On a recent trip home to Princeton, N.J., I somehow let it slip to my mom that I want to make a trip to my favorite shoe store. I needed a pair of platform stilettos. I was pretty good at a runway walk in regular stilettos and now it was time to step up my game. I needed a pair of six-inch heels! I intended this to be a solo trip since I do all of my best shopping alone. But I only had a few hours to spend with my mom and my grandmother, so of course, we traveled together—all three generations of women.
My grandmother is the typical conservative South Asian woman. I remember the look of horror on her face and the shame that was dealt upon me for my halter top prom dress from my junior high school prom.
After having seen pictures of me on stage for the Miss New Jersey USA Pageant and well aware that I am planning on competing in the Miss New York USA pageant again next year—I thought I would give both my mom and grandmother a shock. I would show them the height of the heel that I would purchase.
During the past year, my shyness around my family in expressing my love for pageantry has turned into teasing my mom with my love for pageantry to the point where she is shaking her head at my foolishness. I assumed that my grandmother must feel the same way.
Once in the store, my mom separated from our group to look for her own shoes. My grandmother stayed with me as I browsed. I showed my grandmother a pair of platform light pink strappy shoes with a tall and chunky heel, bedazzled with sparkles. Shoes that were fiercely bold, but a little hoochie even for my taste.
“Do you like these?” I asked. My grandmother smiled without a word. She had the poise and grace that I hoped to gain from preparing for next year’s pageant. I tried the shoes on. I practiced my runway walk—still not a peep from my grandmother.
I continued browsing the selection of insanely tall heels. My grandmother came with me, still without saying a word. I wondered, was she in shock that I was looking at such tall shoes? But she still smiled and stood patiently as I tried on shoe after shoe.
Finally my grandmother spoke, “Are you looking for shoes like this?” she asked, referring to the heels that I had just tried on. I responded yes, for my coming TV appearance I need shoes that will make me look taller. These shoes will elongate my body, I explained. She said she was worried I would hurt my ankle, but she was supportive.
My mom on the other hand responded, “You should buy shoes that you can wear every day.” I responded that the shoes would come in handy in preparing for my pageant and for modeling. These shoes would not solely be for my TV appearance. Furthermore, I would be wearing these shoes all the time. I love heels. I felt defiant. Defiance against my family’s strict conservative views has always made me feel strong.
To my surprise I heard no protest in return. Had I broken my grandmother and mother into accepting that I am no longer the once conservative, quiet and obedient little girl that I had been brought up to be, or had I underestimated them? Are they more open-minded than I thought them to be? I still expected the scolding that I heard when I was 13- years-old and wearing short shorts and a tank top. I still felt like I should be hiding this side of myself from my family. I always feel like I need to portray an image of modesty when I am with my family. I felt so rebellious to even tell my mom and my grandma that I wanted to wear high heels.
Maybe I did not need to hide this from them anymore. They have seen that I have blossomed into myself. My greatest personal and professional successes have come to me by being true to myself. Perhaps my family has begun to see that. I could still have a reason to doubt their belief in me—but perhaps they truly have changed. It is still hard for me to accept that my parents are proud of me as I am. But maybe they are accepting of my achievements. Why is it so crazy to me that they have changed their minds about pageantry and modeling?
Just in case you missed it: Check out Vol. 1 and Vol. 2of the Pageant Diaries Series!
Sheena Pradhan is a Registered Dietitian-Nutritionist, writer, speaker and model. She runs a nutrition consulting and communications company, called Nutritious Balance in New York City. In addition to BG, she writes for India.com, The Daily Meal and Busy Mom Snacks. She also loves to blog about health, food and nutrition on her blog. When she’s not writing, modeling, or consulting on nutrition, you can find her preparing for the 2015 Miss New York USA Pageant, riding her bike around Central Park, or wandering midtown Manhattan for inspiration. You can find healthy tips daily by following her on Twitter!
Social media has stretched a number of news headlines:
“Social media rots kids’ brains.”
“Social media is polarizing.”
Yet those most affected by social media ideals are the teenage users. Apps like Instagram and TikTok perpetuate an image of perfection that is captured in pictures and 30-second videos. As a result, many young women chase this expectation endlessly. “Her” personifies this perfection in an unattainable figure the narrator has always wished to be. These ideals deteriorate mental health, create body dysmorphia, promote a lack of self-esteem, and much more. Even so, social media is plagued by filters and editing—much of what we hope to achieve isn’t even real. Therefore, young women, much like the narrator of “Her,” strive for a reality that doesn’t even exist.
