They loved me.
And I was still drowning.

My parents built a life around me from everything they knew, which was whiteness. White neighborhoods. White churches. White hair salons. White farms in white small towns. And silence around everything that made me different from all of it.

That silence was not meant to hurt me. But it was costly. Because a child who never sees himself reflected in the world around him, who never hears his background spoken about with value and pride, who never has a single adult in his life who looks like him — that child starts to believe that who they are at their core is the problem.

I was that child. And I spent years trying to figure out how to live in a life I didn't choose.