People sometimes assume Nikumonism is a philosophy, something with a doctrine behind it, because of the "ism." It isn't. It's simpler than that, and more personal.

My name is Nikumoni Saikia. My nickname, the one my family and close friends still call me, is Maina. Nikumoni, plus an s, plus an m. Nikumonism. That's the whole origin story. No manifesto hiding behind it, no movement I'm trying to start. Just my own name, turned into a place.

But a name can still hold a lot, even without claiming to be a philosophy. This space is where I put down what I'm learning, thinking about, and figuring out, in real time, not after I've arrived somewhere polished. Some of it will be personal, things I've lived through and made sense of slowly. Some of it will be research backed, things I've read carefully and want to explain clearly, because good information deserves better than a scroll-past.

I'm not chasing a following here. I'm not writing to a content calendar. I'm writing because I have a lot of curiosity, a lot of chaos I've made sense of, and a lot I still want to understand out loud. If something I write helps you think about your own life, your own body, your own work, a little more clearly, that's the whole point.

Welcome to Nikumonism. It's just me, Maina, thinking in public.

I did my Master of Arts in Women's Studies at Gauhati University. Two years. That is a short amount of time on paper. But those two years changed how my brain works. They changed how I see my own life, my own family, and the world around me. I want to write about what I learned, and who taught me to see it.

What feminism is actually asking for

Before I go further, I want to clear up something that gets misunderstood a lot. Feminism is not about women being better than men, or having power over men. It is about pointing at inequality and discrimination based on gender, wherever it shows up, and asking for something simple in return. Equal opportunity. The same chance to study, to work, to speak, to inherit, to be believed, to be safe, regardless of whether you were born a boy or a girl.

That is the whole demand, really. Not special treatment. Not revenge for the past. Just a fair starting line. Everything else in this piece, the history, the theories, the movements, comes back to that one idea in the end.

How we get programmed without knowing it

Before university, I never used the word "patriarchy" out loud. I just lived inside it, the way fish live in water without noticing the water. Girls in most homes learn early to be quiet, to adjust, to put other people first, to take up less space. Boys learn something different. Nobody sits you down and teaches this on purpose most of the time. It comes through small things. Who gets served food first. Who is told to be careful walking alone at night. Who is praised for being "adjusting" and who is praised for being "strong."

In my Women's Studies classes, I learned a simple but powerful idea. This is not natural. It is built. Someone, somewhere, over hundreds of years, decided this is how things should be, and then it got passed down so many times that it started to feel like the truth instead of a choice. Once you see that, you cannot unsee it. You start noticing it everywhere, in old movies, in wedding rituals, in the way people talk to your brother differently than they talk to you.

That is what unlearning means. You take apart the ideas you absorbed without ever agreeing to them. And relearning means choosing, on purpose this time, what you actually believe.

What we all had in common, even when nothing else did

I did not learn all of this only from textbooks. I learned just as much from my classmates, my seniors, and my juniors, sitting together and comparing our own homes. We came from different households, different communities, different money situations. On paper, our lives looked nothing alike.

But one pattern showed up again and again, no matter who was talking. In almost every one of our houses, the girls and women were taught, directly or without a single word ever being said, that their own needs come last. Eat after everyone else has eaten. Speak only after checking if it is your place to speak. Adjust, always adjust, before anyone even asks you to. It did not matter if the family was rich or poor, from a city or a village, from one community or another. That one lesson found its way into almost every home in the room.

Realizing this together, as a group, hit differently than realizing it alone. It meant this was never really about our individual families being strict or old-fashioned. It was bigger than any one household. It was a pattern, repeated so widely across so many different lives, that it stopped looking like a coincidence and started looking like exactly what it was, a system.

Where did the family as we know it even come from

One idea that broke my brain a little in class was this. The kind of family most of us grow up thinking is "normal," one husband, one wife, children, property passed down the father's side, is not as old or as natural as it feels.

A thinker named Friedrich Engels wrote a whole book about this in 1884, called The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. His argument was simple once you strip away the big words. Before people owned land, animals, and stored wealth, there was less reason to control who a woman had children with. But once families started owning property, a new problem appeared. A man wanted to know, for certain, which children were his, so he could pass his land and wealth down to them. Controlling women's bodies and choices became the tool to guarantee that. Engels called monogamy, in this specific sense, not a story about love, but a story about property and inheritance.

I want to be fair here. This is one influential theory, not a proven fact everyone agrees on, and later historians have pushed back on parts of it. But the core question stuck with me. How much of what we call "family values" today is really about love, and how much of it was originally about making sure wealth stayed in the right hands? Once you ask that question, you start looking at marriage customs, dowry, and inheritance laws very differently.

It was not always a man's world, not everywhere

Here is something that surprised most of us in class. Patriarchy is not the only way humans have ever organized family life. Matrilineal societies, where family name, land, and inheritance pass down through the mother's side instead of the father's, are real, documented, and some still exist today, including right here in Northeast India.

The Khasi and Garo tribes of Meghalaya, not far from my own home state of Assam, are among the largest surviving matrilineal communities in the world. Children take their mother's surname. The youngest daughter usually inherits the family's ancestral property. A husband often moves into his wife's home after marriage, not the other way around, which is the exact reverse of what most of India considers normal.

I do want to be precise here, because it is a common mix-up. Matrilineal is not the same as matriarchal. Matrilineal just means family name and property pass through the mother's line. Matriarchal would mean women actually hold political power over men. Most anthropologists today agree that true matriarchy, women ruling over men the way men have ruled over women, was probably never a universal stage of human history. But matriliny is real, it is documented, and communities like the Khasi and Garo prove that tracing a family through its women is not some fantasy. It has existed, quietly, quite close to where I grew up, the whole time.

