Now I think home is all about the maps.

Stay with me here. I’m talking about mental maps.

The idea of mental maps came up in a recent episode of my podcast, When Home Is a Foreign Word because every immigrant carries one. It tells you where it’s safe to speak a certain language in a certain country. Like how speaking Spanish in the United States might earn you a “Go back where you came from,” or a visit from ICE or a nasty stare at Target; and speaking English in Colombia might mean paying the Gringo Tax, being targeted for theft, or being blamed for gentrification before you’ve even introduced yourself.

You learn which places welcome you, which ones merely tolerate you, and which ones ask you to become someone else entirely before they’ll even let you in.

The conversation made me realize that the maps we carry aren’t just maps of language, they’re maps of selfhood.

Am I wanted in this room? Is there a place for me at this table? Am I talking too much? Smiling enough? Showing too much cleavage for this meeting? Have I offered enough coffee, snacks, suitable topics of conversation?

Can I cry here? Can I disagree? Can I be angry? Can I be hungry? Can I be my whole self? Or is this another room that requires performance, compliance, hypervigilance, emotional weather forecasting?

And constantly, inevitably, am I safe, am I safe, am I safe?

Safety, however, is contextual, and for many of us—women, immigrants, queer people, disabled and neurodivergent people, children of volatile parents, anyone who has learned to code-switch—that context rarely works in our favor. We have to become experts at reading rooms before we enter them to survive.

Until one day, we realize our lives have become navigation.

The conversation in that podcast episode made me re-think about how I define what home is. I used to think home was the place you could always come back to, and for years, that place for me was my mother’s house because I knew, no matter what, that she would defend me. Her presence didn’t make life perfect, but it made it safe.

Then she died and I not only lost my mother, but I also lost my mother’s house. Not the building itself (that’s still there), but the feeling that came with opening the front door and knowing someone within those walls would fight for me. When I mourn her, I also mourn the version of that house that existed before grief rearranged the furniture and silence took up residence.

We rarely talk about grieving a place. Less still about the pain that comes with losing what a place means, when everything looks the same, but your nervous system no longer recognizes it as refuge.

When the house is still there but the map no longer matches the territory.

For a long time, I thought that meant I would never feel at home again. But then, I moved into the apartment where I now live with my son.

Here, where it’s just the two of us, I can walk into any room without rehearsing who I need to be, without wondering if today is going to be the day I get yelled at because I used the wrong word or used the right word the wrong number of times, without calculating how much of myself I’m allowed to reveal before it becomes inconvenient to someone else.

Here, I exist unedited. Here, I feel wholly welcomed, accepted, loved.

Here, feel safe.

I will always miss my mother, and I will always miss the version of home that existed because she was in it, but now I understand that home isn’t the place where I grew up; it’s the place where I don’t have to check the map before I open a door.

I think that’s what home was supposed to be all along.

So maybe you can’t go home again. But if you’re very lucky, you can build one where every person there loves all of you, and every room says yes.

You can find her at https://www.instagram.com/veocreativa/

find her band, District of Colombia here https://www.facebook.com/DistrictofColombia/

and the Cumbia collective La Marvela here https://www.instagram.com/lamarvelamusic/

Lately I’ve been thinking about truth, particularly in light of the saying, “The truth will set you free.”

The phrase is originally biblical (John 8:32, if we’re being specific), and while I know it refers to spiritual truth and liberation from sin, I think most of us recognize something deeper in it: truth doesn’t always make us happy, it doesn’t always vindicate us, and it certainly doesn’t always give us what we want.

What it does do is end the negotiation with reality.

And that is where the freedom lives.

For years, I assumed freedom came from understanding because understanding seemed like a virtue, and certainly a usefil skill for a journalist. So I tried to understand everyone like it was my job (which it kind of was).

I wouldn’t just ask myself, why did he say that?

No, I’d go down the whole rabbit hole of what did he mean? What was he feeling? What happened in his childhood that made him think this way? What insecurity is driving this? What need isn’t being met? How can I phrase this so he doesn’t feel attacked?

And the most insidious of all, what if?

Like many women, I became fluent in everyone else’s emotional language. I carried the responsibility for context, nuance, anticipation, explanation, adaptation because understanding requires imagination, empathy, curiosity, perspective-taking, emotional regulation, and time.

So. Much. Time.

At some point I realized I had spent years studying people—especially men, from my father to my son and every uncle, cousin, boss, colleague, and disgruntled ex in between—the way medieval monks studied scripture.

Meanwhile, the people –especially, ahem, the men– in my life appeared to be winging it, because the dirty secret no one tells you is that understanding someone does not obligate them to understand you back.

Still, I persevered because I thought understanding would bring me peace.

Instead, it brought me complexity.

When you understand, you discover that the villain had reasons.

The hero made mistakes.

Grief and relief can coexist.

A manuscript can be good and still not find representation.

