Aguilas Off Pine

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. 

Coming to Terms with my Father’s Role in my Childhood

Aguilar

I read “One Family’s Struggle to Make Sense of 9/11” by Jennifer Senior in The Atlantic’s September 2021 issue. The author describes one trait of a victim’s mother’s grief, how for years she couldn’t bear to hear someone else talk about their child, she just couldn’t. The article itself focuses on the author’s personal experience and connection to the family of a specific young man, but I forced myself to sit with the discomfort of the mother’s aversion to other’s happiness and set aside the magazine for later. Last Wednesday, I went out with coworkers for a goodbye lunch and, as often happens with my coworkers, the conversation turned to their children. My manager mentioned that he really was only into rock climbing because it was the only thing his teenaged son would let them enjoy together and I sat quietly in that, not sure how to say that it was really nice of him to think that way. I had noted that for the first time in a while, a father expressing his love for his children finally did not bring tears to my eyes.

I immediately empathized with the mother who could not listen to others talk about their children. From a young age on, I have burst into tears when I see children being cared for by their parents and more so when it’s the father in the picture. I don’t think I was ever caught crying… but there’s also the insidious thought that perhaps my parents did notice me crying and just figured it was best to leave me alone. It was not the only time, but I recall one family outing specifically that resulted in me sobbing in the front passenger’s seat, both struggling to suppress the body tremors that come with deep sobbing and deathly afraid that I would have to explain the intensity of this emotion. I had seen a family friend, the closest I had to a friendly parental figure, bring out a swing similar to, if not the same one, that he had swung me in before when I was much younger. If it was the same swing, he had kept it for almost a decade and was now bringing it out to play with his son, the youngest of his children and the only boy. I watched them play and felt pangs of jealousy and longing. I hadn’t personally kept a close relationship to this man, but seeing him swing his son brought up memories of when he had also played with me that way and in the great wasteland and deprivation of parental warmth, that memory had bite to it.

That memory of that car ride home, begging my body to hold still but also unable to contain the tears, is now about a decade old itself. But the pain of having grown up without a father has only recently subsided. It was only three years ago that I almost broke down in my then supervisor’s car. We had been working together for near a year at that point and finally had a moment to sit down and have a long lunch and open up a bit more. I shared some of my background with him and he did as well. We were both Mexican-Americans, born to working class Mexican parents that had managed to get us a decent education. The key differences in our upbringing were that he had grown up with his father, who had gone on to teach him soccer and other such things that fathers do, and that I grew up relatively pampered in Orange County to his experiences in inner city Los Angeles schools. I told him how I had a difficult relationship with my father and that he had once tried to teach me soccer, but that he was quick to point out that I would have been a better soccer player if he had raised me. I mention that anecdote to people often to highlight my father’s cruelty, after all, he could have stuck around to raise me had he wanted to. My mother partially named me after him, in a misguided effort to have him acknowledge me as his son. My supervisor said one of the only things people with healthy relationships to their parents know how to say, “Sorry.”

My issues with my father specifically have eroded some of the pain from his abandonment and from generally growing up without a father. However, that pain still shows up from time to time, especially when talking to my coworkers and the relationships they’re trying to foster with their children. That same day we had lunch, my then supervisor explained the rationale behind his and his wife’s decision to home school their children and, in the way that engineers speak to each other, explained the benefits they sought to maximize, while addressing the possible issues that might arise. His careful explanation, his well thought out rationale for his children’s upbringing, felt in that moment almost like a slight against my own upbringing. Had I not been opening up all afternoon over that two-hour lunch, had we just been talking about work, I may have remained more composed. But for a moment in that car, I felt suffocated by what I did not have in my own life, what I so desperately wanted. I had to excuse myself to the bathroom once we got back to the office, to let myself cry and then wash my face, dry it off and compose myself to continue working.

I don’t know how or why the intensity of those feelings has faded. Perhaps it is as simple as acknowledging them and crying about it, over and over again until their intensity fades. The English language has its limits for naming certain things, but I would surmise that the feelings I was feeling can be described as follows: a general feeling of parental abandonment, both physical and emotional; whiplash or post-traumatic stress from experiencing the emotional intensity of my parents, juxtaposed by the careful and thought out planning of my coworker’s parenting styles; for the family friend, a feeling that nothing I had was for myself and myself alone, everything had to be shared and therefore my needs would have to be second hand, second to my younger siblings but also to my parents’ emotional needs; a longing to be loved and cared for as my coworker’s children are.

I told my therapist that at this next session we could talk about my dad and I already mentioned that there are specific things he did that left me longing for his absence in my life. I didn’t meet him until I was around 10 or 11, even though his sister, my godmother, had plenty of times babysat me while my mom worked. He very quickly proceeded to molest me, as he explained later, to satisfy some curiosity he had over my body. What I have gathered in the decades since is that my grandfather may have molested at least the youngest three of his children, my father the eldest of that trio; that the ranch my dad and his siblings grew up in was sexually permissive with the animals; and that my father seems to be, unsuccessfully, suppressing homosexual desires that contributed to his lack of respect for my body. For his family, his bipolar diagnosis complicates matters, as they treat him as if he is never truly sound of mind. I am not a therapist, and I am biased, but I don’t buy that for a minute. He didn’t appear manic at the time, and he didn’t disappear from my life again after it happened, as he would later on following other episodes, so I believe he was within his ill reasoning when he molested me. On top of the molestation, he was generally an under educated, arrogant and mean person. He actively campaigned against me attending any after school or extracurricular activities that were too focused on science and not enough on sports, was disappointed I would go on to attend college instead of getting to work right away, and was fond of saying that things would have been different had he raised me. I agree they would have, and I assume I would have grown up more homophobic, more traditionally masculine and interested in sports, likely less well educated, and unfortunately even more scarred as I assume my father would have molested me more frequently and more often.

