Conscious Untethering, Sub-conscious Standards.

Have you ever been acquainted with one of many post-modern torture devices, one that makes people shriek and gasp in horror (read: the mighty weighing scale)?! All jokes aside, it often does seem like that when you can see shocked expressions when (much to your terror), your classmates peer over your shoulder to cast judgements upon this number that supposedly quantifies you, and take it upon themselves to use it to vilify your worth as an individual. A number that could very well fluctuate due to anything from hormonal imbalances, to even the weighing scale being kept a certain way, is suddenly the subject of jeers that seek to poke and drill holes within the walls of your own fragile, adolescent self-esteem. Slowly but surely, the doubts creep in, much like cracked walls with caked-on plasters and you start to question the fleshed vessel you see in the mirror, picking apart every tiny detail. 

With a faltering smile, you try to keep yourself from crying. The tears slowly roll down your cheeks, and this saltwater pool seeks to remind you of all the ways in which you have failed yourself. Glazed eyes take one look and proclaim vehement vitriol to coat the reflection that you see. Eyes that once could have held light and laughter, now prick and pester themselves with the ideas of deemed inadequacy. A sinking heart replacing one that sang and smiled, ultimately getting stuck in a tirade of superficial, and sub-conscious self-loathing. That was just one of many instances that burn into my memory to this day, no matter how much I may try to forget. I distinctly remember looking at the barrage of tears that streamed down my face as I looked at the version of myself in the mirror, cursing everything wrong with it. The worst part about it all is, that even when the utterers fade away into the distance over time, the words immortalise themselves within you and sting you at your lowest. 

From a young age, in an almost suffocating fashion, we’re cuffed to an obsession with labels (in a literal sense too), especially when we place them upon ourselves as well as others. 

However, as much as I would like to be surprised, womxn constantly have a history of being shamed, particularly in the exercise of their bodies. Womxn are already made to carry heavy loads of century old-Eurocentric beauty standards that direct everything from the colour of their skin to the size of their waist, yet somehow this age-old burden goes unnoticed on the dreaded scale. This absurd infiltration of thoughts finds its own weaselled parallels within the glorification of certain body types in the media, while others remain in the background, only to be seen as supporting characters. It doesn’t help the case that fair, thin, cis, straight and able bodies are considered mainstream, and to a large extent, the norm. 

Having grown up seeing everyone looking like me just be a “before”, in a heroine’s story before she undergoes a magical makeover in order to be loved, it became all the more imploringly evident that perhaps I wasn’t worthy of happiness just the way I was. Like shattering porcelain, my ideas of self-worth similarly crumbled under the influence of these ideas that jailed my happiness and kept it captive. Was I supposed to change everything about myself just to find love and acceptance? 

As years upon years’ worth of unrealistic standards are our captors, it becomes difficult to separate your own worth from whether or not you’re conventionally attractive. We see ourselves in terms of absolutes, completely disregarding the multitudes that swirl within us; the lenses themselves are so warped that they only make us see inadequacies where there could exist kintsugi-like imperfections. We look upon ourselves, and the bias has contorted us so, that we only notice the extra kilos we’ve shed or lost, the melanin that tints our skin, the supposedly taunting crooked nose that sits at the centre of our face, the frazzled way our hair sticks out, and we wonder if all these implicit permanent “blemishes” taint whether we’re deemed to be worthy of dignity. After all, the mirrors lie, the filters morph, and when the world seems to echo our worst fears, it’s difficult to not feel hopeless and dejected.

When a similar dejectedness washed over a friend of mine one day, I hugged her and told her that she was nothing less than beautiful, just the way she was. It pained me to see the hurt expression on her face when she told me woe filled words of how every word that was ever uttered at her body size, be it from her classmates or anyone in her family, ruminated into a spiral of ever-lowering self-doubt that she couldn’t find her way out of. With ever increased sincerity, as I told her of how she needn’t change herself to fit an ideal that is itself, questionable, could I hear a slight tug at my own heartstrings. Somewhere within, it felt, absurd that such a contradiction could arise from my own nature. As I was wiping off my friend’s tears, the image of my own sadness washed before me, as I muttered words of encouragement, I could hear the harsh words I once said to myself at the back of my mind. 

It had begun to dawn upon me that the love I failed to give myself out of the suffocating chains of internalized insults, paled in comparison to the love and support I could give to my loved ones. If I was more than capable of this emotion, and to direct my care whenever needed, could I not do the same for myself? If the cusp of these cuffs stung me so badly, why was I punishing myself, and injuring myself with these restrictive burdens just to placate a flawed idea of flawlessness?

It was probably my meandering around this idea that made me realise, albeit slowly, that the unbearable lightness of my being (rather the light and love within), can gradually be untied and untethered to the confining, heavy burdens of forever-unsatisfied, societal standards.

By Deeksha Puri, for the Trans Solidarity Fundraiser

• ASHOKA UNIVERSITY
• Trans Solidarity Fundraiser