About

Why I Am Still Here:

A Story of Liberation

Why I Am Still Here:

A Story of Liberation

Growing Up in Silence

From a young age, I felt a deep sense of emptiness, isolation, and fear. Social gatherings terrified me, and I spent my childhood watching other kids experience joy that felt completely out of reach. I was constantly asked why I never smiled, so I taught myself how to perform happiness, practicing in front of a mirror to avoid being called “weird.”

By the time I was 11, I had turned to perfectionism, obsessively chasing high grades and academic achievement as a way to distract myself from my growing suicidal thoughts. But no matter how much I accomplished, I felt disconnected.

I was wondering if anyone else wanted to die.

Suicidality and Psychiatric Control

At 14, I told my mother I wanted to die by suicide. The response was fear, panic, and attempts to control me into feeling differently. Mental health professionals diagnosed me, prescribed medication, and told me I just needed to “have fun” and “make friends.” My family, desperate to help, turned to religion, framing my suicidality as a demonic possession that needed to be exorcised.

Nothing I felt was validated.

No one ever asked, Why does death feel safer than living?

The American Dream and the Reality of Assimilation

Moving to the U.S. was supposed to be my redemption. I believed I would finally get real help, that I would find belonging, that things would get better.

Instead, I was put through a revolving door of psychiatric hospitals, residential programs, and forced interventions. I lost my autonomy. I was confined, restrained, and punished for trying to escape. I was treated as a liability instead of a person in pain.

Police and ambulances became a regular presence in my life. Mental health providers framed my distress as a personal defect rather than a response to disconnection, oppression, and acculturation. Every time I asked for help, the response was more control: hospitalization, surveillance, social workers monitoring my physical presence, decisions being made for me instead of with me.

At 16, I realized the only way to break the cycle of hospitalization was to stop telling the truth.

From that moment on, every time a provider asked, “Are you suicidal?” my answer was no. It was the only way to keep my freedom, and it still is.

From Patient to Survivor

For years, I internalized the idea that mental health was an individual issue. That I had a chemical imbalance, that I just needed therapy, that the solution was within me, not in changing the conditions that were making me suffer.

But as I unlearned assimilation, I also unlearned the lies about mental health.

I saw how my experiences weren’t just personal. They were systemic. The racism, the control, the coercion, the dismissal of my pain, the forced psychiatric treatment, the pressure to assimilate, the internalized colorism; These weren’t just struggles I had to overcome. These were designed systems of oppression.

I started reclaiming my identity. I let my accent stay. I found pride in my culture instead of trying to erase it. I stopped striving to fit into whiteness and started dismantling the ways I had been taught to reject myself.

And most importantly, I realized I wasn’t broken: the systems I had been forced into were.

The Birth of Estoy Aquí

Estoy Aquí was born out of my refusal to accept coercion as care.

I know what it’s like to be seen as a liability instead of a human being.

I know what it’s like to ask for help and be met with fear, punishment, and coercion.

I know what it’s like to be treated as a problem instead of a person in pain.

Now, I dedicate my work to creating spaces that honor autonomy, reject coercion, and address the real reasons people suffer.