When she walked into my life
Her smile took up two pages of description
In a YA novel.
My arms could wrap around her waist twice
If she ever let anyone get that close
Her hair whipped winds with effortless beach waves
And a hint of natural coconut
Clothing brands were created around her
“One Size Fits All” one size to fit the girl who has it all
With comments swarning in hourglasses
But when sharp teeth nip at her collar,
She could bite back biting back
And simply smirked with juicy apple lips
Red hearts and sympathy masking condescension
“My body doesn’t take away from the beauty of yours”
“We are all equal, we are all beautiful”
Beauty
A sword she wields expertly
Snipping, changing,
Aphrodite in consistent perfection
Cutting remarks with sickly sweet syrup
And an innocent, lethal wink
When she walked into my life
She led my life.
My wardrobe winter trees
Barren, chopped in half
Unsuited for the holidays
Mirrors were refracted under in my gaze
Misaligned glass was the only explanation
For unsymmetrical features
And broken hands
Still I taped them fixed
Over and over
Poking, prodding
Hoping to mold stomach fat like wet clay
Defy gravity,
Move it upward
To chest
Instead of sagging beneath a belt on the last hole
In the spring
She would stir me awake at 2 AM
“You need to be me”
Lies spilled from her tongue but
Solidified, crystallized
Fabrication spelled dichotomy
And I drifted farther out to sea
When she walked out of my life,
I was drowning.
Reliance had me capsized
Others witnessed
Furrowed brows and glances away
Like spectators of a shark attack
They can watch but the damage is done
They clung to my mangled pieces
Gravestones spelled
“Stressed”
“Depressed”
But I was mourning too
Today I looked back at my mirror
But glass turned into prism
Broken pieces rainbow
Colors coating clothes
She didn’t pick
Aphrodite
Perception changing
She wasn’t perfect
Just lost at sea
The opinions expressed by the guest writer/blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Brown Girl Magazine, Inc., or any employee thereof. Brown Girl Magazine is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information supplied by the guest writer/bloggers. This work is the opinion of the blogger. It is not the intention of Brown Girl Magazine to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, or individual. If you’d like to submit a guest post, please follow the guidelines we’ve set forth here.
Christian life crisis prayer to god. Woman Pray for god blessing to wishing have a better life. woman hands praying to god with the bible. begging for forgiveness and believe in goodness.
For BGM Literary, editor Nimarta Narang is honored to work with writer Sri Nimmagadda. In this short story, we follow a man in a gray suit who makes a stop at a church to bide his time before a job interview. Sri Nimmagadda is the Chief Program Officer at MannMukti, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing the stigma around mental health in the South Asian community through storytelling and advocacy. He lives in Los Angeles with his dog, Rani, and is passionate about authentically growing inclusion and diversity through storytelling in the entertainment industry. Editor Nimarta was extremely grateful to have Sri join the legacy of wonderful and moving authors for the literary vertical in honor of Mental Health and Awareness month.
A man in a gray suit stands in front of a church and looks up and through the entryway with the resignation of a desiccated man taking a bitter medicine he’s absorbed for years but simply accepts as a fact of his life, however unpleasant. So, the man in the gray suit — a get-up slim but not so lean as to emit a cockish, metrosexual air, scraggly lint escaping the seams across the surface in a manner that supposes either venerability or somewhat tired desperation — thinks about what it means to take a bitter medicine, the trade-off between the instantaneous sour, bitter, wretched, and cloying and the promise of perhaps a better tomorrow, or a better tonight, or a better five-minutes-from-now. After some consideration, this man in a gray suit — an outfit that some would’ve supposed he’d purchased from Goodwill, the night before, for a painfully wrought $95.67 with tax after getting into an argument with his wife about who was going to take the kids to school in the morning and fucking Brenda skipping out on babysitting again — steps inside the church.
