My self-hatred started at a very young age, and it started with my race.

I’m horribly aware of my current animosity towards myself, but I know it currently stems from a slew of recent actions and other minuscule things that my mind has blown out of proportion. I’ve never met a person who hated themselves more than the one I see in the mirror every day.

Perhaps if I hadn’t grown up in a place where I was the minority, then maybe I would have had a less miserable childhood. I doubt that, but wishful thinking is a powerful thing.

I don’t remember learning what racism was from school. I learned it through the way a little boy looked at me when I told him my last name, or the way the cashier kept looking disgusted at my frustrated mother, trying to communicate with him in her broken english and thick accent.

We didn’t get the groceries that day.

Oh god, the things I blamed my mother for at a young age. People would often look to me to translate what she spoke, and over time it felt as if she couldn’t do anything herself without my help. I hated being associated with her. I despised being stuck to her side, explaining to her things that I thought were just so simple to understand.

I hated my mother, I hated myself, I hated my race.

Why? Because I was being bullied every day as I walked down the aisle of a school bus for…being asian? Here I had thought racism was a bad thing. Being the literal child I was, I couldn’t comprehend why people who were racist to me could turn around and speak about how it plagued our country and world. I was genuinely too simple-minded to understand how they could contradict everything they did at every turn.

So I blamed myself, my mother, my race, all of it.

Truly, what else was I meant to do? For all I knew, being Vietnamese was a bad thing.

It was the panels where the boys were playing war and actively rejecting their ethnicity that I could understand the most. When reading it, I made a face, as if to say “Now why would they do that?” when I would have done the same thing.

They were being told that they were the enemy, the bad guys, the villains. How could you blame them for abhorring who they were? Unfortunately, I related to them with all my heart.

I took everything about my culture, family, and ethnicity and I forced it into a bug-shaped mold so I could crush it under my heel into the concrete.

I was so ashamed.

What’s even worse, is that I still hate myself for it now! Isn’t that absolutely ridiculous? I hate myself for being a child, and believing that the scars from the guilt and regret would hurt less than the things they threw at me. I hate myself for not being like my friends and speaking Vietnamese to my mother, or understanding what they say about me.

I love my friends dearly, but when it comes to our culture, they diminish me until there is nothing left. I am constantly being pulled apart by them, and that hurts as much as the racism in my childhood did.

So I hate myself. Sadly this is only one of the many things I am hateful of, and unfortunately, I don’t believe any of it will change anytime soon. But as I previously aforementioned, wishful thinking is a powerful thing. One day I will come to love myself, but that day is not today.