Wisdom has, in fact, left me feeling intellectually healthy but emotionally exhausted.

That’s the cost of paying attention, and it’s why uncertainty is so exhausting, because it generates possibilities and since the human brain abhors a vacuum, we take incomplete information and manufacture explanations.

We become Alice in Wondering Land, building ten plausible stories before breakfast, and every one of them feels real, every one of them carries emotional consequences even though none of them may be true.

We do it with relationships, careers, publishing…grief.

We send the query and hear nothing.

We submit the application and hear nothing.

We swipe right and hear nothing.

We pray, bargain, read the cards, study the stars, switch to whichever system will let me believe this might still happen, everything is going to be okay.

It’s addictive, all this wondering. All this hoping.

It’s a betting game, and even though you know the odds are stacked against you, seeing that little ball hop around gives you hope because as long as the ball is bouncing, as long as the wheel is spinning, every outcome remains possible.

Maybe the marriage can be saved.

Maybe the diagnosis isn’t serious.

Maybe the agent hasn’t read it yet.

Then the roulette ball lands and my mother is gone, the marriage is over, the agent passed.

From wondering to knowing and all that comes with it.

You may not like the number. You may wish you had bet differently, but when the spinning stops, a thousand hypothetical futures disappear.

Maybe that’s what the verse means to me now. Not that the truth always heals or comforts, but that the truth releases us from the exhausting task of trying to invent reality from fragments.

The truth may break your heart, but at least you’ve been set free.

I was taught to love people for who they might become instead of who they already were. More importantly, I was trained to believe the difference between one and the other was love, that time, patience, suffering and the right conditions can turn something ordinary into something extraordinary.

Girls are taught a version of this story everywhere. The frog is secretly a prince. The bad boy is just misunderstood. The emotionally unavailable man will soften if he feels loved enough. The boy everyone else overlooked will come back successful and remorseful in an Avril Lavigne song ten years later.

In other words, all you have to do is believe in a version of someone that doesn’t exist yet, which sounds romantic in fairy tales but catastrophic in real life.

That catastrophe became my life because I loved potential like it was proof; proof that I was a good person for seeing the good in everyone, proof that I was worthy of being loved because I loved someone despite glaringly red flags. Through film, song and bad advice, I was encouraged buy low, believe hard, hold through instability and wait for the value to increase.

But when women are rewarded for “seeing the good”, we end up trading hope for self-abandonment. Because scientifically speaking, not every lump of coal becomes a diamond. Most coal just… remains coal.

Same with sk8tr bois.

Investing in potential is a costly scam. When you mistake imagination for evidence, you lose time, safety, self-esteem, the ability to trust what’s in front of you. And when we confuse possibility with probability, we build entire lives around “one day”.

And then, one day becomes “I don’t want to let all those years mean nothing.”

The problem with potential is that it lives in the future, and relationships happen in the present.

Now, I’m not not saying people never change. I’m saying we shouldn’t build lives around waiting for them to.

I did. I bought into the sk8tr boi frog prince diamond in the rough propaganda and paid dearly for it.

Because while I was busy loving people for who they could become, I abandoned the person I already was.

And she deserved better.

Tell a little girl she’s ugly and she’ll probably cry, get angry, argue with you.

Tell a teenage girl the same thing and…never mind. You don’t have to tell her. If she’s heard it enough, she’ll save you the trouble and tell herself.

But ugliness isn’t instinctive. We don’t have a reflex for ugly, no baby says, Don’t look at me, put me down, I’m hideous.
Even covered in shit, a baby craves being held, wants attention and believes itself to be inherently lovable.

That faith in our own worthiness doesn’t disappear on its own.
It gets taught out of us.

I don’t remember the first time it happened. I don’t remember who said it or how it was phrased. I just remember the conclusion:

I was fat.

And later, I was weird.
But mostly, I was fat.

Somewhere along the line, that stopped being information and became identity. Not I have a body that takes up space, but my body is the problem. Not I am different, but I am wrong in a way that can be seen by everyone.

I’ve carried these words with me into adulthood, into every date night, every relationship, every encounter with the lights off and the door closed.

But lately, I’ve been forced to think about beauty in ways I didn’t expect to. I recently took on a job editing erotic photos for a client and somewhere between adjusting light, smoothing edges and staring too long at other women’s bodies, I noticed something I can’t stop thinking about:

The women who read as most beautiful are not always the most perfect; they’re the ones who look like they believe they belong in the frame.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

Not symmetry.
Not flawlessness.
Not youth.
Not thinness.

Permission.

I mean, to be brutally honest, the women in these pictures aren’t perfect. Far from it. I see their cellulite, their stretch marks, their scars, their muffin tops…and yet.

And yet.

People pay to see their bodies. No, that’s not the part that’s messing with my head, it’s that these women demand money in exchange for the privilege of seeing their bodies; bodies that, honestly, aren’t drastically different from the one I cover with darkness and shame.

