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Introduction

My hand is shaking. I cannot take down the TikTok video. I cannot even toggle to the trash bin icon. I have been found out. I am flushed red and mortified. Shame floods my body. I have put up a video about the first time I learned to say “sorry.” The story is about my upbringing in an Asian household where the word “sorry” wasn’t used. The point of the video is that I was already nineteen when I learned to say “sorry” without sarcasm—that we can learn from unlikely teachers how to become better. The story is meant to be inspirational. It is, until my past comes back to bite me. I am a fraud, I think. I have been found out.

A young man writes in my video comments, “I served you at my store in 2015. You shouted at me. You were the worst customer I had in six years.” I toggle quickly to find his name and add him on Instagram, where I can message him voice notes to apologize. I delete the video, hands trembling. I want to shrink so small that I disappear. The shame that washes over me and sinks into my veins is like ink dropped in water; it spreads quickly, pervasively. My unlovable past is back to haunt me. For a moment, I am that girl whose cousin made a group chat on WhatsApp to bitch about her on a bachelorette party. For a moment, I am the girl who never had a pack of friends at high school. For a moment, I am the girl who didn’t even know herself, so her colleagues could not stand her. I am the girl who didn’t know how to love because she wasn’t shown enough love.

I stop myself. My counselor told me that catastrophizing is part of a trauma response. I breathe. I remember all the self-work and research I have done on connection; my hand stops trembling. I send a voice note to the young man, and I apologize. As I do this, my mind says, “You were the worst kind of shitty, enraged person.” Then my rational brain kicks in and says, “You were that person. That person was born in the belly of grief and loneliness. You do better now. GO FIX THIS.”

After counseling myself, I can dialogue with the young man. He watches some of my speeches, and I send him screenshots of messages from service people from when I lived in Dubai, who got promoted because I told their managers how amazing they were. I am trying to prove that the trauma that filled me with rage was a moment in time, my actions were not my character, and they certainly had nothing to do with him. He forgives me. He tells me I am so strong to have gone through what I have. Although he forgives me, it takes me weeks until I forgive myself. I am glad he got in touch; it was a mirror held up to me in the midst of writing this book, reminding me of the human part of “human connection.” To be human is to be deeply fallible.

You may feel rich with rage. Your trauma is bigger than you. You look at others with envy of the ease with which they view the world. People for them are not a threat. They feel so safe. You can tell by just looking at them. You have not felt safe in years. They laugh open-mouthed at criticism, and it cascades off them like water off the proverbial duck’s back. For you, criticism is a deep trigger, like a thorn being ripped out of the flesh of your foot. Like me, the lack of safety could have started by not being soothed by a caregiver or by losing a direct family member young.

By the time my mother’s legs stopped working, I felt even less safe. We were not one of the chosen families where the father bounces back and survives cancer. We were not one of the chosen families whose mother walks again after a stroke.

I remember when I started very delayed grief therapy. I had disassociated from my unbearable pain, so it was almost two decades later when I finally got to a therapist’s office. But better late than never. In therapy, I learned I needed help, not just to grieve my father’s death or my mother’s paralysis, but I needed to heal parts of me born much earlier, in my childhood.

My therapist asked me, “What do you want to get out of this?”

I said with self-hatred mixed with envy, “I want to be one of those easygoing people. Those people who are carefree and for whom everything is water off a duck’s back.”

Like the Aussie customers I had once watched at my father’s shop, replying “Can’t complain” to the question, “How are you?” So laid back, their gratitude so entrenched, or their expectations so small it could be summed up in two words.

I sat in that counselor’s office, in my socks, cross-legged on a chair. My arms crossed around me, embracing myself for fear that I would fall apart. I thought, Who were those people? Those people seemed to live on another planet foreign to us “trauma babies,” people for whom dysfunction was an ever-present shadow in our childhood. We would never be allowed entry into a smooth, easy existence, I thought to myself. But that statement, you will learn through this book, just wasn’t true. I secretly knew that it was untrue; otherwise, why would I have walked to reception and booked my next session? I had a small sliver of hope embedded in my gut after that session. I did not know it yet, but that sliver was human connection.

Have you felt a hint of disconnection from yourself? You remember your joy as a child. Carefree, artistic, and loving. Somewhere, a relative or primary caregiver puts you down. They do it again and again daily. For those of us who experience it, it is called a “little t” trauma, a chipping away at who you are. We talk too loudly, so we are shushed. We gain weight, so we are publicly shamed. We don’t get the best grades, so we’re destined to be the “dumb one” in the family.

I hope this book will be your first insight into the fact you are not alone. I will speak about things that are felt universally: loneliness in the midst of unprecedented digital connectivity, deepening sadness at the lack of human connection caused by an isolating pandemic, and the effects of childhood trauma on how we connect with others. I’ll also pull back the curtain to discuss things that some of us from an Asian background do not say out loud, let alone write in print. Maybe this will stop you from feeling you have something to be ashamed of because nothing augments shame like silence.

My hope is that you will feel less alone after reading this book. A book on human connection that doesn’t just talk about it but makes you feel more connected. Like your hopes for a life released from being “unlovable” exists. I know it exists because I have emerged on the other side. I started my healing by reading books and talking to people, tears streaming down my face like a forgotten pot on the stove boiling over. Bubbling with pain in my gut. I could not keep my lid on any longer. This book is designed to point an arrow at the places in your life where love and connection could flow in and fill the gaps. Then I hope it urges you to find other resources, like therapy or a coach, to build yourself back up with a more bespoke approach.

Through this book, you will learn how to reconnect with yourself. You’ll start thinking about why you feel a certain way when you fight with your partner, the tendrils of the argument reaching far back into your past. You’ll know who to go to when it’s time to speak about your pain. You’ll understand the kind of trust that is the foundation for authentic connection. You’ll find ways you never thought of to reach out to stop the chill of loneliness setting into your bones. At the end of each chapter, there will be practical connection challenges that can guide you in taking action. We all need to step beyond the pages to form relationships, and these will show you how to build rapport in your communication.

I could give you my professional bio here and tell you that I speak on stages around the world on the power of human connection. And that I have worked frontline for some of the biggest broadcasters. But as we already know, none of those things made me a master at human connection. None of those achievements healed me. In reality, your achievements won’t heal you either. The media taught me to communicate, but it didn’t help me build the kind of connection I’d want to share in a book.

I think what is more important to note is the bio between the lines. As I know it is for many, a search for love and connection is the thread running throughout my entire life story.

I was born in Singapore and raised in Australia to immigrant parents. My childhood was emotionally exhausting, and as soon as I could, I put space between myself and the place I was raised. I used ambition and achievement to get me out of there. Beginning with a scholarship to Switzerland at seventeen, I learned for the first time after living with three families that shouting and walking on eggshells were not an experience all children had.

I now have a Cavalier King Charles spaniel called Charlie; she is the worst at saving face ever. She wags her tail with a desperation and neediness for cuddles that stops people on the street. “Look at her tail; it’s so cute.” She’s so obvious, they think and point. Her whole bum moves when she wags her tail, impeding how she walks. All because she wants love and approval. That was me. My entire way of connecting with people was impaired because I believed I was completely starved of the true connection we all need. This gave off a desperation in the way I connected with others, which was noticeable to everyone but me. This desperate energy repelled the connection I wanted so badly even further. This book traces the journey into how that behavior came to be...