Trusting My Judgement Again: Thanks Meena Kandasamy & The Rookie
A police drama. A feminist novel. Both markers in my journey to trusting my judgement again.
After I escaped a relationship that shrunk me (physically, healthwise as well as mentally), I found it difficult to trust my ability to discern. I had already spent years pushing against glass ceilings before I had barely started my career as well as a decade of non-physical violence from other women about how I presented physically and how I interacted with other people. It was extra hard because I was a 23 year old Indian woman, starting my career in a post 9/11 world. I survived. People around me resented it because they thought I deserved it and should have learnt my lesson.
And then it happened again. This time with someone who checked off all the boxes for a good choice. Pedigreed education, vocally liberal politics, the right blend of corporate success and artistic inclinations. It was devastating, not just because of the abuse but also because of how mundane it was. He was just like any other Indian man and it was that easy for him to fool me, supposedly a highly intelligent woman who had already experienced abuse & violation in a previous relationship. This time, the people around me put me on a pedestal. Social mores had changed so it was now more cool to applaud female strength than to deride it.
For a decade, I was afraid of anger – not just other people’s but my own. I had been taught that it would be punished because female rage is a sign that things are very wrong and the woman knows it. It also shows that she believes that she deserves better. And that makes everyone around very uncomfortable, whether it’s 2003 or 2012.
Hearing The Unequal Music with Meena Kandasamy
I was granted respite between the pages of When I Hit You, the semi-autobiographical debut novel of Meena Kandasamy, a radical caste-sensitive feminist. A good friend gave it to me telling me that I would like it and he was right. Meena talks about marrying a man who shares her politics and then being raped, cut off from technology and the rest of the world….and escaping.
It was the first time that I realised that I did not anymore need the world to believe what I had endured because one other person knew that what I had faced was true. That such things happened. Never again would the underlying disbelief in “I never thought something like this would happen to you” diminish me. If anything, statements like “You’re supposed to be a strong woman. How did you let this happen?” now tell me everything that I need to know about the speaker. Their cowardice and their selfishness.
A few years later, I felt my heart break when I discovered that Meena Kandasamy follows my abusive ex on social media. I am quite certain that she doesn’t know about his history with me – he has made the merest of efforts to deny it and the world has happily jumped in to believe him. I’m also sure it’s because he has pivoted from his performative feminism to performative caste activism. Still, my reactions are emotional and I felt personally betrayed. She does not know me at all and does not owe me anything for my heroine worship of her. And yet.
Finding Solidarity with The Rookie
I was watching an episode of The Rookie right now. In it, a young female police officer gets attacked after a first date with someone who turns out to be a serial killer. After she survives and returns, another female police officer contextualises to the well-meaning men around that what the woman needs is something else. She tells her young colleague,
“I have never gone on a date with a serial killer and you have. And that would make anyone question their judgement.
The Rookie, Season 2, episode 12 ‘Then and Now’
You can never truly know that you are fine until you can trust your judgement again.”
I am finding this scene incredibly powerful. It is not about another person experiencing the exact same beats of a bad situation as you have. It is about another person (anyone and even only for a short while) holding for you a belief that you are on a journey where sometimes you will stumble because you missed a step but that given time, you will re-stabilise. It’s that crucial moment when you are awash in disorientation when someone else holding you briefly can help you regain your balance again.
Some times (like in the scene) that is a colleague who stays within professional boundaries but creates a space for you to recover your balance. Some times it’s a friend who gives you a book that speaks to your experience better than they could because it is an incredibly sensitive, unselfish thing to do. Some times it’s someone who doesn’t even know you, sharing their experience which serves as a mirror for you, telling you that you aren’t imagining it even if the world abandons you and blames you for it.
The people in this do not matter, it’s the experience of being held that they create for you consciously or otherwise and in a way that takes their personal egos out of the equation. The ones who put me on a pedestal after each of my experiences were not doing this. They were throwing coins of fear-charity at me, trying to reduce me to something their petty brains could handle – a victim. Victims turn into symbols for other people to hijack for their own selfish needs. I refused and I still refuse.
I know that this happens because witnessing a person includes the willingness to hold them in the minutes that they stumble. It’s hard and it’s scary because it is also a gateway into toxic dependency. That’s okay. That behaviour is not me and I don’t anymore begrudge people their inability to realise that. They don’t trust their judgement.
Trusting My Judgement Again
This comes on the heels of a stint at the hospital for someone else. Hospitals remind you that completely solitary strength is a myth. We all need help and support at all times. I know that I will stumble again because that is the nature of movement. And if the people I trust don’t show up for me, I will find support in inanimate things and ideas again. That is what it means to trust one’s judgement.
Last month also marked the death anniversary of someone I called bestie as well as of his birthday. This was his last tweet. I miss you, JD.
I also realised today that my judgement has gotten better, even if I don’t trust it. I see men making pedophilia jokes in a conversation about body-shaming and I see their weakness. I see community managers who shut me down for being ‘too feminist’ and I see their fear. Most of all, I know now that I do not need to indulge it. They do not owe me strength and I do not owe them babysitting. That’s a good place to embrace my trust in myself.
Wow, that was a lot to process and at some point it got too much for me to handle reading. Hope you don’t mind me skipping a bit as I found it triggering in a sense. I am glad you’ve gotten the past out of your way and have healed enough to write about it. If I was in your place I’m not sure I would have. I used to be pretty proud of my own attitude to relationships and judgement, as I was under the impression it has worked well for me. I have now come to see the concept of “judgement” far more clearly now – judgement is basically mental shorthand for taking in all the conscious and subconscious input, filtering them through our past experiences, biases and who knows what else, and coming to a conclusion. And yes, I think I fail in terms of judgement in an almost-daily basis. I used to simply ignore my lapses in judgement but now the impact has become too large to ignore. Life goes on though and I now view my path as making the best of my abilities and circumstances as opposed to an idealistic “search for the best way to live”. We live, we learn! *hugs*
@krist0ph3r: ‘Judgement as mental shorthand’ is a great way to look at it. It’s narrow to think of judgementalism as a bad thing. I think we’re constantly course-correcting. And no, I don’t mind your skipping ahead. Mental health first and I want to be able to trust that my readers are responsible enough to navigate my blog as they find best for themselves.