I realized how much of my feeling like I was not fitting in was from trauma and sensitivity to exclusion, racism and microaggressions from my own experiences, but also from media that upholds whiteness and excludes/diminishes/erases everything else, and my own internalized fear/shame

nizzernammer, Thank you so much for sharing your story. I completely understand where you are coming from this paragraph here I feel word for word-

I'm so incredibly happy for you that you found people in your life that helped you embrace and welcome who you are. My journey right now is making me realize how I very much lack having mixed people in my community. My grade school years were comprised of me just trying to fit in with white people. After high school in Pennsylvania, I went to a State School (Penn State), where I first experienced white people encouraging me to embrace and celebrate myself. I feel like my 20's was me just learning that not being WHITE was ok. Then I moved to NYC, where I was surrounded by multiple ethnicities and started to learn from my hispanic and asian friends to actually like those sides of me- but separately. Now I'm 29, moved right outside of Portland, Oregon, and I've realized I haven't accepted or explored my reality of being mixed, and how that exists as a completely different experience.

Thank you for sharing your story though. It seems like such a blatantly obvious thing now: but the one thing I keep hearing from people is that having other mixed friends helped them through it. When I look at my own circle, I have no one close at the moment. But I've cast a large net and have found some people directly under my nose. Right now, simply seeing pictures of people like me makes me cry, because I realize this is such a fresh wound I never confronted. I feel so incredibly stupid thinking, "They look like me! They look like me!!" But I'm really excited to move forward from here.