Revise the border stories you wrote during our 1st class session and share here.
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Revise the border stories you wrote during our 1st class session and share here.
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Border to India
The physical: the deep, monsoon ridden waters, withered deserts, great plains, and even entire continents are just a few aspects that make it abundantly clear how far I am from the place of my ancestors. Actually, it’s not even just the land of my ancestors, it’s even more personal to me than that- it’s the land of my parents. I’ve always wanted so desperately to cling onto, a hope, a humanity and culture of people who should understand me like no one else. These were the people who were raised with my mother tongue, the people who would understand when I struggled to mentally translate a word from Punjabi into English because “there is just no word to describe it accurately” as I’ve found myself saying on nearly a daily basis. All I have ever wanted was to visit the Gurdwaras that gave my parents a higher purpose in life, ones with my namesake, to get married with a big fat Punjabi wedding that lasts weeks, to eat all the interpretations and recipes passed down from generation to generation in my family, to see the childhood homes my parents were raised in.
This deep emotional connection to my culture and people, and you would think its just the physical barrier in my way, but no. The acceptance from my family is the problem. Whether due to familial turmoil, personal fears of being shunned for my queer identity, issues of greed, jealousy over my generation’s ability to be raised with the “American Dream”- they will never accept me. They won’t let me cross that border, they won’t let me experience my culture in the way and at the place it was meant to be. I will always be an outsider to them.
The emotional border, the othering, leaves me at fault, rather than some random extenuating circumstance. Even if that may not be true, this border seems unavoidable and like a hurdle I cannot pass like a physical barrier. After all, how do I change the minds of those who are happily stuck in their ways?
The boarder from High School to College-
The boarder’s intangible, yet I can feel it through the seems of what’s holding me together. I miss my friends, the routine, running up to people for encouraging hugs.
I know I will cross this boarder, maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe in a couple weeks. To not feel this overwhelming panic of never catching up; this imaginary timeline I have engraved in my head. To know where I am, feeling so unbelievably lost. Do I even that I belong here? As I continue watching others skip past the boarders, effortlessly comparing myself to others. Knowing one day that this unknown maze of a place will feel like home, comforts me. Knowing that one day I wish that the days would slow down once more. When I look back and see the growth that came with this new chapter in my life, I want to try and enjoy it. To face the fear of change and evolve, knowing that I will continuously be crossing these boarders of change.
One crisp, November morning, as the recently turned leaves were falling from their branches onto the misty grass below, I had the joy of sitting in the balcony of our dimly lit, insufferably hot auditorium. I was not fortunate enough to be witnessing the beautiful scene outside the school walls, or even to just sit in my AP Statistics class as usual, but instead was made to be talked at by our college counselor. She listed off amazing scholarship opportunities for many higher education facilities: KU, K-state, half of them for JCCC, some for Missouri, and a rare few as far away as Arkansas. There’s an obvious trend emerging, a geographic trend safely placed in the midwest. There’s also a clear message written in the subtext of the “opportunities” provided by this person I had never met and would only meet once: The school can only help you venture so far outside of this state’s borders. If you want to waste your time getting outside of Kansas, you would have to do it on your own.
While I knew it would place more work on me to do the research to find an out of state college that suited me, it was not a hard decision to make. I knew I did not want to be in Kansas for college, least of all the rest of my life. I took it upon myself to find a college that was good for my major (at least I though), one that would provide enough financial aid, and then went through the tedious process of gathering letters of recommendation, listing and describing all my leadership positions and activities, writing essays, finding connections to past alumni through my teacher.
During rehearsals for the winter musical– behind that same auditorium that had unhelpfully given me all the “opportunities” at the start– I finally submitted my Early Decision application to Smith, just praying they would take a chance on a fly-by state, single parent, low income student, who would need almost all of the tuition forgiven. Fortunately, it’s clear how that turned out, and I was able to receive the amazing opportunity– all on my own – to cross the border out of the Midwest, out of Kansas, and into an out of state, New England Liberal Arts college.
