Dear skin of mine,

I never really noticed you. Growing up I knew you weren't the same as all the other kids in the community. I knew you weren't the same as my parents, because duh, you were adopted. At least I had some kids who looked the same as me. However, still, I didn't REALLY notice you making me that different.

I never identified myself as a person of color. I always just thought, I was me. Just another person in this community who looked a little different. I didn't think you would define me so much. I was an adopted Guatemalan girl growing up in a mainly white community, but you didn't make that so apparent. I was a normal kid, had friends, people were nice to me, and I was just human.

It wasn't until two moments and a bunch of comments later, that I would discover, I am different, and I'm not white, at all.

When we were hired for a job and mysteriously let go without explanation, it didn't occur to me it was because of the way you looked. It didn't occur to me that because of the way you looked, that it would be able to make a quota that company was trying to meet. It didn't occur to me that you would be the reason we were hired.

The second moment was when I voted for the first time. You and I walked in, happy and blessed we had this opportunity to vote. Our excitement was great until it was killed by the old white man asking us to prove our citizenship because you looked different from the people in the room. I had all the right identification, we explained we had been adopted and have lived here basically our whole life since we were only months old. I didn't know what to do, but I didn't realize it was because of the way you looked that we may have been questioned.

This sent me into a spiral, while we took a Spanish class as well. You looked the part, and sometimes people would speak to us and assume we knew the language because of the way you looked. It occurred to me that you made me look a certain way, but the inside didn't match the outside. I didn't know a lick of Spanish, and I don't even feel like I am truly Hispanic. Not Hispanic enough to feel I can be a part of my own culture, but I can't identify with the white kids because you weren't given that pigment.

I've always thought you didn't matter. I thought we were just human, people would never stereotype us. We are one of them. I didn't realize how the older I grow, the more I would question what my life would be like if you were white. I find myself asking my friends, what's it like being white? I find myself asking these questions a lot these days. Not just because of the racism and crap that has been happening, but because I've been going through self-discovery and wondering, who am I?

Am I just the girl that their friends refer to as their one person of color friend? A token? I hope I'm a lot more to that than my friend group, and that they see me as a human, not as someone different just because of the way you look. When people look at me what do they define me as because of the way you look? Do they see my skin before they see my heart? I really hope we are a lot more than the way you appear to the naked eye.

My analyzation of you has never happened before, until now. I hope you know, I'm not ashamed of you, I don't hate you, and I'll never wish you turned out a different way. I just hope people see you for more than what I see in the mirror because when I look in the mirror, I see you, but I also see you for more than your complexion, I see a human just trying to make it. I wish for others to see the same.

It's going to be okay.

Best regards,

A Hispanic girl living in Vermont.