Whenever I think back to that day, I get an ache of discomfort. I know there’s a part of me that still wishes I had done XYZ thing to have changed what happened. Unfortunately, so much of my behavior then was molded by both parents and so I was a good victim. After all, my mom had taught me already to suppress my emotional needs, to make them secondary to the whims of my parents and authority figures in life and she had taught me that she would not tolerate any emotional vulnerability in me, would lash out at it even… So after it happened, I had no one to turn to. I recall how much I fought with my mom to stop planning weekends for me with my dad, telling her that I didn’t want to see him. She would argue back with me that I should continue to see him, that we needed the money he was providing. In retrospect, it’s not clear why she didn’t just ask the courts for child support from him. It is true she was often too scared to do these types of things, wanting to minimize her interactions with the court given that they were connected to immigration services and could deport her. But she had already taken legal action against her second baby daddy, was already receiving child support from him. My grandmother would often step in too, the likely source for the argument that I should continue seeing my dad for the money. I will say, I was back then often tempted by the fact that he could afford to buy me things my mother couldn’t and things I wouldn’t necessarily have to share with my siblings, since that wasn’t their dad. When I finally told them, a little over a decade after the fact, I put blame on them for never listening to me, for never letting me not go over to his house, for not picking up on how I was trying to advocate for me to not be left alone with him.

Although my body had started to undergo puberty at the time, I would say my mind was still pre-pubescent. I hadn’t so much as masturbated and, although I had experienced the fresh pangs of desire, I would not say that I had started lusting after peers. Before, there was just a general sense of wanting to feel warmth from my peers, physical warmth yes, but chaste. My father may have given me my first erection. The only ambiguity is that I don’t remember if my body had done that on its own before. Either way, my sexual awakening was at the hands of an overweight construction worker whom my mother trusted, loved so much as to let him take her only son. I recall that we were laying down together, essentially him spooning me. I don’t recall exactly how it happened that his hands were on my flesh beneath my clothes, I remember feeling how he traced the whisps of hair on my stomach. I didn’t move, but enjoyed the feeling and continued staring at the television on the ground above us. His hands traced the elastic of my boxers before he pushed further down, blood had already been rushing to my penis. He firmly squeezed my erection, played with it for a while and I think rested with it in his palm for several minutes. I started to move around a bit once he had slowed down, excited by the touch and wanting it to continue. Perhaps he thought I was asleep.

I believe that was a Saturday afternoon and this was an overnight stay but besides the pants I was wearing, I don’t remember much else after that. He didn’t explicitly tell me not to say anything. My mother wouldn’t have listened to me anyway. I began to masturbate soon thereafter and for a couple years until I started cruising in gyms, I didn’t have an appropriate outlet for the sexual longings I felt. I recall humping a lot of pillows and being more willing to participate in games with friends and other cousins that were sexual in nature. I didn’t know how to initiate that back then, would often find it happening to me, but I wanted to have my penis played with.

Exploring at the gyms, cruising, was certainly an outlet, but I wouldn’t say it was the healthy outlet I needed. For one, I started young, when I was probably fifteen if not a little older. Because my parents did not want to pick me up from school and because I had joined the football team, which made my schedule different than my siblings, I was given a car and license very young. By fifteen and a half, I was able to drive myself to the gym, one of the only acceptable places I could be out at besides school. I had forgotten this, but remembered it in writing, but I believe I was even younger when I started cruising, because I used to ride my bike to the gym too, before I could start driving. In some small defense to the grown men I began to have casual encounters with, my body hair and thicker facial hair aged me up some. This is not an attempt to victimize myself, but I believe it’s true that the body hair enabled me, as it made my body and face look older than I was. However, now as an older adult than they were, I think it would still have been very clear that I was, at best, borderline legal and at worst, a risk for statutory rape if we were caught. There are men who were clearly gay but that seemed incredibly disinterested and, in some cases, even annoyed at me. I recall one in particular that I couldn’t tell if he was gay, that I had seen once masturbating in the showers and had wanted to join but he quickly left; I ran into him years later at a pride event in Santa Ana. I had made a game back then of detecting other queer men and had been excited to have been right about him. We had chatted, I had initiated a conversation in the steam room, and he had told me he had kids only a little younger than me. Perhaps that is why he was able to acknowledge how young I was.

Not everyone was so scrupulous. My MO back then was to lift weights, run, all the while observing the other gym patrons and then go wait in the steam room. It was good for my acne and gave me a way to prolong my gym visit, to extend the time away from home. I think because the steam room was in the locker room, not co-ed, I recognized that men were not wearing undergarments below their towels and I adopted the behavior. It was not long before one of these men undid their towel, showed me their erection and we would begin to mess around. It felt liberating, a secret thing that my mother couldn’t know about and also exciting, the release of endorphins and the touching of my body in ways that I didn’t know how to ask for. But, because I didn’t verbalize these desires and because these were men that were preying on young men, some likely excited at the possibility that I was not of legal age, I often found that these encounters went further than I was comfortable with or with men that I actually was not interested in. Some of those men downright disgusted me, but I hadn’t learned how to say no.

