Today we’d like to introduce you to Serena Sun.
Hi Serena, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Hi! I am a creator and creative. I’m the Founder and CEO of the nonprofit, Breaking Taboo on mental health awareness & suicide prevention. I am a mental health advocate with a background in psychology, suicide prevention education, and personal development. I also have a background in the creative arts. I’m a musician who is a recipient of the 25th annual Los Angeles Music Awards, and I moved out to LA when I was 17 with a scholarship for concert piano. I teach music and I’m a certified life coach, with certifications in CBT and NLP as well as suicide assessment. I am a filmmaker who is working on my first documentary about mental health. I write scripts, novels, poetry, and songs. I am a model and an actor with a theatre background. I’m an animal lover and an avid horseback rider. I am a philanthropist with a vision and I have a hunger for life experiences.
Breaking Taboo is a life long mission that has organically come into fruition. I manage everything from being the Editor In Chief of our articles, to managing our media videos and the creation of our podcast series, to our website, programs, events, and managing our social media platforms, where we currently have over 200k organic followers, not including our other platforms, and growing by 2-3000 per week.
People often ask me why I do so much, and why did I start a nonprofit on mental health and suicide prevention. A lot has happened on my journey. I’ve had many twists, turns, and challenges while trying to make the most of my vision of what I see is possible.
I had experienced a lot of trauma while growing up, particularly as an adolescent, and I suppose moving out to the other side of the country when I was 17 for college, not knowing a single person was the only way I could really begin to find myself. Coming from a very traditional Chinese family, I majored in piano because it was the only creative thing I was allowed to seriously pursue as a child. Music performance as a major at my university turned out to be the most strenuous, pressure driven five years program, wherein I witnessed multiple people who got nervous breakdowns. After I decided I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life just playing dead people music, I tried out music therapy before switching completely to psychology and graduated with my Bachelors in Science. During college (and in high school) I was scouted by quite a few agencies. I figured modeling was a great way to make some extra cash while I had begun to work on my first novel. When my agents found out that I had an acting background, they encouraged me to pursue that – after all, I was in Los Angeles, the film capital of the world. Somewhere along the way a very talented, rather well-known music producer found me. He was excited that I was a “triple threat” and so, I started recording music with him.
Unfortunately, I experienced a Me Too story, something that I had only very recently processed or opened up publicly about. I basically quit the entire music industry for years, thinking that I wasn’t cut out for it. I moved my creative focus to acting and writing- both of which have always been great forms of therapy for me. Writing gives self reflection and creation. Acting, I found to be healing in the sense that I got to dive into and release my emotions. Creativity has always made me more authentic with myself and more in tune with my feelings. I also dived into the world of personal development and continued my work in mental health. I taught at-risk-youth creative therapy and life skills, I gave seminars on suicide prevention. I spent the good part of a decade working on myself and I continued to volunteer wherever I could – in animal shelters, nursing homes, homeless drives, wherever.
Along the way, I lost a few friends to suicide. This was not new to me, as I had lost my first friend to suicide as early as in high school, and I have experience depression myself. In fact, the novel I was working on is about this topic. After loosing another close friend, I had a lightbulb moment where I realized that I could take all of my background, my skills, my training – and create something that could help the world on a larger scale. I realized that it wasn’t necessarily the fact that people get sad or depressed, but it was the taboo that was preventing people from getting the help they need. That’s when I created Breaking Taboo.
The documentary actually came first, as the intention of my documentary is to provide people with the education that I typically gave at seminars and to serve it to them within the comfort of their own homes so that everyone can have access to life saving tools. The ball quickly got rolling, and an entire movement soon progressed. Most of my time now is dedicated to Breaking Taboo. It has been a great challenge, and I constantly have to utilize everything from my background – from entrepreneurship, creativity, personal development, film, and psychology. But I wouldn’t be able to handle it all if it weren’t for my amazing, supportive team-my team is truly in this because they care about making a difference in order to save lives. We continue to grow the organization and serve our communities – and hopefully, eventually the world. However, even if we can save just one life, it will all be worth it in the end.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It has definitely been challenging. There have been many struggles along the way, but I suppose I have never really known a life without much struggle – so in that sense, I’ve always been prepared to take on big things that might scare most people off. I say that with a dose of amusement. The challenges have been both personal and career-oriented. Within myself, I have had to constantly work on my own mental health. I am always checking myself to see if I’m walking my own walk. I can’t just have a nonprofit on breaking the taboo around mental health and not set an example in myself.
The entertainment industry is it’s own challenge. I suppose the biggest one was my Me Too story, which made me quit the music industry entirely. In fact, I didn’t even know I had a Me Too story until the Me Too movement came out and someone pointed out to me that I had been molested. For years I was blaming myself, I was telling myself that that’s just how the entertainment industry worked. I questioned whether or not I was cut out for it because I refused to sleep my way to the top. It sounds really bad, but the stories are there for a reason – and I wouldn’t be surprised if the stories that have gone public are only a tiny percentage of all of them.
