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.