Category Archive

There are a lot of things I want to be writing about, really. There are a lot of posts that float around in my head, about visiting the office today for my summer job and being assigned a cubicle and how I spent the remainder of my tour panicking in my head. There’s a post somewhere in the air about having graduated, about moving back home for a while, about the anxiety of nostalgia and of having to pick myself up and find another job in two months. There’s a post somewhere about finally committing to learning how to drive.

But the truth is, I’m in that headspace where all I want is for the posts to pass through my mind - writing them down is too hard, requires too much formulation. It always strikes me as interesting that although much of my blog has been dedicated to my personal feelings about things, I’m actually quite bad at dealing with feelings. It isn’t that I’m not emotional, I just always fear the emotional, and when it washes over me, be it through nostalgia or tears or anger, I dread it so so much.

Maybe over time, the processing of the larger things will happen on their own - or maybe they won’t need to be processed. Maybe time will just make those larger things seem more manageable.

In the few days I have left before I begin working full time (my first post-graduate Clark Kent job!), all I really truly want to do is write posts about heartbreak*. Because that’s the one thing I can’t seem to do enough processing about. I’ve mentioned it before but the reality is that I can’t seem to be patient about moving on - I always expect myself to do it so quickly. It’s not even been two weeks.

It happens a day at a time though, and part of the moving on means moving forward and trying not to let your mind take long vacations with nostalgia into the past. Trying not to romanticize the experience but also not coating everything with carefully-crafted cynicism. My attempts to not get caught in nostalgia have been fine during the day - but at night I’ve become the victim of those dreams that don’t feel like dreams. Last night I woke up in a panic because I thought my phone was ringing; thought it was one of those late night calls from a friend who wanted to hang out. I could feel that slightly giddy feeling in my sleep, of walking across campus to complain about classroom dynamics in a room filled with cigarette smoke and good music. I don’t miss college, that should go without saying, but I do miss the people, and sadly, I know I’ll miss the work at some point.

I’m awful at goodbyes which is why I just avoided them all this time around. I only said one, it was awful, in that overly emotional and vulnerable way, and I said it because it was the only uncertain relationship that remained after graduation.

I’m trying not to think about it.

It isn’t working.

Rest assured, readers (if there are still readers left after the recent stream of random inarticulate crap), I will soon get back to a stream of posts that actually make sense to people other than myself.

* I should clarify, that by heartbreak, I refer to the broken heart of a brown woman whose support network of nearest and dearest friends has now become spread all over the country, even out of the country. That support network was made up of the best of friends, the loudest of voices, the strongest of hearts, and yes, even a boy at one point. Just in case we all thought I meant heartbreak in the more conventional sense…

Note: This is an excerpt actually, from a speech I gave at an API Student Commencement Dinner at graduation - I had always had fantasies of speaking during graduation weekend so it was a real thrill - the content is important to me so I thought it was worth putting here.

Second Note: This prequel-my-post-with-a-note thing is not going to become a habit.

~*~

I think one of the hardest things about graduating is saying goodbye to the people we have grown to care about over the last few years. Being at a college like this has not been the easiest experience. It’s been difficult for some of us to get through four years of college. Being here has sometimes meant feeling lonely or disappointed or angry or scared or unsafe. But being here has also meant meeting some of the brightest and most competent and loving people ever…

Community need not be completely unified – it need not be made up of people who have the same shared experiences. It is made of voices that must learn to speak and listen to one another, and negotiate with one another. Participating in and working in and being in a community is a process – and it’s ok that our community here in this room has sometimes felt fragmented and disunified. It’s really ok – we all learned from each other and we found support with individuals here. I feel very lucky to have found the people here in this room when I did because these people helped me feel less scared, and less alone and less angry and less disappointed. These people helped me find a voice to speak clearly and articulately in spaces where I was afraid to speak. These people asked me to think about how best to serve my community, how best to live a liveable life, how best to take care of myself while also taking care of others. The people in this room are leaders. They helped make a difference here. They will continue to make a difference wherever they go. I’m so proud of the people here, of the students here. Given all of this, I will reiterate – saying goodbye is difficult.

