FOB struggles are real. Which ones do you relate to?

1. Teachers and other adults thought you were mentally slow because you couldn’t speak English.

2. Someone called out a strange sound and you realized they were butchering your name.

3. You Anglicized your name to make it easier for people…and didn’t respond when called because your new name was just a strange sound to you.

4. Your social circle was limited to other refugee kids from your country because they were the only people that didn’t make you feel out of place.

5. You wondered why you had to take English and a foreign language. Why didn’t English count?

6. You didn’t see the benefit of making a family tree. Your ancestors are all from the country you just came from.

7. You thought it was wasteful to make a gingerbread house. There are starving children in the world. You used to be one of them.

8. When your class read about war, violence, starvation, poverty, oppression, and treat it like fiction or long-gone history, you knew those things are very real.

9. Your afterschool extracurricular activity was running a household while your parents juggled multiple minimum wage jobs.

10. At home you respected your elders and did chores. At school you pretended to be a gangsta.

11. You wore clothes people donated to churches that must’ve been fashionable 20 years prior.

12. You raced your sibling to pick up a ringing phone because it was the coolest technology you’ve ever seen.

13. You understood the difference between a real problem and a first-world problem.

14. You would get up in the middle of the night to wake your parents from their haunting nightmare. Post-traumatic stress disorder is your inheritance.

15. Your allowance was whatever spare change you picked up from the ground.

16. You became an expert at healthcare, public assistance, taxes, personal finance, immigration, and insurance because your parents relied on you to advocate for them.

17. Your family was dirt poor, but you kept that to yourself when visiting relatives in your home country because they were poorer and needed your parents’ remittance.

18. Your parents were thrift store hoarders and you grew up to be a department store hoarder.

19. Your parents would say, “When our country is safe and livable again, we will go back.” After years passed and that didn’t happen, they freak out that you’ve assimilated.

20. Your parents expected you to get an advanced degree in a respectable and lucrative field. There is no word for “liberal arts” or “the humanities” in your language.

What are other FOB struggles did you deal with?