Category: Philosophizing!

Labels: To Defy or Define

Labels are all fine and dandy, but just as long as they’re just that – a first glimpse at a person. A guiding post of sorts. A little name tag that you stick on your shirt while walking into a roomful of strangers.

Labels are comforting, labels are familiar. They are convenient to define ourselves in a word. A snapshot of our identities. A quick and easy sign board to walk around the world with – so that we don’t have to stop and explain to people who we really are, by delving into a lifetime’s worth of experiences and histories. The backstories that we don’t have time to get into. The many many chapters that don’t always make logical sense. The changing world views. It’s simpler, easier to use labels – hello, I’m Pooja. I’m Indian. I’m a grad student, and all that it entails. I’m a Potterhead. An introvert. A bookworm, a nerd, a feminist. An obsessive planner. A city girl through-and-through. A vegetarian. A keyboard player. A summer girl. A dog person.

But each of these labels are all-or-nothing labels. If I’m not A, I must be Z. If I’m a dog person, I must dislike cats. If I’m a feminist, I must hate chivalry. If I love summer, I must be a winter-hater.

However, the world isn’t split into good people and Death Eaters, as Sirius Black so wisely says. I’m not one or the other. And neither are you. It’s so easy, so reassuring to put us in a little box – it feels comfortable and needs no further qualifiers, both for ourselves and for others. In the absence of labels, it takes time and patience to explain where we’re coming from, neither of which we necessarily have at any given moment.

Labels are all fine and dandy, but just as long as they’re just that – a first glimpse at a person. A guiding post of sorts. A little name tag that you stick on your shirt while walking into a roomful of strangers.

What happens when we give labels too much weight? When we rely on our labels just a little too much, and accidentally end up boxing ourselves in? I’m Indian, so must I staunchly keep my heritage alive, and never leave myself open to the ‘corrupting influences’ of the Western world? I’m an introvert, so should I just opt out of all group activities and parties? What if we end up boxing ourselves into a label – and even more terrifyingly: what happens when the label stops fitting, and we start feeling lost, feeling like an impostor?

Because these labels, you see, have been my identity all along. And if I’m not them anymore, what am I? I’m not A, but I’m not Z either. In a world of extremes, that’s pretty uncertain ground. What am I? Who am I? Where’s my one-word summary? What’s the excerpt on the back cover of my storybook? The short sweet concise description of who I am?

There are two ways of looking at this situation. Either I feel lost and bewildered, because I’m a weird hybrid who isn’t native to either place. I can flail about and try to pull myself towards one extreme. One clear identity. And I can constantly reject or dismiss hints of what doesn’t fit my unambiguous narrative.

Or: I could defy those pre-existing labels and define my own. Build my own middle ground. Stick on a new name tag for my current identity, with a bunch of empty name tags to leave room to evolve. I can be the person I am right now, even if it doesn’t totally make sense. My labels can be ‘95% vegetarian’ – to represent that I don’t seek out meat, but will eat chicken if all the veg options are tofu-based (ugh). An introvert, but one who won’t shut up when having a prolonged conversation with someone she’s feeling a connection to. An Indian who loves NYC and the freedom it grants her. A Potterhead who re-reads the seven books every year, but pretends that the Cursed Child never happened. A dog person who doesn’t mind the occasional snuggly kitten. A city girl who likes to lie down in grassy fields and count the stars. A summer -lovin’ sort who goes starry-eyed at the first glimpse of snow. A girly girl who loves romance and all things purple, but couldn’t care less about clothes shopping. I’m not a morning person, not a night owl – just a sleep person. I’m not Team Edward or Team Jacob – I’m Team WhyBella. A bookworm who occasionally gets sucked into the black hole that is Netflix, even though she has – gasp! – three unread books!

So there you go – that’s who I really am. I’m the middle ground, my own unique middle ground. I’m neither extreme. Absolute labels are not enough to define me. Or you. We are too human, too complex for labels. We cannot be summarized in a single word. We are so much more than a clean concise excerpt at the back of our books. We are colorful and messy and constantly evolving. We define our labels – they don’t define us!

In Defense of Stories Untold

But ever so often, consciously or otherwise, we curate and edit our stories – and even if we call ourselves an open book, there are certain chapters we don’t read out loud, certain stories we don’t exchange while sitting around bonfires on beaches at night – because they don’t have conventionally acceptable happy endings, or because they paint us in an unflattering light, instead of as the valiant and righteous protagonists we’d like to be.

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We are all storytellers. We express ourselves through Instagram pictures, overly long Facebook posts, public blogs, or even just dramatic retellings at extra long lunch breaks with our friends. We love being narrators, in varying degrees of spotlight, and there’s something incredibly gratifying to have our audience connect with our narratives.

But ever so often, consciously or otherwise, we curate and edit our stories – and even if we call ourselves an open book, there are certain chapters we don’t read out loud, certain stories we don’t exchange while sitting around bonfires on beaches at night – because they don’t have conventionally acceptable happy endings, or because they paint us in an unflattering light, instead of as the valiant and righteous protagonists we’d like to be. So we bury these stories deep, never to see the light of day – and if we do decide to share them, we prefer to add filters to our photos, don masks for our one-man shows, and narrate our stories from a different angle. Maybe we’re afraid of being judged too harshly. Maybe the statute of limitations isn’t up yet. Maybe we are still in denial, and haven’t yet accepted this chapter. Maybe we look back and wonder what we were thinking in the first place, or if we were thinking at all. And so these stories, these untold stories, are kept under wraps because they spoil the overall narrative, you see? They don’t fit the image we’ve worked so hard to project. These stories are the chips in our armor, the unnecessary glimpses of flawed and painfully real humanity. It’s vulnerability laid out bare in front of the world, and we don’t want anyone to see it, because we ourselves struggle to reconcile with it. So we tell ourselves that it’s just a fluke, a one-off, and that the true narrative is still unblemished.

