🚫 What it means to have grown up with parental immigration stress and fear of deportation
Growing up with immigration stress meant living in constant fear that your family could be torn apart at any moment, where your very existence felt precarious and unwelcome.
You may have learned early that your family was treated as "different" or "less than" because of who you were, making you question whether you truly belonged anywhere. You developed a sixth sense for detecting subtle shifts in tone and micro-expressions that signaled potential rejection or danger. Your survival depended on reading rooms and people, picking up on undercurrents that others missed entirely, always scanning for signs that you weren't welcome.
You may have learned to hide parts of your identity or change how you speak and act in different settings, wearing different masks for different worlds. This hypervigilance to social dynamics makes you incredibly perceptive, but it's also exhausting. Even in friendly spaces, part of you braces for rejection, and you might find yourself gravitating toward fellow outsiders who understand what it's like to live on the social margins without having to explain yourself.