Welcome to Culturally Enough.! A newsletter community to honor and celebrate our cultural differences, while also learning ways to show up more authentically and rooted in our multicultural identities.
As an extension of Brown Girl Therapy, this is the only online community facilitated by a mental health professional for first-, second-, and third-generation immigrants — and frankly, anyone who is straddling more than one culture.
I do not want to act as a gatekeeper of your voices and thoughts, nor do I believe I have all the answers. Instead, together, we will invest in our shared growth and learning to break cycles and live healthier, more authentic lives. Community care is self care is community care…
I’m Sahaj Kaur Kohli, MA.Ed&HD, NCC, founder of Brown Girl Therapy, a mental health professional, a daughter of Indian immigrants and a granddaughter of refugees. I write and research extensively about the intersection of identity, culture, and mental health. I am a Washington Post advice columnist and I am writing an upcoming book for Penguin Life (2024).
As a daughter of Indian immigrants, and the first in my family to be born in the West, who also traveled to Kobe, Japan annually for the first 18 years of my life to visit my maternal family… I know what it’s like to feel the push-and-pull of differing cultural values, norms, and expectations.
As a mental health professional, I help immigrant families, and adult children of immigrants identify their dominant stories — what they’ve been told, what they tell themselves — when it comes to feeling enough in their differing cultural identities.
Basically, I want to help you feel culturally enough.
And, I really, really want to spend less time on social media. I want to show up more honestly, more radically, and more vulnerably, but Instagram and Twitter have their own algorithm and their own vibes that keep me from feeling as engaged or as connected with all of you.
I want to dive deeper into concepts and themes I am researching and seeing in my work with adult children of immigrants, and I want to share these musings and findings with you. So, I decided to start this newsletter in hopes to connect with you, connect you with each other, and invest in a community that is designed to facilitate shared learning, and let’s be honest, unlearning.
About The Newsletter Community
Culturally Enough. has two different community options:
A free monthly newsletter sent out on the first of every month. This includes: first dibs on any upcoming community events; brief musings on what I am thinking about or reading that month, especially as I dive into my own multicultural identity; updates on the book writing journey; tidbits to help you on your mental health and bi/multicultural competency journey.
A free additional monthly short and sweet post with a resource or recommendation and brief commentary.
Or there’s a subscriber only, paid option where you will receive the free monthly email and:
Access to weekly subscriber only posts: These community posts will be posted every weekend and may include:
Extended commentary on what I post on Brown Girl Therapy’s Instagram account, with more tips and personal anecdotes from Sahaj Kohli.
Extended commentary on my advice to readers in my Washington Post advice column (and how I got there).
Group discussions on a theme or a (hypothetical or crowdsourced) question, honing in on the power of peer support and community care.
Exclusive community polls that you can respond to and discuss.
Short videos on a concept, issue, or reflections from my lens as a narrative-driven mental health professional to help you do the work on your own time.
Two monthly conversation clubs on the second and last Sunday of every month from 1pm-2pm ET where we will come together for 60 minutes on Zoom and break up into small groups and meet each other and talk about a specific theme or topic together. These are casual meetups that will allow you all to meet each other more intimately and build on your community! (This is not therapy!)
Commenting privileges on all posts and access to the full archive.
Other resources offered include worksheets, journal prompts, book recommendations, Q+As, short interviews in podcast form, input and voting rights to future content, and therapy resources.
Each month, a portion of the proceeds will be donated to an organization, and you will receive these updates in the monthly newsletter.
Why Subscribe To The Paid Version?
The paid version offers a combination of resources, content, and community that does not exist anywhere else for bicultural and multicultural folks. While this may be an extension of Brown Girl Therapy, we will go deeper and connect more intimately, and intentionally, than possible on social media.
This is my life’s work. When I first started Brown Girl Therapy, I was being paid through a full-time job and it was a side hustle. Now, I am looking to build a sustainable life around sharing and facilitating conversations and learning when it comes to cultural brokering and rooting into our multicultural identities. There’s so much I am learning that is not going into my upcoming book, or transcends what I am comfortable saying or sharing on social media (where it feels like I am talking into an abyss). This feels like the space for those conversations.
By subscribing to the paid version, you have my gratitude for your belief in and support of my work, and you are with me in challenging this belief that as a “content creator” I must be working for free or must be urgently overworking. In this space, I want to prioritize reciprocity, and honor our mutual capacity as we do this difficult work together. By paying, you’re making it possible for me to do my very best work and are contributing to my effort toward sustainability. Imagine what we can do down the road together — I can bring on a research assistant, guest writers, and experts; building this into something more far-reaching and bigger than we can fathom today. Let’s do it.
Paid subscribers also support me in offering no-cost subscriptions to those who need it. If you are in a position where you can donate a subscription, please do so here. And, if being a paid subscriber just isn’t for you, you’ll still get my newsletter + an additional post every month.
*Disclaimer: Culturally Enough. is not therapy, a mental health service, nor is it a substitute for mental health services of any kind. I am not showing up in this space as your therapist — I am showing up here as a curiosity-driven writer, peer, and a human. If you are looking for therapy, please consult with your local mental health resources.
