Curiosity Will Survive Neglect

In tenth grade I had a mental breakdown so debilitating I took to yoga and seven years of inner work to untangle its aftereffects. From my oily-faced days to the sophomore year, I was experiencing a deep depression. Which refused to be articulated in coherent words. A beast in my personal life, at the time it didn’t seem to matter : I was a showboat to anyone who would watch, demolishing men‘s egos, and took to the stage as one out two of the girls in our grade’s theatre class. ( I fell deeply in love with the other girl but that’s a story for another day ) Despite the colorful tapestry of my external world, the dread took to manifesting in splitting migraines and an intolerant nicotine addiction.

My sanctuaried bedroom was a cluster of personality, not betraying the discord. Piles of atomic notes about the psyche and homoerotic novellas stacked beside my bed. The angst of the teenage landscape, justified into plots of romance. My reclusion succeeded, but failed to articulate the preceding hollowness. When requested to write an essay on any given topic, my pen wrote and rewrote my name until the Akhila was a dark blot on the margin.

a snippet from my journal

Being biracial, bicultural and bicurious, I was vaguely aware that the odds of me fitting in were slim. So it didn’t quite surprise me when I wasn’t immediately accepted by my peers. It didn’t even surprise me when the code words I used in my journal for my classmates, mysteriously integrated into the local vernacular. Yet it did astound me to be isolated by my teachers.

It began with the anxious ignored hand raised in class, the red churidar, tossed over a shoulder, and in almost no time escalated to the my formal renunciation as Prime Minister Dunce in front of an audience of animals.(eighth graders, ew) Naturally, I began to fail. Math fell first. The other subjects followed. Doubt was steadily making me quite ill, yet there was one teacher who humored my perspective.

In ninth grade, I had scrounged up a group of misfits to swear at the world with. English class, to most gays and theys provided one safe haven from the academic torment; we would snicker giddily at George Orwell’s 1984. In a British tinged accent, with a modicum of restraint and femininity, my English teacher encouraged organic intellectual discovery. Her patience illuminated the room with discernment and it was her word that predetermined my path as a life-coach.

Her attention was my one anchor, yet the rest of my academic life was at a fast decline.

George Orwell was the perfect flame. His words heightened my observant eye towards insufficient social structures. I caught contradictions like butterflies and stored them in jars that I would bring back to my room and stare at. In class, with battering eyelashes I would look to the board, and feel the warmth of our secret. Me and my English teacher knew the truth. I was certain, her quarters must have had a board of butterflies too.

My other teachers were not as fond of this character upgrade. My distorted reflections in teal bathroom tiles became a familiar pass time to skip math class, and eventually I indulged in a public sob choreographed to churn guilt in the stomach of my superiors. L’s like dirty tissues cumulated at the base of my bed while the unescapable vacuum had become hungrier with time, all while the strawberry vape in my left pocket kept me frugal and dry. It wasn’t enough that I was an incompetent student, I was also emerging as a class-A, little shit.

Some part of me knew what was happening. My denial of her truth was quite alike double-think.

At the dawn of the pandemic, I watched my final board exams disintegrate from behind a screen. In the absence of academic responsibility, I experienced every stage of grief. I’d never grieved something I hated before.

is this incriminating enough?

And after years of failure, served like a fruit platter ever sweet and seasonal : my worth was no longer on the banquet. My defrosting took months. Yet eventually, the vacuum in my stomach had healed somehow. It was a different hunger that kept me up at night, the brain gnawing at itself from boredom.

Five years later, I’m sitting on my balcony overlooking the Hosur lake, white, frothy and pungent from chemical pollution. I was three years into my undergraduate degree and only the ghosts of my academic trauma remain. In the negotiation with my past, I would pick up a book every fortnight, and poise at the poolside cosplaying my Glass-Onion like naivete, but that was the limits to my discovery. Returning to my city over break had reignited me and my old flames romance, and my bookshelf watched me jealously.

So it was quite ironic when it was a substack article that had rekindled my desire to learn.

Utsav Mamoria is a brilliant writer. His piece How to live an intellectually rich life changed my world. With a litany of experiences and interests, his piece reads with adoration and conviction. Polymathically connected, his article maps ( literally he drew a map I love it ) the journey to intellectual discovery and concurrently, intellectual pleasure. He had put words in my mouth that had been dormant for years, and in his Tolkienesque recounting of what must be sought for in the pursuit of knowledge. I was found again.

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In the essay, he references John Conway.

