Tis Me Michelle

You know… Something I’ve taken pride in and I’ve often considered one of my best qualities is my… Independence. The ability to do things on my own and not need to ask for help. Being okay with being single and doing a lot of life on my own. I feel like I’ve always considered independence to equate to freedom.

And somehow I feel like this is the first time I’ve started to feel like my freedom is in jeopardy. Being a first-generation Indian American woman, my identity has been… hard to identify. And yet all I know is the experience I’ve lived. On one side, I grew up in a large South Indian family, and being the second American born behind my brother on both sides of the family, I consider us the family experiment. A lot of my life experience is based on the ideals of my Indian family. Which meant the ideals of how they were raised, because they were all new here too. And on the other hand, I was raised in a very middle-class, primarily white neighborhood. Especially in the workforce, this has come to my advantage, because I sound like… A white girl. I am well aware that I am not white and that I fit into the model minority stereotype, which with a lot of retrospection have realized I played right into and as a result probably let to most of my opportunities. I am also aware that I will never be ‘American’ enough to some and not ‘Indian’ enough to others. It’s honestly such a mind-fuck sometimes.

Why? Because… I know that if by the luck of the draw, had happened to be born and raised in India, my life would be totally different. I may have been arranged to be married off and likely a housewife. And it’s a highly patriarchal culture, so I honestly cannot imagine that being my life. Then if we consider me in America, the land of the free, just 100 years ago. A single, Indian American, “independent” woman, would not have been allowed. I simply would not exist. But regardless, I am who I am. And I consider myself equally both and somehow came into the world at a time and place where I had the ability to manage rather successfully as a first-generation Indian-American, single woman.

Lately, all of these SCOTUS rulings and rise in clear bigotry has really just sunk deeper into my soul. Because someone like me, who has been living with some sense of independence and freedom for just one single generation in my family, is already starting to see the nuts and bolts fall apart. All of the progress we made has been relatively recent, to begin with. It’s not like we’ve been enjoying the freedom of women’s, LGBTQ+ rights, or even affirmative action, for centuries. I made a post a couple years ago when we were all on fire about George Floyd, and I still feel like we are letting our black brothers and sisters down. I first hand saw the performative nature of corporate culture surrounding all the atrocities. The small, necessary progress we made, has made certain people so uncomfortable for barely a second that things have radically begun shifting so dramatically so fast. It just all feels so overwhelmingly backwards.

In what felt like a month of hit after hit, my neighbors sent me a text asking if I was in our community Facebook group. My neighbors are lovely but we aren’t texting about Facebook regularly, you know. So when they messaged me I immediately went to the Book of Faces. Over that night our quiet community, quite literally tucked in a back corner of nowhere, was hit by a White Supremacist group. They left bags of white lives matter notes with the nazi symbol filled with beans. Some folks in our community picked up on it right away and collected them overnight so the rest of us wouldn’t wake up to it on a Sunday morning. I do not know if they were targeted to specific houses, but it seemed like it was just everyone. We heard they were found, but nothing really could be done. It just felt so close… The loss of Freedom.. Independence…

I know things aren’t always rainbows and butterflies. And as I mentioned before, the version of me that exists today, with all the day-to-day crap I deal with, the cards I was dealt led me to a privileged place. But I do think this period is a time to really evaluate our morals, and show our cards on where we stand with human rights. My values are shifting, that independence I held on to so dearly, turned out to be rather selfish. I’m realizing that that hyper-independence made me only consider how things were impacting me, myself, and I. We as humans were not meant to live in silos rather in community with each other. That means fighting for each other. I can only hope that the majority of this country believes that we all, truly all, and justly deserve freedom and independence, at no cost to one another.

For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.

Nelson Mandela