On Behalf of Both My Halves
        It’s annoying. Being mixed that is. Except annoying barely scratches the surface of the seething frustration and dull loneliness that echoes within my heart. Time and time again, I always find myself wishing to be whole; to be able to pick and choose a side. To be able to feel a sense of belonging with people like me. Throughout my entire childhood and even now, I feel like a fraud.  From being invalidated to fetishized, it’s challenging feeling comfortable with myself. Neither side seems to want me. I feel like a trapped tiger being poked and prodded in a cage while people shout at me, trying to tell me what I am. “What are you?” they’d ask, only to answer their question themself. I’ve been told I was Mexican once, by a stranger. My words always fall on ears that choose not to listen.
        I wish I wasn’t white. I feel guilty for saying so, but I can’t lie to myself or anyone else. There’s enough of that going around already. I’ve had people I thought were friends tell me to my face that they hated white people. They called us “ugly”. As a young girl half of my heart breaks. “You’re an exception, because you’re half,” They’d say. My identity conforms to convenience in the eyes of others. So, I distanced myself from my whiteness. I clung to my Japanese ancestry like a small child clings to their mother. I tried so hard to fit in. To feel adequate. To feel worthy. 
When I was 15 I tried to find my mother’s face on my own. I only saw a white woman stare back at me and I hated her. She was the reason I wanted to erase part of myself in pursuit of my other half. All my life, I’ve longed to be whole. I just wanted to be like my mother, and my grandmother. I think they’re the most beautiful women in the world, and it pains me that I can’t see them staring back at me in the mirror.  So I cry. I cry and I push away my whiteness to try and feel more whole. I experiment with hairstyles, makeup, whatever I could to validate my existence. I was told to “Stop Asian-fishing” in 2020. An Asian woman cannot Asian-fish. Sometimes I feel as though I am burdened with rationalizing my existence. Why should I have to explain myself to everyone? Shouldn’t my existence as a half-Japanese woman be enough as is? It would have been enough for the United States Government to incarcerate me 80 years ago. 
When I am not being invalidated for trying to juggle both of my halves, I am being fetishized. Mixed children, no matter the combination of races, are fetishized. It’s not just annoying, it’s disgusting. Children are being FETISHIZED for their ethnicity like prize winning show dogs. People purposely have mixed children so they are “pretty”, but that is such a disgusting concept to me. Why are you trying to create the perfect “breed” of child to show off on Instagram to all your co-workers? When I was younger I took it as a compliment, because it was one of the few times where I felt pretty in my mixed skin. Having my cheeks squished by obasans outside of the grocery store telling me and my mother how beautiful I was because I was mixed. They called me “walking-doll”. But, only because I was this hybrid of a human. My coach literally said I was exotic. Exotic is not a word you use for a person, that’s an adjective you’d use to describe a dragon fruit. Biracial individuals are not objects to be fawned over. We are real people, with real feelings, and with real experiences.
As time passes, I hope to make peace with myself and that others will better understand the troubles that come with being mixed. It isn’t simply having the best of both worlds, but the worst as well. My existence is valid regardless of what other people think. I am just as Japanese as I am White. For better or worse, but nothing will be able to change that. Even if someone avidly protests that I am a hillbilly redneck white woman or if they still, somehow think I am Mexican. I am a person. I am proud of my freckles, my eyes, my face. Without both my halves, I would not be Sierra. I am two halves of two cultures combined. Two halves that make a very proud and happy whole. A whole person who is a whole lot happier to be herself.