Rohan is about to get married and couldn’t be happier. However, when he looks back at his turbulent past, things weren’t always this way. He recalls his early childhood that was filled with different bleaching creams being caked on his face to make him fairer and the “oh, you must be adopted” jokes from within his family, because he was darker than his cousins. He didn’t realize how much of this he internalized until school, when he asked 7 girls to a dance and got rejections from each of them with a snide remark about the color of his skin, “That’s when I realized that my outside was such a deterrent that my inside needed to be way better.” Once he transferred to a different school, he felt a shift. He was now student body president and had joined a drama class. People liked him for who he was, his skin color wasn’t the only thing defining him and his drama teacher became a mentor to him when she saw him struggle. He finally felt at peace. However, this too came to an end when his family moved to the US and he started attending a small liberal arts college in Minnesota, “Undergrad was like starting from scratch again because I felt like the last two years I had spent in Bangalore were the best, I was loved.” There, he faced a different kind of oppression. To him, it felt like racism, colorism, and ignorance had been blended. He received a lot of underhanded comments and was subtly fetishized by his friends and classmates. He struggled a lot with being gaslit about his experiences, but gives credit to his Black friends and exposure to Black culture in helping him feel included and validating his feelings. He now lives in Chicago with his lovely wife, where he’s never the odd one out and diverse people are in abundance, and his skin colour is a point of pride for him now and not something to compensate for.