Embody

Embody

written by Gaurav Lalsinghani illustration by Carmen Ngo, layout by Shay Suban

CW: verbal abuse/slurs

When I look in the mirror, I see a brown, battered shield. A body that has lost all concept of privacy and safety. A carcass that has endured. I can trace the creases of my brown skin, outlines of past bruises, and my protruding rib cage with my fingertips. I don’t know how to call this shell home.

I have detached myself from the day-to-day pain that comes with living as a queer person of color. I have rejected these two identities vehemently for the majority of my life, trying and failing to outrun and erase parts of myself that I have known to be true. With my skin color and sexuality both at the margins, I have done everything in my power to

avoid embracing my existence. It was all I ever knew how to do.

Growing up, everything around me conditioned me to believe that being brown was wrong. Within the world of whiteness that is Texas suburbia, I was taught, both explicitly and implicitly, the diminished value of my culture and faith. I remember being affirmed for selecting peach and cream-colored crayons when depicting my family in grade school. My life at home became a showand-tell on my peers terms. Hand-picked to regale stories of our parents’ “arranged marriages” in high school, my brown classmates and I were constantly reminded that we were not only “other”, but less than. I stomached the fact that students and teachers alike approached me in hopes of proselytizing me, informing that my religion was “going to die out” and reinforcing the idea that my faith was a “mythology” in their eyes. I could tell that my complete racial and religious presence wasn’t wanted.

At home, the smell of incense sticks and sounds of mantras shrouded the shame and guilt I held for myself. Within my own community, I remember the gupshup (gossip) surrounding the manner in which I befriended girls and embraced femininity. I had my male friends reenact Bollywood movies with me as I stepped into the role of the damsel in distress. When I looked for cues of affirmation from those around me, I found nothing. Instead of finding acceptance, I found solitude. The heat and embarrassment that came with the stares of uncles and aunties instilled in me the idea that I was doing something wrong. I couldn’t put words to the experience or my identity, but I began to police who I was.

My entire perception of myself changed when I was reintroduced to myself as a “faggot.” I remember hearing the word for the first time after being dropped into a trash can in the fifth grade. Everyone had cleared out of the cafeteria. I sat amidst leftovers and styrofoam plates, the bruise on my side begging me not to move. I kept replaying the word in my head, trying to place it in my reservoir of English words at the time. I hoisted myself up and proceeded to the bathroom to clean myself up. I remember everything being silent. I became that silence.

That day my identity was defined for me. I was a “fag” over everything. It defined my sexual orientation long before I would find words like “gay” and “queer.” It defined my self-worth. I knew there was something wrong with me and I unknowingly began to do everything in my power to regulate my behavior. Fear of physical violence, escalation, and alienation drove my day-to-day behaviors. Everyday decisions became gambles of self-preservation and safety.

Being queer was wrong. The lesson reared its head at every turn. Success felt antithetical to my queerness. Overcompensation ensued. I knew my sexuality would be used to diminish any accolade or achievement I earned. Day-in and day-out, I pushed myself to conform, overcompensate, and curate every aspect of my life, ensuring that no detail was out of place as to reveal my “otherness.”

I became the overachiever, the archetypical perfectionist. I retyped worksheets in their entirety for middle school assignments, even using stencils to avoid seeing my own imperfect script. I would create additional work for myself to keep myself busy, expanding project guidelines and paper requirements to prove to others, and myself, that I was capable of success. The standard of perfection was set, and my chase for the unattainable ensued.

My body became a point of deflection, and starving it became routine. I silenced my hunger and restricted my food intake as a means of coping with the stress of my own standards. I pretended to complete meals, arranging remnants of rice and daal to convince my parents that I was full. My body was in flux, yet my disordered eating felt like an assertion of self-control. My attempts at self-improvement came at the cost of my own “self-annihilation.”

Upon arriving at UCLA, I withdrew from my body completely. My rote practice of self-starvation became interspersed with frequent trips to my dorm bathroom to purge meals. Having been outed within the first week of my college career, my entire timeline of self-acceptance fell off track as everything came to a climax. I remember getting up off the bathroom floor, time and time again, spiraling out of the abyss of shame and guilt that came with each purge. Ironically, the silent victories of weight loss became my only source of power and stability.

People talked. I knew they did, and I wanted to control how they did it. Comments about my weight were easier to stomach than passing comments about my sexuality. Even as I sought help for my disordered eating and stopped purging, I found myself unable to drop the hyper-vigilance that I had adopted out of fear for being queer. I flashed my anger to the world as I attempted to grapple with the shame instilled in me, wounding the people closest to me. My relationships faltered and the false reality of perfection I had attempted to curate collapsed. My numbness was broken and the silence I had become roared alive. I had to stop running from myself.

Keeping a secret is no easy task, especially when that secret is tied to deep-seated notions of rejection, neglect, and abandonment. For twentytwo years and counting, I hid my queerness from my peers, my parents, and at times, myself. The silence that began as a survival tactic became the most powerful driving force in my life, and slowly but surely, it consumed everything because I gave it the power to.

Sometimes, I contemplate how long it took for me to reach this point of self-acceptance. I think about the passing comments I made out of my own shame and internalized homophobia. I think about how lonely I felt as a kid, unable to even connect with myself because I had been so deeply ingrained with the idea that I was not worthy. I think about how that lack of self-love damaged and destroyed my relationships and friendships. I think about this journey. I think about where I was and I smile because I am no longer there.

I am brown and queer. I am queer and brown. I love that I am both. I am no longer running from myself. I am free.