But don’t these stories deserve to be told? Aren’t these tales important? Don’t these chapters offer insights into self and values, knee-jerk reactions and instincts, as much as, if not more than the stories widely published? In fact, more than the stories themselves, the reasons why we choose to keep them under wraps is a deeply insightful, if difficult question, which provides a clear path towards exploring our own implicit biases and judgments. What do we feel, and why are we feeling this way? What guilt, shame, pain would we rather not deal with, and pretend doesn’t exist? While this ruminating may not change our public narrative dramatically, it does help the storyteller understand motives and reasoning of their primary protagonist – themselves.

We all love the image of ourselves we have in our heads – the perfect, flawless, whip-smart version of us who never messes up. Who never makes mistakes. Who knows exactly what to say at the right time. Who is kind and thoughtful, but also not a pushover. Who has no hair out of place, no wrinkles in their perfectly ironed clothes, no chinks in their armor. Who’s always more talented, more unstoppable, simply more than who we are in reality.

But you know what? That isn’t who you really are. You are not perfect – instead, you are real. You are real, and flawed, and just figuring out those flaws, and working on what you think warrants change makes you gloriously human. It’s hard, so very hard to remember that vulnerability is not weakness. Your messy emotions, your honest-to-goodness pain, your rawness, your awkwardness – may not be perfect, but they don’t have to be. You don’t have to be. All you have to be is your unique self, flaws and all. So let’s remove those filters. Let’s throw off those masks. Let’s read out those stories, loud and proud. Here’s to being fearless, instead of flawless!

Of crashing waves frozen in time and ski tracks in the snow

Hello world! I’m back after a long (and sadly, not a very unusual) hiatus. I just finished my first year of PhD – I’ve got a million anecdotes and stories which were supposed to posted out here, actually. But if I have to sum it up in a sentence, I’ll just say that it was a crazy whirlwind of classes, friends, exams, exploring the streets, doing rotations in different labs to figure out the perfect match, movie nights with pancakes and cookies, ‘discovering’ various book stores and tucked-away cafes, stressing out over course work, and carving out my own little niche in the heart of the city.

So yes, it’s a busy busy life and it’s incredibly easy to get sucked into our little routines and habits. And yes, I have to plead guilty on that charge. Little day-to-day matters bog us down to the extent that we’re always rushing, rushing to meetings, rushing to run errands, rushing to do, without sparing a moment to stop and think. It’s harried and crazy, and we hardly have any time or even inclination to look up and look around – actually enjoy everything, take out a few minutes to just relax and genuinely feel contentment.

And then I got onto a looooong flight – a 16-hours, non-stop flight. I’d expected to be bored. I’d planned on sleeping most of the way, and watching movies on the in-flight entertainment system to make the time go by. And yes, I slept. I watched movies. But what I remember the most is just sitting and gazing awe-struck out of the window. It was absolutely beautiful. The infinitely blue sky stretching out everywhere, and fields and fields of clouds below. When I’m on the ground and look at clouds, I always imagine them to be fluffy, like clumps of soft cotton candy. Pretty, and fun to imagine shapes of, but just about that. But looking down from a plane… clouds appeared like white-tipped frothy waves about to crash thunderously over the shore – crested waves on the precipice of crashing over, frozen in time. In spots of relative calm in this stormy ocean of clouds, I saw long deep gouges in sheets of white – like ski tracks on the snow. It was a majestic sight, almost frightening in its beauty.

And when the cloud cover was flung aside by the winds (Is it still a cover if it’s below you? Somehow a cover sounds like something you pull on top of you.) I could see… everything. Everything in miniature – forests and woods looking like emerald patches of cultivated lawns, shiny lakes which appeared to contain all of two teaspoons of water, tiny little houses which you play with in Monopoly, rivers resembling silvery worms (or fly larvae, actually – I am a Drosophila geneticist after all) and cars which looked like an orderly line of ants on roller blades. And then, as I was all peaceful and content, just gazing outside, feeling connected to the world, and yet sort of distant… I realized that if the forests and cities and water bodies are so tiny in the grand scheme of things, my little day-to-day worries which seem SO overwhelming are really rather insignificant.

And right there in that moment I knew what a change in perspective actually meant. It means that while I live in my zoomed-in little life in which it’s oh-so-important to get to places on time, meet all my deadlines, do my groceries and laundry, pay bills, get my flu shot (Oops. Is it that time of the year already?)… I also need to remember that the world is a big, BIG place teeming with life forms of multiple sorts, and yes, while we all have problems… we need to Let It Gooooooo (sorry, couldn’t resist) because the world is astounding in all its glory. Life is absolutely beautiful, the sun shines, emotions like love and trust exist in spite of cynicism and darkness, chocolate exists, and unicorns really do slide down rainbows. (Alright, alright… I don’t really believe in unicorns. Honest!)

Of course, the moment my plane landed I was jolted out of this pleasant dreamy haze and brought back down to earth, literally. And I was back, back to my busy-bee life – running around to claim my baggage, going through Immigration and Customs, and whipping out my smartphone to figure out the best way home. But one thing is for sure: I now have a crystal-clear image in my mind’s eye to get some perspective. Whenever I feel over-stressed or over-worked or over-whelmed, I’m going to close my eyes, take a deep breath and think of crashing waves frozen in time and ski tracks in the snow.