Category Archive

I’m behind on my writing - adjusting to a job like the one I have is difficult because while I’m learning a lot, the routine is suffocating me. What an idiotic thing to complain about, I know. I’m feeling overwhelmed about the fact that I have no plans for August, and am torn between desperately searching for a job, and running away to somewhere. I’m not really the running away kind, in the way that I’ve been daydreaming about, but I’m starting to wonder if that’s just because it’s always what I’ve told myself. I’m feeling stuck, and tired, so writing hasn’t been on top of my to-do list these days. My apologies.

In any case, behind on my writing means I didn’t get around to writing about Loving Day, which was last week. A belated Happy Loving Day to you all. The Washington Post featured a great article - “What Mildred Knew” - that is definitely worth reading if you haven’t yet.

The other day I got asked a question from one of my best friends, an Indian American living in Texas, a friend whose life is a stark contrast from my own.

“So have you just given up on finding an Indian guy?”

Where could I begin? I couldn’t explain to her, someone who grew up in a context where there were only two kinds of appropriate men to date (Indian-Hindu; White), that it wasn’t that I’d given up on anything, that I’d been struggling with the guilt of dating white men for over three years now. And I couldn’t find the right words to tell her that it had both nothing and everything to do with race.

I hadn’t sworn off white men exactly - more like men altogether - but I had definitely decided that the problems of my past relationships could have been attributed to ignorance about white supremacy, white privilege, and the loaded histories and contexts behind relationships between white men and women of color. The risk of being exoticized and fetishized, of feeling colonized as a body, as an individual, could be avoided if I avoided relationships, specifically relationships with white men.

Well I think we all know what happened then, so I won’t bother reflecting on that again (moving on is hard. but that’s an entirely separate, and probably password protected post for another day).

I went to a wedding on Saturday night, tagged along with some family to this big North Indian Bollywood-esque wedding. There were probably four hundred people there, all dressed up, and at the head of the reception hall, the bride and groom sat like awkward cake-toppers on a throne that resembled a prom-photo backdrop. I was the only young woman with short hair, and the only woman who wore black (which, at a Hindu wedding is perfectly acceptable, though apparently not as appropriate as Barbie pink or Vegas teal).

As one of the groomsmen prepared to make a toast, he turned to the groom and began: “Dude, I always thought you would do something stupid, like marry a Chinese girl, and have to learn to use chopsticks or something. But at the end of the day you did the family right, you did us all proud, by marrying within the community.”

I was seething. is that the right word? It was seething mixed with stinging tears mixed with having the wind knocked out of you. I was all of those things, but managed to maintain my own plastic expression as half the audience clapped ferociously over the notion of “doing the family right.”

My parents did not “do their families right”. They married out of communities. They married out of religions. They married out of region. My mother was a triple threat to my father’s community and vice versa. The women in my father’s community felt they had been done wrong, that my mother had “stolen away one of the good ones.” My mother’s parents were progressive enough at the time to be supportive of the marriage, but they both dealt with the consequences of their daughter’s choices from their families. And while they were legally allowed to get married in India, I don’t doubt that they paid in other ways for their “betrayal to their own kind.”

My friend has dated exclusively Indian men. She is a perfect candidate for the kind of narrative her community strives to fulfill - a beautiful, intelligent woman who is looking forward to a life in the suburbs with children and maybe a dog. She and her husband will play boardgames on the weekends with other North Indian couples, and their social life will revolve around Indian functions, poojas, and weddings.

This just isn’t the way I grew up. I feel no real connection to South Asian culture - my own parents never drove culture into me because they too couldn’t handle the other aspects that come with it - the moderate politics, the gender divided functions, the classism, and prejudices.

