Saudade is a Portuguese word for the feeling of melancholic longing for something that is lost and will never be again. For me, it is the loss of self, the loss of culture. I have never felt like a queer POC (person of color) and thus, I have never felt welcome in spaces created for and around the needs and desires of other queer POC.

It's been written about quite a bit, the plight of the hetero-presenting person. I know that when people see me out with my male partner and with my children, I am automatically assumed to be straight, the other half of a cisgendered, hetero partnership. I have long since swallowed the bitter pill of this knowledge — what am I to do? Wear the pansexual colors on all my t-shirts? Hold up a giant sign that proclaims 'I'm not straight?' No.

In the wake of the Orlando shooting, I felt for the first time that I was a part of the LGBTQIA community. Their suffering was mine, and yet I still felt... Apart. I felt guilty for my own agony and my own tears, my anger over the senseless murder of forty-nine people — I felt as though I was not allowed to have these feelings, for I was appropriating the grief of the community of which I was not a part.

I understand the mindset that becomes hurt when we point out white privilege, when we rightfully scold our allies for making our pain about them. It is a part of me, to know on some level the confusion a cishet white person experiences when their queer friend, filled with pain and fear, lashes out at them. And it is this knowledge that makes me feel isolated from the community of who I feel are my peers, the understanding of the "other side," as it were.

In the last few weeks I came to a realization, but it was not the cold relief of a new understanding, more the scathing awareness of a deeper pain I've been carrying around for years: I do not feel that I am a person of color.

I was raised by a predominantly white family — I was not exposed to the culture of my father's family until late into my teens. I saw things through a fairly limited set of lenses, blinded to the larger picture of race and the pain of those living outside the confines of White America. I was impoverished, abused, lacking many basic rights and amenities my peers took for granted, and yet I know now I was also raised with a privilege that my darker sisters and brothers do not have.

I am mixed, my features molded by a melting-pot of features and races and ethnic colors until my identity is undefinable. People eager to put me into a box ask me where I am from — am I Dominican? Cuban? Am I from some exotic island?

I am mixed, and this allows me to walk between the world of POC folx and that of white persons. My nondescript race relaxes people, my affable demeanor and way of speaking do not pose a threat. I have the ability to avoid racial confrontations simply by being accepted into white society, which is a luxury someone of darker skin does not have, is not allowed to have.

I am mixed, and this is a curse. I am the symbol of the age-old disparity between the African slaves and the children born of their masters, my light skin holding the pain of centuries. I am mestiza, the 2016 descendant of brutalized Native women and their Spanish rapists.

I have experienced colorism, which is the discrimination within minority communities based on one's skin tone, but rarely have I experienced racism. I can count on one hand the number of times a white person has slung a slur at me, but I recall countless times that I have been insulted and mocked by POC.

I understand now why these things were said to me, from what wellspring of pain and resentment they must have sprung. And so my confusion has ended, my brief anger has dissipated. I simply do not understand the agony of black America. My life is filled with privilege—financial, sexual, racial. I have never lived the plight of those who would be my people, those of whom I want desperately to be a part.

"Pick one," I was told, when it came to the three races that comprise me — Black, Latinx, White — "pick one," I was told when it came to my sexuality. "You cannot exist in all of these spaces at one time."

I have immersed myself in readings, articles, teachings of what it is to be a POC, what it is to be queer. I have entered and breathed in spaces where queer POC live and breathe. I see my mixed skin and my love for all genders and I know I am these things, that they define me, but I cannot let myself believe it. I have not suffered and so I do not feel as though I can assume the titles of those who have.