INADEQUACY

I wrote this blog post a few months ago. I thought I'd post it just to share my thoughts. I'm sure many people have struggled with this and still are. Keep pushing forward and doing YOU :)

INADEQUACY

Have you ever felt inadequate in your life? Like you can’t live up to your own expectations? But then you realize they are not your own expectations, but the expectations of the ones around you, like your parents?

Well that’s how I have been feeling lately. I know I’ve been putting myself down a lot and my counselor and friends think I’m very good at bashing myself and I need to simmer the harsh talk down a little. But do you know what it’s like to live in an Indian-American household? Where you’re not a conformist but you’re treated like an outsider because you do everything opposite your own culture.

You’ve had a boyfriend of every ethnicity other than your own. The fact that you’ve “dated” several guys itself is considered ‘bad’ or taboo. You don’t wish to get married in your 20’s, especially not to an Indian guy (yuck!). You don’t follow the money-making jobs out there and are not a financial analyst, a doctor, a lawyer, or anything in the IT field. You spend your time more so interested in the arts; you want to spend the rest of our life in another country. You love any language other than your own.

YES, all of those characteristics above are me. I’m also a feminist, who doesn’t see myself being the housewife, the cook, the mom, and working on top of all the that (aka superwoman). So reading this as an American sounds like such an easy lifestyle to live, right? Well, it’s not.

Being a nonconformist in my culture is difficult, especially when it’s looked down upon. My own parents want me to follow their stereotypical desi dreams, get rich and marry rich…well it’s not happening, at least not in the next 10 years (haha if that).

My life is confusing right now. I don’t know what I want to do with it. Whether I’d like to travel or stay here. I also don’t wish to live with my parents and “give back” to them for all they have done to me. I think it’s selfish of desi or Indian/Pakistani parents to expect that from their children. I mean yes, they came to America, with little or no money and worked their butts off for us, but does that mean I need to stay in my parents’ house till marriage and not go for my own dreams? I don’t think that’s the way I’d like to live.

To be honest it sometimes makes me cry, feeling this way. Because this is what my parents actually tell me I should be doing. It hurts to feel inadequate. I want to conform but I have my own dreams.

It’s been such a struggle growing up in America with Indian parents, not wanting to budge on the culture. Yes, they’re modern but some things are unarguable.

Cognitive dissonance was something that was brought up in church today. According to dictionary.com, it is defined as anxiety that comes from having simultaneous contradicting views about things. This is also something I learned about in Psychology (perhaps Advanced Social Psych?). The topic relates to a lot that I feel each and every day living in a American society, trying to balance out being culturally oriented in my home values and also balancing that out with the American values I learned from friends, school, peers, and societal norms. For example “I think this guy is cute, but I know my parent’s would disapprove so I can’t date him” or “I really want to go to Spain, but who will take care of my parents if I do?”

I also learned this weekend, during an uplifting conversation with a friend that I tend to not only be so judgmental outwardly, but I am ten times more judgmental internally. I may have received this negative trait from my family, and how I was brought up, with such a harsh tonality with everything they said, so blunt and straightforward, but also hitting me like pins and needles. I don’t know how some people say they have learned to let things fall off their shoulders after hearing such harsh criticism, where as I feel I’ve just turned more into a fragile egg.

What I do know is, I will never be happy following my parents dreams. I have to reach for my own, even if that means not seeing my parents as often. I love them to death but I’m not willing to give up my life in replacement for theirs. If that’s selfish to some, that’s okay, I think I deserve to put myself first. I don’t really care.