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!

Bigotry and Suffering

So here I am, hiding out in my room upstairs, as all my family bar one sister and life-long family friends enjoy themselves downstairs. When they arrived, I actually made an effort to be sociable. We talked about university and work and my plans for next year, and I was (much to my surprise) encouraged to do a Master's and think about academia, because if you can stomach all the studying, it's a pretty comfortable life. I concurred based on what I know and paused resignedly every now and again as people talked over me, interrupted me, or rushed out before I could finish what I was saying.

(Story of my life, and now you know why I vent myself crazy on this here blog!).

I was delighted to speak to a fellow English student (well... former in her case), being as I was able to exclude my sister and brother for once. That sounds bad, but growing up in a house full of medically-oriented people has had the effect that nobody respects me at all, even though I don't exactly exaggerate the importance of what I do. My sisters, when they are both here together, talk pharmacy. My brother, trainee doc that he is, sometimes joins in and if my brother-in-law is here, they talk medicine too.

So, it was a pleasure to establish a connection of my OWN for once, and to talk about Forster, Lawrence and Huxley; to hold forth on The Trial. I don't do it to say 'Look at me, I'm so clever,' but I do enjoy talking about it because it impassions me and in this family where I am a solitary alien, I never get to enjoy that. Used as I am to being babied, bullied and bitched at, for me to be able to say what I THINK and talk about things that interest ME is a rare treat indeed.

However, as I observed in the first paragraph, even that scant moment of happiness does not remain unmitigated. It was positively annihilated, however, by what came next. We shifted rooms in order to sit in the 'back room' (the extension) and there was eating and general conversation. I groaned inwardly at the sight of all the calorific treats which are in the process of making me get fat and giving me more spots than I've ever had in my whole life. I know the latter to be true from looking at pictures of myself and also from the succession of comments from my mother and sisters. My mum in particular remarked upon it almost angrily, as though it were my fault. In her head, I'm sure it is, for some roundabout reason or another.

(One plus point of the day though - I was wearing a ribbon in my hair and for once my brother didn't call me 'Gyppo' as he usually does, but I think that was only because of the guests...).

I was focussing my energies, after consuming a suitably small amount of fried nonsense, on trying to work out the fiendishly elaborate 80s Bollywood film that my dad had on as background noise. There was a sequence where a baddie kept repeatedly being 'attacked' by a falcon which had previously stolen another man's handgun which amused me no end (more genius of the utterly WTF? category)! It didn't save me though, oh no. Not even this year would I get away without having my holidays ruined by the bigotry that is almost integral to these intimate family get-togethers.

Suddenly, before I could even get a handle on where it had sprung from, the subject of the Pakistan-India tensions caught the collective imagination. The mother of the family who are our family friends (the 'children' are my sisters' age, i.e. late 20s, so the two sisters get on with my sisters and their elder brother is just kind of there, like a pot plant) remarked on how she would love for India to simply bomb Pakistan out of existence. Her son spoke up to support her.

Then, the fun kicked off and we got into some good old-fashioned Muslim-bashing. My dad said, how could you associate with people like that when you knew that they were looking at you and deciding that you had to CONVERT in order to be their friends (um, a little exaggeration there, perhaps, Pater?). The son informed us all of how it was 'their mission' to convert the whole world to Islam. For no apparent reason, the 'girls' talked about how they had seen the roads in India lined with goats when they were there 'and we asked him why and he said because it was Eid'. Cue agitated fawning all around for the poor goats that were going to be killed!

(Just like the billions of cows that die worldwide to feed people every year, but I didn't hear any railing against that. Funny really, as this family are Hindus, I would've expected to... Perchance it was because those are not just eaten by Muslims?).

There was talk of how the Arab nations are 'uncivilised' and also of how they are 'dirty.' Bollocks! cried the ghost of GCSE history from the depths of my stomach. Absolute fucking bollocks! They were advanced in medicine long before the West got a clue, and they invented geometry! As usual, however, as one of the youngest in the room and the only person who has bothered to question any of these 'hand-me-down' opinions, I knew better than to open my mouth.

Support for the complete eradication of Pakistan gathered around the room. 'Ethnic cleansing!' my sister proclaimed jauntily. In my already-twisting guts, I felt the amorphous horror of a face trying to force itself upwards, a scream trying to make itself heard. 'These are absolute dogs' the mother of the family kept repeating. All Muslims everywhere ever were blamed for the ills of the world. It was conceded by the eldest daughter that ha, now it was the whole world at their mercy. I believe the mother said something about how 50% of the population being born in India were Muslims.

