One random winter night in Norway, after a few therapy sessions I performed on myself and having taken a very much needed break from post-master's life, I realised something: I am grieving.
See, I could analyse my grief through three theoretical frameworks, but the problem wasn't the grief itself; it was that I was analysing it through three theoretical frameworks. I could not feel my own grief. I had the perfect language for liminality, decoloniality, identity reconstruction and so on from my high criticism-focused social and cultural master's degree and my psychology-infused-eldest-daughter-syndrome-personality. I was slowly realising, while going through the numbness of everything, that I did not have rest or relief to let it out. And then came another, even worse realisation: That I had brought it upon myself.
My hyper-intellectualisation became my survival strategy. For migrant women like me, for example, this has a worse outcome: it can slowly turn into self-erasure. It was happening to me, and I did not even know it. I was experiencing something completely and very opposite of what I wanted to exhibit and showcase for the host country to see: my worth and my importance. Because of the consistent stalling by man-made borders, labour markets, and the subtle exclusion I faced while European-born migrants around me succeeded, I was coping by becoming hyper-aware of my patterns to curb them; I was becoming hyper-adaptable to mould myself into the Norwegian systems, and I was becoming hyper-capable by over-exerting and over-compensating myself to be accepted. I desperately wanted it, but my awareness could not heal me; instead, it deepened my exhaustion.
What I went through, which was the afterthought of being taught to endure systems, I don’t want the forthcoming migrant women to experience. And thus, I end my #Reculturing journey through these pieces with a proposal. I want to embody my own lived experience and propose an electrifyingly beautiful alternative to hyper-intellectualisation: creativity. I wish for migrant women to opt for containment and not optimisation, to prefer softness over self-surveillance, for nostalgia of the past-life to feed love back into your present-life instead of being tied up in a catch-22 double-edged sword of the future-life. My #Reculturing has a new meaning now: to learn how to externalise structural harm and rebalance emotional labour. To put it lightly: I need to let it out.
A woman is born a migrant.
Something that instantly needs to be acknowledged here is that a South-Asian woman’s life is a migration before the physical act of migration itself. Subconsciously. She’s a traveller; she’s constantly on a journey whether she likes it or not. She’s either a guest or a quest. She does not have one place to truly call her own. She does not have a home, a resting place, somewhere she can be who she was before others defined her. She gets out of the womb to constantly be reminded of how she has a womb of her own and that she must use it when she is older. She gets married and moves to another home full of strangers she does not know, and somehow she has to suck it up. She is then creating a new life without being present in the one she already had within herself. She’s a migrant within the premises of her own country, her own city, her own home. And on top of all that, if she moves abroad, she’s a migrant-by-visa. In this fiasco, she forgets the path she needed to take; she does not journey back to herself because she did not know she had one. She is too tied up in being a migrant (much like I was, still am). I have a feeling that a woman only truly knows herself in the early years of teenage-hood, and disastrously, she doesn’t know that, and even more disastrously, she doesn’t remember it when she is older. The Little Prince taught me better.
Animals have been migrating since forever. Birds, mammals, fish, reptiles, amphibians, insects, and crustaceans alike. They have to migrate to search for a better land, better season, better food, better atmosphere. My personal motivation for migrating has also always been the monarch butterfly, which flies up to 3,000 miles while navigating using the sun to live a new life. Like a monarch butterfly, a migrant woman must use the sun. She must look up. She must follow the light. Migration is imminent. It is a human right. It is essential. For a south asian woman, it is life-saving.
So really, I don’t ever want people to ask why owning a home means so much to women. Her home is where her sun lives. Her thikana (dwelling, a resting place). She must have a place of her own when she doesn’t want to be the perfect migrant anymore or even the perfect woman, the perfect wife, the perfect daughter, the perfect mother. In other words, let her have a damn break from being a migrant.
It’s time to stop feeling at the periphery of your own life.
In one of my personal journals, during one of my intense grieving periods, I have written, “Life is the act of finding love and losing love in odd places. But why can’t I make or demand space for myself like I used to before? Why have I waived the white flag? Where is my determination, the zeal and zest to fight? I have surrendered to a mediocre life in Europe. I am not brave enough to say it out loud.”
