Beyond the Label
“Visibility is not freedom — it’s surveillance in praise.”
For a long time, I thought identity was something to defend.
I spoke about being a woman in the world of work, a woman in art, a woman in thought.
It gave me visibility, but not freedom.
Visibility itself can become a cage — one lined with praise, statistics, and slogans.
The moment a voice is asked to represent a category, it begins to flatten.
Real diversity has never been about demographics.
It’s about the variety of ways of seeing.
The mind shaped by solitude, the voice tempered by self-questioning —
these are what make a writer distinct, not the tags attached to their name.
This is why I chose a pen name:
not to hide, but to unfasten myself from biography,
to let the words stand on their own.
I want readers to encounter the work, not the author.
To sense that behind the language there is a consciousness —
human, fallible, unlabelled — reaching toward understanding.
“Authenticity is not the performance of identity,
but the practice of being real.”