But this is what I realized in the last few weeks – I’m ashamed to admit how late in my college years I truly came to understand this. I come from a history built on goodbyes – goodbyes that were much much more difficult than the ones I will have to say in the next two days. Let me expand on this a little.

In 1947, my grandmother, her siblings and her mother said goodbye to their home in what is now Pakistan. Her father would remain there to tie up loose ends while his family went on to start a new life in India. They did not know how he was doing for three years. It is called partition for a reason – it tore communities away from their homes and separated families from one another, sometimes for years and sometimes forever. I can still see the trauma in my grandmother’s eyes when she discusses this time in her life. I cannot imagine what it must have been for her to say goodbye to the people she loved, to the home she grew up in. I cannot imagine what it was like for her to say goodbye to her parents and move with her new husband to a new city, when she was only 21. How does one recover from these kinds of goodbyes?

My parents immigrated to the United States in 1982. My father and mother said goodbye to their families and arrived in a new place halfway around the world, with what they had. They did it, I think, for a life that would be better than the one they had left behind. They did it so they could live a life that wasn’t their parents’ lives. To do this meant saying goodbye to family and friends – it meant being separated from an entire history, it meant giving up a homeland, one that would never seem the same once they had left. What was it like to feel this kind of isolation? To feel so overwhelmed by homesickness at a time where one could not simply email or call regularly.

The point of my recollecting familial history is this: for most of us, myself included, we come from immigrant histories that our founded on goodbyes. We, or our parents or a parent or grandparents or great grandparents or great-great-grandparents left homes and families –risked heartbreak and homesickness so that we could eventually be here. That’s really astounding. That’s really something we need to consider when we leave college because it is a testament to the kind of love that exists amidst fear and anger and pain. I really believe that we have to stay committed to remembering and writing our own histories, of uncovering our own pasts, because there are many many people in the world that have tried to take this opportunity away from us. It’s important to realize that it isn’t just about making a difference through our work and our decisions on a political level, it isn’t just about looking towards the future, it is about remembering the people we’ve said goodbye to in order to create new opportunities for other people’s lives. The goodbyes we say today will give way to a better life for ourselves, and hopefully for our families, present and future.

Five days ago, a professor of mine, in a class that I am required to take, that is centered around 18th century European (read: white, male) philosophy, announced to the class that I had visited him during his office hours to let him know that I struggled to understand the course material (this was in an effort to meet with a new professor and discuss with him my feelings about his class - and people wonder why many women of color often resist asking for help).

This is a class in which I already feel insecure, due to my race, gender, and inability to relate to any of the material on a personal and political level.

How humiliating. I’ve written about insecurities in the classroom before, so I won’t reiterate. For those of you that don’t understand why this is problematic and hurtful, please do not contact me about this.

Lesson learned: the next time I visit a professor, I will ask for a verbal contract of confidentiality, even if it sounds ridiculous.

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.

**

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.

A brief note: this post is meant to be often sarcastic and sometimes ironic and even a bit harsh. Heaven forbid a woman use such narrative techniques to express her anger towards issues of patriarchy in and out of the classroom! But in all seriousness, this rant is in response to so many liberal men that I run into that I end up in conversations with, only to walk away frustrated at how simple considerations are completely ignored during these interactions. Enjoy.

Dear Mr. Liberal,

It has come to my attention that while all this time I have been worried that I was unable to talk to you, due to your performance of charm or wit or intelligence or social acceptability, in fact it is you who is unable to speak to me, due to your inability to actively acknowledge your privilege as a male in and outside the classroom. For your convenience, I have listed a few of your many offenses, in hopes of clearing up some of my concerns, and providing answers to the claim, “I don’t understand what the problem is”

1. Listen with your ears, not with your interrupting mouth. I’m sure you’re really eager to prove to yourself and everyone around you that you understand what I’m saying - hey, maybe I haven’t heard about that article in the paper yet, or maybe there’s something neat that happened to you last week that is sort of related to what I’m saying or maybe you found a quote in this book that adds to my point- It really doesn’t matter when I can’t get through what I’m saying because you cut me off. It also doesn’t “make it all better” to throw something in afterwards like “Oh sorry. What were you saying?” Don’t tell me what a good listener everyone thinks you are when I’m in the middle of telling you something. I know this might hurt, but sometimes, it’s ok when you can’t hear your voice in a room. It’s even ok not to be the first person to bring up a particular point. Remember, listening when I’m talking doesn’t necessarily mean that you are not engaged in a conversation.

