Some people say that they discover themselves abroad by backpacking or meeting new people or eating different foods. I went abroad and found out that apparently, I was hot in England. I grew up in Bismarck, North Dakota. Almost nobody does. My high school had 1, students, but I was the only Indian girl, and my brother and I were two of just five people of color.
People in my hometown asked if we rode tigers when we went back to India and if we were "feather or dot. That was the most accurate way she knew how to describe me β as if I looked like a long-dead, Greek-Eygptian pharaoh. The United States has a long history of celebrating Euro-centric beauty ideals, particularly among cisgender women. Bismarck, North Dakota, isn't alone in this β but because of the lack of diversity in my hometown, I didn't see any other options for what a beautiful person could look like.
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I only knew that in a tiny thousand ways, I felt other. The internet helped me feel seen as something other than my skin tone and ethnicity.
Online, I met my first boyfriend, made friends, and discovered that I had a decent sense of humor. I believed that anyone who asked me out only did so out of pity.
It didn't matter if friends told me otherwise. That feeling of otherness was too deeply rooted inside me. And then I studied abroad. The city had an impressive concentration of Indians and Pakistanis, and the University of Leeds taught Punjabi and Urdu, two languages from my family's ancestral home that I had never learned. Studying abroad in Leeds felt like an opportunity to experience my own culture in a new place and to finally grow into my identity. Leeds was utterly amazing from the start.
