At times like this, I feel my old self creeping in with self-doubt and not believing that what looks and feels like the impossible can become possible. 

Being 25 years old.

Turning 26 years old in June. 

Ahhhhhh (that’s me screaming internally) 

Turning 25 years old I literally felt the ping of my frontal lobe finish developing. 

I woke up with new eyes.

I saw myself differently. 

I saw my beauty.

I saw my skin complexion in a light that shined and glowed in the highs of the sun and the lows of the moon. 

I didn’t give a fuck about things I cared so deeply for. 

I don’t know how to explain it. To this day I still don’t get it. 

I had a misunderstanding with a then friend and I didn’t care about trying to make the situation better. Or trying to figure it out. I felt like I’d seen all I needed to see to choose… not wanting to be friends with them anymore. 

My 24-year-old self was like, “What the fuck are you doing? We don’t toss out friendships or people. We keep hacking at the situation until it’s fixed.”

My newly 25-year-old mind asks back, “At what cost? At whose cost? Mine? I saw what I saw and I didn’t like it. Why go back? To hurt myself even more? Why do I treat myself like that?”

Turning 25 years old this level of confidence in myself was off the charts. I will say that at first, it was a feeling that vanished. Or maybe I got used to the new hum. I don’t know but it was a hum that was only felt. There was no evidence of it in how I spoke about myself. I wanted to fix that. 

As I settled in my 25 I started to ask myself questions.

• Do I want this person to be my friend? Do I even like this person? 
• Why am I doing things I don’t like doing? I don’t have to do that?
• Who is talking? Who is behaving this way? The little girl Sabryn or the teenage me? 
• What exactly do I want from a romantic relationship and why do I want to be in one? Do I even need to be in one at the moment? 
• Do I even like myself?
• Why am I the victim? 
• Am I the bad girl in someone else’s world… (show myself I’m not perfect Patty) 
• What do I do that makes me feel bad about myself?

Turning 25 made me look at my world and go “If I had to be this person, think this way, do this job… would I want this to be my world for the next 25-40 years?” 

How I’ve been operating lately my answer is no. 

I want to genuinely like myself and to love myself.

I want to find a passion of mine I can call work and never feel like I’m working. Have that passion be my part-time job when I retire. 

I want to be around people who uplift me and ask me the questions I don’t know to ask myself.

I want to be around people who make me feel like I’m in the right place and belong.

I want to admit to my fuck ups and be forgiven as I have learned to do for others. And if I’m not forgiven then I’ll still be able to patch myself up and not allow that to drag me down and make myself feel like shit.

I want to be in a romantic relationship to feel the love I give to others and to grow something beautiful with the person I’m with. 

I want to know and understand that I’m not perfect Patty but shit if I can get close to it and understand that the world and I are not perfect and the world and I are still beautiful… that’s growth for me. 

And lastly. 

Understanding that I and you that’s reading this…

We have a choice of what our world looks like. 

We choose the world we live in. 

My mantra is “You design the life you want to live”. I realized just now as I’m typing this that it’s a mantra that’s enclosed in -choice-. 

These last 2 months. 

I have been on a rollercoaster of emotions. Been on the rollercoaster of wanting to give up and not give up. The rollercoaster of becoming a hermit but then being like Ari Lennox and screaming about how I need people. I have been on the rollercoaster of being stressed out and thinking about all the things that will and can go wrong and trying my best to think about all the things that can go right. 

All of this is allowing my emotions to control my mindset. 

Allowing my emotions to affect my train of thought. 

Allowing my emotions to be on the hamster wheel of fighting with my anxiety and hanging on a string of depression. 

I learned how strong the mind is.

How ‘choice’ is the captain of it all. 

I choose if I will allow my emotions to ruin my entire day. Or I can do something that will help me shake off the negative emotions I’m having. 

I can choose to redirect my train of thought when I think negatively about my acne. 

“OMG, another fucking bump is on my face. I already have 3 that are living there and aren’t budging.” 

I’ll look at that thought and say to myself yes I do have acne but let’s step back. My acne has been looking much better lately. My hyperpigmentation has started to lighten up. I’m taking care of my face. I will break out but that’s not the full story of my face here. I am beautiful and I am gorgeous. Don’t I ever stop believing that.

At times now, I look at my face in the mirror and I tell myself how beautiful I am. I compliment myself on the shape of my lips, the color of my eyes, and the moles on my face. Shit, I even flirt with myself. 

I choose to make a difference in how I view myself. 

I come to realize no matter how many people tell me I am beautiful-it won’t ever change my mind on how I look at myself because if I don’t believe it the words mean nothing. 

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As a little girl, I didn’t think about how I looked at other people. I was just Sabryn or Say Say. 

Say Say was a little girl who just wanted to have her hands in every extracurricular activity. She loved to laugh and speak her mind. If she didn’t want to do something she wasn’t gonna do it. She was a firecracker. My niece reminds me so much of me when I was little lol. 