That legacy belongs to both my parents. Each one contributed to my inability to voice my own desires and boundaries. Again the English language shows its limits, but, for my mother’s part, she pulled me into her emotional messes, exposing me to adult conflict that I was not ready to help process and punishing me when I gave unwise, youthful counsel. My father literally introduced me to sexual desire, primed my body for it long before I had even learned sexuality and thus I had no vocabulary with which to act upon it. I quickly picked up the language of cruising, itself primarily non-verbal, but did not have the necessary defenses to be able to insist on rejecting people, verbally and clearly, nor even to listen to my body when it was saying it wasn’t interested. I learned very quickly to dissociate, to leave my body while things were done to it and let men finish. Most of these guys did not have condoms and this was before the preventative, anti-HIV pills were readily available, so this was mostly non-penetrative. I recall at least once that one did have a condom and did want to insert himself, but at least there I acknowledged my discomfort (or was it that my internalized homophobia flared up) and said “No.”

I have already written about how my being in the closet exacerbated the situation after an acquaintance sexually assaulted me, which is linked to the above because I was still learning how to say no to unwanted sexual advances. Unfortunately, beyond just the cruising, I did lose my virginity to a man who had catfished me and who I was not interested in. Because my father had taught me to just quiet up and let him finish, I had that in my ill fashioned repertoire of sexual tools. It was not long after I started cruising at the gym that I started lying about my age and meeting people off Craigslist and Adam4Adam. I was so drawn to sexual desire that I was risking being kicked out of my home, because my mother later did do that when I came out. In college, as a freshman, I figured I was finally old enough to lose my virginity and had even found the perfect candidate, a grad student with a toned, hairy body and also in the closet. The person who turned up at my doorstep had no relation to the pictures and was much heavier, smooth, and not the least bit hygienic. To my every no he had a negotiation and finally, to get him to leave, I let him ride me to his completion. After he came, I asked him to leave again, and that was my first time.

So it is that I recognize the pain in movies when they show children who have been molested or forced upon by older relatives. Even to those who were later taken advantage of there is an intense feeling of sharing their trauma. I don’t know if that feeling has a word, but certainly, I am “triggered” when I see sexual assault portrayed in the media. There is an intense feeling of dissociation, perhaps because I have not fully reckoned with the pain of the molestation. I can attribute behavioral patterns to it, I can acknowledge that I will experience intense discomfort when I hear stories of sexual assault or see them in television, but perhaps I still keep the pain at arm’s length and so have not fully healed from it. I don’t know how to process it any better. Let me name the feelings as I did above: there is the discomfort in knowing that my body experienced pleasure as well as the memory of my mind drifting away; there are shades of guilt, of wishing that I had been bigger or stronger enough to overpower my father and remove him from my side; there is resentment that my mother would not have believed me and seemed intent to ignore the complaints I had to be around my father; there is that I will never get to experience a first time like in the movies, awkward and messy but with a peer; there was the confusion in the years between when I was molested and when my mind finally caught up with my body and I began to explore my sexuality in a way that I could verbalize; there’s the danger now that I get too unconscious, that I let myself get into a scenario where my mind could leave my body and I could let something happen to me, something that would remain in my flesh’s memory even as my mind tries its hardest to not feel it; there’s rage at other parents who do this, other predators who do this, the absolute wrath to grow stronger that I might destroy these people… I picture myself hulking out essentially and wiping my father off this planet but not stopping there, somehow finding all these pedophiles and destroying them too; there is too, sadly, some measure of compassion for my father. Be it his illness or repressed homosexuality, there is something that is driving him to express sexuality in such an unhealthy manner. I do not wish to know what it is, but I feel bad for him. In essence, that is wrapped into my desire to kill him, that he may do no further harm, given that he is weaker than his base impulses.

I sign off with this as a declaration of where I would like to go from here. The idea of someone hurting children in front of me still drives me to anger, which remains proper. If I see something in front of me, I want to be so in my feelings that I will overcome social mores to speak out, to tell the parent I think they’re wrong to raise their child that way, to report what is so evidently wrong. But what I am tired of is reacting to even movie and television portrayals of this. Maybe it isn’t a bad thing that it led me back to therapy, but I recall several moments in Netflix’s Feel Good that I had to legitimately walk away from my television, barely holding in vomit and a desire to have my body torn apart that I may no longer feel that disgust. There is the fact that I can’t watch Michaela Coel’s HBO show, I May Destroy You, because from the very beginning it is clear this show will be about sexual assault. This sensitivity to these topics, I don’t know that it serves me, I don’t even necessarily need it gone. I just think of how I used to cry at the examples of good parenting… Will something similar happen as I process the pain of sexual assault?