Today, I said it out loud. And it is freeing me of my own shackles.
It is time to acknowledge that your voice, the personal, the political and the poetic, matters. That you, as a woman, make meaning even in between spaces. That you must actively refuse to shrink to fit systems that were not built for you. This is how you reculture yourself in a city where you cannot breathe, but must.
Take these with a grain of salt. But take them. Because I wish someone (preferably a woman) had stared at me deep into my soul and reminded me of myself when I needed it.
- Being hyper-aware will not save you
Hyper-intellectualisation of your struggles is toxic, and this cognitive coping is unhealthy. You are not an analysis, a research project or a theory. It is okay to have learnt to intellectualise your suffering. Yes, you are angry, and that is valid. You have the education, the credentials, the marriage, the adaptability. Yes, the world still keeps you waiting. Living in a chronic liminality and identity strain will drown you in grief for an unrealised future and eventual emotional exhaustion. So just put the psychology books down for starters. Now the journal. Now the pen. And breathe.
- Resist oppressive systems, without absorbing their judgments
Do not think you are inadequate or blame everything on timing. This is a double-bind (I have to give it a name). This is a communicative dilemma where you are receiving two or more conflicting messages through yourself, and any response would be inherently inaccurate. They cannot judge who you are. They don’t even know you. You don’t know yourself. You don’t have to know yourself so desperately to end up judging yourself through the eyes of the majority. You are a minority and that is special. You have to learn to externalise the structural harm, which is to blame it on stress that migration is causing you; don’t blame any personal flaws. Lean skills and effort-making and resilience. Don’t let the system's story (politics, borders and racism) get to you.
- Emotional expression will be the saviour
Probably the most important tip: Regenerate. Or just generate. Or just: Create. You need somatic and affective processing. In non-psychology language, you need to feel the feeling. If you don’t let the discomfort sit with you, you will delay a release and your body will fatigue. You will feel heavy. The way out is creativity and expression. Write poetry but not for an audience. Move your body, breathe slowly. Move slowly. Brush your teeth slowly. Wash the dishes slowly. Cook slowly. Instant gratification, or in other words, social media, will make this tougher. Go create, don’t consume.
- Work on repair
You know what the best thing about this life is? That humans are walking contradictions. Hold on to that. These contradictions exist not for you to resolve them; they exist because they simply must. Nothing needs to be fixed. Nothing needs to be certain. So choose your actions based on what matters most to you (your values) instead of waiting to feel sure or safe about the outcome. Imagine this: You want to go out in the rain and dance. But your clothes will be wet! Oh no. Too bad.
- Rebalance emotional labour
As a woman, if you want something, you have to learn how to want it without needing a justification for it. Also, you need to be able to welcome mild relational discomfort. Let your friends hold some weight. Let them carry something heavy for you. Let them learn that they hurt you. Let them tell you you hurt them. You don’t have to be agreeable to be loved; you can take the easy way. Let life serve you instead.
- Containment and consistency, not optimisation
Set fewer goals for yourself. Hold them gently. Practice something called ‘Compassionate realism’. So what, something did not work out exactly like you had pictured it? The prison is not being stuck; the prison is letting yourself stay stuck. Your inconsistency may be the biggest curse. You are getting in the way of your own dreams by optimising yourself like a robot only to let yourself be a feed to the masses. I read somewhere on Substack that it is the most embarrassing thing to want something and then be lazy about chasing it, and another post that said it might be the greatest sin you can commit against yourself is to know what you want and not to act on it. Optimisation won’t get you places; consistency and strong willingness will.
From the very beginning of thinking about positioning myself in our ‘Reculturing’ vertical, I have been grappling with the very sane reality, according to me, that is: in Europe, specifically in the Nordics, lies the indisputable tension between the white-man-made integration ideology and the desire of the immigrant to retain their cultural sovereignty. The battle plays out in my life constantly. But I don’t hand in my skills at the cost of myself. I hand it as a skill only if it is a benefit to me. That is my #reculturing. In my first essay on #Reculturing, I asked myself, ‘How do I begin to assemble what to carry and what I could leave behind without losing who I am?’ This essay is my response.
