MEET KIRAN DHALIWAL
I’m 41 years young. I’m a lawyer, I’ve done this for about 15 years now. I come from a large family. I grew up in Mission and the Okanagan. I am still someone who is learning a lot about myself, but I think I’m at that point where I have myself figured out in terms of what my values are. It’s about building on who I am and growing into aspects about myself I want to explore. I want to figure out what my alignments are around values put around us, especially trying to balance the Punjabi part of me and where I am right now as a lawyer and woman. I’m thinking about my spirituality and it’s something I am trying to work on these days to figure out what I believe. I find it very hard to connect with South Asians at times. I sometimes feel like I’m an outsider and it might just be that they’ve had to face things I’ve never had to face. I never struggled with confidence or identity, and I feel people from the Lower Mainland struggled with that more.
When I got divorced, I was no longer the good wife or good daughter-in-law. I was always the good daughter and there was a part of me that thought I let my parents and my siblings down. There is the idea in our community that if you’re divorced there’s something wrong with you. What is it about her that led to her divorce? And, it’s always the woman. I think it was added pressure which made me start feeling like I had to show up to events I didn’t want to go to. My Mom didn’t want to see me get into a funk and often made me go to these events. There was sudden pressure on her to prove people’s assumptions about me wrong. For me, it was getting to the point where you realize you can’t be a service to someone else if you can’t take care of yourself–physically, mentally, and emotionally. If you don’t feed these aspects of your life, you can’t connect with anyone. That wisdom only came to me from being single. I don’t know many South Asian women who are able to define themselves for who they are.
We always talk about people losing themselves in relationships or friendships because it’s so easy to do. It’s so much easier to have clear definition of what someone else wants you to be. But it’s really hard to figure out what you’re meant to be. To say to yourself, this is the life I want to lead and to put parameters on that is the hard part. I don’t think we’re taught to look inside ourselves that way.
