I found a different self slowly, learned to exist as if with many different goggles on at once. Always speaking from my mother’s kitchen in the Silicon Valley and, at the same time, my grandmother’s crowded living room in Punjab. In these years, I would feel the sharpness of many kinds of difference, marginalization. But when I looked down at myself for signs of why I felt so other, all I would find was the color of my hands.

Sometimes being queer and black, bisexual and biracial, feels like contradiction, like too many things, and sometimes I’m not sure that I’d recognize myself if I walked by.

“It isn’t until the summer, when the frost melts and the icee man comes calling and the pool is open and the yard (however ridden with stubborn weeds) starts to incubate natural life, that you realize the source of your woes isn’t dependent on the weather. It’s you. “

Other than partying, what did we like, what were we good at, what defined us? One area that many LGBTQ individuals, including myself, struggled with was redefining what it meant to be queer. But, if being queer was synonymous with getting drunk, then how would I ever be able to define myself as anything other than a drunk?

“It would have been nice to share my entire truth with her, but because of the Standards of Care, I didn’t; I feared my story would be seen as diverging from the typical trans* narrative too much.”

“I feel like yelling at people,” she told me. I didn’t really grasp then that she meant that. This was the very first time. This was the day after Easter.