Let me make that statement a little bit more clear. Maybe, to stay true to who I am, I have to keep moving.

I feel like I’ve tried almost everything. At this point, I have found and explored perhaps hundreds of ways only to realize that they all are either dead ends or round-abouts. Just when I think I have a solution, it always trickles through my fingers like water. And the current situation in the U.S. seems to have closed even the road I am on right now – I’m cut off and there’s no way forward, to the right or left, and the bridges I’ve crossed to get here are still there, but nothing is waiting for me on the other side of them. And turning around, going back,… is never an option anyway.

And so I keep stumbling forward on the closed road that is my life in the U.S., falling over, and nearing the point beyond which I cannot go. But as my father used to say, “even a fall on your face is a movement forward,” and as a character said in an anime I decided to binge-watch to help me battle the anxiety that creeps in every day, “if we fall, let’s fall forward.”

And so I’m getting ready to fall forward – and not hit the ground. Maybe, just maybe, I should stop falling over the sticks that are thrown under my feet by immigration laws, lack of money or ____. Maybe it’s time for me to forget those, give staying on the road up, and use the remaining distance I still have to gain speed so that when I do finally reach the barricade, I won’t crash into it or stop moving. I can use the remaining distance I have to gain speed and take off. Maybe I don’t have to stick to the road, however much I’d love to, however much I worked to get on it, however safe it feels.

Heights are scary. The sky is the domain of birds. Learning to fly is hard. But it may not be impossible. And once we are in the sky, there’s nothing left to stop us. We may fly into storm clouds and we may get burned by the sun sometimes, but nobody can build walls and barricades tall enough to reach us there.

Yes, I may just fail spectacularly and run face first into the wall. But with every day that I waste on thinking about that, I lose a day which I could dedicate to learning to fly.

And I have to keep reminding this to myself every day – because every single day, I just want to lay down, hide away from that barricade that looms above me even though it’s still some distance away.

I’m scared. In fact, I’m horrified. And it’s so easy to let that fear take over. But I don’t want to allow it to paralyze me, I want to do something. I need to do something. I worked hard to find out who I am, to become the person I am, to get on this road where I can really be who I am. And I thought – and still think sometimes – that I can be who I am only here, on the road where I walk right now. I forgot that I am me walking on the road, that I am not the road itself. And so, maybe, to stay true to who I am, I have to keep moving, even if it means leaving the road. Maybe, to keep being me, I have to stop walking this road. Maybe, to stay, I have to move on.