By Casandra Krajisnik

Dear fellow High Pointer,

We aren’t so different from each other. We are both figuring out the next chapter in our lives, debating whether to stay in the comfort we may have in the current chapter while living in a world that teeters between chaos and peace.

But I also live in a different sort of limbo than you may be in. Or maybe we live in similar limbos that can barely begin to understand the other.

That limbo is being a first-generation mixed-race American. I call it a “not enough” limbo.

I am white, but not white enough.

I am Mexican, but not Mexican enough.

I am who I am, but I don’t “look” enough one way. I don’t look enough of one race, and some people insist I must not be a mixed-race person. I live in an American nightmare where I don’t belong but am required to pick a side that won’t entirely understand me. Even though people will deny me simply because I don’t look like them.

The reality of being a child of immigrants, especially the firstborn and mixed-race, is that you fight to fit in with society and the environment around you. It’s not until you stop trying to bend to everyone else’s concept of you that you finally feel like you simply are you.

I had to bend to my own rules, my own concept of myself.

Children of immigrants have to accept their differences and live in a world all of their own, which not even their siblings will fully understand, to find their self-confidence. Sometimes, it takes a lifetime.

I’m lucky I found myself while still in school.

As a kid, I hated going to school. I loved learning, but I avoided people.

My socialization wasn’t at the same level. For almost six years, I couldn’t communicate that I was being bullied or the emotions that came with it.

For almost six years, I wasn’t given the chance to learn conversational English that my monolingual peers had.

I don’t remember much other than pain and isolation in my elementary school years. I do remember how much I wished no one else would face an injustice.

Unfortunately, I fell prey to injustices most of my life.

In my own extended family, I’ve been turned away from and treated like an idiot or lesser than for not being “purely” their race. In my schooling, even in college, I’ve been treated like an inconvenience, especially for how I pronounce my name.

“How do you say your name?” teachers ask. “Cas-ann-drah or Cas-awn-dra?”

“Cas-ahn-dra,” I say, mimicking my mother’s accent since I could speak.

I’d get blank faces and a frown. They wanted me to stay within the box of the two American pronunciations. The easy ones. Teachers would pick one of the American pronunciations, and I’d shrug it off to save the headache of an argument.

I say, “That’s fine. I don’t care.”

“No. Which one do you prefer?”

I’ll always prefer the way my mother said it with a Mexican accent, flowing and softening the consonants and vowels.

People consistently choose a pronunciation of an American variation.

I’d like Cas-ahn-dra, but it seems too great a courtesy for people to try. It’s too much time to care to pronounce my first name correctly.

My confidence took hits for years. I came to expect micro disrespect from professors, from other people, from peers. I don’t mind helping someone learn how to say my name, but many don’t care to ask for help or even try.

While my confidence was low, my little sister never seemed to stop gaining hers. In a way, she’s who showed me how to just be confident.

Anna, my sister, is two years younger than I am. We grew up together in the same white two-story house on the same street, forming polar opposite personalities but a close bond. Despite being raised together and having gone to most of the same schools in a constantly-growing High Point, our memories aren’t the same.

Over 18 years of sisterhood under the same purple roof, but our understandings of each other’s lives and memory couldn’t be more different.

I was never a confident person until near adulthood. Anna always seemed to be since elementary school. We disagree on a lot of memories we have and ways to approach relationships. We acted on fear or anger very differently, often causing a day of tension between us.

What we can agree on is the struggle of being unable to conform or portray ourselves as “American” and not being able to understand certain social norms, like TV shows or the way we do things as individuals.

“It was hard growing up in three different cultures at once,” Anna says. “But it was also an experience I wouldn’t change for the world because I learned so much from each.”

Our mother is from Mexico City, a metropolis wedged in a valley with buildings hugging each other while kissing the streets. My direct family lives in the city. It’s a second home to me despite the stench of diesel gas and pollution in the air I miss.

My mother’s genes are why my sister can tan darker than I can. She’s got dark, dark hair, high cheekbones, and light copper skin that glows in the sun. My mother is why we’re so eager to identify as Latinas, as Mexicans.

Our father is from a small town somewhere in Bosnia-Herzegovina, with heritage from the neighboring Serbia. He’s why I look so white. His hair is cropped short, dark, and his hazel eyes are piercing.

Anna and I, both with dark hair and darker eyes, were born in the United States, but the rest of our family immigrated into the U.S after reaching adulthood.

