Why do I feel invisible or like an outsider in spaces that should feel like 'home'?

This is maybe the sharpest loneliness of diaspora life—being in a room full of 'your people' and still not quite fitting. Sor Juana knew this acutely. She was Mexican, but educated in Spanish intellectual traditions. A nun, but fiercely independent. Indigenous lineage, Spanish-speaking, writing for courts and clergy who both needed and resented her brilliance. That invisibility often comes from an actual mismatch, not from you being wrong. Maybe you speak the language differently. Maybe your family's version of the culture doesn't match the dominant version in your current location. Maybe you've changed, grown, moved in directions that distance you from where you started. All of that is real and valid. The invisibility also comes from systems—from being read as 'not quite enough' of anything. Sor Juana wrote about this relentlessly: the gap between who she was and how she was perceived. Her response was to keep writing, to document her own thinking, to insist on her own definitions. Start by separating two things: the real cultural distance (which might be real) from the systemic erasure (which definitely is). Then ask: whose version of 'home' am I measuring myself against? And is that the version I actually want?