Skip to main content

Being Told

 D is now deceased but a few days ago I remembered the words he said to me that stayed with me for a very long time. We had known each other for a couple of years at the time and one day in all seriousness he told me that I was the kind of woman that no man could possibly live with. That judgement dissected and analyzed for accuracy might have revealed that D was making an impossible claim. Humanity is too vast and diverse for an extreme statement like that. No matter now odd, strange, and weird a person it is very much possible that there are people who can deal with it and even thrive in a relationship with them. I took D's words to heart because it built upon a foundation of self-doubt about my ability to cohabit with just about anyone. I had always struggled with room-mates, was alleged to have impossible standards that no one could live up to and so on. 

I presumed D had stumbled upon the hard truth about me and accepted it as such. His statement proved to be incorrect but that did not prevent me me from having many spikes of angst about failing when placed in a new situation or context. I have to do this new thing now involving a person I am unfamiliar with and therefore I am more likely than not to fail. Having presumed failure even before it happened, I set in motion events that caused me and those around me a lot of undue pain. Each time, I proved to myself that I can actually operate in a "normal" manner and nothing is terminally broken about me, the inevitability of D's pronouncement fades a bit more. It has not lost its sting entirely, but it definitely hurts less. The people you trust as friends and mentors can do the worst damage to your psyche because you present to them your most vulnerable and receptive self.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more