Racially Motivated Aesthetic Nightmare. High School Trauma Resurfacing in my Nightmares…

So I had a nightmare last night. It started off as a dream, as many nightmares begin, and then the following transpired:

I was minding my business, and these two white girls came up to me with scissors and just started cutting away at my hair.

These white women were not hairstylists, they were just a bunch of mean girls.

In real life, I would have fought back.

But in this dream, I just let it happen apparently. They were laughing, mocking me, and cutting away at my hair, whilst I was in a sort of frozen state.

I looked in the mirror and well, I looked like an idiot.

“Why did they do this? Why did I let it happen?”.

So I woke up this morning and asked myself the same questions.

Well,

I’d grown up with and been honestly surrounded by white people throughout my public school education. The area I lived in was mostly a collective of white upper-class people. It was a breeding ground for racist and classist bullsh*t.

Many of these families had wonderful, kind children… whilst others gave birth to and raised demon spawns.

Girls that were rude, entitled to touch my hair, and racist in consideration of me and other people of color behind closed doors.

The number of times I was “friends” with girls who would touch my hair without permission and ask me uncomfortable questions about being black…

…and the number of times those same “friends” would become ex-friends:

• Compared me to monkeys on social media.
• Called my hair nappy.

Some of them were even outed for using the N Slur, which they should hope was not in consideration of myself. Nonetheless, terrible awful people with racist motivations towards me for many years.

Yet I let them mistreat me, I let them make a fool of me, and then when we became “ex-friends”, they went on to say and do terrible things and I didn’t say a word.

I isolated and moved on as best as I could.

But when someone goes through this cycle over and over again, one can’t help but feel like it’s almost inescapable.

“Perhaps I was supposed to be treated that way; maybe I was ugly, maybe I was less than them.”.

I feel as though this dream summarized my high school experience very well.

There I was, minding my damn business thinking these girls were my friends, and then suddenly, they took out some scissors and started cutting away at my hair; which is not only very fragile, culturally significant but unique to me.

Not to mention, I am not a woman that wants to have super short hair, and they knew that. They were:

• Damaging something that is already fragile.
• F*cking around with something culturally significant to my race.
• Obstructing and attacking an aspect of my appearance that is unique to me.
• Purposefully attempting to make me less attractive in our superficial society.
• Rendering me miserable with my appearance.

Not to mention, those feelings that I’d always had. The feeling of not being able to stop it from happening and wallowing in the pain of losing aspects of my being that mattered most to me.

In that environment, and according to a majority of those people, I was not allowed to be who I was nor was I allowed to be happy with my authenticity.

It was a dream that I believe reflected and summarized a chapter of my life that I am grateful closed many moons ago.

I only hope that I will not have to have such a reflective dream tomorrow about such traumas, although, my dreams always tend to be reflective and eye-opening.

We’ll just see what happens…

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