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You know, that feeling you get when you're texting with someone and it's going great, and then that little bubble comes up, the one with the three dots and you just waiting, waiting for the response. And even if it's been like three seconds, it's taking forever.

What are they thinking? What are they about to say? Start creating these stories in your head. Fuck. Am I coming on too strong? Did I sound disingenuous? God, why was I myself? God, why did I wear that color scrunchie?

I knew what she gave me. That's basically what happened with Carla and I tried to be chill, but on the inside, I was bugging out. I think I like I wrote you this letter about wanting to work with you and that I thought you were so special and that I loved your voice. And really, you are one of the people that has been able to express a lot of my experiences and kind of what I feel into words. But but that girl who that's inside me, like that girl who is my like my trauma, I guess was like she thinks you're stupid.

She doesn't think you're good enough, she doesn't like you. And I'm like, oh, I was like brooding.

And I remember I was like, but she's on IJI. So, like, I'm sure she's right, miss.

I just did not know how to respond that Carla, I wanted to think of you as not a celebrity, but as a person who was coming into my life and I wanted to honor that and respect that.

And so I didn't want to gush. I didn't want to make you feel like I was a fan. But I also wanted to respect the the glass ceilings that shattered and the path you'd carved for us.

So it was a lot to consider, you know, so you can hear why I'm so taken by Carla. She's thoughtful and considerate and deeply empathic and. She can see right through your corniness, Carly used the term dream, and I want to ask you something throughout your book, The Undocumented Americans, you continually take issue with language.

You stop and you pause and you interrogate the terms that we now take for granted. One of those terms, a term that you seem to hate, is dreamer. You would be counted as a dreamer, an undocumented student brought here young. But you don't like that term. How come? Why don't you like dreamer? Look at me. It's not punk rock, it's corny, but also it's propaganda. I would be OK with the term dreamer if it was a dream was capitalized to show that it's an acronym for the DREAM Act.

But it's not. It's now lowercase to show. That it's like a descriptor of an effective experience, which means that you are a person who dreams and in literature, a person who has a lifelong dream tends to be a tragic figure because they don't achieve the dream. And that just tends to be the case. And I'm not that kind of person. That's why I love her. And it's what makes her such an extraordinary writer and person. And so much of that comes from her lived experience.

And because she's a fucking genius. I love how honest she is and I aspire to be like her.

I'm doing great. And yeah, no, I'm not OK. This week, a voice of our generation, Carla Cornhole Villavicencio. Hey, it's OK to talk about our mental health and happiness. Humans aren't meant to keep everything inside. It makes us sick and therapy helps. There's no one right way to do therapy. It's whatever you want it to be. Maybe you're not feeling motivated right now and need some tools to help.

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Okay, listeners get 10 percent off their first month at better health outcomes. Not OK. That's better. H e l.p dotcom not OK, yeah, no, I'm not OK is supported by the L.A. County Department of Mental Health, acknowledging that in stressful times it's OK to feel anxious, sad or overwhelmed about things like covid-19, racial injustices, uncertain jobs and fluctuating school and child care needs. You are not alone. The L.A. County Department of Mental Health is here to help for support.

You can call their helpline 24/7 at 888 five four seven seven seven one or visit DLH that L.A. County dot gov resources.

So as soon as I got this show, I knew I had to talk to Carla. Her book, The Undocumented Americans had me so shook.

I had never read a book that told a story I connected with so deeply and I had never heard the undocumented experience told quite like this. But first, I want Karla to tell you about herself, I was born in Ecuador and grew up in New York City, in Brooklyn and Queens. I grew up undocumented. My parents are still undocumented. I am now a permanent resident. My younger brother is a citizen. He was born in Brooklyn. He's very Brooklyn.

I am thirty one. So I grew and came of age at a time before Dacca. And so things are a little different then. And so I was like a very gifted student and all of that part of it was just like natural talent. I was really good with language. I was just also like really competitive and ambitious and wanted to be number one all the time. But also from an early age. I knew that I needed to be super, super successful if my parents were going to make it out alive.