2. If you simply have to interrupt, try to remember that I was telling a story. Mr. Liberal, you have such a tendency to go off on some sort of tangent and upon returning, you do not acknowledge that I was in the middle of a story. I shouldn’t have to use the phrase “what I was saying was…” I’m going to make it really easy for you, too and list out some of the things that I personally think are appropriate to use after your rude interruption:

“Wow, sorry for interrupting you, I got so excited about that thing I wanted to tell you. But you were talking about ____ ___ and I really want to hear the rest of the story/more about it”

“I’m so rude. So what happened with ______?”

I even have an example of what to do if you are just bored and really don’t want to hear what I have to say! (Because, yes, I’ll admit, that definitely happens)

“So sorry to interrupt. I actually have to go [insert excuse here]“

These sentences may be adapted to suit your own personal conversational style. Collect all three! Then try to remember that first point I made, about not interrupting.

3. Ask questions. You know what’s rude? When I ask you a question like, “What did you think about [insert progressive point here]?” and then you spend five minutes talking about it, narrating in circles and finally getting to a point, and then wait for me to ask your opinion about something else. It’s pretty cool when you say “what did you think?” - and yea, I know you think you do that all the time. But trust me. You usually don’t. Questions are good because they are indicators of engaging in conversation.

Don’t want to ask questions because you don’t want to know my opinion?
Good point- why am I even trying to talk to you. Good day, sir.

Don’t want to ask questions because I always ask them?
Hm…you should think about why that is a little more.

4. Don’t patronize me. Isn’t this self explanatory? Let’s hope it is.

5. Try to keep in mind that you carry with you certain entitlements that I will never understand. It’s a good thing you claim to be so well-read and brilliant, because that means you have probably encountered at least one or two texts that elaborate on this statement. It’s tricky, understanding why my eyes glaze over a little while you’re talking, I know. But if you attempt to shift your paradigm a bit, perhaps you’ll see that usually I’m taking into account why you are able to say certain things without hesitation, why you are so confident in your ability to project and perpetuate norms, why you don’t notice that I was in the middle of a sentence, or was waiting for you to engage in a conversation. When we are affirmed at every moment because of a particular part of our identity, it may be difficult to understand why every other individual around us does not “just” do certain things or “just” say certain things or “just” speak up in class. But then, it is also difficult to survive every day when one is subjected to daily violence because they are marginalized in society. So, yeah. I don’t really feel bad for you.

6. Don’t thank me for doing the work you should have done. Take accountability for the fact that you did not do it. This one needs a bit of explanation because it can be easily misinterpreted. One day, I went on a semi-tirade in class about the lack of critical discussion going on, particularly when it came to the colonial apparatus and issues of race/gender (it was a postcolonial literature class, so this was not an unreasonable criticism). After class, a member of your Liberal label approached me and said: “Thanks for saying that. I was going to say that, but I was really tired”

(Funny, so was I.)

With privilege comes the opportunity to step back from the fight without consequence to your own emotional or physical health. Perhaps your friend, dear Liberal, should have simply affirmed my comment instead of making some patronizing excuse as to why they weren’t able to articulate themselves in a moment where criticism of the class became necessary. There are times to thank me for doing work and taking action, and there are times to acknowledge your lack of work. Work on understanding the difference, I beg you.

7. Just because you can point it out in academic text doesn’t mean you get it. Mr. Liberal, you are so well read! You have certainly taken steps in your academic life to educate yourself about issues of gender and possibly race or class or sexual orientation. You’re at a point even, where you can read a novel or essay or article, and point out the problematics of the text. Maybe you even get to this point before some of the other women in the class, because you’re just so eager to share your wealth of knowledge.

