Boring.

I've said it before, but something is wrong with me.

Like, right now. I am just sitting here, hot, unshowered and slightly fatigued. I feel sick. It is very possible that I have been before a screen for longer than I should've been.

My eyes just filled with tears. A few moments ago, I had a great urge to duck into the front room, where we usually have guests, and cry.

Delivering folded piles of clothes to appropriate rooms upstairs, I felt the - what? Grief? Pain? Anger? Some melange of the three? - come back. Earlier, I had had a sudden vision of slicing neatly into my arm with a blade of some sort. Would it make me feel more in control? I put the thought aside because I don't think we have any knives sharp enough to slice skin open like paper, and I'm NOT doing it with scissors.

Anyway, I was in my room and I just looked at the light 'fixture' (as I have learned to call it, in the American English parlance) and it would NOT be suitable for a hanging. I reflected on what on Earth I could hang myself with anyway - my scarves are probably too slippery. I don't think a belt would work (but maybe it would...?).

Now, I just feel tired and the thought of doing any theory test preparation is too much.

Emo fucking shit.

I met two people today. One I'd never even spoken to on the phone before, the other I had a history with.

The first experience, lasting barely an hour, made me feel like a fish on a hook. Even when I think I know the right thing to say to somebody, or what seems like it anyway, why can't I make it come out right? So much verbal communication with others is horrible. I come away from it feeling wounded, wondering if I am some sort of misanthrope. I certainly don't have a continually balanced relationship to people, that's for sure.

Tout le temps, toute seule... mais quelquefois, je me trouve toute seule.

Don't get me wrong, it doesn't hurt physically. People seem to like me. I don't know for sure that they do; I have to believe and that's where it falls down. It's not as if the metal tip was bloody in my chest. Of course there was no deathly experience. Yet always, social interaction is... so much twisting. So much twisting into knots, as if you can reconfigure your own face and body into what the other person is attempting to reflect from their face and body.

The pathological desire to please. The hatred of the desire to appease. The knowledge of the 'rules' and the gnawing fear of contravening them. What will people think? What will people think? WHAT WILL PEOPLE THINK?

My pride suffers. I need my family; I cannot reject them whatever they might have done to me. Yet part of me deeply resents the need for others, at times. The Libertarian has proved to be so astoundingly compatible with me that I'm starting to get over this in terms of romance. I have a couple of best friends who are usually there for me.

But deep down, right in the bowels of the fear, is the terrible knowledge that I don't matter. Nobody is indispensable, The Libertarian told me once. 'Hearts' colours change like leaves... Like leaves.' We were discussing an event I am unsure whether to attend or not, on account of the fact that I admire the people there. I don't hero-worship, but I always want to feel like talking to me is not a way to pass the time in between 'real' conversations with other people.

Those weren't his exact words, but that's what he meant. I know that it's true.

I perhaps ought to mention that one of the people I met today was my ex-partner. I tried to talk to him. It was a laboured experience, and I was filled with horror at the fact that I had tried so hard to make this person relate to me, who was so beyond my reach. I had a sudden flash of the future I once wanted. I would never, ever have been the person he was looking for.

Seeing him left me emotionally drained, as I'd fought some kind of battle. I had - I was trying to prove myself to him, I think. Still trying to undo the damage that I wasn't really even responsible for. Just friendship is dangerous though - I'm not sure I'm ready for this.

He said I made him feel callous and shallow. Or something. I wasn't totally certain of how I'd done that - we were talking about cynicism and political involvement and blah-de-blah. I was basically trying to argue for greater self-awareness for those who consider themselves thoughtful human beings. We looked around for food this evening, and I said 'I don't know why, but I feel like I might cry.' He said 'Why?' then laughed in a frightening, hollow way. I admired him so much, and I still do.

I feel like he could kill me - not in an actual, physical sense, but kill whatever it is that makes me want to keep going. When I was with him, I tried to take his grief and confusion and suck it out, like poison from a snake-bite. Simultaneously I was trying to break myself up, let the pieces of myself re-form into what he was looking for.

Or was the one the means to the other? My sister came to me, I held her and hugged her and talked at her. She cried in my arms, I told her we [the family] loved her. I think it worked. Why am I so rubbish at human interaction? I have been beset with terror for the last year or so that all my friends dread talking to me because all I talk about is TL. I know this is not true, and none of them would lie to me like that. Yet deep down, it is because I know that all I do talk about is TL and political stuff. Not because I am a boyfriend-obsessed hairbrain, but because I have no life. Lack of money - and fear - hold me back.

I don't want to be famous, or particularly rich, or successful. I wish I felt able to believe people. Doesn't help that many of the recent people I've met are journalists (ha ha). Even if a few people could say they loved me. I keep wondering, if I die suddenly, what will my family say? How quickly will they recover from my death?

