A Love Letter to the Self (Part I)

Written by Alok Das

Forward: RIS is pleased to invite colleagues to engage in Alok’s wisdom through this new blog series, which encourages us to be reflective of mobility’s meanings. Our field is often preoccupied with notions of ‘experience’, but this ultimately limits our ability to think relationally about the human and personal meaning that international students ascribe to mobility and what mobility ascribes upon them. Alok’s words allow us to reflect on embodied emotions which underpin student mobilities, of which each student has an individual story, if only we make space for the curiosity to listen. RIS invites responses and engagements from the community, through our blog, but also through whatever artistic forms move you. 

Series Framing

This six-part series is written under a pseudonym—not to hide, but to share the self with care.

Written by Alok Das, a former international student turned international education scholar-practitioner, the series offers an intimate, embodied conversation with the International Study Program (ISP) in Canada. It is not a policy analysis, nor a solution-driven intervention. Instead, it is a sustained dialogue with the self—one shaped by migration, longing, survival, complicity, resistance, and moments of unexpected joy.

At a time when the International Study Program feels increasingly grim—weaponized by policy volatility, public hostility, and economic extraction—this series pauses the rush to fix, defend, or abandon. Instead, it asks: What other possibilities might still exist if we stayed longer with our own stories?

Each piece weaves personal memory with everyday encounters inside the ISP—offices, forms, classrooms, borders, silences. The writing refuses binary understandings of welcome and exclusion, success and failure, domestic and international. What emerges is not clarity, but companionship: an offering to all who are entangled in the ISP—students, staff, faculty, policymakers—to enter a deeper dialogue with themselves. Inspired by Rupi Kaur’s Poetry,  the series moves through six embodied moments: love, wilting, falling, rooting, rising, and blooming.

Part I: A Love Letter to the Self (Before the World Enters)

January 16, 2026

Dear Alok,

This morning, I woke up with an unexpected swell of feeling — one I rarely allow myself. You know how easily you slip to the bottom of my priority list. Everything and everyone else comes first. You have learned to live with the scraps of your own attention.

Yet today, as I stood in the kitchen trying to make coffee — yes, I made it myself for once, and yes, I spilled half of it on the floor — something shifted. My husband stared at me, part disbelief, part resignation, unsure which was more surprising: that I attempted to make coffee, or the mess I created in the process. But even in that moment, with the floor sticky and the French press sulking on the counter, the feeling inside me was not about him, not about the mess, not even about the coffee.

It was about you.

Not the Alok in this single morning moment, but the Alok who walked through the labyrinth of the Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Canada’s (IRCC) international study program. The Alok who carried students’ anxieties, their hopes, their ticking clocks, their longing for permanence, the memory of home that both holds and haunts them. Alok, who learned to hear the unspoken fear in every question, the exhaustion in every email, the quiet courage in every attempt to stay afloat in a system not built keeping their humanity in mind (or heart – however way it exists). 

This morning, as the house stirred awake, I realized something: My love for you is tangled with the love you hold for all those students navigating the fragile edges of temporality in this land.

They who hear every tick of the clock louder than anyone else.

They who dream of futures that may never be guaranteed.

They who carry the contradiction of belonging here and longing elsewhere.

They who build lives in a place that constantly reminds them of their conditionality.

And you — you have walked alongside them, holding their fears, their paperwork, their stories, their heartbreak, their hope. While the castle will prioritize prosperity, and the defenders of the empire will perform their loyalty to the Crown, and the thinkers will debate the “big picture,” you already know where your attention belongs: with the people outside the castle walls — where your heart has always lived. Because, regardless of what the castle decides, we survive out here together.

So yes, Alok — I love you.
But not just for who you are in any single moment.
I love you for the journey you have taken.

And because of this love — this fierce and tender love — I have decided to write about your journey. Not to praise you, but to speak to international students around the world, looking at the world map and saying – Where can I fly for different possibilities. To tell them why I believe Canada is still that place. I want to tell them they are welcome here, and what that welcome truly means — with all its complications, truths, and possibilities. I want to tell them that there is no welcome mat, but rather constant negotiations, and in those negotiations, we built life. We find people who make our morning coffee and encourage us to clean the mess we create with soft but firm eyes. We break, we build, and in that process, we write incredible stories. 

These stories need to be told. And you, Alok, are part of its pulse.

With love,

Alok

P.S. Today is your late father’s birthday—the one who bore the cost of your international student journey and never got to see you make it through the (im)possibilities of the migration nexus. Treat yourself gently. Remind yourself: all his sacrifices in life for you came from love—so that you could love.

So, love.

About the author:

Alok Das is author’s pseudonym. Author is based in Canada and a doctoral candidate and an international student advisor in a comprehensive university in Atlantic Canada.