"The Geography of Becoming" by Isaac Amend
essay
I do not remember Saudi Arabia, though it occupies the first line of every biography I have ever written.
I was born there, in Riyadh, when my parents worked abroad, and because I left as an infant, the country survives in my imagination as inheritance rather than memory. Saudi Arabia belongs to family photographs and diplomatic anecdotes, to stories told across dinner tables years later. It is the opening sentence of my life but not its first paragraph. The geography entered me before consciousness did. I inherited the desert the way other children inherit eye color: without consent, without recollection, and without any ability to distinguish what came from the landscape and what came from blood.
Perhaps this is always how identity begins. We are shaped first by places we cannot remember.
Pakistan, by contrast, arrived with mountains.
Some of my clearest memories involve driving through Abbottabad on our way north toward ski slopes that felt impossibly foreign to the Pakistan represented in American news coverage. Adults spoke in hushed tones about politics and security while I pressed my face against the window, fascinated by roadside vendors, painted trucks, and the gradual transformation of the landscape as the plains surrendered to elevation.
Children possess a remarkable indifference to geopolitics. We remember textures instead.
I remember motion.
I remember roads curving upward.
I remember realizing, perhaps for the first time, that a country could contain multitudes. Pakistan was not a headline or a security briefing. It was families drinking tea, mountains dissolving into clouds, and the strange exhilaration of understanding that the world was much larger and more complicated than any single narrative could contain.
If Saudi Arabia taught me nothing consciously and Pakistan taught me movement, India taught me abundance.
Delhi remains, in my memory, a city that refused minimalism. Everything existed in excess: sound, color, traffic, conversation, heat, possibility. My twin sister and I wandered through Dilli Haat, passing textile stalls and spice vendors, absorbing the ordinary miracle that entire worlds of craftsmanship could coexist within walking distance of one another. At Khan Market, I rummaged through bookstores with the seriousness of a child who already suspected that books might someday become a profession rather than merely a pastime.
And always there were Lay’s chips.
It seems absurd that something so mundane should persist in memory with such precision, but childhood frequently preserves the trivial alongside the profound. The yellow packet in my hands. The dust settling on bookshelves. The satisfaction of discovering some forgotten volume while eating a snack that, for reasons I still cannot explain, tasted better in Delhi than it ever has in America.
Outside our house, cows grazed quietly on green grass.
No one shooed them away.
One simply accommodated their presence, rearranging human movement around animal dignity. I remember learning that harming or disturbing them carried religious significance, and even as a child I recognized that I was living within a moral framework fundamentally different from the one I would later inherit in the United States. The world did not exist solely for human convenience. Sacredness occupied public space. It wandered into front yards. It chewed grass beneath ordinary skies.
Meanwhile, I ate streetside samosas whose heat exceeded my patience and whose flavor exceeded anything I have found since.
The smell of frying oil.
The crisp exterior.
The brief burn on the tongue.
Memory is often less intellectual than culinary.
India taught me that civilization could be overwhelming without becoming alien. That crowds and beauty and contradiction might coexist productively. That an entire civilization could organize itself around assumptions utterly unlike my own and still feel, somehow, deeply familiar.
I sometimes wonder whether my later resistance to rigid categories began there.
Pluralism is difficult to abandon once you have lived inside it.
Russia arrived when adolescence did.
This was unfortunate timing.
We moved to Moscow in 2007, and suddenly everything hardened: the winters, the architecture, the politics, and, unfortunately, my own body. Putin and Medvedev occupied their peculiar constitutional dance, exchanging offices while preserving continuity. The newspapers spoke of modernization. Everyone understood where power truly resided.
As a teenager, I found something perversely comforting about Russian honesty. Not honesty in the moral sense. Honesty in the aesthetic sense. Moscow made no apologies for its seriousness. The city expected endurance. It rewarded composure. It had survived emperors, revolutions, famines, invasions, and ideological experiments. My adolescent confusion barely registered against such historical scale.
And yet I carried it everywhere.
