[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. I - 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 exhausting liturgies of white-washed feminism?

How do we see ourselves in an era where we are constantly submerged in images 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, 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 the century of spectacle and forgetting, to be known 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. 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. What chance do any of us have to build something whole, when we are always under siege? When the siege begins not with the outside world but within the soul? I am a subject in exile from herself. I play catch-me-if-you-can with my own embodiment - like so many. I have never seen myself. The idea of myself has always been easier to live with than its actual reality. I have been trained 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. This war began before memory, before any one of us can remember. 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). Or is it the white gaze? The unbearable weight of the Other’s eyes, of the colonizer's eyes. They live in my brain. To be female, to be different, to be Othered, is to live with this gaze embedded in your bloodstream. To perform the acceptable self for safety. But there is no safety in fragmentation. I learned that the hard way.

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 performance? Performance so as to blend it that crowd you've never wanted to be apart of. 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.

Have you ever buried yourself under 500 layers of rock, just to survive? I have. Invisibility was my shield for years, maybe decades.

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 and its inner voice speaks in the accents of those who colonized my elders. Do you understand me?

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 (Global) South’s children raised under the shadow of the (Global) North standards. After all this time, I am still building the right vocabulary in my own language to name myself.

But I am scattered. Scattered across time zones and continents. I see different iterations of my identity dispersed all around me and I crave unity and wholeness more than ever. Today, I know that to take up space in this aching world is an act of defiance. In all the tools I have accumluated over my life, to live fully as myself is my most radical one yet.

The work, then, is clear: to claim the fullness of the self. To continuously refuse to disappear. To build peace and wholeness from the cracks: for myself and anyone who wants to tag along.

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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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