Aguilas Off Pine

Month: September 2021

Numbness from CPTSD; In spite, the Intense Desire for Intimacy Remains

Aguilar

I had initially thought to make a post whining that my peers are too emotionally soft, have childish complaints given their status as working professionals. I even noted this to my therapist, that I wanted to meet someone who was capable of greater emotional range and resiliency than the people I have gone on dates with recently. However, I have now spent several days reeling from a conversation I had with my crush. It remains true that the childhood and familial trauma have hardened me to many of daily life’s injustices and that I am now working on finding gratitude and grace in the simplest of things. For all my lofty self-praise, I’m still human and can be affected, vulnerable, and have expectations dashed. Having recognized how a little indifference can cause me to spiral, I refocus my attentions on searching for the continued capacity to empathize, to find softness for myself and others.

I had spent the week dealing with issues at work that came down to coworkers poor communication skills and their frustrations that we could not deal with technical and contractual problems in the specific way that would vindicate their prior work on our shared projects. In other words, they found a solution that worked only for their team and no one else and were mad we had to take everyone into consideration. I had to deal with the same team on two different projects, under two different supervisors, and both supervisors complimented my ability to maintain a level of composure with the team. I let the supervisors know that I had also grown frustrated but took the time after work to process those feelings and this helped me see through the several weeks of issues. I was riding the high of those compliments into a pseudo-date with another public agency employee, whose hiking pic had caught my eye and the similar views on environmental policy and public service led to us meeting in person.

I say pseudo-date because when I got to his place it was clear he did not have the same thing in mind. I had gotten dressed to go out for dinner in downtown. As both of us were only a short walk from the downtown restaurants and as we had both mentioned being hungry, I did not feel that I needed to specify that I wanted to go eat. He invited me in and I figured, what the hell, why not. Given the assumed roles we’d be taking, I figured he may want to get the fun out of the way and then eat more comfortably after. Eventually we did make it out, only now stoned and more relaxed. We started out eating and drinking in downtown Long Beach before making our way over to the gayborhood bars.

During dinner, a friend had let me know he’d be out drinking at those bars and I told him I was with someone but wanted to meet up and drink with him and his friends too. Instead, at the first bar my date and I went to, I ran into said friend, his friends, a couple of guys I had hooked up with, and other guys who I had chatted with here and there. Although I figured I had handled each person except my friend casually enough, introducing everyone, I was disappointed to hear from my date, “Sometimes I go to gay bars and I just don’t feel like it’s my place.”

“Well, you have spent the entire afternoon telling me that you only have straight friends, so that does make sense. For me, I just need a place that is completely different from the uber-straight environment I have to work in.”

“Yea… I guess I just don’t see myself here.”

“Well,” I said sternly, “you’re here now.”

My friend left for another bar, but I didn’t go with. I told my date that we didn’t have to go and that he also did not have to finish the drink he had gotten. Perhaps I should have realized he wasn’t kidding about not going to gay bars often, as he was surprised by how strong his cocktail drink had been poured. I encouraged him to just leave it, pointed out that I had only gotten an energy drink and water since we’d left downtown and so he shouldn’t feel pressured to finish it on my behalf. He didn’t listen.

On the long walk home, with his inhibitions lowered by sex, drugs, and alcohol, he began to disclose more about his friends. He didn’t have any gay friends, his ex-boyfriend and he had kept themselves separate from the community. Of the friends he was comparing himself to, he revealed that they were two tech workers in the Silicon Valley. “Oh so they’re wealthy?”

“Well, they don’t consider themselves wealthy because they didn’t grow up with this level of money.”

“Duh, no one grew up with that level of wealth. They’re literally top earners of money. You just said one half of that couple took 6 entire months of work to hike the Pacific Crest Trail and is now back in SF with his wife. If that isn’t wealthy, then what is?”

“Maybe, but I don’t like questioning how people identify.”

My inhibitions had also been lowered, the anger already there at the surface and I retorted, “That’s bullshit. That’s how people like that convince themselves that tax policy is unfair. These are two double income, high earners, no kids and the ease to just take 6 months off of work between jobs. Most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.”

