Vanina Vergara Podcasts- The Price of Holding It All Together S01E03 The Price of Holding It All Together Adolescence did not arrive as a fresh breeze of freedom, but rather as a forced relocation into the role of adulthood. Whilst other girls dreamt of their first kiss or an evening at the cinema, I was extinguishing emotional fires at home. I was the “caregiving daughter”—the one who accompanied her broken mother, who dried her tears, who listened in silence to laments about an emotionally absent father, at times absent in body as well. At that age, I had already mastered the art of reading silences and veiled outbursts. One had to hold everything up. One had to be strong. One had to keep quiet.I am Vanina Vergara - C.V. Vergara to the english-speaking world born in Asunción- Paraguay. I have three children whom I love deeply, and this is my life.I was raised beneath the watchful eye of traditional Catholicism, which taught me that sacrifice was virtue, and that the duty of a “good woman” was to endure, to yield, to forgive, and, if need be, to erase herself entirely. No one ever spoke to me of boundaries, of mental health, of self-love. Only of what “must” and “must not” be done in order to remain “a decent woman.”Then came the years of the catwalk: the rehearsed smile, the image that reflected what others expected of me. I worked as a model and appeared on television, yet I always felt as though I were playing a part in a script written by someone else: pretty, proper, compliant. Inside, I continued to carry a dense sadness—that mixture of fear and obligation that takes root when you believe you cannot fail, for if you fall, everything collapses.My first relationships bore the very same pattern. I adapted, I moulded myself, I justified, and when it hurt… I endured. Because that was what I had been taught: that love was surrender, even when it wounds; that a respectable woman knows how to suffer in silence; that if a man is angered, it must be because you have erred; and that a family must be defended, even at the expense of one’s own sanity.In time, my body began to exact its toll: anxiety, insomnia, nameless anguish. Still, I carried on functioning, as any dutiful “caregiving daughter” would. Until one day, the entire system collapsed. My marriage to the father of my children—begun as a desperate attempt to build the home I had never known—devolved into a brutal repetition of what I had sworn never to live again.I found myself at point zero: divorced, stigmatised, with three children living with him, and a society pointing its finger at me. A good mother does not leave her children, does she? No one spoke of the violence behind it all, of the manipulations, of the domestic hell. No. The “mad one,” the “unstable one,” the “irresponsible one”… that was me.And there, in that dark abyss, another journey began—the journey of rebuilding myself.I read letters sent to mailto:[email protected]

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