Next time I meet somebody I like and admire, mayhap I should just hide. Or make like Saul Green in The Golden Notebook and stammer 'I - I, I, I, I'. I know I am paranoid, but I don't fit anywhere and I don't look right either. If I was pretty in some real way, it might help - but I know that is ridiculous because my sister is pretty and she is heartbroken.

Groups of people frighten me. I want to bolt. I feel like a sacrificial offering. I can never be sure that they won't choose to get rid of me, because they have no obligation to hang on - and I take so much, with my petty need to be loved all the time. Crude, crude, crude. Sometimes, I want them to put me out of my misery, morph into birds, take to their wings and tear me to shreds. Like bait on a hook.

Existence-based guilt

I meant to write a post on this before. I have meant to do it many a time. Fear of making some invisible descent into irredeemable humourlessness/congealing self-pity held me back. Plus, y'know. It's BIG SHIT. It's like serving up an elephant turd in a kitty litter box. Haha. I would be presenting you with the elephant turd (existence-based guilt) in the kitty litter box (my blog) and your eyes would roll collectively back in your heads before you fainted. Or you would go 'That's not cool, man. Get over it' before continuing about your business.

But - y'know what? THIS IS MY BLOG! That basic elementary fact eludes me sometimes - rather too much - and that in itself says a lot. I've never really had a physical place in which I felt 100% 'safe,' especially not a place which could be accessed by others. That's probably why I forget that my blog is such a place. No-one has tried to hound me out (yet). It may never happen. The length of my posts probably wears them down. Haha.

Anyway, the nub of my gist is that while my place is 'publicly-accessible,' I don't have to tolerate whatever. I take a similar line to many feminist blogs, although I've not had anywhere near the level of trolling that they have. I set it up and it belongs to me, hypothetical bitches! So now, I can proceed at last to offload.

I think I've mentioned this particular issue of mine before. In this post, here <--- look! :-D I brushed over it quickly though, as if I were simply glazing pastry with milk, or egg or... Anyway. I need to explain the whole meguillah properly. 'Existence-based guilt' is when I want to die. It's not that simple, though. Take two. 'Existence-based guilt' is when I am hurting inside - for WHATEVER REASON - and then I proceed to reach into said pain, pick it up, stretch it out even further and then stab metaphorical sharp objects into it. I make it bigger and more acute. I try to make a whole, functioning personality from it, because, you know what? When I am depressed, I am like broken pieces of a mirror. Lots of little fragments which should be related, but which aren't. I chose the mirror image not for emo appeal, but because a mirror shows a reflection. It passes no judgement in its own right. That is what my mind does when depressed - it doesn't pass judgement, it simply reacts to external stimuli in a completely irrational and suspicious manner.

I don't know who I am. That's not me being melodramatic, it's the result of a very genuine FEAR and confusion. Do you know me? Have you met me in real life? Whether or not you have, let me tell you something now: I have lived my whole life rooted in fear. You may reflect now, and think that actually, yes, you can see it. You can see slices of the fear and uncertainty in my responses to things, in my social interactions. I don't think I hide it that much, though I have been told that I am 'remarkably well-adjusted.'

Plus, y'know, you get used to living a certain way. You can FORGET that that is your life until the mirror breaks.

Ever since I was little, I have been very emphatically 'the odd one out' of my family. Now, this is nothing new. It led to a situation which was also 'nothing new': the second-generation liberal Asian female child rebelling against older, more conservative, more religious Asian parents. That is FOINE. Well, it's not, but for now it is.

The problem is not that particular conflict, but another one altogether: that of the crazed, wrong and abnormal VS. the sane, right and normal. My mother must be singled out and accorded special status here. Bluntitude time: this woman should not have had children. Or married. She should have been working on projects at NASA.

However, she was born in the India in the '50s, so... dream on. Here we are today, and here I am. For whatever reason (and I strongly suspect that it emanates largely from her own disappointment and resentment), my mother has somehow bypassed the whole 'maternal instinct and human empathy' bit.

I am extraordinarily sensitive. I don't know why, I didn't ask for it and that should be the end of the story. Unfortunately, I was (as I said) born into a family much in the manner of a cuckoo appearing in a nest. I had two older sisters who were 10 years above me, and then I got a brother who was two years younger and the youngest. My sisters hence were on the receiving end of my parents at their most energetic, erratic and maladjusted. Immigrants to this country, they underwent cultural displacement, racism and a late swing towards major religiosity inspired by guilt. Great. Naturally, the deeply-conservative values that this all reinforced, were passed on to my sisters.

Social conservatives, let it be said, do not generally look kindly upon difference. Maybe, if I had not had two older sisters, or if I had been the youngest, things might have been different. I found out years later that apparently my parents thought I was going to be a boy, which may have explained a lot.

