Why I Write (Pt. I)

Oh. Oh, I know, you've seen that little 'I' right there and you're thinking 'Oh Godddddd. Is this going to be the first in a series of long and unbearably pompous self-obsessed rants?'

Short answer: yes! In indie shoe-gazing-fashion, I will attempt (as always) to reflect on myself. Although I will not do so whilst wearing dark colours (not intentionally anyway), tight denim (fuck that) or 'exciting hair.' Guitars and abstract maudlin wailing will be absent for the time being.

The reason I'm writing this is because a) I haven't posted in a while and I think it's making me crazy - I NEED TO WRITE and b) I need to clarify posts like the previous one. I had to explain this to the Libertarian once, after I posted something without speaking to him first, and he was (understandably) somewhat hurt. No major revelations had been concealed, but he wanted to be my rock. I then attempted to say what I'll say now, but more succinctly and clearly this time.

As was meant to be evident by the tag, posts like that serve a paradoxical purpose relating to my depression. That particular one was written (as was quite flaming obvious!) after having issues with TL. It wasn't a fight, but a series of compounded and painful misunderstandings. The fight itself, involving plenty of meaningless snark and inflating-of-self-for-anger purposes, came after.

Before I go any further, I must just comment on how much that strikes me. Fights in themselves are not bad; we might think that they are. They're actually a relief, coming after the egotism that misunderstandings generate. You are open about your feelings, clear in your aim to lash out and destroy. Often when misunderstandings occur, however, there's no-one to blame. Instinct demands that we blame someone though, that there be no grey areas. As a result, there can be a whole disgusting grey area of feelings. Despair, at the preventability of the whole thing, at missed opportunities for maturity. Irritability at the other partner, maybe partially founded, partially unfounded, for just not understanding, for being as human as you. Frustration at yourself for being human (read: 'failure'); guilt at yourself for blaming them.

I spent much of that day feeling like a raw wound. It wasn't helped by the fact that I was crying constantly. The post was the height of my fucked, depressed self-indulgence. I fashioned betrayal from a misunderstanding. Why? I knew TL loves me, I knew that he didn't really think I expect him to plan my life around him - but I was in the zone. The depressed, pre-menstrual zone. I have worked out now that I may be a bit miserable for the rest of the month, but being pre-menstrual triggers depression proper in me. I become incredibly irrational, lose all sense of perspective and balance, have suicidal and self-denigrating thoughts...

Let's not forget that I'm also pre-menstrual, so I have a lower pain threshold, general increased sensitivity (physical and emotional, as a result of hormones). The more severely pre-menstrual I feel, the worse I am overall. I often don't sleep as a result of being so uncomfortable and unable to relax at night. So, I'm pretty much a little time-bomb, waiting to blow. Blow I do, at the same time every month. ALWAYS before I'm due, and ALWAYS once I start, the suicidal tendencies and despair lift considerably.

However, normal rules do not apply when I'm 'in the zone.' I am a solitary person generally (although I have realised I need to work on this!). PMD finds me in an awkward position, reduced to calling up people and begging them to save me from myself. Since I am not accurately able to conceive of how others view me, I cannot do this. I imagine concealed irritation, better things to do, frustration. The worst part is that lived experience informs these fears. I loved a depressed man. Depressed people are hellishly trying. If they retreat into a self-destructive downward spiral - that is, if you get to them just a bit too late to head them off at the start - you may well find them simultaneously 'boring' and 'infuriating'.

Again, however, there's little logic to that fear. You'd only feel that way if you were in the position I was, of being a person's go-to rock. Being on the receiving end of that kind of thing for hours a day. Plus, (and this will sound really awful, apologies!) I don't last very long in the self-indulgent phase, unlike my ex. I move quickly into heavy self-loathing. Not 'I can't make people like me,' or 'I'm not cool anymore' self-loathing. 'I shouldn't exist/ My mother was right, I AM a psychopath' self-loathing. It explains why I could handle my ex's depressed spells, but mine destroyed him. He became like that when he felt wrong-footed. Paradoxically, I was the opposite. I became like that when I was fully, bleakly sure; I become like that when I feel that my internalised bullies have been validated. 'They' are right after all; right about everything; right and they always will be. I think I really will have to get therapy at some point, because having my family's shadow over me for the rest of my life will destroy me otherwise. However, living away from them for a sustained period of time (like, longer than 2 years) may do the trick... here's hopin'!

So. I'm in the zone. I need help, like URGENT HELP. Platitudes and attempts to deploy logic have, and will always, fail. My mindset crystallises back into the world of binaries. There is a black and a white. The dichotomy that interests me at that point, though I obviously don't realise it then, is that of action and words. Telling me I am loved and that people would miss me if I died MEANS NOTHING. That is my breaking point; I risk everything, I trust nothing. I test belief. Love must be demonstrated, not promised. I need to be held, in a touch which is firm yet yielding. Not stiffly, not as if I'm being restrained. TL excels in this department, and hence I felt the first terrifying butterfly-brush of awareness that I could fall in love with him on only our sixth meeting.

