Scarleteen

One of the hard things about growing up on suburban Long Island and being the awkward “new girl” at my elementary schools was the endless barrage of taunting I received. I was socially awkward: singing songs I invented in the hallways, drawing and illustrating my own stories in my free time. But I wasn’t sure what brought on the endless barrage of taunts, especially when we first moved.

Maybe it was because I came to my first day of public school in my old Catholic school jumper, on my mom’s insistence. The moment I walked through the doors, I knew I’d made the wrong decision. The pall of mortification fell over me. When I got to my new classroom, I tried to hide myself behind the chair stacked on top of my desk as my second grade teacher introduced me. I didn’t want people to look at me.

I was a good student, unwary, and sincere. I approached my peers with wholehearted warmth, which they disparaged. I didn’t know to be mean, to be suspicious of the laughing clusters on line who asked me what scissors do, or who asked to see my drawings, and ripped them apart once I showed them. Most insults, eventually, zeroed in on my appearance. I’d never thought about how I looked before. My mom thought I was cute, and told me so regularly. But after hearing it day in and day out, I eventually internalized these messages. They had to be true, right?

I even picked myself apart when I was crying in my bed, my face cupped in my small hands. I even look ugly when I cry, I thought, sputtering in the safety of my room. I hate the way my nostrils flare out like that.

Eventually, ugly was an identity I embraced and even took pride in. As my peers in middle school shared salacious gossip over who was dating who and who was kissing who in the coat closet, I saw myself as above it all. By sixth grade, I’d ditched my dreams of distancing myself from my pariah status. My undesirability was intimately tied to my sense of self. I’d never date anyway, so there was no point in even thinking about which teenage heartthrobs or boy band members were attractive, or finding out what my “type” was. In an excoriating WordPad document I wrote when I was twelve, I remarked that if a guy were ever attracted to me, he would run away screaming the second he saw me naked.

Being deemed unattractive all my life made me feel like I was unworthy of even being able to ask questions about my sexuality, allowing myself to be unguarded and vulnerable. Wouldn’t they laugh at me for daring to think I was worthy of love? Conversations about preferences or what you wanted in a relationship was the province of the pretty people, interests I was quick to dismiss as shallow instead of integral to one’s identity. Even though at times, I wondered what it would feel like to have my love reciprocated, I kept my mask tight in my waking life. If any of my older friends asked me if I wanted to date in the future, I’d roll my eyes.

“Isn’t there a more intellectual conversation we could be having?” I huffed.

On Long Island, there was a very clear hierarchy of attraction, and black women were on the bottom of it. Between all the boys I’d known in my life thus far choosing white girls, and choosing to self-isolate by going to a single-sex Catholic school, nothing about the first eighteen years of my life challenged my perceptions of being indelibly unlovable.

All that changed when I went to college...