THE GIRL I ONCE WAS.

It was a warm sunny Tuesday; the new term had started a week ago. I sat down as I waited for my friend to arrive ... I opened my bag to make sure I had my running clothes. 

I did.

While waiting for my friends, I watched the schoolyard slowly come alive. Laughter echoed across the grounds as groups of children reunited with their friends, their voices carrying through the morning air.

 A group of girls walked past me. They couldn’t have been much older than I was. They were talking loudly, the way children do when they think no one is really listening.

One of them pointed toward another girl standing nearby.

“She’s so pretty,” she said.

The others nodded almost immediately.

I looked over.

At first, I didn’t think much of it. Children compliment each other all the time. But then the conversation continued.

“Of course she’s pretty,” another girl laughed. “Look how light she is.”

The group giggled before moving on, leaving their words hanging in the air long after they had disappeared.

I don’t remember what happened next in class.

I don’t remember what was written on the board that day.

I don’t even remember whether my friend arrived before the bell rang.

What I remember is the feeling.

The strange feeling of suddenly becoming aware of something I had never noticed before.

It felt as though someone had quietly handed me a rulebook everyone else had already read.

I began looking around.

Looking at my classmates.

Looking at myself. My dark-skinned self.

Looking for evidence.

That day someone commented on my dark skin in passing, not cruel enough to be remembered as an event by anyone else, but just enough for it to settle somewhere I couldn’t remove.

Nobody told me these observations would become the foundation of how I understood how safe I was in the world. 

At the time, I did not have the language for what colourism was. I was too young to understand systems, histories, or social conditioning. What I understood was observation. As the oldest daughter, observing had become second nature to me. I watched people carefully. I watched what was rewarded and what was ignored.

It seemed as though certain girls moved through the world more gently. They were noticed faster, complimented more freely, protected more instinctively. Whether that perception was entirely true no longer matters. What matters is that it became true in the mind of a young girl trying to understand where she belonged. 

And slowly, without realising it, I began to confuse beauty with safety.

As I grew older, people praised me for different things.

They praised my maturity.

My responsibility.

My strength.

My athletic abilities.

But with a younger sister looking up to me, these qualities became my identity. I wore them proudly, never realising that they were slowly becoming a shield. Every compliment taught me another lesson: be strong, be dependable, and need less.

 I learned to make parts of myself smaller.

My anger became smaller.

My sadness became smaller.

My need to be comforted became smaller.

My desire to be protected became smaller.

I thought that if safety did not come naturally to me, perhaps I could earn it through usefulness. Through resilience. Through carrying more than I should and asking for less than I deserved.

Looking back now, I realise that the girl I once was was never really studying beauty.

She was studying survival.

She was trying to understand who the world treated gently and why she was not a part of it… Why she didn’t feel safe even when around people who loved her.

I see now what I could not see then: that safety should never have been something a child felt she needed to earn. No amount of strength, sacrifice, beauty, or usefulness should determine whether someone is protected or loved. 

When I think of that girl sitting in the sun, waiting for her friend, I see a child who was trying to make sense of a world that was teaching her lessons it did not even know it was teaching.

The girl I once was thought she wanted to be prettier and maybe a little lighter in complexion.

But that wasn’t it at all.

What she really wanted was to believe the world would want to protect her too.