Most of us carry a gratitude tangled with love, pride, hurt, and guilt. These scripts — threats as lessons — come from parents hardened by survival, not malice. In a foreign land with no room for softness, they gave up dreams we’ll never know. They carried the weight of survival so we could live with the freedom they were never given.

Men are not to blame for India’ rape epidemic.

We love to condemn the West for being too open about sex, yet our own repressed, voyeuristic culture hides a far uglier truth. Ninety-six rapes are reported every single day. We worship goddesses yet strip real women of dignity and life. Outrage flares when the victim is beaten, burned, or killed — then silence returns. Maybe if we blamed rapists instead of daughters, this epidemic would end. Maybe if the shame clung to the men who destroy women, not the women they destroy, our collective conscience wouldn’t wait for the next sacrifice.

Your twenties are meant to be messy — a time to be a little lost, maybe even a little delusional. There’s no roadmap, just noise — and it’s jarring when that noise tells you you’re too much. Too loud, too ambitious, too independent — especially for a woman. But maybe what’s seen as “too much” is simply what’s not seen enough.

“Pretty — for a brown girl.”

I straightened the curls, bleached the skin, plucked the brows, shrank myself to fit a mould never made for me. While white women borrow our features as trends, we’re told we’re too much. Too dark. Too hairy. Too loud. This isn’t about beauty — it’s about survival under the white gaze, and the long, painful unlearning that follows.

Sex isn’t the problem — it’s the performance. We’ve just traded purity rings for performative detachment — and called it liberation. In a culture that praises emotional indifference, hookup culture has become a race to care less, a freedom that sometimes feels like a trap.s with an idea.

“Not like the other girls.” We shrink, soften, and shapeshift — chasing worth through his eyes. Validation dressed as empowerment, desirability mistaken for self-worth. We disappear parts of ourselves to become visible to men who never had to change.

We walk a tightrope between cultures, praised for being different while punished for being too much. And still, we ask for validation from the very system that erased us. All to be palatable, acceptable, invisible under the white gaze. But proximity to whiteness doesn’t grant us white privilege.