Unfinished: A Memoir

by Priyanka Chopra Jonas

Part of this desire to be introspective comes with maturity, no doubt.

I decided that I would do my best to learn from each new situation I found myself in, to throw myself into it wholeheartedly and work as hard as I knew how. Sink or swim. And if there was a choice, I was always going to do my damnedest to swim.

I have always felt that life is a solitary journey, that we are each on a train, riding through our hours, our days, our years. We get on alone, we leave alone, and the decisions we make as we travel on the train are our responsibility alone. Along the way, different people—the family we are born to and the family we choose, the friends we meet, those we come to love and who come to love us—get on and off the cars of our train. We are travelers, always moving, always in flux, and so are our fellow passengers. Our time riding together is fleeting, but it’s everything—because the time together is what brings us love, joy, connection.

Because as I have discovered, if you’re willing to be a student of life, the possibilities are endless.

Privilege and responsibility go hand in hand.

Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it….If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend. BRUCE LEE

“You don’t want to leave because you think you have your whole life set here,” he said. “But in fact, you’re one of the lucky few who can leave your mistakes behind.

will be like a clean slate. No one will ever know any of that. You can become whoever you want to be. That’s your superpower.”

As Aaliyah said, “Dust yourself off and try again.” Nothing lasts forever, and I could always start fresh somewhere else.

Out of torture came a new love.

In the early days, seeing her reminded me of being pushed away, of feeling rejected and banished, but seeing her now reminded me of how far I’d come, how much I’d grown and changed.

This was no longer just the place where she’d once left me. It was my place now, and I was proud to show her everything about it.

Part of that faith is knowing that every individual on this planet who believes in a faith has their own face for it.

Religion wasn’t used to define anyone; it was just another part of who we were.

Being on my own at such a young age taught me how to find my own solutions. If I needed something, I’d figure out a way to get it somehow rather than waiting around for someone else to get it for me.

But I know that being sent away at such a young age affected me in other ways, too. I learned to compartmentalize difficult moments and events in my life—to focus on the next amazing thing I wanted to do and move on without always fully processing whatever had just happened to me. Keeping the sections of my tuck box neatly organized and separated, and moving forward, always moving forward, without looking back. My version of being like water.

I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you. CHARLOTTE BRONTË, JANE EYRE

Short version: Own your choices. Or, as my mother must have told me hundreds of times growing up, “have courage of conviction.”

His faith in me caused me to realize that one failure doesn’t mean failure. It means you didn’t get the part this time, but you can prepare hard for your next opportunity and maybe you’ll get that one. Or the one after.

confidence is not a permanent state of being, a piece of wisdom I still believe. It’s something you can work to develop and something you have to work to maintain.

with each new experience comes a new opportunity to reinvent yourself. I recognized that as long as I could find the confidence I’d lost, I could then choose who I wanted to be.

There was empowerment in reinvention.

From now on, if I was going to be an anomaly, I was going to be the shiniest damn anomaly around.

My difference is my strength.

I should focus on my commitment to the process, not on anyone else’s, and that’s what I’ve endeavored to do ever since.

We can’t choose the family we were born into but we can choose our actions. We all want to take care of the people we are closest to, those sitting at our table. But is there a world in which those who are blessed with more might build a larger table rather than building a higher fence?

I’m happy to report that sometimes those pep talks we give ourselves actually do work.

I’ve come to see that there are times when you should speak up, and times when it’s better not to. So I’ve started picking my battles.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. RAINER MARIA RILKE, LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET

I never really examined or dealt with my grief. Instead, I tried to power through. I was doing my best to be resilient, but the fact is that I was burying my grief rather than coming to terms with it. I moved from one extreme to another, like a pendulum, always in motion, always swinging. Either I was working long hours, moving fast, traveling, not giving myself time to think, or I was completely inside myself, shut down, uninterested in seeing friends or seeking company. Over time, I came to realize that my grief, rather than diminishing, had simply become an ever-present companion. Once I realized that it wasn’t going anywhere, instead of trying to distance myself from it, I allowed it to move in with me, as if I were a host, perhaps, and we were in a symbiotic relationship. I accepted that I would take it with me wherever I went, like I took my cellphone and my keys. Or perhaps like I took my determination and my loyalty, which are simply parts of me, as grief was, too, now. You might think this would be an impediment, but somehow the comfort of knowing that this grief, so personal to me, was like a priority item in the tuck box of my life allowed me to move forward. I knew it would always be there. It might change, evolve, become larger or smaller, but it would always be there. And this acceptance, it seems, helped me move forward.

