When You Don't Look "Right"
With all the talk about POC representation in publishing, I’ve been thinking a lot about this post I wrote a while back. I still find myself so turned around, with a million questions and insecurities in my head. I still wonder, “Do I count? Where does a ‘white-passing’ person fit in all this? I don’t look right, so maybe I don’t count though I wish I did and I don’t even know…”
I’m starting to realize I’m so much weirder than I thought I was. I have read about some POC talking about how they saw blond hair and blue eyes as the symbol or beauty, while I spent my childhood wishing I had dark hair and brown eyes and tanned skin. Because to me those were the things that I was missing, my blond hair made me different from my family and cut me off from my heritage in the minds of so many people.
I still remember so vividly when the American Girl dolls came out with those ones you could design yourself—the ones it seemed to imply you would design to look like you. I wanted one so badly, and my mom promised I would get one for Christmas. That magazine…I poured over all the faces and hairstyles, trying to decide on the doll I wanted.
Long, dark brown hair. Brown eyes. Tan skin.
That’s what I picked for my doll, because I think in my little kid mind that was the ideal—that was what I wanted to look like, and if I couldn’t then by golly I’d at least let my doll look like that.
When I took my choices to my mom, she was rather surprised. I think she even asked me something like, “Don’t you want the doll to look like you?” And I shook my head with determination. No. I wanted her to look beautiful. Not like me. And my mom, because she’s awesome, just said okay and let me get that doll exactly how I wanted her.
I thought that was all very normal when I was little, but as I grew up I realized it was pretty much the opposite of the classic American culture/media that glorifies the blond bombshell. I was one weird duck, but that was my honest experience as a child who “didn’t look right.” I just wanted to belong to my family, instead of getting asked if I was my aunt’s kid (she is blond), or the neighbor kid, or get jokes about being adopted or being “the milkman’s.”
At age ten, I very seriously asked my mom if I was adopted. I had concocted this elaborate story in my head of being secretly adopted and no one wanted to tell me—because I didn’t match and everyone knew it. My poor mom, she pulled out photo albums of my birth and told me stories of my babyhood in an attempt to soothe my wild imagination.
It was that big of a deal to me as a kid, and those tiny “joking” comments did impact me. They quietly whispered to me, without saying it directly, that I didn’t belong.
So where do I fit? I’m not sure I’ll ever know, or if there will ever really be a “place” for me. All I know is that diversity is something I care about, and I contribute how I can, whether or not I “count.”
