Growing up in a small town, one thing was very clear: information travelled faster than people. News moved through neighbours, shopkeepers, and casual conversations. It often felt like everyone knew everything about everyone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For years I thought nobody had taught me anything about sexuality. But later,I realised that wasn\u2019t entirely true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The truth is, I was learning about it all the time. Through gossip, warnings, television, school lessons, and conversations that adults probably never meant children to hear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nobody explained what sexuality meant, but there always seemed to be rules around it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of my earliest memories of those rules comes from a school photograph taken in Class 1. Our school had organised a class photograph, and after paying a small amount, each student received a copy. I came home excited and showed it to everyone \u2013 my parents, grandparents, and anyone else willing to look at it. Among the many faces in the photograph was that of a boy I liked talking to. At that age, I did not know what a crush was; I only knew that he was someone whose company I enjoyed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At that time, there was a girl in Class 11 or 12 who would occasionally come to work at our house when her mother was unwell. While showing her the photograph, I pointed towards the boy and casually mentioned that I liked him. She smiled, teased me a little, and I thought nothing of it. But after that, whenever I refused to listen to her or complained about something she had done, she would threaten me by saying that she would tell my parents about the boy. She said that if my parents found out, they would stop sending me to school and make me stay at home and clean the house with her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I do not remember whether I completely believed her or not. What I do remember is my fear. I kept hoping she would never tell anyone. In my mind, if she told my parents, it wouldn’t stay there for long. Having seen how quickly people gossip in a small town, I felt that news would travel quickly, and I was scared that everyone would eventually know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nobody explained why liking a boy felt like something that needed to be hidden. Nobody spoke about crushes, attraction, or relationships. Yet somehow I had already learnt that this was information that needed to be carefully protected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As I grew older, I began noticing that I was not the only one learning these unspoken rules.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I remember being in Class 6 when some girls in my class would play the paper-and-pencil game FLAMES ( Friends, Love, Attraction, Marriage, Enemy, Sibling) during lunch break. I was also part of the group, although I was more interested in the game than what it actually revealed. The girls would get excited when certain names came together and giggle when they were matched with boys from our class. At that time, I did not realise that many of them actually had crushes on these boys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What I remember most is what we did after the game. Before going back to class, we would tear the paper into tiny pieces and bury them in the sand. As if the game and the giggling had never happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One day, I casually told other people about the game because, for me, it was just a game. The other girls got upset with me and stopped talking to me for some time. I did not understand why and only much later did I realise that I had broken an unspoken rule. The game was fun, but it was \u2018secret\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, I came across a similar rule in a very different situation. Our school organised a session on menstruation, but only girls were allowed to attend. The boys stayed back in their classrooms while we were taken to a separate room. I do not remember much about who conducted the session, but I clearly remember wondering why the boys were not allowed to hear any of it. We were told what periods were and why they happened. Until then, I knew almost nothing about menstruation. What surprised me was that some of my classmates had already started getting their period. I remember thinking, \u201cPeople my age are already getting their period\u2026 why haven\u2019t I got it yet, and how come I don\u2019t know anything about this?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It felt like everyone else knew things that I was hearing about for the first time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On that day, we not only learnt about periods, but we also learnt who was supposed to have this information and who wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After the session, when we came back to class, most of the boys were curious about what had happened. They wanted to know what we had discussed and why they had not been included. We giggled, avoided answering them properly, and treated it like a secret.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now when I think about it, not telling the boys probably made the topic even more mysterious for them. They became more curious, and we became more secretive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As I grew older, information continued to come to me from different places. Friends talked about crushes, slam books (autograph or memory books that friends wrote in and shared, answering prompts like favourite song, first date, name of their crush, etc) moved around classrooms, and television spouted its own ideas about love and relationships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then came time for the famous \u2018reproduction chapter\u2019 in school. The students were curious and the teachers seemed uncomfortable. We learnt the scientific terms, memorised diagrams, and prepared for exams, but asking questions was a different matter altogether.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Outside the classroom, information came through rumours and friends. I remember hearing terms like \u201cblue films\u201d long before anyone explained what they actually meant. People used the term freely, but nobody ever seemed willing to explain it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What I found interesting was that nobody seemed worried about children not having information. On the contrary, the tension was always that children might become \u2018too interested\u2019 in these topics. Talking about crushes, relationships, or sex was often seen as a distraction from studies. Not talking about them never was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Years later, when I started facilitating sexuality education sessions with young people, I found myself thinking about many of these experiences again. What surprised me most was how much information they already had. They learnt things through the internet, social media, web series, online games, and conversations with friends. Many of them knew things that I had not gotten to know until much later in life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Their questions reminded me of my own confusion while growing up. They knew a lot of things, yet they still had questions. Sometimes they would share something they had heard online and ask if it was actually true. Sometimes they would already know the answer but wanted someone to confirm it. What many of them seemed to need was not more information, but a place where they could ask questions without feeling awkward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I often wonder how different my own experience might have been if curiosity had been treated differently. Growing up, many of us were taught that these topics were distractions. Asking questions sometimes felt riskier than staying confused. We were curious as young people, then. Young people today are curious too. The only difference is that we looked for answers somewhere else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While facilitating sessions with young people, I often found myself thinking about my younger self. The child who was scared that someone would tell her parents that she liked a boy. The teenager who learnt about periods in a room where boys were not allowed. The student who knew the reproduction chapter would be taught, but knew better than to ask questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now I think about my own experiences differently. For a long time, I had thought that nobody had taught me about sexuality. But when I started tracing where my ideas had come from, I realised I had been learning about it all along \u2013 through gossip, warnings, school lessons, things people said, and things they refused to say. I was receiving pieces of it all the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The information was never really missing. The pieces were always there. I just had to learn how to connect them. That is what sexuality education means to me today: not just giving information, but helping people make sense of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cover image by Dominik Scythe<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The pieces were always there<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":614,"featured_media":29577,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5450,6],"tags":[2695,255,3280,4468,5497,472,439,99,251,408,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-29576","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-information-and-sexuality","8":"category-theicolumn","9":"tag-adolescence","10":"tag-comprehensive-sexuality-education","11":"tag-curiosity","12":"tag-growing-up","13":"tag-information-and-sexuality","14":"tag-myths-and-misconceptions","15":"tag-puberty","16":"tag-relationships","17":"tag-sexuality-education","18":"tag-srhr","19":"tag-young-people"},"menu_order":0,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/614"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29576"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29622,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29576\/revisions\/29622"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}