A university counsellor observed this too; that I have moments when I really test my partner(s). I have gotten a lot better at not doing this, with TL; that might have a lot to do with us actually being emotionally suited. I don't quite know how to break that pattern, although I know what formed it. Years of being ignored and mocked have made me terribly insecure about whether my voice matters or not. Whether I am sane or not. Whether anyone is really listening or not, and do they care? Can they care, when the people who were always meant to didn't? Especially when those same people told me they wouldn't care?

This quote sums up the situation rather well, I think:

second generation Punjabi women – being the product of patriarchal culture – are either depressingly servile or terrifyingly aggressive… Sikh girls don’t have personalities, they have post-traumatic disorder. They have to fight so hard and so persistently for their independence that they become brutalized by the experience, and even when they have their freedom, they can’t stop fighting.

This has a grain of truth, rather than being 100% applicable. Not least because it fails to appreciate that many girls can - and do - flit between those two states. I find myself doing so... The thing about not being able to stop fighting seems very apt here though. Paranoia and fear of betrayal - two states of mind which are, interestingly, embedded into Punjabi Sikhs, especially many who are now British Asians - make me challenge everything that I should believe in.

In such a state of mind, not quite on the verge of total despair, I am on the brink of escaping. Thankfully, the part of me that wants to live seizes it and runs like hell. If I can trust no-one, I can tell no-one. I can, however, suck out the poison and spit it onto my blog, which is after all intended as a literary mirror of the inside of my head.

So I do, and then paradox frees me. By writing down my feelings, I can almost 'seal' them on an imaginary page (a Web-page?). They leave me to course, like insignificant minnows, into the cyber-stream. I don't have to worry about them any more because I have 'set them free' - and myself in the process. Yet simultaneously, blogging my depressive states also does the opposite. It sets them as if in concrete, to remain there for all to see. They cannot get away into the safe darkness of forgetting. Not just an exercise in humility and maturity, they are also evidence. Proof, to be exact. When I blog a foul mood like that, I let it go AND I own it. Afterwards I have the proof of my own survival. Evidence that I made it, and can thus do it again. To quote the glorious Gaynor: 'Did I crumble? Did I lay down and die? Oh no, not I! I will survive!' From that point, I can face my own part in generating a misunderstanding more honestly. I can call and apologise and tell him that I love him. I can save myself - not a psychopath, but a survivor.

(Speaking of which, one of my best friends recently told me in her usual calm and direct manner that my mother is a sociopath, as she lacks some basic human ability to relate to others. I agreed, noting that it is her ability to empathise which appears to be, ahem, seriously fucked. It was all v.heartening!).

Time to go sleep now, though, almost 2 a.m... Whoops. This is what happens when you artificially prolong wakefulness by Jeff Buckley's sexiness and being determined to be organised and efficient and all that other shit you aren't in daylight. Don't look at me like that, I know Jeff Buckley is dead, but he's still sexy, goddamit! His voice AND his physical form *chuckles idiotically.*

Sick of being second best.

Today, I realised something. I am sick of being second best. Once I realised that, I sought out a relationship where I wouldn't have to be second best for once.

You know what? I found it, and not even where I was expecting.

I (stupidly) thought that my partner would be the one to provide it, but that is total bull. My family are right - nobody has to put you first, other than your family, because everyone else has automatically got that all-important Number 1 position filled already. Who's filling it? Themselves, of course.

That's where I have gone horribly, horribly wrong. The importance of value and self-sacrifice are deeply imprinted in me. That doesn't mean I'm some charity hero or anything, but it means that I am somebody who can - and WILL - be flexible and adaptable for my partner. Unless there's something absolutely, incontrovertibly unchangeable (like, I have to work or be at university), I will try to be there. I'm so fucking idealistic I will drop it all to 'be there.' Hence the terrible guilt I went through when my young cousin died, and I wasn't there to help my cousin with her grief, even slightly.

Other than friends, though, who will give up their time to you to some extent (and even then you need to have more than one good friend, because no one person can always be there), THERE. IS. NOBODY.

The folly of society's fetishising of monogamy is suddenly even clearer than it was before. My new motto is 'Put it on the backburner.' No more dreaming about marriage and children. I have emotional problems, and quite frankly, ain't nobody having that much power over me.

My cousin has never made a point of saying she loves me, but then again she has also never effectively told me to go fuck myself. Never made out that I was wasting her precious time. Never has she LIED to me and made me feel like I was more important than I really was.

That is love. Being totally honest with someone else. In relationships, hormones cloud our judgement and we say things we don't necessarily mean. Like 'I will always try to be there for you.'

