Learning to Love Me for Me

The most prominent Latino trait I have just by looking at me is my hair. My whole life I've hard dark hair that grows back basically right away. This quickly became something I detested about myself, since having a mustache in 5th grade was an easy target for cruelty. The thing that bugged me the most, however, was my arms. I LOATHED having hair on my arms, and just wanted to look like the blonde-haired, blue-eyed girls I encountered on the daily. While I began to accept these things about myself more and more as time went on, it wasn't until one particular moment in which I vowed to never shave my arms. I was watching Ugly betty about two years ago, and Salma Hayek was a reoccurring character in the first season. The first thing I noticed about her was that she was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. The second thing I noticed was that you could vaguely see the hair on her arms as she appeared on screen. This led to an epiphany- if I am still able to find her perfect, even though she shares this trait with me, why should I view it any differently on myself than I do on her? Since that moment, I have decided to embrace this part of myself, as well as any other part of myself that I wish wasn't there. Because all that is doing is erasing my ancestry and encouraging a pattern of attempting to fit into a mold I am born to fit out of.