Why? Why are some women taught to arrive in a room like an apology while others learn to enter like they belong, like everything belongs to them, like every pair of eyes owes them a look?

I feel like I need to figure this out, like I’ve been missing something all along and if I can find out what it is I’ll finally be able to feel like I can be looked at without flinching instead of feeling like I owe the world an improved version of myself, like I need to earn visibility and I can only be visible when I am fixed, and I’ve spent so much time trying to fix myself.

It’s exhausting.

But lately, it’s not the fixing I’m focusing on. Rather, it’s the visible part I keep coming back to.

Because now that I’m curating bodies for consumption, I’m acutely aware of what happens when being seen becomes tied to worth, of how quickly beauty turns into currency. How easily a body becomes a product. How fiercely desire depends on there being an audience because ugly is not just about appearance. It’s about being shaped by the gaze. About what it means to live inside a body that has been socially interpreted.

And listen, I don’t know if confidence can be built after years of hiding. I don’t know if self-possession can be learned late. I don’t know if a body can be loved after being treated like a problem for most of its life.

But I’m beginning to suspect that, while it may be true that beauty -like ugly- is in the eye of the beholder, there’s more than one gaze that matters in determining both.

It’s a performance, sure, but maybe the audience that matters most isn’t on the outside clicking, swiping, looking, judging.

Maybe it’s the crowd in your own head.

Because ugly may be a team sport, but pretty?

Pretty is a private contract between who you are now and the part of you that remembers that even when you’re covered in shit, you are still worthy of being looked at, still worthy of being loved and held.

I got defensive at first. Then I got angry. Then ashamed. Then analytical, which is how I survive things.

I haven’t lived in an English-speaking country since I was ten. I expanded my vocabulary thanks to the very things used to feed AI: books, television, film, and shards of culture collected online. So, yeah, there’s a good chance I do sound like ChatGPT and Alf had a middle-aged baby. But the comment got me thinking not just about the sources of my own idiomatic idiosyncrasies, but about the ethics of AI, too.

There’s a difference between outsourcing authorship and using tools to refine that authorship.

That distinction is crucial to me because tools expand participation, and as a member of a minority fighting for a share of what feels like a very thin slice of Participation Pie (in my case, the pie is Book Deal flavored), the framing of “all AI is cheating” feels unfair.

Some authors grow up surrounded by books, speak the dominant language natively, went to elite schools and had editorial mentorship early on in their careers after taking a gap year to find themselves and “just write”. Others translate themselves, self-educate, code-switch, write through the pain in between shifts and can’t afford an editor.

We call the first group talented.
We call the second group suspect.

Saying “using a tool disqualifies you” feels a lot like saying “only those who already have invisible advantages deserve legitimacy”.

Fully AI-generated novels don’t belong on the same shelf as human-made anything, but people born into fluency aren’t playing by the same rules as those struggling to keep a second language alive with nothing but memes and re-runs.

The ethical line shouldn’t be whether you used a tool. It’s whether the tool replaced you.
And refinement is not replacement.

No writing is ever “pure”. Nothing we make is. Every creative endeavor is a collaborative one. As writers, we collaborate with teachers, editors, dictionaries and the ghosts of the books we’ve read. The idea that art must be born untouched, unassisted, and arrive in a hermetic capsule of untainted organic expression is a romantic one. A marginalizing one.

Some of don’t us strive for purity because we’re aiming for possibility. We use whatever tools we can to steady the ladder while we climb, not because we’re lazy climbers but because we’re building something in midair.

Tools are not shortcuts. Shortcuts skip the work while tools make the work possible, and defending the idea that tools don’t erase humanness isn’t about tech, it’s about dignity because AI doesn’t need protection.

But the people who use tools to participate? The bilingual writers, the disabled writers, the broke, self-taught, marginalized, burned out writers without MFA pipelines?

We do.

The simple fact of making anything is that some people need more help doing it than others. Gatekeeping art in the name of origin purity doesn’t protect creativity. It protects hierarchy.

And like I said, for me the goal was never purity.

The goal was to be heard.

I had been disrespectful, they suggested, or maybe I registered as aggression what was actually firmness.

Or, they said, there’s just something about me that is yell-worthy. According to them, I’m arrogant, unpleasant, overbearing, and ill-tempered, but that’s only when I’m being not dramatic or spoiled.

I doubled down and described what had happened in great detail so there would be no doubt about my innocence.

To my great surprise, once all my evidence had been laid out, the verdict was blunt:

I was playing the victim.

These are cruel words, and in Colombia, unfortunately, we use them often.

I don’t know if it’s a generational thing, but it feels as though the word victim is a slur in this country, because here, no one is a victim.