My mother despaired of me as a child. From the start I was shy, artistic, imaginative and rebellious. She thought for a while that I might be autistic; I apparently refused to do anything but draw, and would not learn to read English until my drawing was threatened. Eventually, I started to get it together and by year 2 I was top of the class and apparently 2 years ahead of my peers ability-wise.

Then, disaster struck. I got into books. My mathematical ability vanished; my artistic inclinations deepened. My natural shyness and bullishness prevented me from being especially sociable. I've pretty much been that way ever since.

My mother despaired. She couldn't understand me - so she condemned me. In the harsh Indian world she grew up in, her father smacked her hand repeatedly when she said she 'couldn't' learn times-tables. The fact that I wasn't like her, or any of the others, meant that she had nothing with which to 'manage' me, and my brother, the much-longed-for boy, made an appearance before too long. Instead of taking time to treat me as a human being, she criticised me incessantly. Why was I so slow? So lethargic? This lethargy was not only physical but mental too, according to her. Why did I not have Asian friends? Why did I give her trouble, by refusing to acknowledge teachers who were mean to me?

On its own, I might have dealt with this. However, seeing the love my brother got made me intensely jealous. One of my earliest memories of him is of scratching out his eyes in a picture everyone loved, and being put in the garden as a punishment. I paced, weeping 'Nobody loves me, nobody loves me.' I knew that what I had done was wrong, but my parents didn't allay the terrible anxiety that I had about being replaced. My brother was beloved, and I was a problem.

My sisters, supposed to be the elders, also could not help being resentful of the lenient treatment and spoiling that my brother received. While my parents constantly made a show of how we were all equal, the hypocritical truth was always there. One way my parents made us equal was to turn any telling-off of one person into an attack on all the others. Imbibing this, my sisters were resentful not just of my brother, but of me too. In some ways, this was useful for me. In many others, it wasn't. Both were training to become healthcare professionals in the NHS - a stressful job - and had to look after us too while my parents worked. Hence it became 'OK' for them to take this out on us, particularly me. My brother, detecting his inborn advantage early on, started exploiting it before very long and would cheek them constantly. In a strange way, I think they themselves ended up seeing him as superior; he was rarely punished though empty threats were frequently made by my parents.

I took their attacks because, well, I couldn't not. When you are one of six living in a house and the second youngest, where do you go to escape? I didn't have my own room, and the toilet was hardly a place to relax. I had to deal with being told that I was fat, lazy, useless etc. etc. constantly. My brother and I bickered a lot, and soon my sisters refused to intervene at all, so the only one who could avenge what he said to me was ME. That got me in further trouble. I ate my sisters' low-fat snacks because... well, it was something to do, I suppose and eating made me happy. More trouble for me. When my sisters had PMT, I knew I was going to get bullied. They often ganged up on me, making bitchy comments together. My boobs were too big. My dress sense was weird. I breathed too loudly. I dragged my feet. I thought I was 'so clever' and a 'tortured poet' (as if! Just because I wrote). My mother in particular gave me life-long insecurities about my nose. She kept saying I looked like a duck, that I had a 'duck' nose; she would then say it was going in the wrong direction, seize it and try to 'pull it back.' The others subsequently made the same comment, and I became paranoid about my nose. I only tried to stop her yanking it - and stopped doing so myself - after blood came out. Even now, I do it without noticing.

My brother joined in with GLEE when I got older, and then I was well and truly alone. My family repeatedly impressed the notion of not trusting anyone outside the family on me. I felt like I couldn't tell anyone about what was happening to me anyway, because it was normal. They all told me it was normal; no-one behaved in any way that indicated that my position was especially hard. When I threatened to commit suicide, I was laughed at. Everyone just thought I was a weirdo. It didn't matter that I was good at some subjects because in my family's eyes, they weren't useful. Besides, they were not subjects we had ever done in our family before. When I said I wanted to study English, my older sister said 'Over my dead body'.

The thing that I learnt better than anything else was that you could not question ANYTHING. Question my sisters' authority, and they and/or my parents would punish me. Do the same with my parents and ditto, but even worse. Question my own or my brother's position, and I would be made to feel guilty. Any deviance from their beliefs was asking for trouble. I spotted my family's hypocrisy over religion early on, because I became devout for a while. I did a lot of reading and realised that a lot of their actions and claims didn't match up with how Sikhs were 'supposed' to be. This led to me becoming agnostic.

The turning point came when I confessed to being agnostic. Big fucking mistake. My whole family sat opposite me. Now that I reflect, I remember that I was literally up against the wall. As if I were facing a firing squad. I sure felt like it. My second-eldest sister, who I partly wanted to be like, smugly asked me why, what my arguments were. I could make none, I was terrified. My father had just accused me of betraying him, stating that he couldn't believe that a child of his could live under his roof and say that. My brother thought it was hilarious, naturally. I didn't want to be kicked out or shunned. They kept me there for three hours, until I was wilting with tiredness, then I was watched like a hawk for months.

