Let’s kick off with physics, because, why not? It’s brutally clear: nothing stands alone. Motion? Stillness? Position? Meaningless without a frame of reference. Your ‘at rest’ rocket is screaming across the sky in someone else’s view. Nudge the frame, and the whole picture dances. What felt rock-solid starts to wobble. What seemed obvious, purely made-up.
Physics admits this upfront. We pretend otherwise. We nurture this cosy myth: the Self as some eternal core inside us, unchanging, pure, just aching for expression. Safe from the world’s chaos. But let’s be real. The Self thrives in relation to people, institutions, raw power. No isolation. Shift the frame, and it morphs.
Picture a woman in a government mental hospital in rural Bengal. Over a decade locked in. Her name? Faded to a case file, ID number etched in faded ink. Days blur into medicated routine: meds at dawn, group therapy echoes, lights out by nine. Inside, the docs nod: ‘stable’. She complies, stays quiet, no outbursts. System-speak: ‘at rest’. It’s tidy, contained.
But zoom out. That ‘rest’ screams confinement. Stability for whose world? Recovery into what? A life doled out in portions? Seen through which lens, doctor’s chart, family’s whispers, society’s side-eye? The institution tamed her. It didn’t rebuild her Self. It archived it.
We’ve met dozens like her in our mental health programs across Kolkata’s fringes and beyond. Folks for whom ‘who am I?’ isn’t about self-discovery. It’s survival: do I even register as a Self? Mainstream identity talk assumes an intact core, ready for unpacking, celebrating, TikTok affirmations. But reality bites differently. It’s erosion, a slow grind of being unseen, redefined by others’ scripts. Lives plotted on charts you didn’t draw.
Call it what it is: identity deprivation. Not muddled feelings. Straight-up starvation.
Enter sexuality. Not as sidebar fluff, but the razor-sharp arena where Self gets greenlit or ghosted. We romanticise it, desire, orientation, bold identity. Empowering, personal. Yes, if you’ve got the runway: freedom to claim your body, your intimacies, your pace.
Most haven’t. In asylums like hers, sexuality? Erased. No hungers acknowledged, no boundaries yours to set, no touch beyond clinical pokes. Bodies become vessels, dosed, scrubbed, surveilled. Feeling? Choice? Laughable.
Shift to the slums and villages we organise in. Women pour out stories: bodies as workhorses. Dawn-to-dusk labour, fetching water, cooking for ten, enduring floods or fevers. Caregiving marathons. Survival mode. Pleasure? A hazy rumour. ‘My body aches from bricks and babies,’ one said last workshop, eyes distant. ‘Joy in it? That’s for films.’ Sexuality feels alien, maybe sinful, reserved for making heirs, not claiming delight.
Queer and trans kin face it worse. Every glance a probe, every step a correction. ‘Fix that walk,’ families hiss. Clinics ‘treat’ it as illness. Communities police it into shadows. Recognition? A fragile truce, revoked on a whim.
Sexuality persists, though. Just reframed:
Desire in one world.
Danger in the next.
Blank slate in the last.
Same soul, wildly different permissions. Their depths don’t flip, the frames do. So ‘what does the Self offer sexuality?’ lands flat. The Self arrives pre-shaped, rationed by what’s tolerated.
Punitive cage? Sexuality turns toxic, not uplifting. No mirror of true seeing? Self withers. Our go-to fix? ‘Accept yourself. Build that inner fire. Claim your truth.’ Feels good, but it’s a dodge. Pins blame inward, spares the structures strangling possibility. Like telling a caged bird to soar higher.
Affirmation sparks in connection, not vacuums. Sexuality blooms affirming only with scaffolding:
True recognition, as whole person, not labels. Desires valid, boundaries sacred.
Relational haven, intimacy safe from fists or shame, vulnerability cradled.
Structural green lights, laws shielding instead of snaring, institutions enabling, communities embracing multiplicity.
Lacking these, ‘be you’ mocks. Expand? In shrinking boxes?
That ‘discharge-ready’ woman teeters here. Hospital frame, check. But family reunion? ‘Too broken for marriage.’ Village gaze? ‘Medicated oddity.’ State aid? ‘Compliant case closed.’ Each frame resets her. Who emerges? What hides for air? Personality? No, permission.
We prod ‘know thyself.’ Flip it. At rest, according to whom? A trans youth we worked with put it raw: ‘I’m still when the cops look away. Racing when they circle.’ Frames dictate.
In one rally last monsoon, a survivor shared: post-hospital, her desires resurfaced, quiet wants for touch, laughter. Family frame crushed it: ‘You’re cured, act normal.’ Community? Gossip mill. She shrank again. Till our circle reframed it: “Your body’s yours. Tell us your story.” Permission unlocked flickers of Self.
Ignoring frames keeps ‘be yourself’ unequal. Gift to the privileged, burden to the bound. Self doesn’t solo-emerge. It ignites, or fizzles, in worlds we craft.
Change those worlds, and sexuality stops echoing limits. It sings what’s possible, selves fully, fiercely alive.
Illustration by Rukmini Chakravarty
