//these pseudo-essays are written with minimal editing and are not meant to be polished outputs. they’re exercises in writing regularly and publishing with as few barriers as possible. tbh, your time is better spent reading something more thoughtful. for my formal writing, visit longwayhome.substack.com. inspired by @visakanv’s 1000wordvomits.
I like being at home. Time with my parents has been really good but more than that, I really like the space and the comfort of being here. The suburbs feel more like a meandering creek than dangerous rapids. I need to meander for a while. I need somewhere I can take a breath and find my footing again. I need an environment I can work to build some healthy habits and unlearn poor habits – being in a new environment jumpstarts this process but I still need to put in the work. I’m still spending too long on my phone, I’m still procrastinating and delaying and chasing cheap dopamine during the days, but I’m getting better. Slowly.
I think Shivani and I can really build an exciting lifestyle here. And by exciting, I don’t mean chaotic and full of novelty. I mean stable, predictable, routine. Something in which I can find some comfort and safety. My life has enough novelty with the travel and the work. I want some quiet. I need some time to work.
I want to find new topics that tickle me the way topics from my newsletter did. They intersected in this interesting way and felt evergreen and made me feel like there’s someone out there who could get a lot out of them. I don’t want to just keep writing journal entries. And I will have ideas. I’m just not capturing them. They’re conversations or fleeting thoughts lost to the bowels of my memory. I want to get better at capturing these ideas for processing and building later.
I feel like I’m getting closer to a breaking point where I will not be able to tolerate a life where I’m not publishing and putting myself out there online. I feel like a life where I’ve given up trying to create something and I keep sending these lame emails and taking notes in these lame meetings and keep track of who’s done or not done what. It’s just that I need to feel this fire and frustration when it matters. I need to sit and try to come up with something regularly, as a part of a routine, even when I’m not feeling inspired, because the writing comes first and the inspiration comes second. And once I’m in a routine, I can figure out how to take it to the next level and earn my first dollar online.
//these pseudo-essays are written with minimal editing and are not meant to be polished outputs. they’re exercises in writing regularly and publishing with as few barriers as possible. tbh, your time is better spent reading something more thoughtful. for my formal writing, visit longwayhome.substack.com. inspired by @visakanv’s 1000wordvomits.
Part 1: What is Anger?
All our emotions share an evolutionary utility. They try to spotlight our attention on a given stimuli amidst the floodlight of perception. Understanding how various emotions contributed to our species’ survival helps us understand why we experience the emotions we do and how best to process them.
Anger is fascinating; it’s a fiery, explosive emotion that holds great constructive and destructive power. Anger can fuel and motivate us, but it can also drive us to harm ourselves and others.
Why do we feel anger? What is anger trying to signal to us about our reality?
We experience anger when we feel a boundary has been threatened. This includes both physical and emotional boundaries. This is helpful to recognize because framing anger in this way will help elucidate our boundaries for us, all of which are not obvious, or even known, to us.
Part 2: Understanding Our Own Boundaries
Consider this: you hear a burglar breaking into your home at night. You’re terrified at first, afraid for your and your family’s safety. The burglar trips over a child’s toy, spraining their ankle and knocking their head against the wall. This completely neutralizes the threat and fear fades, allowing another emotion to bubble to the surface.
Anger.
Who does this person think he is, breaking into _your_ home, where _your_ family sleeps, attempting to steal _your_ belongings, for which you have worked so hard? It’s your responsibility and your duty to keep your partner and children safe, and you feel infuriated that this thief forced themselves into your private safe space.
You’re blinded by your desire to harm them to ensure they never think about entering your space ever again.
Next, consider this: you come home after a long day at work. You tear your shoes off and throw your work bag beside them, collapsing on the couch. Your spouse enters the room and senses you feel defeated. They probe you to talk about it, but given you just got home, you request some time to vegetate and decompress before talking through the laundry list of mishaps and professional torments that characterized your day.