Learning this changed something for me. It is easy to believe patriarchy is just "how humans naturally are." It is much harder to believe that once you learn there were always other ways to organize a family, sitting a few states away from your own childhood home.

Savitribai Phule, the woman who started it all in India

I cannot write about feminism in India without starting with Savitribai Phule. She was born in 1831 in a small village in Maharashtra. She was married at nine years old, and she could not read or write at the time. Her husband, Jyotirao Phule, taught her to read at home, since no school back then would take a girl like her.

She did not stop there. In 1848, together with her husband, she opened one of the first schools for girls in India. She became India's first female teacher. People threw stones and cow dung at her on her way to school, simply for the crime of teaching girls to read. She kept walking anyway, carrying a spare saree so she could change once she reached the school. She also opened schools for Dalit children, fought against child marriage, supported widow remarriage, and started a shelter for women who had nowhere else to go.

I think about that spare saree often. It tells you everything about what she was up against, and what she refused to give up. Every time I sit and write freely, in English, on a laptop, without asking anyone's permission, I am standing on ground she dug up with her bare hands. I do not think I fully understood gratitude until I learned her story properly, not the two-line version in a textbook, but the real one.

The waves of feminism, explained simply

My professors taught us that feminism did not arrive all at once. It came in waves, each one building on the last.

The first wave, mostly from the late 1800s to early 1900s, fought for basic legal rights, especially the right for women to vote. It was about being recognized as a citizen at all.

The second wave, roughly the 1960s to 1980s, pushed further. It fought for workplace rights, reproductive rights, and the right to be seen as more than a wife or a mother. It asked why women's unpaid work at home was never counted as real work.

The third wave, starting in the 1990s, brought in something important that earlier waves had often missed. It said feminism cannot only speak for one type of woman. A poor woman's struggle is not the same as a rich woman's struggle. A Dalit woman's struggle is not the same as an upper caste woman's struggle. This idea is called intersectionality, and it changed how I think about every single issue, not just gender.

The fourth wave, from around the 2010s onward, is happening online and offline together. It is the wave of hashtags, of survivors speaking up together, of using the internet to reach people old movements never could.

I am a product of all four waves, whether I chose to be or not. Every right I did not have to fight for myself was fought for by someone in one of these waves.

Vandana Shiva and the idea that connected women and the earth

Ecofeminism was the idea that surprised me the most in my two years. It says that the way society treats women and the way society treats the earth are connected, not separate.

Dr. Vandana Shiva is the name most linked to this idea in India. She trained as a physicist, then became one of the world's most well known environmental activists. In the 1970s, she joined the Chipko movement, where rural women in the Himalayas hugged trees to stop loggers from cutting them down. She later said this movement taught her something no textbook had. The women protecting those trees were not fighting for money or land titles. They were fighting because those forests gave them water, food, and fuel, and they understood that better than any trained forester did.

She went on to start Navdanya, a movement to protect native seeds and support organic farming, and helped build over a hundred community seed banks across India. Her core argument stayed simple through all of it. When a system treats nature as something to extract and exploit, it usually treats women the same way, as something to be used and controlled, not listened to. I should say her work has critics too, some scientists have pushed back on some of her claims about agriculture. But the core idea, that caring for the earth and caring for women often come from the same place, stayed with me.

My professors

I owe a lot to the professors who taught me this. They did not just hand me theories. They made us sit with uncomfortable questions about our own families, our own choices, our own silences. They taught with patience, even when a room full of twenty-something-year-olds pushed back hard against ideas that challenged everything we grew up believing. I am who I am today partly because of how hard they pushed me to keep thinking. I am deeply grateful to every one of them.

Learning about gender beyond just "men and women"

One of the biggest shifts in my thinking came from learning that gender is more than two boxes. Sex is about the body you are born with. Gender is about identity, how a person understands and lives their own gender, and it does not always match the box someone is assigned at birth.

Cisgender means your gender matches what you were assigned at birth. Transgender means it does not. Non-binary means someone does not identify only as a man or only as a woman. There are more identities than these three words alone, and the honest truth is that no single article, including this one, can capture all of that in a few paragraphs.

What stayed with me is simpler than any definition. Every person deserves to be understood as who they actually are, not forced into a box that was decided for them before they could even speak. That is really the same lesson the rest of this article keeps coming back to, just applied to a different part of who we are.

What I carry forward

Two years is not a long time. But I walked out of that program seeing my grandmother's silence differently, my mother's sacrifices differently, my own instinct to shrink myself differently. I learned to trace a straight line from Savitribai Phule's spare saree, to the women hugging trees in the Himalayas, to the professors who taught me in that classroom, all the way to me, sitting here now, writing this without asking anyone's permission.

That line is not finished. I am just one more small link in it. And I hope whoever is reading this finds their own name somewhere on that same line too.

This piece draws on biographical accounts of Savitribai Phule from Britannica and multiple historical sources, on Friedrich Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, on documented research about the matrilineal Khasi and Garo communities of Meghalaya, on Dr. Vandana Shiva's own interviews and writing on ecofeminism and the Chipko movement, and on the framework of the four waves of feminism as taught widely in Women's Studies programs, alongside my own coursework, classroom conversations, and experience in the Master of Arts in Women's Studies program at Gauhati University.

Let me tell you something small that happens in almost every Indian home. A woman uses a pad. She wraps it up and puts it in the garbage bag. Then the kachrawala or kachrawali, the person who collects our trash, picks it up. In my city, this happens through GMC in Guwahati, or BMC in Mumbai. The bag goes into a truck. The truck takes it to a landfill. Landfills fill up fast, so workers often burn some of the waste to make space for more.

