First Generation: Identity, Belonging, and a Session That Asked Hard Questions

My parents came to the United States when I was three. I grew up in a suburb of Cincinnati, went to American schools, spoke English without an accent. I also came home every day to a household that was entirely, intensely not-American: the language, the food, the expectations about what success meant and what a daughter owed her family.

I became very skilled at code-switching — reading what a situation required and becoming that version of myself. I was also, by the time I reached my thirties, exhausted in a way I couldn't quite locate or explain.

The session didn't resolve the ambivalence. What it did was show me that the exhaustion I'd been carrying wasn't failure — it was the reasonable consequence of doing an enormous amount of work, every day, that most people around me didn't know I was doing.

There was something in the session that felt like: you are allowed to be tired. You have been doing something difficult.

That felt, unexpectedly, like enough. I came back from the session with something I didn't expect — not resolution, but compassion for the person who has been navigating this for thirty-three years.