Celia's Story

In my first two years of school, I wasn’t aware I looked different. I knew my skin and hair colour were more melanated, but I didn’t know how much it would affect me as my schooling continued. In Australia, racism is casual, sewn into the fabric of the culture. It is ingrained in the minds of [some] young children, the notion that all people that look like me are not meant to be here, (despite the fact I was born here). 

From Year 3 onwards, my caucasian classmates sought to other me, laughing at my choice of uniform length (no joke), my choice of school shoes (huh), my stationery (I’m 100% serious) my hair length (this is silly), my oiled hair (ludicrous) and most regularly and cruelly, my skin colour. “Poopy, dirty, ugly”, and more wonderful verbiage were used to describe my skin colour. I was able to change every other thing, but the one thing I couldn’t change was my skin colour, (I mean there’s Fair and Lovely (iykyk),  but no one would have sold that to an 8-year-old). The bullying was relentless, people pretending to be my friends so they could use information told in confidence as ammunition to laugh at me.

I was never free. It happened in the classroom, the playground, and even the school bathroom. They would follow me into the bathroom and would stand in all possible escape routes. I still vividly remember freaking out one time and screaming. They all ran away and a teacher came to help me out. I said the lock got jammed because I couldn’t tell them that four of the nice girls had caged me into the bathroom stall. After all, that’s crazy (!). After similar situations, I became very claustrophobic, something that I still deal with. It was after another extremely traumatic situation that I finally told my year 3 teacher about what was happening, to which he responded, “You probably deserved it”. Imagine being a fully grown man telling an 8-year-old girl that she deserved these things. After this, I held a resentment for teachers, believing this was their collective sentiment.

Too many things happened for me to write in this post, and a lot of it is very traumatic and, if it was done by an adult, frankly illegal. It all came to a head in my longest hospitalisation in 2018. There I was diagnosed with PTSD. I was still having flashbacks 8 years later, and seeing them in public would send me into a tailspin. Because of these bullies, my self-loathing was all-consuming. My life began crumbling away at 8, and I almost fell off the ledge at 16, which is when I finally began to rebuild. For a long time, I rejected female friendships because I was sure that any friendship with a girl would result in them using secrets to hurt me. I hid as much of my body as possible and began overcompensating with a strong Australian accent in public and fearing the sun because God forbid I became browner (ahhh!!). It came to a point that I preferred my arms being covered in scars because it beat them being brown (and darker than the rest of my body). 

Ironically, social media helped. Seeing all of these people online appreciating/appropriating our culture and changing facets of their aesthetics to look more like me, selfishly made me feel better about myself because I get my curly hair and tan for free! Seeing the girlies with their mehndi and festival girlies with their pottus (lowkey problematic), I realised everyone wants a piece of this South Asian culture. It's a shame that people tend to reject it when it's on the source, but it has taught me to love myself. Being an immigrant, it is always a struggle to blend our two cultures, or even if you choose to blend the cultures, and the motives behind them, whether or not it is your choice to make others more comfortable but, in the end, accepting my Sri Lankan-ness did help with my mental health journey. Your culture isn’t something that should be shamed out of you!