In my life, there is a Before and an After.

I was born in a body that would age to hold stories — stories spanning my land and stolen lands, stories spanning my heart and foreign hearts. Swaths of brown skin caged a soul and cushioned a heart that would witness revolutions within my body and outside of it.

You see, being born in a body with a vulva accompanied conditions of existing — conditions meant to keep me in check before I could even pinch a pencil between my stubby fingers.

Conditions were drafted with the notion of keeping my dignity, body and heart safe. Conditions were set because liberation was a threat to the expectations my family held for me.

The knowledge to wield a rolling pin, to roll bread and scrub greasy dishes were essential if I hoped to please my potential husband and his family. My fat thighs with gigantic dark birthmarks, my big nose and lips were seen as “ugly.”

My family also never signed up for my sharp tongue and sharper opinions. Instead, they encouraged a meek attitude and hums of acquiescence — indicators of a sophisticated and appropriate upbringing.

Respect, obedience, sweetness, hard work and compromise were the pillars on which my personhood was to be founded. These values had to be at my core; they would hold my skin tight, my bones together. Without them, I was a loose leaf at the bottom of some man’s teapot, ready to be discarded after he was done sipping on his chaha. But even then — especially then — I wouldn’t be free.

I couldn’t simply be an object — I had to be a prize; always the best, and never in control of my own fate.

On August 30, 2021, I first set my foot on this stolen land called “Vancouver,” convinced there was no eraser strong enough to eradicate the boundaries keeping me hostage, and no glue sticky enough to hold me together.

I was sure that I was watching a movie. I was a bystander in other people’s lives — ones much more interesting than mine, lived by people who ignited my envy for their bodies not caged within limits and boundaries.

But I never forced myself to look past the flesh and the face. I could only see their limbs held together with confidence, hear sharp syllables form witty remarks, arms flung around their buddies, faces and eyes brighter than my Diwali lanterns. I never looked at the big picture; I simply accepted that they were a model of perfection that I would never reach.

I would have kept wallowing in self-pity had the After not appealed to me more.

This After held promises of independence, freedom, choice, Queerness, friendship, sex, pleasure and — best of all — a gradual shrinking of self-doubt and the start of my quest for liberation.

I had always anticipated roadblocks, but there were unprecedented factors I hadn’t considered at all, mostly because I thought I was being too idealistic in dreaming about them: love and community. Two things I grew up believing would be my Achilles heels if I fell head first into them.

I had always been told that interdependence would make me weak and put my heart at risk, so to witness and experience love and community took practice and willingness. I didn’t achieve self-love overnight or have a grand epiphany of all the potential and greatness I held.

The first time I went to a Queer Halloween party, I witnessed love interlocking people’s hands, love tying strangers together, nudging us to share our stories.

Love saw me through the first time I went against my instinct to contain anger and grief, and instead stepped into radical spaces where common values tied yet another group of strangers together. We were fraught with the same hunger for liberation, victims to the same systems of oppression. Yet none of us lacked love for the world.

Once, I wore my low cut pink dress that clung to my tummy rolls and made me not want to breathe or drink lest I look more like a stuffed teddy bear than a Barbie. But not a single scathing word or barb was hurled in my direction. I was amongst big bodies, mid-sized bodies. Bodies carrying cellulite and warm smiles and affection and reassuring words.

I felt and witnessed love in these moments. Moments that contradicted my history and subverted my expectations. Moments that were normal to some, but only existed in the After for me.

“The world isn’t full of people out to hurt me, after all,” I thought to myself. “It’s not as harsh, and I don’t always have to be so strong,” I reasoned with my heart.

Moments of tenderness still catch me off guard. For a few seconds I am unsure what to make of them, whether I should allow myself to revel in whatever emotion threatens to overcome me or keep clinging to the fading lines that previously defined me. They’re familiar after all; familiar, but hated.

I loosen my grip on these lines: lines of shame, disgust, woman, more shame. I let myself feel. Let myself love and witness love.

The old lines and limits are not fully faded and my skin feels the same, but my blood doesn’t. My body is shifting — outlines cracking and realigning, rubbing off, reforming themselves into new ones. The stench of the old boundaries might still cling to my skirt, but I don’t pay them much heed.

I’m still not free. I’m still oscillating between moments of tenderness and the harsh realities of my world. I’m still aware of the ways my body and identity limit what I can do, who I talk to, what they say to me. I’m still aware of my voice cracking when I’m demanding the right to be liberated.

I’m still not free because others aren’t, but because love has tied us together, our freedom shall come together. All the lines caging us will be rubbed off at once.

I’m so much freer than I used to be. I’m holding onto love, toppling cracked walls of oppression, chipping away at constraints of suppression.