The taint of ‘not’ tags
Throughout my childhood every time I enthusiastically signed up for sports and dance something happened. Once my skirt lifted up in the middle of kho-kho match. Another time I broke my finger ligament giving everything i got on a volley-ball serve which didn’t reach the net. Legit one time when I was little I got caught in the chain of madly running boys and was dragged unintentionally across the ground while other kids cheered my bravado to roughhouse with the boys. For the longest time I made a complete fool of myself , but was unaffected and still signed up for sports and dance teams in my school. Every year I say to myself, this is going to be the year you are going to make it in the audition.
As I grew up , unfortunately the sense of shame and bullying increased and my defence mechanism started to kick in. I called in sick on sports days, immersed myself in books during PT hours, skipped dance auditions. I started exploring other avenues, and got better at things that naturally came to me and people started looking me beyond the clumsy mess I was at the playground. Days passed and my excuses became more elegant. ‘I am not athletic type’ ‘. With this tag I wrapped up my old sports shoes along with all the childhood horrors behind and escaped from most of the just-one-game offers and dance workshop passes. College was a disney land full of geeks and I never had to bat an eye about sports and used the same two moves when anyone pushed me to dance. World was good except for the sudden panic when someone throws a pen at me and expects me to catch.
My small happy bubble was burst when I moved to bangalore. My friends who thrived on diet of pizza and noodles in college suddenly stocked up green tea and organic cereals. Everyone signed up for some fitness class. People started to play badminton every weekend. They had weekly playoffs, monthly tournaments, clubs within office. There are only so many innovative excuses you can come up with to avoid these over enthusiastic badminton groups. My roommate gave me a glorious pep talk to pick something else up and one fine morning I found myself in sports shoes heading to a dance class that I dreaded throughout my childhood. This time around it was different. I gave nervous nods to people around and stood in front of mirror. As the music kicked in what I noticed was, nobody was looking at me. Nobody was noticing my skirt. Nobody made fun of my legs. I am an adult who has payed a good amount of money to deserve the respect despite my hand-eye co-ordination. This whole idea liberated me finally. In a world that is growing increasingly impatient with our smallest mistakes, where one missed deadline, one failed test-case, one wrong conversation could put you through so much trouble and criticism , I have a space where I could make mistakes and it wouldn’t cost me.
Behind every tag we defined ourselves growing up — not athletic, not bookish, not romantic, not a people’s person and what not, there is an untold story of rejections, insults and failures that we chose to hide. May be we can loosen our grip on the obsession to be the best in everything and revisit the list of all the not tags with which we annotate our personality. My friend, who claims to be not a big-words type, wrote me the best birthday note during college. My designer friend the other day was helping me to solve a puzzle. She essentially called herself right-brained throughout the high school maths phase.
Im not going to say that you are going to be exceptional when you take up everything you left behind now. You can still continue to suck. And you might find that acceptance and laugh it off. Or the tiniest progress you make might boost your ego and heal the torment you put yourself under once. Either way it wont kill you as it once did. In my story, I still come up with creative excuses if you ask me for weekend badminton, the ball I throw might still not reach your hand or anywhere within four square meter, but as I finished dancing my favourite song and looked in the mirror, I saw a little girl who never got to wear frock and flaunt in the stage, beaming with pride.