So I told her the truth in the best way I knew how. No, I hadn’t “given up” on Indian men - the ethnicity of my partner just doesn’t matter as much as his politics - his racial and gender politics, his ability to negotiate through the dynamics that are bound to arise in being with a woman of color. Meeting straight men like that isn’t like shooting fish in a barrel, it turns out. More like standing blindfolded in a lake trying to stab at fish with a fork. So I’m in a privileged position not to have to limit myself to “Indian Men,” I’m not going to. There is a part two to this, about my failure as a candidate for the seemingly prototypical Indian man, but that’s really another issue altogether…

Until next time.

Ok folks. It’s time to admit to you all and to myself that the reason why the posts have been written in scattered sentences is because they haven’t been REAL. They haven’t hurt as much as they ought to have. Time to delve into the relationship. There are two posts, and the second one is about white men, and how I’ve hated them and dated them.

But this one is about one boy in particular. And me.

It wasn’t really a relationship in that it had some real boundaries - the timing for one. The inevitable end, the expiration date, which I grew to hate, but also was the very thing that kept me from running away from the whole two month affair in the first place. I refer to it as an affair because at times it is how I felt about it - I snuck out at night, when the work was done, when my friends were away, when the meetings were over, when the library closed. I was struggling to keep my head above waters poisoned with guilt, with betrayal, with hypocrisy. After all, I was the girl who held steadfast to spitting on the people who fell for the “opposite attracts” slogan, who hated hearing about “those cute stories” - I associated partnership with those narratives. It was an affair because I didn’t want it to be public -  too complicated. I hated the thought of being eyed up and down by a group of women I didn’t know, a group of men I didn’t respect. Even more, I feared the reaction of the people who were close to me. I kept telling them, It’s just a fun little thing. It isn’t a big deal. We have nothing in common. What could I possibly grow attached to? Besides, we’re graduating.

The truth is, I went kicking and screaming down the slope of emotional attachment. I didn’t even think it was possible to care about this boy, until it happened. I found my seemingly steadfast barriers coming down, as I began developing more trust for someone that even now, I sometimes feel I barely knew. For the first time, I felt safe without feeling dependent, found myself not having to do the work for two people. He could read me well, he knew when there was something on my mind, and let me talk about it, and yell about it, and cry about it. I had baggage. He knew it. He waited while I tugged it along, and for the first time, I didn’t feel the need to apologize for it. This last part is important because it was a testament not to his patience, or maturity blah blah blah. No, it is a testament to the fact that I finally learned to stand my own ground, to yell ‘take it or leave it’, and to not let myself get into a situation where I felt trampled on. And I met someone, at a time when I least expected it, who I want to believe really understood that, and took it.

(Once someone asked me what remained so terrifying about relationships, with regards to my abusive past one. Besides the fact that I was verbally abused and emotionally wounded? I worry I’ll end up in it again. That I haven’t learned. That I’ll be tested, and I’ll fail. She said, “You aren’t 16 anymore. Forgive yourself. Forgive that girl. She was so young.”)

I miss the warmth, the comfort, the trust, the late nights. I miss the intimacy and the conversations. I don’t want to rebuild those things all over again with someone. It seems too hard. My inner cynic tells me “lightening doesn’t strike twice in the same place, so buck up woman.”

I haven’t forgotten about the reasons why it stopped being feasible, why it would have been impossible, why it couldn’t work. I haven’t forgotten about our differences, and I haven’t ignored the realities of our dynamics - the racial gendered and contextual ones that would probably have surfaced and spilled over our ability to negotiate through them. And trust me. I’ve thought about it. It would’ve been too hard, too impossible. The people around me remind me of those seemingly irreconcilable differences, remind me of my worth - he was too lucky; you were too good for him. It was about the timing more than anything else. What did you even have to talk about? All fine. I hear that. It’s probably all true.

But I think there was a little more to it. I really think there was. And I’m still dealing with the moments where I look back and wish our little affair had had a little more time, a little more space, a little more opportunity for continued feasibility.

There it is. Ouch.

This isn’t really a story, but it might be once I tell it.

