Intimate Strangersss

✨ Healing Through Expression ✨ 🇵🇷 Imagine growing up in a house where it was normal — encouraged, even — to share knowledge, talk openly about dinero , or name betrayals without fear. A house where your voice was seen as a healing instrument instead of a nuisance. Well…that wasn’t my house. When I learned something new and wanted to share it, it was often met with: “Get out of here! Go find something to do. Or I’ll give you something to do.” Usually, that something was an adult task (like folding fitted sheets or fixing the lawnmower) that nobody ever showed me how to do. 🤦‍♀️ 💸 The Money Taboo Money in our house was like Voldemort. You know — He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. There were so many mixed messages: 💰 “Money is evil.” ⛪ “Give 10% of your dinero to the church.” 🪙 “Help the poor — they’re more important than you.” It was confusing. Many of us didn’t want to know anything about money. We just wanted to get our ...

  🌋 BEGINNING: What Happened to Us They called it “corrección” , but it felt more like castigo . They said it was “por tu bien” — but the words came out sharp. They meant to love us, maybe… but their tongues had trauma in them. Spanish words that hit like chancletas: ¡Cállate! ¡Estás loca! ¡Siempre con tus cosas! 🩴 🧸 The niñ@ inside of us? Scared. Frozen. Convinced that being small, quiet, or perfect would stop the noise. 🎧 The teen in us? Started wearing headphones. Not to vibe… but to survive. Because if they couldn’t hear the insults, maybe they wouldn’t stick. (Spoiler alert: they stuck.) 🌎 The young adult in us? Now over-apologizing at work, flinching at kindness, not knowing if this is “anxiety” or just regular Tuesday. We start Googling things like: “Is it normal to feel guilty for existing?” That’s internal violencia . Passed down like arroz con trauma. 🍚💀 🫁 MIDDLE: What the Body...

🧬 Generational Fog (a.k.a. “My family’s just like this”) Let’s talk about the patrones we were born into — the ones nobody explained, but we somehow followed anyway. Control. People-pleasing. Silence. Sometimes it’s not even just ours. These roles run in families. 🧃 About 30 years ago, I started waking up to the Puerto Rican intensity I was raised in — like how arroz con habichuelas with pork or chicken wasn’t just food. It was law. 🍚🍗 And then I did the unthinkable. I went full-blown Vegan . And gluten-free. 🌱✨ 🇵🇷 That’s when they really lost it. Split wigs everywhere. “But... how are you gonna get your proteína ?” They thought I’d joined a cult. I hadn’t. I just left the kitchen script. And then I found Buddhism. Not instead of Christianity — just alongside it. I was curious. I was changing . 🧘🏽‍♀️ My family didn’t take it well. The Buddha over Jesús? All hell broke loose. But so did I. And I haven’t looked back. We don’t need to fight our...

🧬 What No One Noticed — But You Are Now 🫧 You grew up with invisible feelings, so you longed to be seen. Your lineage learned to survive by hiding truth — now we’re remembering how to name it, without shrinking. 🛒 "No big deal, just crying in aisle 7 because I never learned how to have needs." 🪻 You were parentified, so closeness got tangled with merging. We come from people who stayed fused for safety. Now we’re learning: it’s safe to belong and still be ourselves. 📡 "Me: I need space. Also me: Where are you? Are we good?" 🌊 You didn’t get boundaries, so every relationship feels like too much — or not enough. Your ancestors couldn’t afford personal space. Now we’re discovering what it means to take up sacred room. 📱 "I love boundaries. I keep them in my Notes app and forget to use them." 🌈 You didn’t see emotional regulation modeled, so you wait for one person to fix it all. Before us, silence or collapse was the only optio...

If You Didn’t Know, Now You Know 💬 If You Didn’t Know, Now You Know This isn’t a summit, a course, or a TED Talk. This is just someone who had to learn the hard way… and decided not to keep it to themselves. I wasn’t born knowing how to care for myself. In fact, I was trained out of it — trained to keep the peace, smile politely, hold my bladder, and never make anyone else uncomfortable by existing too loudly. So if you feel like you’ve been faking adulthood with zero manual, welcome. You’re not broken. You’re under-parented, overexposed, and possibly still running on fumes from 1998. 🧠 Five Survival Needs They Forgot to Teach Us And no — this isn’t a checklist for how to “do better.” We don’t shame babies for not knowing calculus. So we’re not shaming grownups who never got these basics modeled. Let’s just… name it. Laugh a little. Breathe a lot. 🌬️ Breathing (Yes, Really) Turns out, *not breathing* is a trauma ...

✨ Why Are We Taught to “Love Our Enemies”? ✨ We weren’t wrong for asking. Maybe nobody ever slowed down enough to explain it to us — from a safe place. 🥣 🔍 What We Might Be Noticing Sometimes we hear words that sound kind — but feel confusing. “Love your enemy” can be one of those. It lands like a puzzle piece from a box we didn’t open. So maybe we can look at it together — gently, curiously — like kids holding a question up to the light. 1️⃣ In Spiritual Spaces 🔔 In some spaces that speak about spirit and peace, we’ve heard this idea before. It may have been meant as a way to stop cycles — the kind that spin forever when hurt meets more hurt. Maybe it was someone’s way of saying: “We don’t have to carry what they gave us.” 2️⃣ In Our Own Minds 🎧 Sometimes, we notice that staying angry takes a lot of space inside. It doesn’t always leave room to think, to breathe, or to dream. It’s not wrong to be angry. That feeling is honest. We...

🥣 Post-Combat Childhood: The Sequel Nobody Asked For 🇵🇷 Some of us didn’t come home from a war. We came home to one. 🪖🛋️ Not everyone had a chancleta thrown at them with Olympic precision, but if that rings a bell… bienvenido. This doesn’t read like a guide — more like a mirror. The kind that didn’t hang in our homes. Just a small flashlight in a hallway nobody walked down with us. This one’s for the kids who became bodyguards without signing up. 🧃🫠 Maybe papá yelled at things no one could control. 🌪️ Maybe mamá cried while stirring arroz and said, “I’m fine.” 😭🍚 Maybe everyone around us kept performing as if nothing happened — even when everything did. 🤡 We didn’t put on armor. We turned into it. 🛡️ So yeah, there’s flinching when someone slams a drawer. Guilt for saying “I’m tired,” even when the exhaustion is loud. Explaining ourselves — over and ...