They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us

by Prachi Gupta

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.

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.

I wondered what it might be like to be raised by men like them, men who did not appear to yell to get what they wanted. I wonder now how their affection shaped your understanding of the world. Maybe you thought all men in the world were that caring, because in your world, they were.

Maybe if we could have acknowledged the pain of womanhood, too, we wouldn’t have been so burdened by its constraints.

The world discouraged men from seeking help and told women that goodness was self-sacrifice.