I've had so many moments, within the last like two years, thinking about how I went from living alone through the heart of the pandemic, being like, "I need some kind of sign outside of myself, to know that there is some purpose for all of this — for feeling all of these things that I'm feeling and going through what I'm going through."

In the last year, so many people and so many reflections of me and of my own heart have materialized in my life in ways that are just like screaming at me, "You are not alone, you are not alone, you are not alone."

There's no way I could tell that to my younger self, and that they would believe me. The only thing I could say is "You have to keep going. You have to keep going."

I'm in the process of learning that it takes a lot of energy to be the first representative of your kind, in any space. It sometimes feels daunting and we might think "I don't want to have to do the work of explaining this, and this and this to people. I don't want to have to take that on."

And that’s a legitimate feeling.

My experience is when we do go that extra step to explain who we are, or show up as who we are and live in the example of people like us, it does a lot for people who don't have the context, vocabulary or language on how to think about us.

It does good and gives permission for more people to occupy that space. As a people, we just have to keep going.

We can feel frustrated, we can feel like people aren't seeing us for who we are. But the bottom line is, if you start a race, you got to finish it.

You wouldn't get so close to the finish line to tap out. So power over the finish line.

[As told to @Ragi Gupta — continued]