Monthly Archive

Warning: this is a long post, and it is a bit confusing and will probably be edited after the New Year. Until then, happy holidays.

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I took this macroeconomics class, in an attempt to branch out of my field and my imperatives and incorporate some mainstream jargon into my everyday life. I sort of felt like a not-so-undercover spy the entire semester, as I took notes in the back, trying to hold back laughter or tears or anger at the extremely-pro-capitalist arguments presented to me and made by classmates around me.

Everyday, I had a story about this econ. class. Everyday, I had some comment, some rant. I think it shaped my semester in ways that I’m only now thinking about, because, well, I have the time now, and it’s time to start owning up to things, and being a bit more honest with myself.

So the truth about macroeconomics was, I felt stupid there. I felt like my lens of analysis was unimportant, impractical, and irrelevant. I felt like the one time I couldn’t hold back my opinion, the majority (I’ll get to this clarification in a minute) of the classroom looked at me like I was crazy; and instead of feeling like I was speaking up for myself, I doubted my intelligence because it takes me a long time to understand GDP and aggregate demand. What does she know? said the voice, every time I stepped into the classroom.

That class reminded me how important it is to carve out a supportive space for oneself; because we can’t always avoid the Dominant Voice, and we can’t always yell and cry and scream about every problematic notion that passes us by. Sometimes we just have to find a group of people who understand us, and help us through the day-to-day. I’m so happy for having found people like that in college. You know who you all are.

Something interesting happened in my economics class as well: I finally ran into a straight white man who I had to (very reluctantly) admit was pretty smart. I mean,  after having spent the last 2 years meeting man after man who either claimed to be really progressive and wasn’t, or was just a racist/sexist/classist/homophobic asshole, I met someone who said critical things in the one class I least expected.

It finally hit me how distrustful of everyone I have become - how hard it was for me to articulate that there was someone smart in this class, who could talk about racism and xenophobia (albeit in an academic context).

But of course I have become distrustful, right? After all, I have been in bad relationships, I have been called too sensitive, too radical, too emotional, too loud, to awkward, too aggressive, too stubborn and too stupid, by men along the way, and I have felt betrayed by the ones who I, even now, consider to be good friends.

In conclusion, my macroecon. class became the very space in which I was able to recognize that it was time to start at least thinking about what it means to swim back to the island.

A wonderful friend, I’m talking one of the best, inevitably sat me down one day to verbally slap me in the face with a fantastic metaphor that a professor had shared with her. She said that we all are on a kind of island that we have spent our lives on, and that certain things might happen that make us want to leave the island. So we do. And the struggle comes in swimming back to the island, because swimming back is difficult, and often long and definitely tiring. But once we swim back, once we have set our own pace, the same island we left long ago has a different meaning. Because this time we arrived on our own terms.  She also reminded me, cleverly, that sometimes, we may decide never to return to the island. And that’s ok.

I only recently swam back to the island of my South Asian identity. I had rejected it for years, having associated it with cultural norms and politics that I could not support. After years of living off the island, attempting to ignore my race and my roots and my skin, I came face to face with a wave of politics that shaped my identity as a woman of color. This process encouraged me to swim back, back to an island that I could dis-identify with, find my support in, and even embrace.

The island I’m struggling to swim back to now is one that I left the moment I was able to use the term “patriarchal,” the day I was able to name my longest romantic relationship an emotionally and verbally abusive one. I thought I could never go back, because I thought it made me insecure and ignorant and weak. I thought I could never want to go back. I rejected and ignored this part of my life for a long time, forgiving the experiences, but never myself. How can we ever learn to trust again? After a history of colonization and a context of oppression, how can we ever be honest with another human being?

(There are three people I feel I trust completely: two are my best friends, and the third is my mother)

It turns out, being away from the island has also made me feel insecure and ignorant and weak. Because now, instead of actively resisting, I’ve just started to float around (recall the image of passively standing on the moving walkway). I need to be swimming. I need to reclaim the agency I stripped away from myself because I was scared to be honest and truthful with myself about what I want for fear of being hurt and traumatized.

I don’t know what to label this island, because I don’t know what it means for me to go back. But the process begins with self-care and it begins with writing. So I wrote.

Until 2008 dear readers.

Oooh it’s so hard to write about self-care. But not harder than actually doing it.

The thing is over the last month, that is, the last four weeks of the semester, I’ve done a lot of taking care of others. And that’s fine. Because I love my friends, and I care about them, and because that’s what it means to be a friend.

But the problem is, that I use taking care of others as an excuse to not take care of myself.

When I should have been looking for a job, I looked for jobs for other people.

When I should have been writing cover letters, papers, and studying for econ., I was having semi-fake heart-to-hearts with people, asking them for advice about things I already knew the answer to, in an effort to feel like I was paying attention to myself.

When I should have taken the time to think about my own life, to figure out what I want from the next two years, I was doing….well…not that. I was performing…let’s call it “self-care procrastination” - mixing up the difference between actual self-care and things that seem like self-care.

Self-care varies. Self-care is a process. And you know what else? Self-care can’t happen all the time. Because if I spent all my time taking care of myself, I’d probably have to take a semester off from school to recover. Survival and self-care are not always synonymous. But they do dovetail.

Here’s another thing I am remembering again and again: Self-care is hard. It has never been easy for most of the women of color I love and admire. It’s usually the first thing we are willing to sacrifice, because it doesn’t hurt the people around us. And when we meet other people who don’t practice self-care, and even more people who don’t even have to think about practicing self-care because it’s normalized into their daily lives, self-care starts to seem more like a privilege we can’t afford. I do have the privilege of being able to think about self-care. I have the privilege to think about practicing it, and then practicing it. So here I go.

