Self-Love is The Best Love

I have spent the last 18 Valentines with one goal: to look in the mirror and be happy with my reflection. Not okay. Not content. Happy.

It took most of my teenage years, but I feel like I am getting pretty close. When I walk into family functions, everybody agrees on one thing: I am just like my mother. Our laughs have the same resonance. Our tempers shake the same rooms. Our personalities leave the same impression.

But outsiders will always see us as strangers. My hair doesn’t coil or look like the night sky. The shades of my skin are described by makeup companies as “light” and “ivory.” When I speak my mother language, people are surprised. Even my last name describes the people with dark skin that I came from.

Yet, all she ever wanted for me was to have a more comfortable life. She put oils in my hair to reduce its height. She slapped sunscreen all over my face until it burned my eyes. She allowed the school to put me in ESL for an extra year with the promise I’d  lose my accent. 

Since I was born, all I have wanted is to look like the woman I admired the most.  Every time people asked if we knew each other, or asked if we wanted two separate checks, it was a cut to my pride. All I ever wanted was for the world to be able to physically see the pride I had for my heritage. I wanted to grab a tattoo gun and print the symbols of indigenous culture on my forehead.

This has led me to my current hypothesis. God has created a cruel joke for her fellow daughters of color and is forcing them to face the most significant dilemma. We either become outsiders in the eurocentric society we live in, or we become outsiders in our own communities. Yet when growing up, we all go through that period of wanting to be a mirror image of our sisters. Frustration with the hair we were born with and envy in our veins. And though it may seem like self-image issues were written into the DNA of every woman, WOC are also influenced by the histories of discrimination of other women in their families 

I am still working on ways to find peace with this internal battle. I have now resorted to using humor to brush off how much it previously affected me. When people ask where I’m from, I tease them for trying to investigate my ethnic ambiguity. I ask people to make a game of it and guess all the possible combinations I could possibly be. And when I looked at the polaroids of my mother when she was my age, I remind myself that I don’t have to be her. I don’t have to represent the beauty of my entire community. My only duty is to love the body I inhabit.