Growing up, I often struggled with feeling like I belonged. One of the main reasons for this is that I felt like I had to pick one cultural identity and I wasn’t sure which one to choose. At school, I endured relentless racist bullying and so I didn’t feel particularly Canadian, but then I also struggled with many aspects of Indian culture.

It took me years to land on how to describe who I am culturally, and I learned some important lessons along the way!

In this #ShineWithRitu video, I share both how I’ve come to see myself culturally and why it’s important to move away from a binary way of thinking about our identities, all so that we can experience true belonging.

Watch now!

Learn more about living authentically with the Three Selves Framework here.

Download the first chapter of my book The Authenticity Principle to learn more.

The post It Can Be a Struggle to Understand Your Cultural Identity appeared first on Ritu Bhasin.

I’ve had countless women reach out to me to share their stories since the launch of my book, The Authenticity Principle. Many of these women are Indian or South Asian and feel deeply connected to the stories I share about my life and my journey learning to live authentically. A constant theme in these messages and conversations is, “How can I live more as my authentic self when I’m facing such ridiculously high expectations from my parents?”

In a nutshell, my response is this: as Indian women, if we want to be happy and fulfilled, we must stop living for our parents and start living for ourselves.

This is a tough topic, and an uncomfortable one for many of us, parents and daughters alike. But I’m going to go there. So many women, just like me, are suffering and not living their best because they are striving to meet their parents’ expectations — expectations that don’t accord with what they actually want for themselves.

If you’re one of these women, know this: there is a better life out there for you, and you deserve to live it.

Why It’s Tough to Talk About

This topic is not often addressed out in the open. South Asian cultures are group-focused and have a high commitment to “saving face.” We’re taught to care deeply about what other people think of us, and as a result, we tend to focus only on sharing the good and keep the bad hidden away. If I had a dollar for every time my parents said, “What will society think?!” I’d be rich!

This attitude can make it very difficult for us to talk about the realities of being an Indian woman and daughter — experiences with oppressive parenting, violence, abuse, mental health issues, addiction, and more. We talk a lot about the good stuff (and we should!), but when it comes to the tough stuff, we just don’t.

Another reason we may not speak truth to power about what it’s like being an Indian daughter is because of the biases we know are already coming our way from people outside our culture. We’re (rightly) afraid to talk about our experiences for fear of affirming biases that are both rooted in and byproducts of systems of white supremacy, power, and privilege — such as the bias that we’re an oppressed, marginalized group of women in a highly misogynist, backwards, and uncivilized community.

Fear of affirming these biases has made it hard for me to come forward too. But there are aspects of our culture that are oppressive — for all of us, but especially for women, and we must name them before we can overcome them. And we can do this while also applying a critically conscious lens about the impact of white supremacy and colonization on how it is that our parents learned to parent (and how their parents learned to parent, and how their parents learned to parent, and so on. i.e. The cycle of how intergenerational oppression is passed along).

Why We Live for Our Parents

Many of us are committed to fulfilling our parents’ expectations because as children, we received conditional forms of love. When we did what our parents wanted us to do, we were celebrated and received their acceptance. But when we didn’t listen to them and didn’t do what they wanted, we were reprimanded and criticized, and love was taken away. Often, these patterns continue into adulthood — and it feels awful.

Receiving conditional love from our parents, even when we know they care for us and love us deeply, can lead to a lot of woundedness, hurt, and pain about who we are, and because of this, many of us in adulthood are not living our best, most authentic lives. Instead, we’re struggling against ourselves to meet the expectations of others, hoping we will receive love and acceptance as a result.

Indian daughters feel our parents’ expectations in countless areas: the kind of work we do, who we befriend, how we speak, what we wear, who we love, who we marry, when we marry, where we live, how we parent, and more. The problem is that when we give our time and energy to meeting expectations that don’t match how we actually want to live, we give our power away. We take time and energy away from doing our own self-work. Away from discovering, embracing, and loving who we are. Away from creating the lives we really want. Away from cultivating self-love.

Most importantly, when we don’t cultivate self-love, and instead are stuck in a place of woundedness and in a life we don’t connect to, it prevents us from attracting the best love into our lives.

Learning to Live for Ourselves

So how can we break out of these entrenched patterns of seeking conditional love and reclaim our power? The greatest gift you can give yourself as an adult in this situation is unconditional self-love. This means accepting who you are and living it out as much as possible.

I struggled throughout my life with what to do with my parents’ expectations of me. It wasn’t until my thirties that I began my own journey towards unconditional self-acceptance and self-love. Now, at 42, I can finally say that I live the way I want to live. Even though it’s been hard for them, I have drawn boundaries with my parents because I wanted to live better and be happier. And I finally am.

If you’re at the beginning of this journey, start by asking yourself how you want to be living, and what your authentic self looks like. Where do you want to live? Who do you want to be friends with? How do you want to dress? Who do you want to love? When you figure out the answers to these questions, you can then work to cultivate your authenticity in bringing this to be.  And you can finally take your power back.

The post Indian Daughters, It’s Time to Stop Living for Your Parents appeared first on Ritu Bhasin.

