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Hi, my name is Lissandra, and I am currently 17 years old. I was born in Miami, Florida but my parents are from both Cuba and Peru which makes me Cuban/Peruvian. I am in the 11th grade, and I currently am going to Everglades High School. In the early years of my childhood, I grew up in a middle-class economy. My parents got married in 2007 and then later gave birth to me on October 11th, 2008. When I was 3 years old my parents got divorced and decided to live in separate homes, so I basically had two different homes growing up. The main theme of my story is a mix of maturity and grief. Some of the challenges that I faced growing up with divorced parents were having to constantly be in the middle of things and having one weekend with my mom and the other with my dad. To be honest, growing up I felt closer to my dad because he was mainly the person to get me what I wanted and took me out. Meanwhile, my mom would stay working at home being super busy. The outcome that came after all of this was that I learned to see different perspectives on many things and be more empathetic towards people.  

One of the key moments that helped me become the person I am today is the fact that I was friends with a very toxic friend group during my elementary years. These challenges in my life caused me to gain insecurity problems, anxiety, and feeling socially left out. In addition, I also had a very good childhood best friend that would always do everything with me even if it meant doing crazy stuff. This best friend that I grew up with ended up being a fake friend and left me once I started to defend myself for the times that I felt disrespected or invalidated. Another thing that made this situation worse was the fact that I had emotionally unavailable parents, which means that every time I wanted to open up about something, they would always end up saying that they wanted to talk about it another day or that they genuinely didn’t have the capacity to talk about that. Overall, elementary school was a time for learning more about the real world and realizing that you can’t really trust people so easily.  

Now, middle school is another story. These times for me were one of the worst parts of growing up, especially in teen hood. For example, during the covid era this was definitely a dark time for me to grow up because I was exposed to a lot of mass media and entertainment. This influence even caused me to start wanting to change my personality and start trying new things. It got to a point where I even started questioning myself and who I was as a person in society. Moreover, being in middle school has taught me that people change a whole lot once they start to go through all these changes in their body.