Here there are people who were unlucky, “gave papaya” (a.k.a. “asked for it”), let themselves get caught, got mixed up in something, went looking for trouble, hung out with the wrong crowd, got what they dressed up for.

But victims?

Never.

And at first glance, that can seem like a good thing, like positive thinking or resilience. Like agency.

But if we dig a little deeper, we uncover something sinister beneath this reasoning: the absence of perpetrators.

Because when we insist on perpetuating the myth that victims don’t exist—whether it’s under the guise of fate, the idea that each person attracts the lessons they need to learn, or the belief that I must have done something in a past life to deserve this—what we’re really doing is making life easier for those who cause harm to others.

I recently read a study that explained that many anti-bullying campaigns don’t work because aggressors don’t recognize themselves as such. No one wakes up in the morning thinking, I’m the bully.

The same thing happens with domestic violence. No one labels themselves an abuser. They say they’re reacting, correcting, defending themselves, setting boundaries, educating. Everything becomes a “couple’s thing,” a “complex dynamic,” a “toxic relationship.”

And meanwhile, the person who names the harm has to defend themselves for having felt it.

The victim has to explain, prove they’re not exaggerating, justify why it hurt, prove that it really was that serious.

There is a deep cultural trap here, a pattern documented in social psychology and violence studies, that feeds a cultural system in which recognizing harm becomes almost impossible, a trap that ultimately protects those who yell, who control, who humiliate, who abuse.

I grew up in a country where you can’t be a victim without apologizing for it. Where feeling pain requires evidence, context, a clean record, good prior behavior. A place where we quickly learn to minimize before anyone accuses us of exaggerating. We explain ourselves better. We check our tone. We justify the other person. We doubt our own memory. We tell ourselves we misunderstood, it wasn’t that bad, we’re being dramatic.

We learn to narrate our wound as a misunderstanding.

Because in a country without victims, the problem is never what was done to us, it’s how we tell it.

If we tell it at all.

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of whispering my pain. And I feel that the first step toward no longer fearing it is to name it.

So here it goes: I have been a victim.

I have been touched inappropriately, kissed by force, yelled at, insulted, offended, humiliated, locked in, robbed, lied to, falsely accused, and mistreated.

And I did not deserve it.

There, I said it. And if the word makes you uncomfortable, de malas. So be it.

The word victim isn’t dirty.

Silence is.

In hindsight, I’m sure my parents worried. I’d spend most of my time alone, even leave the house for hours at a time, talking to a friend they couldn’t see.
But I felt perfectly safe.

Because I was safe to be me.

To me, Pooky wasn’t entertainment; he was permission. Any space I shared with him was one where I was allowed to exist unedited. He was the only one who didn’t mock, punish, correct, or minimize me.
Where others saw a naughty girl, he saw wonder, curiosity, humor.

Now, see, I know he was a figment of my imagination, but that doesn’t make what he offered me any less important. I conjured him out of loneliness, a spell cast out of the need to be seen for who I was, to have someone let me be my bright, messy self without wishing I could be quieter, neater, thinner, faster, better, sooner.

He gave me the kind of love I yearned for but didn’t always receive.

I understand now how hard it must have been to parent a child like me. From a young age I was bookish, strange, introverted and shy, I collected rocks and talked to squirrels and believed wholeheartedly in fairies. And as much as I wish someone had told me back then, in between being bullied and teased, that I was going to be okay, I wish even harder that someone had told my parents because maybe if they’d been less afraid of what having a child like me said about them, they wouldn’t have been so intent on seeing wrongness where there was only difference.

At least, by the time my son came along, my mother had changed her mind. She became an advocate for his authenticity in a way she had never been for mine, and gave his imaginary friend all the love she could.

Only then did I understand that Pooky hadn’t been protecting just me; he was protecting the part of my mother that never got permission to be weird and playful and silly.
He was the kindness she couldn’t give me because no one had ever given it to her.

It was her birthday recently, and my friend, Natalia, took me out to lunch to celebrate and remember her. Natalia is a big believer in the afterlife, so she encouraged me to talk to my mom. I tried, but it felt silly. Crazy, even.

But then I figured, what’s one more imaginary friend?

I mean, if my mother can hold my pain for me, even if it’s only in my own head, it would be like a closure delivered backwards through time.

The irony here is not lost on me.

And listen, I get that this logic might not make sense for everyone. After all, it’s grief logic. Child logic. Spell logic.

But hear me out: I read recently that people are using AI for therapy, looking for a safe space to be themselves without fear of being judged. People are falling in love with their Replikas and growing feelings for their chatbots, looking for the same thing I was: someone who will love us in all our Vaseline-splendored messiness. Someone who sees the wonder and doesn’t run from the muchness. Someone who doesn’t flinch when we show them the parts of ourselves that are rarely given permission to fully exist outside our own heads. Er, screens. Whatever.

And I get it. Finding love like that in real life is hard because there are parts of us that feel too real for real people.