(Apologies if I've described this incident already...).

See, I got into a relationship and my ex-boyfriend slowly started to make me see that what was going on wasn't normal. My family had no right to shoot me down just because I didn't agree. My mother had no right to say that I was a psychopath just because I refused to obey her. I got the courage to tell friends, and slowly but surely I got to the stage where I am today.

However, the problem is that along the way, I lost my anger. Much of my teens were consumed in a burning rage, I would literally sit in my room, reflecting on things that had happened, until I was shaking with rage and crying hot tears. I wanted to kill one of them, but I sincerely believed that I would be arrested and/or killed myself if I tried. I came close to striking my mother once, and she used the guilt against me like a billy-club.

Just as girls are trained to do, not just in South Asian culture but very acutely and particularly in SA culture - I began turning the anger and hatred inwards. My parents HAD worked hard to support us, my sisters HAD been like mothers to me. I couldn't reconcile these facts with my anger at the way they'd treated me. So, I absorbed them. I got myself into a destructive relationship, repeating the same dynamic of harsh criticism and inferiority that I had with my mother. He was always seeking to change me, to 'improve' me somehow, and I thought that was good because of my messed-up values.

This relationship absorbed a lot of my self-loathing. In some ways, it was a coping mechanism - though I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. I spent five and a half years not being quite right, pouring all my energies into my partner who had problems of his own. He emotionally blackmailed me; I gave him money. I don't even think he was doing it consciously, but it happened nonetheless. My outbreaks of PMD (pre-menstrual depression) which I was then unaware of, baffled him. He could not listen; he tried to tidy me away. Like my mother, intense emotion was beyond his comprehension.

Away from him in France, I got myself into a similar relationship with a friend. Our intense friendship impacted upon my mood severely when it was in a 'down' (which it was for many months). At one point, I deliberately endangered myself, subconsciously hoping that something bad would happen to me. I wasn't sure what, but I 'reasoned' with myself that I didn't really matter enough for it to be an issue if something did. That was the first time my mind 'fragmented' and the evil depressive demon appeared. It justified my decision to me, and after I took it, I regretted it. I was reeling with guilt, and my then-boyfriend's reaction made me suicidal. The friend who had 'replaced' him expressed relief at my safety, and that brought me back to something resembling normal.

When I came together with The Libertarian, I finally got what love was supposed to be about. I realised early on that I was going to fall for him. The day we met after kissing for the first time ever - it was our sixth meeting - I told him how my sisters had shredded my self-confidence. He did not respond. He stopped walking, let go of my hand, turned me to face him and then pulled me into a tight hug. Things finally made sense in me; I felt delighted. This, THIS was what I needed! How could he understand that so instinctively, so easily, when my boyfriend of five-and-a-half years couldn't?

In a relationship with a wonderful man and realising that I had trustworthy friends after all, it was me VS. the demon depression. I determined that I was NOT going to let it wreck things like it had with my ex, even if he was wrong for me. I would prove my mother wrong; I was NOT going to turn out to be a serial killer. I was NOT a psychopath. Sadly, it's taken a lot of hard work to convince me that I can trust people and believe in myself. Even now, I belittle myself and my needs, especially when PMD strikes. I cannot believe that love - whether platonic or romantic - is unconditional.

That is where existence-based guilt comes in. A lifetime of negative thinking that was both passively inherited from, and actively reinforced by my mother, kicks in. This links neatly up with the ongoing pressure on women to be perfect, especially in SA culture. Add fear of being 'unwomanly' and a desire to change the order of things as a feminist, counterbalanced by the ugly knowledge that nowadays 'feminist' is a dirty word that carries a huge burden. I cannot settle for my contradictions, like most people can. Ever since I was young, I have to 'choose' whether I'm British or Indian. However, it's always other people who set the parameters of those categories for me. My mother framed the choice cleverly, in terms of health and the greater good. My family specialise in hyperbolic distortion with a tiny grain of truth embedded in it - and when PMD strikes, that little grain flies like a fishing hook, embedding itself in me. I wish I had never existed, I wish I was dead. I wish this because I cannot wish to be what my parents want - for emotional reasons (my mum's never happy and it's already ruined our lives) and logical reasons (they already have my brother).

I wish death upon myself because it would be 'easy.' I am not an 'easy' person, I'm always analysing shit and refusing to be gift-wrapped as 'Asian' or 'English.' After my family's bullying, the LAST thing I want is to identify myself with a group of people. A whole, hurtling boulder of pain and guilt is too much for any individual to bear. I do not want to wear out the love and patience of those who I always turn to. There are no human Atlases for me; I have outgrown mythology. That is when posts like this one pop up, and I tip the load off my back and into the depot of cyberspace. Forget gods, forget humans - machinery's the future!

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.

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...