Gender Confusion

Aguilar

I have been struggling with my gender lately, even though I still find myself defaulting to masculine presentations. I have previously mentioned that I experienced dysphoria in response to trauma and to being treated as a grown man since I was young. That dysphoria felt more like a resentment of girls, who are in these specific instances, treated better than young boys of color, to my own sisters who were protected by my parents in ways that I hadn’t been. I discussed this type of dysphoria recently with my sisters, acknowledging that they felt resentment toward our parents for being overprotective of them, but pointing out that they down right neglected me at best, or unintentionally put me in harm’s way. This feels different, maybe just as reactionary though.

Earlier in the week I was listening to the Savage Love podcast. I was listening to the host, Dan Savage, respond to what sounded like a joke call from someone who claimed to be a “half-breed” with “Aryan preferences.” It absolutely sounded like a prank and if it isn’t, I feel bad for the caller who is not able to find pride in her non-white background. He pointed out that even if calls are fake, they sometimes pose interesting hypotheticals and after all, every call is just a hypothetical scenario for everyone but the one caller. The way he frames the rest of his response, while logically sound, is perhaps not as forceful as I’d like to hear from him. He reassured the caller that while ultimately, no one can make you sleep with someone you don’t want to, that you should interrogate your desires and really acknowledge the difference between your own desires and what society has handed to you. It felt like he answered with a bit more hem and haw than this, but I had a flash of desire, I pictured my naked body, a little leaner but without a penis, instead some sort of pubic mound.

I wasn’t sure what to make of this mound and listened to another caller describe the dysphoria they have been feeling. As they said those words, described their discomfort in their own body, a sense of unease came upon me. I recalled how I had selected something like non-binary on a new dating app I had downloaded, well new to me, and how that somehow felt more appropriate than selecting man. But as I was jotting down these feelings, noting them down on my phone, an old friend came up to me at the gym and we lifted together for a while. I pushed the feelings aside and let something new in, this sense of comradery to be lifting together. I let him talk and wondered what to make of this, how I had been feeling disconnected from my male body until someone I had known, intimately, came up to me and suddenly I was partially back into my maleness.

This feelings have been ebbing and flowing but I still default to maleness.  At this point it feels like the default for me because I was born male and have “masculine” features. Case in point, I am worrying about a circuit party I’m going to later with friends, well… somewhat friends and the first one I’m going to. I stay active, but I’m not fit enough to feel totally prepared for the event. I know, I know, I’m perpetuating unrealistic expectations of what our bodies should look like in the gay community, but this feels like the one place where I’ll have to prepare myself for stares and looks of “You don’t belong here.” If I’m lucky, it’ll be just that. If we’re both lucky I’ll stay quiet if it raises to remarks…

Returning to my male body though, the hairiness of it may be enough to help me “fit in.” I’m trying to convince myself that I’ve never really cared enough to fit in, which is true and not. I never cared enough about fitting in because I just kept my head down and assimilated, even though in my heart and soul I didn’t care for it. It’s just what was easy. So too in this moment, I’m hoping that my body is enough that I can just enjoy the evening. I’m not going in with expectations that I’ll get laid or that everyone will want to be with me, no, what I want is to roam and enjoy myself but not have to justify my presence there. That’s where I’m trying to convince myself that I present in such a way that I’ll be left alone.

And that feeling… that feeling that I can relax and just allow my “natural” masculinity to protect me, is conflicting with prior feelings I had had of dysphoria. I am wondering of course, if in the same way that I wrestled with my sexuality when I was younger, if the same will hold true now as an adult. When I was younger, I felt very off put by the labels gay and straight, as I didn’t fit into either well. I know there are times now that I’ll default to gay when I don’t feel comfortable around people (gay or straight), if I even feel comfortable enough to acknowledge sexuality. Even as I explore gender expressions, will I still default to “he/him/his” just to make it easy on the general public? Will I end up then, in the same way, only able to acknowledge myself as a whole person in queer spaces… In time those queer spaces may grow, but that isn’t the present I live in yet.

—

I didn’t want to make this a separate post because it is so inconsequential in the long run. The people at the circuit party looked exactly as I expected: muscular, hairless, white bodies. A handful of people of color were around, but not enough brown skin for my tastes. I’m sure the people were lovely, but it was so loud that I couldn’t hear anyone talking and didn’t try to raise my voice above the steady thump of music. The bass in the beat shook my body delightfully and I stayed near the speakers, letting the vibrations pass through my body. I went back and forth on whether to stay or not, on leaving before my friend and his friends got there. Eventually, they did show up but the place kept getting more and more crowded and that made me uncomfortable, the casual ways that other’s near naked bodies touched mine. I understand that other people might enjoy that, might find a sense of community in that, but I couldn’t bear it. I have been to plenty of nude beaches now and have gotten more comfortable with my own body in that way, but I still can’t handle people brushing up on me. None of it was mean-spirited by the way, I do want to make clear that everyone seemed lovely, on drugs and alcohol, but lovely. It just felt overstimulating to have so much casual contact on my bare skin. My friend showed up with many other friends and that was ok… One of his other friends took it upon himself to move the group around and that was fine, there was just lots of checking in which I knew would annoy me if I stayed, because I was not having a good time and was trying to hide it. My friend didn’t pick up on it and he even invited me to the next one. Recently, out at dinner, I told him how I actually felt and why I had tried to hide it more that night, didn’t want to bring the mood down but I wasn’t comfortable. His friends were nice enough and with them I felt included, but the recurring thought was, “Do I actually want to fit into this?”