We were two really different people who seemed to have nothing in common, but I think in reality we were two different people who had things in common that were contextualized by completely different backgrounds and life experiences. These differences were made especially apparent at our small little college, where we did different kinds of work with different groups of people who had formed communities that fundamentally opposed one another.

Sometimes circumstances mean you meet someone who you shouldn’t be able to have a conversation with let alone feel close to in any way, and you find that they are pretty decent and that they ask questions when they don’t understand but they also don’t question your experiences and personal truths. It still astounds me that I ever met someone so different from me, who I became comfortable around enough to yell about racism and sexism in my own daily life.

I could never get myself to be public about our little affair though. I was betraying a community and I felt guilty about becoming another one of those people who paired up with someone during their last semester of college (there is a separate post in the works on this issue). I feel fine about this because it’s what I had to do but one of the side effects was a constant desire to escape my own life. Of course, the yearning for escape is 1. not new for me and 2. happens when you’re struggling to deal with graduating and the uncertainty of the rest of your life. My escapism became realized through a dialogue that, as a result of its content, became a kind of metaphor for the whole thing.

I had said we should take a trip somewhere. For the weekend. We were done with this place, we could find a couple days to sneak off. We could do it it would be amazing and relaxing and just what we needed.

Santa Barbara, CA. I have a friend there, we could stay at her place, she would be fine with it, there’s a beach nearby. Obviously that makes no sense, you should go there to see your friend and you’d feel stressed about balancing that time out.

San Diego, CA. It’s lovely there - but we’re going with our separate groups of friends to San Diego in two weeks.

San Francisco, CA. It’s a much longer drive, but we could do it in a weekend. I could skip class you could move meetings. But my parents live there and it is a longer drive and could we do it in a weekend?

Los Angeles, CA. You hate the city.

Joshua Tree, CA. I hate the outdoors.

Santa Fe, NM. It has some city, it has some outdoors. It’s beautiful, there might be a place we could stay, it would be a lot of fun we could drive all night I’ll skip class and you could move meetings, my parents don’t live there and neither do our friends, it isn’t college and we could just take a little time away from the rest of our lives.

But it’s Santa Fe. We can’t go to Santa Fe. How did we even go from Santa Barbara to Santa Fe?

So there we were - one minute talking about the feasibility of a two hour car ride and the next minute ending up in another state, many many hours away, having to move around our lives to make something work, only to realize that our reasons for taking the trip were different. I’m still not sure what his reasons were, and maybe he just didn’t have them the way I did, but I’ll tell you. For me it was the idea of escape. Of leaving everything behind and feeling the way I thought you should feel when you were sixteen but being an adult enough to actually live it out. The further and further away we planned to drive, the closer the escape became less and less feasible.

We said we’d keep doing what we were doing for as long as it was possible. And the distance made it impossible, so we stopped doing what we were doing. It hurts a little.

Do I regret not making that trip? Ask me in a few months, when the question doesn’t make me want to run away.

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.

A note: this post is personal and vague, and not written very well - hey, I’m a bit rusty on the blogging. My apologies.

~*~

I had lunch with a good friend a couple of weeks ago, and I mentioned how angry I was, how much I was dreading the period post-graduation, when the thought of goodbyes and some heartbreak would reduce me to tears for I couldn’t tell how long. And she said “you know, you’re the only person I know who would be preemptively mad about being sad.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

I really dread these sorts of mourning periods - maybe we all do, in different ways. I have always been impatient about the heartbreak phase, always expected 24 hours later to wake up and feel perfectly rational and fine about everything. I was the one in the audience who secretly loved the idea of erasing one’s memory of another person in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I hate tearing up in the middle of the day, I hate caring, I hate myself for missing others. I’ve contemplated more than once a formula to help cure the dreaded heartbreak - a formula in which I include everything, it seems, except time.

