When I unleashed the inner black beauty...

When I unleashed the inner black beauty..

The story of Rashmi Singh (Name changed)

Based in India

Written by Mallika Bhatia

I am the youngest and the fifth amongst my siblings; four sisters and a brother and yet I was always the happiest when I was alone. People always confused me, Neighbours, friends and even my family members made fun of the way I looked, I was too dark for them and hence not beautiful. They often said 'badi hogi toh theek ho jayegi” (She might start looking better/acceptable when she grows up). My sisters were fair skinned and conventionally beautiful. People, including my own father, a well respected, high ranking police officer, would discriminate against me based on my complexion. I remember my father's behaviour towards me always had underlying anger or he simply ignored me. When he paid attention, he would comment on my features and say "at least she has beautiful eyes.”  My mother tried to make it easier for me. She would sympathetically tell me “Always remember that beauty lies in simplicity and you are my Black Beauty.”

Education was always given a lot of value in our house. So much so that everything else, including extracurricular activities were considered a distraction. We had to focus on studies and on getting high scores, everything else was simply not allowed.

Somehow my parents spoke to me almost only about the errors of my siblings. I was always told about their mistakes and warned against repeating them. Their pattern of communication actually pushed me further into the shell that I already lived in. I never asked for anything, never shared my feelings with anyone and started believing that I had to earn things only with hard-work. Unfortunately the lack of emotional support was also a given. I was still an ambitious child with a clear head. I enjoyed school, as I could be who I was amongst my friends. My school was my world.

One fine day though, that was snatched away from me. When I was in the eighth grade I was told by my parents that I couldn't go back to my school. No explanations given, no reasons shared, I was just supposed to be at home. I didn't go to school for a whole month, missing my studies and friends while searching for reasons for this punishment. My mother later told me that there were some issues in the family and there were threats to kidnap me, hence they couldn't risk sending me to school. I did not understand why I was being targeted yet Maa refused to give me any explanations. I did not have the courage to ask them about my friends, my studies and everything that I had left behind. I couldn't tell them that I wanted to meet my friends again or that my world was snatched from me.

Picture by Aziz Acharki on Unsplash

Sometime later I was shifted to a school in another smaller town where nothing made sense. Neither did my mental capabilities match to where I was now, nor the social rules. I was too shocked with everything around me. My life had completely changed without my involvement or consent. I wasn't even aware of what had caused the uprooting. All I knew was that someone else was responsible but I was suffering. I felt abandoned and unloved.

My mother, my only partial support in our family had not moved to this new town with me. It was just me, one older sister and my brother. I missed Maa terribly and kept asking myself what my fault was in all this, why did I have to suffer? I wanted my mom and I needed answers. I wanted to know why was I abandoned. I got none of that. I was just told by my extremely strict father that I had to fulfil my responsibility towards the family and do what was good for everyone. Hence I had to adjust in this new setup.

At 13, none of this made sense to me. Why was I abandoned and was still expected to fulfil my roles? What had I done to deserve no love or attention? Did I not deserve any answers? What good of the family were they talking about? Everything about my life had changed overnight. I did not know this town, I did not know the people nor the rules. I felt as if I did not fit-in in the scheme of things of my family so I was just tossed away. I realised that I wasn't loved or valued hence it was OK for everyone to abandon me.

Back then I could have never imagined that this incident would define how I would live my life for a few decades to come. School finished and college began in another town. I lived in a hostel and could slowly breathe again. I could look for my tribe, make friends and find out who I had become. With college came a new sort of excitement in life, I fell in love with a batchmate who cared for me so deeply that he wanted to protect me from the world. Only that the 19 year old me did not realise that defining what I could or could not wear, whom I could talk to and how I could conduct myself wasn't truly protection. I was looking to be loved finally so I did everything he wanted me to, believing that this was what love was all about.

