A Holiday During Which I Experienced Visible for the First Time.

When I turned 24, I traveled to the Emerald Isle for the very first time. It was that fall after completing my studies at university, and a close companion who had won an award for her thesis invested her winnings to rent a seaside cabin on the island of Valentia, with the aim that we could use the time developing our novels.

The rocky cottage was situated very close to the water’s edge on the western tip of Ireland, facing the vast metal-blue expanse of the Atlantic. The island had a rugged kind of beauty – cliff edges, a lush rainforest, chilly, foaming waves. It took our breath away. As did the serene quiet. It was exactly what we had hoped to find.

When we weren’t writing, my friend chauffeured us so we could explore the island and the wider country, traveling through the town of Killarney and down to Derrynane strand where we went horseback riding along the fine, yellow coast. After a week of our adventures, it occurred to me that we had yet to see a person of colour. We were in such proximity to England that I had arrived anticipating the variety I was familiar with at home.

One afternoon, I stopped off at a convenience store. When the girl behind the register glanced up and saw me, the shock in her eyes gave me the impression that I was perhaps the first brown-skinned person she had ever seen in person. I purchased 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 felt as though I stood out.

I grew up in Leicester – one of the first exceptionally mixed cities in England where ethnic minorities form the majority. My yearbook pictures show a sea of brown faces, and for many years I thought Leicester to be a model of England, maybe even the wider world. My self-perception was, whether correct or not, strong. And yet my early life also lacked real diversity, because I was mainly surrounded by people who were from a similar background.

Back at the seaside cabin, I was compelled to consider what it might have been like for someone such as 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 emigrated from India in the early 60s. In the years that came after, a wave of Indians would arrive in the city and attempt to make it their home, lured by the fast-developing community. Did they feel invisible? Was there a sense as though they stood out?

By comparison, the feeling of difference I had felt on my trip felt temporary. I went back to the comfortable environment of my old routine. Or so I thought.

In the years that followed, I began to envision people as inflatable objects, their sense of self expanding or contracting depending on their situation and where they were in the world. I came to see I had spent my early life in the reassuring state of expansion, believing, with a degree of innocence, that I was a part of the mainstream. My experience on that holiday forced me to contract, and I suddenly felt a jolt of fear at my own smallness – the way a monarch might feel upon discovering that his fortress was only a small room inside a vastly bigger castle.

I left Leicester to go to university in Hertfordshire, finally settling in London. It was in these places that I found people from every corner of the globe living and working together; there that, rather than grow or shrink, I felt I could live in the balanced center. Since then, I have journeyed farther – and observed the world to be a pulsating landscape of people who are different to me in all ways. But rather than feel overwhelmed – as I did at 24 – I enter these worlds with self-assurance and compassion.

After that trip, I was more able to see things from new angles. In recent years especially, with events like the summer riots of 2024 as well as last year’s “unite the kingdom” rally, I came to see how a person’s self-concept might have diminished so greatly as to become shattered. Below the rhetoric and conflict, I saw the anxiety, however misplaced, that seemed to drive the masses of people gathered – the fear of being displaced in the place they thought of as home. I recognised that fear: it dwells within the core of every immigrant.

Being raised in Leicester gave me the inner resilience to acknowledge my strength and position and to assert it, while that short trip in my 20s granted me a view of my own insignificance. The more I live, the more I find that, in order to find purpose, one needs to know both.