Coming from a small town with limited resources and not even half of my class going on to college or a trade school was crushing. I had to learn how to cope on my own and find a path that was very different than most of my classmates. Realizing I had to cross the border of not only many states but also the fear and anxiety within my mind was terrifying. I decided to jump on a plane and into the possibilities of unknowns and new territories and hope it was for the better. Though, I cannot say for sure that it is for the better, yet. I know growth will come from a place that once was anxiety-inducing and filled with worry. The place I call home may be miles away and I create my border in my mind to not flee back to it. This border can be both in my mind and physically. The many states I crossed eludes to the physical border. Yet, my mental blockage and anxiety can represent the mental border I face.
Being very close to my family and leaving them behind was new for me. I felt as though I relied on them for many things. Now I go from being extremely sheltered in my town that touches nothing but the grains of sand that live beneath the cloudy marine layer and the rough ocean that greets the shore. Familiar faces I see every day that I greet with gentle hellos and friendly waves. Now I am in an unfamiliar, much larger town and I walk on the street and see many strangers. In some cases, I may recognize them but most of the time I cannot put a name to a face, which happens to be a very unfamiliar custom to me. Now, I will have many culture shocks and new experiences. Adopting myself to a new routine can create many mental borders that are not present to the eye but live in the depths of my mind. To allow myself to catch that flight meant introducing myself to many mental borders as I counted how many states I crossed.
The invisible blockade of education distinctly outlined the restrictions of life in 1970s Mexico. The responsibilities of 10 or more siblings, the burden of working as early as children are able to, and the struggle of transcending borders for a new life. There were hundreds of obstacles for my parents, obstacles that never allowed for the privilege of higher education. Their most prominent border would be the one between Mexico and America. Mine was the border between me and reaching higher education. It was the lack of knowledge of processes, resources, and connections that made college unreachable. Around December all the way through the universal decision day I’d hear over and over again the help everyone received from their parents. My boyfriend’s parents knew the ins and outs of college, what to apply for and when, how to get where, and who to contact for additional support. I kept hearing people who had connections in various states, who had a lot of family for support who attended prestigious colleges. We didn’t even have family we knew across the country to possibly help. There again appeared the giant obstacle of the US/Mexico border and the uncertainty and unknowability of what stood between me and college life. In writing this I want to make it clear that my parents did everything in their power to help. My parents saved as much money as they could for my education, and reached out to as many people as possible. They paid for a college counselor yet she had a restriction of not helping with financial aid. There were always people you could pay for help but it wasn’t practical to pay someone to help every time.
When passing through the border, and obtaining the badge of honor that reads “first-generation college student” there are more struggles to face and more uncertainty that my parents can’t help me with but passing the first border has filled me with enough passion to try again.
My grandmother wrote a book a couple of years ago. It chronicles the migration of one line of my ancestors across the United States. They did well for themselves, establishing enclaves in each new city they settled, each border they crossed. And over the generations, my family became too comfortable with packing it all up and making promises that “we’ll see each other soon.” My grandmother lives in Massachusetts, my aunt and uncle in San Francisco, my cousins in Nairobi, New York, Colorado, Canada, suburbs and mountains and looking out over different seas under different stars.
My immediate family is three: father, mother, brother. Our stars are hidden by Texas light pollution and we make yearly pilgrimages to Port Aransas to swim in the gulf. Plane tickets are expensive, so growing up it sometimes felt like our little unit of four was all there was. As I got older, things changed.
As the first grandchild, it became my job to bridge some of those distance gaps. I became a representative of the Texas Delegation (as we are called by the extended family). I still remember the excitement of the first time I was sent alone, Texas to Massachusetts, to visit my grandparents. I was about seven. The flight attendants fed me crackers and brought me headphones. When I landed I ran to my grandparents as they waited for me outside the gate.
My grandmother’s book is named Borderers. When I asked about the title, she said that it just popped into her head as she wrote. “It just fit who they were and who we are,” she told me. And she’s right. I am a borderer. The new and different has always drawn me past the lines that should stop me.
