Defying the Labels

Many a great person have said, “Everyone is unique, nobody is like you”. No matter whether you are a gem of a person, or a discarded piece of society, these words still stand: “You are unique and unlike anyone else”.  But still by and large, these unique and different people can also fall into some similar groups and somewhere they can enjoy the feeling of oneness, despite the fact that there might be striking diversities between them. They comfortably label themselves as extroverts, introverts, friendly, short tempered and so on and they also expect everyone else to wear a label that has been laid out by them.

 All through the years in this world, I’ve struggled to decide, which label do I fit in? I might have the characteristic of one group, but then I lack its other properties, so, how do I classify myself? My dreams, ambitions, feelings, desires and my own wonderful world where a silver moon and a golden sun shines at the same time, did not fit in anywhere amongst these labels.  Then, this society enlightened me with a label that is specially designed for people like me, which is, the “misfit” label. And, if by any chance you are a woman with the above characteristics, then you are given the privilege of being called a “problem woman”.

Perhaps some time ago, I also believed that I am a “problem” woman.  I resented my parents for bringing me up the way they did. For not buying me Barbie dolls, which made it a struggle for me to befriend girls of my age, for not teaching me that pink is for girls and blue is for boys, for not telling me that the ultimate objective for a girl is to look pretty and most importantly for not cautioning me that boys would never pursue me if I wasn’t dumb enough.  Their decision of not buying Barbie dolls kept me oblivious of how I was supposed to look when I grow up, because hey, isn’t here where all little girls get their first lesson of how they are supposed to look? Ever seen a Barbie doll with a shaved head and ripped muscles? No, right? Instead Barbie dolls are tall, blonde, thin, and have huge breasts; and thus the young girls learn what women must look like. This view of women is embedded into young girl’s minds through play and later in life as exactly what they have not become, which leads them to have low self-image and poor mental health. From this point, the Barbie hands over the baton to the beauty industry, which promises these insecure damsels that they have the chance of being that Barbie doll if only they use their products.

 So coming back to my story, the problem was that since I never played with a Barbie doll, and with my mother being a bad-ass geologist herself, I was blissfully unaware of my “misfit and problem woman” label until I passed out of my all-girls school. As an adolescent, as I entered the college, in a short period of time, I realized that I was not being treated the same way as other women were. Boys resented me for having too much of an opinion and girls resented me for having too much of an attitude. Desperate to be accepted, I decided to change myself: grew my hair longer, tried to keep silent, and started playing with cosmetics. The result was disastrous: if you try fitting a large vase into a smaller shelf, the vase shall undoubtedly break! I could not recognize the person I saw in the mirror. Nor did this change help people accept me. The ones who hated me still did, and the ones who loved me, well, they couldn’t recognize me. This great confusion pushed me into a hell pit of depression.

This entire episode made me question the entire purpose of the society and its norms. Why do we even need to fit in? Who made the norm for women to have long hair? The society expects women to have long hair on their heads, but frowns if she has hair on any other part of their body! I mean, isn’t this a common sense that a person with good hair growth would have it on all the parts of the body and not only head? There was one thing that I knew for sure that, in the beginning, God said, “let there be hair”. And God saw the hair and saw that it was good.  But then, people ruined it.  I read somewhere in the ocean of internet that the ancient Egyptians started this sexist shit. Turns out when they weren’t building mysterious feats of mankind with 1,000-ton bricks, they were inventing nonsense beauty standards like hair removal. Women began removing their body hair with all manner of torture tools, plucking it out with tweezers made of clam shells, scrubbing it off with pumice stones, striking it down with the world’s first copper razors and yanking it out with beeswax and cotton strips. But Egyptians also invented marshmallows, so they are forgiven. The hairless trend continued into the Roman Empire, where hair removal was, in fact, a sign of wealth and cleanliness. In Elizabethan-era Britain, wealthy women often removed their eyebrows completely and plucked their hairlines to create the illusion of a taller forehead.

Well, at that time, the clothing in India was extremely conservative, covering most of the female body and scandalous topics such as women’s leg hair were best left behind closed doors. But then, how did Raja Ravi Verma, the guy who is responsible for the images of the Gods and Goddesses that we believe in, forget to paint facial and body hair on women and goddesses in his paintings. I’m sure Veet or Gillete wasn’t available then! (Oh yes! Here you realize that no one has seen God, these images were created by a human like us! Let’s keep this topic for some other time).

The men were smart, they understood that their hair were coming in their way of work and capabilities (maintaining hair is quite a task, duh!) and they chopped them off. But, they cunningly prevented women from doing so, an action which was a part of the great propaganda of keeping the women folks at a back-foot. In order to make sure that the women don’t use their common sense, men began praising women for their long locks. This is how media worked back then. You must have read a lot of poetry describing women’s hair and their eyes and their beauty. Ever heard a poem about a man’s hair and his beauty?

I was overwhelmed by all these thoughts. While I saw my friends striving for identities and finally ending up copying the ones they idolize, tattooing their bodies, piercing their navels, straightening, curling and colouring their hair- I decided to stand out. A voice inside asked me- "What if they don’t accept you? ". “At least I will accept myself for being myself, and that’s all that matters”, I replied. I chose to be myself and told myself: “I have to be a shining star!” No matter how many stars are there around me, I have to be the brightest, the best, and ‘unique’ as I call it.

I shaved my head and broke up with my hair straightener, curler and the other countless hair products. The result was amazing. It was a fulfilling emotion beyond description. In a country like India where a woman having short hair can be a terrifying , shaving your head is a big thing. But once I overcame that fear, shaved my head and realized that I look amazing, my confidence hit the roof!  (On a lighter note: In the dating scene, shaving my head automatically filtered out the narrow minded chauvinist creeps and paved the way for really intelligent and open minded guys!).

I wanted to be the brightest star!  Like the ‘polestar’! But then I realized, to be the polestar, I have to shine alone. Away from everyone else. It would help me, as there would be no one to steal my light, but then I forgot, there will be nobody to give me light when my own light grows dim, there will be no one to share my darkness…

So, I worked hard to be different, to be ME. I did not believe in altruism. I was proud to accept that I was a perfect self-obsessed selfish woman . As I succeeded, I became known, I became different, I became popular with an “un” before the word popular, but that, ceased to matter as I was completely in love with myself. Finally, I could recognize this person in the mirror and talk to her. At the top, you are always alone. But the truth is, how long you will dwell there: It’s easy to reach the top, but difficult to stay there. I wanted to be great. Greatness, fame, envy, respect and admiration in other people’s eyes. Others ruled my conviction. I started spiraling down the same web which I had laboriously battled through. I had to pause. Pause and think. Why?

As I thought, I realized that “greatness” is just an exaggeration of emptiness. It’s not that I’m not happy with myself but I can never be satisfied because I belong to the species which can never be content. It’s just that I have still not achieved my ME. I know that I will achieve it as I have that extinct ‘libido’ that an average human lacks, probably then I will achieve my ME. But I wouldn’t let the so called beauty industry make me believe that they can make me better than what ‘I’ am.

I know I am not the only one, the only one who is taken to be an ‘Outcast’ and at the same time put on the ‘Pedestal’. There are more, but where they are, where is the group to which I belong to is still a mystery, but there is always one person who does not belong to the moving times and this time I’m the one. I would be criticized and called crazy, but “statues are not made of the critiques or the rejecters, statues are made to honour only the criticized.” 

All that I can say now is “Watch me!”

Image Source: 1^st Art gallery.com