They feel like you’d feel better if you just talked it out with them so they push, inching closer on the couch and nodding. You’re exhausted, frustrated, and feeling incompetent. The last thing you want is to leap into an animated montage of all the hurtful things everybody said and did to you today, so you push back. They offer their ear again, this time more aggressively. They sprinkle in a bit of guilt-tripping, reminding you they’ve been waiting for you to get home for hours.
You snap.
You raise your voice, telling them to back off for the last time. You jump off the couch and storm to the bedroom, slamming the door behind you in a rage.
In both these examples, boundaries were violated. Vastly different boundaries, but boundaries all the same. One we can see, the other we can’t. One we can easily explain (and legally defend), and the other is fickle, transient, and conditional. We’ve all had our emotional boundaries violated at some point, driving us to behave aggressively in an effort to protect ourselves from harm and make us feel safe again.
We’ve also violated others’ emotional boundaries, driving them to do the same. We sometimes are taken aback by their strong responses, bewildered by their aggression. We just stumbled onto someone’s emotional boundary. It’s entirely possible they themselves were entirely unaware of it too.
Infringing a physical boundary is straightforward. There are walls, property lines, and tangible bodies to help us understand physical boundaries. People can lay claim to things in a way we all understand, resulting in a finite number of ways a physical boundary can be threatened.
Our emotional universes are infinitely more complex. Where we have laid claim to territory in our familial, social, and professional lives is much more abstract and challenging to parse. We are almost guaranteed to infringe on others’ emotional boundaries unknowingly, just as they are guaranteed to infringe upon ours.
Part 3: Setting New Boundaries
As children, many of us live our lives as per the whims of the adults around us. As we enter adulthood, we try to develop our own value system, our own operating system of sorts. This requires as much unlearning as it does learning. We all have unhelpful beliefs and perceptions of reality that impede our progress, regardless of the goals we set out for ourselves. Inherent in achieve these goals is doing things differently than when we were kids.
The most terrifying thing about growing up is having the courage to establish our own individuality amidst other adults who expect us to continue thinking, feeling, and behaving in accordance with how we were as children. This brings disappointment, confusion, and in many cases, relentless admonishments about what will happen if we don’t live the life these adults envision for us.
After all, most adults in our lives love us and want to protect us. It’s always well-intentioned.
Many of us fall victim to this pressure, interrupting our lives and denying our natural inclinations along the path of least resistance. We are unhappy and resentful, living our lives for our parents, their teachers, and their bosses.
Adults like this never learned how to set their own boundaries, the consequences of which are monumental and everlasting.
Establishing boundaries is fundamentally conflict-prone. A boundary needs to be established because some desired territory is not ours, it’s someone else’s and we want it back. Setting a boundary requires us to consciously expand our boundary to the point of contact with someone else’s, and then continue to push, advancing ours forward and forcing theirs back.
As we have already established, when a boundary is infringed upon, the result is anger. And the distance the boundary has been pushed is directly proportionate to the anger. It’s like a metabolite the process. Pushing a boundary backwards releases anger, like an exothermic reaction.
We see visceral reactions to our efforts to establish boundaries in our lives and we get frightened and back off. We think the conflict isn’t worth it or maybe we need to try another strategy, instead of recognizing that although there are possibly more or less inflammatory ways of establishing boundaries, anger will always be a byproduct.
We should mentally prepare to be met with anger during these difficult conversations and resist the temptation to mirror back that energy. Anger at anger leads to an eruption, not a cooling. We should keep in mind the cost of not establishing the boundary, which is living a life lacking individuality and devoid of personality. It’s impossible to feel at home in a body that solely works for other people, and never feeling at home is floundering in the abyss and deeply incompatible with happiness.
So identify where your boundaries are through what makes you angry, push back on other people’s boundaries through asserting yours, and prepare for the fight.
//these pseudo-essays are written with minimal editing and are not meant to be polished outputs. they’re exercises in writing regularly and publishing with as few barriers as possible. tbh, your time is better spent reading something more thoughtful. for my formal writing, visit longwayhome.substack.com. inspired by @visakanv’s 1000wordvomits.
