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.

We serve a story that will never serve us, and I fear that the next generation will seek to do the same.

Papa followed this common immigrant road map and imprinted the map upon Yush and me. But along the way, we forgot that this is not necessarily who we are—it is who we felt pressured to become.

I learned that when I was seen as the object of desire of a tall white man, suddenly, I mattered. I became visible.

We were all drowning, unintentionally dunking one another below the surface in an effort to lift ourselves up in a raging ocean.

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.

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. I felt robbed.

Words usually come to me on the page more readily than in speech, but in this case, that is not so. It is like the words are lodged deep inside me in cavities and I have to search for them and then excavate them, one by one.

I think that when he achieved such success, he sank deeper into feelings of self-hatred, and assuming that more success would relieve him of this pain, he sought to attain more. He drank poison, believing it was medicine. I wonder if you ever sensed, as I did, that this obsession with achievement had led us astray—or if, like Yush, you drank the poison, trusting it to be the cure.