Loving Myself As I Am: Aziza Shuler in Her Own Words

It wasn’t until my mother met my father, that she experienced a love unlike anything she’d ever known. At the tender age of 18, she had never truly beheld her own beauty, nor did she believe herself deserving of the limitless, all-encompassing love that my father lavished upon her. The sheer magnitude of this affection, previously unimaginable, touched her soul at its core. She’d found her soulmate. Yet, their love didn’t fill the void or heal the scars of her shattered relationship with her mother. 

Both my parents struggled with drug addiction, after all this was the 1980’s! But my mother faced a dependency on drugs that my father didn’t. He managed to maintain a sophisticated level of functionality. My mother who knew no bounds. When I was born, my parents already had my five older brothers. During her pregnancy with me, my mother was

in a women’s jail doing time for theft. The sentence might not have been long, but it was long enough for her to go into labor, give birth to me, and then painfully return to the confines of her jail cell without her newborn baby. Hours after I came into this world, my father was there to pick up his baby girl and bring me home to Washington, D.C. Two years later my mother gave birth to my sister. My parents had yet to overcome their addiction and it was a matter of time before the consequences of that caught up with us. 

I was a toddler when Child Protective Services broke up our family and forced the seven of us into the foster care system. That was the beginning of another generation of children deprived of a mother’s love. It was also the catalyst for a heart-wrenching journey of relinquishing my own self-love. 

Much like my mother, I had never truly seen my own beauty due to the scars of my childhood. In foster care, I endured mental, emotional, physical and sexual abuse. When my abusers beat me, yelled at me, assaulted and abandoned me, I believed I was worthless. Actually, I didn’t know I was capable of knowing my worth or that I held the capacity to feel love. I’d experienced turmoil longer than I’d experienced the warm embrace and safety of my parents’ love. 

As a child, I was made fun of for my distinctive features–large nose, big teeth, and skinny frame. If I had known I was the spitting image of my beautiful mother, those words wouldn’t have cut so deep, butchering my self-esteem. But, at that time, my maternal grandmother and aunt were raising me. They despised my parents, particularly my mother, and taught my older brother, younger sister, and I to never speak of our past or our parents. 

When I turned 12, my long, thick hair began falling out. Initially, it was a small bald spot, but then it quickly spread throughout my entire scalp until I was completely bald. I was diagnosed with Alopecia, a condition where the immune system attacks hair follicles, leading to hair loss. In many cases, doctors attribute alopecia to stress and trauma. As a teenager losing my hair and occasionally my eyebrows and eyelashes, I felt different and, worse, ugly. My aunt bought me wigs to conceal my bald head. Not once did we have a conversation about seeing beauty beyond my hair or seeing beauty beyond other imperfections that I viciously hid. Throughout elementary school, I had eczema. I wore long-sleeved shirts, even in the height of the summer, to hide my arms and a stomach that was plagued with hyper-pigmented, flakey, bumpy rashes. 

Hiding became my identity. But this camouflage only amplified my insecurities. Those insecurities screamed at me every time I looked in the mirror. I had constructed an armor that I wore every time I stepped out into the world – wigs, makeup, and a steel guard that I put up to keep people from getting too close to my vulnerable side. The side that lacked self-confidence. 

Staring at my reflection in the mirror, it often felt like I was gazing into something far beyond the physical. The looking glass seemed to reveal not just a reflection but a portal into the intricate, tangled web of my insecurities. In those moments, there was no armor. I could see the remnants of past wounds–the suffocating shadows of childhood and generational trauma that I desperately tried to outrun. 

I was running without a destination in sight. Much like my mother, who used drugs to escape the void, I too was running from the same emptiness. Only I wasn’t addicted to drugs, I was addicted to perfection. Running, for me, meant masking my insecurities, wearing wigs, being meek, acting overly kind, pursuing unattainable love, and obsessing over career achievements. Soon enough, just as my mother discovered, none of it was ever enough. None of it brought me inner peace. I remained unfulfilled, running an endless marathon.