He was overprotective and said that it wasn't me but the world that he didn't trust. I believed him, ignoring all my instincts, which clearly told me not be get into the trap that I had already experienced with my overprotective father and brother. I still did everything he told me to, everything that would make me 'lovable' in his eyes. I made sure everything he said was done the way he liked it. I was there for him all the time, the way he wanted me. Though whenever I really needed him,  he went absconding. Later he would come back and blame me for forcing him to go away. I loved him too deeply and truly felt that I had driven him away. He was also,forced to abandon me because of who I was, just like my family.

Towards the end of my graduation my parents asked me if this  boyfriend of mine would marry me. He said he would and then, yet again he vanished. None of his numbers worked, no friend had his contact details. For months I didn't know where he was, he did not even come back to give the final graduation exams. Yet again someone I loved so deeply abandoned me without an explanation. Maybe I did deserve that.

I finished my graduation and wanted to be independent for once.    I was soon told by my father that women in our household don't work. If I decided to work, then I was never welcome at home again. It was an easy decision for me to make. Even though I deeply craved their love and approval, I knew that I had to pave my own path.

I found a job and started sharing a flat with a few friends from my graduation days. My work slowly helped me get back some of my self-esteem. I had started seeing some value in who I was and what I deserved in life but the journey had just about began when my boyfriend came back yet again. He obviously attacked me emotionally rather than apologising for vanishing. He said that I had put him in a tight spot by asking him to marry me and he had no choice but to run away. I went back to him, after all I believed that he loved me enough to come back for me.

By now he knew that he could make me do anything. The otherwise emotionally abusive relationship now moved to the next level of being physically abusive as well. Somedays I would go to work black and blue. His habit of vanishing had not gone. He would be untraceable for weeks at a time. Slowly the abuse wasn't just behind doors, he would come to my work place and create a scene. He wanted me to leave my job and not interact with other men. He would tell me about the other women he slept with while he was away. He said had to sleep with others to see if it felt wrong to him. According to him coming back to me after every sexual encounter showed how much he loved me. This went on for about two more years before which I decided that enough was enough.

Photo by Sydney Sims on Unsplash

I changed jobs, changed my address and moved on. I was in a new place but my patterns were following me.  In the next few years I had a series of relationships with men who seemed very decent and calm initially but would abuse me every which way once I was committed to them. Often I would get hit by them which would be followed by them apologizing profusely and adding that they were insecure and didn't want to lose me hence they couldn't control themselves. This mental abuse was something that had started feeling normal to me, like something I had to endure to be loved. Yet there were days when it seemed truly scary and I knew I had to do something about it.

A big city seemed to be the solution in my head. I started looking for work opportunities in other cities and soon moved to a metropolitan. IN this bigger city, I had great professional exposure and truly wanted to improve my overall life. I decided to study while working. I did an MBA. I kept moving up the career ladder yet unfortunately my luck with men hadn't changed. I continued to be in relationships where I had no respect. I would support my men emotionally and financially. I would try to be 'good' and in return I always was left, abused and told that I deserved nothing. I was in my 30s by now and realised that something had to change.

I decided to seek the help of a psychotherapist. That changed my life, she urged me to understand my patterns and change them. The process of therapy truly helped me explore a new side of my life. I started seeing my role in all that was happening around me. Now I knew that I was the common factor in all the relationships. I was making sure that my internal beliefs about being unloved were simply being manifested through all the relationships I had. I had let the men do to me what I believed my family had done to me in my childhood. I was allowing it to happen I had to had to stop  it. I had to stop expecting everyone around me to change. I had to change internally, the onus was completely mine. I started recognising the strength within me that I always had but never saw as everyone made me feel small throughout my life.

I started giving myself credit for always being independent, right from the start of my career. This gave me strength, I had never liked a male dominant environment that unfortunately all the girls in my family had faced. How much we craved for things and activities but were curbed, hence I had decided not to wait for anyone's approval, another decision I was proud of.  Even as a child I had made up my mind to be independent, no matter what. I knew I had to always move forward and no job was too small. I knew it was OK to ask for work when there was none openly available. I kept seeking work and kept growing with it. These were some of the best decisions in my life and acknowledging them really helped my self-esteem.

