Na Idhar Ke, Na Udhar Ke
– An Essay from The Middle Child
For as long as I can remember, my parents tried their best. They came to Canada in their twenties with a suitcase of thin clothes, building a life out of borrowed money in a cold, unfamiliar country. It was an uphill battle—but despite it all, they raised three children, kept a roof over our heads, and clothed and fed us—often going hungry to make sure we never did. Do you think their sacrifices were worth it? I think so, even if I’m afraid what I think might not matter.
Their eldest daughter, my sister, became a doctor—an inherited dream, but a remarkable one. Their second? A 19-year-old scholar published at Princeton. Their youngest son, eleven, already has Harvard Medical School on his vision board. They raised their pride and joy. I love them more than words can express. They gave me beautiful clothes, Costco cake birthdays, and a childhood untouched by poverty—from what I knew. I was loved—and that love is why it’s taken me eleven years to write this. To legitimize memories I spent years pretending weren’t real, because they felt like a betrayal.
My name is Anna Chauhan. I am a second-generation immigrant, TEDx speaker, Cambridge Future Scholar, and published researcher at Princeton. I have stood on the Senate floor and served as an equity lead for over 200,000 students. These accolades are my armor—my identity. They are the crown jewels I polish to transform myself—the invisible middle child—into a glistening figurehead. They make me visible. They make me worthy of love in an Indian household where success is currency and affection is conditional.
Yes, I am the middle child. But I have never identified with the usual clichés—neither the glue nor the black sheep. I was simply the one no one worried about. The toughest, the strongest, the most confident, the kindest, the most reliable. Qualities that others admired but that carried more weight than most realized.
Middle children live in parentheses—between the punctuation marks of a perfect firstborn and a cherished youngest. I am not only a middle child—I am a daughter, and the daughter of immigrant parents at that. In homes like mine, there are always more urgent concerns—larger problems that seem to matter more than you.
Maybe that’s just the way it is. But I recently read a quote by Abigail Hing Wen: “I don’t care what baggage they dragged over the ocean. They have no right to make me carry it the rest of my life.” I agree. But this kind of baggage—where children are expected to carry their parents’ dreams, disappointments, and fears—is not easily discarded. Over time, it fuses with your sense of self. It calcifies. It becomes your posture.
This weight is my inheritance, but it feels more like a tax. It is meant to protect you, but ironically, all it does is teach you fear—of risk, of vulnerability, of asking for help. The suitcase you never packed becomes who you are. Unconditional love teaches you that being a good daughter means carrying everything—and never complaining. I carried it for years. But slowly, I am learning that love should not depend on being strong, low maintenance, or simply someone you’re not. There is no prize for putting yourself last. It is wrong. I wish someone had told me that. I’m telling you now.
If you’ve made it this far, congratulations. But this is just the beginning. People talk about acknowledgment like it’s a magical fix. It isn’t. It often makes things messier. Healing—like grief—is not linear. Believe me; I’ve tried it all. The books. The candles. The gratitude journals.
I’ve also tried pretending nothing happened. Gaslighting myself into thinking I was being dramatic, sentimental, or simply about to get my period. I wish the past would just "stay in the past" like people tell you, but that is not the past's nature. Just like nations have histories, people have histories too. And isn't it a common saying that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it? Similarly, the past, if left unexamined, resurfaces. It festers. It rebrands itself as new faces, new experiences, new dynamics, but the same conflict nonetheless.
During my journey of healing, I had one new face appear over and over—the face of blame. Blame makes you feel like you are in control, so I blamed everyone. My parents. My brother. Myself. My experiences felt especially uncomfortable because they didn’t fit the mold. I wasn’t the black sheep or the neglected child. I was, and am, confident. Loud. Bossy. I stood up for others. I made bullies cry. I have always known who I am—which made the dissonance worse. But maybe I was invisible because I was confident. Because I was so perfectly capable that I disappeared.
When you are confident, you are seen as someone who can handle things—so you’re given things that were never yours. A child to raise. A therapist for grieving parents. An emotional landfill for others to drop off their burdens. Your plate is stacked with responsibilities that were never yours, but you balance it perfectly. Because you’re so good at it. Because survival can sometimes look like competence. And no one notices that you’re shrinking because you’re still getting things done.
I try not to remember how I did it all. No one noticed how I spent lunch breaks printing worksheets for my brother instead of running on the playground. How I did homework alone while others laughed in the halls. How I swallowed feelings with a smile because expressing them earned punishment, while silence earned praise. A child who stands up for themselves is just such an inconvenience. So you shrink some more. Eat your feelings. Blame yourself. Shrink again. Until you've backed yourself into a corner that is impossible to get out of. Until you’ve disappeared. I was such a loud, outspoken child. And I grew so, so silent. It didn’t suit me. Emotional maturity in a child is like a shoe too big—supposedly good because you’ll grow into it, but still too large for your tiny feet. You trip and fall. You can’t run, and you can’t argue with the infuriating logic of it all.
Maybe that’s what I hate about it so much—it all made sense. There were so many responsibilities, so many reasons. My parents couldn’t have possibly done it all, right? And it’s hard to blame people who gave up everything for you. Especially in immigrant households, where parent and child roles blur far too early. I won’t sugar coat it; healing is brutal. It is easier to avoid. It is why I am writing an essay I needed when I was eight years old at nineteen instead. But healing helps you breathe easier. Sleep deeper. Look in the mirror and understand what you see. Fall in love with yourself again. Most importantly, it teaches you to legitimize your experiences and reclaim the narrative. Instead of torturing yourself with questions like, “why did this happen to me”, you start realizing how strong you were for persisting through it all. You begin to value what you preserved: your empathy, your kindness, your voice. You learn to honor your calluses instead of trying to file them down. You realize the rough parts made the soft parts mean something. You start to value the kindness, empathy and self-respect, little miracles you preserved through it all. Healing, especially as a woman, is about reclaiming your life in a world that insists on defining it for you.
Take caregiving. An honorable job, yes—but unpaid, unrecognized, and expected. Especially from women. Especially women of color. My issue isn’t with caregiving itself. It’s with the assumption that caregivers—mostly women—don’t need care themselves.
Caregiving is not just an act of kindness. It has served as an instrument of sexism as an unpaid labor system. It is no coincidence that those asked to do this invisible work are women. Policies like universal childcare and fair wages aren’t just feminist—they’re human. They remind us that care isn’t finite.
Of course, standing up for yourself comes with a cost that I have paid my whole life. But I read somewhere that whatever you aren’t saying no to, you are saying yes to. So I stopped waiting to be chosen. I stopped filling out checklists for conditional love. I started choosing myself. The art of self-parenting is something middle children like me have earned a PhD in—but I recommend it to everyone. I am learning to celebrate myself in a home where mistakes are the only thing acknowledged. To feel again. To stop apologizing for being too soft—or too hard.
My emotions are real. My experiences are real. And the past? It happened. But now, I do not run from it. I honor it. I hold it. And when I do, it finally lets go of me.
- Anna Chauhan (Anna is a Princeton-published scholar and TEDx speaker who’s spent her life walking the fine line between too much and never enough—a troublemaker with biting wit, unapologetic honesty, and a tendency to name the elephant in every room.)