For years, I never thought about this. I just packed the bag and moved on, like most people do. Then one day I learned what "carbon footprint" means. It means how much harm something you use leaves behind on the earth. That idea stuck with me. A pad I use for a few hours would still be sitting in a landfill long after I am gone. Around that same time, I saw an ad for a menstrual cup. I decided to try it. My life has been better since. Less waste, less worry, less cost over time.

But switching was easy for me. I had the money to buy a cup. I had the internet to learn about it. And no one at home told me it would hurt me or take something from me. Many women and girls in India do not have any of that. I saw this with my own eyes, not in a report, but in real villages.

What I saw doing fieldwork in Assam

I used to work as a researcher with an organisation called CINI, Child In Need Institute. We did a study across 11 districts of Assam. Our job was to check how well a menstrual health program was working in government schools. This meant real visits, not just reading papers at a desk.

What I saw was hard to watch. Many schools had no proper toilets. Some had toilets but no running water. The ones that did exist were often dirty. You did not need a survey to understand why girls skipped school during their periods. You could see the reason just by standing in that washroom.

Our survey backed this up too. Before we started our program, we asked girls questions. Most of them said they would rather stay home than come to school while on their period. We already knew why. We had just watched them try to manage it in places with no clean water and no privacy.

Looking at all this, I had one simple thought. If pads cost too much money for these families, why not give out menstrual cups instead? One cup can last for years. It solves the money problem and the waste problem at the same time.

My colleague's answer stuck with me. She said the girls did not want to use cups. Their mothers were scared. They believed a cup could get stuck inside the body. They believed using one could take away a girl's virginity. They believed it would be painful. So even when a good solution was sitting right there, an old belief blocked it completely. It was never really about the product. It was about fear, and about ideas passed down about a girl's body.

That is the part most articles about period waste miss. People talk about access like it is only about money, like giving out enough pads or cups will fix everything. What I saw in those 11 districts taught me something different. Money, clean toilets, and old beliefs are three separate walls in front of the same door. You cannot fix one and expect the other two to disappear.

The numbers behind what I saw

The bigger data backs up what I saw on the ground. A national survey called NFHS-5 found that only 43 out of 100 young women in rural India use safe period products like pads, cloth made for this purpose, or cups. In cities, that number is 68 out of 100. That is a big gap between two parts of the same country.

Many rural women still use plain cloth instead. Studies show this number is somewhere between 50 and 62 out of 100 young women. When cloth is not washed and dried properly, it can cause infections.

There is good news too. One government program gave free pads to girls in Assam and Tripura. A study checked what happened after. Pad use went up a lot among girls aged 15 to 19 who got the free pads. This tells us something important. When help actually reaches people, it works. The problem is that it has not reached everyone yet.

Now for the waste side. India throws away somewhere between 12 and 12.3 billion used pads every single year. That adds up to about 113,000 tonnes of waste. Almost all of it, 98 out of 100 pads, ends up in a landfill, the same kind I now think about every time I take out my trash. A normal pad is almost 90 percent plastic. That is about the same amount of plastic as four plastic bags. It can take anywhere from 250 to 800 years to break down. In one survey, 88 out of 100 people said they wanted to use less polluting options, but could not find them nearby or could not afford them. Same wall, blocking a different path this time.

And under all of this, old beliefs keep doing quiet damage. In parts of Maharashtra, women are still sent away to huts outside the village during their periods. One study found that every single woman following this custom also avoided cooking food and doing other normal tasks while on her period. Another report found that 63 out of 100 village schools do not teach girls anything about periods at all. Shame is not a small side problem here. It shapes what a family lets a girl use, what a school bothers to teach, and what leaders think is even worth offering.

How to actually throw away a pad properly

Most of us were never taught the right way to throw away a used pad. What we usually do, wrap it in any plastic bag and toss it with the rest of the trash, is part of the exact problem filling up our landfills. It also puts waste workers at risk, since these pads carry blood and are technically medical waste, not just normal trash.

A better habit, when nothing else is available, is to wrap the pad in paper instead of plastic, and keep it apart from other recyclable waste. Never flush a pad down the toilet. It clogs pipes and often ends up polluting rivers and lakes anyway.

But a single person's habits can only do so much when there is no real system around them. This is exactly the gap I saw in those Assam schools. This is where machines can help.

The most common setup uses two machines side by side. One is a pad vending machine, so anyone can get a pad when they need one. Right next to it sits an incinerator, a machine that safely burns used pads into ash so they never touch a landfill or an open drain. In Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, one project installed both machines in around 65 government schools. Girls no longer had to miss school for lack of a pad, and no longer had to throw a used one into the open. Similar machines now exist in schools across Hyderabad, Punjab, and Bihar too, usually set up by an NGO or a company working with the local school.

This is turning into real government policy, not just a one-time idea. A central program called Samagra Shiksha now pays for these machines as part of school funding. Colleges are required to have both machines too, under rules set by the UGC. India's rural sanitation program pushes for these machines to be added inside public toilets. A few states have gone even further on their own. Kerala's She Pad program puts both machines into every government school in the state.

I want to be honest here too, since a good article should not oversell anything. Some reports have found that cheap, small incinerators without proper filters can release harmful smoke into the air. So the machine by itself is not a perfect fix. The version with real smoke control is what actually helps, and that is something every school or office should check before buying one, not just assume.

Offices could easily follow the same idea schools are slowly adopting. A pad machine and a proper incinerator, side by side, treated as normal bathroom equipment instead of a special request. It would do for working women what it is meant to do for schoolgirls. It would turn a period from an awkward, difficult problem into just another normal part of the day.

Why I think all of this belongs in one story

It would be easier to write three separate pieces here. One about access. One about shame and old beliefs. One about plastic waste. But the girl I met in that Assam school, the one with no clean toilet, unlikely to ever be offered a cup even for free, whose family's used pads would end up burned in a landfill just like mine, is not living through three separate problems. She is living inside one system that was never built with her in mind, not the toilets, not the product, not the beliefs around her own body.

