Hello! I'm a global citizen practically since birth. With all that moving around, starting from just a few months old, and some very imbalanced and unhealthy family dynamics, I struggled a lot with feeling isolated, ignored and excluded or singled out, both at home and with being 'the new kid' over and over again. I imagine that this is part of why I am particularly interested in the struggles of people who are minorities, since I have always felt a bit like an alien who landed from another planet, and I have lived in many different countries in my life, so I've always belonged to a minority group in some respect or other (whether it is to do with racialisation or religion or ethno-linguistic origin or migration status or multiple/intersecting factors).

I've lived in over half a dozen countries spanning three continents, and I didn't attend the same school for longer than 1-3 years until my undergraduate degree. The way I tried to avoid the risks of bullying was to escape into invisibility, and I have struggled a lot with how to balance this desire for invisibility with the need to be extrovert in so many aspects of life. The alienation I experienced due to a lot of mobility and always being the 'odd one out', both inside and outside the home, was also probably deeply rooted in and exacerbated by being autistic, but since I fell into the category of 'high-functioning' and was a cis-gender girl, the fact that I was non-verbal with strangers got labeled as extreme shyness. My condition was never diagnosed and I was streamed into 'gifted programs' for 'bright children'. Realising only after the age of 40, and entirely by accident, that I am neuro-divergent has helped me make an awful lot of sense of a lot of things that I could never understand before.

I have worked in different rights-based sectors (relating to minority rights, migrant rights, women's rights and gender equality, LGBTQI/SOGI rights, and other issues), and was a voracious reader from early childhood. I've also got extremely diverse friends from various walks of life, which has helped me to see things from many different perspectives and to empathise with those who have less power. I also grew up in a rigidly conformist, and rather judgemental and fairly socially conservative family/socio-cultural context, with some highly negative, extremely critical, perfectionist, and obsessively anxious parenting from both sides; despite all their good intentions, the way I was raised was probably a terrible environment for the socialisation of a weird little autistic kid. I can see the differences because my neurotypical sisters didn't end up with nearly the same levels of anxiety or depression or isolation that I did, so I reckon I was probably taking all that extreme anxiety and expert guilt-tripping very literally in ways that they were not.

Additional issues of guilt and loss have arisen out of my younger sister passing away from a terminal illness before she reached the age of 30. Due to all the imbalanced family dynamics, I wound up not having any kind of a close relationship with my siblings at all, which is another type of loss that I've had to accept, and one I basically bore the blame and responsibility for most of my life. I realise now that my lack of bonding or sororial relations had a lot to do with many factors that were not my fault and were completely beyond my control and that I must learn to accept what cannot be, and learn not to take on the responsibility for this 'absence' that others have sought to place squarely on my shoulders.

Somehow I have come through all this relatively functional and not nearly as unhealthy as I ought to be, though I've definitely got the scars! I think all of these experiences have helped me to see the world from many different angles and have made me a more accepting and empathetic listener. I hope I can be of help to others who have confronted some similar issues, and that volunteering here and engaging with others who seek to be reflective about their life challenges will inspire me to find the strength to forgive and to forget the need for validation and acknowledgement that I could never obtain.