I was able to appreciate the fact that a small fire, set by local transients, had broken out and interrupted my ranting. There was a person passed out near the fire, but I doubted they had set it. We watched it blaze and he even called the fire department. I was content to let it burn once I realized it was just going to cause smoke damage and there wasn’t much I could do. Perhaps I should have urinated on the fire instead of on a nearby tree. Regardless, this clear sign to change the topic did not take. After we resumed walking, he started in again on his wealthy friends.

“I just admire that they’re having this mid-life crisis. Like, I don’t know that I picked the right career or that I’m really fulfilled by my job. Don’t you feel like you’re in a mid-life crisis?”

Again, my derision and scorn were front and center, “What a privileged and frankly ridiculous take. So many of us don’t have that opportunity to take such an emotional look at our jobs. Perhaps that’s why we’re all angry, but I think those who can do something like that should feel grateful. I don’t have the opportunity to take a mid-life crisis, unpaid break without risking my mortgage. And even the fact that I’m paying down a mortgage puts me in a great position.”

“Well, you never wavered in your major? I changed mine five times.”

“I never had the opportunity. I picked my major at 17 years old and refined my career path from there. But I had to do what I could to survive.”

“You realize that’s atypical? Don’t you feel that you’re unsatisfied at your job? Don’t you feel…”

I cut him off, “No, I don’t FEEL that. I understand and empathize with you if you do. Truly, I know I’m being a hardass, but no, those aren’t feelings I share. I’m much happier finding fulfillment outside of my career too and letting my job be my job.” We had gotten to his place and said our goodbyes with that. I walked home wondering what it was that had upset me in the end. I summarized the above for my therapist and told her it seemed a combination of the constant whining about his insecurities and his decision to cast my situation aside and double down on his own feelings, almost to the point that it felt he needed me to mirror them back at him. I explained to her that I understood that I had to respect the pain I had been through and the strength it took to still build something of value, but that the date had ultimately been disappointing for me. She and I walked through a conversation on the varying levels of emotional resiliency in people.

I’m not sure that I would call it resiliency though. My therapist says I’m strong to have gone through all this trauma and still gotten to the point where I have this great career and education. She says I’m resilient, I just think I’m jaded. I often joke that no coworker will ever say or do anything as horrible as my parents did, no matter how angry they get at me. When a coworker is raising his voice at me or being particularly difficult, I just detach and watch them. In a very real way, I don’t have the sensitivity to be able to react emotionally to their frustration or pain, only to intellectually note the signs of frustration and pain. This inertness comes in handy, working with men of a certain generation, with short tempers and gruff attitudes. I have no issue having my ear talked off for a simple question, my intelligence questioned because I’m asking for a clarification, or my inexperience made front and center as they question how someone without forty years of experience could possibly contribute to the situation at hand. For all their ranting about their perceptions of the poor job I’m doing in that moment, nothing these coworkers say will cost me my paycheck and so there’s no point in defending myself. In that way, I’m so jaded by what my parents said and did, people who were responsible for my well-being and whose opinions did matter then, that my coworkers can’t get a reaction out of me; it’s also true that having grown up believing that at any moment the government could kick down our doors, deport my parents, and toss us all into foster care, it’s hard to care about things like a white-collar professional’s mid-life crisis. It is a telling and unfortunate fact that numbness, emotional inertness, is a strength in our industry.

