Shivani M.
Featuring Shivani Modadugu
If you are reading this during a season of doubt, wondering whether you belong, whether you are capable, whether anyone around you actually sees you, I want you to know that the answer to all of those questions lives in the people you let in.
The lights turned on. The music stopped. My eyes are tearing up.
I am crying, but not out of sadness but out of... We just finished performing our dance set at a college dance competition in Santa Barbara, California. Our team SMU Rang, is a part of a fusion finance circuit that incorporates all kinds of Indian dance styles from classical to folk to Bollywood. The twenty- five of us performed as one and now after our last performance, standing onstage. I stood amongst the people I had built something with. I was part of a whole.
I grew up with a lot of confidence about my identity as an Indian American, it was never something I felt I had to hide or tone down. But coming to college blurred my strength in myself in many aspects of life. Questioning my path, burning out and even doubting myself while some of my peers moved with great certainty. For the first time I felt alone and vulnerable.
I realized then that I was missing my sense of belonging and community. I started Rang in my first year at SMU with not only a passion for dance but also just a simple belief: that students like me deserved a space to claim their identity on a campus that may not always reflect them. Allowing for an avenue to share and express this incredible part of our identities. Rang is not just a dance team but a place to beeline. Slowly, without me fully noticing, Rang became the community I hadn’t known how to ask for.
There’s a version of growing up where strength is defined by standing alone, and growth is measured by how self-suficient you can be. I believed that for a long time, especially as a first-generation older daughter. I don’t need anyone; I am capable and can figure everything out. I am all those things, but I have also learned that being strong and being healed are not mutually exclusive. The people you surround yourself with help shape who you become.
In the classical Indian dance form I’m trained in, a hand gesture only holds meaning when it is performed with intention and received by an audience. It is never just you but always a relationship. Community works the same way. You can be extraordinary on your own, but the things you can create together and what you make possible for the person next to you is something else entirely.
If you are reading this during a season of doubt, wondering whether you belong, whether you are capable, whether anyone around you actually sees you, I want you to know that the answer to all of those questions lives in the people you let in.
Reach out. Build something with someone. Show up for the people around you and let them show up for you. You don’t have to perform alone to prove your worth. You are already enough, and you are even more when you are part of a whole.
Southern Methodist University, Shivani Modadugu
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