I won’t provide context for this story because it’s too new to really speak about casually, which is sometimes the only way I can speak about things in this space. The context also doesn’t particularly matter, which might be the only time I ever say that ever. Let’s just say, for now, that the swim back the island involved an interesting surprise, a fantastic two months, and a decision to pull out the ol’ blueprints for that heartbreak-remedy and revise them in hopes of a successful testament, worthy of at least one late night infomercial.

While time heals all wounds, it also creates them, and this time, time created a surprisingly painful circumstantial goodbye.

But this post isn’t about any of that - it isn’t really about the remedy because I’m not sure if mine will work (although, I will say this - there’s a reason so many poets have written about the ocean. I spent the afternoon by the water, toes in the sand, trashy romance novel in hand, and I have to say, it may not heal wounds but it bandages them up for a bit, definitely) - it is about the narrative that was stripped away from me in choosing to slowly (slowly) care a little about someone and dispel of a little baggage.

In the last three years I grew to be a follower of an important narrative that I had carefully woven into my politics. It was a narrative about relationships - it was a story that was narrated through phrases and sentences and rhetorical remarks to friends and family and perhaps to this blog’s audience at some point. It was the one where I told myself that I simply was not the kind of person to care about people a certain way. It was the one where I told myself I really preferred sleeping alone at night. Where I really hated making time in my schedule for those daily visits, where I hated wanting to talk to someone in particular about my day when it was awful. That narrative that made singleness synonymous with independence and integrity, and attributed attachment to a kind of incompleteness and weakness. And finally, it was a narrative that made me feel safe because I told myself it was implicitly connected to my feelings about feminism rather than my relationship history and trauma, to progressive politics rather than fear.

The narrative slowly wore away. My impulse right now is to say it was taken away from me, but no, it just got worn away. It unraveled itself from my politics because suddenly I was in a situation where I didn’t feel like I was giving up a part of myself to negotiate a relationship. It pains me that it took so many years to finally be in this sort of circumstance, but that’s how it goes sometimes.

But when the relationship ends, not because of radical political differences, or huge deal breakers, but because of circumstance and distance and time, feeling stripped of that narrative and having to move forward is just awful. The vulnerability that I’ve been left with, those realizations that I don’t always like sleeping alone and I do like being able to call someone about my day and there are certain things about a romantic intimacy that I missed - it’s awful. It’s just awful.

So awful that all I want to do besides stay here at my best friend’s house and cry and sleep and drink tea is to reclaim that narrative for myself all over again. To write it back in, into the person I claim to be. It’s so tempting, so safe, so easy to put back up the wall, all of it, and write it off as survival.

There is no conclusion either. I can’t promise that won’t happen, I can’t promise I will commit to alternative ways of thinking about caring and loving and affection that are not rooted in fear and anger and bitterness.

I can promise I will be thinking and writing and processing and that the posts will get better after this one.

It’s definitely one of those weekends where the weather got suddenly rainy and cold and it’s all I can do to keep from staying in bed all day. I finally felt the overwhelming impulse to write again - it’s hard when the majority of my time is spent feeling anxious about producing papers and thesis work. Blogging has moved from the backburner to the tupperware in the fridge, and that’s just the way it’s going to be for a few months. The occasional post is my way of making sure the remains of this site doesn’t spoil.

I canceled three individual sets of plans in the last week; plans that I had initiated making with people that I thought I could catch up with; plans that I backed out of because I didn’t have time because I was trying to write a thesis chapter and had deadlines to deal with….plans with men.

