By: Jasmine Biju
Honestly, I can’t recall a period of more than 4 months where the person I looked at in the mirror appeared the same. From my youth to my teenage years, I have had to grapple with the ambiguous state of my identity, both internally and physically. The phrase “new year, new me” quite literally applied to me. Every picture day, I looked unrecognizably different. The same challenge always lingered around: being comfortable in a never stagnant, always changing self.
Well, to be honest, I quite haven’t gotten to that point of unwavering comfort in myself. After all, we keep it real in this community and definitely do not downplay the very valid feelings that individuals blessed with vitiligo go through. I say “blessed” because I have realized that vitiligo has given me a chance to truly get to know who I am. I am in tenth grade, and this is the age where the plague of identity crisis is highly contractible. Well, I won’t say that I have immunity to that. But, I know as a fact that I am a confident human being with love for the quirks that I have. While social media has denoted the ways to attain “true beauty,” I am happy with who I am. I do not need to take measures to reach a so-called “beauty” standard, because I already met that standard the day I was born.
My ongoing vitiligo journey has been unpredictable. I started as a timid girl who found shame in my differences and withdrew from multiple activities, friendships, and opportunities at the thought that I did not fit in. But in the beautiful stream of life, I arrived at a point where I was able to live life through the eyes of a person who fell in love with every one of their blemishes and imperfections. This newfound appreciation of myself was so strong that after most of my facial vitiligo disappeared months later, I was saddened that I lost what I considered to be an integral facet of who I was. Fast forward to now, I am a tenacious first generation Indian-American young woman marked with vitiligo who is eager to paint a legacy of vitiligo's non-textbook definition of beauty.
There are so many individuals like me who are embarking on this ridiculously challenging, but worthwhile journey of creating an identity. Vitiligo is a gift in disguise, a test of our personal strength, and honestly a great background story for when each one of us becomes an incredible globally-renowned change-maker. So, let's connect, share our stories, and show the world that vitiligo is not just “a condition in which the pigment is lost from areas of the skin, causing whitish patches,” but for some of us, the defining trait of our very existence.