You’ve all heard me talk plenty about otherness and onlyness. I’ve spent most of my 53 years othered and onlyed. My self-esteem was ravaged in my youth, and it’s a little tattered well into my adulthood too. I’m not sure where any of my confidence comes from. Out of necessity, I suppose. I am still often the only one who looks like me in most rooms I enter, be it for pleasure or professional reasons. You’d think I would be used to this after literally a lifetime.
As a reminder, I never grew up seeing people who look like me in any of the spaces I occupied. I grew up in the South and spent a decade or so in the Midwest, only to return South. I looked up “Patel” in the phonebook in every town I ever lived in to get a sense of how many Indians I might run into. I never had a brown doll. I never read books with characters with a name like mine. I never had a teacher who looked like me. I never saw people in pop culture who were anything like me. The only taste of representation I ever had was in mockery and perpetuation of stereotypes. The term “microaggression” wasn’t in our vernacular back then so I had no way to articulate my experiences. It was just one big yucky feeling.
I am ashamed to even now admit to you how embarrassed I was to be Indian.
It was painfully obvious that I was not from a storied American family. Every teacher I ever had gargled the letters I, L, I, N, A in her throat trying to pronounce it, all eyes on me. People tried to conjure up a nickname for me to no avail, and then I was teased for having such a “stupid, hard name” that couldn’t even be turned into something easier for the people around me. My lunches looked and smelled weird. My parents had an accent. I hid from the sun while my friends basted themselves in bottles of pink-capped baby oil. I so desperately wanted blue eyes. I looked in the mirror and saw an ugly face staring back at me, unibrow and all.
As you can imagine, these feelings of self-loathing and insecurity were exacerbated by never seeing images of beauty that looked like me. A lack of representation is damaging from the inside out. How could I dare to think I was beautiful when the only imagery of beauty was defined as white, blond, and leggy? I was a tiny, chubby-cheeked, brown girl, with silken black hair that my mother wouldn’t even let me get feathered a la Farrah Fawcett. I tried to fit in and failed because no matter my clothes, I was always the only, the other. I was the answer to the childhood game One of These Things is Not Like the Others.
Even in pristine white Tretorns, pink madras plaid Bermuda shorts, an Izod shirt, a kelly green Papagallo Bermuda bag, and a french braid, it just seemed as though I were playing dress up. The mean girls (and there were plenty) told me that with a name like mine I’d never be one of them anyway. There was never a time I could hide who I am. Why was I trying so hard? Why did it matter so much?
Because I was a brown kid in white America, and there were no other options but to try to fit in.
Fast forward a few decades (I’ll spare you the agony of my dating years and skip to adulthood).
I’ve grown to be immensely proud of my heritage, in part because I have license to. Indians are no longer extras on set, or even supporting actors. We are front and center in pop culture, medicine, CEO suites, and even the White House. I follow some fierce desi women in my social media feed, and relish their candor and insight, but mostly, I love their contagious joy for being Indian. It’s just what young Ilina needed. Old Ilina too.
And so I took this photo one day when the light was good because I wanted to document that I was sporting a look made by Indian women-owned brands. This is truly a case of better late than never, and now you know why my battle cry is Representation Matters.
Eyes by Vasanti Cosmetics
Lip and cheek color by Live Tinted (color: Origin)
Earrings by This Is Alaya
Love this post!
My father gave me some great advice when I graduated from college and was nervous before job interviews. He told me, “whatever you say/do, be yourself, that’s the only person you can truly be!”
How simple and true this is.