A Little Bit about Me
August 10, 2019
Wow, will you take a look at that! We’ve made it to a second post! Sweet! Thank you for coming back!
In this post, I want to write a bit about myself. I think it’s important that I share my background if I want you to understand where I am coming from. It has nothing to do with the fact that it’s been a slow week, no, not at all.
You may or may not know me in real life, but here you can call me Aemi. I am 26 years old. I don’t like long walks on the beach, but for real though, who does? The sand gives way as you’re walking, so you have to do this waddle and then it gets in your shoes, on your feet, in your nails. Three weeks later you’re still dumping sand out. No thanks, I’ll pass. I do like sunsets, but only because I am not getting up early to see the sun rise.
I am American, born and bred in the good ol’ U S of A, for better or for worse. But my ethnic roots take me back most recently to the small state of Kerala on the Indian subcontinent. This means the culture I grew up around is a mix of 21st-century-American and 70s/80s-Indian that has been adjusted for time inflation. That was a long and convoluted way to say that I come from a culturally conservative background.
As such, it is inevitable that I will eventually get married. I think what bothers me the most is that I never really had a choice in this. Sure, I could “choose” whom I marry or, theoretically, I even have the “choice” of if I should marry. No one is holding a gun to my back and saying I must do this. But the alternative is almost as bad. If it were something that affected only me, then I would have been fine with it. But my choices do not solely affect me. It affects my parents, my siblings, my extended family, my church members, my neighbors, my family’s neighbors. Anything I do, or don’t do, affects people who are four and five degrees of separation away from me. “Alkar enthu vijarikkum” (what will people think) is the law we live by.
Is it fair? Of course not! I didn’t ask to be part of a culture that judges their own value based on the achievements of those around them. At the same time, though, they didn’t ask for a daughter whose every fiber screams fight the establishment! Unfortunately, my downfall is my empathetic nature…my parents didn’t ask for a daughter like me. I’m sure my parents had certain expectations when they found out they were going to have a child; certain things they wanted for my future. While I accomplished some of the things they hoped for, it wasn’t in any path they had imagined. I am not the child they wanted, but I am the child they have. And we both have to come to compromises about that.
I cannot change the past. Who knows if I can change the present? But the future is on me and how I choose to mold it. I am choosing this path because any other future will bring pain to those around me. I am also choosing to write about my experience on this path because I don’t ever want to forget how all of this feels. We tend to remember our past through rose-colored lenses. I don’t want to dismiss the feelings of anyone who comes to this intersection. I want to remember these feelings I had when a sister/daughter/niece/child tells me they do not want to get married. I don’t want to be the Aunty that says “oh you’ll change your mind when you get older.” You might change your mind; you might not. But that is not for me to tell you. I hope this blog will remind me of that.
It’ll be a journey that I hope you will stick with me for. Like I said in my last post, I don’t know where this will end; might as well sit back and enjoy the ride through my life.
- Aemi
