Do you know people who grow up carrying insecurities, deprivation, mishaps, and all the troubles of the world? At least as they see it this way, because that’s the life they’ve lived? Struggles upon struggles. One of those people is me-yes, Kanchan.
I can’t make anyone truly understand this feeling, or the weight it leaves on a person’s mind.
And then comes the part of being first generation- never knowing what you’re supposed to do, always fumbling through the unknown. Even though I step into a new year, every year I still ask myself: does that label stay forever? Am I always destined to be the one figuring things out? Scared- even though trying hard to fit in and making things work.
I remember once, a friend casually told me, “You could’ve just sent the email and cc’d me.” It sounds so simple, yet back then, even as a working professional, I didn’t know that was a better way of letting everyone know to do the thing. And the shame of realizing I “should have known” cut deep. I can't make anyone even realise how does that feel to me. Even before they said so, how much I would have cried to those people and how I was not even cared for. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it’s just my fate- that I can’t say out loud, “Hey, this hurts.”
There are so many such moments. A colleague once shouted at me for asking a question that was perfectly okay: "Why did this person leave?" That was a simple question. But apparently, I wasn’t supposed to ask. Another time, I was asked to leave because something given to me came back, as if my integrity itself was in question. Talk about free speech? I have not been able to exercise my free speech apart from my tweets event until I was 30 and more. I wonder do these people Can you imagine the layers of insecurity I’ve lived through? And how I’ve slowly lost the energy to fight back? Because in the end, people only remember what you didn’t do-not the reasons why. And rarely does anyone pause to hear another person’s reasons.
Metta!