Driving to Smith was a fifty-five hour process of crossing physical borders, many city, county, and state lines. Mountains, desert, farmland, and cities flew by as we drove further and further from the only place I’ve called home. I’m now left on the edge of something bigger and greater than what I’ve known my whole life. But the prospect of breaking out of my self-defined, small shell is terrifying. I sit and think about the semester ahead, wondering how I will cross this line, if I’m capable of learning to exist as multiple things at once. Will all the different parts of me mix? From a logical standpoint, it is easy for me to understand that I am made of many things, of all the things I know and love. Trusting that I can grow into that person, learn how to exist as all these things is where the trouble lies. After living as one thing, easy for others to be around and understand, I’ve grown to be afraid of duality, and it has become my greatest weakness. The thought of being anything more than simple bullies me. Leaving this notion behind is not nearly as simple as hitting the road to get to this new place. Crossing state lines was a clear-cut process, but breaking away from the familiarity of one box and creating someone new is a task far too great to be dealt with in fifty-five hours. Though I was itching to get out of the car the whole way here, I wish I could have that much time again to face this prominent and pushy mindset shift.
I wouldn’t have known it then, an eight year old eager to go on vacation, that I wouldn’t be coming back. I arrived in suburban Georgia outside of Atlanta in August of 2013, not exactly a travel destination, but a marvel nonetheless. I saw big yellow school buses I imagined to exist only through the multicolored pixels of my TV. I saw supermarkets I believed I could walk in for miles on end, browsing snacks and dolls. I saw people of different skin colors, and I no longer comprehended the murmurs of conversation surrounding me.
I’d flown out of the borders of Turkey and into the promise-filled free expanse of America. It was a political choice made by my parents who foresaw alarming changes in their home government. It was a choice of opportunity, of education, of hope. Perhaps the only physical one I crossed was the security checkpoint where our bags were ruffled through as some foreign threat. But that was the first of many borders.
On arrival, a barrier was placed between my tongue and the air just outside, impenetrable to sound. The language seemed like an insurmountable difference as I flipped through flashcards of colors and animals and cried tears of frustration at school as my teacher Google translated nonsensical sentences in an effort to communicate with me. Lucky to be little and unwitting, I absorbed like a sponge over the first few months as English words permeated the borders of my malleable brain. Suddenly more fluent than my parents, I became the translator, I became culturally ambiguous, I became disconnected.
I’ve become a long assembly of borders demarcated and erased, over and over, leaving behind markings that patch my strength to disassemble the next.
In history class, the Mason-Dixon line often came up in discussions about the Civil War. While my peers scribbled it down in their notebooks as another fact to be memorized, this border—the divider between the North and the South—was only new to me in name. Ever since my family’s first 14-hour road trip down Interstate 81 to visit our extended family, I felt its existence. I felt its hold over me when my friends would giggle at my short i pronunciation of ten; when I couldn’t relate to the excitement of staying with grandparents or cousins on a school night or over the weekend. Although my family crossed the Mason-Dixon only a few times a year, I felt a deep connection to the border.
This is because I often find myself emotionally in the same geographic location as the Mason-Dixon line—straddled between the two regions, the two cultures, the two communities. Having spent my entire life in the North, my attachment to it makes sense; however, it’s strange to me that I feel such an attachment to the South seeing as I only find myself there for brief visits.
In moving hundreds of miles away, my parents likely hoped that I wouldn’t have this attachment to the South; that I wouldn’t, like them, have to confront the ideological and political divide that separates us from the rest of our family. Normally a goody-two-shoes, this has been my one rebellion. On our road trips, I often breach the subject: why did you decide to leave again? I ask my parents about their religious and political beliefs and, alternatively, those of their parents and siblings. I wish I could take the easy route and just hide an internal anger behind a facade of friendliness when visiting my southern family; however, my heart longs to understand them because, in the end, I love them.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to feel close not to the Mason-Dixon line itself, but to the I-81 drive. Truth is, if you give me a map, I won’t have any idea where to draw the Mason-Dixon line because that’s all it is—a drawing on a map. I will, however, always be able to identify that feeling of fluid motion, of seamless morphing and melding as the mile markers ticked down and I felt continuously at home.
