My life once lingered in a kind of half-light — not darkness, but a dimness that clung. It felt like standing beside deep water: still on the surface, restless underneath. I’m an international student in the Addiction and Mental Health Worker program at Centennial College, learning what it means to build a life of my own here. My days were full of tasks, yet not full of me. Classes, deadlines, screens, sleep: everything kept moving, yet I felt as if I were going nowhere. Beneath all that motion, a quiet question lingered: What am I becoming?
Sometime later, at a college event, I heard a sentence that stayed with me. Harrison Browne quoted: “Every man dies, but not every man really lives.”
In that moment, I simply wrote it down and moved on. Only over the next few days, as the words kept circling back, did I realize why they unsettled me: they gave language to a place I already knew very well — the in-between space I had been standing in for a long time, somewhere between breath and being, between simply existing and actually living.
When I try to understand what “really living” might mean, I always end up thinking about the women who raised me. My grandmother learned how to endure a world that allowed her very little. My mother began to ask a different question: How shall I live, so I can respect myself?
From them, I inherited an unwritten creed: do not surrender too soon; love, but do not lose yourself; if something keeps dimming your light, you may walk away; you belong to yourself first. No one in my family ever called this feminism — it arrived instead as strength passed down in silent languages: a glance, a choice, the quiet art of rising again after life has sat you down.
Because of this, I grew up believing that most people carry a softness inside, even if it is wrapped in many layers of living and defence. That belief makes it hard for me to reduce anyone to a label, and it makes me resist being reduced to one myself. I am clarity and confusion, courage and fear; all these shades, woven together, make me whole. I don’t want one neat word to erase the rest.
Before I ever left home, I had already come out to my family. That first circle of truth was small and deliberate: the people whose belief and love mattered the most were also the first to be invited in.
Moving away didn’t start my coming out story, but it changed its shape. In a new country, in new classrooms and unfamiliar streets, the question shifted from whether to speak to how, how much, and to whom. “Being myself” stopped being a simple idea and became a daily, practical choice. I often found myself asking: Do I hide, or do I unfold a little more?
Slowly, I learned that not everyone deserves your truth. Some people only meet the surface of you and are content to stay there. So, I began to choose more carefully, holding on to my family’s quiet creed — you belong to yourself first. Instead of a grand declaration to the whole world, I offered a quieter version of myself: in safe hands, at chosen times.
For me, then, coming out is neither a performance of bravery nor a single announcement — it is an ongoing practice of sovereignty: the right to decide who is invited closer, and who is gently kept at the edge of my inner life.
Alongside that, another understanding settled in: we are not finished stories; we are sentences being written. Each choice is a word, each day a line. Even the smallest step, taken in honesty, is no longer mere existence — it becomes life.
A philosopher once urged: “Don’t think, but look.” I try to remember that. Don’t get lost only in ideas of who we should be; look instead at how we actually live. How we love. How we hold ourselves. How we rise after falling. How we treat those who cannot offer us anything in return. In those almost unseen places, the soul is quietly drawn.
That is why I am willing to speak, and to share these small truths. Not to pin down a final definition of who I am, but to whisper something I am still learning myself: life is already heavy; carry only what honours you.
People sometimes say, “Live out loud, then leave quietly.” My “out loud” is not thunder. It is love, given deeply. It is choices, made consciously. It is walking my own path — not always boldly, but steadily, in the direction of a self I can live with. And when the quiet leaving finally comes, I hope I will be able to look back and say that there were moments — whole seasons, even — when my life looked quiet from the outside, but I was fully, fiercely alive in it.