They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us

by Prachi Gupta

The belief that we were exceptional protected us. Until it didn’t. Because stories designed to uphold hierarchies protect only one group—those at the very top.

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.

In our family, we learned to love one another for how well we were able to conform to the story they wrote for us—not as who we really are.

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.

“From now on you’re going to carry a phone with you,” he said. “You could get raped. It’s not safe.” With his one comment, my pride at having run so far turned to shame.

This makes my heart so sad

I had learned that to be a good woman is to be chaste, and he had learned that to be a good man is to protect a woman’s chastity.

What I heard instead was, You may be going away, but don’t forget—you are not your own person.

A part of me wondered if I was living your dream, deferred.

I felt like a routine phone call had opened a tenth circle of hell in mere seconds, and now an indestructible tie had somehow been severed. Yet I had never been so sure that I didn’t deserve to be treated like this.

“This is a dumb analogy, but it sort of fits. It’s like in Men in Black. If you don’t believe in aliens, you walk around like everything is normal. But once you become aware of depression and how it lies to your mind, it’s like you know about the aliens. You can’t go back to the way you used to think, and you can’t believe how uninformed you were.”

“Prachi is Goddess of the Rising Sun and Destroyer of Darkness. And you have given it a third meaning!” he said. “What’s that?” “Terminator of the male ego.”

“The problem with humanity,” Dadaji continued, was “the belief that the man should have the upper hand.”

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.

In a capitalist society, the measure of wellness isn’t a person’s actual health or happiness but how far one can rise or how much wealth one can accumulate.

To seek mental healthcare as an immigrant was to threaten one’s security and chance to succeed, to suggest bad parenting, or to imply that one’s ethnic culture caused their children’s problems.

To know that, as a woman who had been taught that I needed to serve a man to be complete, I could instead build a life for myself that I loved, and that I could sustain that life by myself. I hoped that, maybe if you saw me live this way, you might choose to come back to me.

yet to write about injustice, I had to draw from the well of rage within me every day. And my well was bottomless.

I wanted to learn how to live with the fact that the person I loved more than anyone could not love the woman I was becoming.

When another Hearst site sent a white male writer to discuss Trump’s proposals on a cable-TV panel with a politician who embraced white supremacist views, I understood that what was controversial was not Trump, it was me—a brown woman speaking candidly, moving the political beyond the realm of theoretical and into the personal.

“But you shouldn’t need me to tell you that in order to know that this was racism. You already know this. I don’t want you to be surprised at the racism you experience—you know that the world, that these white institutions, are racist. The question I want you to consider is: How do you accept that reality and not let it take your power from you?

“Hey, guys, at least now it will be legal to grab pussy!” he yelled to a group of young men who walked past. “America just elected a rapist for president!” They laughed and high-fived one another.

The truth is, society doesn’t raise people to aspire to be kind or compassionate or happy. It pressures adults to achieve and accomplish. It teaches people that what matters more than their character or how they treat others or how they feel about themselves is how much money they can hoard, who they know, how famous they can get, and how much power they wield over others.

Unless we choose to face it, grief folds us inward and pushes us deep into our own pockets of suffering, intensifying our pain and further isolating us from those we love.

love someone well was to perform perfection for them, and to be loved well was for them to perform perfection for me. But that is not true love. That is self-abandonment masquerading as love. Now I understand that intimacy can form only when I accept someone as they are, not as who they can be for me.