So, to complete the circle, the only people I can really rely on are my family. But wait... oh dear, I'm pretty fucked, aren't I? While having a thoroughly painful cry on the sofa, I imagined myself before my parents. I imagined begging them to love me the most for once, just once, please. I would beg forgiveness for being 'wrong.' I would grasp my mother's hand and tell her that I didn't want life to feel like a burden any more. I didn't want to have any more days where I wondered if I could get the courage to hurt myself.

I could imagine her recoiling. I could imagine their shock, their incredulity. Their inability to comprehend my pain when they had 'given me everything.' I would tell them that I have depression and they would tell me I was sick. That I was mental. As they did of an Indian cousin's wife, who also has depression. As my dad did of some other unknown woman at the gurdwara.

The thought of it made me cry harder still and feel very, acutely, alone. Just typing it now made me cry some more. They are right, I am sick. I don't know how I should treat it. I don't feel like I can put faith in romantic relationships like I used to. That's not to say that I'm perfect and no-one's my equal - far from it. I am so emotionally messed up that dreams of marriage and so forth are just that - dreams. Delusions. Better that I realised it sooner rather than later.

'There ain't no way...'

... is the title of a song by a group that I quite like, called Cunninlynguists (yes, that IS the play on words that you're guessing at).

I met with Laurie today in a somewhat soporific afternoon encounter that was hopefully helpful to her (apologies if I came across as an automaton at times - having my hair out AND hot weather and sunlight to contend with, make me akin to drunk).

Now, she is a very patient and intelligent lady who tends to attract to her blog many of the sort of people who I'd frankly just like to sock one in the face. I find it amusing - I think many of 'em have followed her there from Liberal Conspiracy and wait around for her to metaphorically pat them on the head, and then she posts about REAL feminist stuff, and you get 'permanently bewildered' and victim-blaming (see her post, Perfect Slaves?, for example) among other things.

Bizarre, really, since in the main, the comments on other pieces have been largely supportive and encouraging.

Maybe it is 'radfem' of me to say so, but I confessed something to her today. I believe that things are really not going to get any better until the middle classes get their act together and start rocking the boat.

If you read this blog, I am presuming that you live in a Western country. I will say this to you now: live your principles.

LIVE YOUR PRINCIPLES. Granted, there are limits to what we can do, but I am sick of hearing, reading and seeing women and men staying with each other out of pity. Out of fear. Out of sentimentality.

It is VERY RARE to find a dysfunctional coupling where nostalgia and sentimentality don't play a substantial role. I am struck by how many women say that they are feminists, and yet in their home life they end up doing most of the work, and generally giving in...

While I know it's not easy to up and leave, or to dig your heels in - is it impossible? Is it really impossible?

Might you, after all, have the privilege of being able to live your principles?

A while back, Feministing had a post on this, but in a more straightforward sense of 'being privileged enough to educate oneself in a feminist-friendly way.' They also had a very good recent community post, where the notion of 'using privilege for good' surfaced in the comments. That came back to my thoughts today, along with a very interesting F-word post from late March this year. In America, it was apparently found that:

Wealthy families, she said, have tended, with their work-around-the-clock husbands and at-home wives, to have adopted a rather old-fashioned model of marriage, with fixed sex roles. They’ve set the tone, but the rest of the population hasn’t necessarily followed.

Something makes me think that such a scenario may not be entirely inconceivable in this country.

I'm not going to rosily claim that all middle-class people really love the Daily Fail and that working-class people are like exaggerated versions of the characters in Saturday Night, Sunday Morning (which by the way, you should totally read because it is a British CLASSIC, and also because that's how I want to write when I grow up).

The fact remains, however, that the Daily Mail - and the Telegraph, I would say, as well as the Guardian and Independent - exist as sources of information written by middle-class people, for middle-class people. We middle-class people are the source of normativity. Boo-hoo, we have it so hard, etc. Seriously though, I for one do not feel OK with the idea that I am part of that normativity (even though I am) because of my family's economic status, though that may have a little summat summat to do with my race and gender.

To recap though: WE ARE THE SOURCE OF NORMATIVITY. Even little ole privileged I. People want to write about US, the lives we lead, the foods we cook and eat, the money we spend and what we spend it on. That last factor is possibly the most important (ADVERTISING!). Basically, WE MATTER. WE MATTER in a way that working-class people don't; because our 'class' is growing all the time and because of our spending power.

You just can't reduce people to evil or pitiable caricatures when you're trying to coax their wallets from them now, can you?

So, all I'm asking is a very small thing. Though it's a good rallying cry in some ways, I'm not going to say 'People! Vote with your wallets when it comes to shit you don't like.' That involves effort and thinking and nobody likes that nowadays.

Instead I'll say: 'People! Live your principles.' We are economically and socially privileged. Let me contextualise to remind you, gentle reader, of the power you (unknowingly) wield.

In some communities in India, when a man divorces a woman, she is thrown out onto the street. Just like that. Sometimes, as is believed to have happened to a cousin of mine, the woman is married. Then, her husband and mother-in-law (almost ALWAYS that particular team, but not always) murder her and flee with the money/gifts/property rights. My cousin was praying in the house when she somehow got locked in and the building burnt down. Let's not even start on 'honour'-based violence...

