Take Yourself Home

On Indian girlhood, therapy-speak, and the right to leave before your body forces you to.

When we were younger, my parents had a rule for outings. If any of us cried, screamed, threw a tantrum, or generally fell apart in public, we all went home. The car keys came out, the four of us got in, and we left. Whatever it was, a movie we’d queued for, a dinner someone had cooked all afternoon for, the house of an aunt we’d driven an hour to reach, a restaurant we were excited to go to (with McDonald’s being the big daddy!), it got abandoned without ceremony.

We went home, the meltdown got handled or it didn’t, and we tried again another day, or we didn’t. The logic was simple. If a child can’t handle being out, the child should not be out.

It took me a long time to register how unusual this was. Most Indian children I knew were taught the opposite of this rule. You stop crying because Aunty is here. You smile because the photo is being taken. You don’t make a face at the food because the host is watching. You sit through the long evening because we are not the sort of family that leaves early. You behave because behaving is what good girls do. The whole vocabulary of Indian girlhood is the vocabulary of staying. Adjust. Compromise. Don’t make a scene. Sit nicely. Smile through it.

My parents, for whatever reason, opted out of this. They had decided that the plans could wait, but that a four-year-old having a hard time was not something to wait through. I don’t remember a single instance of being told later that I had ruined an evening. I don’t remember being asked to apologize for the meltdown.

When I notice I’m composing a reply with more heat than the situation actually warrants on social media, I take myself home. When I find myself refreshing a thread I have no real business refreshing, watching the quote-tweets accumulate, I take myself home. When I name-search myself on Reddit and feel the sweet-sick feeling of being perceived unwillingly, I take myself home. When someone in a meeting says something vaguely annoying and I feel myself react in a way that is wildly disproportionate to the offence, I take myself home, which in that case mostly means I excuse myself, walk to the bathroom, and stand at the sink for a full minute before going back.

The principle scales down to the smallest unit of leaving. Sometimes home is just the other side of a door.

In adult life, taking myself home mostly means logging out. Closing the laptop. Putting the phone face down. Sometimes, literally walking out of the room. Once in a while, it’s just quite actually going home. It is not a refusal to engage. It is just leaving the place where I am no longer behaving like someone I’d want to be.

What has surprised me about this practice is how often the thing I was reacting to was not the thing I was reacting to. Some woman I have never met said something faintly stupid on the timeline and I was about to respond with the stored-up irritation of someone who hadn’t slept properly, hadn’t eaten in five hours, had spent the morning in a frustrating call about something else entirely, and was carrying fourteen unrelated grievances into a tweet that didn’t deserve any of them. I was not pissed off at the post. I was pissed off at fourteen other things and the post was simply where it came out, much like how a leak comes out at the lowest point of the ceiling and not at the place where the pipe is actually broken.

You cannot see this from inside the moment. While you are in the reaction, the reaction feels measured to its cause; the cause feels exactly worth the heat. It is only after you have left the room that you can look back and see how much of what you were about to say had nothing to do with the person you were about to say it to.

This, more than anything else, is why I trust the practice. Not because leaving makes me a calmer or more virtuous person (it doesn’t) but because leaving is the only reliable way I have found for telling the difference between a real grievance and a displaced one. The genuine grievances survive the walk away. They tend to deserve a response that is composed rather than spat. The displaced ones evaporate the moment I am no longer near the scene of the supposed crime. I come back and look at the thing I was about to fight about and I cannot, for the life of me, remember why it had felt so important.

I have, over the last decade, watched the vocabulary of mental health expand into every corner of how women are expected to talk about their lives, and I have watched it do the opposite of what it promised. We were told that this language of boundaries, self-care, holding space, doing the work, showing up, being present, accountability would let us protect ourselves from the demands the world makes of women. What it has actually done is multiply those demands without us realising. To set a boundary, you must first announce it; then you must enforce it; then you must communicate, with appropriate calmness, why it has been crossed and what consequences will follow. To take care of yourself, you must first build the capacity to take care of yourself, which apparently requires a routine, a journal, a therapist, a supplement stack, a morning pages practice, a yoga mat, and a circle of friends with whom you are doing the same work in synchronised parallel. To rest, you must rest correctly, lest your rest become avoidance. The only thing this vocabulary has not given us is permission to simply leave.

