A Trip During Which I Experienced Noticeable for the Very First Time.

When I turned 24, I journeyed to Ireland for the very first time. It was the autumn after finishing university, and a friend who had received an award for her thesis invested her award funds to lease a coastal cottage on the island of Valentia, with the aim that we could use the time focusing on our novels.

The stone hut was situated extremely near to the water’s edge on the far western point of Ireland, facing the expansive metal-blue waters of the Atlantic. The island possessed a rugged kind of beauty – cliff edges, a verdant jungle, icy, bubbling sea. It astounded. As did the profound peace. It was exactly what we had been looking for.

When we took a break from writing, my friend drove us around so we could explore the island and the wider country, traveling through the town of Killarney and down to Derrynane beach where we went horseback riding along the powdery golden coast. After a week of these excursions, it struck me that we had not come across anyone who wasn't white. We were geographically near to England that I had come expecting the variety I was familiar with at home.

One afternoon, I stopped off at a convenience store. When the young woman behind the register raised her eyes and saw me, the astonishment in her eyes suggested that I was possibly the first non-white individual she had ever seen in person. I got what I needed and exited, but later I found myself thinking about that encounter. It was the first time in my life where I had truly felt as though I was visibly different.

I was raised in Leicester – one of the first “super diverse” cities in England where people of colour constitute the greater part. My yearbook pictures show a sea of brown faces, and for many years I thought Leicester to be a blueprint of England, maybe even the globe. My identity was, for better or worse, unshakable. And yet my formative environment wasn't fully varied either, as I was primarily surrounded by people who were from a comparable heritage.

Back at the beach hut, I was forced to contemplate what it might have been like for someone such as my grandfather, who moved to England from Africa in the 1950s. At that time, he would have been one of a small number of individuals who weren't white living in Leicester. Or my mother, who came over from India in the early 60s. In the decades that followed, a wave of Indians would come to the city and try to build a life there, drawn by the rapidly growing community. Had they felt invisible? Was there a sense as though they were different?

By comparison, the sense of being an outsider I had encountered on my trip felt fleeting. I returned home to the secure bubble of my previous life. Or so I assumed.

In the years that followed, I began to think of people as balloons, their self-awareness growing or shrinking depending on their environment and where they were in the world. I realised I had spent my formative years in the comfortable, empowering state of inflating, believing, somewhat naively, that I was a in the dominant group. My experience on that holiday caused me to deflate, and I suddenly felt alarm at my own smallness – the way a king might feel upon discovering that his fortress was just a tiny chamber inside a giant structure.

I moved away from Leicester to go to university in Hertfordshire, later relocating in London. It was in these new environments that I found people from all over the world living and working alongside one another; there that, instead of expand or contract, I felt I could simply exist in the steady state. Since then, I have journeyed farther – and observed the world to be a throbbing landscape of people who are different to me in every aspect. But instead of feeling overwhelmed – as I did at 24 – I approach these worlds with confidence and understanding.

After that trip, I was better equipped to consider things from different perspectives. In more recent times 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 shrunk so severely as to become shattered. Below the chants and slogans and aggression, I saw the dread, however misplaced, that seemed to motivate the masses of people gathered – the fear of losing their footing in the place they called home. I recognised that fear: it dwells within the core of every immigrant.

Being raised in Leicester gave me the strength to acknowledge my strength and position and to defend it, while that brief journey in my 20s offered me a glimpse into my own small place in the world. The more I live, the more I find that, in order to lead a meaningful existence, one needs to experience both.