I've been told my whole life how much I favor my mom. I'm her mirror. Which is ironic because the relationship my mother has with mirrors is a relationship she passed on to her mirror-image daughter unknowingly.

I was shopping with my mom recently and she said something about losing 5 pounds. Don't you notice?, she asked earnestly -- rightfully wanting her hard work eating right and exercising to be acknowledged.

I don't see you enough to notice 5 pounds, I replied nonchalantly, barely looking up from the clearance rack I was deep-diving into.

That means you should notice even more... She looked discouraged. 

This conversation mimics a hundred (maybe even a thousand) conversations I've had with my mom in my 28 years of life. Conversations about weight, about body image, about a negative view of her outer self that no one else sees but her. Conversations I imagine she had with her mother and that Nana had with Grandmother, and that a million mothers have had for ions before. Conversations that, until recently, I didn't realize had impacted me so heavily.

What we were really having was a conversation about the person only we see in the mirror.

Most of my life I was lucky enough to be sheltered from harsh realities; not because my parents hid things from me intentionally, but because I lived an admittedly fairytale-like life.

My parents weren't just married, they were happily married and modeled what real love should look like. I didn't just have a roof over my head, I lived in a beautiful farmhouse my dad (re)built from the ground up. I didn't just have a family, I had an entire community of relatives on one road where a babysitter, friend, or role model was literally at the next stoop over. I never went hungry, never wanted for seemingly simple things, and didn't experience anything that scarred me beyond repair -- little loss, no trauma, few tears; hell, I didn't even break a bone until college.

I say all this not to rub anyone's nose in the dirt, but to say I lived most of my life wearing rose-colored glasses, enchanted by my own experience and unable to understand the existence of any other reality from my own. Sometimes I miss those rose-colored glasses and wish I could unsee some of the things I've seen while taking them off; other times I wish I could rip off the glasses that others wear. It's strange when I look back at my life and think about every time something was right in front of me that I was able to ignore because of my rose-colored blindness.

Lizzeth was one of my best friends in my kindergarten class. I remember coming home from school one day and mom telling me we were going to send a bag of clothes to Lizzeth. I didn't ask why. Lizzeth was my friend, so I probably assumed it was like a present. My mom never said, "Lizzeth is poor and her mommy can't afford to buy her new clothes." She definitely never said, "I came from a home where we struggled and I don't like seeing other kids struggle."...She just sent me to school with the bag and I gave it to Lizzeth. She hides it well, but my mom had her own share of loss, trauma, and tears before she should have. Sometimes I think she wanted me to wear rose-colored glasses because she never really got to.

(This is where my mom will stop reading and text me and say I should add in that she was well-loved and happy growing up -- because she was, but she was also a "mom" most of her life to her siblings while their parents worked, which forced her to grow up too quickly... So thanks mom for making my life sparkle more than it had to. You rock.)

Just like I did with Lizzeth, I walked through most of my life avoiding big questions and without seeking a deeper understanding of the things around me. Why was my house so much bigger than other houses on my bus stop? Why did my dad make me finish my corn because "there were kids starving in Africa"? Why didn't the moms of the kids on TV who needed "just 10 cents a day" take care of them? From the smallest discrepancies to the largest, I never bothered to ask why -- and no one bothered to ask me why I believed certain truths either. My parents rarely challenged my beliefs or opinions about the way the world worked, and few of my teachers prior to college did either.

I don't think I sought the answers to all the "why" questions until college. Even then I wasn't seeking answers because I wanted them but because my glasses were yanked off by people I met there -- peers, mentees, mentors, professors -- they all came with a set of laundry I needed to sort through to figure out more about my own perceptions of the world. Maybe that's my bigger issue with other peoples' glasses; it isn't that people wear rose-colored glasses, it's that they have no desire to take them off every now and then to examine why they're wearing them in the first place. Too many people are comfortable with ignorance; complacent in not knowing or addressing the bag they were or weren't handed at birth. I mean, who likes sorting laundry anyway?

My first day of class at UNC I remember sitting down in a 9:00am POLI101 class and the professor asking us to pair up with another student to share political affiliations (what an icebreaker, amirite?). I got ready to find a partner and do as I was told. We each shared the political parties we were registered with, but then we were supposed to ask one another why we affiliated ourselves with that party, and I couldn't.

I was stuck because no one had ever asked me why I aligned myself with certain values. This wasn't the last time I'd have to take a second for introspection and question my own beliefs. I've found over time that probing others or yourself with why can do one of two things: It will either 1) deepen your beliefs or 2) it will crush them entirely and force you to build new ones. Either way, you have to remove your glasses for a hyper-second.

There are plenty of harsh realities in our world I'm facing every day, and often when I hit others around me with the "Y-bomb" in response to an opinion they've stated, they get hostile. I can't blame them, the limelight is bright when you take off the rose-colored glasses and think about why things are the way they are. Gloria Steinem said it best: the truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.

No one wants to contemplate why, in homes across the US, we're throwing away uneaten food or unsold groceries while every 10 seconds a child dies from a hunger-related illness in the world. There is a never-ending tunnel of whys if you think too long about how we ended up existing in a world were 1% of the population own 99% of its wealth. It hurts if you think too deeply about the fact that out of 17 Sustainable Development Goals established by the UN in the 21st century, ten of them focus on things like access to clean water and ending global hunger. 

One of my fictional idols once said, "One day you're 17 and you're planning for someday, and then quietly, without you ever really noticing, someday is today, and then someday is yesterday and this is your life."