Maybe if I wrote a story about a Liberal Man who interrupted women, never offered to take notes during meetings, never took accountability for their lack of effort, never directly admitted to their participation in patriarchal norms, and felt the need to prove his awareness of gender dynamics at the cost of silencing women in the classroom, you would be able to see that your understanding of theory does not translate into your everyday praxis.

8. Read some articles that make you uncomfortable and possibly knock you off your high liberal pedestal.

Laurelin has a great letter to Leftist men that you should read. And in case you never got around to understanding male privilege, here’s this for you - actually that site is where I will start recommending all the Liberal Men I run into in my day to day life, who want me to educate them 24/7. Then, you should read every single thing on this site.

And so Mr. Liberal, I have reached the end of my letter. Take care and remember, you can’t call yourself progressive when you aren’t making any progress.

-obw.

I am plagued, dear readers, by three large and loaded words that have haunted me in college for nearly four years. Two terms that are plagued themselves by overuse and misunderstanding. And I’m going to try to get to my issue with both terms, though it could very well happen that I get stuck on one and have to finish up at another time.

I’ve been called oversensitive many times, in many different contexts. I remember having to do assignments in middle school where you have to describe yourself for some reason, and I often picked the term “really sensitive.” Hell, that’s what I was, really - sensitive about things, about what people say to me, about what people say to other people, about people’s actions. I still feel this way; of course now I don’t connote these traits with oversensitivity. I don’t believe sensitivity towards certain actions and hegemonies keeps me from developing the thick skin I need to survive. And I don’t believe there is anything “over” about my sensitivity.

There is a line drawn, it seems, that divides the normal or appropriate amount of concern from all other amounts. If normalcy dictates what is an appropriate amount of sensitivity (which varies based on race, class, gender, sexual orientation, age, etc.) to have about a given circumstance, then oversensitivity perhaps implies sensitivity in some sort of marginal space.

I think maybe using examples is a better way to explain myself. I’m sure I’ve mentioned this in the past (long ago, when this blog was in its first weeks) that there was an ex- who was filled with good intentions who told me that I was emotionally high maintenance and didn’t I think I was being a little bit too sensitive about certain things? This was in response to my bringing up the way our time was divided and whose schedules we worked around in the relationship (if you guessed “his,” you would be correct). At the time, my response to this criticism was to hold my tongue whenever I felt compelled to ask why aspects of the relationship were going the way they were.

I won’t suggest that my response now to claims of oversensitivity is to look those claims in the eye and spit on them. There are moments when the doubt creeps in, that perhaps I’ve searched too far through my progressive lens and have started to split hairs, have felt emotionally charged or impacted by something that doesn’t matter, that signifies nothing about larger institutional systems of oppression. The little voice says to me…maybe women need to buck up.

This is a part of self-loathing, though, isn’t it? It appears in it’s ghostly form and haunts us from the inside, telling us we are not as good as the beautiful people around us. It makes us doubt, makes us drained of our thick-skin-reserves so that we must take the time to exhale, exhale, exhale away the comments we have heard all our lives that rise to the surface again.

Sigh - those comments. They really are like a little plague that doesn’t seem to be an ailment until you are having a conversation with a male peer and you find yourself wondering why he looks slightly disengaged when you bring up the political and you think, “I talk too much. I’m talking too much. He’s looking at me like I’m oversensitive.”

And then you return to your room and you call those women of color who support you through your thick skin and thin and they help you ward off those ghosts for a little while longer.

I thought I would start up on posting links here - I don’t remember why I stopped - maybe because it seems like a cop-out-post. Still, with the primary elections in the air and my increased commitment to educating myself about politics and that ever-so-talked-about-real-world, I thought I would share some articles that I find worth reading. The titles speak for themselves today:

“After College Ends, So Does Activism” by Adam Doster

“Why Clinton Trumps Obama and Will Continue to Trump Him” by Earl Ofari Hutchinson

“Interview with Chris Rabb: Founder of Afro-Netizen.com” from Mother Jones

A note - I still haven’t developed a full opinion on who I am supporting from the Democratic candidates, though I’m pretty sure my heart is with Obama. When I figure it out for sure, I’ll do one of two things: write about it, or tell everyone to mind their own business.