As a Puerto Rican woman, born on an island that wears patriarchy across its forehead, I have come to see the women in my family as storms wrapped in silk.
My mother and grandmother were into healing the mind through sound (yeah like the 432Hz waves), optimism and a very neat denial of their flaws, always hiding behind a bright smile and positive affirmations.
When I go out people tend to find me special and exciting. I often hear, “You glow wherever you go.” But others see right through the smiles I have mastered, recognizing them for what they sometimes are: just another tool in my social emergency kit. Regardless, I no longer conceal my flaws, at least not as meticulously as I used to or as the women before me did. Instead, I wear them like armor, as if to say, “I’ve gone through it, and here I am, as bright as ever.” Annoyingly so that armor is still a kind of performance, and not everything that glows is worthy of plain admiration; sometimes it’s the lightning before the storm.
As I grew older, I realized… maybe none of us invented this performance. Puerto Rican women are not simply expected to be perfect, we are expected to be complete: independent, working, beautiful, virgins or mothers, with great self-esteem, who party and maintain a social life, yet not too much that’s all we do. Yeah I know, easy right? Especially living on a small island, where there’s little that goes unnoticed and less that goes unjudged. Inevitably, you find ways to make up for it. How? Class.
The higher your rank, the more leeway you are given. The richer your family is, the more room you have to fuck up without being defined by it. In the version of Puerto Rico I grew up watching, the rich girls always seemed to have a bag of cocaine and their goals sounded something like “party planner or freelance model” while the poor ones were too busy trying to make something of themselves. Then there were the exceptions in between, like moi. The girls who did not give a fuck despite everything they stood to lose (art mayor here woot woot), and the ones who were seemingly born perfect, remained perfect, and looked down on the rest of us.
I come from a small lineage of prestigious addicts, people who destroyed everything before I ever had the chance to. The type that was so hardcore I’ve had boy’s parents say they can’t go out with me because I’m the daughter of… them.
Still, I had been raised to believe I would be different. My mother made me into her little doll on a shelf, separating me from everything that could jeopardize what she wanted me to become. Any friend, cousin, or trait that resembled the parts of herself she wanted to escape, she steered me away from. She wanted straight As and straight behavior, and all I ever wanted was to please the unpleasable. I was expected to become proof that she could undo herself through me.
Her carefully crafted image shattered when I was around thirteen. In high school, people talked about the pain of their parents divorcing, but I had already grown up with divorced parents. This was just round two. Both of mine were separating from their second spouses at almost the same time and well, I inherited the wreckage. I took on the responsibility of protecting my younger siblings while my father “fixed” his alcoholism by becoming a religious fanatic and my mother surrendered herself to the bottle.
It was during this time that I became suicidal in silence. I wanted to die every day, but I could not be honest about it without being chastised or reminded of how ungrateful I was. I could not even express that pain through my art. I was told to create only beautiful or happy things and convinced that giving form to my real feelings would only make me sicker. Funny how the same darkness I was forbidden from expressing, was allowed to consume me in private.
By college, I still believed I would die before I ever had to become anything of myself, whether by my own hand or through my complete lack of fucks. I treated the world like my playground because consequences meant little to someone who didn’t expect to live long enough to face them. My newfound taste for rebellion was too sweet and too exciting to resist. My mother had gone from being everything I admired to my greatest source of misery, a crumbling tyrant whose every rule I wanted to break.
At first, I mistook that rebellion for freedom, “libertad por libertinaje” as they say here. It was only after developing self-esteem, self-love, and things I genuinely cared about losing that the weight of my choices began to settle over me. First came fear. I thought I had damaged my reputation so thoroughly that I was afraid to go outside and show my face. Then came shame for having been so careless and shortsighted. But now, it is something else entirely.
Taking a step back, I see all the weight placed on my inner child: an inherited demand to be perfect, from generations of women raised to become everything… only to destroy themselves in the process. I thought there would at least be a prize for all my effort, but instead, every achievement just brought on another expectation and fewer reasons to keep living by them.
The more I thought I was escaping her, the more similar I became, and I didn’t stop until the day I looked in the mirror and saw her staring back at me. I was her through and through, an embodiment of her pain, her hunger for escape, and her talent for disguising destruction. Maybe that was the real performance passed down between us, the insistence that we are fine while simultaneously falling apart. I still wear my flaws like armor, but I am learning that healing is not proving how brightly I can survive them. It is allowing myself to be imperfect and honest without believing I’m failing as a woman because of it.
Best of all, now growing is fun, taking care of inner mini me is my passion, being a better person than I was and helping those around me. Who would’ve thought? Hahahaha. Not me, teenage me can’t even believe I’m still alive.