I switched to a cup because I had money and information and nobody standing in my way. That is not something I earned. It is just luck. The real work, the work I saw missing in those 11 districts, is building the toilets, the clean water, the trust, and the honest conversations that let every girl have that same choice. Not just the lucky ones who happened to see the right ad at the right time.

What this taught me about design

I did not train as a designer first. I came to design through storytelling and research, through sitting with real people and watching what actually happens to them. But looking back at those 11 districts now, I see the whole problem as a design problem too.

Good design starts with one simple question. Who is this actually for? Not who we imagine is using it, but who is really standing in front of it. A pad vending machine designed for a city office does nothing for a girl in a village with no electricity. A menstrual cup ad that works on me does nothing for a mother who fears it will hurt her daughter. Every solution I saw fail in the field failed because it was built for an imagined user, not the real one sitting in that school.

This is also what a system looks like when nobody designed it on purpose. No one sat down and planned for a girl to have no toilet, no water, and no one to explain her own body to her. It happened because every part, the school, the health program, the waste truck, was built separately, by different people, at different times, with no one asking how it would all fit together for the person living through it. That is the real lesson here. A broken system is not always built by someone trying to cause harm. It is often just built by many small choices that never once considered the whole picture, or the whole person.

Designing for a better world, in this case, would mean something simple. Start with the girl standing in that dirty washroom, not the policy document. Build the toilet, the pad, the disposal machine, and the conversation with her mother as one connected system, not four separate projects handed to four separate people. Ask her what she is afraid of before deciding what to give her. That is not just good ethics. It is good design. The two were never really separate to begin with.

This piece comes from my own fieldwork on a menstrual health study across 11 districts of Assam with Child In Need Institute (CINI), along with data from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), research on menstrual hygiene in rural India published in Health Policy and Planning and Scientific Reports, a 2025 study on period huts in Gadchiroli published in Discover Public Health, research on sanitary waste published in Environmental Science and Pollution Research, reporting from Down To Earth, and news reports on pad and incinerator machines from Deccan Chronicle and MVS India.

I want to write about something that has followed me my whole life. Not from men. From women. Aunties in my neighborhood. Female relatives. Women who share my own gender, who should, in theory, understand what it feels like to be judged only by your body. Instead, many of them have been the loudest voice doing exactly that.

I am calling this piece observatory research, because that is exactly what it is. I have been observing this pattern for close to two decades now, on my own body, in real time. I want to lay out what I saw, and then look at what research says about why it happens, and who benefits from it.

What I actually went through

When I was a child, I was thin. Very thin. People called me "matchstick." In Assamese, they called me "khorika," which basically means a thin stick used to light a fire. Grown women, aunties in my own neighborhood, would look at a child and say things like, "don't your parents feed you properly," or "what do they even do with all their money." Someone once said my hair looked like a homeless person's hair. I was a child. I did not choose my body type. I did not choose my family's income. But somehow, my thin arms became a topic open for public comment.

Then puberty happened. My body changed the way bodies naturally change during puberty, and I gained weight. The same kind of women, sometimes the very same individuals, switched their comments completely. Now I was "becoming like an elephant." One line has stayed with me word for word, and I want to write it exactly as I heard it, in Assamese, because something is lost when it gets translated. "Atiya tuk besi koi khate pite ghoror nisina lagise dekhat. Besi koi nekhabi, faati jabi sabi." It means something close to, "now you look like you belong to a family that overfeeds you, don't eat too much or you'll burst." I was warned, more than once, that I would "face issues to get married" because of my weight.

My body did not stop changing after that, and neither did the comments. From around 2019 to 2022, during my university years, my body settled into what most people would call a balanced weight. I was commuting long distances to reach university almost every day. I was also running a small home bakery on the side, baking, decorating, and delivering cakes myself. On top of that, I was eating low carb. Between the daily commute, the physical work of baking and delivering, and the way I was eating, my body found a kind of balance on its own, without me chasing any particular look. Even then, someone told me, "you were cuter before, why did you lose weight, you're looking like a patient now." Not thin, not fat, just a normal, balanced body, and it still was not left alone.

Then in 2023, I moved to Mumbai, and my body changed again. My food and environmental allergies caused ongoing inflammation in my body. Around the same time, I fractured the ulna and radius of my right forearm and had implant surgery, which left me with very limited mobility for a long stretch. Less movement, more inflammation, and my body held onto more weight again. Here is the part that matters most to me. My blood reports and internal markers are in a healthy range. On a cellular level, by the actual numbers, I am healthy. My body simply looks bigger than that, partly because I have wide shoulders and wide hips to begin with. I am a kapha body type. I was never built to look like a vata body type, no matter how much weight I gain or lose. Right now, I am back on a fitness journey, but this time it is for my own strength and endurance, not for any judgmental aunty waiting to approve of me.

Thin was wrong. Fat was wrong. Balanced was apparently wrong too. And now, fit and lean again after this year's work, I am waiting to see what the next comment will be. There was never a version of my body, across any of these years, that was simply left alone.

There is a pattern here that goes beyond just comments on weight. When I meet many of these same women now, the first thing out of their mouth is rarely, "how are you." It is a remark about my body. Not a question about my work, my mind, my day, my health, my happiness. Just my body, evaluated on sight, like a product on a shelf. Then, almost every single time, after they are done commenting on my body, the same people ask me for help with their own life problems. For years I said yes every time, even while feeling completely drained by the exchange. Criticize first, then ask for a favor. I have watched this exact order repeat itself so many times that it stopped feeling random.