Obviously, if you're in an abusive/domestic violence situation, it's going to be different and a lot more difficult. To those of you who aren't, I ask you this. Are you pressured into getting married before sex and living together can even grace your wildest dreams? Will you be ejected from your territory if you break up with someone? Is a lack of companionship and a bit of judgement from Smug-Married friends and hapless-but-well-meaning family (or friends) comparable to being burnt alive?

No. No, it's not. Your incentives for 'staying' come much more from YOU than from outside. Though there is bourgeois influence as well, no doubt. The decision is much more 'yours' than it would be in other countries and cultures. I'm currently in the process of trying to get my eldest sister (now living back with us at home, in case you forgot!) to just hurry up and tell the mofo she's divorcing him already. 'Tis a frustrating task, one that led to me writing an essay on the day it was due and then handing it in with another, which turned out to be LATE by two days (!), earlier this year. I wrote the bibliography by hand, having forgotten it entirely, 15 minutes before it was due. I subsequently found myself having a crying breakdown in my tutor's office while she was out retrieving the late essay...

My sister will be gossiped about by some in our community. Some will be pleased that her marriage failed, and many will now doom her to eternal celibacy as a result of her being divorced at the ripe 'old' age of 32. Benign-intentioned inepts will continue to suggest that she should have 'tried to make it work.' Yeahhhhh. Try to make it work with a man who spouted these gems:

He: I've lost respect for your dad now. He should have asked me before he came to pick you up.
(Translation: I own you).
She: ?! You're lucky he didn't beat the crap out of you.
(And how!).
He: (smirkingly proud) He's just an old man. I would have battered him.

When that particular exchange was conveyed to me (by phone, by my sister herself - a sign of all the progress I've made with her!), I neared tears trying to summon swearwords appropriate to my strength of feeling. Thankfully, because I was cooking, I settled for taking it out on my ingredients. Nothing like a spot of stabby-stabby for Mr. Motherfucker-you-are-my-property-and-you-will-stay-till-I-hit-and/or-kill-you, safely exorcised via chicken.

(Just to clarify: he didn't hit her and there's not very much evidence at all to suggest that he would. While undoubtedly abusive and uncouth, he does not fit the profile of the charming and cunning abuser that I have seen described on feminist websites. He just really is incredibly pathetic, compulsive, childish and deluded. Still not a reason to forgive him and 'settle,' now, is it?!).

People! Just stop and think. You are adults now - if your partner don't split the housework/other duties with you - they don't got your back. Yes, it really IS that fucking simple. You may not have the guts to leave just yet, but think twice if nothing else. Reconsider how much of your life you want to give to something that cuts right at the core of you NOW, and isn't likely to go away.

As the villains of Indian soaps so hilariously proclaim, 'just wait and watch.' You have a brain, you are not just a bag of hormones. The lulls in conversation are a chance to reflect. DON'T SETTLE WHEN YOU HAVE THE PRIVILEGE TO LIVE YOUR PRINCIPLES. That's all I ask of you.

Ladies, in particular: ROCK THAT FUCKING BOAT. Shake it like maracas. Cleanliness and neatness is not its own reward. That shit come and that shit go! There is a time for being adult (it's called PARENTHOOD!), and there is a time to fight fire with fire. If you haven't got kids with a bloke yet, you do not have to give in and do the housework. Talk to him - make him aware of what needs to be done. Give him a little 'guided tour' of the house, i.e.: 'Washing starts here, then is transferred either here if underwear, or here if in need of ironing...' Make a list of the tasks that need to be done, and split it so that it's equal or close enough.

Once you have children, it is GAME OVER on that front. Fighting for yourself will, unfortunately, become secondary. Do it while you can. If you don't, you WILL regret it (unless you get a lobotomy) and then your children will suffer. Hmmm, inconvenience yourself, or give your kids a chance to be equipped to fight the patriarchy? Even if you don't want kids, you still have YOU - ageing, society-and-culture-blasted, frail mortal YOU to consider.

I have, I freely admit, been uber-lucky. The Libertarian was raised in a household where his father did the cooking and the bulk of the washing-up. However, that didn't mean that he shirked on his parenting or housework duties - it was equally split. Once TL was old enough to help out, he got involved with everything from icing cookies to painting walls.

Again, privilege played a part in that arrangement being possible. I accept that not everyone can have it 100% equal. If nothing else though, we can avoid becoming servile. Men going out to work keeps the economy running, but women doing housework and raising children keeps society functioning. House + work = it's work too, even if it's not publicly visible. Be houseproud by all means but don't be a workaholic. Make your partner do what he can. Privileged feminists - LIVE YOUR PRINCIPLES!


Recommended Reading: Who needs two parents?

(P.S.: This is HILARIOUS). I think I am in love with an unopened jar of peanut butter. Gulp.

