I DIDN´T BREAK - I MULTIPLIED: What migration gave me that I couldn´t find back home.

There are days when I wonder: how can my mind feel like a storm?

Days when I wake and don’t recognize the thoughts running through my head; when my own emotions change so fast that I can barely hold them. That instability hurts to the bone. There is no other way to say it.

I used to think I had to endure, keep going, stay present—because resting was being weak and slowing down was failing.

But now I know we are not machines. It’s okay to rest. It’s okay to stop.

It’s okay to sleep all day if what you need is silence.

This is something I’ve had to remind myself many times, especially in the stillness that migration brings.

A journey that not only changes your place in the world but shakes you inside.

Migrating awakens things you didn’t expect: grief, comparison, joy, loneliness.

The worst part is having to deal with it all at once.

Amid that noise, I’ve learned to listen to what is beneath it all:  that soft voice that says “stop.”

That voice that reminds me that feeling is not weakness, that needing time is not failure,  that silence is not emptiness but space for things to settle. Our minds can be cruel. They question every step, doubt every achievement, and repeat voices we thought we had left behind.

Even after eight years away, I still compare myself. 

I still doubt my decisions.  I still wonder who I would have been if I had stayed. And yet, here I am.

I’m grateful.  Because here I am doing what I love most and fear most: 

writing, in a country where I finally feel I can be myself.

In my home country, I never found the courage to say all this out loud. And every day I realize:  my voice matters.  

THE CULTURE New Zealand Magazine 2025

My voice changes.

My voice influences. 

My voice transforms.

Now my words are not just thoughts.

They are paragraphs. 

They are pages. 

They are mine.

When we look back, when we think of Colombia, we feel how much we love our roots. But that love can also hurt. That attachment sometimes didn’t let us breathe.

It taught us to be silent.

In my migration process, I understood that many wounds come from far away — from childhood, from the culture we grew up in, from voices that told us to stay quiet.I’ve come to realize that many of those wounds still live in our minds — and that’s what makes them so hard to name, so hard to release.

Being Colombian means carrying deep pride and deep pain.

A culture we love, but one that can also weigh heavily.

The history, the expectations, the unspoken rules — they live in us like quiet echoes.

Yes, our country has endured terrible things.

Those collective wounds shaped us, and sometimes they felt like our own.

But being Colombian also means learning to rise, to resist, to grow, to transform every single day.

It means healing and teaching. It means becoming someone your people admire — even while you're still carrying your battles inside. It’s making someone say: “I’m proud of you,” even when you're still learning to be proud of yourself.

That’s also part of who I’ve become. And that also hurts: realizing that many of the wounds we carry live only in our heads. That the voices that told us to be silent were never right.

That we have the right to say what hurts.  That we can set boundaries. We have to stop normalizing what is not normal:  abuse, manipulation, violence, emotional exhaustion.

These things don’t make us stronger—they make us shrink.

And healing starts when we say:  “This is not okay.”  

When we stop justifying the damage, we learned to tolerate. When you normalize that you don’t have the right to express your emotions, one day you realize:  your voice matters.

 Your voice is worth gold. And it deserves to be heard.

It’s in the quietest moments that I notice how much I have progressed, not in the big victories, not in the huge milestones,  but in that small change of no longer apologizing for existing.

Because healing doesn’t always look like joy.

Sometimes it’s a quiet morning, a deep breath, or saying no. 

Sometimes it’s as simple as knowing that what hurt you no longer defines you.

Because migrating didn’t break me — it multiplied me.

Today, I embrace each one of my thousand facets:  those that fell, those that resisted, those that dared to start over. 

I no longer want to hide them or justify feeling.

Because even the day I forget all that I have been through,  I know it will be one of them — with its strength, its memory, or its tenderness —  that will remind me that I didn’t lose myself: I transformed.