Ok let’s recap. The last time I intentionally spent time with a man in any capacity was in November. He was/is a good friend and we hadn’t seen each other in a long time. We grabbed coffee and what I thought would be a superficial play by play of our lives turned out to be a very wonderful conversation that allowed me to share my anxieties about my last year in college. He was a great listener, we had worked very closely together for a year, and he really heard me. Furthermore, I was able to listen to him speak about his own life, where he was at, and feel comforted by the level of openness we had silently committed to that evening. I’m a sucker for good conversation and could write extensively about it - right now, let us just say that good conversation is truly a few and far between aspect of my life these days. Is this the nature of being around very busy people? Of not truly wanting to open up to everyone I see? Or maybe it’s just a rare thing, and that’s why it’s so wonderful when it happens. Thinking back, I want to believe that every conversation I’d ever had was amazing; I doubt that’s true. I think with some people, family, certain friends who connect with you, it’s possible to replicate good conversation because it just clicks. Something in the air. Something in ourselves, as well.

Tangent aside, it was a great conversation, and yes, of course part of the reason why is because it was a rare occasion where I found myself able to be frank with a man about how I was doing, because I was comfortable.

I don’t really want to get in to why I have such few male friends; regular readers can probably guess, and for those of you who have stumbled across this post, let’s boil it down to bad relationships, the insecurities that were created out of them, and a genuine and strategic desire to spend time building a network of friends who are women of color. This last bit makes me want to clarify that 99% of me has absolutely no regrets about the way I have prioritized getting to know people.

But that isn’t what this post is about. It isn’t really about any of that. It’s about the fact that I haven’t had a good conversation with a man in a long time, but then I committed to swimming back to this island and working through some of issues that keep me from simply picking up the phone and calling someone who I’ve been friends with for a year and want to see.

But I finally did that last week. I made plans to catch up. And then the day before, I emailed to cancel. Thesis chapter, I said. No time.

Two days before I backed out of going to this lecture with this guy that is a really good guy and under other circumstances, I think we could have become great friends. Thesis chapter, I said. No time.

Four days before that I canceled lunch with this same person.

I initiated all of these plans - I took a deep breath and made them all, and then one by one, I canceled them. Shuffled away, and it didn’t really hit me that having work was not the problem until recently. Lord knows I’ve made plenty of plans while being swamped in work. I couldn’t do it.

I couldn’t allow myself to feel close to a man in any capacity - one a once-close friend and one a possible new one.

What’s the big deal, right? It’s just lunch, it’s just catching up. I know everyone’s thinking it. But it is definitely a big deal. I think that’s just what happens when you’ve experienced such closeness to friend after friend and they eventually just walk away or you wake up and realize that their attempts to make you a better person or a better partner are actually just verbal attacks on your well-being.

The difference between me now and me a year ago though, is that even though I recognize this, I want to work through it. I can’t keep letting these demons follow me around forever, not about something like this.

But it’s so hard because I’m at a loss of what to do and I think a part of me childishly just wants to write it off as, well I’m a busy person and I don’t want to take initiative on anything that has to do with men. Why should I after all; shouldn’t they take some initiative? When was the last time I knew a male peer to have to schedule plans? All the women I know are so swamped in extracurriculars and running organizations and working that it’s all we can do to plan a weekly meal. So when I meet someone who has no real schedule, why shouldn’t I expect them to take the two steps forward?

There’s a lot to be said about vulnerability and intimacy and trust, but this post is long enough, and I haven’t quite figured out what to say about it, and it would also require a long prequel about the gender-based attitudes placed on women regarding these issues.

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’ve been struggling a little to write this on account of how it makes me sad to think about it - but this is memory I suppose - it’s something I desperately want to hold on to but I also don’t want it to make my emotions go haywire every time. It is written as a possible contribution for Apples and Thyme, an event going on at one of my favorite blogs, Vanielje Kitchen.

My Nani (my mother’s mother) practically raised me. My mother stayed at home to raise me for my entire childhood but my nani - she really developed a particular part of my identity in such a way that I can’t tell whether it was a nurturing process or a naturally inherited one. Probably a bit of both.

In December, I went to India and Nani made those foods that make my mouth water and my eyes well up - she insisted on making only my favorites because I haven’t seen her in years and suddenly all the energy seemed to surge through her body once again and she bounded into the kitchen every morning to set aside dough for chapatis.

