Hi Karen,

I feel like this from time to time. My mom is from Nicaragua and immigrated as a young adult in the 70s. She had a lot of struggles on her path to citizenship in the United States and beyond as she had no family here but she got through it all knowing that she was creating opportunity for me and my sister. She likes to remind us of this often, creating a lot of pressure to succeed in certain ways.

I try to remind myself that success is, to my mind, a truly internal experience. I like to think that being fortunate to be in a country like the US means that I actually have the luxury of defining success for myself instead of having it defined for me in the much narrower terms of basic survival.

I hope this is of some help and good luck to you in all you do!