Opening
In Chapters 21–25, Stephanie Foo chases every possible cure, then realizes she’s turning healing into another job. A psychedelic breakthrough gives her a language for her pain, and a return to San Jose forces her to test her memories against the world that made them—until one recovered scene restores her faith in her own story.
What Happens
Chapter 21
Stephanie packs her days with restorative yoga, meditation, acupuncture, and even holotropic breathwork meant to induce hallucinations through hyperventilation. She joins an informal childhood-trauma support group and recognizes her own patterns in others—validating and unsettling at once. Seeing the members’ kindness and talent challenges her internalized belief that people with Complex Trauma and Its Lifelong Impact are “monstrous.”
She notices her calendar brims with trauma-centered tasks and realizes she’s treating recovery like another performance metric—a form of Workaholism as a Trauma Response. Arriving late and tense to a meditation class, she catches herself: “I was stressing out about not being perfect at my relaxation class.” She scales back and chooses only what brings easy joy, recommitting to The Journey of Healing and Recovery as a source of nourishment, not pressure.
Chapter 22
Turning to psilocybin mushrooms—once helpful after a breakup—Stephanie hopes for self-acceptance now that she has a C-PTSD diagnosis. The trip begins with self-loathing but cracks open into a metaphor: her trauma is a “void,” a “black hole” that devours praise and affection, leaving her endlessly hungry for more proof of love. During the trip, she finally absorbs her friends’ kindness, and the void softens.
Knowing one transcendent night won’t rewrite old programming, she decides to make the breakthrough practical. Gratitude, she realizes, is the “flame that penetrated the darkness,” so she “systematizes the light” by finally following her former therapist Samantha’s advice and keeping a gratitude journal. Recording moments of pride and joy lifts her baseline mood—“palliative care,” she calls it—that stabilizes the present while she prepares to confront the past.
Chapter 23
Part III opens with an elegy to San Jose, a “majority minority” city where immigrant cultures blend into a shared childhood—unspoken rules, vivid food, and a collective identity. Beneath that vibrancy, Stephanie recalls brutal academic pressure and widespread silence around pain. A group of “sad kids” plays “Who Had It Worse?”—swapping stories of parental volatility and violence rooted in Childhood Abuse and Family Dysfunction.
She links this violence to Intergenerational and Cultural Trauma: parents who survived war, poverty, and displacement lacked tools to metabolize their grief and passed it on. Children became conduits for adult anguish, turning it into perfect grades to “wipe away our parents’ brutal pasts.” Stephanie frames her returning question: Was her childhood uniquely horrific, or the quiet cost of growing up in the Valley of Heart’s Delight?
Chapter 24
Stephanie drives down the 280 to “fact-check my abuse,” acutely aware that trauma can warp memory. The first challenge arrives instantly: the hills she remembers as a “banal expanse” reveal themselves as “riotous” beauty. If dissociation hid this from her, what else did it steal? She asks, “Can a mentally ill woman ever be trusted with her own story?”
At her old high school—newly polished and well-funded—former teachers remember her as bright and self-sufficient, oblivious to her abandonment. They deny a pattern of abuse, attributing stress to “tiger moms” common to a high-achieving immigrant enclave. Their model-minority narrative contradicts her memories and leaves her more isolated, unsure whether she’s projecting personal trauma onto an entire community.
Chapter 25
A kind, elderly Vietnamese woman now living in Stephanie’s childhood home lets her look around. The layout is familiar; certain places trigger flashes—being thrown down the stairs, beaten in the den—but the expected flood of clarity doesn’t come. In the backyard, something else surfaces: “Nostalgia. Joy.” She realizes dissociation didn’t only erase the bad; it erased the good. The loss of happy memory feels like its own heartbreak.
Leaving, her doubt spikes—maybe the teachers are right—until she sees her old neighbor’s house. A memory returns: Barbara once confronted Stephanie’s Mother about the screaming and threatened to call the police. Terrified, young Stephanie begged her not to, protecting her mother to stop the threat. This scene becomes external validation: the abuse was real and audible. It demolishes the “bullshit” narrative of a happy, well-adjusted neighborhood and restores Stephanie’s resolve to trust her own account.
Character Development
Stephanie shifts from perfectionism disguised as self-care to intentional, joy-centered practices and from symptom management to truth-seeking. Naming her “void” gives her a map; gratitude gives her tools. The San Jose trip destabilizes her, then rebuilds her self-trust through one incontrovertible memory.
- Recognizes and interrupts performing wellness as work
- Adopts a gratitude practice to counter the void’s pull
- Moves from self-loathing toward Identity, Self-Loathing, and Self-Acceptance
- Tests personal memory against communal narratives
- Reclaims lost positive memories alongside traumatic ones
- Secures external validation (Barbara’s intervention) and recommits to her narrative
Themes & Symbols
The chapters braid two core strands: the interior technology of healing and the social architecture of trauma. The “void”/“black hole” gives form to the C-PTSD mechanism that swallows praise; gratitude becomes her counterforce, a repeatable practice that turns a mystical insight into daily light. Healing, she learns, isn’t another performance but a relationship to attention.
San Jose itself functions as symbol and setting. The “riotously beautiful” hills she once called “banal” expose how dissociation edits reality, erasing joy as well as pain. The teachers’ model-minority framing reveals how communities normalize or mislabel suffering, masking [intergenerational] forces under the language of success. Barbara’s intervention becomes a hard proof in a story plagued by doubt, anchoring personal memory in public record.
Key Quotes
“I was stressing out about not being perfect at my relaxation class.”
This line captures the paradox of turning recovery into a grind. Stephanie recognizes how trauma scripts can hijack even peace-seeking, and the moment catalyzes her pivot from mastery to gentleness.
The C-PTSD is a “void,” a “black hole.”
By naming the mechanism that devours love and praise, Stephanie externalizes self-loathing and makes it legible. The metaphor transforms shame into a system she can study—and counter.
Gratitude is the “flame that penetrated the darkness” and she resolves to “systematize the light.”
These images recast gratitude from cliché to technology. The move from flash insight to daily practice marks her evolution from chasing transcendence to building resilience.
Keeping a gratitude journal is “palliative care.”
She refuses false cures. The phrase honors what helps now while acknowledging that real healing requires facing origin wounds, not only managing symptoms.
“Can a mentally ill woman ever be trusted with her own story?”
This question is the section’s ethical and epistemic core. It surfaces the double bind for survivors: trauma unsettles memory, and that instability is used to dismiss their realities.
“Nostalgia. Joy.”
These two words upend her expectation of pure horror in the house. Recovering pleasure alongside pain complicates the past and restores pieces dissociation stole.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters mark a pivot from treating symptoms to confronting sources. Stephanie refines a sustainable toolkit (gratitude, discernment, community) and tests her history against the powerful cover story of the model minority. By reclaiming both beauty and brutality—and securing external proof in Barbara’s intervention—she reestablishes trust in her own mind. The memoir widens from a single life to a portrait of community, inheritance, and the quiet systems that can make suffering invisible.