How I Healed My Inner Mirror as the Dark-Skinned, Big-Smile Girl
I didn’t always love what I saw in the mirror. In fact, there was a time I hated it.
I grew up the eldest of five, three of us remain. And in our house, my two younger sisters were considered “the pretty ones.” Different father. Lighter skin. “Good hair” that curled up just right with a little water and Blue Magic.
But me?
I was Hershey chocolate, skinny, big knees, buck teeth, with a wide smile that seemed to stretch across my whole face. A smile I learned to hide. A face I didn’t feel at home in.
While my sisters were getting compliments at the grocery store – “Ooh, y’all so pretty!” Look at that hair!”
I was the one sitting at the kitchen table, holding my ear so Mama wouldn’t burn it with the hot comb. And don’t let it be summer in Texas. I’d sweat it out before noon and come home to more frustration. “Didn’t I just do your hair,” mama would scold.
Even as a little girl, I felt it. Felt that the world saw me differently. Felt invisible. Felt “too much” and somehow “not enough” all at once. And somewhere along the way, I started asking questions like:
Why you make me Black and skinny, God?”
It took me years…
…years to unlearn what beauty meant. Years to stop comparing my reflection to anyone else’s. Years to understand that I wasn’t lacking, I was just different. Sacredly different.
It wasn’t until my 40’s that I started to see myself clearly. Started to notice how my skin, the same Hershey brown I used to wish away, was aging like fine wine. How my frame stayed lean. How, even as the eldest, I was the one still getting carded. How the features I once hid had become the very ones people have come to admire.
Now I See What They Couldn’t
Today, I’m on my morning walk in my full presence. With ease. With pride. With my wide smile uncovered. Not because I’m trying to prove anything. But because I finally feel at home in my body, in my skin, in my soul.
I no longer ask, “Why me?”
The girl who once hated her smile now blesses the world with it.
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Too Healed for That: 12 Intimate Soul Stories of Healing & Growth.
These are the same stories that carried me through shame, silence, and self-doubt and helped me come home to myself.
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And let the healing begin.