Parth Shukla
TRIGGER WARNING: Color Discrimination, Bullying, Homophobia
Realizing my flaws and recognizing them as the source of my strength has been revolutionary for my mental health in ways I’d desperately needed it to be.
I have always been fascinated by the color of my skin. Over the years, it has been a topic of much interest for a wide variety of people. Whether it is Pooja Aunty, who lives a few houses down from me, or some of My Fathers’ colleagues whenever they come over for a chat or brunch. I have managed to learn many ways of lightening my skin shade over the course of these years through such unnecessary rendezvous.
For some reason, almost anyone I encounter from the generation preceding mine has always felt potentially entitled to be able to comment on the color of my skin. I have mostly dismissed it for sheer ignorance but even when I have tried to confront it, I have been unsuccessful in comprehending the reasons surrounding such deep-rooted stigmatization of my melanin-rich skin and that of millions of others living beside me. The fact that we live in times where only “Fair” can be lovely or handsome, as propagated in the myriad of advertisements pertaining to fairness inducing cosmetics, doesn’t only set us back by decades but is a real-life example of toxic superiority of a certain type of an image of people in the said context.
But it hasn’t always been just about how much turmeric I should cover my face with before going to bed, the judgment and stigma has followed me around in the way I walk, the way I talk, The way I keep my hands to myself when standing alone, The way I present myself in front of people and even the way I eat. Lewd, Mis-gendering and Homophobic comments and Slurs have been thrown at me in school since as far as I can remember and have been an inextricable thread in the fabric of my life. What saddens me more is that years after I came out of the closet in 8th grade, the same people who would once call me names, were now joking with me about corny gay references in high school, for they “supported me for who I am” and were just ‘normalizing’ our friendship like any other. As if they would ‘jokingly’ refer to their cisgender heterosexual peers by denunciating terms aligned and equated with the LGBTQ+ community due to the contemporary and historical social construct and prejudice that has surrounded it. Irony, a cruel mistress indeed.
In retrospect, I realize today that I shouldn’t have let them treat me like they did. Not that I was exploited, I could care less about what a few shallow high school bullies thought of me, I was way too occupied devoting my energy and attention to people who loved me the same before, I came out of the closet, and after I did. I’ve had a good fortune in that department. Not everyone I was surrounded by in school, had the same mainstream narrow mindset.
I was lucky enough to have friends who would stand up for me whenever they thought they needed to and friends who helped me realize the best of my potential. But the way how I didn’t let all that name calling affect and offend me by blocking all my thoughts about it away was not the most appropriate way to confront such a situation. Standing up for myself as out-rightly as I do today, would have strongly urged me to validate my self-esteem and self-awareness with the same magnitude that I validate such things in the lives of people I care about. Talking and analyzing such a situation then and there, would have been the best possible way for me to avoid bottling up all my anxiety from it until I couldn’t help myself without therapy.
Such realizations occurred to me after being on Anxiety medication for over a year. It was the only time I had ever felt claustrophobic, only, the crowded and suffocated space in this context was myself, dependent on a substance to keep unwanted thoughts away, not being liberated enough to go to sleep without that .75 mg Clonazepam pill. Sooner than later, I had no other choice than to turn things around for myself. By suppressing all that revolt and anger in my mind I had disabled myself from doing that for a long time. Only time helped me heal all my wounds firsthand.
Talking about it was relieving, even writing it down did the work if talking seemed like a lot. It’s another one of those things I’ve come to understand, manifesting your emotions is the best way to deal with them. The effort may seem like a big thing at times, putting it into something even a bigger one, but from what I have learned, the only place that effort needs to be invested in is within ourselves through the course of our days. Time will do the rest of the work, it always does.