Their words seemed to confirm what growing up as a woman and a person of color already taught me: that I belonged in margins and spaces, valid only as a minor character in their lives and stories.

【B1】. Their words confirmed what I had heard my whole life; that I was “other, ” that I didn’t belong, that I wasn’t good enough, simply because I wasn’t like them. And that feeling, I realize now, was, and is, shame, a shame for the things that made me different, a shame for the culture from which I came from.【B2】. And to me, the most disappointing thing was that I felt it at all. Because the same society that taught some people they were heroes taught me I existed only in the background of their stories and waiting for them to rescue me.

And for a long time, I had been brainwashed into believing that my existence was limited to the boundaries of another person’s approval. I had been tricked into thinking that I was beautiful only if someone else believed it, regardless of my own opinion.

Yes, I have been lied to. We all have.【B3】. And it was in this realization that I felt a different shamed—a shame for the world I grew up in. And a shame for how that world treats anyone who is different.

【B4】. I am not the first person to have grown up this way. This is what it is to grow up as a person of color in a white dominated world. This is the world I grew up in, but not the world I want to leave behind.

I want to live in a world where people of all races and gender identities are seen as what they have always been: human beings.

【B5】. And this is the world that I will continue to work toward.

【B1】

【B2】

【B3】

【B4】

【B5】