Born Tired: Where Survival Meets Healing

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Eirene: Before we ever understood our identity, many of us were already learning where we fell in someone else's hierarchy of beauty. The shade of our skin, the texture of our hair, which parent we resemble. All of it becomes a conversation before we're even old enough to understand what those conversations mean.

Sometimes it sounds harmless. A relative commenting on how light a baby is, someone praising a child's hair for being good, someone laughing about how another child took after the darker side of the family. At first, these moments feel like background noise, something adults say casually while children move through the room unnoticed.

But children notice more than people realize. They notice which features make adults smile. They notice which ones get corrected, compared, or quietly criticized. They notice who gets described as beautiful and who gets described as different.

Over time [00:01:00] those moments start teaching you how the world sees you. No one sits you down to explain the rules. No one says out loud that the hierarchy exists, but you feel it. You feel in the way certain family members are admired more easily. In the way compliments seem to follow some children naturally, while others receive them more carefully.

You begin to understand without anyone needing to say it directly, that appearance carries more meaning in ways that go far beyond personal preference. For many of us raised in cultures shaped by colonization and colorism, those meanings are deeply rooted. Ideas about beauty were never neutral.

They were shaped by history, by power, by centuries of colonial influence that elevated European features while diminishing everything else. Even when families love each other deeply, those beliefs can still show up in subtle ways, in jokes, in comparisons, in passing comments that linger [00:02:00] in a child's memory even after the moment has passed.

By the time you're old enough to form your own sense of identity, parts of it have already been shaped by how other people reacted to your reflection, and that's where many of our stories begin.

This is Born Tired, Where Survival Meets Healing. A podcast for those of us who grew up in survival mode but are ready to heal and speak our truth. I'm Eirene, a cycle breaker, learning what peace feels like after years of survival. Every episode is an invitation to rest inside your truth, to feel seen, and to remember. You are never alone. This is what it sounds like when silence finally breaks.

Before we begin, I want to share a gentle reminder. This episode includes stories and reflections about childhood trauma and abuse. Please listen in a way that feels safe for you. If at any point you need to pause or step away, honor that. Your wellbeing matters more than finishing the episode. You are not alone. Take care of yourself while you [00:03:00] listen.

Today I wanna talk about something woven into many of our lives, even when nobody names it out loud. How identity begins forming through other people's eyes before we ever understand our own. In many families, a child's features become a conversation way before the child understands what's being said.

The shade of their skin, the texture of their hair, which parent they favor. All of it becomes a story. A story about where you belong, A story about what parts of you get admired and what parts of you get quietly criticized. There's an unspoken script that many of us absorbed growing up. That beauty tilts towards Europe, that lighter skin holds more value, that straighter hair is more refined.

That proximity to whiteness is something to be proud of. Worth becomes measured against standards we never agreed to, and children grow up trying to understand themselves inside a system they never chose. Because colorism [00:04:00] doesn't always appear as open hostility. Often it shows up through familiarity , through things that feel normal. Through comments, people repeat without questioning where those ideas came from. And over time, those messages shape how we see ourselves.

They shape how we interpret our reflection. They shape what we believe is acceptable, desirable, or even worthy of praise. Which means healing from colorism often requires something many families were never taught to do. Naming it, recognizing that the beliefs we inherited about beauty were never neutral.

They were built within systems that rewarded proximity to whiteness. Understanding that history can be uncomfortable, but it can also open the door to something important. The ability to see ourselves and each other more clearly, and once you begin to see it, you can't unsee it.

Because colorism wasn't just something I noticed in culture. It was something that shaped my own childhood and the way I saw [00:05:00] myself. When I was growing up my relationship with my appearance wasn't something I discovered on my own. It was something shaped for me, shaped through comments, comparison and jokes that weren't really jokes.

Beauty wasn't just personal preference. It was a quiet ranking system everyone pretended didn't exist but lived by anyway. You learn early, which features are and which ones people simply tolerate. I have traits from both my parents, but a lot of people on my mother's side always insisted I look more like my father, not because they loved him, but because they didn't like the features I inherited.

My mother's family had lighter skin and what they proudly refer to as good hair. And in Dominican culture, good hair has nothing to do with health, it's about proximity to whiteness. Hair that is straighter, something closer to European features, hair that signals distance from African [00:06:00] ancestry. Hair that signals proximity to a beauty standard that colonialism taught people to admire

When people say "pelo bueno" good hair, they aren't talking about the hair itself. They're talking about what the hair represents. And when you grow up hearing that language around you, you start to understand what features are celebrated and which ones people wish were different.

I'll never forget the day one of my uncles looked at me, he had a look of disappointment mixed with disgust, and he said, the only thing you have from our side of the family is your hair. Thank God for that. As if my face, my skin, my features were defects, as if the only part worth keeping was the one that reminded him of himself.

When you're a child, you don't always have the language to understand moments like that. You just feel them. You feel the shift in the room, you feel the way adults look at you, you feel the message, even if no one explains it. [00:07:00] For a long time I thought comments like that were about me, about the way I looked, about something I had done wrong simply by existing in the body I was born into.

