My beginning

I was born on January 21, 1965, in a small town called Almada, Portugal. My mother was 41, and so was my father—two people who had already lived through heartbreak, two failed marriages, and the responsibility of raising the children from those past lives.

And then there was me.

But the truth is not soft or sentimental. I was not welcomed into their lives—not by my mother, not by my father, and not by their children from before. I wasn’t seen as a new beginning or a blessing. I was more like an interruption, an extra burden, a complication. I was a thing that arrived in a life already overflowing with problems they didn’t know how to handle.

I grew up feeling the weight of that truth. Not wanted. Not embraced. Not really anyone’s priority.

And yet, this is the beginning of my story—the place I rose from, the place that shaped me, even if it never held me gently.