Hima Bindu writes about her journey of grit and determination, and how she never gave up in spite of several hurdles.
Hima Bindu writes about her journey of grit and determination, and how she never gave up in spite of several hurdles.
My life, my choices, my mistakes, my lessons, not your business!
The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own. No apologies, no excuses. No one to lean on, rely on, or blame. The gift is yours – it is an amazing journey – and you alone are responsible for the quality of it. This is the day your life really begins.
This is my story from being a managing director for a school to driving a taxi for livelihood.
This is a story about how society plays a role in a woman’s life if she decides to live it against the norms. This is the story about how a woman can fight against all odds if she is really determined about her decision.
I am Hima Bindu. I come from a typical orthodox Hindu family. I was an innocent teenager who couldn’t get any support from parents, to explore any opportunities and challenges, which would have made me more tolerable to society. My parents were eager to handover my responsibility to someone they liked, though I had different plans. I wanted to study further or at least work for few years before my marriage.
My plans did not work and I was married at the age of 21 to one of my relatives, with no options left.
It took no time for me to realize that this relationship wouldn’t work. We are two different people without any emotional connection between us. I felt powerless living for someone else. I was constantly torn between his expectations and my beliefs. I was never happy with the relationship and neither was I feeling the need for it.
This is an open fact that our relationship has existed only for the sake of my parents who believed in society, which never expects a wife to leave her husband and live life on her own terms. In spite of many efforts to get out of the relationship (yes I have filed for the divorce thrice) I was bound to stay in the relationship for a period of 12 long years due the emotional pressures from my parents.
This is the time I started to focus more on my career and my son as well.
My parents were more concerned about society rather than my happiness and asked me to focus on my career, leaving behind my personal life.
I opened a school and started to spend most of my time in developing it. Years passed by and my school was expanding. In the process, I recruited a principal. It took no time for us to become good friends. We shared a very good relationship and were working progressively, which created negative vibes for people around us, including my husband because of our long working hours.
But this never affected me as I always believed in myself and I knew that we never had such kind of feelings for each other. We even went on a three-week philosophical tour to Himalayas. This tour strengthened my perspectives towards life and made me understand the deeper and real meaning of the way it has to be taken. The inner meaning of life what I understood is all about your personal space. This personal space need not necessarily be with another person. It’s all about the way you understand and address to your own self. I understood that I need to hear to my own thoughts and act accordingly. I got to know the mistake I had done for all these years, ruining my life. I then decided to take it back and start living it.
As soon as I returned home, I revealed to my husband that I wouldn’t be staying in this relationship, and he assumed that my friend and I were in a relationship. I then felt that this could be better grounds for divorce and hence did not deny any of his assumptions. Things became worse after this and my husband and my parents threw me out of the house.
It’s getting tougher every day. I am missing all those days spent with my son. I’m losing out on my finances, getting threatening calls from my husband, running around with my lawyer, trying hard to support myself with a small job with no work satisfaction, and above all, fighting against my family all alone.
I know that this time is hard, but it will pass. But I am happy with my decision, because after all it’s for my rights; it’s for my life.
I do have a business plan of working for adults with special needs for which I need to invest. I am planning to drive a cab to earn more for the same, and have already initiated the process to start. I’d been living in others’ world all these years and not trusting myself.
At the end of it all, I got to know that no one can fit in my shoes to see the world the way I see it. I need to build up my own life, learn from my mistakes, gather strength from my struggle and bring my own sunshine. I have every right to be happy with my life and the saddest part is that I am fighting for my right.
Society will support you as long as you do things that it looks at favourably. But it’s foolish to live your life for the sake of society alone. You need to be happy with it. When things are not working well, and you need something else from your life and when you are clear about what you need, and when you feel you have the guts to face all the consequences:
Fight for it and go for it.
(Written by Hima Bindu)
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