Questioning the consequences of these negotiations seemed wrong, too. My cultural identity—often the thing that made me even a little bit special—also felt fragile and poorly defined, so easily threatened by the outside world that anything that challenged any aspect of our tenuous but distinct way of life struck me as a judgment. This isolation exacerbated my struggle: I was not able to separate my true self from coping mechanisms I’d learned to adapt to an environment that did not fully accept me, and then I blamed myself for the limitations of that acceptance.
