British | Jamaican

View fullsize

I describe myself as a dysfunctional functioning human of mixed-race; Jamaican Caribbean and White British. I don’t have a religion but I believe in Spirituality. I’m Bisexual and I have some mental and physical health issues too.

The pandemic didn’t really affect me that much because I was on benefits for a couple of years due to quite a bad mental health breakdown after University. Whilst all of that was happening, I didn’t really go out a lot so the pandemic just emphasised it even more. If anything it was actually a very eye opening experience for me. I realised a lot about those who were close to me and I learnt a huge lot about myself and who I wanted to be once it was ‘over’. That kinda led me to the identity crisis I had this year (amongst other things).

My Mum is White British and my Dad is Jamaican. They met at school. Honestly, they didn’t really combine their cultures when raising me. Without throwing anyone under the bus, the main thing we did was go to Jamaica for the summer holidays as kids (which was more of my Dad's idea) and even then for the most part we went to resorts and rarely stayed at my Grandparents in the mountains. It’s only since my parents have divorced that the culture of Jamaica became a true part of me and my sisters life and that was after we researched the culture, who we were as half Jamaicans and through our Grandparents giving us letters and telling us about their stories. My Dad started to open up a bit more about his experiences too. Me, my sister and my Dad stayed at my Grandparents a lot more which was always eye opening but homely. Don’t get me wrong we would go to certain attractions in Jamaica with my Mum, and we would visit my Grandparents and we would eat some Jamaican foods at home in England but nothing too cultural. We grew up VERY white honestly.

George Floyd’s murder and the protests that commenced afterwards 100% have shaped me for who I am today. That whole experience started my identity crisis. Obviously it was insane seeing such an out roar from the world and I think that’s why it hit me so much, because unfortunately this was the first time that I felt like I’d seen different races come together as well as fight each other over the injustice of George’s death.

For the first time I felt this immense anger and all I could see was red. I cried every day and I realised it was because I wanted to advocate for Black lives being mixed-race, but I didn’t really know what that meant because I’d never properly really embraced that side of me before. As kids, we never really learned about being mixed-race, and even our hair and what ‘percentage of Jamaican’ we were was taboo and foreign to everyone and us included.

I could also see the lack of presence in certain family members and friends, and this made me question quite a bit. I was sooo active on social media, reposting everything that I possibly could and the less input I saw from those close to me as well as hearing people scream All Lives Matter and saying as many excuses to their racism and ignorance as they could, I just lost it. These people were my life. At the time, through the arguments and trying to explain the best I could why the movement was so important, I was apologising and justifying myself and I was growing increasingly more angry and honestly just sad at how it really showed the lack of urgency and education between races and the close people around me.

On social media I could see the anger and I could see the education being illuminated everywhere, I just wondered where that urgency was in the people around me, not just in the world. I also had a lot to learn myself. Not only that but because I was ‘new’ to learning about my race, becoming increasingly aware of colorism and me being quite light skinned, I just felt helpless and wordless but I shared and I spoke anyway. It was a time where all I could see was my Black family getting hurt and possibly being in the same situation as George and seeing how little people really thought about it that way.

I would say to these people, ‘have you always just seen me as White’ and that angered them. A lot of what I said angered them. To this day I have unfortunately lost about 4 best friends, some of my partner's family and my own family with estrangement because they just couldn’t see the bigger picture.

Even though this is tough and it really made me question why I was in certain peoples life and how they really thought about me and my family, I can say now that even though I struggle with coming to terms of letting those people go, I know that it’s not my responsibility to teach people. People can only learn what they want to and I can’t have that ‘ego’ on my conscience trying to ‘fix people’. It’s not my job.

I have also come away learning as well that I didn’t have to be so reactive but at the end of the day I understand why I was. I’m sorry to those I hurt by being so abrupt but I don’t think there’s a correct way of learning about something so important and instilled in you. It was all roaring to come out. I also understand that people don’t have to be so active online to show you care about an issue like this but for me I do feel like there’s a time where you read the room and act accordingly and I believe anyone that cares enough would be angry enough to want to share and talk about it, to reach out to their friends and ask how they are. I can’t and don’t want to make people feel guilty about that because everyone deals with it differently but that doesn’t mean that I have to be okay with it. I know how I want to feel supported and I'm not going to feel guilty for that. I know who I want in my life according to their values and actions and sometimes you have to just let people go, no matter how close they are to you, to protect yourself from hurting. Because I couldn’t just pretend like I wasn’t hurt, and as ‘selfish’ as other people felt like I was, that’s not my problem if they just don’t understand and don’t want to overcome their own egos and pride and try to.

I can think of two times I have hidden my identity. The first time wasn’t overly intentional. It was when I was a kid and I would always have my hair up or I would straighten it for parties. I think 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 with a new single coming out soon and I’ve been pitching to blogs asking them if they could write about it and it’s 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. But 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 found myself not sending the latter as much because I was scared I would come across as ‘too political’ or that they simply just wouldn’t want to hear my story because I was speaking about race. I also hesitated sending it to Black blogs because I didn’t want to come across as a light skinned girl complaining about her race problems because to some, I take up space because dark skinned people get racism worse. You can see how my brain does flips about where I actually relate!

I did in the end though just decide to send 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.

I have a brand new single coming out. Starting off with me as an artist, it’s been a whole year since my previous release but I knew I wanted to start embracing my mixed-race heritage and as much as I claimed to be an R&B artist, I didn’t really listen to too much of it and I hated that!

So I challenged myself just to try and find my new sound in R&B and went on Youtube just to find some free beats and play around. But instantly, I found this beat and fell in love and after showing my partner and sister, we all agreed that this song was the best start for me and that I should release it.

I didn’t have any lyrics planned for this, as I said I just listened to the music and I let the lyrics flow and I was even interested to see what was swirling around in my head at the time.