I’ve been noticing the borders between myself and my peers at Smith a lot over the past week. Mainly the divide between their girlhood/femininity/womanhood and whatever it is I have. Yesterday, at my summer reading discussion, I was sitting between the only two other people in the room who weren’t cis. This was a complete accident. I hadn’t introduced myself, I didn’t know them beforehand, and they weren’t more obviously queer than many of the other people in the room. And later, when a girl in the discussion insisted that we were all “female presenting”, there was a little collective cringe from our corner of the room. The border isn’t walled off. It isn’t shut down. It’s just a gradual blend from one way of being to another. I could have walked over to the other side if I wanted to, and taken part in the femininity that the others in that room seemed to want to share. For the first time, though, I was happy to be outside the group. For a long time, I’ve been waiting to be a part of a group of women who would see me as one of them, and now that it’s a possibility, I realize that the difference has made me tougher than them, made me look harder for community than them, made me see the world in a different way. Instead of being pushed out of the majority, like I had been in school, I feel like I’m beginning to form a smaller group. I’m proud of it.
Over the years I’ve encountered many borders – both physical and metaphorical, and I’ve learned a lot about myself in the process. One such recurring border first manifested itself in a physical sense, but I’ve since come to realize it exists metaphorically as well. I was twelve, on a life-changing trip to Switzerland with only a close friend at my side. It was the day of our long and treacherous hike to Elsigenalp, a nearby snow-capped peak high in the Burmese mountains. The hike was arduous and totaled sixteen miles, and included a substantial gain in elevation. It was unlike anything I had ever faced before. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I had created a mental divide between my physical abilities and those of someone able to complete the hike. By summiting Elsigenalp that day, I crossed a border that only existed in my mind – pushing myself past both my physical and mental limits in order to reach the peak. My internal dialogue before the hike was one of doubt in myself and the strength I had within me. When I pushed past the constraining borders of that negative mindset, I found that I could do so much more than I ever thought I could. Now, I’ve used that strength to uncover and push past so many other borders in my life. I’ve since taken classes I never thought I could and had incredible experiences to shape who I am today – experiences which wouldn’t have been possible within the confined borders of narrow mindedness.
I am standing on the border of childhood and adulthood, trying to experience what it means to be a teenager, while still grasping at the freedoms that come with adulthood. Is there truly a change in me, child to adult?
Of course, there is a technical answer, which is yes. I have left 17, and am now 18. In the eyes of the law, I am no longer dependent, even if I may have been a week ago. Being 18 technically means I am as much an adult as someone in their fifties, but that would never really be true. So then, I feel as though I should search for some qualitative explanation as to my shift into adulthood.
Maybe the shift took place the day I received my first parking ticket, or when I participated in my first election. Except, on those same days, I played at the beach for hours with my sister while my car was being ticketed. Not even two hours after I voted, my mom helped me pick out a first-day-of-school outfit.
Is there really any way to define the border of childhood to adulthood when I am jumping over it daily? As someone who had to “grow up quickly”, I feel gratitude for those small moments of childlike joy. However, the nagging voice of responsibility pulls me out, sometimes too fast for my liking.
The border between instability and stability is one I feel I am constantly crossing over. Years ago, I was far on the line of instability– mental, social, physical. I felt doomed to live in a broken state forever and questioned whether happiness was really in the cards for me. A giant, wrought-iron gate loomed over me, reminding me that I was barred from entering a life of balance and security. Eventually, after many months of work, building routines, and cultivating a healthy relationship with myself, I found a way to scale the fence and was welcomed into a new way of living. This side of the border is certainly not synonymous with joy or fulfillment. But it is a place of consistency where I can acknowledge both my pain and my ability to overcome it. Now, I happily reside in that space for most of my time. Every so often I trip backward into that place of self-doubt and shame. But I suppose the difference now is that I know I have the strength to cross back over the border. It is sometimes easier at at other times more difficult, but it is a muscle I strengthen often. And soon, with enough practice, I think the gate will fade into less of a border and become more of a bridge.
Standing on the edge of a crossroads has long been an afterthought to every other part of my life, underpinning every interaction, every introduction. I have been socialized according to two very different patterns. One of forced hugs and automatic familiarity with people I’ve never met. One of close-knit small gatherings and casually dispensed criticism. At each new family event I question: Do I speak as if to an aunt or a grandmother? Which side’s aunt? Which side’s grandmother?
