They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us

by Prachi Gupta

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

Our problems began when I started searching for a way to explain everything that felt so inexplicable. 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.

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.

stubborn, opinionated, strong-willed, outspoken, and loud. Traits admired and encouraged in my father but concerning when manifested by a girl.

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.

By virtue of your role as mother, wife, and immigrant, the self-exploration that benefited me in college was not a privilege extended to you, at least not unless you upended your entire world again and risked losing the community you had created in an isolating new country. It brings me so much shame to consider now if there was a part of you that held this against me, jealous that you had to lose everything to make certain choices for yourself, while I had the privilege of knowing I’d still have the support of my friends if I walked away. And, although it was you who made a decision to search for more opportunity, it was I who benefitted from that sacrifice now. 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. I was a good kid now. I was upholding my end of the bargain that—for years in high school, yes—I had reneged on. But my current success gave Papa so much to brag about. He even bragged about the money he saved by not sending me to an Ivy League school. I was far from perfect, but I was indisputably the sort of daughter that you both could finally be proud of in the Indian American community.

Success was supposed to make one immune to struggle, I thought. I had long understood that mental illness didn’t happen in high-achieving Indian American families like ours. In fact, both Yush and I had believed that part of what made us so successful was this ability to clamp down on our feelings and not let them out all the time, the way white people did so gratuitously. In my simplistic understanding of the world, it was this unfiltered outpouring of feelings that caused white families so much strife, and it was our emotional discipline that enabled us to work hard and succeed.

We didn’t know that Asian American college students are more likely to deal with suicidal thoughts and attempt suicide than white students—straddling multiple cultures, experiencing racism, and living up to narrow expectations of achievement exerts extreme stress on the mind and body. To navigate those pressures, Yush and I learned to repress our feelings and forge onward, as Dadaji did, as Papa did, as you did. None of us knew that this very survival tactic compounded our pain.

And we dealt with it the way most families do: quickly and quietly. We swept up the mess, put things back as best we could, and continued to live in the same way, as if nothing had ever happened. We didn’t know that by trying to forget, we were more deeply committing ourselves to the very circumstances and problems that had caused the explosion in the first place. We didn’t know that we were teaching Yush not to resolve his pain but to find more-creative ways to hide it.

I had tried so hard to be what Papa needed me to be. It was painful that my best ability to express love was received as rejection, and it made me feel like, no matter what, nothing I did would ever be good enough for him. I responded as carefully as I could.

And then came the words that continue to haunt me: “How can you leave me?” I wanted to cry, How can you expect me to stay?

I knew that this decision would hurt you deeply, Mummy. I knew that you wanted me to forget and move on. It is what you had done. But, Mummy, I couldn’t. A part of me wanted to call you, reason with you, plead with you to see my perspective. But I knew that you didn’t want to hear any of it. I was angry with you, too. I didn’t see you as the casualty in the war between Papa and me anymore. I felt as if you had firmly chosen a side, and it wasn’t mine. You didn’t protect me anymore. I understood now that you protected him.

Again and again, I was told that what I called mistreatment was a misinterpretation of the lengths to which my father had gone to ensure that I succeeded. When I refused to accept that explanation, several relatives and family friends pulled away from me, casting me as ungrateful for what my parents had sacrificed. It felt as if success was so paramount that no one was willing to consider whether its pursuit could come at a personal toll.

But when I was just being myself—even when I was not trying to prove some point—I was still wrong somehow. Too loud or too outspoken or too opinionated or too independent—traits that Papa had encouraged when I was a girl but found threatening as I became a woman. It was only because I did not fit into his world that I began to ask why I did not and why I could not.

For the first time, I read literature that described the dynamics of our home not as love or duty or tradition, as I had understood them, but with harsh, unforgiving words. Domestic violence. Emotional abuse. Gaslighting. I had thought of abuse as purely physical: brutish fathers who came home drunk and battered women black-and-blue, never showing their families a shred of kindness. 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. The labels and definitions offered me a new frame for understanding my experiences within our family, turning my fuzzy feelings into concrete shapes with names from which I began to form a language. Realizing that our family dynamics matched with established patterns observed again and again by others allowed me to recognize myself in something beyond my microscopic view of the world. The literature validated my sense that what you and I experienced at home was not something either of us had to accept.

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 was a tumor that had been surgically excised and discarded. But this time, I did not know why I had been cut out.

I would struggle to believe that anything I created could ever really matter, because it didn’t seem to matter to the people who were supposed to love me the most.

“But I never tried to control you. Everything I did, I did because I wanted the best for you.”

I had spent a good portion of my life feeling cheated out of the exceptional family I was told I had. I believed that if I held the same values and followed the rules laid before me, I could make that perfect family materialize. When that didn’t happen, and most of the people around me doubled down on that message—to suggest that we were not happy because I was not adhering to the rules closely enough—I felt like I was losing my mind. Now I had learned that the secret of having a happy family was pretending to be perfect.

The instability of the career that I thought would save me, coupled with the rupture in my relationships with you and Papa and my growing distance with Yush, made me feel alone in the world. Not alone in the way that we are all ultimately alone. Alone in the way that I belonged to no one anymore, that if I fell ill or lost my job and health insurance, I had no support to make it through.

I had always felt slightly ashamed, like I had failed at trying to be normal and happy with a life that most people would have felt lucky to have. I thought I was a disappointment to you both—to Papa especially.

That I was too selfish, too emotional, too much, too hard to love.

My insecurity over my identity had turned culture into a performance rather than something I inhabited authentically.

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.

But as a woman, and as the defiant sister who had challenged the natural order of our patriarchal family, though I was the closest to Yush, I had also become the person least likely to reach him.

I had thought of love as a taut chain with a tight clasp that carried our weight as we clutched one another, no matter what dragged any of us down. I had believed that when I love someone, I should hold on regardless of what else I have to give up in order to keep them. The more one gives up, the greater the love, I thought. To 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.

I know that letting go of my fantasy of togetherness does not mean that I do not want the best for you and Papa or hope that each of you finds your way back to me. I still want all of that. But I no longer live in the space where I tell myself that if I silence or shrink myself, I can one day have that ideal relationship with you both.

For a long time, I felt ashamed of who I was. I didn’t know what it meant to be me, only that to be me was to be wrong. I was rejected for speaking my truth, because it was not what anyone wanted to hear. I was rejected for who I am, because I did not portray an image that people wanted to see. I thought people could see an ugliness in me that I had to work hard to hide until I appeared flawless to them. But when I finally achieved what I thought was such perfection, I learned that, even then, I did not belong.

Now I feel grateful for that rejection, because rejection forced me to learn to find value in myself, value that I had jockeyed to receive from others. I learned that I am not defined by how others perceive me. I learned that the limits of their acceptance are not a symptom of my failings. I am grateful, because not only did I survive, but I expanded. I grew in infinite directions. I learned that I am not done growing. I am just beginning.