When I was younger I wanted to burn my skin off.
I wanted to scrub it off, bleach it off, peel it off in hopes that whatever was underneath it was something that would make me more beautiful, more worthy, more acceptable. In hopes that underneath it was the golden yellow undertone of skin that my mixed cousins were blessed with. In hopes that whatever I found under the skin I wanted to so desperately get rid of would be something that would make me happy. For once.
My grandma used to tell me I had "beautiful chocolate skin." She used to tell me it made me amazing. She believed it was something that showed my strength and my power. She told me it made me a queen. I wanted to believe her. I wanted to look at my skin and see what she saw. I wanted to look in the mirror and believe that I was beautiful. That I was worthy.
I wanted to believe that my skin was a good thing. But I had everything in the world telling me otherwise. On TV, all I saw was white skin. If it wasn't white, it was the lightest tone of black with the curliest of hair. A black person who looked nothing like me. At school, when kids mentioned dark skinned people it was never anything good. It was someone comparing us to roaches or saying we looked dirty or that we smelled. It's hard not to internalize these things.
My other grandma hated my skin. She used to put make up on me that was shades too light. She used to warn me to stay out of the sun. When I brought home school pictures she would ask me why I looked so dark. That stuck with me.
My best friend in 7th grade once looked at a magazine with a dark-skinned woman on the cover and said, "Oh, she's pretty. That's weird. Dark skin girls usually aren't pretty." I was standing right there, standing in the skin that wasn't good enough for anyone. That stuck with me.
Everything stuck with me. Every word, every insult, every jab that nobody realized was hurting me stuck to the skin that caused it all. If I could get rid of the skin maybe I could get rid of the pain. Maybe I could get rid of the scars caused by every harsh word that cut deep if I could just get rid of the skin that caused it all.
But I couldn't. I had to learn to love it. As hard as it may be. Now, I look in the mirror and I don't see ugliness. I have skin the color of a Hershey's bar. I see beauty. Of course, I still have my days where I try to find the lighting that will make my skin look the lightest or I wish I was lighter. Years of self-hatred isn't something that goes away in one night.
But I'm proud to say, that for the most part, I love myself and the skin I'm in. And that's what matters most.
