Memoir
Scars are a natural part of the healing process. They form when the dermis, a deep layer in the skin, has been penetrated. The body collects new collagen fibers to mend the damage.
Every Friday at 2 in the afternoon I go to therapy. I talk about my chronic depression and general anxiety disorder. I talk about my relationships, my friendships, not being able to wake up in the morning, not feeling motivated to do my class work, tensions with my family.
We don’t talk about my mixedness.
Therapy for that exists in solidarity.
When I was born, my mother wanted to name me Kelly. She thought I would be born white. As soon as she saw my skin and hair, she decided to name me Sofia. It was a better fit.
When I was five, my brother told all his friends I was adopted. They took one look at me and laughed, assuming of course. There’s no way someone as pale as him could have a sister as brown as me.
When I was nine, my parents friends debated over which of them I looked most like. Everyone assumed I was the spitting image of my dad. “If you look past her color, she has her moms face,” someone said.
When I was twelve, I was condemned for not being a Real Dominican. He looked me in the eyes, “you don’t speak spanish, and your mom is white. You’re not Dominican.” He was a Real Dominican, so he knew.
When I was fifteen, my mom called me a Black Irish. “Those exist,” she said, “we call them black Irish.” She wasn’t referring to Black people. She was referring to white people with black hair.
When I was seventeen, I sat in a circle at my high school during lunch with tears down my face. “I don’t know who I am. People keep telling me ‘oh, you’re this, oh you’re that’ but I don’t fucking know. Why can’t I be both? Why can’t one exist with the other? Why can’t I just be mixed?” My cheeks burned red as I rubbed the tears from my face. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to over share. It’s just overwhelming.”
“Don’t be sorry. I’m mixed, too,” someone said.
Trauma lives in the body. For me, it lives in my face. These scars do not exist as raised discolored lumps of flesh that you can touch and feel. They exist in the brownish tone of my skin, in the shape of my eyes, in the texture of my hair, in the redness in my cheeks. They exist when you ask me, and I tell you the stories of how people see me and question me, from birth. When they question me, I question myself. Who am I when no one else can tell?
Process notes:
I really was unsure how to connect this memoir to STEM, so I decided to focus on a physical representation of pain. Therapy is a form of a doctor’s appointment, psychology is a science, and scarring is very representative. And yet, we don’t often consider the impact of emotional scars. The dermis in this case is my identity. These words have penetrated my identity through my face, because of how I look and how that doesn’t match people’s expectations of me. Maybe I should talk about my mixedness in therapy, but I find the most comforting aspect of it is relating to the shared traumas of people who have also experienced this scarring. A common theme of being mixed is an identity crisis, not know who you are or where you belong. The most soothing remedy for that is being in a space where you are not judged or questioned for your appearance because everyone around you understands the erasure of identity that occurs in that judgement.