And I also knew because the narrative was everywhere, that grades were the thing that were going to get me out of the hood, like it was like dancing, basketball or grades. And it was going to be great for me, you know.

And I ended up going to Harvard and I was one of the first undocumented immigrants except into Harvard or or maybe graduated from Harvard. And I think maybe like the first cohort, you know, that was accepted and graduated from Harvard.

And it was really crazy because there was they called us international students. So we would go to like events where it was like international students from China and they were really wealthy and we had nothing in common and they treated us the same administratively.

In 2010, Carla published an essay in The Daily Beast called I'm an Illegal Immigrant at Harvard. It was published anonymously during her senior year, and in it she talks about the deep fear and trauma she has felt through her young life as an undocumented person living in the United States.

After that essay came out, Carla was asked to write a memoir by several literary agents, but she turned them all down. She was only 21 and she knew that the story they wanted was that stereotypical inspirational one about the poor, sad immigrant girl who miraculously pull yourself up by her bootstraps, bootstraps, bootstraps.

So she said no thanks, and instead she kept on the academic path. Though not entirely by choice, and then I went to Yale for a Ph.D. because I couldn't work and for Yale you didn't to need a social and I didn't want to do a Ph.D. I wanted to go back to New York and work in magazines, but I couldn't do that. And I appreciated the health insurance because I was really depressed and. Yeah, and so I've been living in New Haven for the past 10 years, and I basically used my time at Yale to learn as much as possible and to use the time to write.

And so I've been writing professionally since I was 15 years old. I started writing about music.

And then when Trump won in twenty sixteen, I knew I was the best person to write about immigration in the way that I wanted to write about it, which was like unapologetic, really examining what illegality means to a person aside from just like breaking the law equals bad because like the way that I think about it, like all of the American dream icons like the Kennedys, The Godfather trilogy, Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gatsby, all of those folks like bootleggers, mobsters, just absolute people who made their lives in the informal economy, like Americans fucking love heist movies, movies about underground, like crime.

But if an immigrant uses a fake social, God fucking forbid, they should be deported, they should be killed, they should be shot in the head.

You read that in the comment sections. And it's like, well, that's actually antithetical to the American dream story because the American dream story is about committing crimes in order for your family to get ahead in order to create generational wealth. And so I was like, I need to say that. And people weren't saying that before me. People were just like I mean, immigrant writers because they were writing for white audiences. They were saying, please accept us.

We really want to be citizens. We really want to be Americans. We love America red, white and blue. And I was just like, this is dehumanizing. I love America. I love the English language. It's my language. This is my country. I'm like New Yorker. I'm I'm from Brooklyn. I'm from Queens. I'm so fucking proud. But also, I don't have to turn myself into a caricature to demand respect.

And so I wrote a book and I was the first undocumented person to be nominated for a National Book Award. And Barack Obama recommended my book as his one of his favorite books of twenty twenty, which was surprised a lot of people, because the dedication of my book is Gengel Amera, which means Fuck Ice. And I haven't commented publicly on that, but I think I understand why he chose it. And presidents don't apologize.

Doctors don't apologize, and I understand why they don't, because it would all crumble if they did. But him using his name to back up my book, I think says something about what he thought about his administrations and their policies on immigration and also the fact that my book is like a book where I say I'm not going to talk about dreamers. This is about their parents who get no attention, who get no love, who get no respect. And Obama, it was the DACA president that was his great achievement.

And so I think his support of my book. Just said something, and I'm not going to say what he said, but I think it says something, you know. Mhm. Yeah.

Looking back, it was hard to reconcile that Obama was separating record numbers of families and perpetuating the good immigrant, bad immigrant narrative, which is why I think your book is so important, like I'm dyslexic.

It's very hard for me to sit down and read a book. And yet yours was so clear to me.

