[Part of a self-portaiture project/series]

How does one write the self in a culture so in love with itself? A culture drowning in reflection yet starved of recognition? I don’t think I want to keep learning the language of exposure—of curated selves, filtered bodies, optimized timelines. We have mistaken mirrors for intimacy. And in this carnival of projection, the question remains: how do we write about the self without becoming yet another narcissistic node in the network?

What does it mean to narrate the feminine self without reproducing the tired tropes of white-washed feminism, where empowerment is sold in the language of corporate hashtags, and womanhood is flattened into a brand?

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How do we see ourselves in an era where we are constantly submerged in images—not of ourselves, but of what we are supposed to be?

How do you build an identity that is rooted and loving, with pieces of broken wood, made of cracks and negative whispers, in a skin that does not love you back, all in a world at war with itself and all of God’s children? To see myself means to risk confrontation, with a fragmented self, composed of broken reflections, warped by colonial inheritances and capitalist desires. The work of identity becomes excavation.

I ask: can we actually see ourselves?

And what does it mean, in this violent century of spectacle and forgetting, to be known—not just by others, but by oneself?

Writing about the self is exhausting. Thinking about the self is exhasuting. It requires entering a terrain without maps, where the terrain shifts as soon as you name it. The I that begins the sentence is never the same I that ends it. I want to stop thinking. I want to escape the recursive loops of performance and distortion.

Who is this “I”? She is not beautiful. Not thin enough. Not brilliant. Not rigorous. Not “doing enough.” Lacking. Always lacking. A litany of insufficiencies echoing like a punitive hymn in my mind. An accretion of no’s. Each one sutured into my skin.

Overweight. Unfocused. Too much. Not enough. The negations keep accumulating, filling the cracks, sealing the silences. What remains is a wounded architecture. And yet, I am asked to build a forever home in this body. A home made of broken wood and of skin that does not yield to love. In a world that does not yield to peace.

What chance do we have—any of us—to build something whole, when we are always under siege? When the siege begins not with the state but within the soul?

I am a subject in exile from herself. I play catch-me-if-you-can with my own embodiment. I have never seen myself—not fully. The idea of myself has always been easier to live with than its actual reality. I have been trained—groomed—to perform instead.

I offer this: self-knowledge is impossible without self-perception. And self-perception is impossible without love.

We live in a world at war with itself, and with every self within it. Peace has left the group chat, not just in our cities, but in our homes, our minds, our languages. This war began before memory. Perhaps, as Fanon wrote the alienation of the colonized begins not with the loss of land, but the loss of a coherent “I” (1). A dissociation so profound that even the reflection I see in my mirror cannot be trusted.

I see myself. And yet, I do not. I have fantasized endlessly about the self I could be—the one who was lighter, sharper, quicker, easier to love. The self that could survive the gaze of others (2). The unbearable weight of the Other’s eyes. Surveillance weaponized into self-hatred.

To be female, to be different, to be Othered—is to live with this gaze embedded in your bloodstream. To perform the acceptable self, not for joy, but for safety. But there is no safety in fragmentation. And there is no wholeness in performance.

I don’t want to become someone else. I only want to become myself. But how does one do that when the world only rewards approximations?

Have you ever buried yourself under 500 layers of rock—just to survive? I have. Because sometimes invisibility is the only shield we have.

This inadequacy I carry, this fracture, comes from a life lived in contradiction. Torn between who I am and who I’m supposed to be. Between my body and the images projected onto it. My mind is colonized—its inner voice speaks in the accents of empire. Does yours?

Pecola Breedlove, in The Bluest Eye (3) , prays for blue eyes—not because she thinks they’re beautiful, but because she believes they will make her visible. Worthy. Beloved. That’s the level of distortion we’re dealing with. The South’s children raised under the shadow of Northern standards. Aesthetic and moral hierarchies so internalized they bleed into our most intimate desires. Will I ever have a language with which to name myself?

We build walls to survive. We fragment to function. The self becomes a costume—a careful curation, tailored for specific audiences: the interview, the romance, the dinner party. We switch selves like outfits. And beneath the layers—do we still exist?

I write “we” when maybe I should say “I”.

Someone I love calls it “la dictature Gaussienne”—the tyranny of the Gaussian curve. The tyranny of the mean. The bell curve demands that we conform. And most of us— non-white, excentric, queer, fat, racialized, neurodivergent—live in the tails of that curve, trying to slide our way into the “normal.” Just to breathe. Just to be left alone.

But I am scattered. Scattered across time zones and continents. Iterations of my identity dispersed like seeds in the wind.

To live fully, to take up space in this aching world, is an act of defiance. And yet I am continuously failing at it. The self I present is still a compromise. Still a response to expectation. Still afraid.

Audre Lorde understood the urgency of claiming the “I.” She writes:

“I am Black, Woman, and Poet—fact, and outside the realm of choice… All that I am is of who I am, is of what I do. The shortest statement of philosophy I have is my living, or the word ‘I.’”

In all the tools I have accumluated over my life, to live fully as myself is my most radical one yet. Not to survive, not to perform—but to live in full.

The work, then, is clear: to claim the fullness of the self . To continuously refuse to disappear. To build peace—not from perfection—but from cracks. From the very pieces we were told to discard.

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(1) Fanon, Fanon (1952) Black Skin, White Masks

(2) Plath, Sylvia (1963)The Bell Jar

(3) Morrison, Toni (1970) The Bluest Eyes

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