Moving to another country comes with many challenges you would never think of. One of them — and in my opinion the most impactful — is identity issues. Do I lose my identity when I adapt to a new culture and embrace it as my own? No, but for four years, I convinced myself of that when I compared my experience to the experiences of other Brazilians living abroad.
‘What makes a person truly Brazilian?’ is something I always asked myself. Is it speaking Portuguese at home and with friends? Is it listening to popular Brazilian music? Or is it not assimilating to the new culture I had to expose myself to? To be honest, I don’t know the answer to these questions because there is not a true answer for them.
It was not long before my junior year of high school that I started distancing myself from my friend group. It was the first time I was told I was too Americanized for a Brazilian girl. For them, it was wrong for me to immerse myself into the American culture. I could not leave our Brazilian bubble; we had to impose our culture where we lived instead of accepting both as our own.
I left the bubble, and only then my path to understanding my identity began.
Using English as an everyday language has caused me to doubt my roots even until now. Am I not Brazilian enough for forgetting one or two words in Portuguese? No, this is something totally normal when another language is used more often than the other but explaining this to my 15-year-old self took time. Sometimes I still struggle with it.
