5. On Self-Made Geometries, or Relationship Norms

Being home for the week usually has me thinking about change. Maybe it’s going through High School yearbooks, seeing my old Ninja Turtles in a bin, or stacks of my favorite books against the wall. Quite a bit has changed since then, while some things haven’t changed at all: the crispiness of Amma’s okra curry; the way Appa thumbs open the pages of a magazine he’s reading; the scent of sandalwood incense and coffee in the mornings.

I’ve been thinking about change more, particularly around relationship norms. Relationship norms here have to do with the set of automatic protocols we’ve cemented, a set of heuristics that we’ve coded in our interpersonal interactions.

These norms are set in relationships early on. If you’ve been quiet your whole life and begin to speak up, this will tend to confound friends and family. If you were the class clown, doing a Ph.D. in Philosophy would do the same. Often, others will not be able to comprehend colossal change. This is one reason meeting new people, making new friends is often exciting. It gives us a chance to reinvent ourselves.

Photo by Berk Ozdemir

People tend to create stories in their minds about us: “They’re like this, they’re like that.” Perceptions that veer from their expectations are alarming. It may be less so that they push back explicitly, but rather they push back in opaque ways, internal ways. Their story of you is being challenged, and there’s a skepticism that hangs in the air, one impossible to ignore. It forms a well of gravity that we’re always tracing, a kind of black hole that is somehow supposed to define who we are.

Perhaps there's a degree of accuracy to these stories. So, we end up burdened by these histories, and no matter how small they are, we’re like barely pliable plastic. If we bend and twist, we’re still a product of our self-made geometries.

Often, it’s simply easier to settle on those stories. There’s a kind of comfortable familiarity to their rustling static. Familiarity and skepticism can intertwine, generating that massive gravitational pull against our attempts.

Great change requires great patience on our part, accepting that even if we attempt to work to be our best selves, others will ignore it, that their assumptions of us will overshadow our new reality: “I know them. I’ve known them for years. There’s no way they would do this. There’s no way they would do that. That’s impossible. I know them.”

Someone might say, “just ignore the haters.” That’s easier said than done. The biggest “haters” might be those closest to us: parents, a spouse, kids, close friends. People with whom we want to maintain (and grow) our relationships.

In the end, it’s still worth it. There's certainly nothing wrong with change. For a handful of people, your changes will cause them to reflect on themselves. They’ll need to consider if they’re willing to update the story of you they’ve held closely for so long. In bad relationships, they won’t. In fact, we might lose some friends along the way.

In good relationships, they will, and our bonds with them will grow stronger.

Some publication news:

• I’m a little behind on announcing this, but my story “Jackson Heights” won the 17th Annual Gival Short Story Prize. The story follows a couple during a day in Jackson Heights, Queens. Judge A.J. Rodriguez had some very kind words to say about it:

“Jackson Heights is one of those stories that hands things over to the reader, saying ‘here, I’ve painted this intricate, tense, yet utterly beautiful portrait around two lovers swimming within different levels of a diaspora, embodying the disparities of privilege, and trying to make it work through it all; now it’s up to you, reader, to fill in the remainder of the picture, color your own pains and yearnings and remembrances into these characters; I’ve given you their griefs and misunderstandings, their desire and their history, so however you want to imagine the significance of these elements is what this story is about. Like all moving fiction, this story raises questions, questions about the intersections of love, of the bridges between culture, of the accessibility to one’s own identity, and, more concretely, what will become of these two lovers. But a definitive answer is not the point; the point is that those investigations lead us to a resonant emotional truth—something I think we all long for at the end of the day, especially these days. In that sense, Jackson Heights, succeeds, flourishes as a work of art, and above all, it is a pleasure to read.”

Press release: https://vikramramakrishnan.com/jackson-heights-press-release/

You can read the story here: https://www.givalpress.com/post/gival-press-short-story-award-winner-2020

Until next time.