Something changed for me once I became financially independent. I started saying no. I stopped entertaining conversations that only existed to serve someone else's needs while draining mine. And the response from these same people was not self-reflection. It was an accusation. People started saying my "attitude has changed" since I started earning money. As if having boundaries is an attitude problem, but constant unsolicited body criticism is normal behavior that needs no explaining.

I also stepped back from being active on my own social media accounts, because I kept receiving the same kind of comments there too. A body that is always available to be looked at is apparently always available to be judged.

None of this was ever really about me. Not one version of my body was ever good enough for them, no matter how much it changed. Thin, average, heavier, lean and fit again, it did not matter. Something was always wrong. And the thing is, many of the very people passing these judgments were not living especially healthy lives themselves. So I started asking myself a real question. Why do women do this to other women? Is there an actual explanation for this pattern, something beyond just individual rudeness?

There is. Here is what I found.

It is not really about your body. It is about their own insecurity

Researchers have a name for what happens when someone feels bad about themselves and then compares themselves to people they see as worse off, just to feel better. It is called downward social comparison. Psychologists have found that people who feel threatened, or who already have low self-esteem, are the ones most likely to do this. When someone cannot fix what is actually bothering them in their own life, comparing themselves to someone they can label as "worse off" gives their mood a quick, artificial lift.

There are two versions of this. One is quiet, where someone just privately notices they are "better off" than another person and feels relieved. The other is active, where someone actually puts another person down out loud, often dressed up as a joke or as "concern," specifically to lower that person's status and raise their own by comparison. Reading this, I recognized my own life immediately. The comment that I was "cuter before" and now looked "like a patient," said during my university years when my body was genuinely balanced, was never really information about my health. It was someone finding a new angle to bring me back down to a size where they could feel comfortable again.

This also explains something that confused me for years, why nothing I did was ever enough. If the real goal was never actually my wellbeing, then no version of my body could ever satisfy them. The target was never really my weight. The target was keeping me in a position where they could always find something to say.

Why other women specifically, and why patriarchy needs it this way

This still leaves an open question. Why does this criticism so often come from other women, from people who understand exactly what it feels like to be judged this way, since they have almost certainly been judged the same way themselves?

Researchers who study internalized misogyny have looked closely at this. Internalized misogyny happens when someone absorbs sexist ideas from the world around them for so long that they start believing and repeating those ideas themselves, sometimes without even realizing it. One effect researchers describe is called horizontal hostility. Instead of a woman being angry at the actual system that judges women's bodies so harshly in the first place, that anger and frustration gets redirected sideways, onto other women instead. It becomes easier, and safer, to criticize a sister, a daughter, a neighbor, or a niece than to question a much bigger system that nobody around you seems willing to challenge.

My time studying Women's Studies at Gauhati University gave me another way to see this same pattern, one layer deeper. A patriarchal system does not actually need every man to enforce it directly. It works far more efficiently if women end up policing each other on its behalf, for free, generation after generation. Think about what this achieves. Women spend their time and energy watching, judging, and correcting other women's bodies. That energy never gets pointed upward, at the actual system that set the impossible standard in the first place. It gets pointed sideways, at each other. A system built on inequality survives longest when the people harmed by it are kept busy managing one another instead of questioning the structure itself.

I think about the aunties who criticized my body throughout my life. Many of them grew up being judged themselves the exact same way, by their own mothers, mothers-in-law, and neighbors. Nobody ever told them that was wrong, or gave them another way to process it. So the pattern simply continued, aimed at a new, younger target each time. It was never fully their own fault alone, and it is also not something I have to accept quietly.

The marriage angle is not random either

There is a very specific reason so many of these comments, in my life and in many South Asian households, circle back to marriage. Researchers who study body image among South Asian women have found that marriageability often works as the main, unspoken reason behind a lot of the appearance policing that happens inside families and communities. Being told I would "face issues to get married" because of my weight was not a random insult made up on the spot. It fits directly into a much larger, very old belief system, one where a woman's body is treated less like it is her own, and more like something being prepared and evaluated for someone else's future approval.

One line from a study on South Asian women's body image experiences stuck with me the moment I read it: women reported feeling like they could never win, they could not be too thin, and they could not be too heavy either, because no size was ever truly acceptable. That single sentence could describe my entire life, word for word.

Who is actually profiting from this insecurity

There is one more layer to this that I think gets missed too often. All of this body shaming does not just disappear into thin air once it has done its damage. It gets picked up, packaged, and sold back to us.

This is where trauma-informed design comes in, an idea I have grown genuinely interested in through my own work in communications and content design. Trauma-informed design starts from a simple, respectful question. What has this person likely already been through, and how do we build something that does not reopen that wound for the sake of engagement or profit? A trauma-informed product would notice that a woman who has spent twenty years being told her body is wrong deserves a calmer, more honest experience. It would not use that old wound as a lever.

But most of the products aimed at women's bodies are not built this way at all. Many of them are built the opposite way, on purpose. Diet apps, weight loss teas, skin lightening creams, waist trainers, and endless beauty filters are not simply offering help. Many of these products and the apps selling them are engineered around a very old, very effective loop. First, make the insecurity feel urgent, using the exact same language the aunties in my life have used my whole life, words like "before and after," "problem areas," "flaws," and "correction." Then offer the product as the only fix. Then bring the person back tomorrow to check their "progress," so the insecurity never actually resolves, it just gets rebooked for another day, another purchase, another scroll.

This is not accidental bad design. It is often very good design, just aimed at the wrong goal. Every dark pattern in these apps, the countdown timers, the guilt-based notifications, the "before" photo you are asked to upload on day one and stare at every single day after, is built by people who understand psychology extremely well. They understand downward social comparison. They understand internalized shame. They are simply choosing to use that understanding to keep someone anxious and paying, instead of using it to help someone heal. Capitalism does not need to invent new insecurities when centuries of aunties, patriarchal conditioning, and marriageability pressure have already built and maintained the insecurity for free. The market just needs to notice it is there, and monetize it.

