Every morning I wake up to the sound of shuffling, my roommate coming in from her run. It is about 6:30 and I still have 25 minutes before I have to get up for a Tai Chi class. Lying in bed, the room brightens as the sun rises revealing the room to me. There are four white walls, three raised beds, a lockbox to make us feel secure in leaving our more expensive items in the room, and a long cupboard filled with books, clothes and notebooks. I suppose the room feels a bit cramped for what I am used to (a full-size bed in my own bedroom) but considering it is only temporary, I don’t have a problem with it. Here, this early in the morning, I can already recognize many ways in which my life is privileged, although I often let myself forget them.

The first sign of privilege comes not from waking up to my roommate who has just been on a run. In many places in the world, a woman would absolutely not have slipped on a pair of jogging shoes and gone out on her own to exercise; many cultures in the world do not consider women athletes whatsoever. But for many women on our trip, running is a recreational act that we as women feel that we can participate in. This may be seen as a mixed privilege because since being in India we have realized that running isn’t the safest of acts for us; we have gotten gawked at, mocked, chased after, and grabbed during the act. However, the fact that we have grown accustomed to feeling safe whilst running reveals our backgrounds, showing that life has been kind enough to give us the privilege of security.

Second, I have in much of my life enjoyed the privilege of time. Though I tend to keep my schedule busy in a way that might seem overloading, I have always had the privilege of choosing that schedule. At school, I choose to work, involve myself in numerous extracurricular activities, as well as being a full-time student. None of these things are absolutely necessary for me to do. If I chose not to work, I would have less spending money and I would have to be more particular about my choices on food and house shopping. But it would be completely feasible for my lifestyle considering the monetary support of my father. Here, I am certainly on a tight schedule and often feel weighed down by it. But it is a semester I chose to throw myself into, a program I excitedly signed up for. So even though a 6:30 wake-up is about an hour and a half earlier than I would have asked for back home, I know that I have had the privilege of choosing it for myself.

The room that I was put in at Mitra Guesthouse shows many aspects of my privilege. It is a clean, white, medium-sized room that I share with two other people. For the standards all three of us have been set because of our lives in the states, it is quite a small area to live in. But in comparison to many of the Indian families that have opened their homes to us during our trip, it is beyond comfortable. Our beds are raised as opposed to being thin mats or mattresses on the floor, our walls are thick and protective as opposed to some of the eroding mud huts we have seen and they bear large windows that let in cool breezes as well as give us beautiful views. The decorative wooden cupboards stretch across the length of the room, which is good because we have brought and accumulated enough goods to fill them up. The amount of “stuff” we have is incredible and beyond what many Indian families have to fill their whole houses with.

Finally is the fact that all of this, this schedule, this room situation, is all temporary. I have come halfway across the world, away from my house, my school, my family for three months in which I can experience a whole new lifestyle. Perhaps I needed a “new beginning”, or maybe just some space from my old beginning. I got it. I have the privilege of taking myself out of a situation if I need to. I can go on a vacation through Kerala. I can stay for three months in Auroville. I have been given the funds and support to take the time that I need to get out of UMass for a while and experience something new. But while I do this, the places I am coming to are full of people who don’t know the meaning of a day off of work let alone a month. Nor do they have any conceivable way of getting halfway across the world to spend four months. I think that the privileges of “starting new” and “getting away” are significant and often overlooked.

Honestly, I could go on picking apart my morning of waking up for many pages. I could dissect everything I own, everything I do, naming how each thing is fleeting and an unnecessary comfort. And this is only a quick snapshot of my day, before I even go out into the world where other people are. I think acknowledging privilege is an important step towards anti-racism and leveling the playing field. I allow too many days to go by without recognizing how lucky I am even though I have spent so much of my life in places where people are so poor and have so little.