I knew I was too high for the event. Too in my head and too critical and too observant and too anxious. No one was distasteful in any way, there were no disgruntled looks as I had been worried about, but I couldn’t stop the question repeating over and over. For me, the answer is no although I’m glad I went and have reaffirmed lessons I’ve learned about myself, time well spent, but wouldn’t go to another. Similarly, I’m posting this update to move on and let my mind drift to other topics at hand. 

A Documentary of a Suicidal Creative: A Stream of Consciousness Response to Roadrunner

Aguilar

I watched Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain this weekend. Spoilers about all that from here on, but in the back of my mind was the fragment of a memory, a friend telling me about him after he’d read Kitchen Confidential that Bourdain had committed suicide. I wanted to watch this film over everything else that was currently out. I’d watched Zola days earlier and The Green Knight hadn’t come out yet. So I picked Roadrunner, at least aware that I’d be watching something with emotional weight to it without really stopping to think about it.

The first two thirds of the documentary are fairly standard as far as profiles of brilliant creatives go. This is not to minimize Bourdain, but to say that I recognized in him the common traits of his peers, these brilliant creatives: a storm mind, wandering eyes and heart, the seeming inability to be still, obsessive focus and passions. Again, this is not to minimize him, I absolutely loved hearing this in the first two thirds. So there I was, absolutely giddy for this creative madman, when they started in on his negative traits.

It’s around this time in the documentary, when he’s on his third marriage, that they really got into the negatives of his personality with his friends and family. Hints had been there in the documentary throughout, there had been the first divorce, him rejecting that stability despite a claim that he once desired to be normal. Did he really? I wonder now if that desire didn’t only rear its head when he was feeling down on himself, unsure of his work or life choices. Again, when one of his friends said that nothing could last for him, I realized I would need to get out my phone and start jotting down thoughts.

Before I continue, I want to be clear that I wasn’t nothing his accolades and brilliance in an attempt to elevate myself to his stature. Rather, it’s to give myself the permission to be honest about the ways in which his mental illness resonated with mine and to give myself the space to pity him, to hope for a better outcome for myself. It was at first only a mild not of similarity, the hints of his sexual infidelities, perhaps they were just unrealized desires, but the way he joked about his first wife’s divorce lawyer only needing to subpoena the film suggested more. In that grimace as he turned to the camera, for it was no joyous smirk, I saw a man aware that his desires and passions could lead him astray, they greater in fervor than his spousal obligations. I had my phone out already when a friend of his admitted that it felt like nothing could last for Bourdain.

I bristled at the though, at that character note. I had earlier in the day been noting my annoyance with my college friends, their way of upgrading any passing reference to something more serious. At a recent get together, I had thrice separately had to correct the record, as the guy who I had been seeing and somewhat interested in had received the label of boyfriend. I explained to them that we actually did not know each other all that well, hadn’t even gotten to a point where we could talk about a future together. I had then, in the back of my mind, thought of Jose Esteban Munoz’s description of queer time and straight time in Cruising Utopia. My friends, married and straight, only had this timeline in their heads of dating for a relationship, a pressure I had thought I’d felt from my therapist in our last session as well. Not all straight people subscribe to this notion of course, but these beloved friends have married in their 20s and thus could not understand, not immediately, just dating for intimacy without concern for it lasting.

Going back to the documentary, either the man himself or one of his friends, somehow the idea was raised that life goes on for a long time and asks whether it’s possible to escape our younger self’s anger or cynicism. It could have been his friend, but, funny enough, there was a scene with a therapist. His therapist asks him to reflect on his life, his resources, and whether he really wanted to change anything. Bourdain responds that it’s too late for him. When I recounted this scene in particular to my therapist, she seemed annoyed that I was comparing myself to him. “Sweetie, it is never too late to change!”

“I know, I understand, it was just an emotion that came up during the documentary,” I realized as I was telling her some of this that I would need to moderate what and how I said things to her. It was relieving to hear someone finally say that it was never too late to change, but I didn’t note that till just now. I think it may be prudent to explain to her that I have often used external media to help me process my own emotions, to face up to them.

After all, at our last session, we had been discussing my anger and bitterness. Her response, then and now, was to recommend that I work out more, more gym time and specifically to get into boxing. Bourdain’s friends felt that him getting into jiu-jitsu, courtesy of his last wife, did a lot for him. I haven’t told her that I am hesitant to learn how to actually fight, although we’ll see where I’m at several lessons in. Perhaps it will make me more committed to pacifism. Asia Argento said, of her own practice, that she wanted to be able to hurt anyone who had tried to hurt her. Again, for myself, the concern is that I would do exactly that, violently lash out and hurt anyone who had once hurt me. On that again, the resonance was with the negatives, as Bourdain himself also said he wished to inflict violence on people and dreamt of one day being happy.

Of his suicide, one of his friends discussed what seemed like an explosive anger, a need to lash out. “Had there been someone in the room with him, it would have been a homicide, not a suicide.” I wondered about that sickly feeling, when my thoughts and feelings crescendo into a desire to maim myself, to burst at the seams, to feel the release of anger by destroying a limb. On this subject of violence, I recalled the statement, the likely claim in Lindsay Gibson’s Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents (ACEIP) that men tend to be more successful in both suicide and homicide attempts. She doesn’t elaborate, or hasn’t yet at the point in my reread. I brought this up to my therapist and she agreed and circled again, back to boxing, to help get the anger out. I agree with her wisdom and note with sadness that Bourdain’s friend thought either murder or suicide were equally likely.

