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This paper is an auto-ethnographic exploration of the historical, familial, and sociopolitical factors that led to my first psychosis at age 31, and the familial, cultural, and social supports that allowed me to achieve a virtually full recovery. I was born in Hong Kong to a refugee family that had fled Shanghai in 1949 and immigrated to the U.S. in 1955, when I was three and a half years old. In the early U.S. years, I was a lonely, rather volatile, and sometimes fearful child; but a move to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, at age eight allowed me to acquire a broad circle of friends outside of family. My fears, though not volatility, returned in my mid-teens, but as I learned, through psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, to understand and accept the world and the person I was within it, and especially after becoming a mother, my sense of self returned. After someone suggested in 2017 that I am an empath, I engaged in additional research, conversation, and writing that has opened doorways toward greater understanding of the unsettling experiences and sensations I have had throughout my life. Substantial portions of the lived experience narrative in this article is drawn directly from my 2016 memoir, Hearing Voices, Living Fully: Living with the Voices in My Head.