My period is knocking to be let in. I wasn't quite ready for it, but more than that I now realize why I've been sleeping uneasily the last couple nights and why I've been waking up groaning in response to dreams and half-dream thoughts admonishing me for who I am and how I am hurting others around me.
Our therapist had, just before I broke up with her, challenged me with the proposition that I needed to feel exceptional, that that was why I persisted with my daily life activism, arguing and rebelling against family, traditions, and society, and feeling the need to point out and counter their small mindedness, their racism, their prejudices, but also their counterproductive and limiting Indian-parent-behavior of refusing to acknowledge that their children are adults and more importantly, are their own individual beings. Since then, despite brushing it away as "that's an ambition, not a need; and everyone considers themselves exceptional, otherwise what's the point of consuming energy to stay alive?", I've been putting that question to myself again and again, wondering if she was right and I too haughty (or too insecure) to accept it.
two nights ago, getting into bed, I asked him if I was (a)Odd (b)Smug (c)Both. After failing to ignore me, his forced response was a safe "(d)Neither, and (e)I don't know", to which I added, "The correct answer was: Stop thinking so much about yourself!".
As far back in life as I can remember, I felt odd and alone, left out, different, unwanted, but also like I had a secret voice and thought within myself that others did not seem to have - almost like I was chosen by something supernatural, something that was especially benevolent toward me. I remember standing outside my classroom in lunch breaks when I was possibly 5-6 years old, looking down at my classmates running and playing around; I don't remember wanting to join them.
Growing up I started slowly to turn that feeling of odd-ness and being left out inside out. I started to convert it into my shield of honor, into a "but I do not even want to be with you, or like you". I started living in stories, in books (at first comics bought for me by my mother and slowly books won as prizes in school, and then borrowed from libraries), movies, the Mahabharata on TV, and my perceptions of what went on in others' minds and thoughts.
In my teens though I started to become popular, never as a desirable girl but rather as a fun companion who could also help with schoolwork, possibly because I didn't care much for rules and yet somehow managed miraculously to ace school.
I've grown up to be a contrarian, a rebel in all the small ways. There's a friend at work who keeps asking me if we are obliged to do this or that, and my response has usually been a rhetorical, "what do you mean by 'obliged'?". I realize that that word doesn't much exist in my dictionary. That I do not function like most of my colleagues do, led by crumbs of incentives into an unquestioned direction, and when they try to help me with friendly advice to do this or that to make my life easier or more successful, my knee-jerk reaction (thankfully not revealed often) usually is, "I am not like you, I'm better than that."
A few long-time friends have seen through my politeness. Even a few new ones have now started to glimpse it. Otherwise I usually keep it wrapped up, at least for a long time, to not scare a new acquaintance with my odd-ness. Because soon as they realize my oddness, they feel one or both of pity or envy, and when they realize that I've begun to proudly own and embellish my oddness, they expect my condescension and my superciliousness. Those last two I often do not express, but when someone showers me with pity, I can't help both spewing out. Because you cannot pity me for what I have chosen, can you?!
