Looking in the mirror has never been easier.
Trigger warning: mentions of body dysmorphia
When I was in high school, my parents bought me a massive mirror to place above my dresser. The mirror was gorgeous, the glass was pristine, the frame was made of a dark wood that complemented my room’s decor and it was a perfect fit on my dresser. Two hours after my parents gifted me this mirror, I covered it up with a blanket. Whenever friends came over to my house and saw my room, they’d question my choice to cover my mirror. I brushed them off every single time with the same excuse that I’d seen a TikTok about how sleeping across from a mirror invited unwelcome spirits into your house. They ridiculed me for believing in a horror story, but the teasing was preferable to them knowing the truth: I didn’t want to see what I looked like.
Growing up as a woman of color in the United States, it was clear to me that I wasn’t pretty. I don’t mean that in a self-deprecating way; it’s a simple fact that the standard of attractiveness the U.S. and most western countries propagate doesn’t acknowledge the beauty of people who aren’t skinny, white (or at least light-skinned), or people who don’t possess Eurocentric features. I’m midsized, dark-skinned even by Indian standards, and my face doesn’t hold a single European feature, so I knew early on that I didn’t meet these criteria. This knowledge colored all my interactions with other people. If I met a cute person, I was wondering if they thought I was hideous even if the interaction was positive. I thought every boy who asked me out was lying to me. Whenever I walked into a room, I was aware of every difference between me and the white girls in the room. I distanced myself from everyone around me so that they couldn’t reject me first.
This is the attitude I brought with me to college. I’m positive that other girls felt this way, too, regardless of their race or body type. Everyone’s insecure. Everyone carries the weight of all the negative comments we make about ourselves and each other with them. I expected to feel that way forever. I thought that self-hating kids grew into self-hating adults, and we all had to work around our obvious flaws. I packed long sleeves and long pants for college, expecting that I’d just suffer in the heat for a few minutes a day before I made it inside an air-conditioned building. Now, it’s completely different.
Don’t get me wrong; I still struggle to accept the way I look. Seeing myself in the mirror is a negative experience most of the time. I still scan every room I walk into to see if I’m the only person of color present. The great thing about going to the University of Florida is that even though it’s a predominantly white institution, there’s still an immense amount of diversity on campus. There hasn’t been a day I’ve been here that I haven’t seen girls who look like me. I see girls of all shapes and sizes, of all races every single day. Knowing that I’m not the only woman of color (like I was in most classrooms during adolescence) is freeing. I’m one of many. I don’t meet the conventional standard of beauty, but neither do the majority of people I meet. College is great, because you’re exposed to so many people that you feel irrelevant in comparison. I am keenly aware that there’re thousands of people on campus – no one’s looking at me. No one looks at me hard enough to determine if I’m pretty or not, and it wouldn’t even matter if they did. I won’t see them again. College vastly improved my self image by reminding me that I’m not alone in my ancestry or my looks.
If I could go back in time, I would tell my younger self to relax. I’d tell her that she shouldn’t worry about being pretty to other people because other people aren’t concerned about her whatsoever. I’d tell her to uncover her mirror. It might’ve been hard to view myself positively when I lived in a white neighborhood, but in the real world, it’s never been easier to look at myself in the mirror.