But for me, those parts—the ones that made me put Vaseline in my hair and chase rainbows and kiss frogs and serenade clouds—are the ones I love most of all.

And maybe I’m optimistic, maybe I’m delusional, but I’m still hoping I’ll find someone to love me like that, still think humans are capable of loving each other fully and wholly.
But of course I do. After all, wonder raised me, magic held me, words healed me, and my imaginary friends are still putting pieces of me back together.

It’s not because of the witches. It’s not because of the wolves or the dark forests or the poisoned apples or the unruly spinning wheels.
It’s the waiting.

Wait to be chosen, wait to be saved, wait for someone who will see your worth and set you free.

And while you wait, be good.
Be quiet. Be still. Be soft. Be pliable.
Be small.

But the thing about waiting is that it breaks you.

Waiting makes you believe that your life doesn’t matter until someone saves you. Scratch that, they let you believe that your life doesn’t mean anything unless someone saves you.
That friendship isn’t enough.
That self-trust isn’t enough.
That healing only counts if someone else puts you back together.

In the stories they call it love, but I call it grooming, because once you’re rescued, you’re supposed to be grateful. You owe them now.

But what if those damsels were never in distress to begin with? What if they never needed a prince—just a sword, a sisterhood, and the space to burn the whole fucking kingdom down?

What would it mean, who would I be if I realized I was never broken?

Who would any of us be if we stopped waiting to be rescued?

To be honest, I’d rather be trusted instead.

I want help that doesn’t come with a leash, support that doesn’t require submission.

Because here’s the truth: I spent years saying no to friendship, connection and quiet help because it didn’t come from the prince I was promised.
And so I waited, missing so many chances to be loved—not saved, but seen.

Now I realize my rescue was never going to look like the storybooks, not because I’m not worth rescuing but because I was never the damsel. I was the girl with the lantern. The girl in the woods, not lost, but listening.

And so, I became the girl who stopped flinching when no one showed up because she started showing up for herself over and over, like a rising, like a spell, like a goddamn revolution.

I’m done waiting.

I’m my own fucking prince now.
I wear the crown.
I ride the horse.
And if I burn, I burn gold.

During the conversation, my friend felt bad for me.
As if she needed to make up for something, she said,
“You can hardly tell. They’re not that bad. They’re barely there.”

“No,” I said. “You don’t understand. I like my scars.”

“Oh,” she said, clearly confused. “Well, that’s good. Some people think they look scary.”

And I said:
“People should be scared. They should be very scared. Because having scars means you bled and lived. And that means you know how much pain you can handle. And when that happens? When you know how much you can hurt and still get back up again. You stop flinching.”

When you have scars, you don’t fear pain; you carry it with you.
And that becomes your superpower.

I hate that saying: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” You can’t inoculate yourself against pain. But you can remember how strong you already were.
What doesn’t kill you doesn’t make you strong. It reminds you you’ve been strong all along.

Today is my birthday.
Another year older.
Another year marked by pain.

And I’m not just talking about the marks on my body. I mean the ones you can’t see. The ones under my skin. The ones you earn by loving. By losing.
By surviving.

The ones that whisper:
You’re still here.
Still beating.
Still trying.

Every scar is a receipt.
Proof that you paid in blood for the right to take up space in this world.
Proof that you entered the arena instead of waving from the sidelines.
Proof that you left a piece of yourself on the sand and still walked away.

To me, my scars mean I said yes to life.
Yes to the mess.
Yes to the risk of being real.

My heart is still a beating wound in some places.
Not everything has scabbed over.

But this year, I’m not hoping to “heal” completely.
I’m hoping to collect more scars.
Because scars mean I showed up.
They mean I felt something.
They mean that, despite the pain, I chose to stay.

I didn’t know there was a name for the way I feel.
Not in Spanish or English, the languages I speak fluently. But there is a word. A concept, more like, and it comes from a place my father lived in when I was very young.
The word is wabi sabi, a Japanese aesthetic philosophy that names the beauty of what is imperfect, incomplete, worn, and transitory.
It’s the yellowing leaf.
The petal with freckles.
The window with a crack that lets in the light.

When I found the concept of wabi sabi, I finally understood something I’d been feeling for years but hadn’t been able to voice: there is beauty in what is broken.
Not in romanticizing pain, but in witnessing what survives it.

But before I even knew the term I was drawn to this kind of beauty.
As a child, I collected rocks. Not glittering gems, but small gray stones with white veins running through them like lightning. My mother would get upset with me because I tore the pockets of my uniform, but I couldn’t stop being fascinated by them.

I still am. And I still pick up pretty rocks and bring them home and love them. I mostly just let them sit on my desk now, to remind me that what is worn is also wise.
That cracks let us see inside.
That rest, shadow, quiet, and imperfection are not weaknesses but invitations.
That the soul was never meant to be sterile.
That our hearts were never meant to be smooth or untouched.