That difficulty of being among the first in the family born in the U.S follows us every day, whether it’s by the way we look or the way we act or approach things.

I was always jealous Anna could “look” more Mexican and tan darker and be the most confident and beautiful person I know. Come to find out, that was a lie I told myself.

She says looking more Mexican is her frustration. She expressed it to me saying, “People say ‘You don’t look like you’re from here’ or ask about where I’m from, or [where] my family’s from because I look ‘different’ or ‘exotic’ or ‘just not from here.'”

Anna never told me these things. She says, “I just don’t talk about it because it just feels like complaining.”

Despite that disconnect, our greatest similarity is certain habits. “People don’t eat the same foods [as us],” Anna says. “They can be judgy when I didn’t grow up watching the same things or don’t like ‘American Mexican’ food or I don’t always want to do this [action] in an ‘American’ way.”

Come to find out, another disconnect between us is that I’d believed she could make friends easily. She has friend groups in the double digits. She learned English as a toddler while I learned as a 5-year-old. Anna could communicate with these groups.

She never seemed to struggle, having been able to brush off comments about ‘non-American’ habits and approaches. Anna didn’t have as much an issue speaking English as I did.

But English is my struggle. I learned Spanish growing up, not really learning natural conversational English until going to preschool. I struggled to focus on solely speaking English. I still think in Spanish while thinking in English, often leading to blank expressions or struggling to find the right expression in English.

When I was little, these blank expressions were breakdowns and tantrums. I would be set off by the frustration of not being able to express how I felt to people. Tantrums, as normal as they are with young children, were outbursts where I couldn’t vocalize I was angry or missing someone any other way.

“It’s hard to be light when you don’t know everything around you,” Sarah Stringer says. She’s a close family friend, practically a big sister to me.

She was also a witness to my tantrums, and has frequently told me how quiet and hyper aware I was as a kid, meeting me around 16 years ago. She says, “I don’t remember as much when we were [first] introduced, but we spent some time together, and we were going to leave. And I asked if I could hug you goodbye and you said, ‘No.’ […] I was like, ‘That’s fine. That’s perfectly okay. You have the right to say no.

“The look you gave me was like… that did not occur to you,” Stringer adds. “And that ‘Wait a minute, that was an option?’ And that’s when we got each other.”

And we continue to be able to understand each other despite nearly 20 years between us.

Sarah Stringer, her siblings, and her parents are like family. While my mother, sister, and I have been able to grasp and almost fully understand what we go through, the Stringer family have been outside sources we felt close to.

My mother is the one who met Sarah’s mother. They’re like sisters now, asking about how to deal with kids and asking to be each other’s emergency contact. We’re each other’s “bonus family.”

Sarah has also been the main person to listen and help me think through things I thought was an awkward thing to do or just a Southerner’s habit, like phrases that can’t quite translate between languages or pronunciations. While teetering her hands like scales, Sarah said my perspectives are “a very interesting, specific point of view.”

The reality is that being involved or connected with multiple cultures is that kind of point of view. You can never see things the way someone with one culture has.

I’ve never been able to see through the lens of my peers. I always thought with a different mindset due to language difference and cultural blending. I’ll never be able to see things like my mother or my family in Mexico.

Sarah told me, “You’re not automatically connected to your culture because of your skin tone. There are preconceived notions we have based on skin tone.”

Cultures are a way of life and sometimes even thought, not a skin tone. Unfortunately, Sarah is right. There are preconceived notions and biases that connect skin tone to culture even though each country around the world has multiple skin tones and varying facial features.

I may never be seen as an “other” due to how I look, but I always will be “other” because of how I think and speak. I will always live in the limbo of “not enough” because of biases I’ve encountered in my lifetime.

Dear fellow High Pointer, being in an “other” group is not a failing, and living in the limbo of “not enough” is not a shortcoming.

It’s an advantage. Being first-generation gives someone a leg up, be it through how someone thinks or how many languages someone speaks.

I was a scared little girl who struggled to stay in one language once. I don’t think that little girl would recognize who she’s become.

Good.

That little girl has learned to find herself. And so can all the other little first-generation children. One day, maybe there won’t be false connections between skin and culture.

Dear High Pointer, I urge you as a citizen of the world, embrace your differences. Connect with your similarities. Enter the next chapter with hope and confidence.

The adventure is worth it.