I Can Only Be My Best Self

These days I find myself wishing to be the woman who writes this blog, not just when I sit in front of my computer but all the time. Her life is pretty good. She is a poet and a clinical researcher. She has an adorable toddler. She has a lovely house on a hill and the ability to watch sunrise caressing the winding trails and roads sprawled below her. She has the luxury to write about things lost and forgotten from a safe distance. There are a few people who like what she writes. Every day, she is able to get at least two uninterrupted hours of listening to audiobooks. She is poised to do bigger and better things. She is so positive in her writing. She talks about seizing the day and bottling up happiness and loving her naughty toddler. She talks about cooking and loving. Her life is pretty good from this vantage point. Pretty damn good. And I want to have her life all the time rather than  during the single hour it takes me to write and proofread a blog post. 


 Yesterday, in a small group of smart and sensitive women that constitute the Desi Writers' Lounge Bay Area Readers' Club, we talked about The Goldfinch. I insisted that several characters in the book probably had personality disorders. Sahar Ghazi, an extremely perceptive member of the group and a dear friend, challenged me on this notion. "Why do you think they have personality disorders," Sahar asked. "We are learning about them only through the main character's perspective. Maybe they are completely normal and going through life on a pretense. Maybe they are not opening up their true selves in front of him. People live their life pretending sometimes," I am paraphrasing, but that is the general arc of Sahar's view. I think I presented a different  and opposing argument, something feeble and completely petulant like, "But I don't pretend. And who pretends? How can they do that?" Puerile - to say the least. 

The fact is, everyone pretends to some degree. Yes, this is the space where I come to be honest with myself, call myself on things that I did wrong, and talk about how wronged I have felt in the past due to other people's insensitivity. But honesty has degrees, too. It has layers and components. Often people reveal part of a fact and it is up to the reader to brush off the sand occluding their vision from this partial truth, and like an archeologist, try to determine what the whole story is. Think about it. We do it all the time. The missing pieces are sometimes inherently present in what is revealed - the tone of voice, the choice of words, the tangent of the neck, the slope of shoulders, the audible sighs, the wistful eyes. The bright smile that is plastered on one's face as a confirmation of happiness has nothing on all these other overbearing signs, and some poor folks are just completely transparent - I am beginning to think I may be one of them. 

I guess what I am trying to get at in a very roundabout way is that we often think our best self is our happiest self. That is not necessarily true. I am a poet - my writing is dependent upon being miserable. The poems I write when I am happy do not resonate with me and probably not with my readers. I need superficial tragedies, arguments, disagreements, hurt feelings, a sense of being wronged in order to create work that has even a whisper of being placed at a lit mag. And though most of the time I bring my cheerful positive self to this blog (and I will not be surprised if you all stand up and say, "But Noor, you are a morose writer and you don't bring your cheerful self to this blog"), that is not my "normal" self. When I write in this space, I emulate the woman I want to be - the one who stands in her balcony every morning watching the sun bleed into the sky, the one who feels a sense of utter and profound contentment, the one who writes about life's little matters because, after all, those are the matters that matter. I wouldn't say that it is an entirely inaccurate depiction of myself, but it is certainly an extension of my character. 

You'll forgive me, of course, for this pretense, won't you? I am a poet who likes to experiment with identity and belonging. This is a natural result of that, you see. In any case, I wrote very honestly just now, and so I must extend my hand towards you in salutation. Hi! Good to meet you today!