Totally random aside relating to this post on Cath's glorious blog: I think feminists should perhaps strike back at the men who try to portray their purchasing of sex as perfectly normal. Y'know, like you pop into Boots for a magazine, and then you go down a side street to buy a woman's vagina... They refer to themselves using the relatively innocent term 'punters.' That's what I mean, when I hear 'punters', I think of normal consumers. Not men who buy sex. So let us not let 'em off (even inadvertently). 'Punters,' my ass. I personally favour 'ratfaces' myself, but I know this is both a) unfair to rats b) somewhat unworkable. So let's be having your suggestions, please?

Putting Things Right

A while back, I had a go at Laurie of Penny Red. I feel pretty bad about that now, to be honest. Not that there wasn't some truth to what I said - but really, what was I expecting? That she should be able to represent the likes of me? Of course she can't; and it's totally unreasonable to expect such a thing of her. Furthermore, although I hope she ends up as an investigative journalist (I imagine she'd be super-duper at that!), she can do what she likes in the meantime. The whole thing did perhaps come off harsher than intended; essentially what I was saying is 'you can do better than this' when it comes to some of her writing...

But who made me an arbiter of what is good? Who am I to tell someone else (especially someone who ain't listening, haha) to 'do better'? This - this post right here - is about me trying to put things right. There's a lot that needs to be put right. This v. good and simple post on PR has inspired me to try and begin to do so, if nothing else.

What I was expecting of her is the same thing I expect of myself. To do better. To strive for perfection. To achieve consistency all the time, blah blah blah. As her post so ably describes, we are all prone to this tendency. It is worse in some ways for women, than it is for men. They're not free of it either, though.

I appear to have indulged in classic projection and lashed out at a fellow struggler rather than stopping and thinking about why I did that. Having said that, I do still want her to go on and become a Socialist Superwoman, and I sincerely hope that she won't lose sight of herself in striving to achieve success. That is a genuine warning, because in trying to sell an unpopular cause to people, one can find oneself unexpectedly compromised. Everyone knows that... I am also developing some rad-fem tendencies, thanks in large part to this blog (and the assholes on Cif but also seemingly EVERYWHERE ELSE on t'Interwebz!), and so I got a bit unfair on someone who I felt didn't have to be quite as 'feminist' as me.

How stupid is that, eh? You live and you learn, though, I guess. I think that is true of many Asian feminists though - there is quite a gulf between what they, and their white (middle-class...) counterparts are concerned with. That is nobody's fault. We have to deal much more with really barbaric things like honour-killings, and the pressure of being sandwiched between liberal society (not free of misogyny and sexism for all that...) and conservative families.

For example, Laurie mentions in her post how:

I've just been watching Meera Syal's documentary about self-harm, in which she asks, amongst other things, why Asian women in particular are so very high-acheiving and yet so desperately unhappy - being the group statistically most likely both to graduate with high honours and to deliberately hurt their bodies.

There you go. We have more freedom to work than is still permitted in India, Bangladesh, China et al (though those countries ARE, in some cases, getting better for women...) yet in many cases, our cultures don't sensitively adjust to this. Instead, it is expected that women will work full-time - AND be perfect slave housewives. It's not just the job market, but also the marriage market, we have to grey our pretty little heads over. British middle-class society also still has this mindset in many cases, but not in the same way as the Asian community.

Paradoxically, no-one wants to touch with a bargepole any woman who doesn't have a high-powered degree (that means I'm out of the running, eh?) - think Biomedical Sciences, Accounting, Medicine, Law... teaching as well. Yet in most cases, she also has to be a housewife. Getting 'lucky' involves all or any of the following:

a) Your husband doesn't hassle you about housework (for the most part) and/or sometimes even HELPS (aka my father).
b) You don't live with your mother-in-law.
c) Your mother-in-law doesn't expect you to become her.


Quite simply, you're not allowed to be thick, dark, rebellious or lazy. Given that I am both rebellious and lazy, my mum actually used to mutter: 'Thank God you have fair skin.' My mother has also tried repeatedly to break my spirit, claiming that she's just preparing me for my mother-in-law. Alongside this, she harangued both my sisters to learn Indian cooking (including how to make a full dinner in one go, even though NOBODY I know, us included, ever eats that). Despite both successfully doing so, she subsequently tried to blame all marital problems, especially my eldest sister's, on cooking.

So, my second-eldest sister and I have a lengthy discussion with my mum about how our brother-in-law is a psychopathic abuser, who enjoys publicly humiliating my sister and refuses to either let her come see us, or come to see us with her. This may last 20 minutes or longer. Mother nods agreeingly and even participates. Two minutes later, she is ranting about how it is all my sister's fault, and talking about cooking. (Although she dropped cooking-as-cause after about a year-and-a-half of ongoing strife...)

