I was always daddy’s little girl.
Or so I wanted to believe. There were these pictures with accompanying stories about how he once took the time to braid my three-year-old hair with African beads he got me, and how he who never entered the kitchen in his life baked me a Micky Mouse cake for my third birthday, and recorded me over video and audio as a toddler, to preserve the memory of my childhood. And I remembered grabbing his pinky in my tiny fist as we walked together some time in my life.
But for as long as I can remember being me, I don’t really remember having a relationship with him. He would ask me especially to do things for him, like find a tiny screw that fell off the table while he was repairing something, or help him unscramble a word jumble in a fraction of the time it took him. And I did these things, gladly, because it was the only way I could feel connected to him, and that he valued me and saw me. Most of the time, though, he was busy behind a page, or a screen, or a plate of food — if he wasn’t at work or in a fight with my mother.
We all lived together “happily” as a family, but I don’t remember him once coming to school for a parent-teacher conference or a recital, or knowing any of my friends, or really knowing anything about me or my daily life. For some reason, this was all left to my mother. “No mother loves her children as much as yours loves you,” he often told us — and thereby left all decisions and activities around us to her.
We did make the occasional trip together as a family, to Six Flags or to a bird sanctuary or on a pilgrimage to our religion’s founding place. These were mostly meant to be trips for us to develop the right values though.
And yet, my brother and I were not allowed pocket money like our cousins. Instead, he told us that we could ask for anything we wanted and if it was appropriate, he would get it for us. This way, he said, the amount of money we had saved up didn’t limit us.
Sometimes he traveled alone for work, to a new country we’d never been to, and he would bring back gifts. I remember practically every single one from him, mostly because I would be so surprised that he thought of me and brought me back something, that I became extremely attached to each and every one.
Looking back, from the more mature, objective perspective of an adult, the question that comes up for me is, why did these things leave such strong impressions in my mind? Why were they such significantly memorable occasions? Why don’t I have such memories about my mother, for example?
And the protective part of my psyche tells me that any shred of affection he afforded me was so rare and longed for, that I consumed it ravenously, holding onto it proudly like a trophy, milking it for all its potential joy and making it last as long as possible.
—
See, in between those rare gifts and family trips, there was a lot of other stuff going on in our daily lives. Of the things that I remember hearing repeatedly, I was accused, as a child, of being selfish, self absorbed, of being hedonistic, of being difficult, of crying and demanding too much, and that if I didn’t change my ways, and stop being so emotionally expressive, well, my family would tolerate it and always love me, but nobody else would.
Looking back through therapy and a lot of healing work, I’ve realised that I threw myself into school work because I couldn’t deal with the overwhelm of our family dynamics, and specifically, the fights between my parents. I worked really really hard, because it gave me something to focus on and drown out all the difficult things that I just couldn’t do anything about. I’d work until I was ready to pass out, so I didn’t even have a chance to lie awake at night thinking about it all. I grew into an adult with a solid work ethic and pride for not needing more than 4–6 hours of sleep a night.
And I wasn’t just avoiding dealing with them. I was also in desperate need to prove to the world, and myself, that I wasn’t an awful person, that I was worthy of love, that I wasn’t selfish or hedonistic, that I was in fact dedicated and trustworthy and valuable.
—
The whole reason I started the Doing Nothing project was because I needed, deeply, to believe that I was valuable without my achievements. That my life had meaning without my work ethic and constant goal-setting for new accomplishments. I’m still not really sure I believe it, the groove of the belief that I’m only as worthy as my achievements is so deeply ingrained into me.
—
My mother used to say to me, “you were such a happy baby until you were three, and then I don’t know what happened to you!” What she was referring to was my many temper tantrums, demands and teary breakdowns that lasted well into my adult life.
And what happened to me was relatively simple. My younger brother came along, my parents started fighting often, my father seemed always angry at us, and my mother took it upon herself to protect us from him.
Perhaps I started to believe I didn’t matter anymore. I didn’t feel seen or heard because they were always too occupied with each other. She had to look after the baby. I was meant to support her as the big sister. And he was just angry all the time.
I was scared. The world became an unsafe place. Right up until we moved again and I started to gain praise from teachers, and I discovered how I could get the attention that I so deeply ached for. At home, bringing back a shining report card didn’t evoke much appreciation, it was just what was expected of us. But at school, the harder I worked and the more I succeeded, the more appreciate and loved I felt. And I could actually control it with my hard work. It was so rewarding.
In high school, by the time my father was relatively senior in his position, I got to go to a rather fancy international school where I excelled more than ever. I felt supported and loved and even my student peers would introduce me as “the best artist in our school.” My teachers were even more adoring. Once, after a showcase evening at school where parents and friends were invited to see what we got up to during the day, my mother said to me in the car ride back, “wow, they’re all so full of praise for you, but we never get to see this side of you!” I still remember the rage in my 16-year-old heart that had no words to express the resentment, or the capacity to explain how I felt treated with love and respect at school in a way that I never ever felt at home.
Respect.
