I stand in a ballroom amid hundreds of cheerful, celebratory people and it occurs to me I’ve lost the ability to be here. I have spent the entirety of my life stitching together costumes to make Westerners feel at ease in my presence—a massive internal compendium of cultural references and jokes and shorthand and all these alternate means of saying, Don’t worry, I’m not foreign, I’m like you—and suddenly I’ve run out of things to wear. The defining emotion, as it has been for months, is bewilderment: What is wrong with me that I can’t keep living as normal? What is wrong with all those people
...more