I'm really proud of that because, you know, going through grad school, like people just really love language that's inaccessible and like theory and academic language, and I just never fucked with that because I was just like, I want a book that, like. That's just that's just for the people, you know, and my book is smart, my book is full of references. My book is just like, you know, how people used to say, like 30 Rock had like 30 jokes a minute or something like that with that's the energy my book has.

But like some people call it a Y.A. book, too, because, like, teenagers can read it, like adults can read it. I've had non-native English speakers who are undocumented immigrants read it. It's just a really accessible book.

And the stories are just like not like really depressing.

So you use this phrase in some of your writing, including a recent piece you did for The New Yorker that's called Waking Up from the American Dream. You call yourself a professional daughter of immigrants. And that really resonated with me. I'm I'm going to read a little excerpt from that piece. In my teens, I began to specialize, I became a performance artist. I accompanied my parents to places where I knew they would be discriminated against and where I could ensure their rights would be granted if a bank teller wasn't accepting their ID.

I stroll in an oversize forever 21 blazer, red lipstick, a slicked back bun and fresh Stan Smith. About a pleather folder and made sure my handshake broke bones. Sometimes I appeal to decency, sometimes to law, sometimes to God. Sometimes I lean back in my chair like a sexy gangster and said, so you tell me how you want my mom to survive in this country without a bank account. You close at four, but I have all the time in the world, then I'd wink.

It was vaudeville, but it worked. Oh, that made me think about how we feel like we have to be our family's saviors and sometimes their caretakers and kind of because we have to be, but it's ultimately.

A feeling that if it goes to the extreme, it doesn't serve us and I wonder, how do you combat that urge?

I don't I don't combat it. I mean, I still do it. I just have more boundaries with my parents because of my mental health.

I realized that talking to them very regularly is a great trigger to my mental health. So I've just cut down on communication. So I still check in on them, make sure they're doing well. I asked them if they need money because obviously the pandemic has hit hard. The service industry and that's where they work. And I still provide for my mom and, you know, she gets sick sometimes. She needs medicines. She needs she needs support. But aside from that, I don't check in on the regular to chit chat very much because I know it's going to become a conversation that I have learned to not expect more from.

You know, it's been a long time where I tried to change them, but I tried to explain to my mom that certain things she says, she said were hurtful. And then I realized what I've learned in therapy, which is that I'm the skillful one and she doesn't have those tools. And so I made boundaries and with my father, I am not ready to deal with.

With just everything that I have to deal with in order to reestablish a healthy relationship with him right now, because my priority is healing and mental health, just in an S.O.S day to day basis and my work right now, and he is maybe the number one source of panic in my life, because just like you've said, I've had a relationship with my mom that is just isn't as close.

And I've just absolutely worshiped my father my entire life, which has allowed me to not really examine the ways in which he's used that love and that trust and that worship to be emotionally abusive or to lie or to exercise his his machismo and his toxic masculinity in ways that I allowed because I thought he was a martyr. And so I sort of put that on the shelf for now. And I said it's best for me to just not talk to you for a, you know, unless it's a check in.

And so it was just boundaries. I'm still there for them.

I know that they won't be evicted. I know that they won't go hungry. I know that they're there are always going to have me to advocate for them with health care, with anything that they need. But that doesn't mean that they're allowed to intrude on my days and my emotional state of mind whenever they want to.

I feel that so much. And those are boundaries that I'm trying to create at the moment with my folks, you know, and as much as they they push back so much on these boundaries because they don't understand them, I I'm just starting to realize in some of the ways that my dad isn't perfect, you know, just because my mom, my mom and I had such such a difficult relationship.

You know, I kind of look to him as the one who really understood me and, you know, know like, dude, you need boundaries to both of you do.

And there's this term called Mentalising, which means, like, you put yourself in someone else's shoes, basically, and like, think about or mind and think about what they must be thinking about or going through and experiencing.

She has no interest. My dad has no interest.

