Asking for Help Isn’t a Mental Health Strategy. It’s a Cultural Unlearning
A letter to all first-gen Latinas out there.
By Miryam Valdivia Romero.
I was standing at the gate counter, passport in my hand, and the agent looked at me and said, “You can’t board. It expires in less than six months.”
And I swear, in that moment, everything in me just dropped. I had just landed from another flight. I was supposed to be on my way to my grandmother’s funeral. And suddenly I was stuck. I could feel the pressure in my chest getting heavier by the second.
Here’s the thing, though. I had been in this moment before, just a different version of it.
Five years earlier, when my grandfather died, I did what I had always done. I held it together. I flew to the funeral, showed up for my family, and stayed strong. I didn’t cry until I saw him in the casket, and even then, I pulled myself back together fast. I remember thinking, "Look at me. Look how well I’m handling this.” I was so proud of that version of strength.
And then my body shut down. Completely. I got so sick I couldn’t push through it, couldn’t ignore it, couldn’t “be strong” my way out of it. Because when you don’t let yourself break, your body will break for you.
So when my abuela died last year, I told myself to be strong, to hold it together, to show up for everyone the way I always had, even though I was breaking inside.
But standing at that gate counter, being told I couldn’t board, I didn’t get the chance to pretend.
I don’t remember walking away. I don’t remember calling my sisters. But I remember their voices, calm and steady from across the country, saying, “Hold on. We’re finding you an appointment. We’re getting you there.” My fiancé drove me three hours through the night to a passport office. The agent made sure I got out on time. TSA pulled me to the front of the line. Strangers moved aside so I could get through.
I sprinted to the end of the terminal, heart pounding, and made it to the gate just as they started boarding.
And then I broke.
For three hours on that flight, I cried. The kind of crying where you can’t catch your breath, where your whole body shakes, where you’re not even trying to stop it. And for the first time in my life, I wasn’t trying to hold it together.
I didn’t get sick.
The difference between 2019 and 2025 wasn’t just two funerals. It was everything we got handed without anyone calling it what it is.
I didn’t grow up in a family that talked about mental health. My parents were too busy surviving. They came here navigating a system that wasn’t in their language, that wasn’t designed for them, that made them jump through hoops just to exist in it. You don’t sit around processing your feelings when you’re fighting to keep the lights on, when you’re trying to figure out a form that nobody will translate for you, when you’re working two jobs and still being told you don’t belong here. You push, you endure, and you figure it out alone because that’s the only option the system gives you.
And as their daughter, I absorbed all of it. No one sat me down and taught me the rules; I watched. I watched my mother handle everything without asking anyone for anything. I watched the women in my family carry grief, stress, exhaustion, and uncertainty without ever naming it out loud. There were dichos for that. “Los trapos sucios se lavan en la casa.” You don’t air your struggles outside these walls. And “el que dirán,” the ever-present weight of what people will think, kept everything locked tight inside. You handle it quietly, you handle it alone, and you definitely don’t let anyone outside the family see you struggle.
I grew up learning to navigate that same system, except I had to do it faster, smarter, better, and in both languages.
Every achievement was a payment toward their sacrifice. Every milestone was proof that what they went through was worth it. You don’t ask for help when you’re trying to prove something, and you don’t fall apart when people are counting on you to be the one who made it. What they called strength, I had made into my entire identity. And I was so good at it that I stopped noticing it was costing me something.
Our parents were running an operating system built for crisis, and they handed it down to us whole, along with the food, the faith, the music, and the love. We became first-gen professionals, leaders, executives, and we carried that same survival code into boardrooms and team meetings and performance reviews, places where we were still being asked to prove ourselves, still being underestimated, still doing twice the work for half the recognition. But here is where it gets complicated. Nobody told us there was an off switch, and nobody modeled what it looked like to stop surviving and start actually living. Most of us never got the memo that we could update it. I thought I had. I hadn’t.
This is why mental health awareness advice so often bounces off first-gen Latinas like us.
The advice assumes the barrier is information, go to therapy, practice vulnerability, and ask for help. And we hear it, we nod, we maybe even believe it intellectually. But none of that reaches the part of us that learned, at a cellular level, that needing people is a liability, that asking for help is a burden, and that falling apart is a luxury we were never allowed. The belief that you have to handle it alone isn’t a mindset problem. It’s the scar tissue of surviving a system that was never built for you.
And here’s what that costs. Your nervous system is tracking everything, every “I’m fine” when you’re not, every time you carry everything alone because you think that’s what strength looks like. When you refuse to feel it, your body will make you feel it. I know because mine did, twice. The second time, I finally let it be different.
Real strength, the kind worth building, is building the capacity to break, building the capacity to ask for help, and building the capacity to let yourself be held instead of holding everyone else together. That is the unlearning that the women before us never had the safety to do.
You are not in survival mode anymore, even if the voice in your head still sounds like the girl who had to figure everything out alone, and asking for help still feels like it comes with a cost.
It doesn’t. And you deserve to know what that feels like.
Miryam Valdivia Romero is an International NLP Master Coach, Certified in Neurolinguistic Programming, Hypnosis, and Regressions. she is specialized in leadership and behavioral coaching through the lens of emotional mastery, communication, high-trust culture-building, and multicultural team development.