Two Lives, One Heart🗺️

For more than half of my life, I’ve lived away from the place where I was born. And I can’t even begin to explain what that means. It’s carrying a divided heart. With every move I didn’t just say goodbye to family and friends, I also said goodbye to a part of myself: versions of me that only existed in certain places and moments. Sometimes I was more authentic, sometimes I tried to fit in, pretending to be someone I wasn’t, just to try it out. But in the end, I always found my way back to myself, to the values instilled in me since childhood, even if many times I regretted not allowing myself to be more, to live more, or to let go of that self-demand that often steals the freedom to live fully.

Living outside your country gives you a resilience and adaptability that only migrants truly understand. You become resourceful because you have no other choice. You learn to do everything on your own, to love your own company, to listen to your thoughts and emotions carefully, analyze them, trace where they come from, and give them meaning.

The good part is the growth you experience. The hard part is that loneliness isn’t always fun. And the “in between” is that every time you move, you become a new version of yourself—because you’ve already learned more. Your non-negotiables grow, your mind never stops, and you even become a little socially awkward because you spend so much time living inside your head, asking yourself questions and answering them back. It sounds crazy, but it’s not.

And then there’s the language. Migrating often means you don’t even speak the new language perfectly. And if you’re like me, always demanding too much of yourself, you want your accent to be perfect, every word to sound 100% correct… spoiler: it’s impossible 😂. Now I think: let it come out however it comes out, haha. After more than a decade, I live with a brain split in two languages. Some days I can’t remember the word in either Spanish or English, so I make up a new one that makes sense in the moment… and then I wake up in the middle of the night laughing because I finally remember how to say it!

There’s also the frustrating part of not being able to fully show who you are in another language. In Spanish, a joke can be hilarious, perfectly matching people’s sense of humor, but in English, it often gets lost in translation, and what should have been a funny moment becomes an awkward silence… while I laugh nervously inside thinking, “It was funny, my people in Mexico would have understood.” And now it happens in reverse too: when I talk to my family in Spanish, I sometimes say things that are literal translations from English, and they just stare at me, trying to figure out what I meant.

And then comes the inevitable question: Where is home? 🏡

People say it’s where your family is… but I built a family here: my husband, my children. And the family I was born into is still there. So I don’t know what to answer. Mexico will always be my root, my identity, but I’ve spent so many years here that many habits are now part of me too.

It’s not just about community either. I have friends far away who remain a part of my daily life, even if it’s just through messages, and I have friends here who are priceless and with whom I share life in person.

The truth is, my heart breaks 💔 every time I see my friends in Mexico gathering, raising their kids together, building their little tribes or when my family sits around those never-ending Sunday meals I miss so much. When I visit, it’s nearly impossible to enjoy, because I want to see everyone, catch up on months or years of absence, but there’s never enough time.

And then there are the hardest moments. Just last week, when my dad was gravely ill in the hospital, all I had were updates through text messages and a few seconds on video calls. That desperation of wondering: will I ever get to give him one last hug? There’s no resilience in the world strong enough to heal that.

That’s why, when people ask me what superpower I would want, I always say the same thing: omnipresence. To be able to be everywhere my heart has left a piece of itself. To be the aunt present in my nieces’ and nephews’ lives, to sit in a café with my brother, to share a meal with my mom on any random Tuesday, to do “sushi therapy” with my girlfriends every Wednesday… and at the same time not miss a thing here, with my children, my husband, my friends who are now my community.

Sometimes I wonder why I chose this life: why I moved between states in Mexico, why I ended up living in another country. Sometimes I think it was the search for adventure; other times, that life simply carried me here. Since I was little, I felt Mexico City would never be my forever place, maybe just intuition, and that’s why opportunities kept coming that led me to move.

There are moves that still weigh on me, like Guadalajara. I still think about it and regret going back to Mexico City, because maybe I should have stayed and challenged myself more. But even that left me with a huge lesson. And now, here in this country, after the biggest storm of my life, I decided to stay. I told myself: “Come on, Mirell, stay. Don’t let fear paralyze you.” That decision brought blessings I can’t even explain: here my two babies were born, here I found love again after a divorce that broke me completely, here I built an entire life.

Living between two worlds hurts, but it also expands you. It makes you cherish every meeting, every call, every hug.

So today I choose to live fully, wherever I am. Life is not promised: hug your loved ones, tell them you love them, don’t wait for tomorrow or later—do it now.

And to all of us who have left pieces of our heart in different places: I admire us. We are so brave.

With love,

Mirell 💕