Like I'm constantly like, I wonder why my father was cruel and crazy. I wonder why my mom is such a narcissist. And then I think back to their childhoods and their life in America and all of their hardships. And I'm like, that makes sense. It's intergenerational trauma and migration trauma. And then I move on. But they don't do that to me. And so I'm like, my my mom is just like, yeah, I guess I was your father was dead and, you know, covid was a missed opportunity.

And I'm like, he is my father. And it causes me panic to think he could die. And you should think that I am your daughter. Like, do you remember that I am your daughter and they don't because like, once you achieve a certain level of success and once you are grown, they feel like they do they feel like, well, we did our job.

Now you have to take care of every single one of our traumas.

And it's up to us to push back because if we don't, they really will take it, too.

Oh, yeah, God knows where I'm learning in therapy that boundaries equal love. And that's something I keep telling myself. And I think that that constant boundary crossing in relationships with our parents affects like every relationship we try to have, be it romantic or platonic, like I've always had an especially hard time making friends with other women, like where we are healthy and cultivating success and lifting each other up and maybe being best friends for her fucking ever.

I have lots of like female friendships in a sense, but all of my closest friends are guys and I don't know what that is. And I think like a lot of women, it's like pretty common when they're to be said, like, don't trust a woman who doesn't have women friends. And it's just it's just sort of happened. And so when a woman does approach me and want to be my friend, I am so confused. And then, like, I don't know how to act.

I'm like, should I be myself?

Because, like, myself is really weird.

I think something that I've always longed for, like women connection, female connection and and relationships with women, because my relationship with my mother is so strained. I think I mean, believe me, I love my mother. We talk often, but we have a strained relationship like we're fighting a lot. And so when it comes to female friendships, I try everything in my power not to argue, not to find myself in a position where I have to fight with them because I will lose them.

And, you know, one hundred percent of the time I end up losing them because I'm overly like, I'm sorry, and did I do something wrong? Or I defer to them even in times where they have wronged me and I should stick up for myself and say, hey, that's not OK.

And like, in order to move on and continue being friends, we must unpack this. I mean, that's why I wanted you to be one of my guests on this pod, because I. I really do think you're freaking incredible person. I and I know you don't like this, but I really do think that you are one of the frickin greatest writers of our generation. And I'm only here to offer my friendship. I really appreciate that. That's really kind.

I also think I'm one of the great writers of my generation.

I have wonderful you know, the only thing I want from you is your friendship, because you know what it's like to achieve certain markers of success and to just feel like the loneliest girl in the world.

I think once you reach certain goals for yourself that you've had for a long time, it can feel pretty empty. And there are not a lot of people who can necessarily. Share the experiences that we've had and we've had different experiences, but there's some overlap and it's incredibly lonely and I think it's in those moments where people feel like nobody understands that you resort to behaviors that are self harming. And that's definitely happened to me.

All my life, but especially in the past couple of years, where I would meet certain goals that I had and I would be like, I feel completely empty and there's nobody that I can talk to right now because, like, my phone is filled with people that.

Just wouldn't understand. And and so I think once you meet someone that that you like and that you think is a good person and that you just think might understand, I think that's just I mean, that's how you form your chosen family. Right. And like as a queer person, chosen family is so important. And I think as far as you know, when you belong to a family of immigrants, there's people who have mixed status. But as you know, sometimes people are deported.

Sometimes people move for work. Sometimes people have to go underground and chosen families important there, too. You have like aunties, you have people that you can't say who are not aunties. You have like people who sell, like, you know, your favorite food from the local restaurant.

And like, that's the only food you can eat when you're sick. Like that's chosen family, too. So those are the people that sort of keep you alive, you know?

And so I think that that's that's really special when you find someone that you feel like you can be yourself around, because so much of what allows people like us to be successful is perform activity like you create a persona when you're when you're young.

I wrote about that in a piece for The New Yorker this week. When you feel like you have to protect your family or your community or yourself, you form a persona.

