One Month: Round Up

Today marks one month since initiating the Leenah’s Lounge. My real challenge, I realized this afternoon, hasn’t really been conducting the Twentea Stories sessions. The actual challenge, I feel now, is to emphatically translate the insights obtained at the Lounge into meaningful and actionable knowledge.

36 sessions and over a dozen guests later, I’m still struggling to make peace with the frequency and ferocity of the examples the survivors of the oppression of fitting-in have shared. 

I’ve talked to men and women; ages: 23 to 53; fresh graduates to parents of fresh graduates; home makers to those in search of home. And repeatedly I have come face to face with the same pattern. We are all alone. And we are all struggling to fit into the mould we’re expected to adhere to. 

The societal makeup we follow is designed to ensure compliance, like all reforming facilities. Like jails. The unwritten social contract is more about defining the limits of a person, than it is about providing them with wings. 

We demand our housewives to surrender all rights to any idea of self actualization. 

We assert our mothers to stop existing outside the parental role. 

We rob our young men the possibility to exist outside the identity of being providers. 

We enforce upon our girls the idea of an honor code that works only with crucifixion. 

We want domestic abuse to be believed as part of the marriage package in the name of compromise. 

We ensure that an adult person’s right to dignity as a member of the society is determined by their marital status. 

We engineer emotional exploitation in the name of culture, tradition, religion, param para, to an extent that our young grow as handicapped adults when it comes to recognizing abuse. They have been so accustomed to being exploited that when an abuser in a professional or any other social setting exploits them, they take it as the natural order of things. 

We practice fear as our religion.

And how do we all become a part of enabling this unhealthy culture?

We let people fade into a grey nothingness.

How do we challenge this culture?

By creating safe places where a trophy wife does not have to be guilty for sharing a feeling of unhappiness; where a man does not feel compromising his “manliness” for voicing his emotional vulnerability; where a woman can be unafraid while expressing her joy; where people are given the freedom to step out of their fears and unburden their heart.

Leenah’s Lounge has been a very humble attempt to provide such an avenue. 

Context shapes behaviour. Together, we collaborate to define a healthy context. Across all the conceivable barriers, together we hold daunting fears like fragile items and try to find a path out of an emotional maze.

Throughout this one month, I’ve been keeping a week-by-week progress track of the developments at the Lounge. I’ve shared, when permitted, the reviews received and the worries voiced. Emotionally, it’s been an enlightening experience. A little overwhelming too, perhaps. 

The point of this post, today, is the invitation that when we all can contribute to each other's "rizq" - intellectual, spiritual, emotional, why choose to settle to be noise only?

Let's do better. Let's connect more.

From June 14’s inaugural announcement post to July 12’s one month milestone, I raise a toast to all those who chose to take a leap of faith and visited the Lounge. All those who chose to open up the door they normally just steer clear of, a door that liberates. 

We are all alone. Unless we connect. 

- Leenah.

Photograph by Katrin Manz, Liguria Italy