My "awkward" thing is that I cannot really swim, but I get into water with the enthusiasm of someone who absolutely can. I'll spot an ocean, and I'm in it before I've thought it through. I've paddled into secluded parts of state forests with no cell service and no one else around, all while technically not knowing how to swim. What I can do is float and somehow get myself from one point to another, but I genuinely could not tell you the mechanics of how. There's no stroke I'm using on purpose. I go, and it works, and that seems to confuse people more than if I couldn't do it at all. Not knowing how to swim while cheerfully diving into anything wet is apparently the strange part. That contradiction showed up clearly on a trip to Puerto Rico, where a group of us took a boat out and anchored somewhere with no dock, so getting to shore meant getting into the water. Everyone kept saying it only came up to their chest. I'm five feet tall. Chest-height on everyone else was well over my head. The current there didn't break into waves the way it does at the shore towns I grew up near; it just moved, steadily and harder than it looked. I was the only person on that boat who couldn't swim, and I got in anyway, floating and half-walking whenever my feet found the bottom, no clearer on how I was doing it than usual, but I made it to shore. The same contradiction came up again on a kayaking trip with a friend who, unlike me, actually knows how to swim but had never kayaked before. We found a quiet stretch of river in a state forest, empty because it's a pain to get to. It was fine until the current caught her kayak and flipped it, and the kayak was pulled downstream faster than we could follow on foot. We chased it along the bank, which was solid mud. At five feet tall, it hit me at the calves almost immediately. We both lost our shoes to it within minutes and kept walking without them, because there wasn't a version of this where we stopped to dig them out. We found the kayak caught on some brush downstream, and someone had to get in the water to retrieve it. My friend was too rattled from the flip to want to. I don't swim. The job fell to one of us who, on paper, was the worst possible candidate for it. We had life vests on, and I understood enough about that specific current to know it applied here too. So I got in, retrieved it, and got out. I've thought about why I keep putting myself in these positions, and I think it comes down to how I weigh risk against reward. I'm not reckless about it. I know exactly what I can't do, and I'm careful about the conditions I'll enter, the gear I'll wear, the moments where I'll actually hold back. But once I've made that assessment, I don't let the gap in my ability stop me from being fully present in the experience. Some of that is trusting a version of competence I can't fully explain. Most of it is being willing to stay in tune with myself even when the outcome isn't guaranteed, and finding that the not-knowing is part of what makes the moment worth being in. That's my awkward thing: a genuine inability to swim, paired with an ongoing, deliberate practice of enjoying the water anyway.

I never planned to work with immigrants. Growing up undocumented, I spent years trying to move past that word, not toward it. I wanted to be seen as American, not defined by a status I hadn't chosen. So when I ended up working full time at an immigration law firm, translating for clients, I thought of it as just a job that happened to fit my language skills. It stopped being just a job the first time I realized how much a single mistranslation could cost someone. A case type that looked similar to another could carry a completely different outcome depending on one detail in congressional law or administrative policy. I was not giving legal advice, but I was often the only person in the room who could make sure a client actually understood what was happening to their life. That is when I understood the shape of my own story from the outside. I had been that client once. Someone else had once held the words that decided what my future could look like. Now I see it everywhere I look. In accounting, in economics, in policy, the same question keeps showing up: who gets counted, and who gets left out of the count. I did not choose this thread on purpose. It found me through the work, and now I cannot do this work without it.