I want to be clear that is the professional veneer I put on, the mask I wear for work. It is true that I’m quieter and more controlled than the usual person, see also uptight and closed off. That’s not how I’m looking to be in a relationship, nor am I looking for someone who is themselves rigid and emotionally detached. Unfortunately, it appears that as people learn I’m working as an engineer, very adjacent to construction and blue-collar work, they expect a level of emotional inertness in the relationship too, as well as a more aggressive person in the bedroom. Given the sexual assaults in my past, I get uncomfortable assuming that role without first getting clear and openly expressed consent, which seems to be a turn off for my sexually repressed peers. For a hook up, I am willing to continue the same masculine, macho bullshit charade, but I’m talking a hook up at the bathhouse. If there’s even a little conversation, I’m aggressively screening the candidates. For example, given the immense responsibility I feel to provide for my family, I avoid any potential dates that even hint that they’re looking to be spoiled or taken care of in an unequal way. Just the other day, a man on Tinder told me he was expecting to have emotional outbursts but that I was not allowed the same. When I told him I was looking for an equal partnership he responded by saying we didn’t have to bring so much wokeness into relationships. I unmatched him, annoyed at what he said, but relieved I didn’t have to wait until I was sitting across from him at a restaurant to be told my date was looking for an “older brother” to take care of him and sleep with him.

So I finally get to the point, which is that I shouldn’t front like I don’t have feelings either. I saw my crush again two nights ago. I had been planning to go out dancing in DTLA for Puteria at Precinct. He texted me early enough in the evening and asked me out for drinks or for Netflix and chill. I let him know I was already trying to go out but would take him up on the drink. It was a nice night and he had even offered to meet me in downtown, a couple blocks down from my place. I wasn’t sure where the night was going, but he offered to drop me off at home, not take me along to his place. I was a bit confused but said OK, sure, that would still beat walking home. He had his dog with him so I assumed this meant he wouldn’t try to come up but I still joked that his dog wouldn’t get along with my sister’s cats. No response. We said our goodbyes downstairs and I let him know I would wait to hear from him because he had now at several times just dropped our conversation in text messages or stopped responding. He let out an exasperated, “What?!” I repeated my point and he seemed to understand and we said goodbye.

The next day, I caved and texted him first, a simple good morning text. He said good morning and then let me know he had gotten up a little later than planned, was already late to an early morning brunch with his friends. He ended up drinking early and by noon was letting me know he was drunk. I said no big deal that way you’re sober by evening. To which he responded yea, drunk all day but in the mood all day too. I laughed and let him know he should have taken me over to his place last night then, but that I was down to go over too after I finished a gaming session with my friends. He seemed surprised I was open to that, I was equally surprised he had even mentioned it, but then he stopped giving real responses to what I was saying. To my messages, he just started lol’ing and lmao’ing and leaving it at that. I told him I’m sure we were both difficult to read to each other and he stopped responding. I didn’t pursue the conversation either, annoyed at his lack of responses.

I went off to the gym and fumed a bit. I wasn’t sure in the moment why it was bugging me so much. Eventually, I gathered that it was annoying to me that I was over here putting my vulnerabilities on display and he was giving me one word answers. In his inability to meet me halfway, I am reminded of my parents’ reactions to me when I would clearly and elaborately explain myself and they would say they didn’t understand, they would zero in on the wrong thing, or would generally dismiss my feelings. With my mother especially, there’s a refusal to be held accountable, and, as my feelings would be in reaction to something she had said or done, she didn’t want to understand my perspective. In truth, this dismissal of my struggles are what irritated me with the earlier date, as he had dismissed me saying I needed to get through to school and start making money just to survive and focused back on himself and his feeling about needing to switch careers. There’s the element of pride of course, but also then on my end, the inability to see how these relatively minor struggles could actually take up this much air.

I paused writing for a while and as the Emmys happened this weekend I saw Michaela Cole receiving her dues. I have before mentioned that I can’t watch I May Destroy You, knowing full well that it’s about sexual assault. Twitter brought me to an article in Vulture in which she beautifully summarizes what I’m getting after: “I’ve never had a garden. We never grew up like that. I don’t particularly mind, but I think there is something in growing up in concrete and not understanding putting fingers in soil, growing things, foundation. My family has rented our whole lives. You’re always on fragile ground because it’s not yours. It gives you a drive, an ambition, because nothing is certain. That is a resilience no person with stability can replicate. You can’t forge it. There’s blessings to the struggle.”