Katy Waldman wrote about this a few years ago in the New Yorker: she called it the rise of therapy-speak. Her observation was that the language of mental health had migrated out of the clinic and into the way we narrate ourselves to each other, but that this migration had inverted the function of the language. In the clinic, therapy-speak is supposed to bring you into closer contact with what is actually happening to you. In the wild, it does the opposite. It lets you describe yourself in the third person. It turns a deeply relational and nuanced process into something ego-directed and performed. You don’t say you’re hurt; you say a boundary has been crossed. You don’t say you need to be alone; you say you’re holding space for yourself. The sentence does the work of distancing you from the feeling that produced it. It is a kind of literary anaesthesia.

The deeper problem is that all of this language assumes you will stay. You set the boundary so that you can stay in the relationship on better terms. You hold space so that you can keep being present in the friend’s grief. You do the work so that you can keep doing the work. The fundamentals of contemporary emotional vocabulary are the fundamentals of staying. The option of simply going home is not on the menu, because going home is not productive. It does not yield a better-managed self at the end of it. It does not generate content. It does not produce a story you can tell other women about how you Did The Work.

This is, of course, the same malaise that runs every other part of contemporary female life. Jia Tolentino called it always be optimizing, the regime under which the ideal woman is engineered to look natural while doing the unceasing work of self-improvement, the woman whose leisure is a form of labour and whose labour is described as self-care. Anne Helen Petersen, writing about millennial burnout, observed that the demand to keep working all the time had become the base temperature of an entire generation, the background music of being alive. We define ourselves, she wrote, by the capacity to keep working, and we have lost the capacity to recognise that this is not a feature of us but a symptom of the structure we live inside. The optimization runs underneath everything. It runs underneath your skincare. It runs underneath your friendships. It runs underneath the way you drink water. Of course it also runs underneath the way you are expected to manage your feelings, which is to say: efficiently, in a way that can be put on a podcast or carousel.

For women in particular, this regime is enforced through visibility. Sarah Banet-Weiser, the scholar who has thought hardest about this, calls it the economy of visibility, a system in which being seen has become the end rather than the means, and in which feminism itself has been reorganised around the imperative of women being more visible, not more free. Mary McGill, in The Visibility Trap, makes the same observation in a darker register: visibility, for women, is not a tool we picked up. It is a condition we live inside, and an always-on culture has normalised forms of comparison, shaming, and watchfulness that an earlier generation would have recognised as surveillance. To leave the visibility, even for an afternoon, is to invite the suspicion that you have something to hide, or that you have been driven off, or that you are sulking, or that you couldn’t cut it. It is, in any case, never neutral. There is no clean exit from a system whose first principle is that women must be seen.

The Indian girl is raised, from approximately the moment she can hold her own head up, on a curriculum of staying. Adjust kar lo. Compromise karna seekho. Thoda samjho. She learns very young that her job in any room is to absorb whatever the room throws at her without producing a visible response. The Matchmaker on Netflix, asking a different girl every week if she is ready to compromise, was not delivering radical content. She was articulating the central instruction of Indian femininity.

This is the exact opposite of the rule my parents made. Most Indian girls are taught that the meltdown is the failure and the audience is the cure: stay in the room, swallow the feeling, don’t make Aunty uncomfortable, smile for the photo, be a good girl, where good is a synonym for absorbed. My parents had decided that the the children, the girls, did not have to tolerate the audience. This was an inversion of a script I did not know I was meant to learn.

The script does not stop at the household. The woman who has been raised to adjust in marriage is the same woman who is told, twenty years later, that she must develop a thick skin if she wants to exist online. The Indian woman who logs off mid-discourse is thin-skinned. The Indian woman who blocks is running away. The Indian woman who simply stops responding is can’t take a joke.This vocabulary makes leaving impossible to do without paying a social cost the woman is then blamed for incurring.

Urvija Banerji wrote a piece for The Swaddle a few years ago called The Price of Fighting Every Feminist Battle. Her argument was that there should not come a point in fighting for our humanity where we have to sacrifice our mental wellbeing, and that staying quieter in our daily lives was sometimes the right way to preserve the energy for the bigger fights. She framed it as a kind of feminist accounting: you cannot spend everything every day. The piece was met, predictably, with the charge that Indian feminists were running away from discourse, which is, I notice, the same accusation a four-year-old in a temple would be facing if she announced she wanted to go home.