Photos by Rebecca McCue

Telling Our Stories

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

I drive the same way home every day. When I emerge from a bend on the freeway, circling on I-280 South past Page Mill, I see a breathtaking view ahead of me. On my left there are the domes of three hills, lush with small blades of grass today, a forlorn deeper green tomorrow, turning brown and patchy another day. On my right there is a towering house hidden behind trees. On an afternoon that blooms as an afterthought to rain, clear and clean, tufts of cottony clouds seem to be hovering above this house. On stormy days, the trees are swaying in front of the topmost tower's topmost windows. In winter, thickets of fog seem to leech on to the ocher exterior of the house and the naked tree limbs. In summer, the house looks bright, the trees full and fat, the sky glitters in the background. It's the same road, the same house, the same age-old trees, but they look different every day. As I merge on to the freeway, I wonder how the house past the bend in the road will look like and how it will make me feel, because it does evoke something different in me every time I see it. These feelings are colored by the successes and set-backs of the day, tinged by the bitterness of failure sometimes, flavored by the aftertaste of disappointment. Sometimes, I am able to find absolute beauty when I look at this house in the heart of the hills, because I bring my happiness with me. It may look like it is crumbling in a winter storm and I may still find it to be a metaphor for resilience, because despite the stony rain and the whipping winds, it stands like it always has, sand-colored with red trimmings around the window glass, peeking through the shivering trees. I find a new story during my drive home this way, and the image of the house makes me bookmark them.


There are so many stories I haven't told. Messy stories. Stories of fear and heartbreak and failure and disillusionment and strength and grit and joy. I don't even know where to begin to tell them. It's odd that I feel so full of these stories, but at the same time, I am so distant from writing one down on paper. To talk about just one, I want to shape a poem around an afternoon during my childhood that taught me a hard and menacing lesson about this world. I want to transport myself to that nine-year-old's body with the two pigtails and the new frock, the hammering heart, the small feet running past the iron gates, into the heart of the house, the trembling hands not knowing what to hold on to, the trimmed fingernails finding a sagging wax candle on a pillar near the stairs, scratching it, clawing at it, breaking it down. The mother looking at that nine-year-old girl curiously, pausing on her way downstairs, "What's wrong?" "Nothing," a croak from the child's parched throat, and all the while her soft nails cracking while shredding the candle to pieces.

How much does a writer choose not to tell in her story? How much should she tell? Anne Lamott, in her book Bird by Bird, suggests telling everything, but she also doesn't pretend that it is easy to do so. I can see how telling some stories that I have chosen not to share yet will be therapeutic, but I am afraid of the walls that I will run into over and over. I have built concrete mazes around these stories over the course of many years. How do I start breaking them down, how do I start peeling away the paint that is supposed to hide the ugliness of truth? How do I make myself remember...

Every day, when I come upon that house on the freeway, it makes its way into my story for that day. I package it into memory and put it away. I imagine different people living in it, caring for it, I embellish it in my mind, and sometimes I deface it. Today, having decided to write about the house and about the fear of sharing the other more sinister stories, I kept my eye trained on the hills, but I couldn't find it. One bend after another I searched the landscape, but I could not locate that house or the mounds across from it. I must have simply missed it as I was trying to merge with the oncoming traffic. However, this meant that I had to reach into the recesses of my memory and dig out the images I had filed away, unconsciously, for many days. I closed my eyes and I saw that house again when I began to write this post. I saw it as I had seen it on those wintry days, on rainy evenings, during high summer. I saw it and I wrote about it from memory. I must reach back to that nine-year-old girl. I must touch her bleeding fingers. I must hold her and tell her, It's alright. I can't make her say to her bemused mother, "I am so scared," but I can convince her to breathe, to close her eyes, to remember. I can look into her terrified face and say, Let me tell our story, and then somehow muster the courage to live up to this promise. 

Photos by Rebecca McCue

Reflections That Matter

I had a long conversation with a friend of mine today about something that matters a lot to both of us. Evidently, it matters more to her than it does to me. And how do you quantify something like this? I used to think you couldn't. But I learned otherwise, and here's a story to tell you how I did so. For a long while I did not speak with my father - familial differences and those of perspective, too, no doubt. I never stopped loving him, though, and being a parent now, I know that I could never love him the way he loves me. But in his Shakespearean way, he often complained to my sisters, "You girls, you don't love me at all, and that eldest one doesn't even think of me." "No, no," my sisters would rally back. "She does, too, so, so much. She thinks of you all the time. And she writes about you constantly." "She doesn't write to me," he'd reply. "How am I to know how much someone loves me if I don't see it." After learning of such conversations I would fume for weeks. Trust my father to be very much the King Lear in our lives. "So young and so untender," Shakespeare whispered to me  with the inflection of my father's voice in moments of weakness and guilt. 

