They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us

by Prachi Gupta

The problems between you and me began when I started trying to create context around things that were meant to be forgotten. 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.

Now I think of memories as haphazard blots of ink in a Rorschach test that we assemble along the spine of the story we are told about who we are. If given enough space, time, and support, we can arrange the memories along a story that we write for ourselves, extracting new meaning from events experienced one way and later understood as another.

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.

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 did not say that a man who forces you to prove your worth is a man incapable of seeing it.

But now I understand that coming together in shared grief is a choice, not an inevitability.

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.

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.