My parents and I clashed a lot when I was in high school. Things always felt kind of tense – a universal teenage experience with parents. I did the usual: I stayed up late talking to friends, I made tons of weekend plans instead of staying home with my parents, I talked back. I was also dating a girl, the unforgivable sin. Of course, dating wasn’t acceptable in my household. Forget permissible, dating wasn’t even a concept.
The largest fights I had with my parents, probably even to today, was regarding this girlfriend. It made our home fraught with tension. My parents would try to stress how inappropriate something like this was, especially at my age, and I’d deny something like that was even going on at all, all the while staying up late talking on the phone, and staying late at school to hang out.
Having a high school girlfriend helped me understand at-home chaos and stress in a way I never understood before. My parents were afraid of losing their child to something they couldn’t understand and control, and I was afraid getting caught doing something I knew I shouldn’t be doing (by their standards). This dissonance was crippling.
This, of course, is an extremely common experience for anyone coming from a traditional household. In my high school of mostly South Asian teenagers, “secret” relationships were commonplace. Everyone was disappointing their parents, one way or another.
Causing this household tension at that age, and witnessing first-hand how my actions affected my parents, disincentivized me from acting out in the future. When I went off to university, I was relatively tame. It felt like the rebellion was flushed out of my system. I just wasn’t excited by the notion of doing anything that felt wrong or unacceptable by the people who loved me. It wasn’t fun.
The same can be said for my peers who had their own Grand Rebellion earlier in life.
A Grand Rebellion is characterized an act, or a series of actions, in which the rebeller is fully aware of their delinquency. It’s a decision they are consciously making that has and will continue to have very material consequences for their life. Grand Rebellions are often kept secret from the rebeller’s close friends or loved ones out of self-preservation or a sense of shame, and are typically executed in one of the following three domains: relationships, careers, or hedonism to the point of self-destruction.
I think we all need a Grand Rebellion. We feel the rush, we feel the rewards, and after all is said and done, we mostly realize that the forbidden fruit is not so sweet. In fact, we realize there may have been a good reason to avoid it after all.
We all have friends who were insatiable partiers when they were younger, or dated a guy/girl of whom their parents would vehemently disapprove (i.e., outside their culture), or disavowed their parents’ wishes and went to theatre school instead of becoming an engineer. We all have friends with crazy stories that make you cock your head and say “Youdidwhat?”.
In university and beyond, we come across people who continue to act out. They feel constrained by rules and feel a childish thrill when engaging in risky behaviour. Often times, these folks never had a Grand Rebellion in which they came face-to-face with the very real-life consequences of rebelling. For them, it’s always felt like a game.
Although these adult offenders are rebelling, they never had their one life-altering hurrah. They’re not afraid of everything being snatched from them because of an error they’ve made. They lack a sense of ownership over the direction of their life. Life, for them, is still a series of tiny rebellions, hoping they don’t found out.
I’m still working through how and why, but it seems like having a Grand Rebellion is crucial for healthy development into adulthood. It provides a strong sense of maturity and responsibility. Those that have Rebelled deeply understand their actions have real-world consequences and they aren’t derailed by cheap thrills. They’re thrilled out. They’ve had their fun.
Now, they’re looking to build the life they’ve always wanted, one calculated decision at a time.
//these pseudo-essays are written with minimal editing and are not meant to be polished outputs. they’re exercises in writing regularly and publishing with as few barriers as possible. tbh, your time is better spent reading something more thoughtful. for my formal writing, visit longwayhome.substack.com. inspired by @visakanv’s 1000wordvomits.
Many healthy relationships are comprised of two individuals who lean in opposing directions as a general way of being.
To illustrate: one person may be more of a spender while the other a saver, one may be more of a talker while the other is a listener, one may be more anxious while the other is spontaneous. The Spender doesn’t always want to spend, but the Spender may be able to more easily rationalize spending in a way with which the Saver might struggle. The Talker can also listen, but talking feels more natural. The Anxious one can be spontaneous, but it takes more self-talk (read: self-soothing) to counteract their natural inclinations and enjoy the experience.
