Anonymous
Photography by Charles Givens
If you’re reading this, you are a confluence, not a contradiction.
It’s an isolating feeling to be at one of the best colleges in the country, yet still feel utterly hopeless about the future. To know that you are in a place to explore your passions and ambitions, yet feel like you won’t make it past 21. I write this letter having just turned 20, and I’ve always hated birthdays. I’m often teased for being an “old soul” - I like sleeping early, nature walks, black coffee, and complaining about my ever-aching bones. But the thought of getting older is something that has always terrified me.
As a queer and trans Indian-American, I’ve always viewed myself as a contradiction. As someone who will inevitably defy familial responsibilities in favor of living this ethereal concept of a “queer life.” As someone who is bound to forgo my real culture, my real community for this group of strangers who, god forbid, have tattoos and hair and pronouns! Internalizing that rhetoric has made me feel at best not real, and at worst, nonexistent. It has not only caused a decent amount of psychological damage, but physical harm as well through years of health complications from eating disorders.
It is a hard thing to watch the people in your life begin to look at you differently, talk to you differently, and to sit in this unspoken sense of disappointment of the reality of who you are. It is a hard thing to constantly feel like you have to choose where you belong to, and as a result never really knowing where you do belong. College has made me realize more than ever that a lot of things in my life are going to be very different - my career, how I choose to create a family, the medical decisions I want to make to finally feel safe in my own body, etc. It is a hard thing to see how divisive and polarizing those decisions become.
If this experience in any way resonates with yours, I want to tell you that you are not a contradiction. Simply being yourself is not at odds with your culture/heritage, or at least it shouldn’t be, and maybe that’s too idealistic to imagine. But perhaps it can be more liberating to view yourself as a confluence of all these different things. How incredible it is that you hold these multiple identities within yourself, and express them in ever-growing ways. How amazing it is to expand the idea of what it means to be queer, what it means to be Asian-American, or whatever else, and to show that there are no definitively “right” or “wrong” ways of being, even though we are often told otherwise. How brave it is to be in tune with yourself and how you’d like to live your life, and to find ways to realize that vision. There is nothing scarier and more badass than deep self-awareness.
Of course, this idea isn’t new, and underlies much of our campus discussions on intersectionality. Nevertheless, I believe this small mindset shift, merely a linguistic change, can provide some sense of comfort in grappling with an uncertain future. It is exhausting to constantly hide and lie about yourself and wrestle with this intense internal conflict that can be really difficult to voice. I hope, in this new decade of my life, to not keep hiding.
Anonymous, Duke University
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