There is a memory I keep going back to. I was maybe thirteen or fourteen. A girl in my class fainted at the school assembly. This was followed by a lot of whispers from everyone. Someone said she hadn’t been eating because she wanted to look good for a family wedding. Someone else said it was a “girl’s problem”. Nobody actually explained what happened. Not to us, not to her. We just moved on. But that silence stayed with me, and it somehow spoke volumes. The way the teachers looked away. The way certain words were never said out loud. It’s like we were being taught something, but at that point I wasn’t able to understand what it was.
A lot of us grew up like that. Learning about our bodies, about sex, about relationships, not through honest conversations but through what nobody said. Through jokes. Through warnings. Through the faces people made when certain topics came up. This is something that I find myself thinking about at times. At that time, it may have not looked like misinformation in the way we usually mean it, some wrong fact on the internet. Basically, the stuff that gets into you much earlier than that, before you even know to question it.
Growing Up in Mangalore
I grew up in Mangalore. I was a fat kid. And then a fat teenager. My body felt like public property for most of that time. At every family gathering, someone had something to say. A relative pinching my cheek and in the same breath telling me I’d put on weight. Aunties at weddings comparing notes on who looked good, who didn’t, who was “healthy” (which never actually meant healthy). It was constant. And the thing is, nobody thought they were being cruel. That’s what I’ve had to sit with as an adult. Through of all those social interactions, I learnt that these very people (who actually genuinely loved me) looked at things in this light, and spoke of them as they did because they had been taught that a woman’s value lives in her appearance, and that commenting on it, monitoring it, nudging it in the right direction, was just part of taking care of her. So that’s what they did; they took care of me, in the only way they knew.
By the time I was twelve I already understood, without anyone spelling it out, that my body was something to be fixed. That once it was fixed, my real life could begin. That until then I was somehow on hold. That belief followed me for a long time. It shaped what I let myself want. What I thought I deserved. How much space I allowed myself to take up. And I know I’m not alone in this. The details are different for everyone but the shape of it is the same. The message that your body is not quite right. That you need to be smaller, quieter, more contained. That you exist mainly in relation to other people, what they need from you, what they think of you, whether they’ll choose you. That’s not just about fatness. It runs through so much of how women in this country are raised. Be good. Adjust. Don’t ask too many questions. Don’t want too much. I remember battling with having to sit daintily ‘like a lady’, not walk like a boy, not laugh too loudly or speak too loudly, to be girl enough.
Nobody sits you down and says these things directly to you. They don’t need to. You absorb them. And once they’re in, they’re hard to find, let alone question, because they don’t feel like beliefs. They feel like facts.
Remember the book and movie The Princess Diaries? It was all about that makeover of looking ‘prettier’ in the stereotyped sense that changed the life of the protagonist. All you need is a makeover and your life will take a 180 degree turn. It always made me think that perhaps if I were thinner, prettier, my world would also change. And looking back, that itself was such a problematic thought.
What Silence Actually Does
When there’s no real conversation about sex, bodies, or relationships, people don’t just stay uninformed. They fill in the gaps. Usually with fear, or shame, or whatever the people around them believe. Girls go into marriages with no idea of what to expect, having been told only to adjust and be a ‘good wife’. Women suffer for years thinking that their depression after having delivered a baby is just weakness, not knowing it has a name, and that it’s common and that help exists. Couples dealing with infertility carry it alone for years, convinced it means something terrible about who they are as people.
None of this happens because people don’t care. It happens because nobody told them. And nobody told the people before them either. The silence isn’t accidental. A lot of it is held in place on purpose somehow, because honest conversations about bodies and sex and desire would mean acknowledging that women have aspirations and desires of their own. That pleasure matters. That a woman’s reproductive choices belong to her. All this still is, in many places, an uncomfortable thing to say out loud.
What Actually Helps
As a Psychotherapist and PhD scholar, I have observed that when someone finally has an honest conversation about their body, their sexuality, their experience, often for the first time in their thirties, there’s almost always grief in it. Grief for how long they carried shame they didn’t need to carry. For choices they made when they didn’t have the full picture. For the years they spent at war with themselves.
And then, after the grief, something loosens. It’s hard to describe. It just looks like relief. Like they’ve been clenching something for years and they’ve finally been allowed to put it down. That’s not a small thing. That’s actually what being okay feels like.
I still think about that girl who fainted at the assembly. How everyone looked away. How the silence just closed over her and we all moved on. We can do better than that. We have to!
Cover image by Kristina Flour on Unsplash
