Belong In The Skin You’re In

I had made the same birthday wish for as long as I could remember – to wake up White. 

I’d close my eyes and blow out my handful of candles – hoping that some sort of magical skin-fairy would come along that evening and transform my outward appearance. If Sleeping Beauty’s Fairy Godmother’s could change the color of her dress, why would skin be any different? 

But in truth, it wasn’t so much a desire for a different skin color. No it had much more to do with wanting to belong.

Maybe it was because I felt like a stranger in my own family, or maybe because my community was predominantly White and I yearned to blend in. Maybe it was the cultural standard of beauty in which I was raised, or maybe it was the subtle ways in which I was treated differently from as early as 4 years old.

To this day, I cannot pinpoint a specific moment or event that inspired this wish, only that it was a desire I felt deep in my bones for decades. To be honest, there are still times I catch myself in the mirror, wishing to see someone different staring back at me.

As a young adult, I fell into a group of empowered women and felt my sense of self surge. I felt much taller than my mere 5 foot, 2 inches (and 3/4) and began to embrace who I was. But still, the Asian in me was something of a flaw that I had to suffer – to endure.

I took to activism and anti-racist work, and as angry as I always felt towards the injustices that played out in society, I still wished to be White. I didn’t yet see that the anti-racist work had to begin from within. I hadn’t yet realized that my struggles with food and eating disorders had been my way of trying to starve the Asian out of me. I hadn’t yet accepted the skin I was in.

The desire to belong is elemental.

It drives us to do the unthinkable, and conjures up stories about our self worth that are beyond the absurd. But over decades of searching for belonging, and losing my footing more than a half dozen times, I can tell you that belonging is not a destination. 

It turns out that belonging has far less to do with looking a certain way, or behaving ‘appropriately.’ It’s an ever changing process of coming back to ones self, and it turns out that it has everything to do with loving yourself. Cliche perhaps, but there’s a reason that cliche phrases become so popular. They resonate with us, and speak to simple truths that are almost too simple to grasp.

But isn’t that always the way of it? That the simple is often the most profound? Whether we’re discovering our own voice for the very first time, realizing the power in our ideas and words. Or we are discovering that no amount of self hate or starvation will eradicate our Asian-ness. 

We must first belong to ourselves.

The little girl who wished to be White is still inside me. But now instead of starving her, or trying to chastise her, I embrace her. I hold her tight and remind her over and over again that she belongs right here.