A man recounts being shot, growing up in Brazil, and immigrating to the US as an undocumented family. He describes how that trauma and struggle led him to rethink what happiness actually meant.
I literally get shot in the neighborhood my mom took us out of, and I still live with a bullet in my back. And so that was a story that Henry and I knew we needed to tell because that was a kind of a pivotal moment where you ask yourself, like, oh, my God, I didn't wake up this day knowing I was going to be shot. Is this really how I want to live my life? And that was the beginning of the pivot that's taken me to where I am today, which is night and day. So much happier, so much more fulfilling and aligned. But some crazy stuff had to happen to get here. I know you said you wanted to get deep, so let's rip off the band aid.
Yeah, I thought we'd have more of a. More five minute buffer here, but more than a five minute buffer. But. But let's. Let's go. Let's. Let's get deep. Right. So what were you doing when you unfortunately got shot? And then what was it like in, like, the days and weeks following as you were recovering?
So I guess I'll start before. We should get some backstory in there. So, like, I grew up in Brazil. I was born in Rio. I didn't grow up. Let's even backtrack that. I was supposed to be raised in Brazil, in Rio, and I was born there. And then my mom, with her childhood traumas, was like, I don't want to raise my kids here, because she grew up in this neighborhood where you didn't know if you were going to come home. In Brazil and in Portuguese, we have a saying. A lot of cultures have this, but in Brazil, you say this even if you're not religious. Every time someone leaves, you say, go with God, because you don't know if the person's gonna come home that day. Like, that is the culture that I was born into. And my mom refused to have her three kids. I was the youngest of three. Being raised in a society that, like, that's just how it was. Like, you could get robbed on the way to school, you could get killed because somebody wants your shoes. It could be so crazy. So she decided to take this crazy risk in 1998 and moved us to the States. And my dad stayed behind. They were divorced. So she kind of took this on as this crazy life change. When she was. I believe she was 36. So she's divorced, three kids, doesn't speak English, and she was successful in Brazil. We had a good family, village kind of a vibe. But she was like, it's not enough for me to have peace of mind. I want to give my kids more. So this is where my childhood took a crazy pivot. Like, we didn't get raised like regular kids. You know, when you are the kid of an undocumented immigrant, and you are undocumented, you're raised to keep a secret. You're raised to know you can't get too close to people because they could tell on you. And all the while, my mom is paying lawyers. She's trying to do everything by the books. But we can't leave. We're just waiting. We're just waiting. We're just another number in the queue. So she goes from being a teacher, a French teacher, and a Portuguese teacher to cleaning houses, to cleaning offices, to being a nanny for these people. And we were the kids. We were the kids of the nannies.