Now that’s a word that haunted me throughout my childhood. My father often accused me of having no respect for him, or for my elders. And once, when I was 6 or 7, a teacher remarked in my report card that I wasn’t very respectful of authority at times. I had no idea where these comments came from, as I never felt I had disrespected anyone. In fact, I pretty much always did what was expected of me, because I was terrified of upsetting anyone and losing their love.
Nothing in the world seemed to matter more to my father than receiving respect. Even if it was not authentically felt, it was expected in behaviour and manner.
Looking back, though, I don’t remember ever seeing him treat anyone with respect. Not his mother, not my mother, not us, not the people who worked for him long or short term, maybe some of his superior colleagues but it was mostly lip service. Maybe I didn’t even know back then what respectful behaviour looked or felt like. I didn’t exactly have a good example to follow.
But I did know how it felt, when I finally received it because of my hard work, from my peers and teachers. Maybe that’s how I finally learnt what it was.
—
Despite it all, I defended him. I defended him to my mother, I defended him to my mother’s family, to my brother, to anyone who had a hard word to say about him. And I did respect him — for the fact that at the time I believed that I didn’t know anyone else who put more effort into self improvement than he did. I respected him when he finally decided to cut his weight by 24 kg in 2 years. I respected him when he finally started exercising and controlling what he ate. I didn’t respect him when he threatened my mother or her family, or screamed and shouted at anyone who dared to cross him. I was pretty sure he thought he was gaining respect by planting fear, but even for a kid like me, it was the opposite. However, I did feel sorry for him, I felt sorry for the lack of his opportunities to learn important things from his own parents, and for having to teach himself things, and for missing out on critical insights because of it. He understood everything on an intellectual level, but never in practice. And I felt sorry for him and his upbringing and defended him and tried to help him see what he was missing, and took care of him for his shortcomings as loyally as I could. I always believed he meant well. I always accepted his failures because he didn’t lie and cover them up with doozies like my mother did hers. I trusted him to be honest, if nothing else. And so, I defended him.
It wasn’t until I was in New York, graduated from college, and earning a decent living that I realised something my brother had been trying to tell me all my life: that it didn’t matter what he said, he had no control over my life and I could just give him the lip service respect he wanted, say yes in words but then go and do whatever I wanted to. However, I was always too principled to do that. I wanted him to understand me, and for us to come to an agreement with each other. When I was finally was independent, I realised my brother was right, and I started living my life without caring what he thought about it. Even when I moved from New York to Amsterdam to live with my Dutch boyfriend, and he threatened me over it, I felt unmoved, and even confident, that he would eventually come around. I told him directly, ‘you can decide not to talk to me but that won’t stop me being your daughter; this is what I’m doing, you don’t have a say, and you can either accept it and have a relationship with me, or not.’ He said he would never visit as long as we lived together unwed. We broke up 2 years later, but it still took him another 11 years to ever visit me.
And I just accepted that if I wanted him in my life, I would have to be the one to visit, take time out of work and spend the money to travel to him. He said it was easier that way for everyone, since they had a bigger house and everything was taken care of and I wouldn’t have to look after him and he wouldn’t have to be dependent on me. I think it’s a big part of why I didn’t want a full-time job, preferring instead the uncertainty of a freelance career leaving me free to travel at will, even if I lost several clients along the way each time I was five time zones away visiting my parents.
—
Six years after he retired, he finally agreed to come and visit me together with my mother. It was 17 years since I had gone to university in the US. And in all that time, he’d never visited me.
And once they were finally here, my parents, together, in my house and life — the illusion broke permanently. He knew nothing about my life. He tiptoed around me and my apartment, unsure of how to be in my space with me. He didn’t know me as an adult. He got to just sit back and relax each time I visited, forcing me back into a 17-year-old shape and convincing himself that I enjoyed it. He didn’t change anything in his schedule when I was there, he still went to golf and all his other usual activities, I was just expected to fit back in as if I’d never left. It fell upon my mother to organise everything that I needed, from food needs to comfort needs, with me left hanging helpless and dependent on my aging parents who were used to having a staff all their lives, until they were retired. It didn’t matter that I’d had a sensitive stomach all my life, more at ease with the relative blandness of western food than with traditional Indian spices. It didn’t matter that arranging my basic needs meant driving to far away markets, while I’d been used to being able to walk to a grocery store. It didn’t matter that being trapped in a compound without any safe and independent mode of transport caused me excessive anxiety and isolation. It didn’t matter that I had to revert to survival mode. For a long time, I would just steel myself for the few weeks I visited them, accepting my imprisonment in order to see them and make them happy, so I felt happy. But once the tables had turned, and I saw his extreme discomfort being in my adult home with me, it struck me so hard what the conditions of our relationship really were.
Respect, to my father, meant that I consider his comfort and avoid putting him at unease, at all times. I was not allowed to put him at unease with the words I said, the clothes I wore, the activities I engaged in, the people I saw, or anything that I wanted, needed or declared. And it didn’t matter how much unease I had to endure in the process, because he was my father, he had earned the right to prioritise his comfort over mine.