This man in a gray suit — armed with a briefcase, and the last and latest copy of his résumé that he’d worked on until 1:30 a.m. the night before after Max and Annabelle had long gone to sleep and his angry, exhausted wife laid restless, in their shared bed, thinking about whether she’d consult the number of the divorce lawyer she’d been recommended by one of her girlfriends in the morning before deciding she’d give her husband another shot just as she had the night before and the night before that and the night before that — paces towards the front of pews almost cautiously, as if someone were watching him, afraid to be caught in the act of being vulnerable and giving himself up to some higher power. Maybe if you go to church and the pastor or some other demure, God-fearing soul sees you, they’ll call you out — who are you? why are you here? — and you’ll realize that for as much ado as people make about the unconditionality of God’s love, they make claims to His love the way they’d claim a parking spot or a position in a queue at a grocery store. Faith, it appears to the man in the gray suit, is really about paying your dues.
So the man in a gray suit approaches the front-most pew — the communion table before him standing guard ahead of a cross. He lays his briefcase down. He sits at the pew. He closes his eyes. Please, he begs Him in his own mind. I need this.
But then this man in a gray suit considers his pathetic whimper to God, how he can’t even acknowledge God by his name, how he begs Please rather than Please God like a weak, unfaithful man who cannot bring himself to say his wife’s name when begging her for forgiveness after his own infidelity. What a mess, he thought of himself. So, he tries again.
Please, God. I need this.
The man in a gray suit considers this again and admonishes himself for his cowardice — when you pray in your head, words and phrases, and sentences and prayers, and pleas twine and intertwine and mix until the signal becomes the noise and you can’t really figure out whatever you’re trying to say. So, for a half-second, you think the only way to get it out of your head is to blow it up so that it all spills out and maybe then God will understand how you really feel — and so he tries again, and puts his prayers to air. The man in a gray suit is not used to coming to church. This is his first time coming in a couple of years. He’s going to need a couple of tries to get this thing down.
“I’m sorry,” the man in a gray suit exhales, “I’m just not used to praying.” But that’s okay. Prayer is a process, the man in a gray suit would find, and what begins feeling ridiculous, or like grasping for spiritual straws, ends up feeling akin to a dam giving way to water; unrestrained, unexploited. So the man in a gray suit — the man who’s come an hour and a half early to an interview because the early bird gets the worm, only to find himself with an hour and a half to kill and nowhere but a church to grace with his presence — prays, and he prays faithfully, and he prays well. He picks up the Bible on the shelf of the pew in front of him, flips it open to whatever page presented itself and begins to read. He closes his eyes, and at that moment he feels safe, like God’s hands envelop him, and that tomorrow will be a better day, and everything will be okay.
~.~
Somewhere along the line, this stupid fucker in a gray suit fell asleep in the middle of Galatians and missed his interview.
Born and raised in Bangkok, Thailand, Nimarta grew up devouring Hindi movies, coming-of-age novels and one too many psychology textbooks. … Read more ›
I organize play dates for my children. They’re friendships remind me of when I was younger when Fridays were consistently set aside for my friends. Now, it seems play is indeed meant for childhood and work is for aging adults. We often can’t find time for ourselves, let alone our friends, who are busy working mothers like ourselves. Or we moved into unreachable corners of this globe, far away from any means of physical communication. It’s fair to say, it’s hard to stay close to friends like when we were in college. Nowadays, it’s easier to travel, but more difficult to bond with others. “My Friend” asserts that we should not end let our friendships fall by the wayside. Even with physical distance and conflicting schedules, we keep our friendships close with kind words on phone calls, regular FaceTime calls, or even encouraging social media comments. Friendship doesn’t end once we become adults.
The opinions expressed by the guest writer/blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Brown Girl Magazine, Inc., or any employee thereof. Brown Girl Magazine is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information supplied by the guest writer/bloggers. This work is the opinion of the blogger. It is not the intention of Brown Girl Magazine to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, or individual. If you’d like to submit a guest post, please follow the guidelines we’ve set forth here.
Sheena Pradhan is a Registered Dietitian-Nutritionist, writer, speaker and model. She runs a nutrition consulting and communications company, called Nutritious Balance in New York City. In addition to BG, she writes for India.com, The Daily Meal and Busy Mom Snacks. She also loves to blog about health, food and nutrition on her blog. When she’s not writing, modeling, or consulting on nutrition, you can find her preparing for the 2015 Miss New York USA Pageant, riding her bike around Central Park, or wandering midtown Manhattan for inspiration. You can find healthy tips daily by following her on Twitter! 