One side is kind, but overwhelming. The other side is cozy, but insecure. I teeter across a delicate line of self esteem, but I am told I should be able to blend, to fill in the gaps between these two cliffs, like putty. Like glue. Isn’t it easier for you? You can just exist as part of either family? I am told it’s my job to stretch my arms out to each side in an effort to draw these contrasting presences into a tidy little knot at my heart.
I can’t stretch that far. My arms do not reach from Ammamma’s busy kitchen to Grandma’s overgrown yard, from gulab jamun to jagger pie.
I don’t know how to answer the questions my dad’s family asks. They are academics, poetry aficionados, musicians. In theory, just like me. I take after their interests but not their social sphere. There is distance there that doesn’t quite make sense to me.
I don’t understand the questions my mom’s family asks. It takes me too long to interpret the Telugu and accented English quilted together. But I clarify and try again to listen to the people who I feel were second only to my parents in raising me.
I don’t know enough Telugu to fit seamlessly into my mom’s family. I don’t feel close enough to my dad’s family. I am paler than everyone else at a family gathering, or darker. One tightrope. Two sides.
There is no fall, not really. There are people waiting on either side of me. But when you don’t match the people holding out their hands in reassurance–any of them–how can you take their word you’ll be welcomed as you are?
When you don’t match–
What does matching even mean?
Skin, language, culture, attitude, interest, upbringing.
I have my maternal family’s eyes but my paternal family’s tongue. I love wearing long Indian dresses but often can’t bring myself to wear western dresses. My enthusiasm for piano has faded. My spice tolerance is laughable. Am I too religious for one side and not enough for the other? Too out for one side, not out enough for the other? Throw darts at a patterned board. Hit a random amalgamation of traits scattered over an uneven line. That constellation of wounds across the round surface? That’s me.
Religion in my family is not concrete. There is no such thing as all following one faith, saying grace before dinner, or even reciting the Lord’s prayer together. Each person in my family practices something different, if they even practice at all. My mother was born and raised Irish-Catholic, the second youngest of seven; my father is Jewish, the middle child of three; and then there’s myself– agnostic and a twin. Growing up, my parents did not want my sister or I to feel like we had to “pick” a side. They did not want us to feel trapped in any sort of box or label that, for so many centuries, had been the cause of conflict and war. We were never baptized or bat mitzvah’d, nor did we go to church or Sundays or temple for the Sabbath: instead, we were raised in a household that celebrated both sets of holidays. Some of my favorite memories from my childhood were in those rare years that Hanukkah and Christmas fell within the same week; I felt so special to share my abundant joy and love for others through two different religious expressions, not confined to just one. This transcendence of religious borders gave me immense pride in my entire identity; it allowed me to have a more open, curious mindset about the world around me. I truly believe that growing up in an environment that welcomed diversity helped shape me into the person that I am today, and that it has given me the ability to form my own unique ideas about what faith means.
A friend of mine in high school once jokingly called me the “most religious agnostic she’d ever met.” She had a good reason – by my senior year, I spent at least five days a week in some form of religious building. The vast majority of those days were due to my training as a choral musician, which by 17 had grown to include a job as a singer and teaching assistant, but their variety is due to the religions of my parents.
My mom was raised Christian, and brought me lightly into that faith when I was growing up, hence my training being church-focused. I went to church weekly as a high schooler, but that’s because my job required me to be there, and I soon realized the peace I felt was more from the routine of music than anything more religious. My dad was raised culturally Christian by his adoptive parents, but made the decision when I was a preteen to convert to Judaism after a deeper exploration of his roots. This makes me decidedly non-Jewish in the religious sense, but somewhat Jewish in the cultural sense, leaving me at an awkward middle ground.
I’ve spent the past few years feeling neither fish nor fowl. I never felt like I was “Jewish enough” to relate to my peers at temple, but the awkward conversations or readings mentioning “the Jews” in my church made me all too aware that a place where I found community and mentorship through music was also part of a larger tradition that had forced my family to flee Eastern Europe decades before.
At home, I could passively be “brought along” to services, or have to go anyway for class or work. Now, it’s a distinctive choice I have to make. I don’t know what to do, but I don’t want to be paralyzed by it.