The thing is: my mum means well. 'Nine times out of ten,' she informed me with a faded bitterness, 'the woman must bend.' It didn't matter that I actually had a boyfriend at the time who cooked for me and shared the housework (at one stage when he briefly lived with me, just before finishing his degree, he was actually preparing every meal and doing all the washing-up while I worked on a project). She had seen what it is like for us Punjabi women, the sham of Sikh equality, and she wanted there to be no hope to so cruelly give way, treacherously feather-light, to betrayal and disappointment.

Despite having a decent boyfriend at the time, I could see myself falling into the patriarchy's tentacles. I sincerely believed that I would never make it to 21, and that if I did, I would find myself in a marriage that would eventually drive me to suicide. How could I continue my mother's cycle, and raise children that I resented? Why would I want to raise another child like myself, plagued by self-doubt and devoured by the family pack?

I was so hellishly afraid of this happening to me that I clung to my now-ex, despite not being happy. The fact that he largely didn't mean to upset me became a handy guilt-trigger, for when I wondered how the hell I could ever love him. I went through my degree, picking up Firsts and even winning a prize. The initial hostility of my family to my education choices gave way to a less-antagonistic but not-much-more-satisfying complacency. They told me 'Well done,' and then would add that I SHOULD be getting marks like that. Their congratulations were always severely compromised by the fact that they neither understood, nor particularly cared, WHAT I was good at. There was also an underlying assumption that what I was doing was not really that difficult or worthwhile.

This last attitude infected me deeply. It birthed in me a painful and schizophrenic feeling. I regarded my mute and detached contemporaries in seminar rooms with a kind of superior hatred. How many of them had been told that they would study English 'over my dead body' by their sisters? How many of them had earned the right to be there, like I had, and were capitalising on it feverishly, like I was?

Even as I felt like this, I kept myself 'humble' by reminding myself always, in a back corner of my brain, that I wasn't doing anything useful or important. But I was also doing French! But I wasn't going into business with it. Even though I hated the French part of my degree at times, it gave me a further edge over the other losers. Were they struggling like I was struggling? Did they have to dilute their favourite subject, just to be taken remotely seriously?

The evidently gigantic chip on my shoulder was carved into deeper by this 'humility' I enforced on myself. One of my best friends inadvertently contributed to it when she joined in with my mocking of other students saying that to those kinds of people, she would say: 'I'm doing SCIENCE, bitches.' I must never get above myself because literature was not essential to the world the way science was. Yet this attitude allowed me to mock those who were fanatically devoted when I didn't understand things - they were out of touch. They didn't see, like I saw, that science mattered more!

Ironic, really. I had tried to take science at A-level, had found it a nightmare (though definitely interesting) and then made a defiant show of taking arts at uni, because other people got to, so why shouldn't I? Deep down, though, I had internalised my family's beliefs and knew that I had failed at perfection. It was bad enough that I was lazy and rebellious, aware of the sexual inequality around me. Now, I had to mess up the career thing too. I was not ambitious enough to reply 'journalist' quick-fire when well-meaning people Qed me about what I would do afterwards.

The one thing that galvanised me above all else, was injustice. Especially the treatment of women by our community. I knew this wasn't exactly a 'career choice' though, and I resented that it was so deeply embedded in my being. I resented others, as just described, because they were normal. I superficially belonged to their world, but behind the facade of shared interests and economic/educational status or political views, lurked That Bloody Awareness. My aunt abandoned. My cousin, believed to be murdered. My other cousin, forced into marriage then deceived and abandoned. My sister, pushed into marriage when she was not, and might never be, ready.

These women were in me and with me, and I couldn't relax and make small talk like normal people. I'm still very socially inept.

[Interlude: My mother just came down because I am STILL up, and when I told her I was writing and that I had to do it, called me 'weird' and said 'You'd better come down to Earth, you're flying around in the clouds.' Thank you, mother...]

I was, and still am, wrong wrong wrong. Odd, and wrong. I'm the lightest in the family. I'm the only one who didn't pursue a science degree. I'm the first child (and until my brother, the only one) to have lived away from home. I'm also the only agnostic, and the only one to date two very 'wrong' men. One, a non-6-foot, non-Punjabi atheist. The second, a 6ft, fair-skinned, believes-in-God dreamboat... only he's a) white b) a historian, with a penchant for reasoned debate on just about everything. Given that my parents like to subscribe to Daily Mail worldviews and a, er, 'Sikh-centric' view of history, it's going to be interesting (i.e., the other day, they were watching a man talking about how Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale was a saint, and totally right to agitate for a separate Sikh state...). If they ever meet.

So ja, I am a spectacular failure. I plan on raking myself over the coals some more in later posts (ooh, what fun!). Even my body is all wrong for a supposed 'Indian' woman. I'm slightly taller than a lot of the Indian girls I see (despite being about average for a British woman), and I don't really look Indian at all. I'm most frequently mistaken for Iranian and Greek, but also Spanish. I'm not tiny and petite and delicate-looking. To quote Laurie again:

I weigh almost nine stone; I have fat on my upper arms... I have d-cup breasts, which I despise, and a tummy which no amount of sit-ups will flatten.

