When I’m angry my brain can’t reason things out. My emotions take over in a way where listening to reason is just not important. I recently realized that my emotion has the driving wheel while I am angry and not my reasoning. I always believed I had the ability to separate emotions from reasoning in such situations, but I’ve realized that’s not true and I want to change that.

I am extremely mad right now. At my brother, at my cousins and at everyone else, because in the past two days I have been here I realized we CONSTANTLY PUT OTHERS DOWN for either fun or validation and I don’t get WHY. How is insulting or teasing someone good? How is it reasonable? I mean, at times my brother does not even realize how much he is hurting someone by talking down to them. He does not realize that the joke he made at the cost of someone else is NOT FUNNY. He always cracks this joke about how I am never going to have my name in my parents’ will (which is true but totally irrelevant) and he is going to inherit everything good, because I am a girl. Today, when he cracked it, I asked him why is he so desperate to live on someone else’ money and my cousin asked me,” who’s money are you going to live on?” I said,” My own obviously.” My brother said,” her husbands’” and then my cousin told me,” astrophysicists don’t earn much” and I lost it. I hate that sister, I have infinite biases against her and my brother, even though he was joking, is a fucking dumbass. IT IS NOT A JOKE TO ME. HE KEEPS ON CRACKING JOKES ABOUT ME BEING A GIRL AND EVEN THOUGH I KNOW HE ISN’T A MISOGYNIST AND HE’S JUST CRACKING A JOKE, I HATE IT. Maybe, it isn’t a big deal. but to me it is. It just makes me so mad. I hate it. I have been trying to get over it for two hours now but I still haven’t and I can’t get over it.

It’s not just that. For the past two days my brother has been putting this other cousin down constantly. He’s been taunting him for his looks, his English and his city i.e. Jamnagar. He said,” Bhaiya, your body shape is so weird””why don’t you wax your leg hair off” “Aise gawaron jaisi english nahi bolta main (I use sophisticated English unlike you illiterate people.)” and multiple other things. He’s said these things over a hundred times in the past two days and everytime he says that I can see the hurt on my cousins face, yet my brother does NOT EVEN REALIZE HE IS HURTING HIM. HOW BLIND IS HE? HOW BLIND OR EMOTIONALLY DUMB DOES ONE HAVE TO BE TO BE SO IGNORANT OF SOMEONE ELSE’S FEELINGS.

I know you all might think that this is really no big a deal, but that day right after he made the body comment; I caught my cousin staring at himself in the mirror. Comments like these can mess with people’s self esteem, they do for me. I know that it is my responsibility to be tougher and take it as a joke, but why can’t we all just be a little bit more mindful about what we say to others and how we present it? Because, even though just words, they can hurt someone a lot and can ruin their day or vacation too. It does not hurt to make someone smile instead of cry; it does not hurt to not say anything instead of inducing self doubt and body-conscious thoughts.

I know, it seems like I am making a big deal out of nothing, but this is how it is in my brain, even the slightest of actions or words can trigger a dam full of emotions. I don’t like it, but I can’t change it either. But the point of this blog is to encourage people to be mindful. Mindful about things we do and things we say.

I genuinely feel so much better now that all of this is out of my system. Please ignore all sorts of grammatical errors, I wrote this in a full on emo state and I am not in the mood to go over it again.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.