But I get it now. How am I to know how much someone cares for me if their feelings don't translate into action? This is the very line I employ when I nag my husband. "You say you're sorry about putting the wet towel on the bed again, but you're really not, or you would listen and stop doing it." Cue in the emotional blackmail, "You don't even love me enough to do this simple task that I have asked you to do a million times." It doesn't work on him anymore, but I have already milked it beyond its worth. Essentially, we need to see reminders of caring and love and friendship and feelings to know they exist. 

Circling back to my friend and the thing we both care about - something lifted today. I was able to not just see but also recognize that what she was telling me was absolutely correct and had merit. How can I claim to care about something if I don't show with my actions that I do? Flashback alert: When I was eight or nine years old, I asked my father for a new pencil case. Some girls in school had ones with magnetic clasps, and I desperately wanted one. To this day, my father has never let me ask for something twice. That day, too, my request was promptly granted. We went to a stationary shop and he bought me a beautiful pencil case. When we came home, I arranged my pencils and erasers in it. A few hours later, my father called me to the sitting room and showed me the new pencil case lying forlornly on the floor by the sofa. I had forgotten it there. He didn't say anything. Instead, he waited for me to be embarrassed of my carelessness. He didn't have to wait long. I tried to explain that I would have put it in my school bag before going to bed, but that was not the point. I had been given something I desired, and I had discarded it after the novelty wore off. I would like to think that I have not forgotten this message, but that would be a delusion. Such messages often times need reinforcement.

I used to invest my feelings in people and things and endeavors. I still do, because this is something I cannot help about myself. I am not happy unless I am dissolved in something: a project, a birthday party, a family member's health, et cetera. But I have also started to reign in my enthusiasm for getting carried away with my feelings when I encounter new interests. I depend on people's appreciation of my efforts for encouragement, even sustenance. When my effort and attention go unnoticed, I become angry. I build fortresses around myself. I turn away, turn against, turn around. It didn't used to be this way. I did things selflessly. I did things because I wanted to, because they made me happy. Somehow, over time, my happiness became associated with what people were thinking of my efforts rather than the effort or the act itself. This is a weakness, and I am lately stunned by the inroads it has made into my character. "You transplant yourself into every conversation," my husband told me the other day. "You make everything about yourself. You like to be the martyr." Others have called me a "drama queen," in jest, but probably with a degree of seriousness behind the assertion. 


I realize that they are right. They are all right - my friends, my father, my husband. And it's all connected, but there has to be a balance! I believe that credit must be given where it is due. The kindness and generosity of people must be acknowledged and praised. Similarly, care and love must be shown in actions and behavior for the things and people that you claim to love and care about. However, I must strike a balance in my personality. I need to be alright with what I see in the mirror without embellishments. I need to ground myself in the belief that I am fine with or without anyone's appreciation. I am still me. I cannot and must not expect that everyone will acknowledge all the good I have done. Indeed, I should not do good with the vain hope that someone will see it and appreciate it. I should simply do good. Do what matters to me. Do what matters. And trust that it is enough.

Photos by Rebecca McCue

Naivete

All good things come to an end. 

I don't think I ever quite believed this. I felt goodness in things (and in people) was a circular quality, that it kept looping around, never ending. In certain cases, I thought, maybe the circle of goodness even expanded with time, became bigger like each ring of a spiral. Good things don't end, I thought, they multiply. 

