SOY diferente. I’ve always had this innate sense that I was not like everybody else. When I was younger, not knowing any better, I just thought I was weird and the way people treated or reacted to me seemed to affirm that. Now that I’ve gotten to know myself and understand so many of my traits, both those I was born with as well as those that life’s experience developed, I recognize the beauty of my diversity. I was born in Guatemala, to two people who did not choose to make a family together, so even before my birth, the circumstances around my life and family were already being forged differently. I was an independent baby who needed space and calm, overly aware and hypersensitive.  As a toddler, I was precocious and spoke in articulate Spanish, my native tongue, by age two.  Then my mother and I immigrated to the USA when I was of school age. We spoke a different language and were brown people from south of the border in a Caucasian dominated society; this led to a socio-cultural, socio-political, economic and linguistic diversity that made me even more of a stranger in the world. Then came many trying years of childhood abuse, emotionally, mentally and physically by my stepfather, which would be the cause of the post-traumatic-stress-disorder (PTSD) that I would develop. During my key formative and educational years, my high intelligence added an extra layer of complexity to an already “different” persona.  I was not supposed to be smart, let along gifted, as a Latina in America; this combined with my high sensitivity and the trauma at home, led to targeted bullying, micro-aggressions and marginalization in life well into my thirties. As a result, my PTSD became complex.

I didn’t know any of this about myself, not until as cliché as it sounds, I arrived at mid-life and experienced a crisis. Especially revealing was the discovery that I was a highly sensitive person or HSP, which is a trait that a significant portion of people in the world possess, around 20%, and which has been known and studied. Being an HSP makes me neurodivergent, as brain activity and patterns of signals behave differently in my brain than in that of a neurotypical person. This, combined with my cPTSD, which is acquired neurodivergence, has really shaped whom I am as a human. Yet for so many years, all of this was unknown to me. I just knew life was harder for me than for those around me and that no matter how much I tried to fit in, I didn’t.

Once I started exploring who I was, where I came from, why life was overtly challenging, why I had a hard time keeping steady work, why I was always a bit on the outside looking in, I wondered, are there other people like me? How would I know? How would they know?

Then it occurred to me, the only way to know, is to talk about it. So, I decided to tell you, my story.