And a lot of that is a lot of armor. And some of that is, you know, vaudeville. And you just stick to that persona. And at some point you do have to ask yourself, like, who am I really? And you do have to find people who know you for who you really, truly are and who still love you for that.

It's not easy being breezy. Khalid tells us more after the break. I didn't know that I was losing so many vitamins every day, and that made me really sad, but guess what?

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And if you don't love ritual within your first month, they'll refund your first order. So, I mean, what's better than that? And ritual right now is offering my listeners 10 percent off during your first three months visit ritual dotcoms. Not OK to start your ritual today. So, Carla, babe. You've been really open about your mental health struggles. Can you talk a little bit about that? What do you want to know? I want to know how you did it, how are you?

I'm I'm I just hate fucking saying that because it sounds so goup, but I'm on my healing journey.

OK, so the mental health journey, first I'll speak sort of generally, which is that through my research, I found out that it was not just me and that so many people, especially older immigrants, aging immigrants, suffer from a lot of PTSD, depression, anxiety, and because obviously they don't have mental health resources available to them, they self medicate. But the thing that people love about immigrants is that we're hard working. Right. And so, yeah, these these people struggle with these horrific nightmares and they like they need to drink in order to be able to sleep and all of that.

But they don't miss a day. They don't take a sick day.

They're able to deal with their mental illnesses and mental health issues while still like looking right. Happy. Yes, sir. Yes, ma'am. And being high functioning.

And so I found out that, you know, in a lot of the interviews that I did, that that was like kind of an immigrant thing. A lot of children of immigrants, so much PTSD, so much self-harm, a lot of self punishing behaviors that our parents don't have because we feel guilty, like there's so much guilt and so much shame and so much pressure to save ourselves, save our families, save our communities. And obviously we're going to fall short.

And so then we do self punishing behaviors and then we feel guilty about that. And so we'll do more self punishing behaviors. But we still show up on time. We still meet our deadlines. We still pay our taxes.

We still you know, and so the idea that, like society has of like someone who's like who needs help is not of like a dreamer who is just like has everything under control. And that's why it was important for me to be public about my mental illness. So the way that my psychiatrists have sort of talked to me about this is symptoms and not diagnoses.

But as a writer, like a diagnosis is very comforting to me because I can read about it and I, I like having the ability to do research. And so I've been misdiagnosed for many, many years.

And I was talking to a researcher at Yale who studies borderline personality disorder, and she told me that it's actually standard practice among a lot of psychiatrists to misdiagnose people who have borderline personality disorder and tell them that they that they're bipolar because the stigma with BPD is so great that it might do more harm to just tell them that they have BPD. And so they'll just tell them they're bipolar and then just be like recommend therapies for BPD. So I was diagnosed as bipolar for many years and I was like, I don't have like manic episodes.

I, I stay up all night writing because I'm a writer.

And of course my mostly white psychiatrists were like, no, I'm staying up all night to write. Just that seems manic. Right. And so I was never asked about my migration history, about my past, about sexual abuse, about what it was like to be undocumented or to, like, hide from ice during like when you knew they were conducting raids in your neighborhood. That's fucking scary and traumatic.

And so it would be like I would have certain experiences at night that would be called hallucinations. And if they had really dug in, they would have understood. Sometimes I had raids and they were at night because they disappear you in the middle of the night. And if I wake up screaming in the middle of the night thinking that I saw something, maybe it has to do with that. And not because I have a like in a state of psychosis where nothing else indicates that that's the case.

So after many years, I had a psychiatrist of color who was like, oh, you have borderline personality disorder. And that fit perfectly based on my experiences. Basically, I'm an extremely sensitive person. And like, if you yelled at me right now, I would just completely be devastated. The rest of my day would be ruined. I would I would just feel like like a wilted orchid. Whereas if. I was just a person who was more neurotypical, I would be like, why are you yelling at me?