Photo by Harli Marten on Unsplash

I started seeing myself in a brand new light. It was not easy yet I knew this was my chance to turn my life around. I decided no more relationships for me. I had always looked for someone to complete me. It was time that I started to figure out how to feel complete within myself.

I slowly started filling the deep void that existed within me, focussing on learning to love my own self. I explored hobbies which were forbidden in my growing up years. I started doing things for myself, things I had expected the men to do for me. I began to forgive myself for my past, for not standing up for myself enough. I could never say 'no' earlier, which is something I had to learn to change. I stopped punishing myself for being abandoned and realised that in all these years, I too had abandoned myself. Since my childhood I had stopped myself at so many levels. I had avoided doing so many things because I did not want to be a bad example, like my older siblings. There was an ignored and neglected child in me which I had to heal.

Slowly but steadily I kept working on my beliefs and was learning to be happy and content in my life. It had taken years but I was finally happy being me. I was falling in love with who I was everyday. There were struggles and difficult days as well but I had decided to focus on only moving forward. I was now more confident than ever and had figured out that if the center of control lies within us, everything else will fall in its place. My profession was going well. I was exploring as much as I could in all the other aspects too. I enrolled in a variety of courses, decided to get a photo shoot for myself and celebrate how I looked, and even explored the option of starting a parallel profession using my talents. In one such course, I happened to gel with the trainer, who was years younger than me. My rule of no relationships was still intact, which truly helped me explore a deep friendship with him without any romantic expectations. I would talk to him about any and everything.

Photo by Steve Halama on Unsplash

From just the two of us, we slowly grew into a gang of friends and it felt like I finally had a family. Two years down the line, he confessed his love for me. I told him not to ruin the beautiful equation we had. I was scared of losing everything that I had worked so hard on creating. He understood where I was coming from and remained like a rock in my life for the next few years as well. He was respectful of me and accepted me as I was. I had never hidden anything from him because I never felt a need to hide my truth from anyone anymore. He would often tell me that I deserved much more than I had in my relationships, I agreed.

Even though I had started feeling for him too, I wanted to test him before I changed my rules for anyone. I do realise that this is not the way but I was still a work in progress. Getting into a relationship again was giving me the jitters, maybe I wanted to find a reason to not start this relationship at all. I had had no experience of a functional relationship before this.

He was all that a partner should be but I was not sure that I wanted a partner anymore. He had seen who I really was. I had never sugar-coated things, I showed him my anger as and when I felt it. I did not hide my insecurities and he never used them against me. I had slowly let my fear of rejection go and had learnt to say NO. Over the years I had started respecting my journey and what it had made me and finally met a man who respected me for that. It wasn't long before I finally fell deeply in love with him and changed the rule. This time not because a man wanted me to but because I wanted to.

We have been married for six years now. We are each other's best friends and my family members respect him too. My father is no more but when he was alive, he had more conversations with him than he ever had with me, he is clearly a family favorite even though he is a black beauty too. I very proudly give myself the credit for finding such a gem. After all, all my life, I had manifested relationships that fulfilled my patterns and fit my insecurities. Only when I changed internally, did my reality outside change. Today too, I do realise that I am still a work in progress as every human being is, however I realise that we need to recognise our strengths even when we aren't perfect. We need to respect ourselves and transition to the newer versions of us to eventually unleash most of our capabilities.

As I share my story today I want to tell every one of you reading this, value yourself and only then with others value you. Find out your own role in your patterns, explore how are you responsible for them and change them. There is never anyone else to blame, we are the centre of our universes and always create a world and relationships that reflect our internal state. If people aren't treating you right then ask yourself if you are treating yourself right. Learn to say NO and keep spreading hope.



* If you found this story inspiring then don't forget to share, comment, like and subscribe to The Hope Tribe. You can be the instrument of Hope for someone by spreading these inspirational tales. Thanks for reading, Mallika Bhatia, Founder- The Hope Tribe

When I learnt to hit back- the journey from being a victim to being empowered

The Story of Anonymous
Written by Anonymous
Edited by Mallika Bhatia

I have often thought that in school, if instead of trigonometry and calculus, they taught us basic values like self-esteem and self-love- the world would be a better place to live in.