Oh-so-patriotic anxiety was expressed over poor little India being surrounded, as my pater put it, by 'Bangladesh. Muslim. Pakistan. Muslim... and there's the Muslims in India!' (I managed to refrain from pointing out that Indian Muslims have themselves condemned the Mumbai attacks). Resentment was expressed about the fact that many Indian Muslims were originally, er, not Muslim (I restrained myself from mentioning that in some cases, as with the Dalits, people have voluntarily converted to Islam because they think it will improve their lives which are rigidly bound by the caste-system promoted by... errr, Hinduism and the conservative Indian culture. Also, if people are so cut up about the fact that their families 'used to be' whatever, why not convert back to that religion?).

Pakistan was roundly and repeatedly blamed and the census opinion was that nobody within its borders should live, they should all be bombed out of existence and then the world's troubles would cease! (How I itched to remark that this wouldn't really resolve the problem of the spread of the noxious Wahabbi ideology which originates from... *gasp* SAUDI ARABIA). The 'evil Muslims' seam was rich with satisfaction waiting to be mined by the roomful of my 'nearest and dearest' (ha!), as evidenced by the fact that when my sister came back in from making tea, she went 'Aww, has the Muslim-bashing stopped? Don't start again without me!' and laughed before exiting the room.

I feel depressed and terrified when this happens to me. It also makes me very, very aware of how alone I am. Often when I was younger, I would castigate myself for these feelings. While everyone else laughed blithely, content in the glow of their reductionist bigotry, I felt my innards interlacing, a near-rigor mortis of discomfort immobilising me against the wave of hate. Why did I have to be awkward? Why couldn't I just join in the anti-Muslim fun without feeling bad? Why did I see them as people and feel it almost as much as a slight against myself, when my family - people who I KNEW to be capable of moral character in other situations - had no problem with it?

The answer, ironically enough, was because I saw myself as a Sikh. Even though I am unsure about the existence of God these days, I still see myself as so bound by Sikh philosophy that even if I wanted to, I couldn't change. Yet clearly something was wrong because my family claimed to be Sikhs too. My dad is baptised and has the 5 Ks. My siblings have been much more active 'within the community' than I ever was. Yet I used to pray regularly and I still do try to treat people equally, taking the story of Bhai Kanhaiya Ji as an influence. The Gurus might have had a historical enmity with some of the Mughal rulers, but anyone with even a passing knowledge of Sikh history will be aware of the fact that this is by no means applicable to all the Mughal rulers, let alone all Muslims, plenty of whom were devotees of the Gurus! Even Guru Gobind Singh, who created the notion of the Khalsa, to which my parents cling in keeping with 'neo-Sikhism', was saved by Muslims! (Scroll down to the final paragraph to see what I'm talking about).

I'm no longer vegetarian, even though my hair remains uncut and my kara on, but I can't believe the hypocrisy of it all. This has disturbed me ever since I became aware of it, because it made me see the futility of truth before ritual. Even though, according to the BBC's 'Sikhism at a Glance,' I am a better Sikh than my family, the fact that they observe ritual more means that they have authority in the eyes of everyone else. Pathetic. As I wrote in a poem inspired by my experiences, '‘Twas the evil in my own home / to make me doubt the existence of a God.'

Yet part of me panics when I see this. Does this mean that loads and loads of people out there think like this? How alone am I? Can the world really be full of people who are ignorant and tribalist and hateful? Whenever I used to show little signs of subversion, when I was younger, my parents always disarmed me with the warning that I should 'stick to my own kind' and when I admitted to agnosticism, one of the main weapons my mother used against me was the recommendation that I should be 'part of a group' because it's 'safer' and that way you can fight against other groups. Er... isn't that the sort of mentality that's led to the apparently ever-worsening gang-related violence on our streets?

Now, in a convoluted way, my mother has a point because Sikhism is about fighting for the rights of the downtrodden and standing up for the oppressed - but I don't see what reason Sikhs have to be playing the 'victim' card as my parents so often like to do. Average Muslims could if they wanted to, but a lot of them just want to get on with their lives. I can't let that go unsaid, because I refuse to stop seeing the fact of people's humanity in favour of other categories. Does that make me a fool? And still the question circulates in my mind: who's the real Sikh here?