I became aware of the homogenization of brown skin when I was six years old. The details of it became distantly irrelevant: an argument about gold bracelets and tigers, lions and other small hallmarks that small children cling to in the name of naive tribalism, only to band together through eye contact when being handed a hypothetical on Roman slavery, and piercing the teacher's with her own hypocrisy. I became aware again over a common family joke, when I learnt that my mother was never proposed to in a way that none of the women in my dad's family ever had the luxury of: total choice over a verdict handed down by her mother all the same. I said he was Singaporean, and she said he's Chinese, with a sort of disgusted admiration, while, in a thin-walled student flat across the city, my father told his sisters the same thing and relished in withholding the crucial affiliation from them. They though you were an English bird, he would say, smiling over G&Ts in our back garden over barbequed ribs and burgers.

I became aware of my own distance from these hallmarks when I was ten years old. I was not the first to come out, but I was the first to come out in skin different from theirs, to confide in a girl who looked like me and did not act the part. Later I would help my friend: Pashto, 16, suspend her on the basis of the same tribalism that lost me a tooth when I was six. But back then, I was eleven, scared, and with a friend who drew her pride flag into the interface of her Apple Watch, joy lost to the tide of medicine and a language that lived under my tongue, ever dormant.

I was not even the first one to come out in skin that was not white, that privilege belonged to a girl one year my senior. But she was black-haired, and bathed in glamour enough to avoid scrutiny, like the girl who came next, living in glitz enough to pass off a kiss as fleeting chic Western sensibility, to dress in fashion and pose on Instagram like it was her hometown. For people like that, there is no native claim, no stake in the great wide world, and so, by living everywhere as naturally as they do, they live in the most powerful seat of all.