Kiara Alegría Hudes

And I often did feel like a migrant in my own life.

I was always traveling between places, traveling between languages, like –

My Spanish is kind of embarrassing, and my English kind of separates me.

English as my first language separates me from a lot of my closest family members, let alone the spiritual languages, the musical languages.

And so, yeah, it was those friction points that –

made me feel kind of alive.

And now I know as a writer, that's what I'm always digging into.

You know, where are the moments where the dichotomy is the reality and is the truth?

So this was something really beautiful.

As I mentioned, my mother, she was born into spiritual gifts, and she sees the world through very different eyes than I have.

She could see spirits when she was a child, and it scared her.

She didn't understand it a lot of the time.

It marked her as different in her community.

and it came with senses of responsibility, too.

You know, she used to see, oh, so-and-so came to me and said, I'm dying, I'm dying, and then they would rush to that elder's house, and this elder had died in their sleep, so she saw a few deaths before they occurred.

And then they started coming to her, asking for her insight, and it's more than a child could shoulder.

So for many years, she kind of tamped down

her spiritual proclivities because they scared her.

But one of the great experiences of my life really starting in middle school was she had always told me about her spiritual life and her spiritual gifts.

But she really started opening the door to serious and rigorous study when I was maybe in about middle school.