So it is that I struggle to relate to the people who are now my peers. I told a coworker I can only listen to so many fintech bros tell me about their stock portfolios before I roll my eyes. He had been telling me he felt pressure toward a more extravagant lifestyle and I wondered who his friends were, letting him know that most of my friends did not have white-collar jobs. These coworkers of mine and their friends, these aren’t the kinds of people I grew up with and have always had a level of comfort and affluence that I couldn’t, as an immigrant child, aspire to. Perhaps now I can, but that does not take away that I am the oldest, American born in a family that started here with just a mother, her brother, and her daughter. The specifics of how and why they ended up here are for another time, but I grew up without any sense of familial connections or roots here. Add to that my family’s extreme dysfunctions and I have never had a sense that anyone cared about my feelings. First and foremost, those are my personal responsibility to process, control, direct as I need to suit the situation. Never am I to just let them wander free and express themselves, there simply was no space for such liberties in my youth, any outburst threatened calling attention to my mother’s immigration status. So while I do blame my mother for teaching me to suppress my emotions, for needing that out of me, I can’t deny that it felt necessary. How different would life had been if I had told that child psychologist the truth, had brought Child Protective Services to our doorstep?

Yet it is so clear to me that I desperately want and need connection. As I age, it is critical that I develop a healthy relationship to my feelings and honest expressions of them. There is no room for pride in this post. I am so desperate to connect to someone with whom I can connect, who can empathize with me and I with them. I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to take seriously some of the issues that are brought up my by white-collar peers, to not jeer at them once I’ve had a drink in me; I can’t hold that against them. Again then, a reminder to have grace for myself, to accept that I will still react to certain triggers, echoes of my parents’ behaviors in the people I meet; to have grace for my coworkers and dates, sheltered as they have been they have not had to develop resiliency but it isn’t my place to judge them for that; and to lead with love, to be open and vulnerable whenever possible, because just getting by isn’t worth it, I need to fill my lungs with air and breathe in the full extent of life.

To that end, I’m signing off for now to drive around in pursuit of a cheaper, hopefully more satisfying cup of coffee than where I’m posting this from.

The Struggle for a World in Which I Would Not Exist

Aguilar

I most recently posted the immediate thoughts and feelings after telling my therapist about my father’s role in my life, which I wrote about at length here. Over the past several days I have been largely depressed as I mulled over the impact childhood abuse has had on my life. I had been contrasting the trauma from both my parents and trying to find a thread to pull on, a story to tell myself that could help me integrate these events and how they have shaped my personality. I hadn’t immediately realized that’s what I was doing, but I knew that in order to move on I would need to find a way to accept the past, when my parents took advantage of my youth to abuse me. But it wasn’t just that I had to accept that it was ok for me, as a young child, to have been at a disadvantage, physically, mentally, and emotionally, to defend myself against the two people who are supposed to have protected me. No, I also had to come to terms with the ways some of that abuse has prepared me for a harsh world and has left me, in a way, unable to fit into the kinder softer world that I desire. Or, more pointedly, I desire a world in which I wouldn’t exist, in which parents protect their children better because they have the resources that enable them to be kinder. 

Let me be clear that I don’t think what my mom did was correct, but that, in the severity of it, I have become accustomed to a harsh world. I was telling a coworker of mine how I have my younger sister living with me, almost rent free, while she gets her life together. He commented that I was a nice older brother and I let him know that I wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing, necessarily, because I saw how quick to fall apart some of our coworkers were. This included, as I shared with him, some of our supervisors. By contrast, I felt that the worst things in life had already happened to me, my parents gave me no leeway and rather than let me live with them for extended periods of time, had kicked me out at seventeen and bid me make my way in the world. He said, “See, sometimes I think tough love is important.” Because I crave a kinder, softer world, I didn’t agree with him, but I did stay quiet and let him keep talking. I sometimes worry, am forced to acknowledge, that in my behavior I’m not creating that softer world, I’m just thriving in this one and wishing things were different. As I told my therapist during this most recent session, I can live with my mom’s trauma in that I can see the good and the bad in the effects of the trauma I have suffered at the hands of my mother. When the woman who birthed you has beat you, berated you, bullied you and then lied about it, nothing a coworker or contractor can legally do will phase you. And you’re not expecting anything from a cold world.