I was a high scoring student. Mostly at the top of my class. My school report card always had straight A’s and glowing references to how brilliant I was. However in the end there was always a small line that read.....'But needs to develop self-confidence'.

I believe my childhood was difficult and troubled. My parents were basically good individuals but their marriage didn’t work. When all the fighting in the house stopped, there was only endless silence left. Both my parents had high profile careers, which meant I was left alone or with the maids a lot of the time. Surprisingly my sister who grew up in the same environment remembers her childhood as the most perfect loving one. So perhaps it could be me who was the troubled child, or a case where two people in the same situation can have very different experiences depending upon their attitude or maybe it is just good old karma.

At a time when most teenagers start planning their careers, My dream was of having a happy family one day - with lots of affection, love and laughter. Studying in the most prestigious college in India or doing an MBA- should have made me feel ‘brilliant’ or in the very least, at least good about myself. But I felt like a loser throughout.

I was searching for love in relationships and by the time I was 24, not surprisingly all my relationships had failed. About this time my parents met a ‘suitable’ boy's family in the church and decided we were a good match. He was based in Mumbai, very well-read, well-qualified and a high achiever. Our families met for a dinner when he was visiting and soon after we got engaged.

During the six month courtship, he would write me lovely letters and come down to Delhi every few weeks, when we would meet for family dinners. We were having the big fat Indian wedding in a five star hotel and my fiancé was moving back to Delhi, which was my city. It was all like a dream come true, until a month before the wedding when my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The doctors had given him only four months to live.

We went ahead with the wedding since it was all organised and paid for. Just after we got married, my husband changed. He rejected me from the start and I didn’t know why. I think I also lacked the maturity to deal with the situation. Instead of being compassionate and understanding and trying to find the root of the problem (Could he have been gay?), I just fought with him and created an emotional mess in the house. We were like two angry strangers living in the same space. Suddenly the bad marriage of my parents that I had so mercilessly judged, I began to have more compassion for…..

What added pressure to the situation was that my father was very sick and I was practically living out of the hospital. The one memory that comes back to me was when my father was in the hospital and getting electric shocks to revive him. I was standing behind the glass door, witnessing his body seizing. It was too horrible to watch and I decided to call my husband for support. I couldn't control my sobs when I requested him to come to the hospital. I really need you here with me, I had said. He said he could not come since he was busy watching TV! That day while my father struggled to stay alive, my already dead marriage died a little more.

Five months after our wedding, my husband took up a job in the U.S. and left without me. I never saw him after that. I moved in with my parents and became very religious. I prayed every day for him to come back and for my marriage to work. It took me a year to realize that he wasn't going to come back and I filed for mutual consent divorce. The irony was that he wasn't even present to sign the divorce petition- he had sent a paid representative who kept apologising to me for what he was being made to do.

So I was 25 years and divorced, and whatever little self-respect I had, now plummeted to the negative. Unfortunately it was a downward spiral from there. My relationships would not work, and at work I would be treated shabbily, I had friends who had problems and my relationship with my parents was rocky. Thankfully my father was still there with us, recovering.

Five years later, I met a man at work who I fell in love with. We started dating and soon enough decided to get married. My parents were dead against this match. For them it was about logic and economics, he was from a poor financial background, the only earning member of a family of six. They all lived together in a one bedroom lower income group (LIG) flat. His family was very conservative where women did not speak to men and almost lived in the kitchen. You are a south Delhi girl from a rich xyz School, how do you think you would adjust with them? My parents had asked me.

You only care about status and money, I had told them, where as I care about love. He cares for me, he gives me love and respect that the well-read husband you found could not give. I am marrying him, with or without your blessings, I had said. I had made-up my mind. Reluctantly, my parents got us married at the local temple with a few shocked relatives from my side and a whole completely alien lot from theirs.

The day of our wedding was the evening I was hit for the first time in my life. Physically beaten, my hair pulled, my bangles shattered, my face smashed against the wall, knife cuts on my back and my body treated like a boxing bag. There was no reason, if there was one needed. I was told by the females in his family that this was normal in marriages and I didn't have to make a big deal of it.

