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📓 December 7, 2025 — 2:22 p.m.
Today wasn’t supposed to be a deep day.
I was just trying to load up and go sell bags.
But my sister stopped me with a question, then another, and suddenly we were in one of those unexpected conversations that actually matter.
She told me about our uncle — how he’d been working on a political campaign, going door-to-door, and how he told her he couldn’t scale upward in politics because at the higher tiers, there was “too much racism.” He even pointed at his forearm and said:
“You see this skin?
This skin can’t succeed at the top tier of politics because I’m Mexican.”
She asked me, “Do you think that’s real?”
I told her the truth — not the reaction truth, but the deeper truth:
“If you go to the bathroom, does that make you the bathroom?”
She laughed, but she understood.
I told her I don’t think our uncle is a bad man.
I think he’s a hurt man.
He reacts to the world but doesn’t see himself.
He sees the limitations he grew up with — and instead of examining them, he assumes they are universal truths.
His identity got shaped by pain, by polio, by insecurity, by broken relationships, by the feeling of being outside the room instead of inside it.
I wasn’t putting him down.
I wasn’t dismissing his experiences.
I was simply explaining that when you internalize the environment as truth,
you become the environment — even when the environment is lying.
You can acknowledge racism without making it your destiny.
You can recognize obstacles without turning them into identity.
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