They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us

by Prachi Gupta

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.

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 wonder how this shaped his understanding of love—whether to be loved was to be made to feel powerful, and to love another was to dominate them. I wonder who that boy would have become, and how that man would have treated you and me, if he had been seen as neither God nor pariah but as an imperfect child capable of making mistakes and seeking help, ordinary and human.

The difference in treatment between son and daughter would ripple through generations, one learning entitlement, the other learning injustice. One sibling would lean into nostalgia for lost culture to justify his behavior, while the other would struggle to reclaim her lost culture, observing how tradition was so often invoked to evade accountability and prevent change.

I was envious that white people didn’t have to liken themselves to something else in order to be understood. They could appear as they wanted to appear, without question or comparison.

The fact that things I loved could seem tedious scared me.

Art kept my spirit alive. Expressing myself, whether by drawing, writing, or dancing, was an assertion of my existence that enabled me to connect to something deeper than simply what I was expected to produce in the world.

When I forgot who I was, creating art helped me find my way back. Art was my entry point to learning how to love myself.

This was usually how we conveyed feelings, too, rarely speaking about them directly and instead telling each other what someone else had said about us, monitoring our emotions and actions based on how we imagined that others perceived us.

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

It seemed to me that success meant giving up one’s time, health, and relationships to make a rich corporation richer.

By not responding to Papa’s tantrums, I took myself out of them entirely, to the point where I could recognize the absurdity of his actions.

The change was gradual, and yet, when my transformation began, I did not feel as if I were changing into someone else. I felt like I was coming back to a self that I had abandoned.

What I read offered nuanced depictions of emotional and psychological abuse, in which people of all genders were capable of genuine care and affection but maintained control over loved ones through a constant but abstract threat of violence and culture of secrecy.

If we could bridge the expansive generational and cultural gap between us so effortlessly, maybe the wrongness Papa saw in me wasn’t something innate to me. Maybe it didn’t mean I was not Indian enough or too American, and maybe, just maybe, I didn’t need to meet so many conditions or work so hard to be worthy of love. 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.

I understood how scary it was to trust yourself. For me, the hardest part was not dealing with Papa’s volatility or verbal onslaught or even the physical violence; it was the way in which our realities were denied and rewritten, how I felt so confused when I spoke the truth.

I am terrified of alienating the only people who have loved me without conditions, afraid of pushing them away by expressing my ugly emotions—my anger or my pain or my hurt—the inconvenient emotions which have pushed away everyone else in my life, including you.

Angry that violence was celebrated as strength, but the ability to endure violence was cast as weakness.

When someone could accept me as I am, as Yush had once done, my outpouring created intimacy and connection. But when I repeatedly shared my reality with someone incapable of seeing it, like Papa, I doubted myself and viewed myself as a failure.

To love myself was to accept myself as I am and to live in a way that honored my feelings, aligned with my values, and trusted my senses, even when the outside world wanted me to doubt or shrink myself.

Therapy became a place not for repair but for the formation of a relationship with someone who helped me see that I am already whole.

The truth is, society doesn’t raise people to aspire to be kind or compassionate or happy. It pressures adults to achieve and accomplish.