The Huffington Post: I’m A First-Generation Indian American Woman. I Married Into A Family Of Trump Supporters.

How could they love me, a brown-skinned woman, if they believed lies that placed whiteness and the power of empire above all else? Above me? My parents’ lives? The lives of the people who made this country? Could they love me without truly seeing me, in all my identities? Would they love me only if I stayed quiet and looked the other way from their racism and support of institutions that have been hurting Black and Brown people since they began?

the “spiritual” path of avoidance

What happens when spiritual language leads to disconnection and oppression, rather than connection and liberation? Sometimes, in order to make “negative” feelings go away, we push them away under the guise of spiritual language — we say, sometimes with a certain holier-than-thou-ness, that we prefer to practice connection, love, forgiveness, and endless compassion, when really we are just avoiding disconnection, dislike, resentment, and the parts of ourselves that bring up shame and self-judgment.

the anxious non-anxious presence

It was my intimacy with anxiety, not my ability to distance myself from it, that made me a good chaplain. I knew what students were feeling when they came into my office doubting themselves, worrying about the future, and not wanting to sit with their own feelings. I knew what it was like to be a perfectionist or a people-pleaser, to have a hard time being alone, or to only ever want to be alone. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a tinge of anxiety when a student came into my office to talk. What will I say? Will I be able to listen well? Am I really the person for this job? Am I even that spiritual?

on homeland

I grew up on stories. On oral tradition. They are my sustenance and my lifeblood. The memories my father would share with me as I went to bed each night about his childhood in rural India, the stories my mother tells about her first anxiety-ridden years in this country, the folktales I learned from Indian comic books growing up (Amar Chitra Katha, anyone?). They are my connection to something that I feel is missing in my life, that somehow got left behind. They fill that perpetual incompleteness and yearning for some other place that we children of diaspora (and those of us with vagabond lives) know well.