A Vacation During Which I Experienced Visible for the Very First Time.
When I was 24, I journeyed to Ireland for the very first time. It was the autumn after finishing university, and a friend who had won an award for her final project invested her winnings to rent a beach hut on the island of Valentia, so that we could spend a week working on our novels.
The small stone building was situated very close to the coast on the western tip of Ireland, overlooking the expansive gray-blue waters of the Atlantic. The island had a wild, raw beauty – cliff edges, a dense, green rainforest, chilly, foaming waves. It took our breath away. As did the profound peace. It was precisely what we had come in search of.
When we stepped away from our work, my friend chauffeured us so we could explore the island and the mainland, making our way through Killarney and down to Derrynane strand where we took horses for a ride along the soft, sandy coast. After a week of our adventures, it struck me that we had not encountered another non-white person. We were in such proximity to England that I had assumed I would find the multicultural mix I was familiar with at home.
One afternoon, I went into a small shop. When the lady behind the counter raised her eyes and saw me, the astonishment in her eyes gave me the impression that I was maybe the first non-white individual she had ever met. I got what I needed and went on my way, but later I couldn't stop thinking about that encounter. It was the first time in my life where I had experienced the sensation as though I was visibly different.
I grew up in Leicester – one of the first extremely multicultural cities in England where people of colour form the greater part. My class photos show a multitude of brown faces, and for many years I believed Leicester to be a accurate representation of England, perhaps even the rest of the world. My identity was, whether correct or not, strong. And yet my upbringing wasn’t truly diverse, since I was mostly surrounded by people who were from a similar background.
Back at the seaside cabin, I was led to imagine what it might have been like for a person akin to my grandfather, who came to England from Africa in the 1950s. At that time, he would have been one of a small number of non-white people living in Leicester. Or my mother, who came over from India in the early 60s. In the subsequent decades, a wave of Indians would come to the city and attempt to make it their home, lured by the rapidly growing community. Were they made to feel invisible? Had they felt as though they didn't belong?
By comparison, the otherness I had felt on my trip felt fleeting. I came back to the comfortable environment of my former existence. Or so I assumed.
In the years that followed, I began to think of people as inflatable objects, their identity growing or shrinking depending on their situation and where they were in the world. I understood I had spent my youth in the reassuring state of inflating, believing, somewhat naively, that I was a part of the mainstream. My experience on that holiday forced me to contract, and I suddenly felt anxiety at my own insignificance – the way a monarch might feel upon discovering that his castle was only a tiny chamber inside a much larger one.
I left Leicester to go to university in Hertfordshire, later relocating in London. It was in these cities that I found people from diverse international backgrounds living and working alongside one another; there that, instead of grow or shrink, I felt I could just be in the comfortable middle. Since then, I have explored more places – and found the world to be a vibrant landscape of people who are unlike me in each regard. But rather than feel overwhelmed – as I did at 24 – I enter these worlds with confidence and understanding.
After that trip, I was more able to look at things from new angles. In the past few years especially, with events like the civil unrest of 2024 as well as last year’s so-called "unite the kingdom" rally, I came to see how a person’s sense of self might have contracted so severely as to become crushed. Below the chants and slogans and aggression, I saw the fear, however misguided, that seemed to motivate the masses of people gathered – the fear of losing their place in the place they thought of as home. I understood that fear: it lives in the very being of every immigrant.
Being raised in Leicester fostered in me the strength to acknowledge my strength and position and to defend it, while that brief journey in my 20s granted me a insight into my own small place in the world. The more I live, the more I find that, in order to find purpose, one needs to experience both.