Finally, the obsessiveness as an alternative to deadlier addictions. I am not surprised by this. It often feels like I’m in that boating, weening off alcohol but not sex, not video games, exercise, weed, fishing for attention on the apps. Perhaps these are less destructive than addiction to hard drugs and alcohol, but this desire to chase something, someone, anything new that could give a dopamine rush, that was familiar. What was new to see linked to this type of behavior though, was that Bourdain would cut off people regularly at the smallest slights. Again, behavior that I have seen in my life, but I was surprised to see it mentioned with these other bad habits. I thought again of what I’d recently read in ACEIP, that the emotionally immature parent will engage in black and white thinking. However, as I had been reflecting on my own behavior, my own black and white thinking and my own ability to cut off people, I wondered too if that book wasn’t written to help the reader engage in their own bad habits, to help unlearn the emotionally immature lessons we’ve carried with us into adulthood. I wondered how much the manifestations of my childhood trauma had helped to hide other nefarious characteristics of mine, how the fed into each other. Am I an asshole, I wondered. After all, Bourdain stated his parents only committed the sin of loving him, otherwise gave him a nice childhood. That is not true in my case, but the resonance with his shitty behaviors was hard to ignore. I thought they shouldn’t be ignored, not if I wanted to heal. Again, my therapist didn’t seem to care for this style of emotional analysis… She was quick to point out what she knew of Bourdain, of his drug addictions, of a relatively stable childhood versus what she knows so far of mine.

To end on a more hopeful note though and riding the idea that you don’t escape the emotional tones of your childhood: if we don’t truly break free of the pain and anger, perhaps I’ll be able to replicate some of the successes from my early life. I had strived in my youth to be myself, regardless of and often to spite societal pressures. So it was that I started to come out young, in middle school, as bisexual. I had, with a child’s understanding of sexuality, stared my pubescent desires in the face and acknowledged their truth. Perhaps, the reality is that I’m pansexual, but these are labels that ebb and flow into each other. What mattered then wasn’t getting it 100 percent right, but the feeling of relief when I could finally speak my truth, find love for myself in being seen and no longer hiding. It is true that I had to hide to survive my parents, to fit in, but do I care anymore to fit in at work? Isn’t it better to be myself than to fit in where I am now? I do acknowledge though, before I came out to my parents I had a plan for what to do if things went south, a plan I needed in the end. So it is that I have begun to seek out a new section, for this and other reasons. Still, in spending so much time worrying about the past, I need to also, if I’m going to be dragged back to then, spend time acknowledging what worked, what steps I took to improve my situation, and repeat those with the greater experience and resources that I have available to me now.

Coworkers Punch Down but Can’t Take a Joke

Aguilar

Two weeks ago I was standing around with a couple of subcontractors, the prime contractor had decided to just not show up that day. Technically, he should have been there and he hadn’t informed me he would be gone, but I also didn’t care to be wasting some additional time on site, chatting with the company foremen and presidents. We had finished discussing the job tasks and somehow the topic changed to every white man in this industries favorite thing to say, which is that everyone is too sensitive these days. One of the guys there was a technician but it’s his comment specifically that is still in my head, “It’s like no one can just laugh at themselves anymore.”

Early last week, I was showing color samples to one of the supervisors, he had to pick the color of the new bathrooms at a warehouse we were refurbishing. I’d quickly picked up the habit not to email the non-engineering supervisors for these things, as it remains easier to just print something out and walk around the facility until I find the supervisor and ask my question. I headed toward his office, empty, but heard his voice down the hallway at the superintendent’s office, his supervisor and technically another possible opinion I should check in with for the color samples. I walked over and they asked how I could help, so I showed them the print outs and explained what they were for.

“Man, who cares about these colors! Hell, why don’t you try and get them in a rainbow for us?”

“Wouldn’t that be something. Ha! Rainbows… I bet those are completely sold out right now.” Frankly, I didn’t expect the superintendent to say anything, given that any time there was too long a lull in conversations he would bring up how much he hated California’s liberal politics. However, I was surprised that the supervisor, normally very picky about everything, was having a hard time selecting a color. I realized it was probably because there was a second supervisor in the room and I had interrupted their man time, I figured he needed to show how little he cared about these colors.

“Well, it’s not June anymore so I can definitely get you a rainbow coloring, but that would look awful for this. What color do you actually want?” Their chuckling died down, we picked colors and moved on with our lives. Later in the week, I was back with the supervisor, showing him carpet and flooring samples. “Well, Eric, I got you those rainbows you wanted, but there’s also other options.”

He laughed a bit, “Good one!” My supervisor was in the room at the time and he gave an inquisitive look, but neither of us moved to explain it and instead flipped through the catalogue of samples. I followed up with an email, did my due diligence and moved on with my day.

I’m not sure why I was reflecting on these conversations I had been having with these two groups, however, I noted that while I was willing to “laugh” at myself, not once had I heard my coworkers or the contractors make a joke about being straight, white, or cis men. One of the other supervisors is Mexican and he and I had certainly made jokes about that. Myself, I have been willing to play along with the homophobic jokes, doing what I needed to keep my job flowing. But I didn’t remember that group of contractors once making a joke they were the subject of, for all their fanfare about how everyone should be able to laugh at themselves.

