In her own words...
Two warring sides battled within me, and both won.
The story begins with nine-year-old me who only knew that 1+1=2, and that phonics was pronounced ‘f-onics’ and not ‘p-onics’. I knew I was bilingual in English and Portuguese but wondered why my classmates didn’t know where Brazil was. I barely knew who the current US president was, but could read at a high school level. I was a writer, but didn’t know it yet.
When I settled down in the US after an early life of missionary work and traveling, I was baffled by the simplicity of a “regular” life. We were always on the road in Brazil, or in a different country, so having to sit at a desk for eight hours a day at American school did not bode well with me. My usual story writing sessions turned into a hectic 7am routine that left no time for creativity, which led me to write my stories during math and science lessons that I could barely sit through. I would share my collection of short stories with my classmates, and then translate them into Portugese for my parents.
For the first few years after we arrived in the US, we were poor. Since we didn’t have a green card, my parents couldn’t work “official” jobs, leading my dad to work at our church that didn’t pay him very well. WIC and food stamps were terms I knew much too well, and our tiny apartment was buzzing with rodents and rats. Besides the obvious struggle of waking up next to a herd of cockroaches, I had a miserable internal yearning to go back home and travel. I wanted to relive the days in Brazil when I would wake up and smell Pão de Queijo from the local market. I wanted to see the cluttered streets of Campo Belo and my aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents again. Ultimately, I was afraid that I would be stuck here forever; to me, this was not the final destination.
The longer I stayed, however, the more I fell into an American way of life. When I was 12, we all finally got our green cards, and my parents got better jobs and could provide better food, school supplies, and even rented a new house - one with fewer rodents. School became my priority, leaving less room to worry about my identity or how much I missed my previous life. My Portuguese began to diminish, and while I still understood my parents, speaking and writing required more brainwork than before. This angered me: Why was I starting to forget everything that made me unique? Brazil was my thing, and it would always be; why couldn’t I control my inevitable descent into an American life?
In my sophomore year, I enrolled in a creative writing class on a whim, which reintroduced me to the wonderful world of words. For a while, I had forgotten how refreshing it was. Writing became a new refuge from my own conflicting identities, for with it, I didn’t have to succumb to any negative image of myself that I believed; I could design my own person. I could invent entire worlds with a stroke of a pen, and that pleased me, for control was something I lacked. I was transported into a reality of my own, as if I could be the director of my own movie, controlling the characters while also maintaining an air of surprise and suspense. It was as if the words on the page reciprocated my emotions, and I couldn’t have felt more understood.
My newfound love for writing presented me with the fact that I’m not who I thought I was. I’m not fully Brazilian, nor am I fully American: I am both, which makes me unique either way. Brazil was the beginning of my story - they were chapters of my life that explained how I came to be. However, America is my future - chapters of my life that are yet to be written, and a story that I can create on my own. Through writing, I was able to change my self-perception, and I believe I can change the entire world through words. I believe that home is a place you build on your own; it exists outside where you came from or where you are. To me, home is a pen and paper, my friends and family, and the pleasure I get from helping those who need it. Home is who I am, and I will keep writing my own story until the book is closed, and I finally put down my pen.