Not so with my father molesting me. That still feels like the pits of hell, although less so with every day I truly acknowledge it and the depravity of those actions. There was no well-meaning intent behind his perversion. There was simply the act of a physically larger person, a person who was trusted to take care of me as a child, unchaperoned, there was the act of this person taking advantage of my youth, my childlike body, my literal weakness. There is no making light of it nor finding a silver lining in my sexual awakening being at the hands of my father… And my therapist agreed with me. She affirmed that to even try to find one was folly, because while she seemed to appreciate that I could find something good in how my mother raised me, there was no doubt in her mind that I was right to say this was just all bad. As she reiterated, my father is a monster.

She even tried to get me to write a letter and I told her I understood the therapeutic exercise but that I had nothing to say beyond I hate you and I wish you had never come into my life. I told her that I had seen people, met others who had been abandoned by their fathers. Not to play the oppression Olympics with them, but I let her know that it felt like I could have overcome the painful guilt of abandonment so much easier than the feelings I have regarding my molestation. To belabor the point, I did have those feelings of abandonment, I do remember feeling in some way responsible for my dad not being around before I met him.

For the first decade of my life, I didn’t know my biological father and I was distinctly aware of this. I recall the elementary school yard watching other young boys who were playing soccer and wishing I knew how to play, but my mom didn’t know and my stepdad didn’t want to teach me. I never even felt safe enough around him to want to ask. I can recall these thoughts and feelings I had, watching these kids play at recess and knowing this was just something dads and older brothers taught them and that I was going to be excluded from that. I didn’t feel comfortable asking anyone to teach me, didn’t even feel like I could join the other boys at play. This isn’t a moment where I went and discovered I preferred to be friends with girls either. No, I just sat alone and read, trying to push away the feeling of being left out because I didn’t have a dad.

I must have then, at some point, asked my mom about him. Given that the above is a memory I can recall and that I was at least in the third grade, if not a little older, this does line up. Not too much longer after that, I got to meet my dad. I remember being very excited, thinking that this was the best thing that ever happened to me. I remember feeling special, ready to forgive him for not being around and finally feeling like I was worthy of having a father, again, because it felt like my father hadn’t stuck around due to some character defect in me. And then things went downhill and my memories of the time are scrambled. Before I turned ten and after about fourteen, my memories have temporal relationships for each other. I can generally recall when two memories happened in relationship to each other. For example, one of the earliest memories I have is about catching and playing with a ladybug in the garden, which came before a particular afternoon in the pool during which I swam behind a woman because I had mistaken her tan swimming shorts for nudity and was shocked by what I thought I was seeing. From about ten to fourteen, when the childhood abuse peaked, the combined effect of the traumatic events shattered my perception of time. It wasn’t that I could no longer tell when it was morning or night, but rather and for example, I can’t place when my dad molested me in relation to other events involving him. Similarly, I don’t know if that most severe of beatings at my grandmother’s hands had already happened by the time I was molested, although I remember that these things happened around the same time. In order to live on, I had to bury the pain of these events, had to bury the boy that happened to. I couldn’t undo what had happened, but I could attempt to freeze them out of my timeline, to trap those memories and that body feel outside of my timeline.

That day changed my life, and suddenly, the pain of abandonment didn’t seem so severe. I began a long campaign of getting away from my dad, of skipping weekends with him. Suddenly I wished for the days I had never known him. I used to say at least I got to meet his family, but the truth is they had always been in and out of my life, had always tried to maintain a relationship that he did not appreciate. Problematically, rather than my mom blaming an absent father for my sexuality, once she found out, she blamed my father molesting me. She didn’t even wait a while to ask this question, when I told her what my dad had done she and my grandma immediately and openly started theorizing that this is why I’m uno de esos. This must have been easier than listening to what I was saying, which is that I had fought and argued so much with the two of them for me to stop being left in my father’s care and that they had each and every time yelled at me and told me I was stupid for advocating for myself.