A new phase of my life had begun; he would hit me every evening without fail, and in the morning he would come with roses and apologize profusely. He would say he loved me deeply and didn't know why he behaved the way he did, a very smart Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. My self-esteem was so poor, that I believed if I was a better wife, then he would not get a chance to hit me. However like most cases of domestic violence, the euphoric happy moments were punctuated with horror.                 

Photo by Kat J on Unsplash

Once just after four months of being married to him, he took a pillow and tried to suffocate me. I struggled with all the strength I had, I tried to push him away but couldn't and believed I was going to die. I stopped breathing and that’s when he moved away, picked up his already packed suitcase and left the house for a business trip, just like that. I went to a hospital but the doctors told us that they needed a police report before that could start treating me. I had no strength left, mental or physical, to deal with the police. So I just went back to my parents place.

My father was still struggling with cancer, and when he saw me walk into the house. He was beyond shocked. I remember in between his sobs he put disinfectant on my wounds. In the next few months just as I started regaining my health, my father lost his.

My dad's passing away was the last straw I needed. I had now hit rock bottom. Some months later I fell into clinical depression. For the next three months I could not leave my room. My mother had to quit her job to be with me. I did not even have the strength to lift an arm. I would have suicidal thoughts. I even remember walking into the kitchen one afternoon with the intention of stabbing my stomach with the kitchen knife. It was like I was on auto pilot and had zero control over what I was doing. As soon as the knife reached my stomach I think God's hand came upon me and I dropped the knife and went back to my room. I know I could have killed myself that day.

That episode shook me and helped me to realise that the time to make a change had come. I was a good loving person and needed answers as to why all this was happening in my life. I found a psychotherapist who started me on a richly rewarding journey to self-healing and self-love. We started with small steps to build my self-esteem. Together we worked on understanding what caused me to accept all that I took from the others around me. I realised that I had to love myself enough to get love and respect from outside. I learnt to take responsibility of my own life. I realised that I had to stop playing the victim in my life’s story. Each and everything that had happened in my life was a result of what I attracted from within.

I read all the self-help books I got hold of and with baby steps at a time, worked on courage to implement them. I attended workshops on self-discovery and betterment. I even went through alternative healing modalities such as Past life regression therapy which answered my questions as to why this was happening in my life. I became an avid Buddhist chanter and got a wonderful support group of friends. To this day I hold that when one has a really big problem in life, then family, friends etc. can help only to a certain extent. One needs a higher spiritual power ultimately.

I worked furiously to build my life again. It took me 8 years. I worked on each and every belief system that I had till now. Slowly my life changed, my friends changed, my work situation changed and my mental state changed. My father wasn’t there anymore but personal experience has shown me that one can heal a relationship with a person even after the person is gone. As an adult, my feeling unloved wasn't something I could blame on anybody. I no longer needed a relationship or someone from outside to feel loveable. I was happy with myself. I looked in the mirror and felt good about what I saw. For the first time in my life I was a confident person and knew how to draw boundaries.

And the outer world reflected what I felt from within. From being an unhappy employee who was always disrespected- I became the head of a department of a multinational company. My salary went up 150%. I loved my job and adored my team. I won global awards and walked down the aisle of my office with my head held up high. Each day was exciting and filled with possibilities and new potential.

Now it is time to help others who maybe going through similar experiences like I did, so I decided to share my story. I would like to be there for anyone who might be going through something similar. While I am proud that I made a success of my relationships and career, I am most proud of my unshakable belief in myself that was forged and built one day at a time. I know today that I have a solid foundation within myself.

And for those of you wondering about the family life that I so craved; when I stopped looking for love outside, I found true love. My husband and I have been together for a few years and we have a family of two dogs and a naughty adorable baby daughter.

Photo by Trinity  Kubassek from Pexels

                                             
* If you found this story inspiring then don't forget to share, comment, like and subscribe to The Hope Tribe. You can be the instrument of Hope for someone by spreading these inspirational tales. Thank you, Mallika Bhatia, Founder, The Hope Tribe