Naivete is the lifeblood of the uninitiated. It is a shroud we shed eventually, and when we do, we overtly despise it, but secretly wish to internalize it once again. It is irrevocable unfortunately, this gradual emergence from the veil of innocence. What's interesting is that from the other side of this divide, everything is so much clearer. It's like your vision suddenly expands. You realize that your view of the world before was hidden by a giant boulder. Before you appeared on the other side, that boulder was the center of your world, but now you can see that it was just a tiny rock in the vast landscape that surrounds you. The boulder wasn't the entirety or the boundary of your world; it was simply a very small part of the whole. What I am trying to say is, there is some truth in what we tell ourselves when we're naive. It isn't right, but it isn't completely wrong either. It may be, at best, only partially false, and at worst, only sparingly true. But it is always a combination of the two. In my naive belief that goodness in things lasts forever, at least I was partially correct - it has a finite lifespan, but in those moments of its existence, it feels infinite, as though it could stretch out and curve and loop and go on forever. 

All good things come to an end. The monumental things, like a life well lived, and the seemingly insignificant things, like a wonderful meal. But I always knew this, didn't I? What's changed? What's the new discovery? The big realization of the newly enlightened? That's the question, and I can't put my finger on the answer. The closest I can come to capturing it is by describing an amalgamation of feelings - anger, disappointment, resentment, helplessness, desperation - directly juxtaposed with the naive understanding of attributing the opposite of these feelings to something not worthy of them. I don't know about you, but side by side like that, they make me momentarily feel nothing, almost empty, and then, invariably, a fierce rage, and simultaneously, a melancholic yearning for that old naivete. That's all. 

Photo by Rebecca McCue

Defining Principles

prin·ci·ple

noun: principle; plural noun: principles

a fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior or for a chain of reasoning.

It is a hard truth to stomach when you are made to realize that no matter how loudly you toot the horn of “your principles,” you are not in fact living by them. If in fact, you were living by the principles you hold so dear, maybe you wouldn’t be in the house you are in, maybe you wouldn’t be married to the person you’re married to, maybe you wouldn’t even hold dear the possessions you presently prize. No matter how hard I try to reason with other people, vehemently and often quite belligerently, in order to elucidate my principles and beliefs and all the things that are wrong with “the system” in terms of discrimination on the bases of religion, caste, color, wealth, gender, and other such constructs, I am in fact living in “the system,” and haven’t done anything to discourage these discriminatory behaviors around me other than speaking against them, which in itself is a little hypocritical, isn’t it, for I am talking against something, but still living by it. Am I even allowed to call these ideas my principles then, if a significant portion of the above definition is absent, that is, while I use these grand ideas as a belief system, they don’t often translate into my behavior by virtue of the limitations I have in my present situation and my actual origin. 

Let’s state facts. Who am I? I am a 28-year-old woman, born and raised in Pakistan until the age of 18. I moved to America for a college education ten years ago. I left behind my parents, two sisters, and a brother. I am married to a Pakistani man, whom I fell in love with while we were both living in Lahore, Pakistan. He also moved to the United States to go to college and left behind his parents and two sisters. We have a daughter, a child of Pakistani immigrants born in America – by definition, a Pakistani-American. What are my principles? It is hard to define what these are succinctly and comprehensively. I believe in the basics – you know, like all good people, don’t lie, cheat, or steal. Don’t screw someone over for your personal gain, give charity, et cetera, et cetera. 

