Autobiography

Autobiography

My name is XYZ. I was born in Devlali, Maharashtra India. I belong to a Hindu family and considered being Asian. The religion we follow is called Hinduism. Our church is known as a Temple. I have been born and raised in India with pure Hindu values and traditions followed by a typical Hindu family.

My dad is a retired army officer. I did get the opportunity to travel places within India because of my dad's job. This gave me an opportunity to meet different people, see their culture and learned how to respect their differences within India. Through traveling, I gained a lot of knowledge about different people and their personalities and how their values differentiated from my own. By meeting people, I always had the urge to be more confident and do many things in life. But, I did not have the means to pursue what I want since there were a few restrictions in the family I belonged to.

In my family, education was always given importance. My dad use to say: “There is one thing nobody can take away from you, is your education.” I did my schooling and college from India. I went to a catholic school in India for six years and used to attend church in the school, but then my mom decided to put me in a non-Catholic school so that I may get more associated with Indian values and avoid getting aspired from non-Hindu values and customs. One day I told her that I wanted to be a nun, a very common concept in Christianity, when I grow up and I believe she was not impressed by what I used to think so she decided to change my school.

I was growing and entering my adulthood, we never talked about sex or sex education neither at school or at home. That was not something acceptable. I did not know the concept of gay and lesbian till I came to the United States of America after getting married. Now I believe it is not that gay/ lesbian concept is not prevalent in our society, but it is just that it is not acceptable by the society, so I did not see any or knew anything about it initially until I confronted it myself.

I was never allowed to date. I did my college from a solely “college for women”. In my city, we did not have colleges where men and women studied together. I was given good and higher education, but at the same time I was not that career oriented because I was getting an education to be educated, but one day I will be married to someone and then I have to start my family life. I was fine with it and nothing was wrong with it. Education was an important thing in our family, but it was limited to getting educated only, specifically for the girls. All my friends in college were getting married one by one or once their family was ...