Sorry, Punjabi Sikh community of Britain! Sorry British society! I don't fit either of your notions of 'conventionally attractive.' Believe me, the shops have drummed it home by now that an apple-shaped body is NOT GOOD. I'm not Kelly Brook, and I'm not Freida Pinto either. I didn't trade in my plait and glasses for feathered/layers and contacts as soon as I hit 16. I want to aim for more than a car, a house near my parents and a husband that doesn't hit me. I won't pretend stoically that the guilt and shame that keep us locked into deceiving our parents and beating ourselves up are to be respected or tolerated.

Call me pathetically feminine if you will, call me 'coconut' and 'posh' and whatever else. I will cry in your faces about the fact that I have been, and still am, hurting. No 'put up or shut up.' How about 'fess 'up, or fuck off'?

This post will get ugly. And uncomfortable.

I'm writing this because I'm sort of a little bit worried about myself.

Just admitting that has made me feel slightly better, already.

Something is wrong with me, and particularly in the way that I approach my problems. I have always been somebody who tries not to attract attention, who tries to be 'stoic' about things (I put that in inverted commas, because I think no truly sane person can really be stoic about things). A certain amount of pragmatism is obviously necessary for continued survival.

People so often slip blithely into the Oppression Olympics, because they are trying to balance the good, old-fashioned need to vent with an enlightened awareness of the greater suffering of others. I think this is stupid, on reflection. Provided that you don't just moan on about how hard you have it all the time, without any acknowledgement of those facing bigger problems elsewhere, you're not betraying anyone. It's one of the things I find the most silly amongst feminists and left-wingers. A sense of injustice is (provided it's not obsessive) healthy. 'Liberal guilt' is not, because guilt isn't really healthy. Small doses of it enable us to become better human beings, but the complex that so often constitutes 'liberal guilt' can't really be called small.

I'm sure I've said that before...

Anyway, because I find myself falling prey to this same stupid mindset that I've just condemned, I try not to moan. I've had things easier than my parents' generation when it comes to race, and it's not like I was around in the nineteenth century - or even the 1950s - when things were a lot worse for women, and particularly Asian women. The stories about marriage that I've heard - even within our apparently fairly 'modern' family - are pretty appalling, and thankfully I can say confidently that that sort of thing WOULDN'T happen today to the best of my knowledge. Not in our family.

Still, I am lying. In the desire to not be another fucking cliché - another urban liberal Asian female talking about how she was so oppressed and suffered so much OMG - I have become another fucking cliché. God, irony is so neat.

I did not want, and could not see, myself alongside Jasvinder Sanghera, or any of the other women who have written about their experiences within their families. I was never locked up by my parents, or forced into a marriage. My person had received no notable harm. What right did I have to complain?

Repeating this like a mantra, I would keep spurring myself onwards to Be A Success! Act Like A Success! Think Like A Success! An evil little voice mocked my endeavours. It never occurred to me until very recently that the voice that told me to just KEEP GOING and the voice that told me to FUCKING QUIT could be related. Strange that I never spotted the relation, because every now and again, the compartments fused, dividing walls crumbling. Then, the voice that told me to fucking quit was on form. It rambled like an alcoholic, horrifyingly unstoppable, about how I was trying to run from my fundamental emptiness. How everything I did was a pathetic search for validation and meaning of the most primitive kind.

I effectively watched lies evaporate, whenever this happened when I was talking to somebody dear to me. Be it my ex-boyfriend, The Libertarian or someone else, it was like I could hear the stimulus withering in my voice. Feel the sudden absence of balance and optimism, as if against my own ears. Note the sudden loss of language and expression. Those who've ever had to deal with it have said that it is not what I say, but my silence, that scares them. I crack apart into jaws, and the tongue of beast reaches out through them.

I will NOT be taken, though. I am not going to be pulled underwater until I drown. I have tried to suffocate the grief. It simply imploded, resulting in me putting myself in danger, or wanting to. Telling loved ones about the way my family behaved was, I thought, a way of fighting their order to (essentially) not tell the truth. I tend to hate psychobabble, but one word is OH SO USEFUL. Internalised. I had internalised my parents' values to some extent, and seen them heavily reinforced by British society. Keep your feelings private. Mind your own business. Don't air your dirty laundry.

I knew I was never going to be on Jeremy Kyle, and I probably wasn't going to write and publish a book, even though I like writing and it's one thing I seem to do fairly well. So I cursed myself. I was the (sort-of) middle child, the eldest of the two younger children. I was the one who tried on the whole to be responsible, whilst my brother could be bad. Yet I also demanded equal treatment. I could never brook the fact that he was somehow better than me by virtue of his sex, and that paradoxically I was expected to behave better because of MY sex.

