Am I a Social Schizophreniac?

When academics say that growing up with a mixed cultural background is like having schizophrenia, I always thought the statement was a little dramatic. Over the past few years, I've begun to see their point.

I was raised as a Bengali, by immigrant parents. My mom, like many moms, strongly believed in socializing my sister and I. Until very recently, there was nothing that mortified my mother like a socially inappropriate blunder made by one of her children. Given that my mother is also kinda prude, I'm going to blame British imperialism for this one.

The thing is, my mom isn't exactly an anglophile. In fact, she has no respect for the British. She sums up her feelings about them by reminding me that, when they engaged in hand to hand combat with Hindus, they dipped their bayonets in cow fat and when the adversary was Muslim, pig fat. It wasn't enough to colonize or kill Indians, the British wanted to spiritually taint them for standing up for themselves. It is one thing to subject people to your rule and entirely another to poison them spiritually.

So,  I was socialized with a British value of socialization, and the rest of my home socialization is largely reflective of Bengali social practices, right? Wrong. I have always known Bengali social practice is highly influenced by Islamic social practice and the Islamic Empire (two separate sets of ideals) but I am still learning the extent to which colonialism had its hand in the mix. For example, there is a theory that the custom of female leadership and scholarship in Islam may have been lost in interactions with the Western world.


Until recently, I was able to maintain my Bengali socialization at home while socializing myself to school and work environments with simultaneous adeptness. By the time I visited Bangladesh and realized how Americanized I am, I had solidified my doubts over the value of my mother's social values in my own life. (Though my family was hardly lower middle class at it's social "peak," another value to which my mother ascribed,  that may have also come from India's days as England's crown jewel, as Jane Austen can tell you, was a reverence for the upper class.) However, I had also already gone away to college and realized that in my sheltered childhood, I had, ironically, failed to become American enough.


Though my mother's value of proper social behavior instilled in me a heightened awareness of social norms and a desire to shirk them, if need be, as quietly as possible, this happened at such a young age that socialization and social values are so deep for me that it's difficult for me to recognize anything more than a vague conception of them without very deep contemplation. When they are in flux,  I am divided between existential crisis and maintenance of my social status quo on top of being divided between the conflicting social values I encounter. On the other hand, only the instability I experience in it has lead me to realize that appropriate socialization is an integral part of me that allows me function normally.


So I suppose a lack of appropriate socialization, then, is a mental illness? I really need to read me some more Michel Foucault, apparently.

Gut Feelings

I just read an article about learning to be more intuitive. At first it seems counter-intuitive that you can learn intuition. I think this is because intuition has a connotation of being something that is ingrained. Something you either have or you don't have. Learning how to be intuitive rings of learning how to be smart. You either are smart or you aren't, right?

I vehemently disagree on both accounts. More later on the smarts.

Of course you can learn to be more intuitive. By the time people are teenagers, I believe they have had enough experiences in their lives that they can, by intuition, know a lot about most people and situations. The article I read suggests that, in order to be intuitive, you have "be in touch with yourself." It suggests meditation to achieve the inward stretch. Though I enjoy a good amount of yoga and love solitary, meditative activities, I believe there's more to intuition than occasionally slowing down to think.

Being intuitive, first of all, requires a lot of honesty. You cannot be intuitive by lying to yourself. In fact, a lot of times you can distinguish an intuition by asking yourself whether or not the feeling you are having feels like it's coming out of being honest with yourself. After all, if you are not honest with yourself, how do you know if you can trust yourself?

If you're going to be honest with yourself, sometimes you have to confront yourself. A lot of times, in the heat of passion, people feel or say things that they don't mean. After such a burst of anger, sadness, frustration or anxiety, they spend a lot of time convincing themselves that what they said of felt was the truth. Rather than listening to their intuitive side, which continuously posits that they were wrong, they find themselves continuously defensive against themselves.

There are ways that intuition can become muddled which make it difficult to decide if you can trust yourself. I think that being betrayed by someone you love results in a mistrust of yourself deep enough that finding your way back to inner focus can take a lot of healing time and patience. It doesn't hurt to find healing love, either. Just remember, if you try, you can trust yourself again.

Intuition is a powerful skill. It is not the kind of skill that has ever been taught in classrooms, and is probably one reason I eventually hated school. It is powerful enough that it must be used responsibly. It is inadvisable to challenge the limits of your intuition by continuously placing yourself in intuitively challenging situations, especially when your own emotions are involved. I say this from experience. But on this front, Susan King found a healthy outlet for her intuitive powers and I intend to find my own.