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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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...

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...

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...