It’s nothing that at this point is revolutionary, the idea has existed for a while that those at the top of the social ladder don’t know how to be the butt of the joke. If anything, they are most sensitive…

To New York City – A Summer Vacation

Aguilar

Here I am a couple days after returning from my vacation, my first-time visiting New York City and the east coast, fighting a small case of the sniffles. Because of the times we live in, I’ll also need to schedule a Covid test and hope I haven’t been spreading that around.

Two of my friends moved out to NYC earlier in the year and I had been putting off visiting them for long enough. I took a week off from work and the trip lined up well with my 29th birthday, so for me, the timing couldn’t have been more perfect. I even lucked out in that the weekend I visited was a small reprieve from the heat they had been having, but also just before a tropical storm came down and flooded out parts of the subway. I could tell that my friends had been having some trouble adjusting. Brendan had passed through before, during some time in politics, but the friend I’d met first, Christian, had never been. Christian had been working here in So-Cal as a nurse during the worst of the pandemic and had quit as soon as his boyfriend confirmed that he’d been hired at a legal firm in NYC and that they would be moving. Christian is a very fair skinned, almost white passing Latino, a couple facial features apparently give him away because he’s been having a hard time adjusting to Manhattan.

I can’t blame him. Although I had a great time in the city and will elaborate below, on my last day I passed through Jackson Heights. Perhaps I hadn’t noticed it as much at the restaurant I stopped to eat at on my way to the airport because I had been checking out the waiter, but at the coffee shop I smiled to be ordering in Spanish, asking about the Colombian words I didn’t understand and having the waitress translating them to a more generalized Spanish. I sat down and thought about why it was that I wanted to cry, why it was that I had stopped in Jackson Heights in the first place. I had been searching the entire trip for other Mexicans, other Latinos, desperate to find some sort of hint of what my life would be like had I grown up in NYC instead of in Santa Ana, in the greater LA metropolitan region.

On our first night out, Christian broke down crying once we were back in his apartment. The doorman had stopped us on the way in, asking us where we were headed. Once the club had closed and we’d said our goodbyes to the other friends they had made, Christian opened up and let me know that he’d been having a hard time adjusting. Life in Manhattan was too white even for him and he was not happy to be the only one of his coworkers who could speak Spanish and, as many of the patients passing through the clinic where he works couldn’t speak English, he was often asked to translate. He was most frustrated to come home and not have a partner who just understood what that feels like, who wouldn’t be able to understand without more explaining. I’ll return to Brendan later on too, later on the vacation we had our own heart to heart. When the doorman asked us where we were going, I was expecting Christian to react negatively, as he had mentioned many times during his rant on the subway that the doormen at their building always asked him where he was going, even though he was the first person on the lease, the first person they tried to call when they asked me to announce myself on one of my entrances back into the building.

We made it back up and Christian couldn’t believe what had just happened. Literally, it seemed that some sort of childhood trauma had sprung up because he kept asking, “Did that really just happen?” It was strange to be in that space, because of course it had just happened, he had complained that it would happen and then it did. I didn’t know how to create the space my friend needed in that time and that didn’t feel great. He kept repeating his question and I tried different answers, almost like a video game that was glitching and giving me the opportunity to repeat dialogue options until I got the correct one. Except, it didn’t seem there was a correct one because that moment was about so much more for my friend. Times in which he had been told by his parents that his feelings weren’t valid, times he’d been made to feel othered, times in which his class privilege failed him and he was still the subject of some racist attitudes, all of these reared up in this moment and the drinking till the clubs closed at 5 AM couldn’t have helped.

Christian and Brendan slept in the next day, but I was only able to stay in bed for a couple of hours before I got up. I went and walked down the Hudson, or up as after a while I realized I was headed inland toward upstate New York. The lack of familiarity with the geography around me was exciting. I had travelled before, but I was usually a lot more careful to know where I was going as I was in another country, or on my own, or in the wilderness. This was the first time that I could just relax, as it didn’t really matter what time I got back. In fact, I don’t think I would have thought to check where I was except a guy on Grindr told me he was over in New Jersey. I thought this was hilarious, the profile was only a mile away but he was in a different state, across a large river and might as well have been on Mars for the absolute lack of effort I was going to put into seeing him. Although I still want to visit New Jersey, it wouldn’t have been just to go find out who was behind the faceless profile hitting on me on Grindr. I walked past many older runners getting their Saturday jog in. I didn’t realize that I wasn’t seeing younger folks until I walked past centers for pre-kindergarten development, educational programs for toddlers and other such places designed to assuage the nerves of the wealthiest of parents. That’s when it hit me how affluent this corner of Manhattan was.

The first day I had mostly spent on my own while Christian and Brenden worked. I ran around Central Park, excited to be jogging through such a beautiful park, then showered and gone off to the museums. While there, a man off Grindr agreed to meet me at the museums, we chatted for some hours and ended up back at his place. The short walk from the museum to his place had us both sweaty and while I was comfortable with the knowledge that I had showered, I realized that this humidity probably lent itself to many of these conversations about hygiene on Twitter. I showered often throughout the day even at home, but when going from one air-conditioned space to another, home, car, office, car again and back home, it’s easy to stay clean. Not so walking through a city as dense as NYC. With such a dirty environment, it seemed even more critical to be as clean as possible. Perhaps too, this was a way of enforcing an implicit class divide. If you couldn’t afford to stay clean getting across the city or lived somewhere that would require you to take the subway, you’d have greater opportunities to pick up the odors of this city.

