Italian | Anglo-Indian
I’m quite a loner, so being away from people during the pandemic hasn’t bothered me so much but the virus has caused me some anxiety. It doesn’t help that I’ve suffered with anxiety and panic disorder for 17 years. I struggled for a long time with my identity. I often felt so lost and like I never belonged. Moving to a city and learning to love myself has made me love the skin I’m in. I’m excited to tell people where I’m from and I wear my identity with a lot of pride now. That can only improve as I get older. I am a freelance photographer so luckily I work for myself. In every single job I experienced sexism on quite a large scale. In Lancashire I experienced both sexism and racism. I got so used to it that it didn’t even concern me at the time. I wouldn’t have had the courage to come out as bisexual in those jobs considering their reactions to my skin tone and gender. In my current career, I do sometimes feel inequality around the people I shoot. I work with my partner a lot and he will often be the one that clients will talk to or put above me.
I only really understood that I looked different when I started school. My family is so mixed, many are White and many are Brown so I fitted in perfectly. Even my brothers and I are a gradient from fair skin to dark Brown. But at school in a small town in Oxfordshire I felt a lot of negativity and often got labelled as loud. But the worst thing about my experiences was other people telling me how to feel. Other people tell me that they didn’t see it or feel it. That’s been the most frustrating part of my racial bullying. It almost made me doubt whether I should be feeling hurt at all or was I really just overreacting.
Moving to London was the best decision I’ve ever made in my life. I started to embrace my Anglo-Indian side and slowly I started to feel very proud of what makes me who I am. If I had the opportunity to be reborn I would return exactly as I am but hope to be armoured from a young age with better comebacks.
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