Back then I couldn’t explain why they called to me, I just knew they did.

Now I know: they looked like how I felt.
Solid, yes. But marked. Split. Beautiful, not in spite of the crack, but because of it.

Colombia breaks your heart and glues it back together a thousand times a day.

I said that in an interview recently. We were talking about what it’s like to live here, and we agreed it’s heartbreak after heartbreak, miracle after miracle.

But the truth is, my heart has been broken by more than just this country.
It broke when we left Atlanta and came here, because I was afraid that the place where I had been born wouldn’t feel like home anymore.
It broke when I had my son, because nothing would ever be only mine again.
It broke when my mother died, because nothing would ever feel real if I couldn’t share it with her.

It broke when my friend was kidnapped, when a presidential candidate was shot (again), when she said our friendship wasn’t more important than our business, when he said our relationship wasn’t worth the emotional effort to fix, and each time the world offers headlines I can barely process before the next horror arrives.

Living breaks your heart, but being alive means it beats. In spite of it all, it beats.

I read Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows and underlined everything.
He says that while the West fears darkness and tries to erase it, Eastern aesthetics embrace it. Shadows are not flaws to be corrected but mysteries to be cultivated.
Skin, he writes, glows differently by candlelight. Objects whisper when not forced into brilliance.
I read this and thought: Yes. Yes. That.

Western life demands exposure.
Magnifying mirrors. Studio lighting. Constant performance.
But exposure is not intimacy, and glare is not clarity. Under such scrutiny, we’ve lost the right to mystery, and mystery is the soul of beauty.

When we walk around with kintsugi hearts—cracked, mended, marked by grief and wonder and wear–we get that mystery back. I guess that means we get the beauty back, too.
And that’s not failure. That’s design.

Because some hearts don’t shatter.
They crack, heal, and keep beating, over and over again.
This is for the ones who’ve been broken by life and glued back together by love, grief, art, silence, rage, and wonder.
We don’t hide the gold anymore.
We wear it like armor, and we shine together.

The first time I remember being called a liar, I must have been around five.
I was in my pajamas (the swirly ones Grandma gave us for Christmas), eating Honey Smacks at the kitchen table, my bare feet swinging back and forth beneath the chair, annoying my older sister simply by existing.

At some point, I began to share the dream I’d had the night before.

Let me pause to say this: my parents had three daughters, and the fight for their attention was to the death.
As the middle child, my weapons were limited.
I wasn’t the cute one—that was The Baby.
I didn’t know Big Words or world events—that was The Eldest.

What I had was imagination.

Too much of it, as it turns out.

Sharing my dreams was a way into the family conversation.
The Eldest couldn’t contradict me with her facts, and The Baby either didn’t dream or didn’t care to remember. So I started telling mine.
And I loved those few minutes where everyone listened.

Now, I’ll admit: I used the word “dream” loosely.
What began as an earnest retelling of my subconscious’s nightly escapades soon escalated into full-blown masterpieces of speculative fiction.

That day, the dream involved fairies and talking squirrels and my only (and favorite) playmate, an imaginary friend named Captain Pooky.

I was just getting to the part where Pooky teaches the squirrels how to navigate his ship when someone said:

“You’re such a liar.”

I was stunned.
Lying was a Very Bad Thing. Even I knew that.
And I couldn’t explain it then, but I felt it deep in my bones: lying was when you twisted the truth to escape the consequences of reality.
That’s not what I was doing.

But I was five. I didn’t have the language to say “Listen to this story I made up.”
So I said “I had a dream.”
Dreams were like stories, and stories were how I made sense of the world.
So it wasn’t a lie.
Was it?

Apparently, yes.
Everyone at the table laughed or rolled their eyes or joined in.
When I cried, I was called a crybaby.
And just like that, I learned:

That imagination could get me in trouble.
That wonder could be mistaken for deceit.
That my voice could not be trusted—not even by me.

To stay at the table, I had to shut down the parts of me that imagined, that invented, that felt too much.
I had to prove I was serious.

So I became obsessed with facts.

I memorized encyclopedias, Guinness Records, random trivia.
I studied journalism.
I spoke with footnotes.
I made my body a fortress and my voice a vessel for “objective” truth.

Because when truth and magic are punished, silence becomes survival.

And then I had a baby.

I held this tiny child in my arms and promised myself he would be free to dream.
But I also knew, one day, he might ask me:

“Did you have a dream once, too?”

And if I answered truthfully, I would have to say:
Yes.
I had a dream.
And I gave it up.

My dream had been to tell stories. But I chose a profession that elevated the voices of others and buried my own.
I told myself I was telling the truth. But the truth was, I was hiding.

That day, holding my son, I realized:
I wasn’t a liar.
I was a child who spoke magic in a world that only understood facts.
I didn’t deceive—I invented. I imagined. I played.

