5 year trauma-versary
Five years ago, on a seemingly ordinary Saturday like today, the results of a DNA test I took for fun shattered my world. For 34 years, I'd built my identity on a foundation of sand. Biracial, half Cuban and half Indian, that's who I was told I was. That Saturday, I was putting my daughter down for a nap when my phone buzzed with those DNA results. I called out to my wife, and together we looked at the results on the screen. Speechless, I stared at the screen. 100% Indian. Thinking about it now, I wasn’t surprised by this. I felt a strange sense of understanding. It explained so much - my upbringing, the outsider feeling I'd carried for years, and so much more. Then came the shock. Shocked by the weight of this revelation. It meant I'd been lied to, deceived repeatedly. I was flooded with all the moments in my life when I questioned the nature of my being, only to be dismissed as imagination. I was gaslighted more times than I can count and made to feel gui