When we move through our lives as individuals, our internal dialogues often embody both sides of these tensions (and there are an infinite example of such dichotomies). We recognize behaving in any extreme way all the time won’t lead to the best results, so we go back and forth in our minds, mulling over decisions and ultimately making one we feel is best for the situation.
We find stability and security in partners who tend to lean in opposite directions from us. On a sub-conscious level, we realize discussing everything with someone who thinks differently may be more taxing, but it leads to be better decisions for all.
Interestingly, being in these relationships can push us further toward our natural end of the spectrum. Finding a partner with whom to discuss can actually prompt us to dig our heels in when arguing our side, radicalizing us. The more sound the opposing logic, the more passionately we argue our side, desperate for concession.
Yes, our partner is right, but so are we.
Alone, our conscience would voice the exact discussion points brought forth by our partners, but being in a relationship allows us to externalize this back and forth. We outsource our reasoning and allow our internal conflict play out through discussion in front of us. If the other person didn’t exist, we would find ourselves arguing the exact points they’re voicing, but now, there’s no need to hold ourselves back.
This isn’t a bad thing. It allows us to lean more into our tendencies overtime, developing a reputation of being the Spender, the Talker, and the Spontaneous one. Being in such a relationship allows us to actualize the the highest version of our tendencies without needing to impede the process with “weighing both sides” since we trust our partners to play that counterbalancing role. Observing ourselves play a consistent role in discussions develops within us a stronger self-concept. We build confidence in knowing what we like and dislike, and we can more reliably predict how we’d behave in various situations.
I don’t know if all that’s true, but sounds about right?
Being born in the country to which your parents emigrated is the start of a complex life. These kids are forced to walk the line between two often opposing cultures and behave in ways that contradict each other on a daily basis. What’s appropriate at home may not be appropriate at work or at school and vice-versa. From this competing duality, a third culture is born. One that is influenced, consciously or subconsciously, by both.
Being a Third Culture Kid is constricting and liberating, terrifying and empowering, exhausting and inspiring, all at the same time. As my peers and I settle into the workforce and consider settling down, I’ve observed emergent and timely discussions about homebuilding, safety, and parenting.
Being from Brampton, Ontario, most of my closest friends are like me—South Asian. It’s been a treat to observe how these young, educated, emotionally aware, brown men and women talk about building a home and raising a family. We all have things we loved about our upbringing and things we vow to never replicate. While this is a universal exercise, I have the added fortune of having two distinct cultures to pick and choose from when mulling over the possibilities.
Growing up in an Indian household afforded me plenty of luxuries for which I’m infinitely grateful, but I also recognize that Western households have some cultural attributes that I would like to replicate in my own home. I’m in the fortunate position to cherry-pick what my partner and I see as the best parts of both cultures and to fuse them together to create a home environment built for love, security, ambition, and adventure. Each culture has its advantages and blindspots, and being able to know two cultures so intimately gives us a chance at optimizing for more advantages and fewer blindspots if we are willing to do the work.
Anybody who grows up in a multicultural home is in a position to observe the best of both cultures and leverage these lessons to maximize benefits for their own children. For those that are raised in a single-culture context, this essay may serve as an argument to become familiar with cultural contexts outside of the one in which you were raised to minimize the severity of the cultural blindspots from which we all suffer. Here are three traits for each South Asian and Western cultures that I’m excited to hold onto.
Before I begin, I would like to preface that I don’t mean to imply that any of the traits inspired by my Indian home are completely absent in all Western households, nor that all Indian households are devoid of the traits I hope to borrow from Western culture. Doubly, of course, not all South Asian homes will feature the traits that I am hoping to borrow from South Asian culture and it’s possible that they are commonplace in some Western households. Last, I recognize that my class and socio-economic status influence my perceptions of both Indian and Western cultures. Each is full of privilege. It’s not my intention to adjust for this.
My opinions are rooted in generalizations, stereotypes, and anecdotal evidence and I am well aware that I am painting large swaths of people with a single brush. However, I believe my points still stand. Further, each of these cherry-picked traits could be spun into their own dedicated essay. There’s lots to say for each one. Since I will attempt to be brief, my depiction of South Asian and Western cultures will lack nuance. I hope to do this justice in future essays.
