This Body of Work

Audio of the author reading this piece

I may have had more career paths than romantic partners. I started college a film major, added a history second major, did a masters in anthropology, most of a Ph.D., worked in advertising, started a non-profit, became a consultant, worked in philanthropy, and in between all that I started a food pop-up, a bakery, a copy editing co-op, and took on endless freelancing jobs.

Part of why I’ve been even vaguely successful at most of these things is because I’ve only taken three actual vacations in the last 15 years. This horrible, creeping, ‘overachieving work ethic’ has stuck with me — guilt-tripping my Saturdays with friends, and driving me off my evenings on the couch. Three years ago, I realized that I was working at an unsustainable pace — I woke up and set to work and for the next 12 hours I would not get up from my computer, no food, no water, not even a bathroom break. I was consumed. I worked until the sun went down and I didn’t even notice. I did this for days, months, years. I had no concept of a weekend, and the closest thing I had to a vacation was flying home for Thanksgiving, only to make the entire Thanksgiving meal. I would get off a 20+ hour flight and go straight to the grocery store to prepare. That was my vacation because my value is in my work — professionally and personally — though at this point, there is no distinction between the two.

Why am I so invested, why does work need all of me?

My identity is partially my job, or jobs. It’s not that I self-identify as someone who is always looking for new challenges and creative outputs — I would actually contend that I don’t self-identify as naturally driven at all. My skin color, my name, my gender all mark my value and my work. If I do a bad job, it suddenly means South Asians, women, brown women, they all do a bad job. That creates a knot of work, creativity, race, tradition, white supremacy, and capitalism in everything I do — and I keep trying to paint over that knot with a thick, glossy, coat of overachievement.

What does it mean for my job to be such a part of me? Can I trust then, that the awards or accolades have been for my work? Have the criticisms been valid or because I don’t act like the right type of South Asian? Even those with the best of intentions ask about my race, culture, and ancestry — what do my parents think of my job, there aren’t many Asian Americans in that field, why don’t I try to work within a very specific small niche South Asian organization that is only tangentially related to what I do because us being South Asian is more of a connector than the actual work. With the world looking at my major value as my race, gender, and ethnicity, then all my work only exists through the lens of my South Asianness, or my womaness.

Back in film school, while the majority white men in my department made thrillers, quirky comedies, and abstract short films without anyone asking them how their whiteness informed their work, I was encouraged only to mine my ethnic heritage. No one wanted my inner emotional life, they wanted some child of immigrants narrative. It was not lost on me that I got praise when my work seemed “exotic” — exploring my brownness or my otherness.

In my senior year of college, when given an opportunity to make MY movie, I struggled with what to do — I knew my brownness was expected to be on display, but my creative self had nothing to give on that front. The stress of my professors’ expectation vs. my reality ended with a major emotional breakdown, culminating with me (an Ex-Hindu atheist) sobbing in a Catholic church halfway across the world. I finally made a film, a documentary on Brown artists in North America. It was by no means what I wanted to do, nor was it the film that my professors wanted from me — too little trauma for their taste, and too focused on my ethnicity for my comfort. I had been handpicked for this program, and I failed to deliver — not technically, I just failed to deliver their version of my brown identity. I never went back to filmmaking.

Set adrift, I decided to do a Masters and then a Ph.D. in Anthropology. As a graduate student, I had to answer why I was interested in my fieldsite — I was labeled a “native anthropologist” for being a brown woman studying a brown community, even though it was a completely different country from where I was born and raised. No one asked the Swedish couple in my department why they were so invested in Egyptian market sellers. No one was at all worried by the tall, white, Canadian woman researching beauty in Beirut, who came back with stories of being complimented and envied for her fair skin and light eyes. No one else’s identity mattered for the job they were doing except for myself and the handful of other outwardly presenting BIPOC students. We had to write chapters on how our non-whiteness created subjectivity and bias in our research — biases that didn’t exist for our white colleagues.

My Ph.D. supervisor, a South-Asian-British woman, had only one major writing output during my time there — an article that basically proclaimed “I’m not like other immigrants”. She wrote about how un-Indian her parents were, how they were ‘civilized’ and educated and hobnobbed with (mostly white) creatives, musicians, and thinkers. She too studied “her community”, and in order to do so, she needed to separate herself as much a possible. She knew this secret — the only way she would be allowed to participate in academia was to distance herself enough to claim no knowledge, so that despite the outward markers of her “exoticness” and her “otherness”, she would not need to fall into the trap built for anthropologists of color — explaining our identities in such detail as to create our own “bias” and render ourselves un-objective and un-academic.

This is the opposite for so many of my white colleagues. They pepper their language with slang and non-English words they learned in their field sites, they wear accessories and clothing from those spaces, trying to prove to the world how much of an “insider” they are. The harem pants and “Habibi”s worked for my white peers. Just enough of an air of exoticism as to imply that they felt comfortable outside of North American and European spaces and that they had had enough conversations with Black and Brown people to make them experts in the region. Somehow these Brown and Black people could never be the experts themselves, it was only when distilled through a white lens could this knowledge be academic. The anthropology department had no faculty or peers from the Global South — the ones who looked it were like me: Black and Brown people born and raised in North America or the UK. We all understood these traps laid out and yet invisible to our non-melanated peers — some pushed each other in those traps, and the rest of us tried to gingerly sidestep them.

My work is embedded onto me. My body is of work. I was the something to be studied, not the one who does the studying. This placed me in a classic double-bind: If I was the work I was doing, then how could I not embody my work? How could I put any miles between myself and my work, if every thought, desire, and creative spasm I had was a lens through which my work was framed and was the work itself?

Nowadays I am recruited by companies for my ‘diversity’, and I am on lists of BIPOC consultants that white organizations reach out to in order to say they got bids from BIPOC consultants before moving forward with a White consultant. That diversity of experience I bring — one that I need to bring, unemotionally, to each and every scenario, to be opened and mined whenever it is needed or wanted by white leaders — is never worth any financial compensation. I have a decade of communication experience and a lifetime of understanding social and racial injustice, but I can’t use the latter when negotiating pay. In fact, it’s not something I get agency of when I am in the workplace. It’s not mine to decide how and when to utilize it — it’s just something that exists at all times, hanging over me, and like I am merely the chaperone of this identity, holding it for others to use at their luxury.

And so, the work became my identity because my identity is the lens through which the world sees my work. I have to do the job, be good at it, and justify why I even want to do it. It becomes a full-time job. If who I am is so integral to the work, then the work must be integral to my personhood. What I thought, felt, believed, liked — it all had to be present in my work. Every decision is made 10 times harder and every setback or rejection is a reflection of my personal worth. I was my work, I still am. I don’t know how to untangle this knot, this body of work, I don’t have the language or skillset or distance to un-embody the work that has been sewn into my skin and hands and smile. But I do take my dog on walks these days, relishing my time alone with this furry chaos-machine who cares more about her treats than my brownness, working on feeling grounded, untangling that knot, and confident that I’ll strike the right balance one of these days.