For the longest time, I did not think I existed. Even now, I experience moments where I still feel I do not. I experienced the perplexing juxtaposition of simultaneously being in sight and transparent, like a window. I am highly visible but forever unseen — I am a Black girl.

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Three friends and I were going to the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. We all had been school friends since kindergarten; now, it was the summer before our fourth-grade year. Before coming to Sarah’s house, I knew we would likely go shopping or see a movie. My parents and I ensured I was prepared to be out. To explain, I was ten years old, carrying a tote bag stocked full of supplies like battery packs, Advil, Tylenol, eye drops, Zyrtec, cash, plastic bags for my friends’ medications, and tissues - Necessities I brought with me everywhere in case a friend of mine was in need. This habit started early in my third-grade year. I emulated my mother, who always carried big tote bags and purses. She kept various items in her bag to aid those needing something. My grandmother and aunts also abided by these same unspoken practices, so naturally, I grew to do the same.

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“Dad, we’re leaving! Do you have any money?” Sarah screamed to her entire house. Her dad ran down the stairs with the reckless abandon of a child during recess. “Do you have any money?” he asked, not really wanting the response he knew he would receive. She shook her head no and motioned for him to give her some. The other girls stood observing the conversation at hand, but I stood ready, for I knew the next words to come out of his mouth. “Maddie, do you have any money?” he questioned knowingly. I nodded to signal my affirmation and responded instinctively, “I’ll take care of her.” He nodded, satisfied, believing that his daughter was free from all the dangers of the world because I was there. He looked me dead in my eyes and instructed me, “Maddie, you're in charge.” His tone was comedic, and because of this, everyone, including myself, chuckled, though we knew the seriousness of his statement. “If any dude tries to take one of the girls or something, I know you’ll handle them. You'll protect them,” he added, still in a serious-yet-joking tone. I admit I was the most responsible out of my childhood friends. It is still something I take great pride in, but as I have gotten older, I have reevaluated statements/words like these that were spoken to me so often as a child. Did my friends’ parents say these things because they believed I was the most responsible? Did they truly trust me with the safety of their children because they thought I was a quick problem solver? Or that I was especially rational and dependable, maybe even too much for my age? The other girls, Kate and Emily, joined in with his subtly hurtful innuendo to say things like, “Yeah, Maddie, you’ll beat him up!” or “No one is as aggressive as you! You’re a beast!” I joined in excitedly, misinterpreting their faith in me.

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If you didn’t figure it out already, all my friends growing up were white. I attended a predominantly white institution and was the only Black kid in our grade. My friends are all from West Los Angeles — by that, I mean west of the 405 freeway. I am still friends with many of them, but as I grow older in age, these very interactions that I once interpreted as funny or endearing no longer seem as lighthearted as I once thought. I, a 10-year-old Black girl, having never once been involved in a physical altercation and who habitually retreated into her turtle shell at the slightest sign of conflict, was believed to be able to knock out a grown man. I was their bodyguard. I was their mother. These roles had become innate, a part of me, but I was a child, and I wished they looked at me for what I was, a girl. A girl like you, soon to receive her first period, whose boobs just started to grow in, and a girl who learned how to shave her legs for the first time. Growing up in a space where no one looked like me, I believed I was a deformity. My family had taught me to love my Blackness and the melanated features that came with it, but my peers’ rejected me for it. I saw their widened eyes when I came out of the pool and my nappy hair would rise to the sky; I heard the gasps when they saw my curvy figure for the first time, and I heard the judgments they made about my wide, West African nose. When my friends looked at me, they saw an intimidating, fearful, and aggressive woman — never someone’s pigtailed daughter.

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Finally, in my high school years, I was surrounded by more children that looked like me. From them, I experienced a rude awakening of understanding the lack of appreciation, love, and trust I felt from those I grew up with. I came to understand through conversation with my Black peers that my past was shared by others. I learned that I wasn’t crazy or a beast but a Black girl growing up in America. I dealt with the harsh reality at a very young age that those closest to me hated the things that made me, me. In response to my feelings of alienation, I succumbed to the compulsion of what felt like the only option left for me — assimilation. Only when I began to assimilate did my white friends treat me as an exception to the stereotypes they accepted as true of my community. Yet after changing myself to mirror my friends, I quickly realized that no matter how hard I tried to have the same mannerisms as my friends, talk the same way, dress in the same clothes, and have my hair resemble theirs, I would never be one of them. We all knew I would never be one of them. I was the only one to be excluded from group photos, never to receive compliments about my looks or body, and always the one to receive shocked and contemplative faces when I did my makeup.

Now, as a seventeen-year-old Black girl who has experienced what the Black women in my life who have lived and survived these same racially motivated experiences implicitly warned me of all those years ago, I know my experience was not my own but a part of a continuous cycle perpetuated by centuries of generational oppression and bias. I am left with pieces broken off of me from others' doings. Some pieces of my puzzle are forever damaged or missing, but I manage with what’s left and try to make it work. It is the unique but widely shared experience of Black Girlhood. I wonder now, in my late teens — While I stood ready protecting you with my sword and shield, who was there protecting me?

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We were never children to onlookers, nor are we, women. In this colony, we have learned to call home, we sit in the in-between of what has been taught to us as masculine and feminine, but these norms have left many of us unenlightened on what Black women and girls have learned through trial and error. The systems of this world cannot place us out of fear, so they imprison us within their white-centric subjugation. Our bystanders remain in the dark about what their ancestors preached and established about our community. How could we be the threat when we were simply trying to survive? We do not personify the stereotypes they perpetuate in our society because there is diversity within us. We do exist in whatever form we may choose. We are the children of our ancestors – invaluable yet neglected. Our Black girlhood is not something to be afraid of. Our Black womanhood is not something for you to take away. We do not deserve to go unseen due to your fallacies that we are the manifestation of promiscuity, domesticity, and anger because we have so much more to offer to this world. Still, we cannot break through the foundations built to undermine us, but we mourn together. For those who saw and still loved the world for how it treated us; for those who process that the world we live in purposefully tries to eradicate us; and those who do not experience the childhood they deserve. We mourn for our Black girls who wear business suits as toddlers.