For a long time the term ‘late to the party’ has lingered in my consciousness. I have this vague memory of having discussed it with someone after attending a curator’s conference in Kolkata, but it’s all a blur, it was that long ago. We were using it to refer to the feeling of delayed arrival towards a concept, speaking of it like going to a club after all the cool people had already been there a while, so you and your people are forced to inhabit the periphery, where the music reverberates, but not as intensely, and you wonder, ‘why didn’t I get here before?’ There’s this heady cocktail of feelings—the sadness of being left out, resentment towards everyone who got there before, and a bit of imposter syndrome, where you doubt if you were even worthy enough to have been invited.

But the context governing the delay of your arrival compounds the enormity of feeling left behind. Were you late to the party because you were busy navigating other ideas, or were you simply never invited or not meant to be there? There’s a third possible scenario in which you had actually conceived of the party yourself, but didn’t have the resources to host and now you are made to feel like the gatecrasher. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.