Chapatis - how to describe them, truly describe them? When they are homemade, when they are handmade, by a woman you respect and love so much, when they are perfectly round because of years of practice and patience as a wife and mother; when they are perfectly oiled and never burnt and when they are eaten with rice and with that favorite dhaal that she doesn’t like but that she makes for you. When they are accompanied by story after story, about the ‘47 partition, about learning to cook for a stranger you must spend the rest of your life with, about raising two daughters, about raising a granddaughter.

She says “they only taste this good because they are made by your nani” - and that’s true to some extent. I’ve eaten naan and chapatis and parathas from the best of women and the best of restaurants and it just isn’t the same.

When I think of chapatis - the time it takes to prepare and yet how quickly they can be made after years of practice - I think of her. I think of her sacrificing everything because it was what you did and I feel guilty when I think of the times I mistook this selflessness for weakness. I think of the patience she puts into every task and that kind of love that resonates in every gesture. In every chapati is a part of that woman, a part of that woman’s trauma and grace that I so desperately wish I was able to understand.

When I was younger and I watched her in the kitchen as she turned the last remains of the dough into a small heart which she would let me play with before it was put on the pan, I used to imagine her giving a part of her secret life to me - that part of her life that she never talked about but I knew existed long before my life even began. I loved pressing my fingers into the very same spots of the dough that she had, until the heart became an uneven slab of mangled prints.

Now thinking back on it, I still feel this way - this sense of wholeness that comes only when I am with her, or with my mother or with my aunt. Where the fragmented parts come together to make one complete heart.

My nani has affected the way I think about food because I see it now as a metaphor for intimacy and for colonial trauma, as a mode through which we pass down our stories and histories, and through which we receive both painful and pleasurable inheritances. But she has affected the way I view and pursue strength as a woman also; she moves me to want better and to love despite everything else.

One day I will learn to make chapatis as perfectly round and flat as she does, and it will probably be the day I learn to love the way that she does.

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’m still settling into a new (and final) college year, which includes having to maintain a thesis blog for a seminar class - clearly, keeping two blogs that couldn’t be further from one another is frustrating, but I am determined to try!

I found out yesterday that an ex-boyfriend from a few years ago is writing his English senior thesis with an emphasis in male privilege and the ways in which masculinity and gendered expectations for men end up being detrimental for men as well as women, albeit in different ways.

A year after I got so fed up with relationships that I walked away from my last one for who knows how long (this is a good thing - I desperately needed to learn more about what it means for me to be a woman of color in this world…I still need to, every day) this ex-boyfriend contacted me in an effort to find closure for himself. I wonder if anyone knows what sort of situation I’m talking about - a call out of the blue in order to make himself feel better about himself, draining all my energy from me in an effort to explain to him what it meant for him to be a white male in a relationship with a woman of color, and him walking away hoping that he could continue to be educated by me.

We haven’t spoken since. But in reading this thesis work, I can’t help but look back at women of color I know who have dated men and, through the course of their relationship, have ended up educating them, or at least pointing out certain gendered and often racial dynamics. At the end of the relationship, people wonder why the women let such a good man get away. In the particular experience I’m referring to, I can’t help feeling like this ex-boyfriend of mine was able to take what little understanding of male privilege and turn it into a progressive pick up line. And a thesis topic. What did I get? A lot of his white friends giving me that judgmental look that says “you were that girl.” It’s a small campus so that happens more often that I’d like to admit.

That girl. I’ve used that phrase so many times in the last two weeks that I now have no idea what it really means. Maybe someone can articulate what it is about that phrase that I find offensive but continue to use it - maybe I’m trying to reclaim the idea - that girl: the jealous girl, the loud girl, the unfeminine girl, the smart girl, the argumentative girl, the freckled, dark skinned, curvy girl, the unapologetic girl.

