Self-Love in a Multiracial Household

Submitted by Alyssa Galloway

It never dawned on me that self-love was something that wasn't taught until I was in my early 20s. I figured that people were born with confidence and care for themselves and that ultimately something was just wrong with me. It wasn't until I began to recognize that so much comes from your childhood environment and cultural factors that I began to figure out the details.

I grew up in a Mexican household. My father, who is Black was not in my life in my younger years so my whole life was spent with my mother. I experienced a similar life that many Mexican-Americans would relate to on top of dealing with looking completely different than any of my family members. I dealt with my 'blackness' when it came to the way I looked; my hair, my body shape, and my skin tone. I attended predominantly white schools up until high school and constantly felt overlooked and categorized by whatever racially motivated stereotypes were going around. I struggled a lot with my self-image and my identity. It was hard for me to feel understood even when I came home because most of my confusion/anger/sadness (unknowingly at that time) came from my Blackness.

It was not until I began to be around people who looked like me that I began to feel a little more comfortable. I would like to mention that feeling comfortable in my skin was the tip of the iceberg. I feel like as we are growing up we focus on the outside and it is not until we get older that we turn inwardly to face and uncover who we are. I am not saying that I don't have bad body image days or make jokes about getting work done but it is not at all what it used to be. I feel like I struggle with being confident and being sure of myself because of my lack of self-love. I feel like certain instances in my life would have gone differently if I knew how to put myself first. I just never seen that in my life and I feel like this spans the same through for many people of color especially women. We wear so many hats and work so much harder to be taken seriously that we put ourselves last and ultimately forget that we need to take care of ourselves.

From a young age in a household of color, the agenda is never to put ourselves first but to work hard to achieve goals to make our families proud and to showcase that as a person of color we are worthy of being in the room. Why as people of color feel like we need to prove ourselves in a room full of people who have already made excuses before we speak. I can't think of a time where I saw my mom take a break or an aunt of mine say she was going to go out and do something for herself. It has been very damaging to constantly see the people around you always on go and now you've reached an age where you are doing it on your own and you don't know how to.

As I work to put myself first, I am warding off so many parts of me that used to feel normal. As I work to incorporate and enforce boundaries in my life I seem to work the hardest with maintaining them around family. Since they have known you for so long, family members don't understand the damage of not putting yourself first. I want to show that by maintaining my peace, setting boundaries, and putting myself first, I am not neglecting my family or responsibilities but rather balancing them.

I want to go back to my first statement, about self-love not being taught. I understand now that it shouldn't be, what works for you might not work for the next. Listen to your body and get in tune with your soul because only you know what it needs. Understand self-love on your own account so that it can not change when seasons or people do. Understand that while your life growing up might not have shown you how to love yourself - it gave you the roadmap to know what you should work better for.

You deserve love no matter what your childhood home was like. You deserve to be loved no matter what the relationships around you looked like. you deserve to feel love, not because of the color of your skin but rather the content of your character. Even if you have made choices in your life that have led you to a path of destruction or convinced you to stay in undeserving relationships - you are always worthy of giving your chance to start over.

You know better and that's why you're doing better.