Of all the things in my life that I'm proud of, my number one would be my Italian heritage. Growing up with the loud family, the amazing Sunday dinners, and basically any other Italian stereotype that you could think of, it's become a big part of who I am as a person, and it will never be something I'm ashamed of.

Despite all this, every day, I still struggle to fully, one hundred percent, connect to my culture and my heritage. A big part of this is because I cannot speak one word of Italian.

As I grew up, my entire family knew how to speak Italian. However, my parents never spoke it enough around me for me to pick it up. So now, at eighteen, whenever I'm around my family, I feel disconnected and a sense of hurt when I realize that I'll never understand the jokes being said, or the stories that are being shared.

In some ways, I feel like I've been robbed. Every time I am around my family and they all speak in Italian, I find it hard to connect, and realize how easily I could have been raised to speak the language, and how I could be laughing along to the jokes, gossiping along with the family—and that I am not. My best friend is Italian as well, and whenever I see her and her siblings speak in Italian and laugh at jokes I'm unable to understand, I feel extremely envious and almost like I'll never belong in my own culture.

I know I could always just learn the language, but as my family is from Sicily, there are always different dialects and slang words, and there is a huge part of me that feels like it will never really be the same.

Apart from all this, I still feel extremely lucky to have grown up in the Italian family I did, and will forever be proud of who I am.