Pardon for abruptly changing topics, but during the session we also discussed my extreme aversion to unwanted physical contact. She said, “sweetheart, no one wants to be touched that way by strangers.” I got her point, I think perhaps she feels that I feel alienated by my emotions, like they’re not normal, but I don’t think she got mine. There’s a physical pain I feel sometimes emanating from my body… That’s not the right verb. There’s a physical pain I feel throughout my body and internally reverberating, almost like my body is shocking itself in disgust at any casual contact with another body. She asked if this happened in relationships too and I told her that, no but yes, that not often like she was referring to but sometimes and I would have to take a minute to collect from this intrusive recollection. There are times when someone brushes up against me, just to pass by, without lingering or even really acknowledging me and this shocks my body. We talked about concerts and packed venues, gay bars after everyone’s a little too drunk and starts to get too handsy. I told her of a specific time in WeHo, I had gone alone to the bars to take a break from my schoolwork and ran into someone who I couldn’t get off me. He was trying to undress me, the entire time insisting that he would make a good boyfriend for me and that I should have a drink. I had repeatedly and firmly kept telling him to get off me but he didn’t listen and instead tried to force me to drink, at which point I had swatted the drink out of my face and had run away. I didn’t tell her, because that wasn’t the point, but I had called a close friend crying, disturbed by what had happened. It was only during this week’s session that it clicked, my mom had always shamed me for getting angry or for physically engaging with the world and that had left me with tremendous guilt every time I had to act to protect myself. My body’s reaction to casual contact seems clearly linked to my father molesting me, but the anxiety around my inability to protect myself and my guilt when I have used anger to act in self-defense, that comes from my mother.

My parents have done all this only to abandon me again as an adult. I needed to cut off my father anyway, but even before I had exposed him, he had been growing more and more distant. I mentioned it in the past, but, once he was back to himself and following his mental breakdowns, his pride and shame led him to run from any support system. So it was that when in college I took him to Mexico to get mental help and he finally returned, he took a while to reach out to me and ask to see me. I had never been particularly close to him, but the time between our visits began to grow. Eventually, in graduate school, I started going to therapy and so it was that after his next breakdown, I was ready to confront him, to take the time after he’s back on his medication and rational, but before he has been on them too long and emotionally cold, to ask him a series of questions. Per our short interview, he had never wanted to be a father, had never loved my mother, and figured she would do a good enough job raising me, even though she was much poorer and undocumented. With these answers, my mother could move on from him and I could confirm to anyone who cared to doubt that my father was indeed a massive asshole. Of him molesting me though, there wasn’t much for him to say except, “It’s just how things are in el rancho…”

 

It isn’t as if I need either parent to put a roof over my head and feed me. But, especially as an adult man, having a rough time and not being able to go to your parents’ house or to call them for comfort, to vent, to feel reassured, that sucks. There’s no getting around the fact that I have living, breathing parentals that are not able to care for me in a way that I need them to. That support all must come from relationships I build with strangers, have thankfully built with many friends, or I have to allow myself to lean on my younger siblings. All of this could be worse, but still, what I really want is to go home and lay on my mother’s lap and have her sing me a lullaby or tell me it will be ok and to have me believe it, to feel the love and warmth from an older relative. Instead, I am coming to terms with the reality that I won’t get to experience what I’ve described. My father chose to exit the picture and my mother I had to block to stop her from spamming my phone with her anger and frustrations, disappointed as she is with her own living relationship and only able to process that by being angry at her two oldest kids. Add to that my mother’s sexist and machista attitudes, which lead to her specifically lashing out at my expressions of feelings and emotions, things she wasn’t allowed to have as a young person either but that her culture specifically only allows in certain kind of men.

