Veronica Unfiltered

By: Veronica

We lived off Salinas then. I was in the second grade at Blackshear Elementary, already carrying more shame than a child should know.

I dreaded going to school, not because of the lessons, but because of the way I looked and smelled. My clothes rarely changed. The fabric held on to the scent of sweat, mildew, and a body that wasn’t washed often enough. My face was covered with bandages from ringworm, raw reminders of what we lacked. I knew when I walked into that classroom, all eyes would land on me, not in friendship, but in ridicule.

One morning, I decided I could not bear it. I told my mother the school doors were locked, spinning a lie I hoped she would believe. She did, and for a brief while, I felt the relief of escape. But truth has a way of finding its way back. My teacher came to the house, exposed me, and instead of handling it in private, my mother turned it into a spectacle. She made me write a story about the lie and read it aloud in class. My humiliation became the lesson.

The children already made fun of me for being dirty, for smelling bad, for existing outside the unspoken codes of childhood acceptance. Their laughter was sharp, cutting deeper than any bruise. I learned to shrink myself, to sit quietly on the edges of the room, to pray for invisibility.

But invisibility had limits. One day, my teacher pinched me, her fingers sharp against my arm. I told my mother. The teacher lied, insisting it never happened. For a moment, I felt the familiar script of shame, that maybe I should fold, stay quiet, retreat again into the shadows. But I refused. I held to my truth, and this time, my mother believed me. She defended me.

That moment did not erase the hunger or the ridicule, but it carved something into me. I learned that truth has a voice, even when everything around me insisted it should stay quiet. Years later, I would carry that lesson into every role I stepped into. As a social worker, I fought for families no one wanted to see. As an attorney, I defended clients the system had already judged. As a storyteller and speaker, I learned to shape my own scars into testimony.

The courage began here, in hunger and humiliation, where I first discovered the power of refusing silence.