South Asian Traits
South Asian culture, like many collectivistic cultures, features a tightly-knit social fabric, emphasis on academic achievement, and respect for authority. Watching my parents and their peers adapt their cultural norms to a vastly different social context taught me that while not everything has the intended effect, there are some traits worth clinging to.
Circle of Obligation
Like many collectivistic cultures around the world, the term “family” casts a wide net in India. Blood relationships are merely one piece of the social pie. Family friends are routinely called aunts and uncles and are treated with the same care that’s given to biological family. Ayomide Adebayo’s Circle of Obligationbeautifully describes the group of people to whom you feel indebted that will step up to reciprocate that care when required. Social obligation may feel burdensome, but social insecurity can have a deep psychological toll. When children grow up knowing that they will be cared for in a crisis, their sense of collective belonging is deepened. This unleashes a child to strive for personal achievement with a dulled sense of counterproductive fear when pursuing opportunities.
I’ve always dreamt of having friends that I could call over or drop by on without plenty of back and forth. Familial relationships outside of nuclear families can inspire my kids and reassure them that whatever their aspirations, there is somebody they may consult in advance who has their best interests at heart. Eventually, my kids will want professional advice and opinions on academic pursuits, and I hope to be able to create an environment where they will not need to look too hard to find somebody helpful. This means staying engaged with cultural and religious groups that share similar value systems as my partner and I, and modelling familial relationships with non-family members by providing value to other families and inspiring my friends’ kids.
Love Through Action
Traditionally, South Asian couples are not vocally affectionate with each other nor their children, but there is no doubt that love is ubiquitous in the household. Parental sacrifice and prioritization of family needs are a testament to their unconditional love for their children and spouses. Hugs, kisses, and phone-call-I-love-you’s weren’t present in my home, but it never occurred to me to want or need those things. I felt cherished without that.
My mom stood in the heat of the stove, cooking a full meal after an 8 or 10-hour shift. My dad went without well-fitting clothes to afford extracurricular activities for my brother and I. This taught me that loving is more than a three-word phrase. Love is doing. I learned that vocalizing affection, although meaningful and valuable on its own, is most effective when coupled with action that makes the emotion undeniable. And it taught me that care and concern can be communicated without any words at all.
To this end, I never want saying affectionate things to replace doing affectionate things. And I hope that my children are able to replicate this behaviour as well. For me, loving somebody means wanting them to be happier, more comfortable, and less worried, and there are always actions that somebody could take to show their loved one affection by engaging in such behaviour.
Global Awareness
In addition to CNN, Friends, and the Academy Awards, I had Aaj Tak (Indian news), Kasam Se (Indian soap opera), and the Filmfare Awards playing in my house growing up. Western culture wasn’t the only benchmark to which the rest of the world was compared in my household. We had multiple frames of reference and therefore needed to make less of a jump to empathize with those from other cultures. It was easy for us to imagine a way of life and a value system different from the traditional Western culture because we were living it. In other words, having two cultural lenses through which to make sense of the world opened my mind to the possibility that there could be many, many others.
This developed into a cultural sensitivity that is only becoming more important in today’s rapidly globalizing world. I see those that grew up in a single culture household slowly realizing their blindspots as they befriend more non-Western people. I want my kids to start with that advantage like I did.
These benefits, of course, are not off limits to those raised in a single-culture home, but developing a global perspective would need to be an intentional effort in those cases. Consuming multicultural media and being exposed to multicultural people for years can likely develop similar sensitivities.✓
Western Traits
In the cultural shift towards globalization and away from Euro-centric cultural norms, we are so used to criticizing Western culture that it’s easy to forget its merits. Western culture has numerous traits worth preserving and perpetuating into future generations. Here are three such traits that I hope to emphasize in my household.
