I have always been someone who prided myself in never taking too much to heart. From a young age, I was always taught by my parents to laugh things off and not to let things get to me. I can’t count the number of times I would hear my dad question how my being sad would do anything to solve a problem, and it didn’t take long for that to become something I didn’t need reminding of.

It’s not difficult to understand that racism was not something I paid attention to or even knew existed when I was in elementary school. I don’t think anyone did. You learn about slavery and the extent of my seven-year-old thoughts were “That’s not nice!”

A couple years later, in middle school, I knew these problems existed but was still oblivious to the fact that anyone could be speaking offensively to me if they made comments about my color or dropped the n-word in conversation. On the very rare occasion that someone would ask if it bothered me, I would very ignorantly –yet proudly– say no.

Throughout those years, there never was a time that I thought I had encountered any sort of subconscious racism from my peers. I was so comfortable with myself and the image I put out that I think I didn’t even realize it if people were being mean to me. It was like I lived in a world where everything came with an unspoken “just kidding” or “except for you”.

Flash forward to high school. My alma mater is duPont Manual, a school in downtown Louisville which was just as much an anomaly to the rest of the schools in my district as Louisville is an anomaly to the rest of the cities in Kentucky. I lived in something of a utopia. My peers were from all ethnicities and backgrounds, and an overwhelming majority of the students at my school shared my leftist political views. Bullying was not a big issue, at least not in the mainstream sense.

I went through high school and believed I was becoming a more socially and politically aware person because of the people around me. I was surrounded by brilliant people who had no difficulty expressing their opinions on platforms big or small. While I still was in no way ready to start professing my feelings on any hot topic to the world, I was gradually getting more comfortable talking about them in very small settings.

Looking back, I still was uneducated and sheltered. I titled myself as an “independent,” leaning neither left or right and claiming that I agreed with parts on both sides. I still was very tolerant of things that people would say to me – so tolerant that I wouldn’t even consider them to be rude.

I was still receiving comments about my color and I still heard the n-word many times, but to a much lesser extent than in previous years.

Graduating in 2016, I was still in this utopia while the Black Lives Matter movement was gaining some footing in national news and current President Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president. During my senior year, I took a Government/Politics course in harmony with the start of the election campaigns. My teacher was so respectfully unbiased and always urged us to do our own research and make opinions of our own, and it sparked interest in me to do more of just that – and since then, it seems like everything I had claimed about myself changed.

I started paying more attention to the injustices that were happening around me that I was either ignorant enough to not pay attention to or blessed enough to not receive at such a high extent as others like me.

Little by little, I started realizing that all those “you’re pretty for a black girl” comments were not really compliments.

The “you talk like a white person” was not a praise to my dialect. It was not okay when people would use the n-word towards me, even if they didn’t use the “hard r”.

I became almost hyper-aware of any negativity I could find and it made me start to become cynical. I started feeling uncomfortable when faced with any groups of people that I considered could fit the description of someone who wouldn’t like me for my skin color.

I would be in gas stations in any sort of rural area, and I remember reminding myself to get in and out as fast as I could. I remember drowning myself in articles and videos that only showed me how mean the world could be.

I found myself constantly going to my dad in tears and asking him how some people could be so cruel – and why they didn’t infuriate him as much as they were infuriating me. Again, he would ask what me being upset would do for me and finally, everything came full circle.

My dad, an immigrant and a black man would have never got where he is now –in his career and or in his life– if he took everything as personally as I was at the time. I started understanding why he instilled this value in me from such a young age.

Learning that self-worth from my dad and becoming confident in my opinions has helped me learn to now address racism any and anywhere I encounter it without letting it change who I am – which is not the cynical person I started to let myself become. I have kept this period of time with me and I have learned from it. I still don’t take much to heart, but I am now no stranger to telling someone if what they think is a regular comment is actually rude and ignorant of them to say.

I made a transition from a naïve and comfortable person to a person who is mindful and no longer scared or too unknowledgeable to stick up for what I believe in – and that has made a huge difference in me really learning what it means to “be yourself.”