I used to think it was just about sleeping a reasonable number of hours a night, about eating three meals a day. But it’s about doing things that make my body feel good, and getting those chores done that I put off in exchange because that little subconscious voice is telling me it’s ok that I’m living in clutter. But I deserve better for myself - I would tell a friend that, wouldn’t I? Why is it so hard to take the advice we give others?

So over the next few weeks, I’m going to do those things I’ve been dreading, that scare me, that make my stomach flip: like thinking actively about my life after graduation, like looking for a job, and like taking space from people and their relationships, and figuring out what I want from my own life and my own relationships. It means writing again - being creative while I have time.

Once again, I’ve written so much and never got around to the island metaphor. But I will - because it’s hard to write about and because I’ve been putting it off.

Until tomorrow.

I stumbled across this today, a new show on CW Tv called “Crowned: the Mother of all Pageants” - I’m going to side-step the obvious annoyances I have with a mother-daughter pageant reality show (not even because they are obvious to me, more like it’s one in the morning, I should be writing a paper, so this post has to be short) and get straight to pointing out some things I noticed about the cast descriptions on the website. Get ready, because this is just amazing - and by amazing I mean I want to laugh and cry and scream at the same time.

1. Ada and Christian: white mother who has a daughter of color; the tagline under their names is “Hot & Not.” There is simply no way to justify this title.

2. Angela and Tenia: black mother and daughter team whose tag is “Skin Deep” even though neither of them mentions the relationship they have with one another, or their race or ethnic identity of any kind. What does “skin deep” even mean here?

3. Annette and Alana: another mother/daughter of color pair and lo and behold their title is “Silent but Deadly.” I like to refrain from cursing in blog posts but seriously: what the —-.

What I really don’t need right now is another reality show that is telling me that women of color cannot be “dream gals” or “sassy sisters” or “tomboy queens” (these are some of the other taglines of castmembers - not without their problems, but that isn’t my point here) - instead the threat they place on their competitors has to be indirectly or directly refer to their category as a racialized Other. None of the titles talk about their attitude or personality, and two of the phrases involve some sort of negative comparison - they’re silent, but also deadly! Watch out bombshell blondes, they’re coming after you.

And seriously, someone explain to me what “skin deep” means.

I do own one - a flat iron, I mean. I’ve had one for a while, but then when I first cut off most of my hair, the instrument was placed in the garage. Then over Thanksgiving, I went to the garage with the particular desire to find it. And now it is sitting on my dresser. And it’s kept my hair straight for the last two weeks.

If you have read my previous posts on hair, or if you know me at all, this would appear to be a warning sign of some kind - of a loss of politics, maybe some kind of experiment. After all, I’ve never spent much time on my hair; the main reason I’ve chosen to leave it long is so I can throw it back into a ponytail on the way to class (I really dislike when women who are sitting next to me pick at their untied, unwashed hair in class - then it sheds on my desk and I want to scream, “Take a shower!”).

I brought back the flat iron nearly a month after the sweater came along. The sweater, as my friends will clarify as they read this, is not actually a sweater. It’s this blue zip-up hoodie that I brought back with me after a quick trip to visit my parents in October. It came from my mother’s closet - she had bought it but it wasn’t really something she was wearing often and I initially put it on because home is a bit chilly and because I love when clothes smell like that familiar mom smell.

I wear it all the time, ever since I got back to this place. I’ve developed a reasonable collection of sweaters and jackets, it isn’t that. I’m actually someone - clothes that make me feel put together. But then the sweater came along and nothing feels as safe and warm. And you know what else? It doesn’t make me feel frumpy or tired or ugly. It makes me feel comfortable. I really love this sweater. I want to wear it to bed and I want it to perpetually remain clean so that I don’t ever have to wash it.

The question then is, when will I be able to go out again in something other than this sweater and not think about it sitting in all its warmth and comfort on my couch? Issues with body image - do they ever go away? It isn’t just weight issues. It’s that feeling of wanting to put my hands on my body when I’m looking in the mirror and hope that they rub away the things I cringe to look at. It’s when I want to cut off my hair over the bathroom sink because it worries me that the long hair is making me too weak (read: too feminine). It’s when I’m standing in front of the closet thinking how ridiculous it sounds to not want to go outside because I just feel ugly in everything.

(When am I going to start to love, really love, my bumps and scars and shape?)

Back to the flat iron - I’ve been straightening my hair because when you’re struggling to get work done, struggling to get out of bed, to not cry in class, to hear people talk at you day in and day out without asking ask how you are doing, you just want to glance in the mirror and say, “Hey, at least one part of me isn’t sub-par.”

Does it make me feel ugly and unkempt to walk outside with my big irregularly curly wavy natural hair? It really doesn’t. I don’t necessarily feel prettier with straight hair. I just feel like with straight hair, I can get away with wearing the same frumpy sweater everyday; I can get away with having the perpetual scowl on my face.

It has been a long and difficult semester. And I am constantly conflicted by desires to graduate and leave and the fear of not knowing what comes after that. And it has been a challenging time because I feel very shattered, in some way. I’ve spent a great deal with wonderful friends who are loving and supportive and I hear about what’s going on in their lives, and I think to myself, “I have no idea what to say to you because that’s simply not where I’m at right now. Right now I’m in a place where I have to deal with things on my own and I have to figure out my insecurities about myself and my body and future”

This is where I should be talking about the island metaphor, but it is too important and I am working on a separate post for it altogether. But trust me, it is good.