I have heliophobia but everyone thinks I'm colorist
Hi, I'm a content creator online and I suffer from intense heliophobia, I've been struggling with it since late 2019 and it has not faded, I am unsure of the causes but the sun triggers intense anxiety and fear and the sunlight on my skin makes me very uncomfortable and anxious.
I don't know what caused it exactly, but there's this stigma that phobias are the direct response of trauma and well, I guess you understand me in this subreddit.
The thing is, I'm a mildly popular creator and I speak up on themes of racism, classism etc and I stand by my views that they should be eradicated, however, whenever I try to share this part of myself, my phobia, people start accusing me of being colorist and having internalised racism.
I'm Mexican, my parents are brown, my skin gets tanned very easily, which never bothered me, in fact, I used to purposely tan myself before my phobia, here's when I suspect something could've triggered it because one time I got sunburnt so bad my skin literally hurt and was peeling off.
However all my family is kinda light skin but gets tanned very easily and intensely. I wanna state that this never bothered me, and it also doesn't bother me now to be very pale because of the YEARS that have gone without me seeing the sun.
But for some reason people think I am heliophobic because I don't wanna tan, that I wanna be white, that I am afraid of the sun because I'm afraid of tanning and it's simply not true, I don't know what to do, do you have any advice on how I could explain my phobia and talk about my experience?