Reflections 

          These days, I look in the mirror too much and no longer recognize myself. I find a new flaw that warps my face into a different monstrous, man-repelling image each day. My dark brown skin is riddled with mild acne, partially concealed by poorly applied makeup, which I wear alone at home because I cannot bear to look at my face, and my unflattering, un-styled hair frizzes outward, in sharp contrast to the sleek, straight hair I see on girls at my school. My skin is dry, taut, and ashy. I’m seventeen years old, with crow’s feet creeping outward from the corners of my eyes, exhausted by stress that has become so familiar I do not notice it anymore.  

          I do not notice the momentary distinctions of how I feel anymore. Everything is the same: Nothing registers through the static of this endless, enduring pain.  This pain is a noise in my head, a chaotic videotape of memories seared into my brain. 

          I took a wrong turn, somewhere in life, about two years ago. All I can remember, barely, is how I’ve been since, in the shadows. Everyone else is outside and having fun. I’m usually lonely and shuttered in my room, blinds down, locked in tortuous introspection. I toss and turn in bed, holding my head as my thoughts race and tears stream down my face. I used to be part of the world.

           I think of California, where I lived before I moved to this small New Jersey town, and my memories flicker with traces of long forgotten vitality. I run mile after mile in the blistering sun, indifferent to its rays darkening my skin, pushing myself to exhilarating exhaustion– the smell of hot dirt permeating the air – until my feet hurt and I nearly collapse from heat stroke. Limits – if they existed– did not feel so enclosing or restricting. And neither did life. I was constantly reaching for new levels, new territory. I was so free. 

          Now I am trapped in slothful lethargy, with no way out. I hide my skin from the sun and cannot get out of my head; I cannot get out of bed. I am gripped inward by something – a dull, diffuse dolor and incessant insecurities clamoring inside my mind. My surroundings are distant, alien. The kids at school are mean strangers to me. My skin color makes me hypervisible, but no one sees me.  I am smothered on all sides by palpable invisibility.  They speak at me and around me but not to me.  I am screaming inside and they don’t hear me.  

          The story of what happened to me is inside of me, battering around my insides like a tiger trying to escape a cage.  It is an all-encompassing, smothering silence with a force, someone taking my voice out of me.  It lurks in the way I can’t hear or believe my own thoughts, in the way my reality spins around in circles.  

          Everyone is an unreliable narrator.  Being faithful to the past is difficult because memory tends to reconstruct itself. Even though details of events vanish, imprints left by the past linger in my perception of the present: hypervigilance, fear, anxiety, implications of ambiguous comments audible only to me, all circling around a dirty secret that everyone whispers around: white is right, brown is beneath. What I can speak to today is the truth of my present feelings, which result from how the past affected me and contributed to my understanding of people, the world, and my place within it. 

           I overthink to the point of confusion. When I ruminate, I find myself torn between different versions of history: I was mistreated, or I was the one mistreating everyone around me; I am sensitive or I am too sensitive, unable to accept my lowly place in the world, my box, the stereotyped image everyone reflects back at me. I am decimated by the weight of their perceptions, tired of arguing. 

          I work hard. Only my work ethic, my sole avenue for self-expression, seems to reinforce “the box” and diminish me.   What they reflect back at me:  I am an unquestioning and hard-working Indian, mindlessly complying with my parents’ expectations for excellence. A member of the model minority, the image of perfection without emotional interiority or needs.  But the clothes don’t fit.  I am aching with unseen need. My unique identity – something everyone else gets to have – is subsumed by a faceless image. 

          No one sees “me.” To me, running is my art, my expression, my self-assertion, but in the eyes of others, it is my obedience, and consequently my erasure.  Existence itself is a catch 22. 

          I can’t quite seem to recall exactly what happened, which fuels my rumination further, as I try to “solve” the problem of my past to be more present. Whose fault was it? Could I have prevented the course of events? What role did I play, and why can’t I face the possibility of having played a role in all of this mess? Lately I have accepted that I won’t be able to solve these issues. Instead of trying to figure out what happened and why it happened, I need to have faith in my raw reactions and the imprints they left, because that is the legacy of the truth. 

          My raw reactions to past events are handwritten in fifty notebooks stored in my bedroom closet, the diaries I began writing the day I turned thirteen. In an effort to capture my life as faithfully as possible, I recorded my first impressions of a majority white culture, a culture I had never encountered in my diverse hometown of San Jose, CA. I captured what I thought of their expensive brand-named clothes, their tendency to be named Jessica, their reluctance to take school seriously, their insistence on calling me a nerd. Through my eyes, white individuals blended into one body: a threatening “other.” And I capture the way this homogenous sea of white responded to me, when I was in my most “natural” state, before their mindless, emotionless, inferior image of me seeped into my soul and tainted my self-perception, before I became, in my own eyes, “the other.” Years later, I would come to realize that the diaries saved the “me” that was erased. They offered concrete proof that I had inner thoughts and emotions when the rest of the world denied it. 

          More important than what was said in the diaries is what was not said. Those were the secrets I kept from my own conscious awareness, evident only in the clash between my terse, emotionless writing and the tear-stained margins of my notebook. During my freshman year of high school, every entry was a story, some exciting adventure I had lived. By senior year, my entries had devolved into calorie counts and laconic expressions that did not reflect my interior state: they were more like commands to myself to suppress my true emotions. 

          It was in those commands I imagined and created a way of acting in the world that allowed me to avoid what I was truly feeling and to cultivate a way to be “seen” to avoid being pigeonholed. This point represents a break in my consciousness. I no longer was experiencing life and taking in the world from an authentic center. My consciousness split: a double consciousness, diluting granularities of nuanced experience into one blurriness, anxiety around how I should act to influence the way I was seen. My center of experience did not emerge from an inner source: I experience life obliquely, rather than head on. I was on the outside looking in, instead of on the inside looking out. 

          I know I want to get to the bottom of the pain that wells deep in my throat, a pain that exists in the background of every memory I’ve had since I was thirteen. When I come close to describing my pain, I feel like I am as close as possible to authentic expression, my true self, free from impositions on my consciousness. But in my mind, as I come closer to reaching this “voice,” or telling the story that feels right and real to me, I can hear people in my life talking over me.

          I close my eyes and memories of different situations shuffle through my consciousness, all with similar oppressive themes. But what it feels like they are saying is that it is extreme simply because “I” am saying it. Something about “me” makes them not hear or see my pain. I cannot pinpoint what it is about me, and part of that has to do with the fact that I can’t pinpoint “me” half the time without their perspectives invading my own.  

          My attempt to tell my story is my attempt to allay the doubt and confusion and find peace.  My goal is to find my authentic expression of pain, so that I can give it form and ablate it from my body as though it were a benign tumor.  Instead as I dig deeper and become more vulnerable, I find diffuse, animalistic anger that has metastasized throughout my core. It is integrated into me. I cannot remove it without also removing the internal organs that keep me alive: it is an anger that drains me and sustains me: a weary expression of my “self” asserting itself against oppression and discrimination.  
	
          I take in my reflection in the mirror.  My own eyes search for my story from my own perspective.  I see pain.  I feel the pain.   I am the walking wound, the evidence of the injury itself.  The truth that sets me free is written in my nerves.  

	

A. S. studied English and Biology at Rutgers University where she also ran track and field. She has been writing to understand her emotions since she was 14 years old, and has over 50 diaries saved from that time until now. She is currently working on a memoir that seeks to comprehend experiences ranging from bipolar disorder to racial trauma to physical and emotional abuse. Her goal is to help someone going through similar experiences understand their emotions and feel less alone. She currently teaches science to high schoolers in New Jersey.