“American-Born Confused Desi” is the label that us US-born South Asian kids are given. Our Indian ethnicity is seen first in the US, but when we go to India, we are considered more American than Indian. This has made me feel closed off of from my culture, or feel out of place in it at times. It was hard for me to come out of my shell at first, but after coming to college, I learned that embracing my culture was so important for me to feel happy with who I was.
For so long, I tried to assimilate and keep my culture at home or with my family, and not express it at school or in the activities I did. But, that mentality started going away as I went through high school and entered college. In college, I met so many people who shared a similar identity to me, and it was a very healing experience seeing all those people embrace all the parts of their culture proudly. They made me see that I could celebrate my ethnicity and also be American; those things did not need to be separate.
Growing up, there were parts of my culture that made me self-conscious, causing me to try to keep it from being a bigger part of my life. One of those things was the pronunciation of my name. The correct way to say it, the Indian way of pronouncing it, was hard for some people to pronounce, so to avoid any problems with it, I changed the pronunciation of my name to fit in. It took a very long time for me to unlearn this, and to start allowing others to pronounce it the correct way. There were so many parts of my identity that I had to repress when I was younger just to fit in, and so it took some time to unlearn those habits.
In college, I realized that I had no reason to be embarrassed about my name, or to feel like I had to change its pronunciation to accommodate other people. So when people asked for my name, I started saying it the way it was supposed to be, and that made me so much more at peace with my identity.
In addition, I also started going to more cultural events, listening to more Indian music, and incorporating Indian jewelry or clothes into the outfits I would wear. I felt good in my own skin and that was a feeling that I seemed to have been chasing since I was little. Coming to a college with people of various backgrounds helped me slowly ease into fully embracing my culture, and since then, I’ve never looked back.
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