“Who checks your diary?”
Shradha asked me once as I tried to hide what it was I was writing, out of habit, as if she could actually read and understand my quickly scribbled English handwriting. Among the many amazing things I’ve learned from 13 year old Shradha’s perspective on life, this has had the most impact, being both something I appreciate as one of the positive values at SNC, Shyamavan and yet one of the issues I have had to face about myself.
Since that conversation I’ve been questioning myself over and over, where did this privacy concept come from?
How did I get into the habit of filling notebooks of the things I was afraid to share with others? Yet I persist and over the past year I have witnessed my habit of morning writing as well as my using writing as my main mode of expression, has contributed to the barrier between the group and I. Not only because what I write is in English, but more importantly until now I’d not been sharing what I write.
So I’ve been asking myself from where did the habit start, to hold in my emotions, to hold back from speaking out, to hide my inner most expressions or to hold back my tears?
I remember as a child, free-thinking and often saying everything on my mind, eventually I began to be scolded, relatives telling me “don’t become an outspoken girl” or I’d over her someone in attempts to distinguish the twins, “Nicole’s the outspoken one” which I soon came to understand as not a good character trait. I believe this is when my writing practice began; I have a trunk full of notebooks dated as far back as 1st grade, all the things I was afraid to express to others.
Sure at some points in my life, some of the pages have been read to friends and partners as we got closer, but many pages have remained secret.
Over my transition from adolescence into adulthood, as I’ve had more and more experiences with various partner-like intimate relationships, I’ve been working on returning towards being more open and expressive of my feelings and more revealing of who I am. Yet in this culture, far more conservative and innocent then from which I came, I’ve felt a lot of shame about who I am, about some of the experiences I’ve had, many of them wild, passionate, frivolous, pleasure seeking experiences.
So however much I like the idea of sharing what we write in our dairies with everyone else, my harboring such inner shame has not made it easy to come out and be open about who I am to everyone, fearing other’s reactions and potentially their rejection of me.
Read revised story © 2017 on elehpantJournal:
Furthermore as I’ve been digging up old memories, ripping apart old habits, deconstructing old patterns of thought and behavior, sometimes it feels quite painful and quite often I’ve felt like crying this past year. But at the same time I’ve witnessed and heard others speak as if emotional is not a good quality, or repeatedly telling the children not to cry.
This made it difficult for me to feel comfortable to express to others what I was going through, as it clearly was completely emotional and I was afraid the moment I would start talking I would burst into tears in front of them, something I never saw the older girls do, assuming they had been trained not to. So all this time I’ve been trying to negotiate this balance between being equanimous with my thoughts without becoming stoic – something I was accused of being as a child, a stage I allowed myself to fall into for sometime between grade school and college, having held most of my emotions in, trying not to be an “outspoken of the twins”.
This is something I’m working on, and sharing this piece of writing with you all now, is like tearing down a wall, and ultimately feels freeing and good.
[Originally written November 2012. The “you” to whom the piece is addressing is the group at SNC, and was written as part of a 23 questions each member of the house had to write and present to the group.]
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