[Editor's note: Due to the nature of this article, our guest writer has chosen to stay anonymous.]

I grew up surrounded by women. But closeness wasn’t the same thing as safety. There’s been a surge in talk about female support lately — girls who support girls, women uplifting women, being a girl’s girl - the soft-sisterhood movement. Online, it looks easy: women cheering each other on, celebrating wins, trading softness instead of envy. It’s a beautiful thing to witness. But for many South Asian women, it also feels unfamiliar — like a language we understand but never learned to speak.

Because in our homes, love was always present, but it came with fine print. Be careful what you say. Be careful who you trust. Don’t get too comfortable. We were raised in rooms filled with women — mothers, sisters, aunts — yet emotional safety was never promised. Closeness existed in gestures: oiling hair, sharing clothes, borrowing earrings. But vulnerability? That was always dangerous territory.

You learn early that information doesn’t stay where you leave it. You share something in confidence, and by evening, it’s travelled — not out of malice, but muscle memory. In our world, stories move faster than people. One person’s confession becomes another person’s ammunition. A sigh becomes gossip. A joke becomes proof. It brings me back to times where I have sat with family members, starting a conversation with “Swear you won't say anything” or “Pinky promise this stays between us...”, I guess that's the opening I should have remembered to start my conversations with, I’d sit with someone at home and before I could even hear the door shut the news of the information I had discussed had already reached another’s ears — with that the confrontations and tears began — after all of it someone would come to me and say “But look no one blames you.” If only the behaviour and words of everyone else reflected that too.

The warmth that only appears when someone else is in the doghouse. The hug that’s part comfort, part calculation. And then the morning after the storm, when everyone acts normal again. That’s the part that eats you — the pretending. The silence that demands you participate in amnesia.

What stayed with me wasn’t the argument — it was the way my chest tightened the second I realised my words weren’t mine anymore. I remember standing in that doorway, hearing my name in a tone that wasn’t familiar, and thinking: “How am I the one being comforted, when I wasn’t the one who betrayed anyone?”

That’s when it struck me — the pain didn’t come from what was said, but from how normal everyone acted afterwards. That casual, effortless pretending.

There are quieter betrayals too. The compliment that carries a hook — “I mean, it looks nice, but doesn’t it look too similar to what X is wearing?” and once I go back to change out its pure words of negativity, “should she really wear that,” “how embarrassing, some bits don’t seem to fit her properly” followed by giggles and more whispers. However, once the convenience of that outfit comes into question to fight a case comes up “I really don’t understand why you can’t get what you like? I think you looked so amazing!” Why do we only feel the need to raise one and another when it’s convenient?

After a while, you become fluent in tension. You read rooms like weather reports. You know what kind of day it’s going to be from how doors shut and teaspoons clink. You stop saying what you mean because you’ve learned that every word is evidence waiting to be misinterpreted. So, you hold things in. You become careful. Careful becomes your personality.

There were days when I’d wake up already exhausted — not from anything that had happened, but from everything that might. I’d stand outside a room and rehearse my “good morning” because I feared the way it could be received. Warm? Cold? Passive? Punishing? No one teaches you how damaging that guessing game is. It chips away at your confidence, one hesitated sentence at a time.

That’s what no one tells you about growing up in such homes — how hypervigilance becomes second nature. You smile before you feel happy. You apologise before you’ve done anything wrong. You start confusing control for care. And by the time you realise that love isn’t supposed to make you anxious, you’ve already taught yourself to expect it to.

I’ve spent years trying to justify this dynamic — calling it culture, calling it love, calling it misunderstanding. But honestly, I’m tired of explaining pain that could have been avoided with a little honesty. For so long, I thought it was me — my sensitivity, my overthinking, my reactions. But times have shown me it wasn’t that. It was the environment. The rules no one admits exist. The emotional landmines placed in places where love was supposed to be. And realising that was oddly grounding. Painful, but grounding. It finally separated my identity from the chaos around me.

So, when you finally meet women who offer unconditional warmth — women who clap for you without calculation — you don’t relax; you brace. Even now, when a woman is genuinely kind to me, a part of me freezes before it softens. My instinct is to scan for what I missed — the catch, the shift, the fine print. It’s heartbreaking to admit how deeply this conditioning settles into your bones. It teaches you to expect loss in places meant to hold you. You wait for the shift, for the familiar sting behind the softness. Not because you want to, but because your body doesn’t know the difference yet. I’ve been blessed to meet so many like-minded women who simply just want to uplift you because they see that same drive and potential in you, yet when we sit down and speak about it within our families the conversation follows with “But why does she want to help you so much? What does she benefit from this? Are you sure there isn’t something else to it?” We are warned to be careful.

Why didn’t this warning come within the household itself?

It’s not that South Asian women are unkind. It’s that we’ve inherited scarcity. Generations of women who had to ration tenderness, competing for the smallest slice of approval, space, control. They weren’t taught that safety could exist between women — only that it had to be earned or defended. But understanding that pattern doesn’t excuse it. At some point, inheritance becomes a choice. And as much as I understand that I’ve kind of grown tired of hearing this as everyone's excuse for why this happens, “Oh because this happened to me…”, “This is how it’s always been so it’s how it’s meant to be.”

 Our generation is tired of surviving with each other. Tired of reading between lines, of maintaining peace that doesn’t feel peaceful. We want honesty that doesn’t explode, boundaries that don’t need explanation, love that doesn’t depend on who’s winning that week. We’re learning — awkwardly, stubbornly — that loyalty can exist without hierarchy. That softness can stand its ground. That closeness doesn’t have to cost safety. Some days, I wake up waiting for the shift — the tension, the tightness, the sudden wrongness in the air. And when it doesn’t come, I don’t quite know what to do with the quiet. But that’s the work, isn’t it? Relearning calm. Letting ease feel safe.

We were the daughters raised beside each other, not with each other. But maybe that’s where the story changes. The real sisterhood isn’t in the slogans — it’s in the rewiring. In how we talk to each other when no one else can hear. In learning that love doesn’t need to hurt to feel real. Maybe this is what healing looks like — not big reconciliations, but quieter ones.

The decision to stop explaining yourself to people who never really listened.

I’m still unlearning all of this. Some days I do better. Some days I still shrink, still apologise too quickly, still read too much into a glance or a sigh. Healing isn’t glamorous — it’s slow, awkward, and sometimes humiliating. But it’s the first time in my life I’m choosing myself without asking for permission.