Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “10 Stepst to Becoming an Adult” by Suri Matondkar. Suri is an Indian writer and international student in Australia. She currently lives and overthinks on unceded Wurundjeri land where she listens to Taylor Swift and attempts to write things.
Take responsibility for your actions.
Like how during those spilled months between 2020 and 2021—time so slippery, like trying to hold water in open palms— you could probably count the number of times you took a bath.
When you were young, you were diligent, heating water on the stove. Pouring it in a bucket until the steam rose up. A cloud gently kissing a sheen of sweat on your skin and clinging as you carried that bucket off—one arm outstretched to keep your steps steady while the water sloshed. Then luxury arrived within your parents’ grasp, and there was a metal rod that went into a bucket and grew red hot. Your baba always said, rubber chappal ghal, when you went to pick the bucket up, because even when you switched the rod off the bars sometimes touched the edge of the bucket and left welted marks. Now you just turn on the tap, and there’s the hot water, ready to gush out.
So really there was no reason to have avoided a bath in the months between 2020 and 2021. No reason at all unless you think of how you couldn’t breathe right for days on end and there was rough static where your brain once was.
*
Accept that you are never doing enough.
Sometimes you might look around and think how it would feel to tear through everything you’ve been taught to build and guard. How the people you scroll past on social media have become more familiar than the family you haven’t seen in months because you chose to follow a foreign dream to foreign shores and now you’re on your own, a modern immigrant with multicultural pride and WhatsApp calls. Can’t bring yourself to look back because you’re afraid that the path you were set on when you were born, the one you abandoned because you couldn’t bear to be someone they thought they’d figured out, might have been the one you were meant to be on all along.
So you walk around the new world you gambled your family’s once-in-a-generation chance for, and you side-step the fights there because you barely feel qualified to fight in your own country for things you know are right. Besides, how dare you talk about a place you abandoned for another anyhow? And what if you stole that once-in-a-generation chance to come here and squander it by being too loud?
But you try, even though you know it’s nowhere near enough. You watch the news—gutless though you are, you should at least do that much—you pay attention when people smarter than you talk, you unlearn things and remind yourself something is not right just because it is loud. Heart and share passionate posts written by people braver than you who call for the right rights, who battle with algorithms through fruit emojis and asterisks and misspelt words, and sometimes your desire to be bold actually overcomes your fears and you venture to educate people whose breath is hate-tinged and makes you ill. But you usually can’t hold your head up that high that long because you’re afraid they’ll find out what you really are: a cowardly piecemeal thing made of masks that aren’t even yours to put on.
*
Remember the lessons from when you were young.
How to neatly fold yourself up, like the still-warm ironed handkerchief pinned firmly to the front of your below-the-knee frock. Prominently displayed so everyone would know you had it, but it wouldn’t be used and wouldn’t get lost. At some point, you might learn to rip the pins and then you’re sneaking out—every part rubbed clean, so much deodorant it’s staining your skin and bleaching your tight jeans—to meet a boy with a name ripped straight from the Bible.
You don’t look at his name now, ashamed to bring him to life where he sleeps whisper-deep in your psyche where you rolled your thighs over his, trying out moves that were meant to cause sparks and burn whole worlds down. Trapped in a memory where you perched with your fuse unlit, fingers wet from desperate spit, with his teeth marking purple wedges in your arm and demands of, let me in/let me in/just the tip/fuck/fuck/fuck.
In the after where you didn’t gasp and gush, he suddenly remembered where his name came from. Even though he’d never thought of his faith before, not when he smoked joints on the sides of roads and threatened to drive a blade through someone’s palm, never once was that book or its contents mentioned until his hand had reached inside your clothes—touched places you hadn’t thought to touch before—and found it was nothing like what he’d been told. He felt cheated because it seemed you were still just a handkerchief, neatly ironed and folded up. And you think, and think, and think of how it must seem such an ordinary thing to him now—if he even thinks of your shared past at all—of how he touched you and never spoke to you again until the next time his cock was hard.
But sometimes, when you can’t control your dreams, you go back there to when your knees creaked as you knelt in the stairwell—church bells in the air and the smell of dampened body spray—listening to the apartments in the building prepare for dinner the way households do, with the clink clank of cutlery and whistles from pressure cookers that announced they’re done, and he whispered yes and I’m going to come and you stayed there on your knees swallowing hard and thinking how you needed to make some noises too so he wouldn’t have more proof that something about you was off. You’d read so much of violent things, big passions with the words drenched in vivid pelvic thrusting aches just so you could fake it when it’d count. Because passion was meant to be wild. Everyone said that it was the thing that would make you come truly alive. And he seemed to agree, making sounds like he was so filled with life he might have to take a break and have a little die.
