Stop Code Switching and Start Showing Up | Ep318

Stop Code Switching and Start Showing Up | Ep318

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Vanessa: So my son has a way of calling me out on things real fast. He'll say things like, "Mami, your podcast voice is not the voice you use at home." Because at home I have my Dominican mom voice. And when I think about it, I've been switching voices long before I even had the word code switching for it. I'm not quite my mom's Dominican voice, it's just more modernized, let's say.

I am a first gen, Dominican, ESL, eldest daughter, sister, mom, and wife. And if there's one thing that's true in nearly every single Latino household I've ever stepped into, that is that we carry all this with so much pride, so much pride, even when it's heavy.

And if you're listening to this in real time, today marks the start of Hispanic Heritage Month. And there's no topic that I wanted to open it up with more than this one. And that is the bridge generation, what it actually costs to [00:01:00] carry what we carry, and what I've learned to embrace instead, and that is my authentic self.

You're listening to the Free To Be Mindful podcast, the space for high-achieving women who give their best to everyone and are ready to keep some of it for themselves. I'm Vanessa, licensed therapist, speaker, and mom coach. I know what it takes to build a life you're proud of without losing yourself in the process.

Each week, we get honest about ambition, identity, and the parts of ourselves that we quietly set aside. Here we go

Vanessa: Hello and welcome to episode 318 of the Free to Be Mindful podcast. I hope that you're feeling good, looking good, and doing better in this world than you were yesterday.

So here's the thing that a lot of people don't say out loud about being first gen, and that is that it's never just one experience.

What it is though, is that it looks different depending on who's telling the story.

Some of us translated for our parents at seven or eight years old, standing in a pharmacy or a doctor's office, being the only person in the room who could [00:02:00] move between the two languages.

My version though, looks really different. And that is because Spanish is my first language, and then when I was around five or six, I learned English in school along with them. So because of this, I never had the exact job of being my family's translator. But not having that specific experience doesn't mean that I skipped this bridge that I'm talking about.

Because when we identify as first-gen and as a high achiever, they start to look like the exact same skill set. And that is the switching, right? The switching never really stops from when we were five to now, it just changes rooms. Because the kid who fills out her own school forms just because her parents couldn't read the fine print, is the same person who now may be negotiating her own contracts, right? She, meaning me, is still translating just different kind of paperwork.

And here's the part that gets to me every single time I think about it, and that is that nobody is [00:03:00] translating for you.

You spend years building the skill of reading a room and adjusting yourself to make everyone in it more comfortable, even when it meant making yourself smaller by softening your accent, by picking your words differently for a boardroom than you would for your own kitchen. And you rarely get the same thing handed back.

That kind of constant translating comes at a cost that nobody really warns you about. Because you can spend so much energy making sure that everyone else is comfortable that then you forget to check whether you are, and you just keep going at your baseline, which may be a lot of discomfort because, again, you're making yourself smaller to make everyone else feel more comfortable.

And this wasn't how it was for me when I grew up, because I grew up in both New York City and North Jersey, and this is like one of the most diverse pockets of land that you could land in, in the United States.

So I didn't know what it felt like to be "an other," to be [00:04:00] "a minority" as a kid, not even a little bit. But that all shifted the day I went to college. I went to the College of New Jersey, formerly known as Trenton State College, and suddenly, I found myself as being like one out of two people of color in a small classroom.

I remember sitting in psychology classes, and when the textbook mentioned Latinos, it was like everybody's head would look at me, and I felt like I had the responsibility to speak for every single Latino who ever existed at the age of 18.

And for me, this othering was hard in college, but it was also hard once I started working. I didn't know the unwritten rules of things, how to negotiate a rate without apologizing for asking, which rooms and which conferences actually mattered to walk into and to be seen. How ownership and equity even worked when nobody in my family had ever owned equity in anything but a house.

My parents had never been in those rooms, so there was nothing, no map, no blueprint that they could ever hand [00:05:00] me besides really good work ethic, I had to work my way through errors and through hard times, through making my journey longer because I didn't have a blueprint for these.

And this gap didn't close once I'd left the classroom. It just followed me further into every single professional room after that. And I feel it now more as an entrepreneur.

And I do wanna make one thing clear, because Latinos have entrepreneurship woven right into who we are.

And I love how that's true even in my own family, right? My uncles and older cousins went from farming in DR, to owning bodegas here in New York City, to then moving back to DR and building big businesses there. My aunts cook, they do hair, they find a way to make anything work with their hands every single time. Half of them could probably run a big company if anyone had ever shown them or handed them the paperwork.

