being thankful for women? That's in here somewhere.

I don't think I'll blog anymore. In fact, only a week ago I wrote what could be called a diary entry. But the extent to which I intellectualize my feelings scares me to the point of not being able to articulate the most simple of emotions anymore. Another symptom of this intellectualizing has been, ironically, a lack of emphasis on myself as a thinker/person, i think. Somehow, I've wound up thinking it's okay that I don't get too happy-excited about something anymore, or jabber philosophically and holler for intellectual attention online anymore because I had since become a graduate student (in the humanities, no less!) and therefore had sobered up to my intellectuality/ability to have thoughts. Both, are of course naive ways of thinking, and i'm not sure I like either manifestation of personality. But.  Consequently, apart from my writing retarding to what i think is a large extent, I now feel like I've also somehow lost the ability to be as sharp as i KNOW i was as a 17 year old - whether or not it's a good thing, I'm no longer as aggressively sure of mylittleself, nor equally eager to please. It's a pity. Because I don't feel older right now, just less of any of those things that I had once been so sure I would become more of. (Though i'm certainly more articulate).

But I wonder if this is really what it looks like. I mean, I wonder if this means that I haven't achieved what I wanted to, because, honestly, I don't think the 24-year-old me agrees with the strong-willed teenager I have been all these years. And moreover, my identity/sense of self has become much more fraught with contradictions than ever. I'm borderline religious but I think to others' ideologies long before I consider their feelings (a habit I only check while handling student writing); I've officially moved out of home and I can feel my ties with everything I knew and named with some sort of unconscious feeling stretching to their breaking points (some have already snapped, painfully), and yet I have never felt more strongly about the ways in which my family owns me, can lay claims on me in a way I cannot control - but I do know painfully that to dishonor those claims is to begin a process that ends in forfeiting something that makes me/my identity and I do know that my mind does not drive me toward that place. At the same time, I'm extremely invested in arguments that deconstruct, devalue, expose the bourgeois-ness of all kinds of emotional security. blah. I guess this last characteristic was true of me as a precocious teenager as well, except that I now only treat them theoretically: personally, I'm much more invested in reconciling the structural relationships that made my life with the tenets of my own life rather than declare them incompatible. I know this is vague, but I'm shying away from details. Writing in my blog about my personal life can only mean my dropping words like 'feminism' and family, even if it means that the intricacy of the whole thing is lost.

I do think, however, that I have forfeit so much of what was before now considered "given," and I don't know what that means for my sense of self. There is the deeper sense of citizenship with India and Indian history that I now won't ever have, the friends I've given up to long distance, or the missed connections (ref. craigslist, well, but not in that creepy way) that could have been so much more. . . Not that I haven't gained at all from my migration, I don't believe I would have this any other way, just that so much I have known and been and conceptualized as 'me' has now slipped away, even before I got to understand and respect them as such. So, strengthening my grip over the invisible but highly structured ropes my family unconsciously hands is, I think, my evolutionary, self-interested response to all these other (geographical, physical, intellectual) changes I'm coming into (good) terms with. Thank god, especially for god and for all those amazing women now lost to me through death or cultural amnesia but whose work has been to make the families work the way they do.