All I wanted was to spend time alone, until finally, finally, I was tired of being sad. It would be so simple if I could point to one specific catalyst for this change, but that’s not the way it happened. It took almost two years, but eventually I realized that some small inclination toward life inside me was tired of sitting on the sidelines. I tried to remind myself of who I used to be when I’d had a spark. After a long time, I realized that I missed that person. I wanted to be her again.

I was not going to let all the good things in my life slip away from me because I was emotionally devastated. I was not going to give in to the darkness. I decided I had to choose myself, and I had to do it immediately.

Maybe it sounds simplistic, but I decided to focus on the blessings that I’d been given instead of focusing on what I was missing. I started to treat myself with kindness. I told myself not to blame myself for feeling alternately bereft and numb, for having indulged in such a long, quiet period of sadness. That’s what my body had needed, I realized; that’s what my spirit had needed—to mourn and mourn fully. To feel the sadness I hadn’t wanted to feel. I didn’t know exactly how to move from a world of gray back into a world of vibrant color, but one day I figured out one simple thing I could do: I could stop hiding and reengage with life.

But changing my pattern was the beginning of real change for me. Gradually my soul started to feel less heavy.

During my solitary time, I came to understand myself better. As is no doubt clear by now, I have always been a person who wants and expects to work hard, who takes pride in the fact that I work hard. This period of being alone showed me that I needed the space to do nothing, too, to just be.

I think part of the human journey is figuring things out for yourself, and apparently, that’s what I had to do.

For me, one of the hardest things to accept in life is that control is an illusion. I hate that I can’t control what happens in my life, but I can’t. Loss happens. Failure happens. Sorrow happens. I can’t always control where I’m headed, either. Sometimes sadness is the destination, whether or not it’s where I want to go. During my time there I had to learn to trust that I was visiting for a reason, but that it would not be my permanent place of residence, my forever state of being. That, like water, I would flow past it eventually and end up where I was meant to be.

The most important relationship in life is the one you have with yourself. DIANE VON FURSTENBERG

true partnership is a two-way street.

Now I think I was just avoiding taking a deeper look at myself and the pattern I was locked into. And let’s be clear: I’m the one who created that pattern. I was the eraser and the erased. Before I could move forward and change the pattern, I had to own the part I played in creating so much pain for myself. I’m not unique in this; we all have our own painful patterns. Somehow I finally figured out that the only way to break the cycle was to accept my truth and continue from there. Which meant walking through a fire of sorts.

Had my professional do-my-best attitude somehow bled into my private behavior? Was my reluctance to end a relationship I hadn’t been happy in for some time related to a fear that I hadn’t done my best to make it work? That I hadn’t done absolutely everything in my power, in fact?

Was I taking too much responsibility for solving the problems in my relationships by trying to control as many aspects of them as I could? I finally realized the futility of this—and the craziness of it. I can’t possibly control a relationship, because I can’t control how other people think or feel about me. The only thing that I can control is myself. If I’m solid in myself, happy in myself, confident in myself, well, that’s what I can bring to the table in a relationship. And I was beginning to understand that that’s the first step in having a healthy relationship, a relationship of partners who give and take equally, who think about how things affect each party and make decisions accordingly.

Sometimes when you’re not looking for love, it appears right in front of you.

Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow. KAHLIL GIBRAN, THE PROPHET

I am large, I contain multitudes. WALT WHITMAN, “SONG OF MYSELF”

And it will radiate hope, because in order to do the work that needs to be done, you have to believe we can heal.

I believe that the purpose of every life is to make the journey the best one that we can for ourselves and for those around us—those people who sit by our sides in our train cars, sharing joint hopes and dreams; those who leave sooner than they should; those whom we encounter briefly at one station or another along the way; and those whom we may never meet personally but who are part of our larger world. When we act with care and kindness, we lift up ourselves and others. By working hard to create the circumstances that allow us to flourish, we help pave the way for those who travel alongside us and those who come after us, too.