That's weird and inappropriate. But if you yelled at me, I would just I would just I would just it would just be the most devastating thing that could happen to me.

It's Marsha Linehan who is the person, the scientist who created the gold standard therapy, behavioral therapy for the personality disorder, because no medicine exists for it. She calls it people who walk around like they have third degree burns all over their body.

Like everything, everything hurts, everything parts. And so I walked around my life with everything hurting. Like if I saw a person and they had like a string loose in one of the buttons on their coat, it made me feel like immediately suicidal.

Hmm. And part of that sure made me a good writer because I could notice details at that level and notice how that could be sad. And I could write about that. And that makes me like an intuitive, empathic writer. No, it is not a gift. It is based on early trauma that I had based on separation from my parents and on the fact that the people who raised me when I was a toddler and Ecuador probably weren't responding when I was showing that I was scared or was I was crying.

And of course, this lifetime of growing up undocumented in poverty, often hungry and with a father who had a completely erratic temper.

So I was lucky enough to get the diagnosis and I started reading about it and it made sense. And so the thing that helps with the diagnosis is skills. And the skills are called Betty. And that's the program that I am doing now three times a week for three hours a day. And I absolutely love it.

What's Deepti? So Deepti is called dialectical behavioral therapy, and it is a therapy that is sort of based on different behavioral techniques and also loosely based on like Zen Buddhism. So it sounds like a cult. And once you go into it, it feels like a cult because it's a lot of acronyms.

I think it teaches you how to regulate your emotions. So something is when you and I started talking, I told you I was winding down from feeling like an injustice had happened to me. And so that if I feel disrespected, I immediately become hot and angry.

And something that teaches you are like TYP skills, which I can't tell you what the acronym stands for. But one thing you can do is like you can like hold ice in your hands until your hands become too cold, painfully cold, or you can put like ice in your mouth or you can take a freezing cold shower and that is supposed to produce the same amount of discomfort and pain that you would as if you were harming yourself. Mhm. And, but it stops your emotions, it stops, you're like angry, fiery hot emotions where you would be like I want to engage in negative behaviors and it works.

I have an ice hat which you've seen on Instagram where it's like it's just a hat full of ice. I have it in the freezer and when I'm feeling just overwhelmed by emotion, I put it on, I lie in bed, I listen to music and within like ten minutes I'm calm down. And that helps me make a rational decision, because if you make a decision when you're really hot headed, it's not going to go well.

And so, like another skill that, like, you can learn and Deepti is, for example, how to deal with a confrontation with someone and to do it skillfully where you're not threatening them, where they're not being emotionally abusive to you. If someone is being emotionally abusive to you, how to respond while preserving your self-respect while keeping long term goals in mind and not compromising them for short term goals, which is really important for someone like me who's always like I'm going to say this really cutting, biting, witty thing that's going to just like tell them off because it's because I'm right.

And so DBT is like sometimes it's better to be efficient than to be right.

It's like, yes, I don't want to burn this bridge, even though I know I'm right. So I'm just going to stay silent or I'm just going to just like communicate my displeasure in another way.

It's fantastic skills. It scientifically proven to help people with borderline personality disorder or eating disorders, all sorts of different disordered behaviors like that, it really helps them and it really helps with suicidality. And so, yeah, when I started being open about having BPD, there was really nobody who was public about it because it's so stigmatized.

There was just nobody who was high profile or any kind of profile who is open about having BPD and who was also successful, because people who have BPD are said to not be able to hold down jobs, have intimate relationships, maybe never get married and just constantly be in and out of hospital. And because I wasn't on any of those things, but I was doing so much hard work, I felt it was important for me to just share about all the work I was doing to better myself, but also show that I still had a sense of humor about it, that I still called myself crazy, that I still embrace this aspect of myself and just to share of myself, because representation does matter.

And for mental illness, it matters to me.