The vocabulary of staying, the marriage vocabulary, the optimization vocabulary, the visibility vocabulary, the therapy-speak vocabulary that promised to free us and then trapped us inside a more elaborate cage, is one vocabulary. It assumes that the self is a project, that the project must be continuously visible, that visibility is the proof of the project, and that any movement away from the visibility is a failure of the project. The whole edifice depends on women never going home.

It also depends on us forgetting that going home was always available to us.

Because the thing is, we already have a vocabulary for this. It is older than therapy-speak by approximately two and a half thousand years. The Bhagavad Gita has a line that says, more or less, that only the foolish do not know when to engage and when to withdraw (pravrittim cha nivrittim cha janaa na vidur aasuraah). Devdutt Pattanaik has written that the central tension in Indian thought has always been between pravritti and nivritti, engagement and withdrawal, and that no Indian tradition has ever resolved this tension in favour of one over the other. Both are necessary. The householder and the hermit are both legitimate forms of being a person. Vairagya, the Sanskrit word that gets translated as dispassion or detachment, is not the absence of feeling, it is the discrimination, the viveka, between which feelings are worth your engagement and which are not. Ekanta is not loneliness. It is the positive form of solitude. Kaaya-viveka is the bodily withdrawal that is supposed to precede clarity, not follow from its absence.

Arundhathi Subramaniam, the poet, has a line I keep coming back to. We’re capable of stillness, she writes, even as we gallivant. You can be on a ten-city tour and still be capable of stillness. You can be a public woman and still know how to go home. The Indic tradition has been holding this for a very long time. It just got drowned out by the louder, more profitable vocabulary of constant availability, which wants you to set boundaries about your unavailability while never actually being unavailable.

I am writing this halfway through my book tour.

The book is The Girls Are Not Fine. The tour is structured the way most Indian book tours are. It is dense, back-to-back, optimised for maximum coverage in minimum time, on the implicit logic that an author on the road is an author generating press, and an author generating press is an author moving copies, and an author moving copies is the only kind of author the publishing industry loves.

I asked, instead of the usual dense schedule, for three cities at a time. Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Then home. Then three more cities. Then home. Then three more. I designed it carefully. I was, I will admit, a little proud of the design. Look at me, trying to be balanced!

And then, this week, the system did not hold.

I was supposed to be in Bangalore today. I am not. I am at home in Mumbai, because my body simply went down. A stye swelled one eye half shut. My nose started bleeding for no reason. The psoriasis I have spent years managing flared across my skin. I did not decide to take myself home. I was sent home. The body filed the paperwork without consulting me, and the schedule I had been so proud of turned out not to have built in enough, or not the right kind of rest.

I hated it. I did not lie on my sofa in serene communion with my own limits. I lay there furious. Furious at my eye, my nose, my skin, at the city I was not in, at the readers in Bangalore who had signed up, at myself for building a tour I still could not survive. There was no vairagya in it. There was no graceful withdrawal. There was a woman who had written, with some confidence, about the wisdom of going home, being forced to go home against her will and discovering she was just as bad at it as everyone else.

Everything I have said so far about taking yourself home is true, and I stand by it, but it describes the voluntary version. What this week taught me is that the voluntary version is a privilege you lose the moment you need it most. If you do not take yourself home when it is still your decision, you do not get to keep making it your decision. The body takes the decision. And when the decision is taken, it feels like failure, because that is what it is. It is the failure to have left earlier, collected by a creditor who does not care that you were planning to pay.

My parents’ rule, the one I have been building this whole essay on, had a feature I glossed over the first few times I described it. The child did not decide. The child, mid-meltdown, did not raise a hand and calmly request to be taken home. The child was incapable, in that exact moment, of knowing that home was the answer. That is what it is to be a child having a meltdown. The parents decided. The rule existed because the person who needed it could not be trusted, in the moment of needing it, to invoke it. I had rewritten the rule, in adapting it for myself, into something more flattering: I had made myself both the child and the parent, and assumed the parent in me would always catch the child in me in time. This week, the parent was asleep. The child melted down in the middle of the outing. And there was no one external, no actual mother with actual car keys, to make the call before the body made it instead.

I don’t fully know what to do with that yet. I am writing this with one functional eye, so I am not at the height of my analytic powers. But I think what I am trying to say is not take yourself home, it is wise and good. It is closer to: you will go home either way. That is not in question. The only thing in question is whether you go while it is still a decision, with your dignity and your eyesight and your skin intact, or whether you go the way I went this week, resentful and far too late to feel like anything but a defeat.

