The Reach For Equality exhibition took place at a huge convention center. I arrived an hour early to get the lay of the land. It mimicked an empty museum: colourful booths, welcoming banners and the scattered event organizers speed-walking from place to place, following invisible paths of purpose. After stashing my winter coat into a locker, I went inside and spun in a circle, looking at all the booths. Most of it seemed to be informative stands for R4E's grassroot initiatives for the different members of the LGBTQ+ community. Some terms I was familiar with—gay, transgender, non-binary—while others I hadn't heard before, like gender-fluid and polyamorous. Some appeared to be individual businesses, including one that stood out from the rest thanks to its giant bunny logo.

The last time I'd confronted a person I used Shield on, it'd stung because I couldn't swallow being accountable. Instead of comforting, it was terrifying to have another person confirm your worst qualities and fears; weaknesses I hadn't learned to acknowledge until I drew a line separating what was within and out of my control. But I couldn't keep avoiding Rajathiran and live in the gray zone of tentative conversations; I had to know what they thought of me. Besides, unlike Phiona, they were currently in the trenches of literally carving a career for themself. I wondered if they felt like I did; wanting to share my music but also crawl up in a shell and remain anonymous. Rehearsing my dialogue and body gestures, I approached their booth.

"Hey Tai," Rajathiran said distractedly as they chewed their hair. "I had it right here..."

Observing the table of stickers and yoga equipment, I picked out the object that seemed the least likely to belong—a phone.

"There it is! Thanks," they exclaimed. "You haven't seen Monty and Joachim, have you? Ah, well. Since you're here, can you help me set up stuff? Wait, I'll need to rearrange it anyway. Actually, I'll need to rehearse talking to other people about Harmonic Balance, so—"

I averted my eyes. "Do you always talk so fast?"

"Yes?" they said, like I asked if the sky was blue. "Oh I forgot, not everyone has ADHD. I'm so sorry if I'm making you feel overwhelmed! But I swear I'm not talking fast because I want to dominate the conversation. I hate talking actually. Sometimes. It's not personal. Really. I'm trying to be better at social interactions."

"Me too."

Awkwardness stretched between us like a rubber band. This had to be a dream; they were as genuine as ever. I looked for the tell-tale signs; feet pointing away from me, chest leaning away, the sinking feeling of arriving at a rehearsal, only to figure out you practised the wrong song. Instead my gut feeling told me their silence came from their almost-absence presence as they were lost in their thoughts, and were not purposefully extracting themself from this conversation.

Not only had I dismissed the possibility that Rajathiran and I had nothing in common, but I took away their choice to decide if they wanted to be friends with me. Confrontation wasn't just fighting to win some ground, it was assessing your purpose there. Fishing for the thoughts that were obliterated a moment ago, I said, "What's it like being an entrepreneur? Owning a business must give you a lot of freedom, but how do you manage the paperwork and logistics?"

They were clearly passionate about Harmonic Balance, and they talked so fast that I had to interrupt to let them know that they should slow down. "It's chaotic and sometimes it's okay to not know what you're doing," they summed up. "Other times I bite off more than I chew, so it's like you're walking the tightrope between using your lack of knowledge as an excuse and really checking your hubris. So I'm glad to see you and other neurodivergent people doing this stuff, because then we learn from each other and we're not compared to what most people can or should do. The biggest thing I learned was you can't take everything on your plate, and it sucks, but sometimes it's best for you, those you help and those you can't. What got you into music, anyhow? What do you want to do after?"

"Travel," I said, answering the latter. "Not just for fun. I want to see the bigger world so I know which direction to take my music. I don't share this with others because they think I'm doubting my career, and I'm not, but when you're independent, how do you check your own accountability?"

"What do you mean?"

"If I'm doing the right thing," I said, thinking of when my university professor challenged the lecture room to solve an issue instead of debating and throwing blame at the bigger institutions. "I could get lost in my surface level accomplishments but so little could be changed."

"You can't quantify your impact on others, yeah," they agreed. "I don't know, Tai. In the future I see myself as a grown-up person who made progress but also had pitfalls. As long as I learn about myself, I can understand the world around me better and do my best."

—

I studied the buzz activity the way I would during a music theory test, breaking it down to smaller pieces to understand the bigger picture. After engaging in a couple short lived interactions that, like my first campfire, burst into bright flames and quickly faded, I figured I didn't want to stand out with my musical talent. I wanted to aid others, both in passive ways like helping someone through a rough day and in active ways like....I didn't know. But I did know I wanted to feel what Phiona did when she smiled as she greeted fans, musicians and media outlets—like finding a piece of yourself in every person you met. When you didn't have much time in your day to begin with, you wanted every second to count towards something meaningful.

At one point, I spotted Monty, Nora and Joachim talking together in my peripheral vision, the latter holding a satchel and journal in hand. They waved. They didn't expect me to approach them, which was appreciated as I didn't do well in group conversations. It echoed a contradictory sensation that I first experienced in university, of being a ship in an open sea—peaceful and acutely solitary. The transition from being surrounded by clamoring classmates to anonymity in lecture halls and libraries made me question what a reliable safety net looked like. But now I did have support. I was discovering a healthy balance. And I supposed it'd be idealistic for life to fall in the Goldilocks zone. I could only blindly grasp at my dream, making out its shape from the instances I touched it.

