EPHESIANS 2 PROJECT

We Don’t Like Ourselves

December 8, 2024

“We just don’t like ourselves. We don’t like life. Whatever you do to destroy me, you will do to destroy yourself…So, do we really like ourselves?” 

A few days ago, my aunt—a 72-year-old psychiatrist who is in the process of retiring—shared her truth with me over breakfast, and I thought about two things.

First, as a darker-skinned woman who is consistently complimented for my looks by strangers of women and men whenever I’m visiting my parents’ homeland, I’m proud of myself for radically accepting the fact that as an immigrant in America, I will be degraded for my “low-level” looks by racialized White women and men—including professing Believers who do and do not attend church—until I die.

(To be told by more than 30 men in America within my short lifetime that I’m unattractive or ugly due to my skin tone and to still refuse a visit to the doctor’s office to “upgrade” my skin tone or facial features is an accomplishment for me.)

Second, my aunt’s statement got me thinking about how, in the twenty-first century, I don’t know one woman or man who appreciates what they naturally look like, let alone loves themselves in a non-egotistical manner.

(I’ve been on the self-hating path, and I’m not doing that again!)

I’ve known racialized Black women who’ve never allowed their natural coily hair to see the light of day for decades.

I’ve known racialized Black women who’ve bleached their skin, molded their bodies into skinny shapes, gotten nose jobs, engaged in tweakments and worn lightly-colored contacts to get by in America, or to see themselves as beautiful.

I’ve known racialized Asian women who grew up hating the shape of their eyelids and felt insecure about not being born with a paler skin grade. 

I’ve known racialized White women who wore blue-colored contacts, dyed their hair blonde, injected their lips with fillers, committed to the anorexic diet and froze their forehead wrinkles to be appealing to racialized White men.

I’ve known racialized Brown and Black men who’ve wished they were born as racialized White men. 

I’ve known racialized Black men in America who opted to become skinny, because they wanted to date racialized White women in various European countries who valued lean men.

And, I’ve known racialized White men who believed they were unattractive due to their body shape, their height, their voices and/or their hair loss.

Some of us live in a society that’s obsessed with attractiveness and “superiorizing” one’s perishable body versus a society that preaches we are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14).

So, I cannot fault people who are convinced something is inherently wrong with their skin tone, their hair grade, their eye color, their eyelid shape, their lip ratio and so on.

While I recognize that my unpleasant phenotype does not yield any benefits in America, I’ve learned to make peace with my supposed unattractiveness and ugliness by (finally) focusing on my calling before my immortal body returns to dust, where it will surely look horrendous.

I’m in a borrowed body and on borrowed time, so I need to make the most of what’s been given to me while I’m breathing in a bootleg bubble filled with beings who, like me, have been broken by pain.

I believe that some of us—whether we’re born with a visible difference or not—need to be reminded that all humans are deeply loved by G-d, and all humans qualify as image bearers of G-d (Genesis 1:26—27).

I exist in a superficial society that’s been working overtime for a little over 400 years now to convince me that I don’t deserve to exist, that I should hate myself for what I look like and that the world would be better off if beings bearing the color brown were exterminated from Earth.

So sometimes, reminding myself of the tiny truth that a Creator—and a Christ—cared about me before my DNA was created helps me love myself a little bit more.