Once I understood this, I started looking at my own phone differently. I started asking, before opening certain apps, whether this app was actually built to help me, or built to keep me feeling like there is always one more flaw left to fix.

What I am taking from all of this

I did not grow up doing anything wrong to deserve years of comments on my body. Neither did the many other women and girls I know who have gone through the exact same thing. What I went through was never a reflection of me. It was a reflection of a much older pattern, one where women, trained for generations to feel judged themselves, sometimes pass that same judgment forward onto the next woman standing in front of them, inside a larger system that benefits every time we do.

Understanding this did not erase the years of hurt. It also did not fix the food struggles this created for me, since constant body criticism absolutely can affect a person's relationship with food, and mine was affected too. But understanding it did change one very specific thing for me. I stopped taking their words as facts about my body, and started seeing them as facts about their own unresolved insecurity, and about a much bigger system, instead.

Setting boundaries after becoming financially independent was not an attitude change. It was the first time in my life I had the actual power to stop absorbing something that was never mine to carry in the first place. Stepping back from social media was not me hiding. It was me refusing to keep handing my body over for public review, and refusing to keep feeding apps that profit from that same review.

If you have lived through some version of this yourself, I want you to know the same thing I eventually had to learn about myself. Nothing was ever wrong with your body. Something was, and still is, wrong with a system that trains women to police each other, and then sells both sides of that wound back to us as a product.

This piece combines my own lived experience with research on internalized misogyny and horizontal hostility from Cultural Bridges to Justice, a qualitative study on South Asian women's body image and appearance pressure published on ScienceDirect, research on downward social comparison theory and self-esteem summarized by Helpful Professor, feminist frameworks on patriarchy and gender socialization from my own Master of Arts coursework in Women's Studies at Gauhati University, and the principles of trauma-informed design as applied to product and UX practice. It is written from personal experience and observation, not as a clinical or academic paper.

I have a strange sense of humor about my own body sometimes, and this is one of those stories. An allergic reaction, of all things, is what landed me in a hospital bed with a broken arm. I am still laughing about the sheer absurdity of it. But underneath the laughter, this one accident quietly changed how I think, how I feel for other people, and how I understand my own strength.

I want to save the full details of what actually happened that day for a future post. For now, I want to write about what came after, the parts that stayed with me long after the cast came off.

My first ever hospital admission

Before this happened, I had never been admitted to a hospital in my life. Not once. I had visited hospitals, sat in waiting rooms, dropped off food for someone else's recovery. But I had never been the one lying on the bed, wearing the wristband, waiting for a doctor to explain what was going to happen to my own body.

That shift in position taught me something no amount of reading or empathy training ever could. There is a real difference between imagining what a hospital stay feels like and actually living inside one. The uncertainty before surgery. The strange quiet of a hospital room at night. The small, specific fears that show up only when the person on the bed is you. I broke the ulna and radius of my right hand, needed an implant surgery, and spent time afterward with very limited mobility. Simple things I never thought twice about before, opening a bottle, tying my own hair, cooking a meal, suddenly needed planning, help, or patience I did not know I had.

What this taught me about empathy

I work in communications for an organisation that supports children with life limiting conditions and their families. Before this accident, I understood that work with my mind. I read the stories, wrote about the families, cared about the mission. After this accident, I understood a small piece of it with my body too.

I am not comparing my one broken arm to what these families carry every single day. That would not be fair, and it is not what I mean. What I mean is something smaller and more honest. For a few weeks, I could not fully control my own body. I depended on other people for basic things. I felt what it was like to have my daily life reshaped overnight by something I did not choose and could not simply push through with willpower. That small taste of loss of control changed the way I listen now, to patients, to caregivers, to anyone describing a health condition to me. I stopped picturing their experience from the outside. I started remembering, even just a little, what it actually felt like from the inside.

What this taught me about resilience

I used to think resilience meant staying strong and positive the whole time, not breaking down, pushing through with a smile. Living through this taught me a different definition. Resilience was letting myself be frustrated on the days I could not do simple tasks alone, and still showing up for physiotherapy the next morning anyway. It was accepting help I was not used to asking for, without treating it as a failure on my part. It was slowly, patiently, rebuilding strength in a hand and arm that used to move without me ever having to think about it.

Nobody claps for the quiet, boring parts of recovery. The daily exercises. The slow return of grip strength. The frustration of watching your own body relearn things it used to know without effort. But that quiet, boring, repeated work is exactly what resilience actually looks like, far more than any single dramatic moment of toughness.

Where I am now

I still think about that hospital bed sometimes, not with fear, but almost with gratitude, which surprises me even as I write it. It gave me a kind of understanding I could not have gained any other way, about my own body, about the people I write for professionally, and about what it actually takes to come back from something that knocks you down without warning.

I will write the full story soon, the actual accident, the days in the hospital, the parts that were harder to laugh about at the time. For now, I wanted to put down what it left behind. A stronger sense of empathy. A more honest definition of resilience. And a slightly odd sense of humor about the whole thing, which I think I am allowed to keep.

This piece is a first reflection, written ahead of a fuller account still to come. It draws only on my own lived experience.

Somewhere along the way, the word "healthy" stopped meaning "good for you" and started meaning "good for everyone, always, no exceptions." Cucumber is healthy, cabbage is healthy, salad is healthy, low calorie is healthy, or so we are told, again and again, until it stops sounding like an opinion and starts sounding like a fact. Nobody tells you these are general guesses that work for a lot of people. They get handed to you like facts, the same way gravity is a fact. I believed this for years too. Then my own body proved it wrong, in the most inconvenient way possible.

