They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us

by Prachi Gupta

Because stories designed to uphold hierarchies protect only one group—those at the very top.

The myth forces our minds to forget that which our bodies cannot: that belonging is always conditional.

Our problems began when I was expected to shrink myself, as you had been forced to do, but instead I insisted on expanding.

The world we live in, which demands perfection and achievement, teaches us we cannot love ourselves as we are. The myth teaches us to think greatness always resides outside us instead of within us. We must become stronger, taller, richer, thinner, smarter, prettier—and perhaps then, we think, we may be worthy of love. Yet we cannot love ourselves and we cannot love each other well so long as we are preoccupied by the desire to leave ourselves, to abandon ourselves in search of something beyond ourselves. Serving the myth teaches us how to belong but severs our ability to connect.

Now I wonder who we could have been if we saw our ethnicity not as something to manipulate into belonging in white America but as an opportunity to understand why we were treated differently in the first place.

The problem with that kind of a personality, I said, was that when everything was peaceful, one had to create wars to feel useful or important.

Maybe love was simpler than I thought: Maybe it was a willingness to witness someone, to be curious and empathize with them, as they are.