The obvious objection to all of this is that going home is just avoidance framed by empowering language.

You can call it vairagya or taking yourself home or strategic withdrawal or whatever Sanskrit-inflected vocabulary pleases you, but in practice it is logging off when the conversation gets hard, blocking when the criticism gets too close to home, leaving the dinner when the conversation turns toward something you don’t want to defend, or just retreating when you’re asked to stand and fight. The Indian woman who adjusts and the Indian woman who can’t take a joke and logs off are two faces of the same conditioning, and the conditioning is to never actually engage. The liberated thing would be to stay in the room.

This objection assumes there is a single thing called the conversation and that all leaving is a leaving of it, undifferentiated. The rooms my parents removed us from were not conversations. They were rooms. Removing the child from the room was not avoiding the feeling. It was attended to in the car, on the sofa, in the bath, at dinner, sometimes for days. What was avoided was the spectacle. The feeling, freed of the audience, was allowed to be the size it actually was instead of it being shrink-wrapped.

This is the distinction the objection refuses to make. Avoidance is leaving so you don’t have to deal with it. Going home is leaving so you can deal with it elsewhere, in a form that doesn’t damage the people in front of you. The first is burying the feeling. The second is relocating it.

You can tell which one you are doing by what comes next. Avoidance is followed by silence, hardening, a rewriting of events to absolve yourself, and a resentment that erupts later somewhere far from its cause. Going home is followed by the laundry and the bath, and either a clearer return or a considered decision not to return. The processing has happened; it has just happened somewhere private, which is where most processing belongs.

The objection is also made selectively, in the direction of women. The man who logs off is busy. The woman who logs off is dramatic. The man who declines to engage with criticism is above the fray. The woman who declines is thin-skinned. This is not an accident. The vocabulary of avoidance has been built around women because women are the ones whose continuous availability the system depends on.

The people who police women’s leaving are almost never the people the women are leaving. The reader who came to my Indore event is not the person upset that I am home on Tuesday. The friend whose dinner I left early is not the one writing essays about how women who leave dinners are avoidant. The actually-affected parties are usually fine. They realised that the version of me they had access to had run out, and they would rather have me at full strength next month than at half strength tonight. The objection is being made by people with no stake in the specific room I left. They object to the principle of women leaving rooms because it threatens an ecosyste, that runs on women not leaving them.

And finally, my parents’ rule had heft. They did not negotiate. They did not weigh whether the meltdown was warranted or whether the child was being reasonable. They did not perform a drawn-out announcement of their intention to leave with apologies to the host and a public processing of the family’s needs. They just left. The version of boundaries contemporary therapy-speak has taught us (announced, negotiated), would have been useless to my parents. It would have turned every meltdown into an argument about whether the meltdown qualified as a meltdown. The whole point of the rule was that it didn’t have to be argued for.

The adult version works the same way. I do not, when I take myself home, sit and adjudicate whether the thread or the meeting or the dinner or event or coffee or pitch has earned my departure. I do not consult my notes on whether a boundary has been crossed. I notice I am no longer behaving like someone I want to be in a room with, and I leave the room. The leaving is the response to the noticing. It is not the conclusion of a long internal court case in which I am simultaneously prosecutor, defence, judge, and jury.

Women would be less exhausted if they understood they do not have to defend their leaving. It does not require a justification. It does not require a thread of explanation. It does not require a soft-launch on close-friends Stories about how you’re taking some time for yourself. It just requires leaving. The justification, if any, can come later, to the people who are actually owed one, who are almost never the people demanding it.

A child has the right to be removed from a situation she cannot handle without arguing for the removal. That is the part of the rule I have most struggled to translate into adulthood, because the contemporary world insists that adult women earn every removal through documented suffering. I am refusing to earn it. I notice. I leave. I go home. The argument, if there is one, can be had later, on my sofa, with the sister as a witness, in a form that does not require me to win.

I am writing the last sentence of this essay with one eye still half-shut. The rule held. The rule held badly, this week, because I had been a bad steward of it, but it held. I am home. Bangalore will happen, or it won’t. I will go back out, or I won’t. The next time I notice, I would like to leave a little earlier. I would like to not have to be sent. But if I have to be sent, I would like to remember that being sent is also a form of the rule applying.

The car keys come out. Somebody puts you in the car. You go home.