British | Jamaican
I don’t have a religion but I believe in Spirituality. I’m Bisexual and I have some mental and physical health issues too. I can think of two times I have hidden my identity. The first time wasn’t overly intentional. When I was a kid, I would always have my hair up or I would straighten it for parties. It was because my hair was always such a spoken topic and amongst words I would hear around me about ‘not being able to hide it’. People would ask me if it was natural and I think being younger I wondered if it was or not. I felt like it couldn’t have been that natural if I had to be asked constantly and I felt very out of place.
The second reason was recently, I’m a singer and I was releasing a new single. I was pitching to blogs asking them if they could write about it and its release. There’s always different groups of people to submit to and I had a list of them all, including genre-specific like R&B. At first I found myself with two versions of my press release; one where I just spoke about my mental health and the other including my identity crisis of being mixed-race. I did not send the latter because I was scared I would come across as ‘too political’ or that they wouldn’t want to hear my story because I was speaking about race. I sent the full press release to everyone because I realised that this is me and if they don’t like it, then they aren’t the companies I want talking about me anyway. I know that I won’t be everyone’s favourite and my story might upset some people but I think about girls like me who don’t have that much support out there and there’s other people for other people.
Being mixed-race there’s a whole ‘what percentage of this are you’ and it’s very daunting yet also deflating. I’m not a percentage I’m a person, but when issues about race pop up I feel ‘under qualified’, like my struggles or issues don’t matter or that I can’t understand other people and there’s certain things I can’t say. There’s so much I don’t even know how or what to say because I’m the one educating myself on everyone as well as my race, and it’s a lot for one person to learn and get right 100% of the time.
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