“Are you a glass-half-full or half-empty kind of girl?”
Sierra hated everything about this question and all it stood for because there was no one who asked or cared what the hell to do when your glass is completely empty. Like Sierra’s glass was. Sierra would stand up at assemblies, and with a silicon smile on her face she’d deliver a proud acknowledgement to country, proudly telling her peers about her Kamilaroi ancestry, but with every word a tsunami teetered on the edge of her brain, threatening to drown out her words, thoughts and feelings, and leaving only debris in its path. It hurt. It hurt so badly. No-one understood. No one ever would.
The idea of perfection was one Sierra held close to her heart. For her, perfection was something you had to chase like a feral horse, unforgiving, a task only for the strongest, but once caught, it was something you could escape and every tear, every drop of blood, every all-nighter, every crucifixion would finally become worth it. You’d finally be free.
However, the reality of this concept wasn’t as tangible as Sierra first thought, which led Sierra to be in this moment, staring down her mirror as though the Devil himself was in the reflection. For her, it felt like he was. She would never be good enough, not for her teachers, not for her mum, not for her dad who was a cloud, passing over her for a short time but never changing direction for something as insignificant as her, and perhaps worst of all; she’d never be enough for her culture.
“Just look at me,” she whispered, “I don’t belong.”
She pinched aggressively at her olive skin, wondering if it was punishing her. With her father out of the picture, it meant she’d grown up in a “white” family with this “English Olive” (as her grandmother called it) skin. She never felt like she fit in with the First Nations kids at school. Of course she didn’t, when she never learnt language, or song, or dance, or even what it truly meant to be Aboriginal. The consequence of this was an eerie hollow, and a mask with so many layers, Sierra was never quite too sure how to distinguish her facade from her reality.
Discrimination.
It was a word Sierra knew far too well, a word constantly whispered but never yelled. She knew in the country she lived in, having darker skin meant being a constant subject of discrimination. So much so, people would tell she was a four-leaf clover – “white-passing.” What they didn’t know was that in high school, she wasn’t cast as the Indigenous girl in the school play because she “looked too white”, or that later that year she was forced to sit in her deputy principal’s office and explain her family’s lineage and “percentages.” It was even things as small as the looks that made her feel more like a jigsaw puzzle missing pieces than she already did – the constant, “I didn’t know you were Aboriginal.’ Endless reminders that she would never belong.
It was in this disconnection that Sierra’s minutes felt like days, her body hollowed out, her thoughts a rabbit warren – a place of no escape. She’d never let the mask slip, though.
Aunty Tiana was the one who saw Sierra, sallowness aside. It was Aunty Tiana who first introduced her to the breathtaking world of Aboriginal dance. For Sierra, dance was a church. It gave her insight into the 60,000 years of culture that ran through her blood. It was the education that she had been denied her entire life.