How did an event in your life influence your self-perception?

When I was younger, I never felt special. I know that sounds cliché and probably makes me feel like I am needy or fishing for compliments but truly I realized that I was born into an average family and in average conditions. I don’t think of that as an insult but rather a realization that special to me has a different meaning. Because of that perception of special I lived the majority of my life thinking that other extraordinary or “special” things were not awarded to people like me. I think the reason why I felt this was because I grew up in in a large family. I had 9 siblings and felt as though “how could I be special?” “what set my birth or life apart from the rest of my family?”. Growing up I tried to fit in and knew I was different for a lot of reasons but one of them I felt as though I purposely tried to suppress because I felt that it instantly brought up a lot of comments and that was because of my families origins. I started to realize that my perspective was valuable to people. That people wanted to know how they can appeal to Latino audiences and how the Hispanic perspective influenced our perception in the world. I started talking about my language and how I could name the gender of objects that in English had no gender. I spoke about traditions people thought it was something out of this world. I spoke about of the food I ate at home and I realized people stopped and listen. They were intrigued with my culture, my language, my heritage and my family. One event recently changed my self perception. At my sisters wedding my mom catered the whole thing. She spent days and weeks planning the whole thing. She cooked day in and day out prepping complex dishes for what I thought is normal food I had growing up. My mom had filled squirt bottles of homemade sauces and placed them on very table. Each table had 3 different sauces. I remember a woman came up to my mom and asked what she wanted to do with them. My mom didn’t care and said that people could take them if they wanted. My sister who had married a white man had many of her white american in laws at this event. I started laughing when I realized almost all them ran to every table to claim their bottle of sauce. It was such a surreal event because my siblings and I looked on as these people were so excited to have a bottle of sauce that we were so accustomed to growing up. It really showed the value of my culture’s cooking. It made me feel special that I had the chance to grow up latino.