Thank you for what you’ve shared here. I can relate to this in an odd way myself. I didn’t learn until I was 30 that I had substantial, recent Jewish ancestry. The discovery was surprising to me but simultaneously unsurprising; through much of my life, people had been asking me if I was Jewish, often saying that they’d asked because I “looked” Jewish. Hence, in a way, learning of my Jewish ancestry simply made sense. Something clicked into place. Pieces fit.

In the years to follow that discovery, I finally began realizing that, while I’d never considered myself anti-Semitic, many of my adolescent complaints about my own features (and the poor self-esteem that resulted) stemmed from my having internalized beauty standards that were anti-Semitic. When I was younger, I didn’t realize where those “beauty” standards had come from, much less did I realize that I was, genetically speaking, a member of the group they’d been designed to demean; I simply “understood” as a girl that my hair, my nose, my smile, my bodily proportions were all somehow “off.” (I’ve since had similar revelations about my own ancestral links to Africa and the Middle East.)

I’m thankful that my self-deprecation ended even before I discovered those parts of my roots, and especially thankful that we are living in an era of increasingly “global” beauty, but in a way, learning about those parts of my ancestry has made me love and embrace my features even more. Still, I feel sadness when I think back on all the years that I wasted on condemning pieces of myself without even understanding where that condemnation came from: it came from something so old and ugly and untruthful and outside myself, and I regret that I ever let it make me hate myself at all.