Beyond the Mirror: Growing Up in the Shadow of Beauty

It started earlier than I realized. I must’ve been around eight or nine when I first noticed that I didn’t quite “fit.” Not in an overtly painful way—no big dramatic moment—but in the small, persistent glances. The passing comments. The comparisons. I wasn't always the skinniest girl in the room, but not in the way that was considered beautiful. I wasn’t delicate or poised. I was just... not enough.

My hair couldn’t make up its mind—half straight, half curly, often called “frizzy”. My skin—my dusky, brown skin—was never the right shade in a country still wearing colonial hangovers like hand-me-down clothes.

Growing up, I didn’t have the language for what I was experiencing. I just knew that the girls who looked more “fair,” with button noses and soft features, were often treated like they mattered more. When I turned thirteen, I remember thinking: Why does my face feel like something I need to apologize for?

“We are mirrors made to feel like shattered glass.”

— Unknown

There’s this quiet kind of violence in beauty standards. They don’t hit you all at once. Instead, they whisper. They nudge. They plant seeds. I started analyzing my eyebrows, my nose, how one of my eyes always seemed slightly bigger in photographs. The flaws stacked up in my mind like evidence in a courtroom where I was always the defendant and society was the judge.

And then—years later—suddenly, the same features I once hid became “exotic.”

“Your skin tone is so unique,” they’d say.

“You have such a look,” they’d offer, like it was a compliment.

And all I could think was: Where was all this praise when I was thirteen and trying to scrub my melanin off with a face pack?

“You can’t heal in the same environment that made you sick.”

— Unknown

There’s a kind of magic trick society performs: it teaches girls to spend their lives fixing what was never broken. And if we’re busy correcting ourselves, we don’t have time to question anything else.

The older I get, the more I see this isn’t just about skin or size or features. It’s about power. It's about distraction. If we're focused on contouring our noses and bleaching our skin, we’re not sitting in boardrooms or writing legislation. We’re not asking why marital rape is legal in one country while abortion is illegal in another. We’re not pushing back on the systems that keep us locked in front of the mirror instead of giving us a seat at the table.

“Keep her busy with herself, and she won’t have time to fight.”

— The oldest trick in the book

Here’s the truth I’ve learned: beauty isn’t universal. It’s not constant. It shifts depending on who’s looking—and who holds the power. But what doesn’t change is how consistently women around the world are taught to measure their worth through appearance, and how rarely we’re told: You are more than what they see.

It’s taken me a long time to say this, but here it is:

I’m tired of performing for a gaze I never consented to.

So here’s your “fix” for the day:

Step away from the mirror. Look past the ads, the filters, the false standards handed down like shackles. The real question was never “Am I enough?”

It was always: “Why did they need me to believe I wasn’t?”