I always felt anger towards Her. It was never ending, this rage, this frustration, this all-consuming fire. No don’t get me wrong. This is not a story of a post break up venting of emotions or a general anger against the women of the world. Instead, it is a ball of negative, maliciousness against all the important women in my life.
Like all important things, there’s always a downside to them. For me, with my relative inexperience with the opposite sex, it has always been my inability to fully comprehend their complex motives and intentions. It was the reason why movies were a person could read other peoples’ minds always fascinated me – simply put, I was obsessed with the idea that knowing the opposite gender’s mind could help cure my ailments. To understand this better, we have to look back into a past where my major interaction and relation were with boys. This has helped me even today. I know how guys think and how they feel. It is easy to understand what they say and what they mean. However with women it has always been complicated. That’s why with those closest to me from the opposite sex, this frustrates me the most. Cause I never know what you are truly thinking. And that is, for me the scariest reality.
It began from the 10th grade when I first joined school in India and was exposed to co-ed school where interactions I never thought were common were in fact commonplace. Where relationships and friendships went hand-in-hand. In fact, this was the time I learnt a lot about feminism, about gender equality and the need to have female friends. But from 11th and 12th, as my friend circle grew to include more and more girl friends, things became more complicated and frustrating. It was simple – I was always scared to open up to them as I never knew how they would respond and how they would converse. And the bubble kept on growing.
By the time I entered UG first year, I possibly couldn’t match the huge difference I had between my male and female friends. And yet I was scared of opening up. Fear is a brutal thing – it can make you choose to never involve someone in your deepest, darkest thoughts, even when they mean the best for you. Yet, I was having more female friends than ever before and it is still growing. Over a period of time, the shell that I built began to break. And the me that was emerging was ready to be more vulnerable and more open to the people that mattered. The thing is, with men it is often easy to pretend to be macho, chauvinistic and sometimes sexist with a big hint of falseness and fakeness to it. We know each other and we understand that stating the truly emotional stuff is not a possibility either side can bring about.
However with the opposite sex, their train of thought encouraged that and in fact it was this logic that scared me. I refused to be near them when I wanted to be vulnerable. And when I did choose to be, it often backfired or turned on me and from there comes the anger.
Now that you’ve caught up to the whole argument I’m presenting, what would be the logical course of action I should take up? It was a long drawn out thought where many of my guy friends couldn’t be asked for help as it would be out of their leagues. The end result was that of forgiveness. That the Her I referred to in the beginning couldn’t be seen in that way. That it had to exist separately – in the form of each person who was either good or bad to and in my life. And this was the only solution to move forward. Stereotyping is bad. But when done with the intention to avoid any sort of interaction, growth is bound to stagnate. That couldn’t happen.
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