But the truth is you felt none of that when you were touched. Because you were, and are, just a queer little thing—your bones all come with stripes of black-grey-white/purple-blue-pink—and it scared you so much because you’d been taught your worth lies in people’s lusty eyes. And if you could not offer that delicious want why would anyone care to keep you around?
So you tried to put on a good show then and every time that came next. Afraid because although you loved them all, whatever switch made you wet at the thought of sex, any sex, seemed permanently switched off. But you didn’t know. Not then, and not for years to come. It took you so much time to realise that you don’t feel those feelings at all.
*
Take a good hard look at yourself from time to time.
Once you were enamoured with the idea of being your own. Instead, you are a mirror now. A little dull, some parts blurred, a bit fucked-up but you still work. Can still show them exactly who they are, and so they look close to see a little piece of their well-shaped brow, that darkly bolded eye, that mole that flutters in the crevice above their neck—no, the other side—and they’re satisfied and think: yes, enough. Because it doesn’t really matter how dull you look, just that you hold still and show people the bits of themselves they want to show off.
*
Don’t forget those other lessons that were special to those of you they thought were girls.
When you were young you hated compromise, resisted it so much, and it led to more than one civil war. You’d listen to it all—never-ending sermons on your shamelessness and lack of respect—and bathe your hot cheeks in thick tears but then continue to resist. And when you were a teenager, your mother said one day: maybe just pretend for a bit. It was too much, she warned, too much. If you kept shouting and shouting, one day you may not have a throat to shout from—
but you’d cared about everything, everything, everything once / would cry for hours when you saw a skeletal dog on the road, until they kept blinding you so you would stop trying to look around / not be distracted by what was going on /you can’t be sad when you need to get tough / world eats soft heart / until you could no longer see the starving thing begging for a rupee, chest a sunken curl as though their bones had given up—elbows like a worn doorknob’s end—the way your friend’s father sank venom into his wife and kids—that is family business, no interfering—or the dog skin digging in the bin
—so, you said okay and choked the first time and then you choked again until suddenly you were 24 and dating a boy and listening to his friends joke about women and sandwiches in kitchens and you laughed instead of unscrewing your simpering smile and telling them all to go fuck themselves.
*
Stay up to date on the headlines.
- Transport costs at all-time high, but trains rarely on time:
- Girls asking for trouble if they study in libraries at night:
- WFH to be phased out as managers worry about deadlines:
- Inflation rates see 6.9% rise:
- Major publishing house moves hundreds of jobs to AI:
- International students taking jobs from citizens, leaving them high and dry:
- How to save enough to work only two jobs and live your best life:
Then go incognito, load Pornhub and try to get to that elusive place where they say you can take a little break from living a lie.
*
Communicate about the important stuff.
You married the boy you were dating at 24 because he is kind, is working to understand the world, and has learned to tell better jokes with time. And after a few years together he whispers, do you ever just feel unreal? one night.
And you think of how nothing has ever felt real at all. How you’ve spent your entire life pushing a button to live and thinking if you fast-forward quickly enough, you’ll eventually find the good part. Because your life has begun to seem like a jigsaw jumble where you’re trying to fit everything just right and each time two pieces connect you have an overwhelming hope that this is it, and you’ll finally be fine.
But instead you’re back where you hit the remote to escape go flipflipflip between Netflix and Disney + and Binge and you stare at images moving and can see yourself somewhere lurking in the dark mirror just underneath and you think of that violent fling on the beachfront that you’ll never get to have because you’re past 20 now and at closer to 35 stuff like that is just supposed to be sad. Besides you don’t even like to be touched and kissed but this is a fantasy babe and you don’t need facts to ruin it and it’s okay to hallucinate in your secret heart as you sit with the person you married on the couch and they sneeze so loud it startles the dog you’ll get once you sort this adulting thing out. And you say bless you automatically as you keep playing that fantasy in your head of what it must feel like to have sand in your toes because you don’t fucking care enough to put on shoes and you’re thinking of swooning in someone’s arms and you’re thinking there’s probably someone out there in a Technicolor life surrounded by characters that say Technicolor things around cigarettes clutched in their perfectly-drawn lips who sip wine and sparkling water all day and know what it is to scream in more than fear and rage and frustration and pain and when they laugh they feel light and the sun always shines on them even when it rains.
But saying all that will bring up more things that will need to be said, so you shrug and say only, maybe you’re tired and need a little bit of self-care.
*
Acknowledge your imperfections.
Perfect, you say, because you’ve got the self-bashing down to an art. After all, you’re just a messy thing held together by escapism, tears, and Taylor Swift. You spend a lot of energy surviving days where nothing has gone wrong, clutching desperately at delicate words about walking through doors and old cardigans on bedroom floors just to make it through the clock.