So, over my life, I’ve developed an irritable bowel, anxiety, depression, estrangement from my family, the inability to succeed in romantic relationships, the inability to stay in a full-time job, the inability to endure feeling oppressed by anyone, even a client or a sibling, without exploding into a huge defensive rage, and a huge split in my identity between my authentic self that I have worked desperately to hide from most people, and my Outdoor Self, as I call her, the one that knows how to behave, dress, talk in a pleasant way, no matter at what cost to self.
When I first started writing these pieces or ones like it in 2015/6, I was terrified of how people would react, how I would fall from their graces and lose my place in society. I thrived on people believing that I was a glamorous, independent, artistic, long-haired, long-legged, high-heeled fashionable woman who traveled the world and had a life of pleasure and fun. I had lots of friends and clients, but I was always anxious that they would find out the truth of why I never stayed anywhere too long or why I insisted on working alone or why I was still single. But I was tired of it, I was tired of pulling back the curtain when I started trusting someone only to have them walk away. I was tired of even holding the curtain up. And I was tired of being scared of being revealed. I was so, so tired of always being afraid of being found out. So I thought I would just pull back the curtain myself, reveal myself and see how people reacted.
I still deeply believed that no one would love me when I showed my true self. I still believed a lot of things that my father had told me over and over and over again. Even though I knew he was wrong, in my heart, I believed them, because my father said them to me.
And the reality is that most people are not keen on getting close to someone who is constantly anxious about them getting close. It’s not what’s behind the curtain that scares them away, it’s the curtain itself. The curtain that has been a security blanket to me, protecting me from being seen as weak, selfish, miserable, depressed, demanding, and oh so difficult.
The harsher truth is, that world is still out there, the one that is made up of curtains. Where people attach to each other only for what they can gain from each other, and not for what they can give each other. The one that’s only about appearances and how you’re perceived in the world, and not how you behave or feel or think or act. And most of the time, it’s the wealthiest people who can afford thick, blackout curtains.
Because curtains are expensive.
Yet, some of the most meaningful connections and friendships I’ve ever had in my life, where I felt loved and accepted for who and how I was, without the curtain, was with people who grew up modestly, with almost nothing. It’s my experience that these people tend to be the most generous of all, the ones who share everything they’ve got, in material and time and heart. They’re the ones who know that there’s a curtain, they’re the ones who are much more interested in what’s behind it.
Ironically, my father grew up rather modestly, too. But I never felt like he wanted to see who I was behind the curtain.
I can almost hear you, the reader, jumping up to say, ‘well, it probably has to do with how he was raised, or what he lacked or longed for himself, probably he felt neglected in his own childhood, perhaps he needed to prove himself too.’ And trust me, I can come up with many, many more justifications for his behaviour with much more deep insight into his psyche than you are going to right now.
But when you don’t do the work to overcome your own demons, you pass them on to your children to fight. Because children don’t know what’s expected of them until they are taught what’s expected of them, often at the price of their parents’ love in the balance. And the love and fear they have for their parents will most of the time allow them to adapt to any reality that’s imposed on them. Children never want to hurt their parents, they usually just want to make them happy, so they can be happy themselves. It’s the parent’s job to protect them from the burden of their own crosses. It’s the parent’s job to be responsible for their own issues, and not impose them on their child as a test of their respect for their aversion to unease. It’s the adult’s job, not the child’s, to make sure that their child develops self worth based on who they are, not what they do or don’t do for their parents’ peace of mind.
It’s the parents’ job to ensure that the child knows that they are worthy of love. No matter what.
—
I always believed I was daddy’s little girl. But not because he was partial towards me. Rather, because I was partial towards him. I’d do anything for a shred of his affection. Endure any pain, fight any battle, absorb any injury. I needed to believe that if I did everything right, he would reward me with the loving, meaningful, active relationship that I have longed for since I was three. I needed to believe that it was something I could achieve, if I just worked hard enough.
Realising that I can’t make him want to have a relationship with me no matter how hard I try nearly broke me. I lost my direction and purpose in life. I stopped knowing what I was working so hard for. I stopped being able to survive on four hours of sleep. I stopped being fun and outgoing and lively. I stopped being able to put on a face for a couple of hours for the world outside without suffering crippling exhaustion for the next couple of days. I stopped being able to engage with potential romantic partners. I stopped finding men attractive. I stopped wanting to eat, some days, I even stopped wanting to be alive.
And finally, after years of depression, anxiety and crippling exhaustion fuelled by stress, I’ve figured out how I can come back alive, little by little. I have to stop wanting to have a meaningful relationship with him. I have to stop bending over backwards until I break myself just to have that little piece of love from him. I have to stop jumping up in delight when he types me a heart emoji. I have to stop believing all the things he said to me, and start believing that I really am worthy of love, regardless of what I achieve. I’m worthy of respect and don’t need to be pitied, even when I fall apart. I’m not ugly even when I cry. And I don’t need to hide myself each time I feel unworthy.
Maybe one day, I’ll stop giving up my life for the love that I’ve always longed for. Maybe, little by little, I’ll learn how to live and love all over again.