I was sixteen when I left home for Delhi. A curious kid, with the first taste of freedom on my tongue. Delhi was not just another city - it was alive and full of stories waiting to be discovered. I was curious to know those stories, to know the city and in the process, myself.
But curiosity is often limited by circumstances. I was a student, broke and broken. My explorations of the city were stitched together by the metro. It became my lifeline to curiosity and exploration. Each ride carried the thrill of discovery, along with something else. Something unwanted.
The stares. The stares from people around.
At first, I told myself, “Don’t care about them, you’re never going to see these people again.” But I couldn’t ignore it because this gaze was not casual. It was violent, almost stripping. Strangers’ eyes – they moved over my face, my chest, my walk, as if they were trying to solve a puzzle: is this a girl or a boy? I felt flustered each time I saw that question on someone’s face.
It is hard to explain the violence of being reduced like that. Reduced to a question. Reduced until you are no longer a person but an oddity, something to be figured out. I would later come to learn that there is a word for it, reductiveness – it is the arrogant world’s way of reducing one into something simpler than they truly are. It makes you smaller.
Reductiveness hurts. It made me want to disappear. I desperately sought a hideaway, “What would protect me from these unwanted gazes?” I kept seeking an answer. I wanted to hide so I began to build an armour, not of steel but of fabric. Neutral clothes. Neutral colours. Outfits that made me harder to decipher, or not questioned at all. At first, this was camouflage, my way of disappearing into the crowd.
But with time, it became something else. It became my language and comfort. Every muted shade I wore, every androgynous outfit said quietly - I am not an oddity. I am different and I am myself. The whole process, it was not easy. It was painful and took me almost a decade to let go of the shame that reductiveness had brought over me. I gradually accepted myself.
Now when I look in the mirror, I don’t see a question mark, but a person - complex, real and whole. I found what I had been searching for all along. Not in the narrow streets of Delhi, not in strangers’ questioning eyes, but within myself. I found comfort in my own skin.
I found my burrow.
This story is written by an anonymous Burrower,
shared with love on Burrow — a space for slow stories & safe conversations.
0 comments