Yesterday, my friends and I took a 45 minute train ride from Manhattan to have momos in Queens. As I got out of the subway station, I exclaimed: “This literally looks exactly like a part of Lahore.” The overhead bridge (really a track), the smells — except the weed, perhaps — the chaos, and even some of the faces were remnants of the city I grew up in. And then I continued walking along the street with my friends, without an ounce of insecurity or anxiety of walking on the streets as a young girl — something I have never felt in Lahore.

In Lahore, as a girl, you can feel eyes on you constantly. Men gape as if it is their birthright; seemingly a punishment I must endure for having the audacity to be out in the city. I can feel the searing stares through the dupatta that’s draped quite conservatively around my body. I sometimes shudder if my eyes ever meet the ones looking at me through the front or side mirrors of a car I am traveling in. The feeling remains after they divert their attention: a constant feeling of being watched, surveilled and objectified. Wearing a mask in Pakistan sometimes felt freeing in the most unfortunate of ways: they’re watching me, but I remember telling myself that they can’t really see me and perceive me — sort of like a safety blanket.

I rarely ever just walk around and loiter in Lahore, and I am never as carefree as I have been in New York. I don’t feel the need to constantly share my location with people I trust in New York, as much as I do in Lahore. I don’t memorize the route my cab will take to get from Point A to Point B like I do in Lahore, just to make sure that the driver doesn’t take a turn that’ll take me away from more populated — safer — areas. I have had to, on occasion, pretend to talk to an imaginary male figure in my life during rides and explain where I am to just transmit some sort of message to who is driving — people know where I am and where I am going, so don’t you dare think otherwise. In Lahore, I don’t feel comfortable just stopping for a quick cup of tea on the roadside, or going from one area to the next without looking over my shoulder every few minutes, without constantly worrying about the safety of myself and others with me, without the looming threat of finding ourselves in a situation we can’t escape from unharmed just because we liked a street and turned towards it. I genuinely think that it’s a kind of psychological violence that women in Pakistan endure when we’re trying to walk on the streets and exist in public spaces.

As I started writing this, I wanted to try so hard to make this just about the freedom to move, to loiter, to explore, to feel at ease, without talking about violence and grotesqueness that I’ve associated with doing so growing up in Lahore. But I can’t seem to be able to put my experience in those terms, because every time I get home safely in Lahore, without a horrible incident to process and without some kind of harm to myself and my body, I think of how today, I managed to escape the crippling violence that so many others face everyday in the streets of my city. I say Alhamdulillah. Taking a walk to relax in any part of Lahore, barring some extra-safe, privileged, gated communities and neighborhoods, is not a comfortable concept for non-men.

When I came to New York City for my study away in January, I’d heard from too many sources, about how unsafe the city can be, about taking precautions everyday when you’re walking around and being aware of your surroundings consistently. And I am. Yet a day out in New York doesn’t exhaust me nearly as much as a day out in Lahore does. If you ask me to give you directions in Lahore to walk from one area to another, I would not be able to just because I’ve given up on trying to find comfort and belonging in the city since I’ve moved away. If you ask me to give you directions in Manhattan, I can tell you more than one route to take, along with some recommendations for where you can stop to look at some street art, and a quaint little bookstore on your way that’s a must-see.

The saddest part, perhaps, is that I always thought of the constant stares, and the threat of the very possible violence they carried, as the cost of wanting to be independent in Lahore, as a small bargain I had to make to be able to feel a little more liberated. But being removed from home for this long has made me realize how much less anxiety I carry with me, and how much energy I have to give to things when I am not constantly, cripplingly worried about my safety.

When I moved to Abu Dhabi, it was like a breath of fresh air. I felt a lot more at ease going out and about, trying to get out of the Saadiyat bubble as much as I could. I knew that the proximity to home and South Asia meant that I still needed to be careful, but it wasn’t the same as Lahore. It felt like home, but in a warmer way. I was actually able to hold conversations with strangers who came from where I come from, find out more about their lives in the Gulf, because I know that there is a need for kindness and empathy for the people who work here and are subjected to the socioeconomic inequalities within this society’s structure. I found out that conversing with the other person in their language makes me feel like I am doing my part in making the other person feel heard, and, ironically, seen, without worrying about my positionality. The people around me in Lahore have stories to share too, and I would love to be able to just make connections, but I have simply never tried lately because of so many acquired fears. And sometimes, in Abu Dhabi, I felt like I was making important connections; I didn’t feel uneasy when I would be asked where specifically in Lahore I’m from, or why I chose to study here. I didn’t feel paternalized when the old brown uncle driving the cab ended our conversation by telling me to work hard and make my parents proud. I did not constantly question if I was sending signals of blurred boundaries.

But as it turned out in an incident last fall, the kind of harassment that I faced in Lahore pervaded through these socioeconomic structures, left me leaning on my friend’s shoulder and quietly shaking, and later questioning if I had said something or done something that had made me vulnerable and an easy target. Did I put myself in a situation where I was left feeling so humiliated and helpless? I knew better than that.

I don’t want to resent brown men in the Gulf on the basis of one incident and my experiences in Pakistan, but the shell that I’ve built to protect myself in Lahore came back after that incident in Abu Dhabi. A few weeks after I came to New York, I remember telling my mom over the phone about how easy it is to be mobile here, and how I can just move around as I like to. It had little to do with how walkable this city is or the ease of access to public transport. It’s just that I feel not seen and constantly watched like a hawk, and a walk from my dorm to the library doesn’t leave me feeling helpless and any less dignified. I could see that she didn’t entirely get it, and was even a bit concerned, but I didn’t have the energy to explain further then.

Sometimes I wonder if this may have to do with the privilege of living in Manhattan. Maybe it does. But I know that I feel so much more at ease here than I have in Lahore and Abu Dhabi, even on campus sometimes. I can loiter around as much as I want to here. I can sit in a park to have some chai and enjoy the slowly improving weather. I can stop on the road and take a picture of that building that looks really aesthetic from a certain angle. I don’t want to feel more in place in this city that I adore so far, but one I know I will never come close to calling home as I call Lahore or even Abu Dhabi, home. It’s so much easier to just exist. And my heart broke a little as I wrote this piece, because I don’t want to feel more free here, yet I do.