June 27, 2015. Adhans rang melodically through the air as the sun set leaving a reddish glow to frame the waterfront. People gathered in the parks, sitting in circles on the grass and passing around disposable plates piled high with dates, olives, and halal meats. There was celebration on the cobblestone streets. It was Ramadan in Istanbul.
I sat on my $2 a night rented sheets in a back-alley hostel trying to remember what air conditioning felt like, scrolling through news articles from the states, and reading the Whatsapp messages my friends had sent me during my long wifi-less flight. Gay marriage was just made legal in America.
My past and future had collided in such a way, it was only believable because it was true. Here I was taking the once in a lifetime backing packing through Europe trip my working class teenaged self never believed would actually happen, and for the first time in my life, I felt completely, truly accepted. Supported. At peace. Everything had fallen into place, and suddenly, finally, I had a place to fall into too. It was okay for me to be Muslim. It was okay for me to be brown. It was okay for me to be gay. It was even okay for me to break my fast at iftar and then go have a drink with my new tourist buddies. I never needed things to be perfect. I just wanted them to be okay. Okay was perfect enough. I could be, not whoever I wanted to be, but whoever I was.
I don’t know what happened exactly, but somewhere along the way, I lost that feeling. Status quo I suppose. You can’t be gay and be Muslim and you can’t be Muslim in America. Society tolerates you. It doesn’t accept you. And if I couldn’t belong here, in this country where I was born and raised, with these individual identities I thought would welcome me, where could I go to belong? I was, I am, a cultural orphan.
Fast forward to December 2nd, 2015. The Inland Regional Center building is the site of one of the worst terrorist attacks on US soil, perpetrated by two South Asian “Muslims” of course. I’m quite familiar with Inland Regional. I spent 20 years of my life living in a small house just about 20 miles from the building. I worked under the IRC for 3 years. I knew their case workers, their clients, their world. In fact, my time in that world was the catalyst for my application to this program.
I thought being a cultural orphan, even moving from San Bernardino to San Diego, would make me feel safe, or at least care less. It didn’t of course. Somehow I felt attacked more personally than I ever had before. This time not only did they come after my identity, my people, my safety, and my home, but after my chosen profession as well. Here I was feeling let down by the people I thought I identified with but maybe I had let them down instead, by not being there, by being so angry and hurt all the time, by distancing myself rather than fighting on. Maybe I had let myself down.
I went to Tijuana with a few of my fellow MSW students this weekend. On the way back over the border, the customs officer thumbed through the stamps in my passport. “What were you doing in Turkey?” he asked accusatorially. He didn’t ask about my stamps from Norway or Greece. What could I possibly have told him? What would he have understood? I gave him some simple answer with which neither of us were satisfied. I finally made it back into the only country I have ever considered to be my home and to my waiting friends. They were through customs in a fraction of the time as per expectation. I shrugged my shoulders to them in joked apology. “I can’t change the color of my skin,” I said. I didn’t say that I don’t want to. That I have spent way too much of my life denying myself for others. That it doesn’t make things easier anyways.
I don’t know where I belong, or even if I do. But I know who I am, at this time and place at least. And I won’t apologize for any of it. Because that’s who I am. Unapologetically me.