was still available and I wasn't sure it was three years ago. So I went on Google to check that you can still buy it online. And then I came across yet another one-star review review. I'm sure you're used to this as well people just writing one-star reviews. They don't even read the books. They don't read it.
Speaker 2:And it was clearly someone who'd worked with me before, because there were all these um details about the plastic surgery um profession that only someone who would have worked with me um could have known. But anyway, I'm like dude, I left six years ago. Like, move on, I love that. It's like that me like, why are you still so obsessed with me? I love that they still care that much that they want to write this entire essay about what a narcissistic person. And there we go again.
Speaker 2:You know the word narc. I mean I probably overuse it as well. Again, you know the word narc. I mean, I probably overuse it as well. But you know, apparently I'm a narc and apparently I'm a liar, because people are so uncomfortable with me saying how it was for me and it's like. You know, you may not have experienced racism and sexism. But that was my experience and I think it makes people uncomfortable because they probably to some degree contribute to it.
Speaker 2:And you know, early on when the book was released, I had a bookseller with quite a sizable bookstagram following writing a very bad review of my book without admitting to the fact that her husband actually is a doctor who worked at my hospital. So he wasn't exactly one of the bad guys in terms of like. He wasn't an individual character, but he's part of the structure at the hospital. That is, the white male. You know, the white patriarchy at the hospital and exactly the structure that I'm criticising. So I think a lot of people weren't really happy about me saying that because they took it as like a personal attack. Well, it's not really. I mean, there were, like individuals who were dickheads, of course, but it's a more broader observation of what the culture in medicine and surgery can be like.
Speaker 1:I think I did read that no please finish.
Speaker 2:Oh no, no, I wasn't going to say anything else really.
Speaker 1:I was going to say I think I did read that review, um, and I, as I read it, I remember just thinking you're kind of proving the point of the book. But exactly, I think one of the one of the kind of criticisms that this review had was that you, you know, I'm just going to repeat what they said that you couldn't get over a bad night. That you couldn't get over a bad night, that you'd like hold on to it for a week if you had this intense, major bad night I remember thinking like that's the point, man, like that's, that's not healthy for anyone to kind of just have to suck it up.
Speaker 1:And I mean, we also know that there is a really devastatingly high rate of unaliving oneself oh yeah the medical, you know kind of industry, and particularly the more pressure people face.
Speaker 1:This is, these are not this kind of level of productivity, and burnout is not something that we should be aspiring to as a society, whether or not it's in medicine or in education or in any, any kind of field. And I think that kind of goes back to what we were saying at the beginning, which is this, this competition for everyone to prove that they are working the hardest, that they're the most committed to the capitalist framework, they're the most successful. Like, where is the joy? You said something earlier about, you know, adhd. Maybe part of the masking comes from. You can just throw yourself into doing stuff that you like. Yeah, but that's not always, and that's true. But that's what I've been reflecting on lately. Is that that's?
Speaker 1:rarely work for me. Actually, if I'm honest, the things that I really like are glue gunning floral headdresses.
Speaker 2:I love that or headbands.
Speaker 1:I recently, like I like to go to Kmart and look at the crafting section for activities to do with my child and I recently bought like a bunch of soy wax to like, oh my god, I'm gonna make some candles. You know, I've been making bath bombs with him and I'm not saying that I want to do all that stuff for the rest of my life. But I saw a tweet today that was about the eclipse that you know obviously was. There was a totality viewing across the eastern seaboard in America, and the tweet said something like it was linked to an article that was saying the US economy looks set to lose $700 million because of lost productivity because people are watching the eclipse. And the tweet commentary was like wow, wow, this is where we're at in society.
Speaker 1:Is that people can't even fucking take an hour out of their day to to witness a natural, universal phenomenon and take joy in just the, the fucking, you know rarity of being alive, because the economy might lose money. And I think of those things like what? What is it that we're passionate about? What is it that we want to do? And I don't think, as you've articulated so beautifully today and also in your book, emotional Fema, which people can find at the liner notes of this episode. By the way, you can buy it and read it. I don't think that the goal of our society should be well, we've got to work as hard as we can and then take pride in not burning out. That's insane.
