They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us

The myth forces our minds to forget that which our bodies cannot: that belonging is always conditional.

It’s a strange thing to miss someone who is right there. When I talk to you is when I miss you the most, because I am confronted by what I cannot have.

A man who forces you to prove your worth is a man incapable of seeing it,

Yush said that Papa had a “wartime personality” Yush thought this was a good thing to have, particularly when leading a battle, as someone who needed to make tough decisions for the betterment of the group. I agreed with Yush in theory, but I was also confused. The problem with that kind of personality was that when everything was peaceful, one had to create wars to feel useful or important.

I had once thought that I came from a line of Gods, and I had punished myself for failing to be Godlike. But we were not Gods, and I was not the avatar for our family’s unraveling. I was just another product of inherited trauma, unresolved grief, and reactive survival mechanisms, like everyone else who came before me. We were mortals who felt ashamed when we failed to appear omnipotent. Now I see that my job was to release my ancestors from this burden, to allow those who come next the freedom to be ordinary.

In our family, we learned to love one another for how well we were able to conform to the story they wrote for us—not as who we really are.

Now I think of memories as haphazard blots of ink in a Rorschach test that we assemble along the spine of the story we are told about who we are.

We had each been raised to believe that every unknown could be resolved through willpower and intellect, a message reinforced by America’s rigid conception of who we are supposed to be. The truth is, society doesn’t raise people to aspire to be kind or compassionate or happy. It pressures adults to achieve and accomplish. It teaches people that what matters more than their character or how they treat others or how they feel about themselves is how much money they can hoard, who they know, how famous they can get, and how much power they wield over others. Emotions have no basis in this framework. They are a nuisance, a hindrance, a distraction, a weakness.

Until I felt the tenuousness of my own safety net, I didn’t understand that most don’t have access to basic healthcare, savings or stable familial support. I’d been raised to believe that comfort was the result of hard work or innate intellect, but I was starting to understand that fulfillment of these basic human needs was tied to a person’s body, bloodline, and the origins of their birth. Papa’s wealth had made me feel entitled to a level of security that no one is owed or guaranteed. I had a simplistic understanding of the world and how it worked because it worked well enough for me, and it was only when it stopped working for me that I began to think about the ways in which it failed to work for others.

In a capitalist society, the measure of wellness isn’t a person’s actual health or happiness but how far one can rise or how much wealth one can accumulate. Somebody seen as “unwell” is unable to produce and to achieve. To seek mental healthcare as an immigrant was to threaten one’s security and chance to succeed, to suggest bad parenting or to imply that one’s ethnic culture caused their children’s problems

My loneliness humbled me. It sounds embarrassingly ignorant now, but until I felt the tenuousness of my own safety net, I didn’t understand that most don’t have access to basic healthcare, savings, or stable familial support. I’d been raised to believe that comfort was the result of hard work or innate intellect, but I was starting to understand that fulfillment of these basic human needs was tied to a person’s body, bloodline, and the origins of their birth. Papa’s wealth had made me feel entitled to a level of security that no one is owed or guaranteed. I had a simplistic understanding of the world and how it worked because it worked well enough for me, and it was only when it stopped working for me that I began to think about the ways in which it failed to work for others. —

You had now lived outside India longer than you lived in it. Your relationship with your motherland was complex, so much so that I think you struggled to talk about it. It must have been so bittersweet and even painful for you to visit, catching a glimpse of a parallel universe that held both your past and your alternate present in one view; a place that, like you, had changed so much that neither of you could fully recognize the other anymore; yet simultaneously a place that saw and loved you in a way that your other, permanent home never could. Your grief, like all grief, forced you to hold contradictory emotions at once: longing and repulsion, relief and agitation, freedom and entrapment.

Art kept my spirit alive. Expressing myself, whether by drawing, writing or dancing, was an assertion of my existence that enabled me to connect to something deeper than simply what I was expected to produce in the world. Later, when I felt too blocked to create, consuming art broke my sense of isolation and helped me see parts of myself in work created by others. When I forgot who I was, creating art helped me find my way back. Art was my entry point to learning how to love myself.

An Indian woman’s act of political protest was rewritten as hysteria, her sense of duty perceived as desire. In this construct, an Indian woman’s feelings and expressions were never her own; she experienced her womanhood as pathology.

I saw that learning how to love myself was my salvation, a rebellious act of refusing to believe I was what white institutions or Papa had wanted to reduce me to. To love myself was to accept myself as I am and to live in away that honored my feelings, aligned with my values and trusted my senses even when the outside world wanted me to doubt or shrink myself. Therapy became a place not for repair but for the formation of a relationship with someone who helped me see that I am already whole.

I had wanted to think that fame and wealth- conventional notions of success- didn’t matter to me anymore. But they did. I didn’t get approval from you or Papa or Yush, and the desire to be validated was so deep in me that now I sought it on an even larger stage: the whole world, demanding that everyone look at the very thing that no one in our home could acknowledge- my perspective. But now I could see that, while the world loved what I did, it still didn’t love me. I didn’t know what to do with my ugly desire for validation or the world’s ugly response to it.

The sense that he could express care only when he could play the hero.

Like him, I was hot-tempered, stubborn and highly critical. I insisted that the world exist the way I wanted it to, and when it failed to meet my expectations, I got righteously angry. It was only in not lashing out that I was able to prove to myself that I wasn’t the same.

I was trying to get in touch with the part of myself that could express, but after a childhood of learning how to suppress, I didn’t know how to do that.

The world we live in, which demands perfection and achievement, teaches us we cannot love ourselves as we are. The myth teaches us to think greatness always resides outside us instead of within us. We must become stronger, taller, richer, thinner, smarter, prettier - and perhaps then, we think, we may be worthy of love. Yet we cannot love ourselves and we cannot love each other well so long as we are preoccupied by the desire to leave ourselves, to abandon ourselves in search of something beyond ourselves. Serving the myth teaches us how to belong but severs our ability to connect.

We abide by their story because we think that is how we gain acceptance in America. But we cannibalize our bodies, our spirits and our minds to feed a hunger that never abates. We struggle under a weight that the world tells us does not exist. We serve a story that will never serve us, and I fear that the next generation will seek to do the same.

At school, Dadaji learned Sanskrit, English, and history—but not the history of his people. “History was all what the British viceroys did,” he said. “We were taught about that which had no meaning to us.” I wonder now how this shaped his psyche and spirit: When, even in his own country, his people’s stories did not matter, he was forced to study his oppressor’s greatness, and learned to deny his own.

The familiar sensation of numbness, the armor I wore to shield myself as a girl, returned.

The America I knew had died, a painful feeling underscored by the rising awareness that it had never really existed, except in my mind. I had been so invested in wanting a certain idea of America to be true, despite all the evidence that it wasn’t.

Everywhere I went, people saw me as Indian. But India was the only place in the world I felt American.

I relied on the boost I received when a white man wanted me, even if he couldn’t fully understand me, even if when he saw me, he saw conquest or submission or exoticism or domesticity. For a long time that didn’t matter to me because I was using him to perpetuate a fantasy too.

You taught us the most valuable thing of all: how to love and how to allow love in. You taught me that kindness in the world exists, and when I started to lose faith in that, memories of your love reminded me that there are people who are pure of heart. You are one of them.

It was a clumsy expression of anger over how mother was raising daughter to learn that to be good is to betray oneself, to forever contort oneself to fit into impossible, contradictory expectations of womanhood that felt stifling.

South Asian men from the west who sought South Asian brides in the East, often played out the orientalist fantasies of a demure, subservient woman who could restore the brown masculinity robbed by white men in the West- as colonialism advertises.