People Aren't Born, They're Made part 1

Part One - The Lie

#thetrigger #theoriginallie #therapy #blackgirlandmentalhealth

I remember feeling unsure of myself at a pretty young age. I wish my parents had done a better job at helping me to be confident about things like who I was, and what I looked like but parenting is hard. Most parents also seem to have a element of trauma or uncertainty themselves anyway and it's extremely hard to teach your children how to love and know themselves when you struggle to do the same. Because of this disconnection I'm pretty sure a few of my insecurities crept in as young as fourth, maybe fifth grade.

My Best Friend and I - Fourth Grade

I had a best friend who was extremely beautiful and I adored her and so did the boys, my problem with this was that I looked nothing like her, quite honestly I was the exact opposite, she had beautiful cocoa brown skin, long dark hair, deep dark brown eyes and she wasn't quite as much of a stick figure as I was. I, on the other hand, was skinny, my skin was as bright and yellow as the sun, my short/midlength hair looked like someone had mistakenly dyed it a sandy brown color and my hazel eyes looked nothing like anyones around me, so instead of them being beautiful I determined their difference made them ugly. When I looked in the mirror and quite honestly at many of the people around me I didn't feel like I favored anyone except my older brother, and people never failed to mention that, but he was a boy , (I mean seriously what 10 year old little girl wants to be told she looks like a boy) Please understand I'm telling you this story from a child's perspective, so the thoughts that seem childish to you, well.....they were coming from a ten year old child and her logic.

I was mostly raised around my mothers family, which also had this same beautiful cocoa brown skin that wasn't passed down to me. I was the oddball and it didn't help that the running joke was to call me "the white girl" which is still a common crude, colorist, comment amongst the African American community that needs to stop, along with "pretty for a dark skin girl", " nappy hair" ,"good hair" and this list could go on but I digress.Being the odd ball at that age meant being ugly in my mind, to be honest I can feel a deep emotional connection to the story of "The Ugly Duckling". My family not only looked different but truth be told, they were pretty different in general, well from me that is. They were loud, powerful, strong and seemingly confident women and I have always been a little on the soft spoken side, I also was more of a sensitive follower rather than a leader back then. So I often took the back seat, never intervening, always feeling invisible, uncertain of myself and misunderstood. I hope that you guys can understand that I wasn't a completely unhappy child that had a miserable childhood, I was just more of the overlooked child, the internally abusive child and the insecure one.

Because of this place in my family, I adopted a lot of traits that were never really me. Maybe if I raised my voice more often or spoke a certain way I would be heard, and sadly this followed me into my adult life, although embarrassing I find that my dialect and tone of voice change at least five times a day depending on who I am talking to and how comfortable I am in the moment.

“People aren't born, they are made.”

I was being made, and being odd was the foundational brick that I would build the rest of who I was on. Odd was the open door. It was the domino I didn't understand that set the rest of the dominoes tumbling. I held on to that insecurity and the lie that I wasn't beautiful for so many years, it led me down a pretty dark and desperate path, to feel accepted and beautiful that i'm sure i'll talk more about along this journey, but I have to wonder, if someone had caught that first domino and stood it back up and told it how beautiful and important and valuable it was, would the other dominoes have fallen?

"I was different and different was bad", this was lie based on the logic of a 10 year old girl that led to more than 20 years of chaos, depression and anxiety.