But as I got older, I began to understand something deeper. Comments like that weren't really about me as a person. They were about proximity. Proximity to whiteness, to certain features, to a hierarchy that existed long before I was born.

Because colorism isn't just about appearance, it's about value. It's about the belief that certain features represent something better, something more refined, something closer to the ideal that colonial systems created. And those beliefs echo through generations.

They get repeated through comments, comparisons, through the way people react to children before those children understand why. But even within the system, the truth is complicated because I also know this, I wasn't at the bottom of that hierarchy [00:08:00] either.

There were ways I still benefited from proximity, ways I was afforded access, safety, or credibility that others in my family never were. I didn't always recognize it at the time. Privilege rarely announces itself when you're inside of it, it just feels normal. That ease doesn't require explanation.

It doesn't need to be defended or named. It simply exists. And because it feels normal, it often goes unquestioned. That quiet normalization is part of how colorism survives.

It doesn't just create wounds for the people pushed to the margins. It also creates blind spots for the people who benefit from the system without realizing the ladder exists. And that's part of what makes these conversations difficult. Because healing requires honesty. It requires acknowledging both the harm we experience and the ways systems sometimes work in our favor. Both can exist at the same time. And understanding that complexity [00:09:00] is part of breaking the cycle. , But the belief shaping my family didn't come from nowhere.

They were part of a much larger history, a history that began well before any of us were born. The belief shaping my family didn't appear out of nowhere. They came from centuries of colonization, that reshaped how entire cultures understood beauty, value, and belonging. Across Latin America and the Caribbean colonial systems created a hierarchy that placed European ancestry at the top. The closer someone appeared to whiteness, , the more privileged they were given. The further someone appeared from it, the more they were pushed toward the margins.

Those hierarchies didn't disappear when colonial rule ended. They continued through culture, through media. Through family expectations and through the quiet ways people talk about appearance. In Dominican culture, the influence of Europe often shows up in everyday conversation. People will mention a distant relative from Spain as if that [00:10:00] detail elevates them. As if proximity to Europe makes someone more refined, more respectable, more valuable. Yet the African and indigenous ancestry that live visibly in Dominican features are often ignored or spoken about with discomfort.

Those contradictions shape how people see themselves and how they see each other. Those beliefs don't just live in history books. They travel quietly through families, through jokes, through preferences, through the things people say so casually, they barely notice them.

It lived inside our family history too. My father's side talked openly about color. My grandfather constantly said, we need to marry lighter. In Spanish that phrase is often said as improve the race. A phrase that existed in many Latin American cultures for generations. A phrase rooted in colonial thinking. The idea that the further a family moved toward whiteness, the more improved they [00:11:00] became. In the Dominican Republic those ideas were reinforced during the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, who ruled from 1930 to 1961. Trujillo promoted a national identity that emphasized Spanish and European , ancestry, while distancing the country from its African roots. Whiteness was presented as something to aspire to, something that made a person more respectable, more desirable, more Dominican, and the consequences of that ideology were not abstract.

In 1937, Trujillo ordered the massacre of thousands of Haitians and dark skinned people along the Dominican border. Soldiers reportedly use a simple word to determine who lived and who died. They asked people to pronounce the Spanish word perejil, which is parsley. If someone pronounced it with a French or Haitian Creole accent, it marked them as Haitian.

Many people were killed because of that, because of the way they looked, because of the [00:12:00] way they spoke. . Moments like that leave a deep imprint on a country's psyche. They teach people that proximity to whiteness can mean safety. That blending in can mean survival.

And over time those lessons don't stay in politics. They move into families. They move into conversations about who is considered beautiful and who a family should marry. Which is why phrases like mejorar la raza became so common. . My grandfather didn't just repeat those words.

He lived by them. My father was the eldest son, but he was denied his father's name because when he was born, he was considered too dark. It wasn't until a lighter sun was born that my grandfather finally passed his name down. That was the world I was raised In a world where color didn't just describe you, it ranked you.

Colorism doesn't only shape beauty, it shapes power. It shapes protection. It shapes who gets praised and who gets [00:13:00] criticized, and it shapes the roles people are forced into inside their own families. My father was a scapegoat in his family, and I look like my father.

Sometimes I think I became the scapegoat too because I carried the reflection he never learned how to love. For a long time I also wondered if it played a role in the distance between my mother and I, because when you grow up looking like the man who was hurting someone that resemblance can carry its own complicated weight. Family dynamics are really simple.

Pain moves through generations in ways that are not always easy to see while you're living inside of them. And sometimes the patterns people inherit become the patterns they repeat. It took me many years to understand how much of my childhood had been shaped by systems that existed before I was born.

Systems that told people what beauty looked like, systems that told families what features were worth celebrating, and what features were something to hide. But understanding that history also created [00:14:00] space for something else, a different way of seeing myself, and eventually a different way of raising my children.

