I was brought up with a culturally colorful childhood. Russian Jews on my mother's side and Andean Colombians on my father's side. My father, being an immigrant, made Colombian culture a large part of my life, and my grandmother, being an immigrant, refused to have me be sheltered from the horrors the Holocaust cast on her family. I grew up as a small child spending an hour or two after school being taught Russian by my grandmother, and spent weekends mangling broken Spanish together with my Colombian family over Skype calls. I got to enjoy making arepas with my dad and eating tostones for lunch, and my mother's tangy borscht soup for dinner. Like I said, a very colorful childhood.
However, there's something other than joy and warmth that the multicultural individual often experiences. When I was young, I didn't exactly feel a cultural connection among my peers. Usually for show and tell or storytime, I would bring something my dad brought back from Colombia or tell a paletable story of how my great-grandmother survived the Nazis. Sometimes I would share traditional clothing and wear my sombrero vueltiao to show and tell. I was very proud of who I was, and I understood what cultural pride was from a very young age, but there seemed to be a disconnect between my peers and me. They couldn't relate to me, and I couldn't relate to them. In elementary school, there were no Jews and no Colombians, a few Americanized Hispanic kids here and there, but no one I could relate to culturally. And that created a feeling of isolation, a feeling that multicultural people know all too well.
I'm glad I was never bullied for being so proud and openly multicultural as a kid, but the feeling of not being able to fully relate to your peers and your peers finding you a bit outside of the norm wasn't the best feeling either. I remember on several occasions bringing fried ants (a Colombian classic) to school to snack on and share with classmates. Looking back, it was received, for the most part, really well, considering bringing bugs to eat at school would usually be a bullyable offense. But there were times when my stories or turns at show and tell weren't truly appreciated or understood by my friends and classmates, and that feeling of not being understood was enough to make me wonder if my cultures were something to tone down and keep to myself if I wanted to fit in.
For quite some time, as I got older, I stopped identifying as much with being Latino and let my pale skin give me a reason to pass myself off as an average Americana teen. I still would share my Jewish and Russian heritage every now and then with close friends, since it felt like European heritage would be the most relatable and acceptable thing to share, but I toned my cultural pride down to say the least. I just wanted to figure out how to fit in, as most teens do during that emotional and self-conscious phase of life.
Now, as an adult, I'm very outspoken about my heritage and strongly identify with being Latino. I make multicultural advocacy and education a large part of who I am, and I am certainly not quiet about it. While I was attending my first university, I was heavily involved with our Latin student union and our Jewish club, and eventually I joined Alpha Psi Lambda, the first co-ed Latino fraternity in the nation. Advocacy and education became my passion, and they still are.
At college, getting to involve myself and befriend other Latinos and Jews for the first time was such a monumental experience. For the first time, I felt like I found people I could relate to and fully be myself around. I felt safe and welcomed and understood in this crowd, and I knew that I had finally found spaces where I truly belonged.
For a lot of multicultural people, there is a phase or period of time where you feel pressured to Americanize yourself. You have to choose between fitting in with the majority population or picking isolation. Not feeling understood or fully accepted is the exact recipe for feelings of isolation and becoming self-conscious about your cultural identity. According to another blog post by North Star Therapy, feelings of cultural isolation can often come from:
- Feeling like parts of your identity are misunderstood or invisible
- Struggling to connect with cultural norms around you
- Holding back parts of yourself to feel accepted
- Uncertainty around how much of your background to share
Isolation causes one to believe that maybe there isn't any place they belong in. It can leave you feeling hopeless or even unwanted, certainly misunderstood. Community, though, is what I have found to be the solution. You can't wait for your people to find you; you have to go out and search for those connections and relationships yourself. If you want the cure to isolation, look no further than the people who have been in the same situation and have built a community on understanding, pride, and appreciation.
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