Celebrating Exploration
Although the history of Western exploration is dark and dingy, (e.g., colonialism and the destruction of indigenous cultures worldwide) I can acknowledge that the West has a penchant for exploration that is packed with benefits on an individual scale. It’s sewn into the fabric of Western culture to respect and strive for adventure and discovery. In the West, experimentation is deemed innovation and is highly sought after, and there is relatively little concern for tradition. There’s a sense that however well one is doing, one could always be doing better.
The abundance of opportunity promotes a growth mindset that is in direct contrast with many other cultures’ fixation on scarcity. The desire to explore is predicated on the assumption that there is more value out in the world to get, see, and experience and no harm will come to those that go out to find it. It’s a form of privilege, undoubtedly, but helps, in my opinion, much more than it harms.
In the West, it’s not so crazy for a teenager to pack a 55L bag and venture to another part of the world in search of spectacular experiences. It’s not unimaginable to attempt self-sufficiency by moving out of your parent’s home before marriage.
In addition to embarking on worldly adventures and innovating, Western culture also condones “following dreams” and promotes cultivating hobbies and passions for self-knowledge and self-awareness. Goals can be pursued for the joy of the process. This celebration of experimentation and openness to the possibility of venturing down a path only to hit a dead-end without feeling a deep sense of failure fuelled by family shame and embarrassment breeds the will to dream and the fearlessness to fulfill that dream.
Self-Advocacy
In the West, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. There is no expectation that if a Westerner’s need is not being met, they are expected to make do without. Here, the customer is always right. Institutions mould themselves to the will of the people instead of the people feeling fortunate to have the opportunity to be serviced by the institution.
Naval Ravikant famously says “Doctors won’t make you healthy. Nutritionists won’t make you slim. Teachers won’t make you smart. Gurus won’t make you calm. Mentors won’t make you rich. Trainers won’t make you fit. Ultimately, you have to take responsibility. Save yourself.”
When this sentiment is combined with a cultural focus on work ethic and earning your slice of the American pie, it can result in a sense of ownership over your own destiny. In the West, unlike in more fatalistic cultures, there is no such thing as destiny or prescribed plan. Of course, class and privilege play major roles in the opportunities available to individuals, but there is a general sense that if the tools are available to you, you are expected to use them to the best of your ability. This freedom can be powerful for a young mind. While this could also result in crushing pressure and a sense of shame if the use of tools are not perceived to be maximized, I believe that that can be managed and purposefully reframed by good mentors. Of course, this could also result…
Family-Focused Families
Brené Brown says there are kids-focused families, there are parents-focused families, and there are family-focused families. The way that I understand it, the focus dictates who gets priority access to the family’s energy and resources. All cultures have families of all types, but I have observed that the idea of a family-focused family is much more normalized in the West than elsewhere.
In kids-focused families, the children’s needs are always prioritized over the parent’s needs. Ensuring the children are comfortable and accommodated for at all times steadily remains the family priority. Immigrant households are notoriously so, since children are seen as tickets out of poverty and a lower socioeconomic status.
In parents-focused families, the parents’ emotional needs (sometimes one parent) dominate the family’s mindspace. Their mood dictates the home environment and ensuring that the parent(s) is comfortable is the assumed family priority.
In my house, I want open discussions about how we should prioritize the family’s finite resources to maximize family well-being given the circumstance at the time. I want my children to understand the logic behind their parents’ decisions if they find themselves in a position where they are not getting everything they want.
Good Hands
Hearing my peers talk about communication styles, attachment theory, and the interplay of shame and vulnerability makes me feel like the next generation of educated South Asians is in good hands. We will strive to optimize for a nurturing environment for our families to the best of our ability, picking and choosing the best of both worlds.
We will have a lot of tough decisions to make—picking cultural traits isn’t like picking items off a menu. Unfortunately, some traits may come as a package deal with some that we don’t like so much. We’ll learn as we go, like we always do.
Growing up, the third culture we existed in could feel like a handicap. Too white for the brown kids, too brown for the white kids. In moments like these, however, it feels like a superpower. It feels like a cheat code. And I have every intention of letting my kids cheat.
Vandan Jhaveri 