It's such basic bitch behaviour that you lecture yourself sometimes. You pull up mental images of your privileged self, crying bitterly in a bed with a blanket wrapped snug around your chest, when there are people who are starving, who are cold, who do not have the time/the energy/the privilege to feel for themselves. You remind yourself of how lucky you are to be born when you are, when you come from a place where women were once burned on their husbands’ funeral pyres because your culture claimed it was God’s will that a woman was born to die for a man.
You tell yourself to think of that woman who shares your blood, the one who wasn’t lucky enough to be born in the right era. She’s a statue now made of crumbling stone—lives in a little rundown temple near your baba’s village even though she belongs to your mother’s home—
and your mother and aunties sometimes go to her with their marital woes. And you think of how a goddess is just a woman who was forced to endure far too much, and you lie in your darkened bed thinking of your mother and your aunties and of how you are all linked together by this singed goddess-blood, and you shy away from the thought of what they would think—all these women who seem like goddesses to you—of the fact that sometimes you feel so sad you can’t bring yourself to leave your room.
*
Accept yourself for who and what you are.
Sometimes you reach out to touch your reality and see if you can finally befriend it. Stroke its wet snout, graze rough bone under your palm. It pants in response because it is here, starved for your attention, but you can't bring yourself to unchain it in case there’s another reality somewhere that would save you from the quicksand drown of this one. But you have to remember that you are too brown, too middle class, too third world to be another Plath-reading melancholic cliche waiting for the right fig to drop.
What would your family say if they could see what you do with this chance they gave you? If they could see how you sit in your room a world away, holding their expectations and the sacrifices they made in those points in your shoulders and your nape, tapping away at keys and pretending to be working hard? Your mother’s mother hasn’t even forgiven you for having the audacity to abandon home because you fell in love with her colonizer’s tongue.
*
Keep healthy in both body and mind.
Your mind keeps you company all the time, even in the shower stall you’ve never cleaned since you moved in. Your mind is there for you every day, holding on as you build forts with garbage bags because you’re exhausted from just forcing yourself to find something to eat and sometimes you can’t stop and so you eatandeatandeat and the smell from those meals lives in the bags you never threw away. Your mind holds your hand in this world you’ve made, always seasoned with white noise from a TV show because you can’t face anything— mirror/yourself/the phone/their voice/his eyes. Because you’re living on the edges of something you can’t explain, a facade that you try to clean up and stage just right—so no one will ever guess just how broken jagged unsafe things are—turn all the lights on BrightBright to blind them when they get too close and try to peer inside.
But you are training to be an adult—take responsibility, remember? refer back to point one— so you’ll go to therapy because that’s what everyone says you’re supposed to do. But you’ll feel like a hypocrite sitting in your therapist’s room, watching her sympathetic smile as you show her a sliver of your mess and she says how sorry she is. And even as you keep talking and she keeps being kind, you’ll think: I am a fraud.
Because if you were really so bad off maybe you wouldn’t have been able to tell her any of this at all, sitting here—
with an account that not enough money comes into but which is at least enough to put some food in your fridge every month / a partner who accepts you as you are and doesn’t try to push into you at every chance and respects your sexuality and your lack of lust / a family that cares enough about your unattainable dreams to gamble a lifetime’s savings to give you your best chance / a body that is a little big and gets catcalled a bit but still fits into what the world allows to exist and so is some version of safe
—taking up her time when there are people who actually need help, and here you are, explaining about TikToks about depression, anxiety, mental fatigue and how you seem to fit the list.
And you’ll guiltily think of how you can see yourself writing about this someday, spitting it onto a page to try to make it make sense and then showing the world what it says—as if showing people you will never know the inside of your brain will mean you are here and you are alive and worthwhile—pretending that dumping out all this poisonous stuff is art, some New-Age Literariness, Kafkaesque Neoliberalist shit. As if you know what any of that is.
So you’ll try again to be responsible and honest and communicative like the adult you are attempting to become, try not to wince as you think of the bill you’ll be paying out of pocket for this hour, and you’ll apologise for wasting her time and say, I think I’m just being silly and nothing’s really wrong.
And she’ll say, don’t beat yourself up so much
And she’ll say, asking for help is not a flaw
And she’ll say, I’ll see you next time because that’s all the time we have for now.
***
This is amazing. And draining to read. And probably draining to write. I don’t know what to do with it, perhaps to share it, perhaps to internalize it, perhaps to write my own like it.
I am in awe of this writing. I have nothing in common with her. No shared identity or life experiences that match up and yet I was riveted, feeling everything lined up. As if she unlocked my brain-all brains?-, peaked inside and used those colonizing words to describe the workings perfectly.