There is enough red in me

There is enough red in me. 

 

The institution of marriage is one of the greatest protected treasures of patriarchy. A never ending cycle which allows a constant flow of women in and out of families to pass on the pains of the elders to. Hence when people rebel gender norms, this institution is threatened, and the world makes moves to protect it as greatly as it can. In 1984, a judgment of the Delhi High Court said that the Fundamental Rights ensured to every Indian citizen by the Constitution, were not applicable in the family: these rights have to stop at the door of the home. 

 

Women are found then women are oppressed. 

 

When women aren’t given the choices to delegate their responsibility to men, the only choice they have left are other women. This is when the cycle of patriarchy starts. A woman can forcefully hand her responsibilities to the hands of another, but is that her way of fighting her oppression or oppressing another woman. Hence families become breeding grounds for hatred between women, as each of them struggles to survive the pressures, unknowingly becoming a part of it all together. Women are often not left with a choice but to oppress others just to escape themselves. 

 

I started taking anti-depressants after my 18th birthday, a path already well-trodden by the women in my family. I learned that depression was our shared companion, passed down like an inheritance from one generation to the next. Our conversations, once confined to whispered secrets, now unfolded openly, constructing our daily lives with discussions about mental health. Almost as if depression was an heirloom being passed down from generation to generation. As if my family welcomed me to womanhood with this gift I must carry for the remaining of my life. 

 

It felt as though the collective traumas of the women who came before me seeped into my very being, their pain becoming an indelible part of my own existence. Yet, amidst the shadows of their struggles, I found solace in the small, red pill that promised resilience against the storm. 

 

There is enough red in me to cause fires,

Just not in the four walls of my home. 

 

It was both a blessing and a burden, a beacon of hope in a sea of inherited sorrow. In our family, it seemed that women bore the weight of past sorrows, tasked with the unspoken duty of maintaining familial comfort at the expense of our own well-being. We absorbed the pain like a sponge, filtering out the stories of trauma, shielding those around us from its harsh reality. This is the heirloom of a family in pain. 

 

My depression is an heirloom from my mother and grandmothers. It runs in my family either through shared genetics or shared experiences. It is difficult to tell which one, but it is definite that this illness creates unity among the women in my family. We all discuss our little red pill which infests our body to allow us to forget the labours we must serve as women. The red pill is the curse that is passed down in this family from generation to generation. 

 

There is enough red in me to cause fires,

There is enough red in us all, 

Just not enough to escape these four walls.