—

Performing in front of five hundred people who weren't cloaked in shadows of an auditorium or a dimmed restaurant, but were visible in rows of folding chairs, gave me acute awareness of every action I did on stage. I sang a new song, Facing the Wind, then thanked the venue hosters, technicians, and the audience for having me there. (Acknowledging everyone on stage, I learned, filled the cumbersome silence after a show and lowered the tension without crashing it.) Then I received questions from the audience. Per the rules, the artist was excused from answering questions they weren't comfortable answering, and they would take as many or few questions as they wanted. After the basic questions one would ask a musician, Joachim raised a hand. He held a notebook and pen, and it was clear he took time to formulate questions outside the box, though he stumbled on reading it outloud. "Do you feel your culture and/or ethnic background impacted the way you approach music, and how others perceive you?"

"I liked composing songs in Vietnamese. It's different from English since Vietnamese is a tonal language, so your word choice needs to match the melody, otherwise the words' meaning isn't clear. So in English I'm very particular about syllables and word flow. For perceiving, when it comes to my background....I'm surprised when others expect my career story to involve rebelling against my parents. It's not without reason, but not every Asian parent is controlling. I think that narrative locks them into that box and doesn't allow them to change. I know it's an optimistic thing to say though, coming from a place of privilege," I admitted, catching the potential objection like how one would catch a curveball. "Oh, um, going back to your first question, my background does make me conscious of how my music is representing the rest of the Vietnamese diaspora. I haven't actually produced anything specifically concerning that though, since I'm not 100% satisfied with my drafts. And that...that's it." I swallowed at the expansive silence that dwarfed my microphone-amplified voice.

Joachim nodded, before his hand shot out again, and with a guilty face he said, "Sorry one more question. Earlier you mentioned difficulty breaking into the music industry. Any advice for how you overcame those challenges?"

"I'm not sure if there's such a thing as 'overcoming.' When pursuing this path gets tough, I wonder how much harder it would have been to go down the path I didn't want. That's what helps me," I said.

A few head tilts and my own intuition signaled to me that wasn't the answer people expected. As I walked past the audience aisles, Joachim signed to Monty, "—do wrong? But—"

"—open-ended" was all I caught from Monty. 

I did not have the energy to drive home as soon as I wanted to. So I strayed near the entrance, sipping a coffee and savoring its heat mixing with the cold air snaking in from the entrance doors. Phiona's performance was after mine.

Idealistic consolations like things would get better, or that my family loved me, didn't help manage emotional challenges. I wanted affirmation that yes, it did hurt. That sometimes life sucked. Phiona felt extremely positive to me as she had the power of hindsight, but she didn't sugarcoat, so how did she handle the audience?

With half of her face illuminated by the soft stage lighting, she owned the stage. The speakers amplified her voice. "This song is called 'A Promise.' It's not quite like modern soca, but I use as many traditional instruments as I can."

Through the speakers, the first harp chords resonated in my chest, like the song knew exactly how lost I felt. It built up into a gentle release of guitar and drums that reminded me of rain on a sunny day. Phiona danced in beat with her lyrics.

"Make a promise

Promise that you'll be the first one to brace 'gainst the wind and fly

And when you find me on the other side

I'll tell you

I won't say sorry for misunderstanding something neither of us understood

But now I know who I am

So won't you take my hand, and learn about me?

Won't you try to see life in colour, for it's more than black and white

A life that you have fought for

A life that I continue to fight so we don't just live, we soar..."

After the applause died down, Phiona walked around the stage. "I'm blessed to be here today. A special thank-you goes out to my tiny but dedicated subscribers on Youtube who came up to me and in disbelief said, 'No way! You look so much older in real life!' I'm not ashamed of my age, but I am glad my make-up is doing something. It made my day, it really did." There were some laughs.

Phiona answered audience questions with energy and a right to own the stage. Despite not being new to the music industry, I hadn't experienced engaging with the audience like this; my gigs consisted of smooth musical transitions so I could get away with minimal talking while acknowledging my audience. I didn't do storytelling or heck, plugging in my non-existent merch.

Someone asked, "What was the biggest thing that pushed you to pursue a musician's career relatively late in life?"

An imperceptible beat passed before she answered—like an eighth-beat rest, it was there and gone. "I held it off because it felt like I was afraid of losing more. How can you balance between your passion, and your loved ones? What parts of you are worth keeping, and others shedding?" There was a murmur of agreement. "Life is a series of trade-offs, but it doesn't mean you're destined to be stuck. I do what I can to make myself happy, and whether that means doing music or switching to something else, it's been worth it," she said.

I'd observed enough live performances by other musicians to know that connecting with the audience was paramount. Just like when visiting another country you respected its customs because you were the guest, in the music industry you appreciated that your career rested in the faith of others. Later, at home, I scrolled through my growing Instagram profile with a new pair of eyes. I tried to detach myself and observe as an outsider: Who was this musician? What did his songs say, and what did he say outside of those songs? I tried to project my ideal person who I could look up to, but the idea of an anonymous fan doing so to me was laughable.

I looked up to Nora's Toronto skyline tapestry pinned to my wall, and then thought of the other musicians I'd seen at the R4E event, some who orbited as lone planetary bodies around clusters of people. There were layers to anonymity. You could still be truthful without sacrificing your privacy. I needed to be purposeful in shaping those boundaries, not shy away and assume the work had been done for me. Maybe, collaborating with local musicians—not completely in a hands-on way, but to start, making covers of each other's songs, or swapping gigs in nearby cities, could solidify the boundary between the audience and myself without changing who I was. 

The last paragraph took me half an hour to settle on. I hope I'm not accidentally setting up expectations, or maybe I'll need to adjust the plot to pay off the promises I've made. (Or maybe that is a rewrite problem.) I have an idea for the collaboration thing, though again I wanted to be careful of no introducing underdeveloped characters. It's tough writing Tai when his journey is so different from yours; you're learning new things about your own character as you write.