Now I’ve typed “girl” so many times it is starting to look even more nonsensical than it actually is..

To those of you that do not know, I am quite a fan of the television series, “The Office”. I will not go into details about why I enjoy the show because I already have (although, the wit and commentary on the show has depleted since I wrote that post. But that conversation is for another time and another blog).

For those of you that watch the show and have not seen the season finale, do not keep reading. Big spoilers begin here.

In the last 10 seconds of the show, Jim asked Pam out on a date. There he is, in the interview room in New York, and he sees this little note that Pam gives him and he thinks about the conversation they had at the beach. And there is Pam, speaking to the camera, and Jim walks in and says “What are you doing for dinner tonight” and then says “Great. It’s a date”.

Let the era of Jam begin.

I’ve always been someone who becomes extremely involved in whatever I’m watching- I cry in movies, I brace myself at the edge of my seat during season finales. And by the end of this episode, (I’m a bit embarrassed to admit this), I found myself flushed with happiness at these two crazy fictional characters finally getting together. Lord knows they both deserve it.

I love the “will-they-won’t-they” shows on television. Although this cannot be the only factor as to why I watch a particular series, it is a large part of why I watch “The Office”. Pam and Jim are characters that are built to be loved by everyone - and it goes without saying that Jim has a huge amount of appeal, both in the show, and as a character. I needn’t explain why. Let’s just say he has a case of the “Charming Man” (also, another post).

But what I want to flush out right here is something that has been floating around in my mind for nearly a month.

The media gave me a false model for how I thought relationships were supposed to work.

I always believed that if the timing wasn’t right, it would eventually be right. That if a man ends up breaking your heart, he’ll come around later on, begging to be forgiven. That if you fall for your best friend, you’ll come out stronger at the end and totally happy for him and his partner. That sometimes, running back and telling the truth about how you really feel will pay off.

Ah silly brown woman. How stupid you were to think those models worked for you. How silly that you did not factor in timing more, and circumstance more, and politics more and things like racism and sexism more. How wrong of you to think that straight men turn to romantic gestures and grand confessions when they want to win over a loud and rigid and thick-skinned heart.

Before I went to college, I just assumed I would graduate with a significant other. I thought I would spend my four years dating lots of people and having complicated but not melodramatic relationships that were founded on the utmost respect and communication and understanding. We would move in together in our 20s, and maybe one day get married. He would follow me wherever my life after college took me.

But of course somewhere in the midst of my third year I looked around my small liberal arts college and realized that this little fantasy could be no further from the truth. And there are two parts to explaining why.

The first part is that when you’re at a small liberal arts college filled with predominately white, upper middle class, straight men, you find that there is nothing the majority of the student body wants more than to live a consequence free and commitment free life. Relationships are hard to find - they become complicated by the small student body and by the general suffocation that the campus provides. Dating is nearly impossible. And reputations are carried through the campus pretty quickly. There is a very small percentage of students that want to be dating the militant with high standards.

Let’s sidebar very quickly so I can say this: having “high standards” falls at about the same place as having “thick skin” - both are part of survival. Both are things that I want to embrace and here’s why. Respect, a consciousness of one’s own privileges, (the list can of course go on), those things should not be considered high standards. They should be considered standards. Give-ins. Factors that help me decide who makes the cut.

The second part is that I realize that my version of the picket fence house cannot co-exist with the way I want to grow as an individual and as a brown woman. I can’t get married when I’m in my 20s. I can’t even be in a relationship while I’m in my 20s. I still need time to figure out what I’m doing! And that’s ok. It’s lonely sometimes, and frustrating often, but it is definitely ok.

Timing is a funny thing. It can really change the course of who we get to know and who we can build relationships with. The more I think about it, the more I feel that loving other people and being loved is really about solidarity and compassion for one another, about making sure that there is a constant dialogue about the issues that oppress us and empower us. That we learn from each other.