Recreational mathematics was a strange forbidden gem in the world of knowledge that I had previously accepted as outside of my perimeter of understanding. Like most things at the time, math was a subject that my conscious mind had blocked so significantly it denied me entry into even cataloguing the topic as viable information. It became noise. Yet when following Utsav’s rabbit hole into the land of Moradoom, John Conway’s creation lit up a path that I had wandered down giddily.

The pixels in the game of life dance at the same rate that ideas form. Simple rules create complex interweaving designs and systems; Utsav explains the correlation between ideation and this mathematical creation. One idea dies in isolation. More than two, die from overpopulation. He concluded that for a rich thriving learning ecosystem, one must diversify the input of knowledge and ideas in the system to create a thriving world of interconnecting thoughts. Brilliant. In the pixels I found my projects, in the moving starships made from unexpected correlations I saw my own unrelated ideas floating and clashing with another to create wild planet-sized explosions.

The map of my own limitations transformed before me, and John Conway, that son of a gun was building the bridge that connected that immovable block in my brain to the multitalented young woman that I am. I was traumatized by the thought of even attempting to understand math in the fear that in my failure, it would sap me my last reservoir of resilience.

The epistemic dread, already an old friend, finally met my gaze, and invited confrontation. No longer was it angry at me for the injustices that had silenced it, rather I was willing to have one more conversation simply to explore, safe from the purview of authority.

The summer before I read Utsav’s article, I was working a teaching gig where I was teaching every fifth graders favorite class. English during summer school, yay! It was the only class that actually required a strict reading schedule. Met by plenty of resistance from my students who only after realizing that they could never outcringe me, were willing to sit through an hour of reading a SpiderMan poetry book.

One of my students who I will call Dahlia, was taller than the rest. She was a very pretty girl and had sharp, observant eyes that darted from one corner to the room to the other : and that was the extent of her participation. Sharp-tongued, she would tell me off and refuse to touch the books at her desk. She was so bright. I couldn’t begin to fathom her attitude. Clearly she knew how to interact with the material. As most young black and brown students were, she was no stranger to the discussions about institutional discrimination discussed, and I knew that she out of all the kids — who is so eager to point out classroom misogyny when it happened live time — would have something to say about it. Quite similarly to how I used Orwell to refuse my own coordinators unpaid “resume building opportunity”.

We fought and squabbled until finally, in trial and error, discovered what it was. Dahlia was abundantly overqualified. And under recognized. In a sobering attempt, I brought her to the front of the class to instruct alongside me, urging her to share what I had missed when discussing the book. It took ten minutes, and she had already begun to bloom.

Art by my amazing students

At the end of my shift I slung my bag onto my bed, and my body followed with it. Sobbing aggressively into my pillow, I was overcome with gratitude at the privilege to heal my own generational curse. The epistemic dread of learning had melted into my heart, and reached my vagus nerve. Calm, collected and unafraid of failure, I traversed my students curiosity like it was my own. We together were safe to attempt at fathoming what may be unknown.

I wonder what she would have become if I ( and the other teachers that will soon tutor her ) would have manifested if left unchecked and unrecognized. Dahlia’s existential boredom, was a lesser version of my own childhood frustrations. We shared an epistemic dread that is deepened by academic institutions that ignore the intelligence of young women. Ignoring that comment that goes a little too far beyond the school’s definition of oppression, when we connect too many dots, and realize that school isn’t as useful for us as it is the other kids.

Her refusal had forced innovation in the way that I approached learning and teaching. My refusal, in turn has led to the only natural conclusion that seemed worthy. I watched her fail on stage, and curl inwards into herself when her audience was unresponsive, but it gave her the platform to try once again. Her resilience to form was impeccable, and in her creative flow, she provided a breakthrough with the class that I could never have achieved on my own.

Tummy issues healed, the butterflies once confined to glass jars were flapping excitedly in the afternoon draft. And I find myself ruminating as the proud founder of AyaAgora.

AyaAgora is my one on one coaching container where I help women reveal and confront their own epistemic anxiety, no matter how late in their journey. Curated from years of relearning my love for academic growth that actually suits my desires and life’s vision : I keep in mind all of the students who wish to have explored knowledge under the honesty and playfulness they require to truly expand into their truest selves. Intellectual mastery is one of the many topics that we cover to rebuild the foundations of, that are stopping so many women from reaching their potential. Once we heal our relationship with learning, our highest feminine authority follows suit.

If so many minds built for synthesis are rewarded for fragmentation during their most formative years, what might your deepest curiosities demand of you?