All the two plus twos made a big twenty two

I was late to almost everything that is really important. I read my first book outside the school curriculum at 13 and hence never got to reading an Enid Blyton or a Roald Dahl. For the next four years, I read more than a dozen books on women in the Middle East. It angered me. It made me question my place in this big, enormous world. And then I moved to reading what was actually cool at sixteen: a bunch of poetry that was all the rage on a still nascent Instagram. I read religion after that, which made me rethink what I was overtly and covertly taught all my life up until that point. All of that on top of each other, and I was in my sad girl era even before real sadness touched me. Perhaps it has still not fully enveloped me. 

And somewhere between this and that, I stopped being angry. I wasn't thinking about all the people that weren't so privileged. I exited rooms where politics was discussed. Not that I ever considered myself apolitical or apathetic. I just didn't think it was important to make it known. In hindsight, probably everything I read—from women and religion to history and social constructs, with a sad love story somewhere in the middle—made me someone who didn't want to pick up a book for months, which became years. The odd book I bought and started, I never saw the end of. 

I was also late to knowing how overrated being a good, quiet kid is. My parents were and still are obsessively proud of how "well behaved" I was growing up. Whatever that's supposed to mean! In hindsight—because oh god, why does everything come so late to me—being an easy child didn't do me any good in my adult life. If I could go back, I'd definitely throw a tantrum in the middle of a busy restaurant, and I'd without hesitation lie flat on a shop's floor to get the toy I wanted. Maybe if I'd always been a little cracked in my head, I wouldn't feel like asking for what I really wanted or deserved was equivalent to being selfish or entitled. As they famously say, you don't get what you don't have the audacity to ask for. 

Since I'm confessing a multitude of things I shouldn't have been but was, I think I ought to accept I should've failed more. Perhaps the failures I experience in my adult life won't have hit me like a rock. Across eighteen years of formal education, I failed one test in total by a single mark. And I vividly remember the fear I felt. I hadn't failed anything I'd tried—which wasn't a lot of things, by the way—and I would go on to never fail at anything up until I graduated college. The downside of that would be working with people who never failed even that one test and people who had failed probably over a hundred tests. And being one of them, it wasn't so quick that I learned it meant nothing. In fact, people who'd failed over and over had the stunning audacity to remain composed or at least pretend to, and those who'd never failed didn't fear it simply because someone who doesn't know a snake doesn't know it's dangerous either. 

All of this didn't come to me all at once, but it all summed up to me all of sudden. I was in the hospital for two days for something small. Insignificant, if I may say. But it wasn't why I was admitted that made me sum this all up into the only logical reason I was struggling in my mid-twenties; it was how it unfolded. For one, thanks to being a good child, I'd never stayed in a hospital overnight for anything. I'd never even gotten a blood test without someone accompanying me, thanks to a terribly low pain tolerance. And here I was, being put on a drip before my friend could reach. And when I had to ask someone to stay with me in the hospital—because how was I to know how to move around with a drip—I just couldn't. I hesitated and squirmed before I very weirdly, borderline angrily, made another friend stay with me through the night. 

Another day all alone. And I didn't know how to ask the nurses to help me tie my hair because how do you ask for help? I was supposed to be self-sufficient at all times. When my discharge papers finally arrived, at least four different people—from the doctor to the insurance staff—asked me who was going to get me discharged. I almost cried. I was alone. A swollen, immobile hand and three full bags. I went to my contact list on my phone at least three times. Eventually, I decided to just do it alone because oh dear, what if I came across as a burden to people I love, the world might come to a halt. And funnily, I hadn't yet reached the pinnacle of the math that was to appear before me. I got home and it dawned on me: I had unwashed dishes from three days ago because I didn't know I was so sick they wouldn't let me come home. And like a good girl who couldn't ask for help and couldn't fail, I washed them with a hand the size of a brick. 

Now, one would argue why I couldn't call one of those Urban Company executives. Because I hated the idea of slavery under the guise of a tech startup or whatever the hell capitalism likes to call it. Hated it, yet again to an extent that was convenient, because along with being a well-behaved, academically sharp girl, I was also from a privileged class of society where I could choose what irked me and what was just convenient. 

Anyway, circling back to the single moment of utter, shocking realization. It came to me once I sat on my sofa in a dusty living room I have never liked, that I was barely living. Living not in a materialistic, noticeable sense. Living at ease with myself. I realized I was drowning at work because I never learned how to be mediocre. How to not be the best in a room. I was drowning in my friendships because I made asking for help an absolute fucking task. It came with a list of unnecessary quirks, and not the good kind. I had drowned in romantic relationships because I was trying so hard to be a good girl. And because I wasn't really a good girl in that sense, it made me mad and angry. It made me sad and unbearable.

Once all the two plus twos made a big twenty-two in my head, my anger came back. After years, I felt angry about women and class and money and heartbreak. It made me angrier that I had undone so much of who I ought to be because the world around me validated the undoing. It made me despise myself for not being angry publicly at things that actually should be very public.

It's a long journey unbecoming all that I have become—and it's full of all that I have personally lost along the way—the insecurity of not being pretty enough, tall enough, thin enough, just enough. Not being successful by the standards of those around me. I have come to realize I shouldn't be so anal about being well behaved. I don't have to be self-sufficient. I don't have to bend backwards to fit in or achieve anything to be something of value.

But I am glad it has begun. In the midst of loss and grief, I have found my displaced sense of ungodly, unwomanlike nature that is not always self dependent and ever-conforming.