Speaker 2:That's not cool, but then, like I've never been cool, so I'm fine to not subscribe to that anymore and I enjoy rest. Now I've had to learn what it means to take a nap and the joy of taking a nap and just relaxing and learning how nice it is to actually book myself in for a massage or do something quiet, and a lot of that can be a skill, a new skill that you have to learn if you're so used to being on the go all the time. So that's something that I'm very much trying to unlearn all the time. So that's something that I'm very much trying to unlearn and it's a process. But I think I'm better now at relaxing than I was 10 years ago, and it sounds ridiculous to say I need to learn how to chill out, but that is one of the biggest lessons I've had to learn since burning out.
Speaker 1:Well, we might get into that a little bit deeper in our tarot reading which is coming up very soon for you and me, but also in a few days for listeners of this podcast.
Speaker 1:Um, but between now and when people will get to listen to that, what to close out, what would you sort of be, what would be your kind of brief summary of the title of your book? Is emotional female. What would be your brief summary of the title of your book? Is Emotional Female. What would be your brief summary of the idea of emotional female and how it?
Speaker 2:relates to the concept of untethering. I think that being an emotional female, being called one, is being tethered to these very misogynistic ideas of what women should be like. And being emotional is actually a good thing, and I think that we really need to tap into that because it's what makes us good humans. And so I think that in the process of untethering, I've had to accept that I am an emotional person and that there's nothing wrong with being emotional. And sometimes, you know, with emotional dysregulation, I'm not always great at controlling my emotions and expressing them. And again, when it relating back to the new autism diagnosis, sometimes people don't perceive me to be empathetic because, even though I feel it, I can't always show it. So I think a lot of it is to do with perception. But in saying that, I don't think we should really get too bogged down in how we're being perceived, and to be comfortable with yourself as a person and not think that you have to act a certain way in order for other people to think that you're a good person.
Speaker 1:Well, I think you're a good person, Yumiko. Thank you.
Speaker 2:And it's been a pleasure. I think you're a good person too. You have a heart of gold, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1:It's been a pleasure to speak to you on this episode of Untethered. I look forward to reading your cards in just a moment, but just to say thank you so much for shining that light, I think, on an industry that really needs to have the light shone on it, and I know for you it hasn't come without a cost. So I really hope that, with that learning to take pleasure and rest, I hope that you're also taking joy in living and feeling like there are, you know, feeling real confidence and faith in your choice to step away and understand that life is too short to be burning out before 40.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, life is good now. I have nothing to complain about, and I think I just want to touch on a little thing that you and Arja discussed in your conversation about being around optimists, and I think that is really important. And, again tying into the theme of trauma that we started with, a lot of people who go through trauma take different paths, you know, and it's not necessarily their fault if they end up in trouble or end up in drugs and alcohol or whatever happens. You know whatever you need to do to cope with your trauma is totally valid, but I think you can also really do something with optimism. It doesn't matter how hard it's been or what obstacles you have you've had to overcome. I think that having optimism is one of the things that keeps me going. So, you know, to whoever's listening, who's going through a hard time, I just want to say that having a little bit of optimism in your heart goes a really long way.
Speaker 1:What a beautiful note to end this particular conversation on Yumiko Karota. Thank you so much for joining me on Untethered and I look forward now to finding out a little bit more about what the stars and the planets have to say about you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Claire.
Speaker 1:That was the wonderful Yumiko Karota speaking with me on Untethered about burnout, late stage neurodivergent diagnosis, what it means to be a woman in the medical field and what it means to be an Asian woman in particular, and when you're facing down misogyny and racism. It's been a pleasure to speak to Yumiko. You can buy her book Emotional Female at the link included on the liner notes of this episode. Don't forget you can also sign up to my sub stack, where you will be the recipient of two weekly newsletters, one about how to discredit silly arguments made by misogynists and the other a very special tarot club. There will also be bonus episodes occasionally of this podcast there and many other things as well.
Speaker 1:So if you're interested in joining the dear clementine community, hit the link in the liner notes of this episode. The small, small price of one glass of wine a month. You can get access to that and so much more if you'd like to contact me about anything to do with the podcast, offer me feedback or if you would like to sponsor any future episodes. You can get to me on clementineford at gmailcom. Don't forget to tune in on Saturday for the second part of my conversation with Yumiko, where we will go deep with a special tarot card reading. Until then, stay untethered, baby.