Learning to Love My Skin in a Country That Taught Me Not To

The first time I understood that my skin meant something to other people, I was nine. Not in the poetic, “my identity blossomed” way people like to write about. I mean in the literal, physical way — in the way a single comment can rearrange the air around you.

I was sitting in the back row of my Italian classroom, legs swinging because they didn’t yet touch the floor. The girl next to me leaned over and whispered,
“Perché sei così scura? Hai preso troppo sole?” (Why are you dark skinned? Have you been under the sun for too long?)

She wasn’t mocking. She was curious — the cruelest kind of innocence.

I didn’t know how to answer.
The class turned to look at me, waiting for a response I didn’t owe them.

That was the day I learned my skin was a subject.
A conversation.
A spectacle.
A thing.

I didn’t hate myself (and I never did). But I saw myself differently.
Not as a girl — as a contrast.

Growing up in Italy meant learning the geography of my own body through other people’s observations.

“Che bel colore, sembra caramello,” an auntie once said, pinching my cheek.
“Che capelli strani,” whispered a woman in the supermarket.
“Sei bellissima, così… esotica,” said a guy during a date.

None of these words were meant to hurt.
But they trained me to understand myself through distance:
pretty, but in a special category;
interesting, but not familiar;
admired, but not fully accepted.

Italy taught me early that beauty had rules — pale, slim, soft, easy rules — and my skin did not follow them.

By eleven, I was already editing myself.
I avoided bright lipstick because I’d heard someone say red “didn’t work” on darker skin.
I avoided photos because the flash made my face look like it wasn’t mine.
And I avoided shorts because my legs were “troppo scure e storte” (too dark and crooked).

And yet, despite going every two Sundays with my family to the mosque in Mantua — spending half a day there surrounded by confident Nigerian women who had moved to Italy as adults, women with different handmade dresses each time wrapped around their bodies like regalia — no one ever told me to love myself differently.

Self-love wasn’t a concept; survival was.

Years later, in middle school, I was sitting in the courtyard during recess when a boy looked at my arms and said to his friend,
“Secondo me, lei al buio non si vede.”

They burst out laughing.
I looked down at my hands as if they were misbehaving.

It wasn’t just a joke — it was an instruction at a time when I had already stopped expressing outbursts in public to avoid being labelled “too much” or “too African”:
Be smaller.
Be quieter.
Take up less space.
And whatever you do, don’t shine.

I carried this with me long after the courtyard emptied.

But the turning point — the real fracture — came much later, when I was seventeen.

I walked into an Italian drugstore looking for foundation.
The woman behind the counter scanned my face, then the shelves behind her, then my face again.
She said,
“Mi dispiace, per colori così… scuri… non abbiamo niente” (Sorry, for colors that… dark… we don’t have anything).

Her tone was polite. Almost apologetic.
As if the problem wasn’t her stock.
As if the problem was me.

I left empty-handed, holding back a disappointment I didn’t want to admit was about more than makeup.
It wasn’t the foundation.
It was the realisation that the country I called home hadn’t imagined someone like me existing inside it.

That night, I sat on my bed and stared at my skin under the soft yellow lamp.
I didn’t want to scrub it off.
I didn’t want to change it.
I wanted, desperately, to understand why others found it so difficult to see it as ordinary — human — instead of an anomaly that required comment.

But loving something you’ve been taught to monitor takes time.

The unexpected shift came years later — not through travel, or self-help, or affirmation quotes — but through something much smaller.

I was on a train from Verona to Milan. Across from me sat a little Black girl, maybe five or six, with tight braids and skin that looked like mine used to: untouched by interpretation. She was giggling at a cartoon on her mother’s phone, unaware that the world would eventually assign meaning to her body long before she could articulate her own.

At one point she looked up at me and smiled.
A wide, open smile — the kind that recognises kin even before you speak.

And something inside me softened.
She didn’t see my body as contrast or curiosity.
She saw me as a possibility.

In that moment, I realised I didn’t want to spend my entire life learning to survive other people’s gaze.
I wanted to learn how to live in my own.

And slowly — awkwardly — I did.

The first time I wore bright lipstick and didn’t wipe it off.
The first time I bought a dress because I liked the color, not because it “complimented my tone.”
The first time I looked at an unfiltered photo of myself and didn’t critique the brightness or shadows.
The first time I let myself be photographed in sunlight — without hiding from it.

Loving my skin was not a revolution.
It was a series of gentle, private permissions.

I still live in Italy.
I still notice the stares.
I still hear the comments meant as compliments but shaped like cages.

But I also notice something else now:
When I walk into a room, I no longer brace for interpretation.
Not every day, but often enough to feel free in moments where I never expected freedom.

Some days my skin feels like home.
Other days it feels like work.
Both days count.

If part of this essay touched the place inside you where self-perception and survival meet, try asking yourself this:

When did you first learn to see your body through someone else’s eyes — and are you ready to look again, this time with your own?