My name is May Al-Ablah, and I moved to Canada when I was five years old. I got citizenship when I was 16 years old, and I'm now a practicing lawyer in the city of Toronto. My parents migrated here from Kuwait. They were raised in Lebanon and originally were Palestinian. So there's quite the journey throughout the Middle East before we landed here in Canada. And as Palestinians, we were stateless at the time. It took 11 years for that process to end, so I didn't actually get my citizenship until I was 16 years old, which is kind of a funny story because I went to the citizenship ceremony with my family. I was 16. I had already spent more of my life in Canada than outside of it, and I felt very much Canadian. I felt very much like I was part of the society, and the woman handing out the citizenship, shook my hand, and she said, welcome to Canada. And I remember that story very, very vividly, because I remember thinking, what I've lived here almost all my whole life. When I hear the word citizen, I don't think of just the formal citizenship. I think about all the informal kinds of citizenship that people engage in. And to me, a citizen is somebody who has a stake and an interest in the society that they're living in. It means that I volunteer with various community groups, for example, and I'm very involved with the arts-based organization here in Toronto, called ArtReach Toronto, which provides arts-based opportunities for artists and community groups to engage other young people. That work is really important to me because fundamentally, Art is about telling stories and understanding the human condition. So if you only have stories from a very narrow point of view, you're missing out on the fullness and richness of human experience. One of the benefits of being a Canadian citizen for me is that there's a real respect for diversity at the social and political level. I'm able to express myself, to express my gender identity, to express my sexuality, and have laws that protect me, and have communities that I'm able to be a part of, and to have those communities not just exist, but be celebrated and respected. One of the reasons why my family moved to Canada was for my siblings and I to be able to access higher education. And that has always been a value that's very, very important in my family, especially being Palestinian, especially being stateless. Because being stateless and not having legal status in any of the places that we've lived in up until now has led to this idea that education is of top priority because education is something that you can take with you, no matter where you are or where you end up, no matter how many times you need to flee. It is something that you carry with you. And I took that and I pursued it and I pursued it. I went to university and then I went on to law school. Interesting thing too is part of the attraction to law school is recognizing, as an immigrant, as a stateless person, how much the law plays a part in our lives. That's part of the drive that led me to want to understand these systems, to try and change these systems where they don't work, uphold them where they do work. So that's, it's a very interesting process for me to go from being a stateless person and as an immigrant to a new country with my family and to now be an officer of the court of this country.