I'm biracial, damn it

I'm black, I roughly have the same shade as the two arms on the left. I'm in between. When I was growing up, my mom and dad are the same shade as me but one thing didn't sit right with me by the time I got a little older, my grandmother and my sister are lighter than the rest of us including some of my uncles so when it was time to look into my family tree for a school project, I found something intriguing. Other than the fact that my great grandfather was a WWII veteran, he was white and for years, I've always gaped if that changes things for me but my stepdad was always telling me and my siblings that we're 100% black.

I didn't start to see myself as biracial until I was 22 or 23 because I spent most of that spring and summer listening to Logic and even though I look different compared to him because we're different shades, we're still biracial regardless and it was almost tough to come to terms with it because I was so used to being one thing but now I'm two things in one so when it got too bothersome for me to question myself, I asked my mom since she came from my grandmother. My mom said we're biracial. My mom is black and so is my dad but my grandmother is biracial because she came from my great grandmother and great grandfather. It was almost like when Luke found out Darth Vader is his father.

When I started to come out to people that I'm biracial, I always got the same looks or the same answer from some of my friends. "You look black" or they look at me like I'm misleading everyone to get attention so I have to tell everyone that not all biracial people are going to look like Logic or Derek Jeter. So I got in touch with someone I was in a play with when I was 19 to ask her how she deals with it because she told me that she didn't know she was biracial until she was 35. She told me that it's okay that I don't look biracial because all biracial people come in different shades so that helped me a little.

I always knew that something about me felt different because, for some reason, I thought there was something about me that I didn't know and it all made sense because I remember being a kid and seeing a picture of my great grandfather and not knowing who he was. I think I remember asking about him to my mom or someone and I didn't get much of an answer but I'm not too sure about it. Another thing that made me think something was different about me was that I remember noticing small white spots on my right hand and my left arm. Lastly, I would look at my aunt and see that she has vitiligo but I never knew how she got it in the first place so everything was just confusing me until I said screw it and asked about it.

Now, I'm a little better about knowing that I'm biracial but there's some stuff that I have to deal with like there's still the fact that I have to fight a lot of standards and not react to some stuff so it's frustrating. There's also a lot of pressure on me as well since I don't come from a "normal" biracial family since it all started with my great grandfather and great grandmother and even though my mom has been carrying that, it's still weird that I never knew sooner.