While most people grew up surrounded by family and stories of their culture, I grew up with nothing but a vague clue to who I was from a young age. My parents never talked about where they grew up in, and when they did, it was with a tone of shame. My dad is a Taino, which is a native tribe to Puerto Rico but that's all my father would tell me. My mother is Chilean; however she said that her ancestors had come from central Spain. Growing up, I never learned my people’s language, not the dialect my father spoke or the dances my mother would talk about once in the blue moon when she tucked me in at night. I had a yearning deep down in my soul that I couldn't quite place a name on, my family practiced Pentecostalism, which took most, if not all things I could learn from my culture away. In Pentecostalism, I was not allowed to dance, sing or anything remotely considered sinful to the lord’s eyes. This took away my freedom to express myself from a very early age. When learning that the people around me had roots, I was surprised and completely interested, all my life I knew nothing about who I was inside, who my ancestors were. I felt almost inhuman, watching everyone gather in festivals and celebrate proudly, while I was cooped up, sheltered from the world. I grew envious of people who had strong bonds with their fellow people and their village. It only grew when my cousin had mocked me for my Spanish skills and mocked me for not growing up true to the Hispanic lineage, while her family had parties and friends that came over for dinner, she had mentioned how well she spoke and how white I grew up as if my father and mother’s genetics weren't enough to erode the stain of being ignorant of my culture. While I was stigmatized not only for how I looked, but I was also too light-skinned to be Hispanic and too dark to be white, and my rather olive-tone white skin excluded me from my people. My father’s side of my family quickly stopped trying to speak to me since I didn't speak or understand Spanish well. Today, I still struggle with my blood identity, learning from travel sights and blogs about Taino natives from Puerto Rico and my mother’s Chilean culture. I feel an empty space within my soul that yearns for my people, and my culture. I have been ashamed of myself when I've been called a fake Hispanic and a failure to my ancestors, but I want to learn from others and learn my true self at one point, just so I could feel whole again. Earning my degree in dentistry will help me travel to my home country and see the culture for myself, I give back to the community and I can finally find my people, and not only that, I am motivated to reclaim my culture, and to help other people like me, who struggle to know their place in the world and their culture, to not be ashamed of not knowing their language like I was, but to strive to learn more each day to be better than the ones who put us down. I may have learned to scrape together what vague notions lay within my parent’s tight grasp, and I may not ever belong with those who claim to be so woven into the land itself, but I prove to myself that I am enough.

The hardest part about growing up wasn’t the homophobia that ran rampant in the South where I was raised, in a small town in southern Alabama called Salem. It was the religion I grew up in. Pentecostalism was deeply rooted in my family. My aunt and uncle were pastors, and my family followed them everywhere they went. My parents never labeled themselves as Christians, believing that most Christians “followed the world and its sin,” yet church dominated my childhood. I attended services every Monday, Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday, learning the word of God from an early age. Despite my parents encouraging me to pursue relationships young, I never had any interest in boys. Instead, I found myself reading lesbian romance and creating only female characters in games like The Sims, long before I understood what that meant. When I was ten, my mother sat me down with my father and told me she had once struggled with being attracted to other women but chose to ignore it and marry my father instead. I didn’t feel anger toward her, I felt grief for the girl she could have been. Later that same day, my pastor told me I had demons in my soul and needed to repent for the sin of loving another. It took years for me to understand that love is not a sin. That realization came only after extensive self-reflection and surviving a decade long experience of sexual abuse without access to therapy, my parents refused to do anything about it then reluctantly kick the offender out, and from then I grew fearful of men. By the end of my junior year of high school, I came out to my friends, only to discover that they had known long before I did. Knowing that even kids at school could know me better than my own parents hurt me more than I thought it would. I don’t know if I will ever tell my parents. At eighteen, I was kicked out of my home and became homeless. I am currently living temporarily with my best friend while working toward my degree, but even here, religion creates fear. Her parents are also deeply religious, and revealing my identity as a pansexual woman could cost me the roof over my head. I have always yearned to love another girl, and I always will. Despite everything, that truth has survived shame, silence, and loss. Maybe in the future, I will never be shamed by the ones I love the most for who I love.