But let’s face it. I didn’t start this post to go on and on about the basics, did I? Something sparked me into action here and it wasn’t the one white lie I told yesterday, so it couldn’t be the discrepancy between my belief of not lying and the actual practice of doing precisely that. No, it’s something bigger than this. While speaking with someone about how unhappy I become when I have to defend my principles of fairness and gender equality among primarily Pakistanis, the response given to me intimated that if I really wanted to live by my principles, then I shouldn’t even be married to my husband, should I, because in fact we disagree on some fundamental issues. Essentially, my life as I am living it does not show that I am living by the principles I claim to hold so dear. Let me take a step back here. Gender inequality exists everywhere, including America. I was talking about specific things that I have witnessed in the Pakistani culture, like the expectation from a woman to sever all but the most formal and superficial of ties with her family after marriage, because her allegiance now should rightfully be with her married family. I’m sorry, I call bullshit. And this particular act of calling bullshit is under question here. If I am so concerned about a particular expectation that is ever present in my culture, then why am I married to a Pakistani man, who may actually support this very ideology (he doesn’t and neither does his family)? Why am I not living by my principles rather than simply talking very loudly and very ineffectually of possessing them?

Let me tell you why. This has been an uphill climb for me, even to reach a point where I can very openly and without worrying about consequences, voice my opinion about the gender inequality issue – you could perhaps call me an accidental feminist. One fine day, I suddenly started to voice my counter-arguments about this very issue in polite company and I haven’t looked back since. I have faced a few things in my life. I have witnessed injustices that women very close to me withstood only because they were too afraid of the alternative. Loneliness. Divorce. Stigma. “A woman alone has no respect in society,” I have heard reasonable, educated, modern  women utter this. “If a girl is not married, she has no future.” “There is no man that does not push around his wife. It’s completely normal.” We are made to realize that our men do us favors by accommodating us in their lives. “You are so lucky.” No, let me tell you why the vast majority of us are the exact opposite of lucky. In Pakistan, a male-child is a coveted blessing of God. A girl-child is a burden. Yes, even now in the 21^st century. I have been so conditioned by this very idea that when the ultrasound technician told me that I was pregnant with a baby girl, I told him to “check again.” This single, almost inadvertent act of ignorance is the most shameful moment of my life. I do not believe that my daughter is lesser in any way than a boy. Yet, I uttered those two words in that small office. If this is not social conditioning, I don’t know what is. It was not a temporary lapse in the practice of my principles. That weak moment in the hospital was a lapse in conscious thinking. 

It’s like scaling a mountain, you see. It’s treacherous and back-breaking. Sometimes I stumble backwards, and I have to reevaluate my approach, but I am working towards a goal to reach the apex. I want to one day be able to say without reservation exactly what I think of the unrealistic expectations society has of women. I want to tell self-important looking Pakistani aunties with their opinionated first-born sons in tow to wait and think about what they are saying. Do they really mean to say that their son is better than someone else’s daughter or even their own daughter? Do they really believe that a woman is successful only if she is able to secure a well-suited groom? Do they really think that a battered woman should continue living with her husband because “he doesn’t mean it” or “she drove him to do it” or “he was just rough-housing?” Are we ever going to be free of the traditional gender roles that require us to cook and clean and keep house and change diapers and raise sons so that they think they are invincible and raise daughters with a sense of submission? I didn’t lie when I said that it is like scaling a mountain. I don’t always vocalize my discontent, and conversely, sometimes I yell and scream about it. I am an amateur at this. I am learning along the way. All I know is that I cannot support these ridiculous notions. I simply cannot – being a woman, being the mother of a girl – I cannot overlook these ideas that have penetrated into the very fabric of society like a systemic infection.

I also know that sometimes I do not live by the principles I claim to have – I stay silent, I give in to something, I overlook or shy away.  There are many ways in which we do not live by our principles. Does that mean we should stop having a belief system? If I am married to a Pakistani man, for instance, am I not allowed to criticize the expectations and ideas surrounding marriage in Pakistan? Do I have to sit down with my husband and parse out every last detail of what we disagree on before I can voice my opinions about subjugation, misogyny, and gender inequality? I don’t think so. I am going to continue to talk about the principles I believe in, the principles I would one day like to live by even if they are not reflected in my current way of life. Or maybe I won’t talk about them and continue to write about them here in this space, because this, at least, virtual as it may be, is my own.