People Like Us

I was set up to fail from young.

Not with violence. Not with cruelty. But with the kind of quiet discouragement that seeps into your spirit long before you even know what dreams are made of. It’s the kind of slow, insidious whisper that tucks itself into the background of your life, telling you in soft tones that you should never expect more than what the world has already carved out for you. And because it’s soft, because it comes wrapped in love and concern, you believe it.

I remember it like it just happened. I was in early primary school – I must have been seven or eight – and we were assigned to write a list of our goals. The teacher told us to dream big. To think about what we wanted to become, who we wanted to be. I took that task seriously. I can still see myself, sitting on the floor at home, my legs crossed, my pencil moving carefully across the page with the determination only a child can have.

At the top of the paper, I wrote with conviction:

“Study hard. Get a job in a tall building.”

I don’t even know why “tall building” stuck in my head. Maybe it was the books I read, or something I had seen on TV. But I imagined a place that was big and shiny and important. A place with air-conditioning, elevators, polished floors that made your shoes click confidently as you walked. A place that smelled of coffee and possibility. It meant success. It meant I had made it.

My aunt, Vinda, was sitting nearby. She glanced over at my paper and chuckled softly – not cruelly, not loudly, just a little laugh, as though I had said something silly. Then she said the words that would cling to me for years, echoing inside me every time I reached for more:

“People like us don’t do those things.”

Just like that, she rewrote my story before it even began.

I remember feeling confused. Crushed, even. What did she mean by “people like us”? I didn’t ask. I didn’t push back. I just knew that whatever dreams I had dared to put on that page, she was telling me they were too big for me. Too far from the life we knew.

It would take years for me to fully understand what she meant.

“People like us” meant Indian. It meant from Central. From villages with names that barely appeared on maps. It meant people who grew up in small houses with zinc roofs, whose families didn’t own land or businesses, who didn’t have connections in high places. It meant people who were expected to be content with modest lives – working hard, keeping quiet, and being grateful for whatever came, even if it wasn’t enough.

And it wasn’t the last time I heard those words – or ones like them.

Years later, when I shared that I wanted to be a cosmetologist – full of passion and plans, eager to turn beauty into a business – someone else looked at me and shook their head. “People not going to hire anybody for that,” they said. “People learning to do their own makeup. That will never be successful.”

It hurt. But it was familiar. It was the same message with the same limit: dream smaller.

And for a long time, I listened. Why wouldn’t I? When you’re a child, you take the word of adults as gospel. You believe the warnings, even when they don’t sound like warnings. You think that if they love you, they must be right. What I didn’t understand then was that love and limitation can live in the same mouth. I didn’t know yet that sometimes, the people who raise you were themselves raised on fear, and they pass it down without meaning to.

Looking back now, I see Aunt Vinda clearly. She wasn’t mean. She wasn’t trying to crush me. She was tired – a woman shaped by hard years, by the weight of expectation and resignation. She had been taught that it was dangerous to dream too big, that ambition was for people from other places, with other names. She believed, truly, that she was protecting me from disappointment. And for that, I forgive her.

Because the most powerful thing I have ever done – the most rebellious, the most healing – was to not believe her.

I chose to believe in myself instead.

The turning point didn’t come with grand gestures or dramatic moments. There was no applause, no instant transformation. It came in quiet decisions. Saying yes to jobs in tall buildings. Walking into rooms where I was the only one from “Central.” Launching creative projects I was told would fail. Speaking up in meetings where my voice trembled but I spoke anyway. Helping other women from villages like mine to write their own stories – stories filled with choice, with bold ambition, with the stubborn belief that we were worthy of more.

I remember the first time I set foot in an actual tall building. My shoes clicked on the polished floors just as I had imagined as a child. The air smelled of coffee, and the elevator doors opened with a soft chime. I stood there, taking it all in, and felt a strange combination of pride and sadness. I was proud because I had made it, in my own way. And I was sad because I knew how many other little girls like me had been told, “people like us don’t do those things,” and had believed it.

Now, when I think of that little girl sitting on the floor with her list of goals, I don’t grieve for her. I thank her. She was braver than she knew. She held the vision when no one else could see it. She believed before the world told her not to. She believed in things bigger than what she had been shown.

They said people like us don’t do those things.

And yet, I did.

And now, every time I walk into a meeting, or take a call from someone who looks surprised that I’m the one in charge, or launch a project that I was once told would never work, I do it for her – for that little girl with the pencil and the paper.