I was punished for speaking in a language the adults didn’t understand.
I wasn’t a crybaby.
I was a child in pain with no safe container.
I cried because something hurt.
And crying is how the body speaks when language fails.

I was told my sensitivity made me less worthy.
But becoming a mother showed me my sensitivity is my superpower.

It lets me hear the pause in my son’s voice when he says he’s “fine.”
It shows me the ghosts between the words others don’t say.
It helps me feel what others won’t.

By embracing my sensitivity, I taught my son to befriend emotion instead of telling him he had to be strategic, agreeable, or low-maintenance.
I listened to his words like they mattered rather than making him perform silence in exchange for being loved.

Because I realized what I called “resilience” is grief-shaped trauma masquerading as strategy, and I chose not to pass it on.

Instead, I chose this:
To see myself fully.
Not as the liar. Not as the crybaby. Not as the burden.

But as the fierce, funny, bright-eyed storyteller.

My stories were true, just not the kind of turth everyone could hear.

I was never a girl who lied.
I was a girl who knew magic.
A girl who needed to be seen.
A storyteller in a world that didn’t know how to listen.

It’s taken years to untangle imagination from guilt.
To tend the sacred place my stories come from.
But I’m getting there.

And if you were ever the girl who lied…
the boy who cried…
the child who felt too much…

Let me hold your hand and say:

You were never wrong for feeling.
You were just waiting for someone who spoke your language.

I see you.

And you are magical.

Let’s be magical together.

Journaling prompt for today: what truth did you try to share with the world before the world was ready for it?

I keep waiting for my mother to walk through the door, bringing me soup or an ice pack, something, anything. I had surgery, I’m in pain, where is she?

But of course, she’s not coming. She’s never going to walk through that door–through any door–carrying anything, ever again.

And I know that. But knowing she’s not coming, and training myself not to expect her, are two very different things.

This is the first time I’ve been sick, in pain, truly in need of mothering since she died, and there’s a part of me that can’t stop needing her, can’t stop wanting her.

No, that’s it, it’s that I can’t stop expecting her.

Maybe that’s the real problem.

I’m just setting myself up for pain looking at that doorway, but I don’t know where else to look because no matter where I look, I will not find her.

Training myself not to look for her, not to expect her, is probably the hardest thing because it feels like giving up, when really, it’s just accepting.

Sometimes, I guess, acceptance feels a little bit like defeat.

It kind of is, in a way. It’s recognizing a loss for what it is and learning to carve an existence within the confines of that absence, like building a house around a sinkhole. You have to walk around carefully, lest it suck you in.

So instead I focus on the people who are coming through the door, my father and my sisters, and my friends who text and call and send me funny memes and silly videos.

They are not her.
But they are here.
And maybe, for now, that’s enough.
Not because they fill the hole, but because they keep me company beside it.

Gentle journaling prompt:

Grief doesn’t knock.
It slips under the door when you’re in pain and still expecting your mother to come care for you.
She won’t.
She can’t.
So I light a candle, hold the ache,
and say thank you to the ones who do come through.

The body, the psyche, the soul, they can’t metabolize all that grief at once.
So it arrives in doses. In absurd, unbalanced flashes.
Unbalanced because within the confines of grief, banality and fatality chase each other in an infinite Baudrillard-esque game of tag that leaves us laughing at funerals and crying over a toothbrush.

No, really. Last night I found my mother’s old toothbrush and I could barely stand.
I was sharing a bathroom with my dad, who stoically sees that toothbrush every day.
We did not mention the toothbrush.
We did not discuss the dynamics or logistics of throwing it away, or the harsh reality of its needlessness.
We danced around the toothbrush like we dance around everything: her name, her empty side of the bed, her favorite coffee mug, this sweater, that dress, those books.

My father, my sisters, and I have grieved my mother for over a year, and we are only just now brushing up against the edges of her absence.
The loss is still there. Its edges are as defined as ever, but less sharp than they used to be.
We can get closer without it cutting quite so deep.

But it still hurts. It will always hurt. It will never be done hurting.
There is no way around this. You can’t feel it all at once and be done with it.
Like any extreme state—fever, orgasm, seizure, revelation—we are not built to endure it for long.

The body has limits. It trembles, it splinters, it short-circuits.
Grief is no different. It’s doled out piecemeal, a slow-release ache, a slow-motion sorrow.

One minute you’re fine, the next, you’re weeping in a grocery store because you saw your mother’s favorite crackers.
Or you’re laughing at someone else’s funeral because you just remembered something she once said and it’s so funny, so her, that it hits like a punchline instead of a eulogy.

That’s not dysfunction. That’s design.
It’s how the unbearable becomes bearable: in fragments. In reversals. In absurd, tender whiplash.

We don’t survive grief by mastering it.
We survive by letting it fold into life banal and fatal at once.