With everything going on and struggling with my identity and mental health, sometimes lately and a lot of those days this year, I really just felt like giving up. But I knew I wouldn't, I just knew I needed a few sad moments and I would be brushing myself off again.

As I was writing this song, I knew that people could relate because sometimes you just wanna feel all the feels and do what you need to do to feel better and then eventually you’ll get back up again.

So this song is basically my doorway to learning and understanding all of those sides of me that I’ve been struggling with and will in the future.

Personally I would have to say my role models are my Grandparents and my sister. My Grandparents because they just have such an incredible story and yet they stayed humble and they were/are so intelligent. I’ve learnt so much about life and history through them, they were both in Windrush and that in itself is such a moment in history but just thinking about everything they went through as children through to adults; I just hope I am half the person of them at least when I grow up.

My sister is also my role model too, because she really sacrificed a lot for me and herself when we grew up and to this day she’s been nothing but supportive and at times where she hasn’t, she’s sat back, listened and changed her perspective to protect me and love me wholeheartedly. I would be nowhere without her support. She’s my best friend and the strongest person I know.

I just think there needs to be more education about race, and not just Black but every culture's history. We have books and books on White history, but hardly anything within reach about cultural history. I also think organisations and companies need to step up. For example in supermarkets, why are people of colour’s skincare and makeup segregated? Influencers and celebrities also need to step up, it’s not enough just to post one thing when the whole world is doing it.

I think people need to have conversations with themselves too and their families because we can’t control the government but the power of the people can inflict change and it all starts with that individual person I believe.

Positively I think being mixed-race, everyone wants to know about you. So in a weird good way, there’s always eyes on me and my sister. It’s not always good attention but it also means that hopefully when I speak about important things, it can resonate with people that can’t help but watch. Also, as I mentioned being a singer, I feel instantly a lot more comfortable and part of a community being able to have soul and r&b coursing through my music and being a part of such a close unit of people.

In terms of challenges a few come to mind. I think people don’t see me as being mixed-race, sometimes, they choose not to see colour or think about it. So you hear racism or micro aggressions and they say it to you because they don’t think about the other side of it. Sometimes I would get comments like ‘you don’t look mixed-race, it's just your hair’. I would even say ‘I’m basically just White with a tan’, and the more I think about it the more I can’t believe I used to say those things about myself. It just completely eradicates my culture and making a joke about it to my friends who would even laugh too. It’s crazy to think about.

Lastly, also just being mixed-race there’s a whole ‘what percentage of this are you’ and it’s very daunting yet also deflating. Like 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 do not 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. It’s all just one big imposter syndrome.

I have been to Jamaica quite a few times now and I love it, it’s practically my second home. All of my Grandparents' friends adore us and they’re such protective and lovely people, they’re like family. It’s so nice being able to actually be in the country walking through the island at every day shops actually witnessing the culture and the people instead of being refined to resorts and the tourist parts.

I do think as well though just being mixed-race and growing up White in a western world, going to Jamaica it’s hard to feel 100% like you belong there. People look at you like you’re this odd one out, and I hate that a lot. When I was little I don’t think I really understood what being mixed was. I was just excited to go on holiday more than anything else. I see a lot of things now that I witnessed as a child that I used to react to with such an outsider mindset. I remember for example a little Black boy, my next door neighbour, was called out by our headmaster in primary school in front of the whole year because he got a Nike tick shape up in his hair and they didn’t like it. At the time there were only about 5 Black kids in my year and maybe 2 mixed-race including me. But I would gossip with my friends and think none the wiser. It’s only now that I see that as a micro aggression and what was really being shown to me and that little boy at a young age was just racism.

Being an adult and going through everything that I did last year was a huge awakening and now I understand things a lot more but I definitely still have a lot more growing and learning to do. So when I get older, I don’t think my perspectives will change but I’ll hopefully feel more at home and comfortable with my identity of being mixed-race and what it entails.

I think there could be a LOT more representation. At University I remember having a course about Windrush and it was being told by a White professor and all the students of colour just looked so uncomfortable, including myself. I think in music as well, I was a part of a charity that specialised in Mental health and the music was a lot of hip hop and rappers/artists but the whole team behind it including the producers were White. Now they were really talented and such a lovely group of people, but there were maybe 3 people that worked there that were people of colour and I just thought surely there should be more diversity with the team who actually make the kind of music that people of colour tend and want to create.

Since George Floyd's death, I see a lot of media having a lot more people of colour in their adverts and ‘specials’ on daily TV, which is nice to see. I just wish it wasn’t in such a token mindset. Why have specials when you could just include more races to begin with in every episode?

Lastly, with the entertainment industry as well, I think there’s so many people of colour and mixed-race people that are talented but constantly get overlooked. On TikTok especially, Black people basically run that app, but it’s always White people that seem to get picked up by record labels or big companies the most and I unfortunately don’t think it’s a coincidence.

I’m still learning about my culture but the number one thing I like to do is make sure I keep my family's food recipes in my head and in my stomach! Instead of just having Jamaican food when I go to Jamaica, I’m now trying to create those foods at home and have them more often. This also isn’t much of a tradition but I try to decorate my room with my heritage and bits i’ve collected as a kid to help me feel closer to it.

The last time I cried was last week. I had recently been estranged from a family member and they came into contact again. I for some reason like to listen to sad music when I’m sad, maybe it’s because I’m a singer myself and the writing flows better I’m not sure, but I listened to a song by Olivia Rodrigo called ‘Enough for you’ and that night I just felt like the world was on my shoulders. Even though that song is about a relationship, I couldn’t help but perceive the lyrics directed to this person and all of my friends that have just dropped me as a person because of last year. It was a lot that night. Heavy heavy crying!