To many this title is going to sound weird, loving thyself has a certain connotation. And as much as I am in favour of it, saluting the sisterhood is not what I mean. I have now written 2 blogs and if you are one of the few who read it you will have deduced from them and from my many tweets that my past and my childhood has not been a happy one and as much as one would like to come to conclusions about me growing up poor in a village in India or a council estate, those default deductions would be wrong.

My past is a complex one and a big part of that complexity was being born to an incredibly wealthy, celebrity and high status Indian Hindu family. Yet I did not see the advantages of such privileges realised. While my family travelled the world, lived in luxury hotels, afforded the best education and bought Rolex watches, my life looked very different. My life was mired in misogyny, religious and class prejudice and abuse. Those circumstances characterised the life I went on to lead…My biggest sin? Being the child of a working-class Muslim woman and an upper-caste Hindu man and for that “sin” I paid dearly. To top that insult, from a very young age I displayed an egalitarian, humanitarian and feminist ideology in direct contravention to my family’s deeply held traditional Hindu nationalist beliefs.

My grandmother and her family took every opportunity to remind me of the lowliness of my birth. When I was barely 5 my aunt locked me in a room and pummelled me for hours. My obese uncle would lie on top of me suffocating me with a pillow as he rubbed his grossly obese body on me.

Indian society is not kind to its women. Even if you were fortunate enough to have a supportive family, the misogynist messaging of our society gets through. But sadly, my family were my oppressors. When their propaganda of hate didn’t beat me into submission they did what Indians do best to their women – Dishonour you, disown you and infect you with shame.

I lived in an abusive world for too long and when I finally walked away I was left with nothing. No family, no connections, no money. Making my way in a world that was alien to me and try as I might, the shame I was infected with always followed me. When I struggled to feed myself, just like I was trained to, I thought it was my fault. When I saw pictures of my family living the high life, I thought I deserved my poverty and misery; That my decisions, my headstrong attitudes led me here.

This being Indian culture there was one subject in which shame for a woman was inherent and that was sex. My family painted me like some promiscuous, drug taking woman-this is the dishonour part. If you spoke to a man, you were a whore. If you wore jeans you were asking for it. If you used tampons you dishonour your virginity and by extension the honour of your family. If anyone questions the bizarreness of this assertion, let me recount to you how my grandmother fell to her bed in Victorian fashion reaching for her smelling salts, gasping “My God!” when she suspected I had been using tampons.

When I was in University my friends, my peers, rightly so explored their sexuality. While I sat lonely and alone in my flat abstaining out of shame. My entire life my friends lived a very healthy and sex positive life, and again I cannot emphasise how much I support this. It’s an important part of our existence. Yet as much as my rational mind understood the emotional abuse that dictated that shame, my conscience was unable to shift the shame.

I racked up, quite literally, a handful of sexual partners in my life; what some of my friends went through a week on Tinder. After each encounter the residual shame lingered. Years of therapy and reconditioning never completely eradicated the shame. The shame drove me into the arms of an abusive partner and the shame kept me there enduring his abuse. I told myself I deserved it. If my family hate me and deem me worthless can I blame a man for the same treatment?

When I found out I had a high-risk HPV infection that shame kicked in faster than any worry, concern or fear of cancer would ignite in a “normal” person. I called myself a slut, told myself I deserved it. All rationale left me. No matter how many times my consultant told me how common it is and that it was simply bad luck that my immunity couldn’t fight it off, I continued to shame myself in the manner I knew my family would. This last one year I have grappled with this shame and like fighting a possession in a horror film, I have been fighting, not just for my life but for my soul.

Tomorrow I will face surgery. With each cancerous cell taken out of me, I will cut that shame out. Because I finally realise that I should not be full of shame but full of love and life. If anyone should bear the shame it is those who sought to tarnish me even while I suffered in loneliness. Or the men who abused me; from my alcoholic father who called me worthless every night in his drunken stupor or the man I dared call a partner on whose door I turned up broken and lost which only made me more vulnerable to his abuse or my uncle who called me a dyke and a juvenile delinquent cause he suspected I was Bi-sexual. I have no shame because I took from the horror of my past and sought to do something worthwhile. When I was asked that awful pupillage question “tell us why you want to be a barrister” – well that’s why (if the word count permitted) …all of the above!

And when it comes to the topic of sex, I do not regret the little sex I had, I regret how little of it I did. If there is regret it is now only for allowing shame to have determined my life.  

The life of a woman is complex. Our society lays claim to our autonomy, to our sexuality, to our fertility, to our bodies. Some of us are lucky to fight it, some of us escape and god forbid some like my grandmother become the foot soldiers of misogyny. But here, after a past of abuse and sometimes being foolish enough to let those abusers re-traumatise me all over again with the residual shame they left behind, I now instead declare my absolute undying love and admiration for myself. For though the strongest and powerful people were my enemies, my resilience prevailed and hopefully in the face of this dreadful disease, will once again prevail. To quote another incredible woman “There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself”.

When I wake up, if I wake up, I vow to always show myself the kindness and love others deemed me too lowly to receive and I beckon any woman who suffered abuse, anyone ever accused of being the wrong kind of feminine, wrong to the point of being a Dyke or a homo,  to do exactly the same. Sister love thyself!

And if I don’t wake up, remember me without the shame.