Joel Kim Booster: I Knew I Was Gay Before I Knew I Was Asian

Mayim Bialik's Breakdown

Mayim Bialik

Mental Health, Society & Culture, Wellness, Health & Fitness, Comedy, Thebigbangtheory, Spirituality, Selfimprovement, Mentalhealth

4.7 • 5.2K Ratings

🗓️ 31 January 2023

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Joel Kim Booster (stand-up comedian, writer, actor) opens up about bipolar disorder, his early sexual identity realizations, and the challenges of living at the intersection of a variety of cultures. He discusses the complexities of being adopted as a baby by a white American Baptist family, his tumultuous teenage years of finding himself while grappling with his deeply religious and conservative parents, and how the arts helped him with his coming out process. Joel details how his bipolar diagnosis helped him reframe his life experiences, his “productive” hypomania, the benefits of medication, and why it can be difficult to let go of mental illness. He reveals why social media has been the biggest stressor on his mental health, how the depiction of Asian men fed into his depression, and the frustration and freedom that comes with being “stereotypically gay.” Mayim breaks down the different types of bipolar disorder and how the condition manifests.

Transcript

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0:00.0	We're in this place culturally around race where for the first time white people are
0:08.2	starting to have their behavior pathologized in a joking way to the rest of their race.
0:13.4	You know, I think a good example of this is that white people don't season their food
0:16.8	is like something that is like a trope that you're seeing and you're seeing white people
0:21.0	really respond to this being like, hey, I don't like this feeling.
0:25.4	But the fact is that there is no amount of saying white people don't season their food
0:32.0	that will actually impact the white community as a whole.
0:36.2	White people have had to deal with these jokes now for a couple of decades maybe at most.
0:42.5	We're really struggling, okay?
0:44.0	It's really hard.
0:45.7	Whereas we're sort of up against a century of these messages and these ideas around who
0:52.8	we are as people based on our race that are really hard to dismantle.
1:12.3	My maybe all it's breakdown is supported by athletic greens.
1:15.9	I use athletic greens every day.
1:19.2	Why did I start taking it because I was one of those people who was taking a million
1:23.3	and powders and supplements and then forgetting to take them because I was so frustrated
1:26.5	and I didn't want to take them because there was too many.
1:29.4	I started using athletic greens because it's one delicious scoop and in that scoop you
1:35.2	get 75 high quality vitamins, minerals, whole food source, superfoods, probiotics and
1:40.7	adaptogens.
1:41.8	It helps me start my day off right.
1:43.4	It supports my gut health, my nervous system, my immune system, my energy recovery, focus
	...

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