As a child I was faced with a lot of having my ‘own stuff’ thrown into my face: the color of my skin, how wide my nose was, how curly my hair is, and why my last name sounded so different. At the age of 5, we moved from a city where my teacher spoke Tagalog to the rest of the students to a small town where I was not white enough to be white, didn’t speak Spanish, and didn’t quite fit into black and brown culture. When I shared with my white mom how hard it was to get along with the other children and how everyone teased me, she would just say, “Oh honey, they don’t know how beautiful you are.” She never spoke about racism or socioeconomic status or that I was being raised in a single-parent home. She didn’t identify with those hateful remarks,  and I grew up with a sense of unworthiness, hurt, malice, of hating who I am, and how I was raised, even though I didn’t really understand why.

 

It took another 15 years to come back to the Bay Area and be able to better understand who I am as a Person of Color, a beautiful woman that has worked hard to stay in school and become higher than the Socio-economic Status that I grew up in, and loving men who are men in interracial relationships.  This has built many pathways to understand my ‘own stuff’ around being interracial and yet looking more like a white person even though I know that is only half of who I am, by building my economic stability so that I don’t have to depend on anyone else and that I have hella hustles that keep money in my bank. I have dealt with my insecurities, the falsehoods others have directed at me, and ‘own stuff’ from other people toward my interracial relationships. I don’t think it has become easier. Nor does it matter that I have more information about understanding this inequity, being hurt with no words to explain why, or the need for someone to just say that it’s going to be ok! This has taken 40 years of living in a world that isn’t sure of who I am, finding self-love no matter what other people’s ‘own stuff’ is, and defining my outcomes to help other people figure out their ‘own stuff.’ #empowermentguide