How it started, without me even noticing

After I moved to Mumbai, my life changed drastically. I was traveling in local trains, feeling suffocated in the crowd, living alone, cooking, cleaning, commuting, working eight hours, and then spending almost four and a half hours a day going back and forth on the local train and auto, just to stay somewhere less crowded and more green, in the Mumbai suburbs. There was no time left to explore the city just for fun. Weekends went to laundry, cooking, and trying to make an Assamese meal I could not simply order on Swiggy or Zomato.

Time went by like that. Eventually I realized this long, almost daily commute was hurting my body. It was affecting my mental and physical bandwidth at work too, since I had low energy all the time. So I decided to shift closer to the office, even though the rent doubled, because it was a posh area. I thought I would finally have more time for myself, time to focus on recovering my health, time for other useful things.

Once I shifted, I had ample time, and I started exploring the places nearby, going on walks alone, almost like solo dates with myself, and eating food I genuinely enjoyed. My energy was back, and even my colleagues could see the difference in me. Everything went well in the beginning.

Then I started gaining weight, and made it worse trying to fix it

Naturally, I started gaining weight again, because I was indulging. So I decided to start eating only healthy food. Little did I know, the food considered healthy by the whole world is not automatically healthy for me. I ate cucumbers daily. I ate cabbage sabji regularly, thinking of it as a low calorie, smart food. I especially loved a salad made using cucumber, black sesame powder, and lemon, a dish that also reminded me of my childhood days, so I used to prepare and eat it whenever I missed home. Eventually, my body got inflamed. I kept wondering, even after eating healthy, why was my weight still increasing.

Around this time, my friends told me I had not been meeting them lately, that I was always busy, that life is meant to be enjoyed too. They planned a short trip for a long weekend, and I was in.

The trip that ended at the hospital

We went. Everything went well on the first day. We ate super duper yummy, traditional Maharashtrian food. Then I felt bloated again. On the second day, I ate tasty, authentic misal pav in Nashik, and the bloating increased. I felt lightheaded. I drank some soda and moved to our next destination, but I was still not feeling normal. This was not new either. I had felt this exact feeling multiple times in my life before. I just never knew it was an allergic reaction, because I genuinely thought allergies only ever showed up on the skin.

We kept travelling, sightseeing. Then, suddenly, while walking down a flight of stairs, I could not control my body. I did not understand at that moment how I could not step properly, and I slipped and broke the ulna and radius of my right hand. That accident happened in a rural area, far from quick help. My body started trembling. I genuinely thought I was going to die. I kept checking whether I was able to breathe or not.

Then, out of nowhere, my brain gave me a clear suggestion. Hold your hand with your left hand only. You know your own pain. Do not let anyone else handle it. I held my fractured hand myself, and I started affirming, "I am a peaceful soul with a healthy body." We returned to Mumbai immediately for treatment. It took almost nine hours to reach Mumbai.

All through that return journey, I held my forearm, holding onto the hope that the doctors would do a miracle and I would be alright. But underneath that, I was quietly anxious too, wondering how I would go to work, how I would edit videos, how I would even hold my camera to document, the exact work I do every day, with my right hand out of use, and how I would manage something as basic as feeding myself.

Even inside the hospital, once treatment started, the food they served me had my allergens in it, and I felt horrible after eating it, on top of everything else my body was already going through. None of us, not me, not the doctors, knew what my allergens even were at that point, so nobody could have known to check for it or leave it out. A hospital menu, like a diet chart, gets built for an average patient who does not actually exist. Mine happened to react to parts of it, and there was no way for anyone in that room to know that yet.

The people who got me through it

My treatment started, and with time, I recovered. I want to say this clearly, because it matters more than almost anything else in this story. My colleagues, my seniors, my friends and their families, and the young adults and children of Happy Feet Home Foundation helped me immensely to recover. I was traumatized by this accident. Career stress was already killing me internally before this even happened. On top of that, I was living alone, away from home, and it took me time to even gather the courage to give this news to my own family. Without my colleagues, my friends, and my HFHF family, I genuinely do not think I would have survived this the way I did, and today I am not just surviving because of them, I am thriving.

After the dust settled, I got curious. I started asking questions about how something like this could even happen from food. That curiosity led me to look into allergy panel tests, and I did one, and finally learned the real reason behind years of unexplained bloating, inflammation, and now, one broken arm.

The report came back and it explained everything I had been living through without knowing it. Cucumber, the exact vegetable I had been eating every single day thinking it was helping me, was one of my allergens. So was cabbage, the sabji I kept choosing because it seemed like such a smart, low calorie choice. The black sesame powder and lemon in my favourite childhood salad, the one I made whenever I missed home, turned out to be two more triggers hiding in the same bowl. Vinegar was on the list too, and so was chana, along with besan, the gram flour so many Indian snacks and curries are built on. I had spent months, maybe years, treating these exact foods as my safest, healthiest choices, when they were quietly working against my own body the entire time.

Even my own family did not match me

Once I got my results back, I got curious about a bigger question. If my body reacts this differently to common "healthy" food, what about the people closest to me, the ones who share my actual genetics? So I asked my mother and my brother to get their allergy panels done too. My friend and their family members did the same. My bestie in Mumbai got hers done as well.

The results were eye opening. My mother, my brother, and I share a lot of the same genetics, the same household growing up, the same regional food culture. And yet, our allergen lists came back almost completely different from each other. Our body types are different too, not just our reactions to food. If people who share my own DNA and grew up eating the same meals at the same table can end up with such different bodies and different triggers, how is it reasonable to expect a single diet plan, a single fitness routine, or a single wellness rule to work the same way for every stranger on the internet who happens to read it?

