No woman in my family has made it past 63-yrs old. My entire life I have watched young bodies decay long before their time. No doctors were shocked to see old age health issues in our 30 year old bodies and that never sat right with me. See when you have metabolic diseases like diabetes, cardiac issues, or obesity it’s easy to blame the person in front of you because of free will and shit. But that’s a short sighted view because it doesn’t unpack the complexities and factors behind these diseases or why they happen more to some people and not others. The pervasive health issues I observed within my family had a profound impact on me and made me obsessed with my body and how it fits into society.
In fourth grade, I was in personal health, taught by Mrs. Cochran. Because, yes, we use names here. She showed us this now outdated food pyramid. You remember, the carbs at the bottom and the dessert at the top. It was presented as a one-size-fits-all solution. As Mrs. Cochran explained how to apply this chart, she stopped at the desserts and looked straight at me and said ‘but thunder thighs over there should eat less of these.’ I astral-projected out of my body and saw this little brownie bite in a sea of melanin-deficient faces and felt this heat rise over me and betrayal by my own body for not looking like the others. This was one of my first conscious memories of racism at the hands of my teacher. From a young age I was told that this different body didn’t belong in these spaces.
Growing up in an immigrant household prepares you to be the most mentally unstable superhero. I am so used to being the only one who looks like me in a room that my super power is being comfortable with the uncomfortable. But it wasn’t easy. We are growing up in the present time in a different culture than the people raising us but the people raising us only have a framework for parenthood that is stuck in the past from a different culture. Honestly, it’s an amazing experience now. And the policing of a female’s body in the Bengal culture is just as pervasive as it is in the States but different. We had this concept in Bangladesh that only seems to apply to women. It’s called sharam. It means shame. Let me use it in a sentence. ‘Hey girl, that shirt is too tight and too lowcut. Everyone can see your sharam.” Yes, they are referring to my boobs as my shame. This obsession from others with my body was confusing as this formative age and as I got older and developed, the attention I received from men felt validating because someone was saying nice things about my body. And for the longest time I confused attention with affection.
It’s wasn’t until I lost my first love, did I realize was love was. I learned love in it’s absence. My mom passed away last year, three months shy of her 62nd birthday. She had all the diseases. After my mom passed, I frequently disassociated in the mindless portal more commonly referred to as TikTok. The algorithm quickly picked up on my half orphan status and after 4 hours of endless scrolling the algorithm switched up and there appeared Desi Doc on TikTok, a South Asian doctor and medical researcher with a mission to bring health awareness to the desi diaspora. I listened to him talk about the impact of famines on DNA. He said two famines in one generation alters DNA and South Asia experienced 26 man made famines during the British Colonial rule. And before you stands the legacy of those who survived. Our brown bodies hold on to more fat, the narrow arteries which make up the majority of all major organs are narrower and highly susceptible to corruption. We need more exercise for less results. Our bodies carry the suffering of our ancestors. People colonizing each other is humanities history. And it’s easy to erase because something new and terrible is always happening. But we live with the impact every day in this body. And finding desi doc on tiktok finally gave me the language and set me on a research journey to understand my health and it’s not one size fits all. And if my genes carry the suffering of my ancestors, then it also carries their resilience. And like Kendrick Lamar said, I got loyalty, got royalty inside my DNA.