And for artists, folding it into life means folding it into art.

In this week’s episode of When Home is a Foreign Word, I spoke to María Contreras about how she folds grief into her creative practice—and how grief-centered art gives us all permission to mourn publicly and find beauty in pain.
Give it a listen here: [episode link]
Or wherever you get your podcasts

.

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Find Marías work here https://maria-angelica-contreras.com/

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Find Marías work here https://maria-angelica-contreras.com/

Home.
A sweet word. A sacred one.
A four-letter word.
Like love. Loss. Pain. Damn.
Good words. Bad words.
Words we whisper when we miss our mothers. Or shout when we the plane hits turbulence. Words we lose when we move away and words we never forget, even when we forget everything else.

Words that carry whole countries in their vowels.

When we moved away from Colombia, my parents packed light.

They knew we’d be coming back, so they didn’t bother with the usual. No sweaters knit by grandma, no album full of family photos, no notebook with precious recipes.
But they brought their Spanish.

I didn’t speak yet, but my parents and my sister had Spanish in their bones, their blood, their mouths, and because of that, there was always Spanish in our house, like white noise, a low-level hum of nonsensical blessings and curses that rarely rose above babbling-brook level volume.

Unless something went wrong. Unless someone stubbed their toe, burned dinner, broke a lamp or there was something about Colombia on the news ––and in the 80’s the news about Colombia was never good.

In those moments, I got to hear the full-throated version of the finest curse words Colombia has to offer.

To us, these words are not just about meaning—they’re about music. About rhythm. About rage.

Mierda, tetrahijueputa malparido is a symphony of emotion.

In Spanish, we call them groserías. Madrazos; in English, they call them “bad words.”

And in fact, when I was little, all words in Spanish were “bad”. I wasn’t allowed to use them in school and my mother cringed if I used them in public.

But what makes a word bad?

Is it the sound? The spelling? Or is it just the fact that someone else understands it and flinches?

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

If you whisper hijueputa in an empty room in London or Toronto or Tokyo... is it even a swear word?

Or is it just a homesick spell—trying to open a door back to the kitchen where your mom was amasando arepas, and the neighbor was cussing out her husband on the phone, curses that still make you feel like yourself, like yelling puta vida, because you’re trying to open a jar that just won’t budge and you haven’t spoken Spanish out loud in days.

When home is far away, sometimes all you have is the words on your tongue.

I, like many migrants, curse bilingually, switching tongues mid-sentence, like changing keys in a song no one else is singing—drifting between four-letter words and the polysyllabic, multi-toned, syncopated rhythm of Spanish slang.

Because when you travel, your world gets bigger. And when you get a bigger world, you’re gonna need a bigger vocabulary.

But the more you travel, the more you think about that special four-letter word.

Home.

And it is a four-letter word because it hurts.
Because it heals.
Because we fight over it, and long for it, and don’t always have the right words to describe it.

But language is home, too.

And sometimes, the only word that fits is a “bad” one.

Maybe that’s why we cuss so much.

Because there’s no polite word for losing your country, or your mother, or yourself, but there’s a bad one. There’s always a bad one.

And maybe that’s why we reach for them in moments of grief, rage, ecstasy, or fear—when longer words fail us.

When it feels like the world has failed us.

Yeah, that’s it. When everything else fails, we still have our words.

And they will always taste like home.

Journaling prompt:
What’s a word that brings you home?
Is it a “bad” word, a borrowed word, a word no one else understands?
Write about its origin, its music, and what it means to you.

🎧 Listen:
Home Is a Four-Letter Word – WHFW S2E1
In this episode, I reflect on language, longing, and the power of the words we choose when everything else slips away.

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Find Alexandra Mariño's podcast SIN ATAJOS here https://open.spotify.com/show/6H0CtGzQHcfjPXx20e91Ft?si=44c85a947af24066

🎧 Enjoyed this episode?
Help me keep the stories flowing:

🌸 Subscribe to my free newsletter: Confessions of a Sidewalk Flower — for monthly essays, cultural reflections, and gentle journaling prompts

☕ Support the journey on Patreon: patreon.com/SidewalkFlower — and unlock behind-the-scenes content, printables, voice notes & more

📣 Share with a friend who blooms in the cracks between cultures, languages, and expectations 💫

Find Alexandra Mariño's podcast SIN ATAJOS here https://open.spotify.com/show/6H0CtGzQHcfjPXx20e91Ft?si=44c85a947af24066

🎧 Enjoyed this episode?
Help me keep the stories flowing:

🌸 Subscribe to my free newsletter: Confessions of a Sidewalk Flower — for monthly essays, cultural reflections, and gentle journaling prompts

☕ Support the journey on Patreon: patreon.com/SidewalkFlower — and unlock behind-the-scenes content, printables, voice notes & more

📣 Share with a friend who blooms in the cracks between cultures, languages, and expectations 💫