This is exactly the trap I think most of us fall into without noticing. Something works for me, so I recommend it to a friend, a sister, a colleague, with good intentions, genuinely wanting to help. But our lifestyles are not the same. Our stress levels, our sleep, our gut health, our hormones, our histories, none of it lines up neatly just because we like each other or grew up nearby. Learning about my own body, one test and one observation at a time, has honestly become my favourite hobby now. Not because I am obsessed with my body, but because I finally understand that nobody else was ever going to hand me an accurate manual for it. I had to build my own.

Even science says family genetics do not guarantee matching bodies

This lined up with something research already understands well. Allergies do tend to run in families, in the sense that a tendency toward developing allergies at all, something doctors call atopy, can be inherited. But which specific things a person becomes allergic to, and how severe that reaction turns out to be, depends heavily on that individual's own environment, exposure history, and even changes in how their genes get expressed, a field called epigenetics. In other words, genetics can load the gun, but each person's own life pulls a completely different trigger.

Gut health research tells a similar story. Twin studies looking at identical twins, people who share essentially the same genetic code, have found that while genetics does shape the gut microbiome somewhat, individual factors like diet, environment, stress, and daily habits end up creating meaningfully different gut bacteria between even genetically identical siblings over time. Since so much of digestion, inflammation, and nutrient absorption happens through the gut, two people with nearly identical DNA can still process the exact same food in two very different ways.

Everyone's body genuinely runs on different rules

This is not just my personal theory. Actual research backs this up in a very direct way. A well known study by scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science tracked blood sugar responses in hundreds of people after they ate the exact same foods. The result surprised even the researchers. The same identical meal, eaten by different people, produced wildly different blood sugar spikes from person to person. One person's blood sugar barely moved after eating something. Another person's blood sugar shot up sharply eating that exact same food. The researchers concluded that a single universal diet plan simply does not match how differently real human bodies actually respond to food.

This lines up with something else I have learned through my own health journey, dealing with insulin resistance and PCOS. What keeps my blood sugar steady and my body feeling calm is not the same as what works for a friend with a completely different hormonal setup. Someone else's body might handle rice and roti beautifully. Mine gets sluggish, foggy, and bloated from the exact same plate. And, as I learned the hard way, someone else's body might handle a plain cucumber salad perfectly well too. Mine was quietly reacting to it for years before I ever connected the dots.

Ayurveda, the traditional Indian system of medicine, was actually describing something similar to this centuries before modern labs existed. It divides people into different constitutions, called doshas, such as vata, pitta, and kapha, and says each one responds differently to the same food, the same weather, even the same daily routine. I am kapha dominant with vata as a secondary type. I do better on fats, proteins, and vegetables, and I feel heavy, sluggish, and foggy on simple carbohydrates that might make someone else feel perfectly fine and energized. Whether you look at this through a hormone lab report, an allergy panel, or an old Ayurvedic framework, the conclusion ends up the same. Bodies are not interchangeable.

Why the generalized advice keeps winning anyway

If individual bodies are this different, why does the world keep handing out identical advice to everyone? Part of it is simply easier. It is much simpler to print one diet chart, one fitness plan, one skincare routine, and hand it to a million people, than to actually study a million individual bodies. General advice scales. Individual care does not, at least not without real effort, curiosity, and listening.

There is also a deeper assumption hiding underneath most generalized health advice, that there is one "normal," ideal, correctly functioning body, and everyone else is a variation that needs correcting back toward it. My own body does not fit that mold at all. My inflammation triggers are different, my ideal macronutrient balance is different, and my physical shape, wide shoulders, wide hips, a naturally sturdier build, does not match the one body type most fitness content quietly assumes as its default reader. None of that makes my body wrong. It just makes it mine.

What I do differently now

I stopped asking whether a food or a routine is "healthy" in general. I now ask a more useful, more specific question. Is this healthy for me, given my own body, my own hormones, my own allergy profile, my own life right now? Cucumber genuinely might be a wonderful, healing food for someone reading this. For me, it turned out to be part of the problem. Neither of those facts cancels the other one out. They are simply both true, for two different bodies.

This also changed how I think about advice I give to other people now. I try hard not to hand someone else my own solution as if it will automatically work for them too. What healed my inflammation might do nothing for someone else's. What works for someone else's gut might upset mine completely. The only honest advice left, once you actually accept this, is to get properly curious about your own specific body, through real testing when you can access it, through paying close attention to how you personally feel, and through treating any generalized rule as a starting guess, never as a final verdict.

Where I am today

My hand has fully healed now. I have stopped eating every food that came back positive on my allergy panel, cucumber, cabbage, sesame, lemon, vinegar, chana, and besan all included, and my body has thanked me for it ever since. I cannot fully control the environmental allergens around me, that part is harder, but I can control what goes on my plate, and I do.

I cook, organize, edit videos, design reports, and prepare social media content for Happy Feet Home Foundation using this exact same hand today. I am typing this entire piece using the fingers of this hand right now, by the way, not voice typing. I made that choice on purpose. Typing itself has become a kind of physiotherapy for me now, a small, quiet way of proving to myself, one word at a time, that this hand works again, and so does the rest of me.

Now I listen to my body and what it actually needs, instead of what the world insists it should need. Since I stopped consuming my allergens, the bloating and the lightheadedness that used to sneak up on me so often are gone, and I have not felt that uncomfortable, unsteady feeling again in recent months.

Your body is not my body. That should not be a controversial sentence. But it is one worth repeating, especially in a world that keeps trying to sell everyone the exact same solution.

This piece draws on my own lived experience, along with research on personalized glycemic response published by scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science, twin studies on genetic and environmental influences on the gut microbiome, research on the genetics and epigenetics of allergic disease, and the traditional Ayurvedic framework of dosha-based individual constitutions.