I hardened the muscles on my face, furrowed my brow, and clenched my lips into a hard line so I would look more like a man. Though the impression I got was not of a man but of a woman pretending to be a man, and not very well, as my features softened back to their original expression. This reminded me of how after I learned to speak with an American accent, and tried to get back my old Filipino one with its hard consonants and singsong intonation, it always felt like I was making fun of the accent even though it was the one I grew up with. I also couldn’t manage to use that accent in daily life because it reminded me too much of being made fun of, being thought less because I came to high school in America speaking that way. Maybe my mind also protected me from my male past, as I gave up and accepted that I could no longer perceive myself as a man or harden my features to look like one. I wondered to what degree the image in front of me conformed to what was real, but as soon as I wondered this, I also reminded myself that there is no single, objective truth, how reality is so much more malleable than people make it out to be, that the first step in making something real is believing that it could be real, that my very presence in front of this mirror, in this school, in the world, was itself proof of the power of belief in a reality that seemed entirely farfetched.

So the mirror was just a mirror now, the reflection of a reality I myself perceived, that I was a woman. But as soon as I understood this, I also understood that the reality of my race was even more embedded, how I imagined myself as a white American for so long that I didn’t need to even try to conjure an image of myself as an albino Filipino to know that I could not, because I’d relied on my image as a white person for even longer than I had as a woman. Even though I knew I was albino and lived with the sensory reality of poor vision and the palest skin, I perceived myself to be a white person of European descent when I looked in the mirror; I relied on that perception to bolster my belief that I could do well in America, that I was better than the brown rural peasants I left behind.