And I have at least like 30-some cousins on just one side of my family. [00:06:00] And now my cousins, I mean, they're professionals. I have doctors, teachers, military. My cousins have built amazing careers despite all of our parents being born in Dominican Republic and arriving here as young adults with nothing, nothing handed to them.

And yet, despite them having amazing careers, no one in my family is a therapist and a multi-business entrepreneur at the same time the way that I am. And it's part of why I helped start the Latinx Practice Collective, which is a coaching and community platform specifically for Latinx therapists.

And that's because I know the exact loneliness, being the first to build something that nobody in your family has ever built. And I know that's a story that so many Latino clinicians carry.

And that place in entrepreneurship, regardless of what career path you have, it can be a lonely place if you let it.

For a long time, I thought that the answer was getting better at code-switching, right? At rehearsing which tone to [00:07:00] use before I walked into a meeting. At softening my accent, although I don't feel like I have an accent, but many of you tell me that I have like a New York City urban accent, I've been told.

That I'm softening the so-called accent even without realizing it, that I was doing it. Staying quiet at first just to read how everyone else in the room responds or how everyone in the room was talking before I decided which version of myself to bring out. That's the switching that I spent my life doing, and that sometimes, sometimes, once in a while, still comes out.

But what I've actually learned to put aside is the switching itself as much as possible. And what I've learned to fully embrace instead is just my authentic self, all of this, all of that you see and all you hear. And bring that into every single room I step into. Into every boardroom, into every meeting, and then even into every therapy room I walk into.

And if any of this sounds like [00:08:00] you, if you've spent years getting good at adjusting yourself so that everyone else stays comfortable, I want you to hear what I'm about to tell you, not just because it's my lived story, but I want you to take it for you.

Because let me tell you, when I forget a word in English, whether it be in a meeting or whether it be with therapy clients, with parents, I say half jokingly but also very seriously, "Sorry, I was ESL. Sometimes I have a hard time getting the word that I'm thinking of in English because it comes faster to me in Spanish."

And even though I say, "Sorry, I was ESL," that's not an apology anymore. That's just true to who I am.

When I'm with a first-gen kid client who's upset because her parents won't let her go to a sleepover, I get it, and I let her know that I get it because I've been in that exact conversation myself at her age with my own parents for the exact same reason.

And then when I'm with first-gen parents, [00:09:00] I sit in the real tension with them wanting familismo and respeto alive in their kids, and also wanting to parent differently than the way that they were parented because they're just trying to do better. I get that in-between stage, and both of these things can be true at once for them, for me, and for you.

As an entrepreneur, I show up fully as me. I don't hide my Latinidad anymore just to make other people feel comfortable. I don't straighten my hair anymore just to appease people as I always used to do. No matter how many times my mom tells me, "Ponte decente when you have an interview or something important," I don't always blow out my hair anymore.

I don't turn down my salsa as I walk out of my car and into my office. And in the therapy room itself, I'll do EMDR bilateral simulations to a Bad Bunny beat if that's what the client vibes to.

My clinical training and my culture should not be in conflict of one another. And it's [00:10:00] taken me years, years to stop believing every single thing found in the textbooks which were written by people who don't look like me, who've never had to hold both things on at once. None of that has to be a performance for anyone else's comfort, and it doesn't have to be for you either.

So I wanna leave you with something to carry away from this podcast today and to actually use this week. Think about the different rooms that you go in and out of, that you move through every single day. And maybe it's the version of you at work, maybe it's the version of you at home, or maybe it's the version of you that only shows up with the people who've raised you and who know the truest you. Notice which one of these versions of you takes the most effort to keep up with. And then pick one room, not your whole entire life all at [00:11:00] once, but just one room where you're allowed to let that effort go and intentionally let more of your authentic self show up there instead.

And then the most important part is doing this intentionally, but then reflecting on it and seeing what actually happens when you show up more authentically.

Amigas, if this episode found you at the right moment, please send it to someone else living in the middle of these two worlds where sometimes you don't feel like you're neither from here, you're neither from there, but you're just somewhere in between. Send it to a sibling, a coworker, a fellow first-gen friend, someone who needs to hear this message for themselves.

Want us to start actually talking about these things out loud. And these conversations do tend to happen in rooms with the door closed, but it's okay to let these doors open and to invite other people to listen in on the [00:12:00] conversation, to learn from it, to have an idea of what it is to live life through our shoes so that we can all understand each other a little bit more and all grow together.

If you're new to the show, please hit follow or subscribe because this season we're going deeper into these types of conversations than we ever have before.

Thank you so much for listening in, and as always, remember, in a world where you are free to be anything, you are always free to be mindful. Catch you next time. 

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