A Radical Awakening summary

Shefali was born in India. She grew up in a culture steeped in tradition and patriarchy. The patriarchal tentacle that snared young Shefali was India’s infatuation with light-colored skin and eyes. Shefali had both, which meant she became the object of excessive and unwanted attention.

By age six, Shefali wanted to be a ninja so she could keep herself safe from men. The plan didn’t work. By age twelve, she had been groped by dozens of strangers, and molested by two male relatives.

She would tie her bed covers above her head and below her feet, as if she were a sausage, to keep away one of the molesting relatives when he spent the night at her childhood home. But he just undid the knots. Kicking him in the privates didn’t work either, and neither did threatening to tell her mother. He knew Shefali’s tender and generous nature. He guessed she would rather suffer abuse than burden her parents with a problem. And he was right.

Patriarchy and its toxic masculinity, which has scarred women and men across the globe for centuries, also infected Shefali’s young life in less overt ways than sexual assault. She has an early memory of her grandmother absently tying knots in her sari, haphazardly fixing her hair, and then explaining she didn’t need to worry about being beautiful since her husband was dead. This felt wrong to young Shefali, but her grandmother seemed to believe it, so Shefali didn’t question her.

Shefali’s grandmother had been conditioned to see her value only in relation to another person. This is one of the defining characteristics of the patriarchy. Most women aren’t aware of it, but they have been trained from girlhood to crave approval, validation, and praise. Not only do many women all over the world look to some external other for their sense of worth, they also place the needs of others over their own.

The patriarchy conditions people, especially women, to assume predetermined roles – subservient wife, obedient daughter, silent victim – or it scares them into false roles, like Shefali’s ninja, and prevents them from discovering their true nature on their own. Yes, many women are nurturing and generous by nature. But when those instincts are co-opted and abused, they stop being a reflection of the true self.

Institutions like religions and cultural traditions also prevent us from discovering our true natures. Like the patriarchy, these institutions want individuals to seek their identity through something external – church, marriage, an educational legacy, and so on – rather than internal. Your relationship with religion, or your marriage, may be healthy – but it probably isn’t if those institutions are your only source of self-worth.

Subjugation by the patriarchy and conditioning from its institutions leave us so desperate to be seen, and push us so far away from our true self, that we assume a false identity to get the attention we crave. That identity is the Ego, and it takes many shapes.