I know so many people can relate to what you're talking about, from misdiagnosis to not understanding why one resorts to negative behaviors. And I personally experience both those feelings, like I really think I could benefit from DBT.

And maybe it could help a lot of other folks out there. We will be leaving some resources in the episode notes for you guys, whoever is interested, please, please, please click on those resources.

I mean, it is so helpful, but you do have to do the work. And so something I learned that I thought of is that I used to tell myself, like during the pandemic, like be gentle with yourself, like just be gentle with yourself. And then I realized that I was telling myself to be gentle and interpreting it as not doing the work.

So I would just be like, be gentle with yourself. I'm going to lay down in bed and just watch a lot of YouTube videos.

And I was like, that's not being gentle with myself. I was like, I'm going to be gentle with myself. So I'm going to meditate even though I don't want to or like I'm going to be gentle with myself and I'm going to paint like a portrait of a friend's dog while not being high.

You know, like those things are being gentle, too, even though they're. Not necessarily what I want to do, and sometimes doing something that's hard is is the gentler option on yourself.

Oh, I love that. I really love that. You talked about how family separation has damaging effects on the brain. I was separated from my family when I was 14, but before that, the being afraid all the time. About being separated and. Just the inevitability of it all was so damaging. Yeah, and we've seen more research on this recently with the children separated at the border. Can you talk about that? People have no idea like what this is going to look like for generations to come.

Mm hmm. Like, they just have no idea.

And part of it is because those of us who have been through it don't really want to talk about the mental health issues we experience because that seems like blaming our parents. That seems like not being good representatives of the Latin community or the immigrant community. That seems like airing our dirty laundry.

You know, this piece that I wrote for The New Yorker, several people said to me that like like it might not be the best idea to write it like Latin people, because they said that it was like our story and it was private and it was shameful.

And I was like, it's we I mean, the children of immigrants, we carry so much baggage. And the most we do to acknowledge it is to make Meems about it. But we don't talk about how painful it really is to just get through a day. And if you get a text from your mom or dad, you just immediately go into a panic.

And we're dealing with like nervous systems that like it says if we came back from war and we don't talk about it because we've been so preoccupied with fighting for basic decency for ourselves and for the dreamers and for our parents and for the kids who are, you know, separated from their parents at the border, there hasn't been room in the discourse for us to be like, by the way, like I've been doing OK, you know, like I'm pretty successful.

But by the way, this fucked me up for life because people would blame our parents. But we are not talking or writing to right wingers who are going to take anything we say and twist it. We're talking to each other.

You know, we have to stop thinking about racist white people as our audience and start thinking about each other as our audience. And this is a conversation we need to have because it's a crisis like the number of immigrants who are successful, where children of immigrants who are successful, who have reached out to me with suicidal thoughts is alarming. And they can't reach out to me because they can't reach out to anybody else because that would be like betraying their image and their cause.

And so I feel like it's so important to talk about that among ourselves and to have safe spaces where we can talk among ourselves and, yeah, to write about it so that if white people read that, they know, look, we're not here to be your decorative dolls, your votes, your your unwillingness to vote or whatever it is affects us and will affect us for generations because these kids are citizens. You know, we're a community and and like they'll be in class with your children.

It's just it just it's a mental health crisis. The public it's a public health crisis. And nobody wanted to talk about it. And so that's what alarmed me so much, is that I got so many messages when I started being open about this from young people who would be like, I can't be open about this. I can't talk about this. I don't know how to talk about this. And I was like, there's so many of us out there.

And with the policies of the last several years, there's just so many more. And I hope that by the time, you know, the younger kids who have experienced these things are a little bit older, there's enough of us talking, writing, having TV shows, movies that shows them that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. How can we start caring? And this is a big question. How can we start caring for the mental health of.

Of undocumented folks. I think it really does start with yourself and caring for your own mental health and figuring out why it's like such a tough. Puzzle, and it's such a tough like Rubik's Cube for for for yourself. You know, I think that I. I wrote about mental health for a long time before I was willing to really address my own, and I I wasn't ready.

