Everything Changed When I Stopped Trying to Look "Latinx Enough"

Kelsey Castañon is the beauty director at POPSUGAR.

Five minutes. That's about as long as I could sit cross-legged next to my abuela on the tan suede couch in her living room, where she would binge-watch telenovela after telenovela when I was growing up. It was a weekly ritual, my family's visits to her and my abuelo's 600-square-foot Las Vegas apartment, but the rapid-fire Spanish scripts were hard to translate, no matter how many times my Cuban-born father tried to teach me. So instead I watched in bursts, and once that time was up, I was gone — darting out the door at the first sound of an ice cream truck.

The impression those shows had on me wasn't quite as fleeting. A few cinco-minuto stretches later and my sense of self was all but vindicated for the next two decades: I am Latinx and damn proud of it, just like the women I'd seen on TV.

The only problem, of course, was that I didn't look like them — and thus began part one of my identity crisis.

It isn't politically correct — or hell, even factually correct — to assume all Latinx women share a singular aesthetic. There is not one skin tone, hair color, or otherwise physical trait that makes you more part of the culture than another, and yet I didn't know this when I was younger. All I knew was that my dad was born in Cuba and my mom was adopted and therefore didn't know her background, so I clung to my Cuban heritage like it was a wooden door from a scene in Titanic.

Still, having moved to a predominantly white neighborhood in Kansas at age 12, the only representation I saw in the media came in stereotypical, fetishized fashion: every woman had va-va-voom curves and hair out to there, with dark features as striking as the red lipstick they wore. My body, on the other hand, is shaped more like a hairspray bottle: straight up and down, the only "curve" being at the head. My hair is fine and lifeless, and I couldn't have navigated a tube of lipstick even if YouTube videos had existed back then (they didn't). My skin is light, like my mom and dad, but my dad and I also share olive skin tones, meaning we can get tan, quick.

And I did.

In fact, I did often. In high school, I spent more time at the tanning salon than I did in the library, willing my fair skin into darker submission — almost as if it were an obligation to offset my blatant whiteness, and maybe the Hollister jean skirt I was always wearing. I couldn't change my body, but changing my skin color was my first attempt at trying to figure out who I was (or, rather, who I wanted to be). Every Summer, I dyed my hair jet-black. By Winter, I'd look so starkly different from my sister and brother, people joked there was no way we were related.

Eventually, I landed a job in beauty and learned that the worst possible thing you can do to your skin is subject it to damaging UV rays. So at 22, I swore off tanning for good. And yet, that didn't stop my insatiable need to live up to those fabled beauty standards of being a Hispanic woman.

My therapist has told me this is normal. Growing up in the States, in a multicultural household with no direct connection to the Cuban culture I so strongly identified with, made me feel like an impostor. Deep down, I knew there was no qualifier to looking Latinx, but self-doubt can be a powerful, if not crippling, thing. It's why I tanned back in high school. It's why, even with a job that grants me unlimited access to the best hairstylists in the industry, I only ever dyed mine black.

But it wasn't until late December of last year, when a 23andMe DNA Kit uncovered a shocking family secret — that my father is not, in fact, my biological father — that I truly discovered the depths of my self-doubt. Within minutes, I was stripped of the Cuban badge I'd worn so proudly all my life, leaving one big question in bright neon lighting in my head: am I even Hispanic? Without taking a test of my own, I couldn't know for sure.

Struggling for solace, knowing I was nowhere near solace's zip code, I wrote through my fears and insecurities. I decided, with a chest full of anxiety and my family's blessing, to publish my story. As soon as my truth was out there, I could finally exhale — and I was surprised to find the one thing that finally brought me back to myself: community.

Hundreds of messages poured in, with one common thread between them all: who you are is not defined by the insignificant things — your culture is about your upbringing, your familia. After months of soul-searching, it took gentle reminders from strangers on the internet for me to finally accept that it's not what I look like or the results of a genetics test that make me unequivocally . . . me. I am Latinx enough as I am.

Of course, there is a world of learning still ahead of me. I will never have curves or big, beautiful hair, and that's OK. The road to self-acceptance isn't going to be quick, but I've since realized that the best lessons come only when you give yourself a little longer than five minutes to sit back and take it all in.