Eshani (22)

“I don’t want to be shitty. My whole life goal is to not be shitty.”

Eshani Dixit, 22, sat on a couch in her off campus New Brunswick house, her legs tucked beneath her, her phone half hidden under a placemat that was left on the living room coffee table that frequently doubles as a dining room table. Despite the house’s charm, it lacks a kitchen table. Eshani and her roommates named the off campus oasis “The Friend Zone.”

Eshani considers herself as a feminist, though she recognizes that there are caveats to the label. “I have weird problems with the word feminist,” she said, “[but] I think I’d identify as a feminist despite the fact that I want to also acknowledge its weird problematic history.”

Eshani’s passion for social equality took hold at a young age, though it wasn’t for quite such a noble reason. “Honestly,” she admitted, “I really wanted to skip gym class.”

Eshani attended public high school in South Brunswick, New Jersey where she became a public health advocate during her senior year. Her school provided an option for seniors to join different peer mentoring programs in lieu of taking gym class, one of which was a program on sexuality. The program HITOPS, which stands for Health Interested Teens’ Own Program on Sexuality, allowed seniors to take seminars on different sexual health topics, the content of which they would then teach to the underclassmen.

“I mean, obviously I wanted to get out of gym,” Eshani admitted, “but I really liked the content, and I think even before that, I had always kind of been the weird kid who was really interested in sex ed.”

Eshani also pinpoints her senior year of high school as the time when she started gaining an interest in politics. “I was a ‘Democrat’ for a really long time,” she said with a self-conscious laugh, putting the term “Democrat” in air quotes. “I think [it was] at that time I decided that I wanted to do political science and that was what I was interested in.”

“For a long time I was like, ‘I’m definitely going to get a professional degree. I’m either going to go to law school or I’m going to go to medical school’ which, in hindsight, [was] a horrible dichotomy to set up for myself,” Eshani said.

Now, Eshani is a senior at Rutgers University in New Brunswick studying Political Science in the School of Arts and Science Honors Program. As part of the Honors Program, she decided to take on a social action project as her capstone requirement for graduation. For her project, Eshani put on a play called “One in Three.”

The play “is about abortion storytelling and basically focuses on broadcasting the voices of people who have had abortions in a neutral setting,” Eshani said.

“It’s kind of like taking away this policy, pro-choice, pro-life rhetoric that we hear a lot,” she added. “I think [public policy] really removes the agency of the people who this is most relevant to. The discussion around policy doesn’t center the voices of people who are having abortions, which is the most important population. Those are the people we should be listening to.”

“I was born and grew up [in America] and I probably don’t culturally ‘get’ living in India or what that is like, but it sometimes feels like I’m missing something that doesn’t exist. Being the child of immigrants and being a child of diaspora, I’m constantly yearning for something but I don’t even know if that thing is just a mythical object that I made up in my head.”

Over the past four years, fighting for reproductive justice became one of Eshani’s passions, so much so that she believes it has become a strong part of her identity along with being South Asian.

“Obviously, it’s hard because a lot of identity politics spaces can be very insular, not making room for intersections,” she said. “I see this a lot actually.”

“If I go into a reproductive health space, there’s not very many South Asians. Or if I go into a South Asian space, there’s not a lot of discussion about reproductive health,” Eshani said. “So it’s like, where can I bring these two things together that I care about so deeply? I’ve been in a couple of spaces like that; that’s been really refreshing and really eye-opening, but they’re really few and far between.”

“I was born and grew up [in America] and I probably don’t culturally ‘get’ living in India or what that is like, but it sometimes feels like I’m missing something that doesn’t exist,” Eshani said. “Being the child of immigrants and being a child of diaspora, I’m constantly yearning for something but I don’t even know if that thing is just a mythical object that I made up in my head. I feel like I’m missing an experience that doesn’t exist in the outside world. But I feel like, also, maybe that does exist. and I just don’t know it.”

Eshani is so passionate about abortion rights that she is now considering, in the last year of her undergraduate journey, of becoming an OBGYN for the sole purpose of providing abortions.

“Over the summer, I was in the shower and I thought what if I decided to apply to medical school? I went through all the different possibilities in my brain of the ways I could do that and fulfill all the requirements that I need. I came up with a very detailed plan in my brain while I was super anxious about it in the shower. And I got out of the shower and was like ‘What the fuck was I thinking?’”

Last summer, the same summer of the Anxiety Ridden Shower, Eshani was working for Planned Parenthood in New York City. Witnessing the culture war up close was a surreal experience for her.

“I had to pass the clinic every day to get to work and I thought about all of the people who worked there and all of the effort and time they were putting in to make sure the people got the health care that they needed,” she said. “That was really eye-opening for me; that people could still continue to work there and do amazing things for people.”

The bravery of OBGYN’s who provide abortions was not the only thing that attracted Eshani to the field. As an individual who constantly wants to effect change, Eshani worries about the slow nature of public policy creation. “I got scared that that’s something that might burn me out,” she said. With direct service “I can deliver real, tangible results within seconds. Being able to write someone a prescription takes 30 seconds, and you’ve already changed someone’s life for the better.”

“I don’t want to be shitty. My whole life goal is to not be shitty.”

It seemed to Eshani that fate was pushing her closer toward medical school when she came across an XOJane article written by someone who did exactly what she contemplated doing in her panic-stricken shower. On top of the Internet sending her signs, her cousin, who is in the second year of his medical residency, encouraged her that same summer to pursue her MD.

Despite the loftiness of her new goal, Eshani knows she must remain realistic while attempting to achieve it. “It’s not feasible for me to apply to medical school immediately,” she said. “I’d have to wait a couple of years because I need to get all of my prerequisites done. I probably won’t be able to apply until 2018. It’s scary knowing that I’m probably still going to be a resident when I’m 30.”

As far as her overarching philosophy, Eshani keeps it pretty simple. “I don’t want to be shitty,” she said. “My whole life goal is to not be shitty.”