What does culture mean to you?
As a child of immigrants who's lived in three countries and five states, I grew up encountering more cultures during my childhood than some do in their lifetime.
I would consider the first chapter of my life to be the time I spent in India, when I’d get my knuckles regularly slapped with a ruler for acting out and would get made fun of by my peers for not knowing a drop of English. I would be in a sea of faces similar to mine, creating a sense of warmth and comfort I would never feel again other than the few times in the future I would return to visit the country.
The next chapter would be Singapore, where I’d start to learn my fourth language at the age of 7 and experience a diversity like never before - this was a different sense of comfort, perhaps rooted in acceptance rather than familiarity.
The next chapter would be when I arrived in America, but I would consider my time in America to be two separate chapters. The first chapter would tell a tale of feeling out of place accompanied by an incredible sense of confusion. I arrived to America as a child with multiple identities and cultures that didn’t quite fit into any particular mold. I entered my teenage years and experienced high school with the same cultural confusion.
It quickly turned into a dark period of time for me; I didn’t know who the hell I was or what I was doing here. I didn’t know why I hadn’t ‘assimilated’ and why the American culture was so hard for me to decode.
And this is where my fourth and final chapter begins. I now consider myself to be a creative, confident, and accomplished young adult living in a beautiful city.
The thing is, I wouldn’t be able to get to my happy ending if it weren’t for the chapters that preceded it. By experiencing the plethora of cultures that I did during my early years, I learned how to embrace and appreciate different cultures. By not fitting in, I recognized the beauty of being different and following the untraditional route. With the confusion that came with not being able to understand the rules of a culture came the beautiful insight that this exact belief was what didn’t allow me to understand who and where I was.
Cultures don’t have rules. Cultures are forever evolving and contorting. A culture uses its fluidity to embrace things, ideas, and the people that don’t quite fit in and welcomes them inside to create a more intricate, complex, elaborate version of itself. An elaborate culture is the best culture.
I was one of those people. When I realized that the only way I could feel at peace would be simply believe in myself, my ideas, and my story, I knew I had to shed the doubt and fear of being different that I had instilled in myself through years of feeling out of place. I realized that culture isn’t something you decode, but something that you make your own.