That’s the depressing part. I had said at the beginning that I was looking for a thread to tie this all up neatly in my past, allow it all to become part of my story, part of the drive that I have had thus far in life. There’s a couple quick things. I grew up in a harsh environment and am now in a harsh environment that pays well. Construction and engineering are somewhat lucrative fields, completely dominated by men that struggle to express what they really mean, men who let ego and feelings get in the way of work, but are unable to recognize that happening because men don’t have feelings. So my parents teaching me to disregard my emotions, to swallow my ego, lets me take in everything around me and synthesize the needs of many people to find a solution that seems most reasonable, minimizing the burden on specific groups but recognizing how our contracts obligate certain responsibilities onto other groups and having enough ego to insist on and see the solution through. I was praised recently by several coworkers and supervisors for how I had been handling a couple weeks of touchy situations recently. A superintendent said, “You don’t even seem bothered by all the ranting he does,” in reference to a specific and difficult coworker. I told him my parents were worse and that no matter how long the rant, I still got my paycheck at the end of the day. That I owed so much professional success to my childhood background caused a tinge of pain but acknowledging this and incorporating it into my story will help me move on.

As for moving forward, I have to borrow from Cruising Utopia to abate the despair in realizing that I’m too harsh for the kinder, softer world I desire. I know that the phrase itself originated from a webcomic, A Softer World, that I used to read, although I had found the idea first and the webcomic second. In fact, the original comic relates a darker setting, a softer world that doesn’t judge the dark and sexual violence of the protagonist. Perhaps at the time I saw my sexuality as something dark and could only relate to the idea of a softer world ironically, but now there is no sarcasm or ironic defense, what has always driven me since I was young was the desire to create a kinder, softer world, for the young versions of me that I couldn’t go back and raise. In honor of when I needed a helping hand and in gratitude of those who extended one, I have dedicated myself to this idea. However, I have feared and have seen how my upbringing has prepared me for rougher environments, emotionally cold and stunted, but profitable. These fears have been assuaged by the idea in Cruising Utopia that those of us who work toward a queerer world are then left behind when that queerer world is created; we are the products of a straighter environment and so do not even know what we need to unlearn to continue being able to push out further and further the acceptance of our ever changing society. A different synthesis to Munoz’s argument is that each generation must push change and then must step aside and let the newer generations push as well. In this I find some permission to continue being myself, to note the things from my upbringing that I want to change but also not to excessively blame myself for not being a softer person, for not having the ease and loving attitude of someone who grew up sheltered, with stable parents and in affluent neighborhoods. And most importantly, simply to accept that I can have grown in the environment I did and still aspire to see a healthier change in the world beyond just revenge against my parents but not feel guilty when those feelings occur.

Reflecting on Telling my Therapist About my Father

Aguilar

Last week during therapy I read parts of my last post regarding my relationship with my father and this coming week we’re supposed to discuss how I feel about it.

One of the questions she had during our conversation was asking whether it felt better to finally tell someone about this. I corrected her and let her know that I have told many people in my life what happened. Specifically, I had to tell my dad’s family that he molested me when I noticed that my older cousins were letting their kids be around him, presumably unchaperoned. I mentioned that the guilt I felt hiding his secret led me to speak out to prevent something awful from happening. Even writing this down, I still feel a tremendous nausea and disgust, my mind doesn’t even let me imagine what could have happened I just have an extreme feeling of pain, a ball of hurt that won’t let me put to words my fears of what could have happened. I have to allow myself to feel that pain, it’s coming from my own past, but I also have to note that it didn’t happen. I did the right thing, spoke up, righted what I could.

But since talking with his family about it, it’s been more like a family secret than a family reckoning. I do think I would have moved on from this, except my aunts keep sending me updates of him now that he’s moved to Mexico. It is uncomfortable but manageable to see him once in a while at family events. It’s disturbing to have his pictures sent directly to my phone. I will probably need to mention this to my aunts at some point. I do know that in the aftermath, one aunt and uncle specifically chewed him out. They called him out for his pathetic justifications that it’s just something they do back where he’s from and iced him out for a while. He showed up at their son’s funeral, there are some events that unfortunately all people show up for. I have only talked once or so about this with a couple family members, they just wanted to confirm what they had been told and I said, basically, that my mom hadn’t handled telling them well and I acknowledged that, but the truth remained the truth. 

