“I started looking in the mirror and only seeing a white person.”
I couldn’t tell you when it first happened.
I remember looking at my reflection when I was 13. I kept the lights off in the bathroom, because the bright light would sharpen the features that were already hard to look at.
Inches away from the mirror, I criticized the long black hairs above my lip that my ma said no one noticed, the thick little hairs between my brows, and the nose bridge—that was forming weird angles next to my cheeks as it was now growing further from my face. My nose decided it was tired of being flat.
As I stared at the person in the mirror, I sighed. That person looked so different from the people I saw everyday.
At 14, I began wearing makeup. I was enthralled with the vintage makeup of the 1940’s—the bedroom eyes that haloed the eyelid, the ruby red lipstick. I began ripping off the little hairs above my lip, and thinning my eyebrows down to delicately arched lines, painting my eyelids with too-light hues. I learned to take control of that person in the mirror.
At 15, I wore blue contact lenses. One day during lunch, my best friend Liz was chuckling over an encounter she had with our friends Robbie and Chet. “They said you had the most beautiful blue eyes they’d ever seen—they didn’t know they were fake!” We held our laughing bellies. Although I was pleased to have fooled them, somewhere deep down I felt a sadness clench at the part of my body I was holding.
A few years ago at 25, I looked in the mirror one morning. This time, I looked as hard as I had all those years ago when I was 13. I turned on the light, trying to get a better look, examining each quadrant of my bare face with my swollen eyes and disbelief.
I was hearing the voice of others in my head, “You’re a person of color?”
I’m not sure when I began looking past my almost black eyes, the dark moles on my face, my large mauve lips. I’m not sure when I started looking in the mirror and only seeing a white person.
Today at 28, I am looking at my reflection. As I paint warm rose eyeshadow across my lids, and dab champagne highlighter in the corner of my eyes, I remember the same eyes years ago painted in ivory eyeshadow and masked by blue lenses.
I don’t know if I trust what I see in the mirror. It’s so easy to look but not see.
“I started looking in the mirror and only seeing a white person.”
36 x 24 in
Acrylic on panel