Another challenge is the amount of rejection I have learned to deal with. Paving new paths is definitely not for the faint of heart – and you must have a dream to carry you through. In a way, the entertainment world has prepped me for the entrepreneurial world. Businesses and organizations are similar to productions on a much larger scale. You must have the grit and you can’t be scared. You’re going to get a lot of rejections, but if you believe in your mission – in my case, mental health and suicide prevention – then you will do what it takes to see it through.
Other challenges were the impact of losing my friends, which may have been somewhat related to their own challenges within the entertainment industry. It’s not easy being an artist or a creative, and many struggles with mental health, fitting into society, making ends meet, etc. To try to make a career out of creativity can be one of the most challenging tests one could put themselves through- and I saw this first hand. The entertainment industry is strange in the sense that so much of it is just complete chance. Some people think you need to give it all of your heart, soul, and breath in order to “make it”, but I’ve heard from even the best casting directors in the industry that you have to have something else going on in your life. In their words, “It’s a rollercoaster ride, and it will chew you up and spit you out”. Whether this is true or not, all I know is that I’ve lost friends to it. Granted, there are usually other predispositions, but being at the mercy of such an unpredictable, challenging, and sadly often disrespected career choice can take a toll. That is a taboo I would like to break also- Creativity.
Myself, however, I guess I’m both cursed and blessed that I always have many things going on. My mind sometimes runs so fast I feel like the rest of me struggles to keep up. But I think that can said about most things though, you have to have other things going for you. Your life can’t just be about one thing, especially not just about work or your career. And this is coming from someone who usually works 12 hour days – but even I know I don’t want to spend the rest of my life doing only work.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
My dad always tells me, “Don’t waste your talents”, and recently I’ve been joking back, “That’s why I do so many things!” Seriously, whenever people ask me “What do you do?” I cringe or have someone else explain it for me because it can take half an hour to describe. But maybe that’s just because I ramble, haha.
The point is, all these aspects and things that I do, they all make up who I am. Ultimately, I am me, and these are all the parts which make me whole and unique. I used to put on many different hats, and back when I was younger and proving myself in a world full of old male producers or businessmen, I would do things like wear head to toe suits and put my hair up and wear minimal makeup so I could appear as unfeminine and therefore as professional as possible. So that I could fit into old male standards. But now, as I grow older, I’m more and more about authenticity. I built the culture of my nonprofit around being authentic, and like I said, I have to walk the walk. So now, my new thing is figuring out ways to let everything bleed into each other and make every endeavor even stronger. I don’t want to hide any part of myself, and in fact, I am learning – as a part of my own self-growth – to be proud of every aspect of myself and everything I do.
After all, why can’t I be both feminine and strong and professional at the same time?
I am also happy to announce that I recently started creating music again. I also teach piano and voice! It’s more of a fun hobby to do with friends for me nowadays, but who knows. Just like owning my femininity, owning my creativity and owning all parts of what makes me unique is what authenticity looks like.
What are you most proud of?
In my traditional Asian culture, you’re not taught to be proud. Having pride is not a good thing – being humble is. I think the Western culture can learn a little from that mindset – actually, they can both learn from each other. I’m trying to teach myself to be somewhere in between. I can be proud of certain things, as long as I don’t wear my pride on my sleeve. But to answer the question of what I’m most proud of – I’d say it’s probably my own self-development. It’s my constant journey to be working on myself, becoming the person I want to be, accepting the person I am, learning how to love and respect myself, conquering my own demons and my own trauma. I want to make sure I’m not one of those people who pass it onto others or my next generations. Generational trauma is a real thing and all too common, and I think it can all be so much better if people just took the time and energy to work on themselves – for their own sakes and for the sake of everyone around them.
What has been the most important lesson you’ve learned along your journey?
Just do it. Like Nike said, haha. Or this one: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.” I’ve also heard the latter quote replace “do” with “say”. I think this resonates with me because one of my biggest challenges is that I can be very analytical and think about things a lot. It’s my forte if it comes to self-reflection and “smarts” but it’s my weakness if I psych myself out. I know growing up that came from having anxious, protective parents, but it’s been a life long journey for me to be able to just say “f it, let’s just see what happens” and just do it. When I think about it, the some of the best choices I’ve made have been me just taking the leap and just trusting life. It’s also pretty exciting.
I mean, we all make mistakes – but it’s true. I’ve never regretted doing or saying something as much as I’ve regretted not doing or saying something. The “saying” part is also one of the biggest lessons I have learned. Having healthy communication is something I see a lot of people struggle with. I believe that most relationship and family dynamic issues can be resolved with healthy communication (which includes good listening) and an open mind. After all, that’s half of therapy. I believe that a lot of suicides and the taboo around mental health stem from keeping things bottled up instead of communicating. Unhealthy communication, including the lack thereof leads to all sorts of unnecessary evils. So, I’ve learned the importance of authentic communication and I try to practice it.
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
- Website: breaking-taboo.org; musicwithserena.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/serenahopesun
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/serenahopesun
- Twitter: www.twitter.com/serenahopesun
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfvDTsxkJj1f44B9QRRrtYA