I remember at the beginning of my press tour for the undocumented Americans, I would like, like show all of the books that my partner had bought me that were books about healing and Deepti and chronic trauma and all of that now would be like, my partner buys me these books, but I'm not ready yet.

And now I know I'm ready.

Now I'm like in this full time and I'm largely off of social media because people have not been nice and because I don't. I don't want to think of myself as a Sim's character, which I already do, as someone who writes about my life and it's consumed by people and someone who does associate sometimes, you know, I want to just kind of be in the present more. But I do also, you know, want to share with my readers and and be engaged in all of that.

I'm just figuring stuff out. And I want to be honest with people. I think honesty is important.

And I think, like when people are like, I'm taking some time for self care and they'd like it's like a face mask and tamasha. It's like I love face masks and moccia so much, but like that's not really self care. If you have experienced systemic violence, like self care is like here is my heaviest workbook. Here is some here's my here's a notebook where I'm going to write down my triggers and what I'm going to do in response to them.

My phone is off so nobody can interrupt me for this one hour. I've lit a candle with a non triggering smell and I'm going to say, like for the next two days, I will not drink or for the next two days I will not cut myself or whatever.

And it doesn't have to be like a long term goal. Like sometimes I will be like wake up and be like I will be sober forever. And like, that's just not how life works, but just do it for like a day or two to prove to yourself that you can do little things that make yourself proud.

And then once you start accomplishing those, like little by little. I think, like I realized why the world loved me, and then I started thinking, this is something that happened in my class. They said, what do you like about yourself? And I was like, well, I like that. I write well. And then I was like, no, that's my career. And that's what people like about me. And then I was like, Well, I like that.

I'm generous, kind to people. And I was like, no, that's still about external validation and something that I could do for other people.

And I was like, I couldn't think of something. I was like, I like that I'm funny. But that's still like other people find me funny. And then I said, I like that dogs and animals feel safe with me, which is something that I really do value in myself and I think is special. And that has nothing to do with race or immigration status or anything.

And like when there's a dog that runs away in my neighborhood, my partner like calls out for me and I come out just wearing a mask like nothing else. And like sometimes the dogs, like, bared their teeth at me and I just like lay down and they come to me and I don't feel fear because I'm like the worst it can do is bite me. But I don't want them to get hit by a car. And like, part of that is like, yes, I'm crazy because they couldn't call me.

But like like I always help them come home to their parents. And I like that about myself.

And it's like for all of those who are children of immigrants or immigrants who feel like they need to succeed in order to save the fucking world, make a list of why the world likes to make a list of why you like yourself. It'll probably look different.

Oh, my. What do I like about myself?

You know, I was just thinking like I became a permanent resident this year and I'm probably going to be OK.

This is like gothe Kalila like bringing up death again. But leave it to me. I'll probably be buried in America. And I'm like, I would just like to because I know this is a lifelong journey. And the point wasn't going to Harvard or whatever, whatever the point is, like I want like whoever outlives me to be like she didn't die a broken person. She healed herself like all of the odds were against her. And she was supposed to be the girl who wrote about being broken.

And she didn't do that. And then she she killed herself and she died feeling peace. And like that's what I'd like for all of us to just like be like, you know what, the entire lake system of colonialism and imperialism and all of that has set it up so that we just have to swim against the current and just like work, work, work and just like die exhausted in disgrace.

And it's like and for those of us artists, as you well know, it's like we have to, like, play roles or have images that are like subservient, really grateful all the time, really humble, perfect.

And it's like, what if you do things your way but you still are able to have peace? I think that's the greatest thing we could do for ourselves. And once people see that in us, they know what's possible for themselves to. I love you, Carla. Thank you so much. You're fucking amazing. OK, love you. Bye, Momma. Bye bye. Yeah, no, I'm not OK, is the production of L.A. studios, remember to read and review our show, it helps other people find it.

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