I took crap from my sisters when they needed to take out their feelings on somebody, and was tossed into the ring to control my brother 'because you're his age-group.' This despite the fact that he was very aware of his superior male status and only afraid of one person - my second-eldest sister. She barely controlled him, whilst my mother continually undermined both my elder sisters' authority. In a household full of competing personalities with similar interests, I shut my mouth. And I died.

When I was little, I was confident, friendly and assertive. Everyone thought I was cute. My aunt once mistook me for a doll. When I got a fair bit older, I realised that there was a time and a place for unconditional love. It was certainly over by the age of about 11. By that point, I was most definitely different. It had begun around age 7, when I became a bookworm and stopped being good at maths.

My family fell neatly into little units: my sisters, my parents, my mum and brother, my second-eldest sister and brother... The two 'units' I was supposed to be part of, were myself and my eldest sister and myself and my brother. Both were deeply flawed by the lack of equal status: she was a second father, 10 years my senior. My brother, increasingly aware of his privilege as both the youngest and the only male, was supposed to be below me in the hierarchy but knew the reality.

I read, greedily. I was inquisitive and sensitive. I wanted to be good at maths and science, but I was better at English. I had originally wanted to be an artist. Aged about 6, I revealed this to my mother; she laughed and said I would be penniless. That dream crashed to pieces pretty much there and then.

As I grew more and more different from my family, it became more visible to them. The thing that could always unite them, was me. My sisters worked hard to make sure that I would not have any more freedom than they did. Being not particularly aggressive in nature, I went along with most things. I always protested to some extent, but what was the point? My parents, perhaps feeling guilty at their lack of presence in our lives, always bowed to pressure from my sisters. Not that their own conservative values helped much. My mother was very reluctant to let me pierce my ears at 11, and had to be persuaded by my sister.

My brother, as spoilt children do, tested the boundaries as much as I did, and emerged victorious far more frequently. Something I like to tell those close to me occasionally, sums up the difference in our power and importance within the family. For my 18th birthday, I received £20. For his, he received a Nintendo Wii. His laziness, arrogance and obstinacy often allowed him to endure my sisters' attempts to treat him as they did me. Resultantly, he escaped having housework/money-based guilt rained upon him all the time. My mother also kept him somewhat separate from us because boys were a separate and sacred species. He never had to share a room with either of my sisters; nor did he, on the whole, have to put up with their PMT.

My sisters weren't fairer than my parents though. They spoiled him at times too - my eldest sister being worse - and every time I was thrown into the ring with him, they did not want to know. Even if he started fights, it didn't matter. They didn't want to know. I hated him - really hated him. It wasn't a stereotypical, murderous hatred - more a corrosive and grudging loathing. I relished hurting him. I have no shame about that, even now.

And that is because my mother, like my sisters, refused to see my brother's unbelievably spiteful side. When I was being told off, he was allowed to join in with completely superfluous bitchy comments, only being told to butt out when I protested repeatedly. If I was criticised - as I was repeatedly - he somehow had full license to join in, despite my apparently being older. He delighted in calling me 'fat' and 'stupid,' and when I was with my ex, Internet-stalked me, looking for proof to reveal to my parents. He also loved stirring, making completely false allegations about me for no discernible reason other than he enjoyed it. When I came back late from a friend's party, my coat smelling of smoke thanks to her parents in the conservatory, he kept trying to accuse me of smoking.

I'm not done with my anger. For a long time now, I have tried to forgive and leave all this in the past. However, until I document what happened - the major incidents, if not everything - I will not find any peace at all. Now that everyone's older and my sisters married and moved out, everything has been magically forgotten. Swept under the carpet. I disclosed slices of my grimy little history to a number of people. Many of them, I fear, found it slightly ludicrous and unbelievable. Just as many, if not more, made the common mistake of trying to provide solutions rather than just LISTEN.

Part of the reason that there have only been about 2 or 3 people in my life who I can really trust with this, is because it sounds so preposterous at times, like a Goodness Gracious Me sketch. My best friend, who actually heard for herself the transition between my sister's 'outside world' and 'home' personalities. My cousins, who are also 'in the family.' However, it is a history that needs rescuing and confiding not to one at a time, but to this. My patch, my home, my blog.

Partially revenge, but much more closure - I will save my soul. I spoke earlier of the curse, which I transferred to myself. The curse, in effect, of my mother. The woman who would condemn me to a life like hers - or worse - through a lack of faith. She doesn't know it, of course, but I internalised the curse. Like Rosemary's baby, it became something else altogether inside of me. I told you guilt was unhealthy, didn't I? How can I be so bloody sure about it, eh? you ask. I'm not a psychologist, or a psychiatrist.

I know that guilt is unhealthy, because like all noted hypocrites, I suffer it myself. However, I absolve myself somewhat in telling you that it is not liberal guilt - but existence-based guilt that I feel. It is just unacceptable. I do not deserve it, and I'm not going to take it.

Continued, when I have the time/will/inclination...