Thread by @Quinnae_Moon

This thread is intensely relatable.

https://twitter.com/RubenGallego/status/1320750911040360449

There's a reason that the song "Common People" literally has my name on it at my karaoke bar.

I grew up in the South Bronx but caught a bit of luck. I had teachers who took an interest in me. My 5th grade history teacher gave me his old college textbook on Russian history; it was where I learned the words 'glasnost' and 'perstroika' from.

My math teacher advocated for me to get into an accelerator programme that helped disadvantaged kids prepare for the specialised high school exam. I studied hard; I was behind in my reading level because I grew up in a house with very few books.

We had more Chilton manuals than novels at home. The one educational text we owned for many years was a 1968 Encyclopaedia Britannica my father had pulled from the trash while on the job.

Until teachers gave me books and I scraped together my allowance to spend at the Bronx's only bookstore (the Bay Plaza Barnes & Noble, RIP), there wasn't much else to read in our apartment. But I studied hard and just barely earned a place at the Bronx High School of Science.

And I kept having to play catch-up, improving my reading level, trying to compete with classmates whose parents had *buildings* named after their families at Yale and Princeton. I had to work my ass off; and I did.

I feel nothing but satisfaction that I earned everything I got, and grief that so much luck was still involved. The right teacher noticing me at just the right time, the right people pushing me when I was struggling with dysphoria, depression, undiagnosed autism, and despair.

I was always used as "one of the good ones," to prove that *other* Puerto Ricans, other Latin@s, were just lazy or weren't trying hard enough. And I even indulged that for a time, during my teens. Survival. But I knew, even then, that that wasn't quite true.

And I hated it. Even as my birth name got mispronounced all the time and I dealt with insipid jokes about drug use and carrying knives, I just gritted my teeth and persevered.

I got lucky, too. But our life chances shouldn't depend on such good fortune. There are times when I look at my life now and it feels like an accident--because in some ways it is. But there's no question I worked a thousand times harder than the Jared Kushners of the world.

My father and I didn't always get along. But he did nurture in his own way. He recorded The Practical Guide to the Universe on TLC for me. He got me a marker board from the rubbish that I used to teach pretend classes to rows of stuffed animals.

Every book was manna from heaven. Even my beat-up textbooks from elementary school were sacred texts that contained dispatches from another world, a world I travelled through Encarta, gobbling up everything I could learn about every city I could name.

And it wasn't until high school that I learned there was a whole swathe of people who just... took that for granted? Whose parents taught them Shakespeare before they were 10, who were able to just... *go* to the Louvre instead of simply reading about it.

Encountering real privilege for the first time is such a culture shock when you grow up where I did. And suddenly in Bronx Science I went from being made fun of being a nerd, to not being nerdy *enough*. I got picked on for *not having read A Tale of Two Cities yet.* I was 14.

So, yeah. Privilege is a hell of a drug. And I will always despise people who look down on those of us who had to struggle. And who still do, in many ways.