Welcome Home

Street art in Valparaiso, Chile

I am in an airplane seat looking out of the window. The plane is lining up on the runway at Delhi International Airport to take off, I am wondering when I will return to my birth land. For 24 yrs, the length of my entire life, this was home. I feel so many conflicting emotions. So many half finished thoughts running amok in my mind. Does San Francisco look exactly like I have seen in Full House? How will people treat me? Will I get vegetarian food there? Will I change? I keep oscillating between being ecstatic about this new adventure and sad about leaving the familiar, leaving home. At 24, I had quit my job as a branding consultant in India to fulfill a dream of becoming a Social Entrepreneur. And the first step was getting my Masters from the US. I was naive, maybe even a little guileless. And I was going on this adventure anyway. With time, the excitement of going to live in a foreign land for the first time becomes more intoxicating than the red wine the air-hostess had served me and I drift off.

Today, 4 years later, I am making my way back. I am taxing on that same Delhi airport tarmac and the familiar chaos of conflicting emotions are abound inside. So many half finished thoughts running amok again. And just like going away prompted a lot of introspection, a lot of questions. Coming back does the same. How am I different? Why am I different? How will this change be received? Will the people at home accept me? Will they love the revised me?

On probing the journey of the past 4 years, the pits, peaks, and plateaus on the graph of my life I realize how this external journey in some ways woke me up from a social, emotional, personal and cultural sleep that I did not even know I was in.

But this did not happen overnight. I remember my first day in class. A room full of strangers, some from countries I could not have pointed on a map. So many of them confident, decisively expressing their thoughts with a surety I could only admire from my corner. There I sat stupefied by the paralyzing fear of drawing attention to myself if I raise my hand and speechless by self-doubt in the value of my thoughts and ideas. I could hear a familiar voice saying, did I even have a point of view? Was it even important? Why should I waste everyone’s time trying to express ‘my’ thoughts?

I did not even have my permission to take space, I realize. When a lifetime of external voices proclaim ‘you are less than’, you internalize it so much that it morphs into your own voice and a loud one at that. It becomes how you see yourself. And so that is how I saw myself. Less than, ugly, fat, incapable, undeserving of taking any space, born to be someone’s wife and care for his house and children. Period.

Even though this polluted and limited internal perspective of self was normal, it was hard to live with. Just like the turbulence I felt when this plane landed, there was a deep unrest within me while I lived in India. I did not know how to be anything else, but there was a faint and ignored knowing inside me that I was more than this. I had more to offer to the world.

So in someways, the underlining (divine?) motivation to go on this grand adventure was rather feeble. I was escaping. I was escaping confining and restrictive relationships. I was escaping social norms that by default determined my course. Cultural paradigms that defined my identity. I was escaping patriarchy.

I was running away half way across the world, almost as far as I could to rid myself of that inner unrest, whatever the heck that meant or looked like.

I grin as the next thought forms in my mind. The beauty is that in escaping the external limitations of life in India, I ended up accidentally giving myself permission to discover me. I didn’t even know I needed that permission. I did not know there was anything to be found. I wasn’t even looking or knew to look for anything. I have not only ended up knowing me but also as a side-effect found my voice and learnt how to express it. Now, I can only live authentically. My grin widens.

In pursuing external freedom I stumbled upon the inner kind. And this freedom gave me the greatest gift of being human — it made me fall in love with myself.

Yes, deeply and madly in love with me. My enormity. It’s like when you have an expensive piece of clothing that you fought your mom to buy and love so much, but it never really fit, so it sits in your closet like a prized possession and you glance at it painfully every time you open your closet, and then one day suddenly you fancy trying it on, and voilà! — it slides on like a glove.

That is how I feel (want to?) today. This body, it’s curves, flabs, bulges are all perfect. I feel beautiful in it even when the voices around and within say otherwise. I am finally fitting into my own skin, comfortably. I find myself treating my emotions like my greatest treasure. Listening to them, validating them, making space for them, learning from them, letting them pass through my body. I look at my thoughts and ideas like my life breath. My sustenance. My creative chi or prana. They create and manifest through me. Cultural and societal paradigms have now become references and remain only as important as I let them. My identity shines brightly in my eyes. No one has a say in it anymore.

Did going far away from my geographic home, help me feel at home in my own self I wonder? Am I really home wherever I go?

As I stand at the airport waiting to be welcomed home by my kith and kin, I find myself embracing my own self and whispering a ‘welcome home’ to myself. I recognize and acknowledge my body, mind and soul as my truest home. This temple-like residence of my immensity and how perfect it is. The foundations of this home are a strong resolve to never ever dissolve my self-expression. It has windows of dreams and thoughts that open up new vistas for me. Doors wide open for anyone who comes with love and respect. Sealed shut with armed Kali guarding from those who dare otherwise.

What a gift, falling in love with myself. What a gift finding home in me. The girl who could not even raise her hand in class just 3.5 years ago, now travels the world creating learning communities for one of the most prestigious universities in the world. The girl who let a man define her and decide her fate has now claimed her own power. I am fueled by a deep resolve to claim my space in every conversation, in every relationship in my life, in every moment. Like gravity clasping my body, I feel myself symbolically claiming space on the bench underneath me.

What led to the unfurling of this power I did not even know I had? Was it the USA? Perhaps not, perhaps yes. But the important point to me is that leaving the confines of the known led to my expansion.

So then does my continued expansion lie in the the still unknowns? Are questions really more important than their answers? Is growth really a by-product of curiosity and courage?

In my experience a resounding - Yes. Yes. Yes.

My phone beeps. I have received an email confirming an important work project. My grin changes into an ungraceful guffaw. I remember I am busy dreaming and manifesting my next adventure. I am starting a global movement for compassionate community-led social change. I am perhaps still naive and maybe still a little guileless. But that didn’t stop me in the past, did it?

Thumbnail Image credit: Photo by Pop & Zebra on Unsplash