Sometimes I feel like I’m living relative to.
Relative to everything.
Relative to everyone.
Comparing my experiences with those who came before me.
Competing with them instead of simply appreciating the trails they blazed.
I tell myself I do it all for them.
That this life I go about living is one I live for them.
I tell myself that I am living my great-grandfather’s dream.
my grandfather’s dream.
my father’s dream.
I lie to myself.
For my grandfather did not want this for him — he wanted this for me.
I go about papering books with sticky notes, writing pieces that are important to me,
taking classes in dense political theory as if it isn’t what I want to do.
This wasn’t my grandfather’s dream.
I travel different places, capturing the world through my camera lens, journaling away, filling notebooks upon notebooks with poetry as if I don’t do this for myself.
I lie to myself.
For my grandfather did not want this for him — he wanted this for me.
My grandfather lived his life.
A one man show.
Doing it all in one run.
Growing up in the countryside of Bangladesh.
Eventually finding himself in the big, but little, city of Chittagong.
Working as a line worker at a steel mill.
Dreaming of owning one.
Ending up owning two.
Living the industrialist life.
What an incredible life I’ve had the opportunity to witness.
What a blessing it was to have enjoyed his company.
His dreams for himself were different from the ones he had set aside for me.
They were not expectations. They were simply a canvas of possibilities.
I must learn to differentiate.
For I am not my ancestor’s wildest dreams; what an imagined prestige.
They didn’t live for me. And nor should I for them.
I walk on the labor of their backs.
I learn to appreciate and move forward.
For every time I walk into a grand opportunity, it is the labor of the hundreds of brown men and women who came before me along with any of my hard work that brings me there.
I must stop lying to myself.
I live not for them, but for me.
MiC Columnist Alifa Chowdhury can be reached at alifac@umich.edu