Figurative Reflections: A Journey to Self Love
Personal Essay
I did not understand the importance of race representation until I felt the impact of growing up without it.
My brother and I have a significant age gap, so when I was in elementary school, I would be watching teen dramas like The OC (2003). Being easily influenced at that age, I thought that because I liked Marissa Copper, I should be exactly like her — sought after, particularly by boys. I am not too sure why I was so drawn to Marissa. Something about the way her character was depicted was alluring and even as a seven-year-old, I wanted that; perhaps this is where the inner monster started to develop. Without representation, I was seduced by the romantic construction of trouble in the form of a female protagonist. I still absolutely love the exasperating drama of the series and I would never speak badly about having watched it; I enjoyed those Friday afternoons with my brother, watching television while eating McDonald's’ when he was home from university.
Teenage dramas were not the only media I consumed as a child; I also spent a lot of time in my Zellers-branded pajamas watching a lot of children’s shows. However, despite the extensive number of children’s shows I enjoyed, there were no characters that I could relate to in terms of appearance. I remember really enjoying Berenstain Bears (2003) and thinking that Sister Bear was cool. She was smart, she was social, and she was brown. My excitement was a little short-lived when I realized that idolizing her was not quite the same as seeing a brown individual on-screen since she was a grizzly bear.
I am Guyanese, which means my parents immigrated to Canada from Guyana, a small country in South America. It also means that there was little to no representation of brown girls and women in the mainstream Western media I was consuming as I grew up. The lack of race representation resulted in a sense of confusion and misguidedness when I started to put together my own identity. Junot Diaz, the author of “Islandborn” (2018), once said, “If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.” Diaz’s words resonated with me because I struggled to build my identity without feeling culturally reflected in any way, shape, or form.
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I do not believe in role models, perhaps things would have been different if I had one growing up but I do not fault it for my mishaps. Part of my self-love journey included the independence in building my persona — although, if I had to change anything, it would be the way I treated some people that cared about me.
As Stormy says in the movie To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before: P.S I Still Love You, “Sometimes you have to kiss the wrong man to know what is right.” And so, that is what I spent my teenage years doing. There was a part of my life where I just used boys for company; I needed to be in a “talking phase” to ignore the fact that I could not stand to be alone with myself. I needed romantic attention from someone else to feel like I was worthy of love. After a handful of heartbreaks and treating people with disposability, I realized that while I was chasing love in the form of romantic partners, I should have been looking inward. I knew what I wanted but because I wanted it to be given to me by someone else, there was a bit of a disconnect in the way I felt and the way I interacted. Here is where I felt that the inner monster did the most damage, I was unfair to people who seemed willing to give me the world simply because I had a different image of it in mind.
I think about how unfair I was to the boy that used to wait in the parking lot of my workplace just to surprise me when my shift ended. How he felt the need to visit me often because I was full of excuses about not making time to see him. How he bought me a rose for Valentine’s Day but because I was too flaky on plans, he had to watch it die. How he put more effort into me than I had ever seen anyone do at that point, and I still ended up ghosting him. I wonder if despite years passing and him moving on, if there is any bit of resentment towards me for the way I hurt him. It still haunts me from time to time that I never did apologize.
I think about how many relationships I may have ruined either deliberately or accidentally because of my internal conflicts that could have turned out to be positive experiences. I understand and take full responsibility for hurting people, and although I also hurt myself in the process, it ultimately allowed me to grow into a better version of myself. While I cannot speak for others’ experiences with me, I can speak on the fact that despite still being on good terms with most of the boys from my past, a part of me will always be sorry for the way that version of me acted. I think it is important to acknowledge the different versions of oneself, while our current selves have developed from our past selves, we are not them.
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It took an entire childhood of not knowing how to build my sense of identity until I finally clung to one that I had created in my early teens with the help of social media. Tumblr in 2010 was part of an era of the romanticization of unhappiness and self-destruction, which I thought was appealing. Because I often felt sad, I adapted that into a personality and exercised it with self-destructive tendencies. I decided to constantly repeat unhealthy cycles of treating myself and those around me with disregard because I had come to build myself around a persistent feeling of sadness. For a while, I refused to practice healthy habits due to a fear of feeling better and losing my identity. While that Tumblr account has long been deleted as a step in my cleansing, I spent hours per night browsing hashtags that I knew would trigger me into feeling bad about myself and constantly tore myself down at ages that I should have been learning self-acceptance.
At some point I realized that keeping myself sad was beginning to be more of an effort than it was worth; I decided the lost and antsy teenager I was could be left in the past. I stopped trying to fit my old self into my baggage and figured out that it would be lighter for my new self to move on without her. Recreating myself has always been something I was afraid of because I thought it would be difficult, but it isn’t. It is freeing.
It was not that cut and dry, and self-destruction is not something one can just snap out of. It was an entire process to learn that to be the best version of myself, I needed to be my biggest supporter — this meant no more harm.
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One of the most influential motivators in my growth out of the monster I built myself into was a tenth-grade class I had a placement in during Teacher’s College. I had requested to be placed at the high school I attended, and a lot of the students seemed to have taken a liking to that. At different times throughout placement, I had been asked what my background was and had gotten positive reactions from the students upon hearing that answer. I am an aspiring high school teacher and I realized that while I do not particularly expect to be granted the position of a student’s role model, being a positive influence is still critical.
The end of Junot Diaz’s quote is a little more optimistic and still highly relatable, “part of what inspired me was this deep desire, that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors… so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it.” Being in a room with racialized students allowed me to realize that while not much has changed in terms of the small amount of representation in Western media of brown individuals, I could be an individual that represents people of my race and background in a way worth looking up to. As Diaz says, I could create a mirror and be reflective of these students, so they do not have to feel culturally invisible. To fully be that person, I had to let go of all the destructive habits that kept me from being someone worth being proud of. I have learned that the best way to emphasize the importance and the impacts of loving oneself are to exemplify it.