For many years, about once a year, I would find myself facing what I call an “ethnic identity crisis” — specifically, a feeling of being confused about who I was ethno-culturally. In these moments, I would ask myself, “Who am I?” And I didn’t know the answer.

My crisis was usually triggered by a feeling of disconnection from the people I was spending most of my time with, whether that was mostly White people through my work (given that I was, and still am, working in a largely homogeneous corporate world) or mostly South Asian people (the ethno-culture of my parents).

Luckily, this now happens to me only occasionally, and when it does, I know what to do. I call my sister Komal, who knows that I need a listening ear while I share my confusion and hurt. In talking out how I’m feeling, I’m able to exhale — because I realize something that gives me great comfort: that I’m a mishmash of cultures, and that’s perfectly fine.

But it took me a long time to get there.

Growing Up Confused

I grew up in a household run by my Punjabi parents, who immigrated from India in the early 1970s. While my siblings and I were born in a very multicultural neighborhood, when I was eleven, my parents moved us to what I jokingly refer to as the “whitest neighborhood they could find.” They could have moved us to where most of their Punjabi friends lived, but they believed that moving to a White neighborhood would benefit us by teaching us to shift cultural codes, giving us access to more powerful networks, and providing us with a better education.

They weren’t wrong about the benefits, but this also meant growing up around mostly White kids as one of the only Brown kids in my school. I was immersed in White culture at school and at play, and I also experienced extensive racist bullying. Both of these experiences were very challenging. My ethno-cultural differences were vilified — the direct and indirect message was that being Brown was “bad.” So I learned to mask and change aspects of my identity that attracted racism.

I constantly felt like a “loser” and desperately wanted to fit in with my White peers. I would beg my parents to allow me to do the things that my White peers were doing, like going on sleepovers, staying out late, and dating boys. But my parents, who themselves were still adjusting to life as new Canadians, struggled with how to raise us and how much autonomy to give us. In fact, they oscillated between moments of being relaxed and hip (“Have all your friends over anytime you want!”) and being excruciatingly strict.

I also received mixed messages about when it was okay to act “Canadian” versus when I had to adhere to Punjabi ways of behaving. For example, as a kid I was (and still am, proudly!) loud, boisterous, extroverted, and feisty. I was rewarded for this behavior at school and with my peers. But this behavior at home attracted all kinds of negative discipline even thought it was, in part, the reason I was excelling academically at school. To say that I was culturally confused would be an understatement. I eventually found myself railing against Punjabi culture (for example, I deliberately avoided making friends with other Indian kids). I didn’t want to be Punjabi and didn’t see myself as such.

The moments when I felt the best about who I was happened when I was surrounded by friends from other recent immigrant communities, other kids of color in particular (mostly West Indian kids). I felt connected to them because they too were experiencing what I was going through, and there was a similar spirit to Punjabi culture of family-centeredness, community, spirituality, music, and food. But I knew I was just a guest in those communities no matter how much I was drawn to them.

All of this to say that starting from a young age, I felt like an outsider. And this feeling stayed with me throughout my twenties, and even into my thirties.

Redefining Belonging

Teaching about culture and inclusion for a living has helped me to develop a clear understanding of what was happening to me as a child and even as an adult: a struggle to find belonging.

In researching the experience of belonging for The Authenticity Principle, I learned that we all crave belonging as humans — it’s as natural as breathing. As animals, human beings are a tribal species, and we want to feel like we’re truly part of a group. But for me, growing up feeling like an outsider in a number of cultures (including being othered and bullied by some), thwarted that basic feeling of belonging, and sometimes still does.

Thankfully, after many years, I’ve developed a different approach to how I view belonging, which has helped me to feel more grounded in how I self-identify. I’ve learned that belonging doesn’t have to be viewed in a binary way — and that for most of us, an “I’m either X or Y” way of thinking simply won’t work.

I know now that don’t have to identify as 100% Canadian, 100% Punjabi, or 100% anything — it’s ok to be a mishmash. And, in fact, being a mishmash of cultural identities is beautiful.

There are aspects of several cultures that I feel connected to, and it’s in those aspects that I focus my attention and find my sense of belonging. I find these moments in many different places. For example, I can be on a train in India and feel profoundly that I’m with my people. I can also be at a bhangra jam with amazing music and dear friends and feel profoundly that I’m with my people. Or I can be watching a Team Canada hockey game and be bursting with joy (ok, I’ll admit that I only watch gold medal hockey games, but still!). There are countless situations that I feel truly comfortable and authentic in, and when I recognize that feeling, I know that’s what true belonging is.

At the end of the day, choosing the aspects of the cultures that I want to embody and that work for me is how I find my belonging. Mostly, I identify as a woman of color, because the impact of my gender and racial identity has been instrumental in shaping who I am.

If you grew up across cultures, perhaps this is resonating with you. If so, it might be interesting to investigate your own cultural confusion. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What cultural confusion are you feeling?

• What has caused this cultural confusion for you?

• Which aspects of the many cultures that make up who you are do you want to focus on embodying?

• What’s your mishmash of cultures?

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