Dear Drama Mama, I enjoy your writings very much but I find your tagline offensive. “We are all the same”? No, we are not. My husband cheated on me when I was pregnant with my third child and now we are divorced. I am raising three kids on my own without any emotional, physical or financial support. I live alone. My parents have passed away and my siblings, of course, have their own lives to lead. I am lonely and angry – angry at my fate, angry at my ex-husband, and even angry at Allah. (Judge me if you want…but from what I think I have understood of you so far, you won’t.) Are you really suggesting that I am the same as another reader of this page – one who is well off and happily married, one who has never experienced the shattering experiences known as betrayal, poverty or loss of faith? S ---- Dear S, I have written to you privately about everything else but I want to address the We Are All The Same tagline here, for the benefit of other women who might need to hear this: “One of the tragic ironies of modern life is that so many people feel isolated from each other and alone by the very feelings they have in common.” Sir Ken Robinson. In our day to day life, at school pick up and at play dates and coffee mornings and family gatherings and fancy dinners, we meet each other and we discuss the details. Details like where to get the best haircut, and whats a good preschool, and politics and haalat and religion and the latest diets and dramas and kids and susraal and home decor and which lawn exhibition to attend and how crazy work is. Most times these discussions are well and good and we have ourselves a pleasant, easy chat and get on with our lives. But sometimes, especially those times when something in our own lives are pinching us a bit, these discussions make us squirm. They frustrate us. They make us angry and depressed. And I think this might be because discussing the details, the surface stuff, makes us feel lonely. Akaylay. Different. Because for each person, the surface stuff is different. So yes, S, your surface life, IS very different from many other women. There are 2000 people on this page. Is the happily married woman EXACTLY the same as the one in an unhappy marriage? Is the woman parenting with the support of her husband and extended family EXACTLY the same as the one raising her kids alone? Is the woman who has experienced the loss of a child the SAME as that who hasn’t? Is the woman battling cancer IDENTICAL to the perfectly healthy one? Is a special needs parent the SAME as a parent of typical kids? The woman caring for a terminal husband the same as the one living up the golden years? No, not at all. We all have different details. These details are OUR details and they are an important part of us…who we are, how we feel and how we perceive and experience life. They are our differences and they need to be respected as genuine and important by everyone. But I still believe, that since these details about us are different, if and when we discuss SIRF aur sirf these things we will always feel different from other people and lonely. “Her life is good and full. My life is hard and I am alone.” If I have learnt anything from the thousands of comments on this page and the hundreds of inbox messages I get from women around the world, I know one thing to be true: We are different from outside, but inside, when it comes to the essentials, we’re all the same. We are all the same inside. We all feel all the feelings. We experience hope and hopelessness, joy and pain, success and failure. We all lose our minds and our patience and our faith from time to time. We all hate and love fiercely, sometimes at the same time at the same person (Hi Hums!). We are each so, so terrified and so insanely brave. Like the little girl with the curl, we are each a contradictory mix of very, very good and horrid. The details make us people, but the essentials make us insaan. And only when we share the below the surface stuff will we learn that our details are our doorways that we need to enter through in order to get to the most honest place inside all of us. That sacred/scared place inside which acknowledges that for ALL of us zindagi is dhoop and we are all in search for our ghana saya. My personal mission statement, as highlighted on my cover photo, is to practice every day being brave, kind and grateful. I write about trying to be brave, kind and grateful (and also how irritating my kids are at 7pm) because I consider these essential things. And when I write about essential things, and the "Me too!"s start pouring in, its so awesome. C.S Lewis said it best: “Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . ." With every Me Too, I feel less lonely and I want others to feel less lonely too. Because when we feel less lonely, when we feel we are part of a larger community, a larger global family of women, all of who are struggling and soaring, falling and getting up again and again and again in the same/different ways, it’s just BETTER. When we feel less lonely, we are braver. And braver people are SO good FOR and SO good AT life in this messy, messy world. Be brave, S. You can do this. x
Posted on: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 15:05:51 +0000
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