Spaso House became one of the central stages of diplomatic childhood. Reception after reception unfolded beneath chandeliers and history. The Nutcracker performances arrived with winter. Tables filled with cookies, blinis, caviar, and conversations I only half understood. Adults moved through rooms with practiced confidence while children occupied the margins, absorbing rituals we could not yet interpret.
Diplomacy possesses its own theater.
Children of diplomats become unwilling actors within it.
I learned how to shake hands before I learned who I wanted to become.
Outside those formal spaces, Moscow offered other educations. Red Square under fresh snow. The Metro stations that resembled underground palaces. The immense confidence of Soviet architecture, which seemed less interested in accommodating individuals than in reminding them of history’s permanence.
My body, meanwhile, was becoming something I did not recognize.
The timing felt almost cruel.
Adolescence demands certainty precisely when certainty is least available. Friends discussed crushes and futures with an ease that struck me as anthropologically fascinating. I participated in the conversations. I performed the expected role. Yet somewhere beneath language itself sat a persistent wrongness I lacked the vocabulary to describe.
I often think that geography and gender operated similarly in my childhood.
Both preceded understanding.
Both imposed expectations.
Both shaped possibility before I possessed the ability to consent.
Jordan, finally, taught me history.
Not the abstract history of textbooks, but history as landscape, as stone, as something one physically traverses.
Jabal Amman became a place of routine and affection. Rainbow Street, with its cafés and conversations stretching into evening, offered a gentler rhythm than Moscow’s severity. One café in particular, owned by a gay man, introduced me—though I did not fully appreciate it at the time—to the possibility that alternative lives could exist openly, even within societies outsiders frequently misunderstand.
The world, once again, proved more complicated than its stereotypes.
We traveled to Wadi Rum, where the desert expands beyond ordinary language. The scale itself becomes philosophical. Human concerns diminish. Identity diminishes. One stands among stone and silence and recognizes how temporary all categories truly are.
Petra offered another lesson.
Civilizations disappear.
Empires collapse.
What remains are the traces people carve into landscapes and into one another.
Floating in the Dead Sea, I discovered a peculiar form of surrender. The body refuses submersion. It insists upon remaining visible. Gravity negotiates differently there. Ordinary assumptions cease functioning.
I often think about that sensation now.
The realization that environments alter what bodies can do.
The realization that identity, too, may depend upon context more than we care to admit.
We speak constantly about becoming ourselves, as though the self were an archaeological artifact waiting patiently beneath accumulated debris. The metaphor is comforting because it preserves autonomy. It assures us that identity originates entirely within.
I no longer believe that.
I think geography participates in authorship.
Saudi Arabia gave me origins without memory.
Pakistan taught me movement.
India taught me plurality.
Russia taught me endurance.
Jordan taught me history.
America, when I finally returned to it in any meaningful sense, taught me estrangement.
The great irony of my life is that I became American only after spending most of my childhood elsewhere. The country existed as abstraction long before it existed as home. I knew embassies before suburbs. I knew diplomacy before local politics. I knew departure before permanence.
And perhaps that is why transition later felt, in some strange way, familiar.
I had already spent a lifetime crossing borders.
I had already learned that maps change, governments change, languages change, and even names change. Entire worlds vanish behind airplane windows while new ones appear beneath descending clouds. The self survives these migrations, but it does not survive unchanged.
Nothing survives unchanged.
The geography of becoming is precisely this: the recognition that we are collaborations between interior longing and exterior landscape. We are not merely born. We are continuously composed.
By roads through Abbottabad.
By books discovered in Khan Market.
By cows grazing peacefully outside Delhi homes.
By caviar at Spaso House.
By sunsets over Wadi Rum.
By salt water holding us above the surface of the Dead Sea.
The places we inhabit do not simply witness our lives.
They participate in their construction.
Isaac Amend is a transgender man and writer based in Washington D.C. His work has appeared in the Yale Daily News, the Washington Blade, the Los Angeles Blade, The Advocate, Streetlight Magazine, and Brevity. In 2017, he starred in National Geographic’s “Gender Revolution” documentary, hosted by Katie Couric. His author’s portfolio is here: www.isaacamend.com and you can catch him on Instagram at: @isaacamend