Identity Crisis

I want to be known as a person first and a woman later… is this too much to ask or is this too weird a thought?? I don’t have an answer for this…but this question has been playing on my mind ever since a friend confided in me that he would not have spoken to me if I was not a woman, didn’t have dimples and was not single (needless to say that this friend was a guy).

This left me wondering, do we make friendships on the basis of looks only or does the whole package ever count. I went back to my first friend… Mousumi … I remember how I had met her … I was in Prep class and I didn’t have any friends… I used to hang out with my sister and her friends who were 2 years my seniors. They didn’t want me to tag alone as they were seniors and it didn’t do good to their image to be seen with a Junior… so I had started staying away from them instead of putting my sister in a tight spot of choosing over family and friends (she would have chosen me any day...but I would not have the pity, egoistical that I was even at that age).
Anyways I was having lunch all by myself and looking quite lost (btw the looking lost is a permanent expression on my face… not b’coz I am lost but I am wooden and the childhood expression has stuck) when Mousumi struts along and says hi, and asks me if I want to play hopscotch with her (we used to call it KhitKhit). She was not the first person to ask me to join her in some game, but the way she asked me with that smile and that casual way as if it is something she does everyday at the same time with a desperate look that if I refuse, she will be heartbroken was what caught my attention and I have stuck with her ever since. In those days friendship was not about dimples or single status, it was simple need for a friend. We never analyzed why we liked somebody, we just did. In fact, all the above reasoning that I gave for liking Mousumi was as an afterthought in my adult days….how can you expect a 6 year old to read so much into another persons mind…maybe you can, maybe it’s a 6 year olds intuition, maybe it was divine intervention or just plain luck. I don’t know, but the fact remains that we are still very close friends and share our lives with each other. And it helped that at that age I didn’t differentiate between person and woman.

But coming back to the current identity crisis…am I woman first and then a person or a person first and then a woman. Why was I so offended? In this day and age when size zero is the norm and botox enhanced features is the rage, why would I feel offended when someone compliments me on my look. Am I trying to pretend to be someone else, coz I do appreciate any compliments that come my way.

But at the same time, I would like the other person to notice my other attributes namely my thoughts and ideas about certain issues which have nothing to do with the way I look but may have contributed to the person I am. Does this mean that I owe an apology to the person who dared to befriend me on the basis of my dimples? I don’t know, I honestly don’t.

I do acknowledge the fact that I also have a certain filters when I meet somebody that helps me decide whether I would like to meet that person again and a small percentage of it is based on looks. But I would never say that I cultivated a friendship on the basis of looks only. Is this hypocrisy? Aren’t we all looking for an identity that would define us and bring meaning to our lives, so that we can be all labeled, tagged and put up on shelves for our future generations to ‘identify’ us from the rest of the horde? Well, I rather choose dimpled identity over a labeled tag. Major, I owe you an apology.