Because motherhood changed the way I understood all of this. I have four children and each one of them looks different. Different skin tones, , different hair textures, different features, different blends of the history they carry, and every single one of them is beautiful.

It has always been deeply important to me that my children grow up loving their reflections, loving their skin, their hair, loving the way they look without comparison, without apology, without inheriting wounds that were never theirs to carry.

I want them to grow up knowing their worth is not determined by how close they fall to whiteness. I want them to understand that who they are is intentional, sacred, and enough, because I know firsthand what it feels like to grow up believing your features are something that need to be corrected, something people evaluate, something people [00:15:00] rank, and that cycle ends with me.

It ends with the way I speak about beauty in my home. It ends with the way my children see themselves when they look in the mirror. . It ends with the understanding that their worth was never meant to be measured against someone else's standard. When you revisit these memories with adult eyes, something shifts, you start recognizing that the standards you internalize were never about you.

They were about the politics of beauty, about colonial hierarchies that taught entire cultures to measure value through proximity to whiteness, about generations of insecurity passed down, like family heirlooms growing up. You don't question any of it. It just feels normal.

You don't wonder why adults feel comfortable evaluating a child's skin tone. You don't question why hair textures get labeled. You don't ask why belonging sometimes feels like something you have to earn.

You simply learn to read the room. You learn which parts of yourself are praised, which parts of yourself are safer to hide. [00:16:00] You learn how to survive inside expectations that were never designed with your wholeness in mind. But healing creates perspective.

It creates distance, not from your culture, but from the harm embedded within it. It allows you to step back and recognize that the systems that shape those beliefs, colorism, colonial beauty standards, the idea that worth is measured by how closely someone resembles an ideal that was never meant to include everyone.

As you unpack all of this, you begin to understand something important. Much of your identity was shaped by people who carry unresolved wounds themselves. People who were taught to measure their own value through proximity to whiteness. People who believed that blending in meant survival.

There is a grief in realizing that. Grief for the child who absorbed those messages without protection. Grief for the ways love and harm became intertwined. But there's also freedom [00:17:00] because once you name something, you stop carrying it blindly. You stop mistaking inherited beliefs for personal truth. You begin separating who you are from what you were taught to be. And slowly something softens, not because the past disappears, but because it no longer gets to narrate your present. You reclaim your features, your face, your history, not as something you need to defend, but as something you are allowed to inhabit fully.

Identity is not something assigned by other people's comfort. It is something you reclaim over time through awareness, through honesty, through the courage to see yourself clearly in a world that once tried to define you before you had that language to define yourself. As I sit, with everything we've explored, I keep returning to the same realization.

Healing is really about coming home to yourself, to the parts you hid, the parts that were misunderstood, the parts you were never allowed to fully [00:18:00] claim. So many of us grew up being observed more than we were understood. People commented, compared, evaluated, but rarely asked how it made us feel.

No one questioned the impact of being told what category you fit into. Or what features were considered acceptable. Growing up in that environment you learn to shrink yourself to adjust to other people's comfort, to manage expectations before you learn how to listen to your own voice. But as you heal, you begin to see that much of that pressure came from generations who never learned how to fully love themselves. People who survived their own wounds and pass their fears down as truth. And when you recognize that something changes, you realize their words were never a reflection of your worth.

They were reflections of what they had been taught to value. There is power in deciding those values are not yours. In looking at your features, your history, your culture, and claiming it all [00:19:00] without needing permission, choosing pride, where there used to be apology, clarity where there was confusion, softness where there was shame. And when you do that, the way you move through the world changes. Your voice steadies, your body relaxes. You stop chasing validation, you stop explaining your identity, you stop shrinking to keep other people comfortable. Because your story is bigger than the comments you heard, bigger than the comparisons, bigger than the projections. Your story is about reclaiming what was overlooked, honoring what was silenced, and giving yourself the dignity others didn't know how to give you. These conversations aren't easy. They ask us to revisit parts of our story shaped by family, culture, and silence. They ask us to sit with discomfort long enough to notice what it brings up instead of rushing to push it away. So if something shifted in you while you are listening to this episode, if a memory [00:20:00] surfaced, if a realization landed, if a part of you soften and even slightly honor that, that is healing too.

What matters is that you showed up, that you stayed present with yourself. That you allowed yourself to hear something you may have carried alone for years. This space was created for moments like that for reflection, without pressure, for naming experiences, without needing to fix them immediately, for letting understanding arrive at its own pace. For the truths we hold quietly, for the questions about identity that don't have simple answers, and for the parts of us still learning how to trust our own voice.

If this episode resonated with you, please share with someone who might need it and take a moment to leave a review wherever you listen. Your review helps more people find the podcast. It reminds others they're not alone. Don't forget to subscribe or follow the show so you never miss an episode. You can also join me on Substack, where I share [00:21:00] weekly reflections and gentle reminders to help you feel less alone on your healing journey.

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This episode was written and narrated by Eirene Torres. Audio production by Carlos Torres. Original music composed by Carlos Torre.