When I got to middle school I was bullied because of my skin complexion. The wildest part of it all was the girl who was bullying me was a tone or two darker than me. As an adult, I see it was because she didn’t like her skin complexion and I was a mirror of her. But as a little girl, I didn’t understand that.

I would ignore her or try to joan back but my joans were so weak it’s not even funny. 

I would unconsciously soak up everything she said. 

I didn’t even tell my mom about it. 

I told my sister and my cousin but my cousin being a butt hole just made a joke about it.

So I just wrapped myself in the smoke of it… not knowing it was eating at my confidence. 

Back then there were no Issa Rae or Quinta Brunson… people on TV who looked like me and I related to that was being glorified and had darker skin complexion. 

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When I got to college I noticed how my skin complexion had a different effect on the opposite sex. Being from the North and going to school in the South it felt like skin complexion was currency. Shit, the whole world is like that. 

I started to understand how skin complexion was viewed based on how light and close your skin complexion was to a white person. The fairer your skin the prettier you were considered to be. 

I attended a complexion discussion while in college. They played the documentaries Light Girls and Dark Girls. In the documentaries, women talked about how they were viewed in the world, how dark-skinned girls would hate lighter-skinned girls, and how lighter-skinned girls would bully girls with darker complexion. It discussed how the world viewed our complexion going back to Slavery. 

The discussion was for two days. We would watch a film and then have an open and honest discussion about it.

There was a panel of people who discussed their experiences from childhood to now. 

I remember after watching the Dark Girl documentary there was a woman of a lighter complexion on the panel. She addressed how many people viewed her as being of a lighter complexion but she saw herself as a dark-skinned woman. How when she was growing up she was around girls who were much lighter than her and she was considered dark-skinned. Her complexion was about a light brown complexion. 

She explained how the girls would pull her hair and call her names and how people in her community treated her differently. She was told to stay in the house so she wouldn’t get darker. 

The whole discussion from day one to day two was a lot to take and absorb. 

For the first time, I didn’t feel so alone in my experience of being a black woman. 

During that time, I felt ugly in my skin and unwanted. It reflected in how I dressed and carried myself. My goodness if someone would give me a compliment I would shy away from it. Ahhhh 

Being at the event allowed me to start questioning the thoughts I had about myself. Were they my thoughts or were they someone else’s thoughts camouflaged as mine? 

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I finally had a conversation with my mom about it. 

Growing up I saw my mom in the highest of lights. She’s my best friend. I looked to her to learn the definition of beauty. 

Both my mom and I have acne. 

Growing up when acne started to form on my face I freaked out. It was one pimple then another. During the transition I never berated myself. My mom would even apologize for passing down the trait to me but I never allowed her to finish the sentence. “There’s nothing for you to apologize for” I would say back to her.

My mom who gave me my definition of beauty has always carried herself with confidence and knowing who she is as a human being. Therefore, I never allowed my acne to rule my world. Nope naw nope. 

My mom is light brown and I am dark brown. 

The difference in our complexion made me feel like I couldn’t talk with her. She wouldn’t understand my world. 

But one day I was just in my feelings and wanted to share my experience with her. I finally told my mom all the things I was going through about my skin complexion. 

I even admitted how I didn’t tell her because I felt she wouldn’t understand. She wouldn’t understand how the world views her and me differently. Shit how the black community itself views us differently. 

It was a tough conversation to have with her. Mom is supposed to protect me and be my road dog in all things in life. But I felt as though this one thing separated us. 

In speaking with her I found out she related to the lady I spoke about prior. My mom felt she had a darker tone because her sister was lighter than her. She described how she was treated as a little girl and how she viewed the world and related to women of darker complexion. 

I was surprised by her truth. All that time I felt so alone and my mom was there… she would’ve understood. 

I discussed with her that even though she sees herself as a woman of a darker skin tone the world still views her as a lighter woman and treats her as such- differently than me.  

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I feel like from that conversation on I unconsciously decided to take the definition of beauty into my own hands. Define beauty with my own words and thoughts. 

As tough as it was, I finally admitted to myself that I didn’t think I was attractive because of my skin tone. How I felt unwanted because of it. 

Speaking with my therapist who is of a darker complexion as well, understood my thoughts and feelings. Living in a society where lighter skin tone is championed. 

How did I turn it around? 

Being brutally honest about how I viewed myself. When judgment came, I spoke about it. Cried about it. Became angry about it. There were times I shut down. There were times when middle school Sabryn showed up in our meetings and spoke her truth. 

Trying not to be ashamed of myself for feeling the way I did. 

Changing my social media. Making sure I watched people who loved the skin they were in. Watching black women of darker skin tones talk highly of themselves. Admire myself in the mirror. Talked to my friends about how I felt. 

Slowly chipping away at how I negatively viewed myself. I started this when I was 20 and I’m now 25.

It’s not an overnight change because the creation of how I viewed myself didn’t happen overnight. 

I enjoy transforming into my definition of beautiful and I am enjoying being the person I am today. 

And I will continue this ride until my last breath…growth never stops… cause once I get to the top I gotta maintain it ahhhhh.

Can’t wait to talk to you again,

Sabryn