One quote that really struck me, you were talking about sort of grappling with self-image, and you said ‘my face and body were now meant for service, not romance. You don’t need to be attractive to be an activist, I told myself.’ I was struck by that. What did that mean? I thought that activism was now the mission of my life, and I did not have to think about looking pretty for that. On the other hand, I thought that to have love in your life, you needed to be looking all perfect and needed the facial symmetry, and so yeah, I thought, okay, like, I can’t have all of that, but at least I can do my activism. Did you think you’d ever be in a relationship? Like, was that something that… No, really. I never thought that, no. How did that make you feel to contemplate a life without a romantic relationship? My life changed completely when I was in love with a person. I could not fix my thinking, before that, I was this strong advocate against marriages. I had told all of my college friends that do not get married or at least I’m not getting married. These boys are just a waste of time. I was so against the institution of marriage in itself. I was questioning it because growing up I had seen how girls were forced into marriage, or they were married off when they were still children, and that is still a reality for many girls. So I thought, why would even I consider it. I’m an advocate for girls rights. This is the last thing I’ll think about. And here I was in love with a guy, and I knew that culturally, for me to be with this guy, I need to be married to him because in our culture I cannot just live with a guy. Looking at a future without a romantic relationship, did it make you feel, I don’t know… It made life easier for me. Huh that’s… okay. I thought life would be so easy if there were no relationships, no love life to think about and no marriage and all of that. And kids and like family stuff. I said, ew stay away from all of that. Work, work, and work. And I will be honest that becoming an activist at a young age and not knowing so much about what the lives of activists from history have been really like. So in my head I thought like Martin Luther King Jr. or Mother Teresa or Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela all had these lives which were all about work, even though they had like wives and kids and all of that. There’s this perception that have that life all has to be about work. It can never be about you.
