Knowing Myself
Knowing Myself First: A Biracial Woman’s Journey to Identity Before Love
I had to learn who I was before I could love anyone else. That wasn’t poetry. That was survival.
I’m biracial. My mother’s story is not my story. My father’s story is not my story. For a long time I tried to live inside theirs, hoping I’d find myself there. I didn’t. I found pieces. Good pieces, painful pieces. But not the whole.
My mother’s story taught me resilience. It also taught me silence — the kind women keep when the world tells them their pain isn’t polite. My father’s story taught me charm and distance, how to show up and how to disappear. I love them both. I honor them both. But I am not a sequel. I am my own first chapter.
For years I struggled with dating Black men. Not because I didn’t find Black men beautiful — I do. Deeply. The skin, the laughter, the way a Black man carries a hundred years in his shoulders and still makes room to hold you. That’s beauty. My struggle wasn’t about them. It was about me.
I didn’t know myself. And when you don’t know yourself, you walk into love asking someone else to tell you who you are. I wanted a Black man to validate my Blackness. I wanted him to make me feel “Black enough” because I spent my life being told I was too much of one thing and not enough of another. Too light, too loud, too confusing. I brought that confusion to the table and called it dating.
You can’t ask a man to give you an identity. That’s not his job. That’s yours, and God’s.
I had to sit with the way God created me — on purpose. Not half this, half that. Whole. Biracial isn’t a split. It’s a bridge. My hair, my skin, my mouth that says “y’all” and “ope” in the same sentence — all of it intentional. I stopped asking, “Am I Black enough? Am I white enough?” and started asking, “Am I me enough?”
Knowing myself meant grieving my mother without becoming her. It meant loving my father without chasing his approval. It meant studying my own face in the mirror, not for flaws, but for history. My cheekbones are hers. My jaw is his. My eyes are mine. My story is mine.
Only after that could I see a Black man and just see him. Not a test. Not a mirror. Not a verdict on my identity. A man. Beautiful, complicated, human. When you know yourself, you stop dating from a wound. You start dating from wholeness. You don’t need him to name you. You already know your name.
Self-identity is not selfish. It’s the foundation. You can’t build a healthy relationship on top of a self you haven’t met yet. I had to meet Cathryn before I could meet a mate. I had to understand my own journey — the shelters, the PhD, the YMCA, the grief, the God who kept me — before I could invite someone else to walk beside me.
I still find Black men beautiful. Now I don’t find myself lost when I look at them. Because I did the work. I learned my mother’s story. I learned my father’s story. And then I wrote my own.
That’s the order. That’s the peace. Me first. Then we.