Complicating matters are that my father has been diagnosed as a bipolar schizophrenic. His diagnosis has varied with time, as medical science has advanced and clarified the differences between the two. A quick google search and based on my experiences with him, it does seem like he’s on the more extreme end of his illness. I have seen him have hallucinations and speak in tongues… When he has episodes, we often have to get him into a facility where they will bring him back under the effects of medication. He has several times now decided on his own that he will be lowering his dosage, because he doesn’t feel good on them. I empathize, but his illness is not manageable without a more complex support system, both from the medical field and from his family. While not in an episode though, his pride leads him dismantle the support systems and ignore the medical field. To highlight how distant I am from him though, he had an episode after, or was in the midst of one, during my cousin’s funeral. I learned from his younger brother that he had been experimenting with his dosage before he’d even gotten onto the plane from Mexico and the emotional distress of the funeral knocked him off course. I haven’t gotten an update from his family and hadn’t bothered to check in…

Briefly, I’ll mention that I have also told my other parentals, one of my sisters, some friends, older partners… I actually prefer not telling people anymore. Unfortunately, it also means I don’t provide context for my past sexual behaviors, but I also haven’t met someone who I really wanted to know me that way, with full context. Knowing what I know of my experience, I don’t feel shame. My younger self was doing what I thought was correct at the time, reacting in self-destructive ways but I outgrew that mindset.

I found my high school journal and I cringed while reading it. I was so excited to be hooking up at the gym, I had made a game of it and felt I was so grown up to be exploring my sexuality in this way. I even noted the times it went too far and I just wanted it to stop but I just didn’t. I knew then this wasn’t great, but I kept doing what I was doing, apparently not sure enough in myself to stop, to advocate for myself. I see that mindset now in people even my age, where it’s just about numbers, just about keeping the sex going, and that’s why I cringed. I feel like there’s more to life than just having sex, there’s prioritizing having good sex with good people and really enjoying each other on those personal levels. There’s also still going to bathhouses and nude beaches, we do contain multitudes after all. But for younger me, it was specifically running away from what had happened, that pain underlied those interactions.

Continuing the question, what does it feel like to have talked about it? She asked me more about him, did I want to hurt him? I told her yes, obviously. I explained to her that it was unlikely I could do so without getting caught or hurt myself, so I wouldn’t, but I wanted to. I have even imagined turning up at his home, back in the ranch he grew up in and lives in now, and just shooting him in the head and ending him. I told her I felt justified, not just because of what he did to me, but because I felt it likely that he would do it to other kids. After all, his justification was that that’s just how things are done back where he’s from. So now that he’s back where he’s from, why would I doubt that he’d go after the young people in El Timon, Guerrero. If she presses me on it, I’ll explain to her that this is a place so remote that I wouldn’t be able to get back there without help from my family, he would literally know I was coming. I’ve only been once, maybe twice in my life, spent several months there one summer. This is a remote and disconnected place, rural and lonely. I would argue that I can connect with the rural people of the USA, but back there was the added difficulty of political and narco violence. I had an uncle who ran to be mayor of a larger municipality adjacent to the pueblo they grew up in. He won, but was told the same night of his victory that he had a couple days to leave the region and never come back, or he and his family would be assassinated. Las Tierras Calientes…. Both sides of my family come from this region and I’ll need to mention more about it but I want to do so separately. 

To wrap up for now… I feel relief to have told my therapist about all of the prior things and can work with her to continue working through the issues, processing the feelings of weakness? I certainly think I was still judging my younger self, wanted to have been not so young, not so weak, not so exactly tuned for victimhood, so that I could have done something sooner. But those are ways of thinking I need to leave behind, to allow my younger self back and to acknowledge that pain and how young I was… How I didn’t need to be anything more than what I was because the adults in my life should have been better equipped to have helped me and or not been fucking pedophiles in the case of my father.

I’ll never get that clear shot with him. And now I’ve put this out into the universe, showing premeditated intent to harm him. But I don’t doubt that I’d enjoy it. Fuck him.

I want to take some time to go work out but I don’t think I’m done with this prompt unfortunately.