This man was even more bitter about racial issues and he described a level of entitlement that I hadn’t witnessed back in So-Cal. I wondered aloud whether it was that white people in California were barely a majority anymore and that it felt like we were better mixed here in the LA metropolitan region. He said maybe it was that, but that he couldn’t stand the white people here. His neighborhood was in Manhattan too, but he said it was a more affordable portion, still a short walk to Central Park but decidedly more normal than the spot my friends were at. I asked him if he thought too that the people here were flashier with their wealth, that perhaps NYC was so well stratified along class lines that the affluent white folks were just not used to having many people of color around them, those few who made it into their financial circles still had to behave a certain way that let the white folks feel entitled. I chuckled to myself, for all the hate the automobile gets, perhaps the car was the great equalizer back home. Yes, we were alone in our cars, but we were all stuck on the same freeways. In NYC, I imagined myself as a wealthier person and I realized that would mean I would do my best to never ride the subway.

So it was that I didn’t really have to confront the relative affluence of my friends’ neighbors until the second day. Yes, there is a level of privilege in taking off a whole week from work, flying across the country, and spending the day jogging around a park before going off to museums for cultural enrichment. The irony is not lost on me and I assumed this was part of why Christian was struggling so much. We are well off by most American’s standards and the three of us individually would do, have done, and are doing well in Greater LA. But in that corner of Manhattan, we were nothing. Those two at least, a lawyer and a nurse, could afford to live there now, but neither had grown up in it and perhaps that was something their neighbors could pick up on. For myself, I knew I’d never fit into that world, that no amount of degrees and certifications would stop me from craving to be around people who spoke Spanish, for example.

My youngest sister seems to have adapted far more in that respect, her Spanish incredibly rusty and forced. I met up with her and one of her friends on that second day, another trip to the museums. My friends were supposed to meet us as well, but by the time they had woken up and recovered, my sister and her friend, Clarice, had to go back toward Long Island. Clarice’s family was planning on taking their boats out, tying them up and enjoying some beers and fireworks. It wouldn’t be the Fourth of July until the next day, but like many other Americans, they would be celebrating ahead of time with some illegal fireworks displays. I laughed that the topic of therapy and intergenerational trauma had come up and Clarice was chiming in with her own problems. It wasn’t that I thought affluent, white people couldn’t have relatable problems, but rather I was laughing at my sister. In college, I had found all the broken Mexicans, desiring that sort of familiarity. As I’ve already mentioned, my sister has assimilated much more into the American culture, so her friends are more mixed than mine, but still as damaged it seems. I haven’t brought it up to her yet, but I wonder if she’s aware and actively looking for people who might understand her or if she’s doing it subconsciously, finding others who carry around similar familial trauma.

On the Fourth of July, we celebrated by going out Sunset Park for some dim sum, in a restaurant where less than half of the staff spoke English. This was one of the other neighborhoods I had wanted to see. Not Sunset Park specifically, but I was excited to see that it was a mostly Asian neighborhood, probably majority Chinese although I wasn’t looking carefully at the people as we walked through. Somewhere, there would be a similarly Latino neighborhood, specifically one group over the other. I hadn’t wanted to see the Statue of Liberty, Wall Street, or the 9/11 Memorial, but the ferry back from Sunset Park took us close to the Statue and dropped us just south of Wall Street. We ended up walking through Wall Street, taking in the New York Stock Exchange, the Federal Hall and the aforementioned 9/11 Memorial, adding up to the most patriotic Fourth of July I’ve observed yet. Again, I was impressed by the density of even the cultural objects, as we were just strolling through the city and could walk to many sites of historical importance.

On the evening of the Fourth, we watched a play out in Central Park and I got a chance to spend a little more alone time with Christian and one of their friends, Manh, separately. With Christian, I let him know that I had restarted therapy as I felt that there were still things I needed to deal with from my childhood, things I had already been in therapy for, but also specifically I wanted to work on the resentment I felt now and the adjustments I was having to make as I climbed the economic ladder. I pointed out that he likely felt similar resentments and would benefit from therapy. Thankfully, he told me agreed and that he was working toward getting to a job that would give him medical benefits that he could use to take therapy. I was happy for him, glad a friend of mine was trying to take care of himself. I mentioned it often and I said it again, that I was curious to see what my life would have been like had I grown up over there and figured the best way to get a sense of that would be to find raza and ask them over drinks. I mentioned that I could see myself moving now to NYC, to specific neighborhoods, but that it would be so different as a young professional. He let me know too of other places they had considered moving to and listed a couple of places that he knew of that had more people of color, specifically more Latinos. I made note of them, letting him know that I’d like to visit and see what the guys there were like.  

Manh was a trip. Even though he himself did not live in Manhattan and was not an NYC local, I felt that he gave me all the look I needed to know that I would hate to date in NYC, in Manhattan even more. Manh is a Vietnamese immigrant, working in some financial capacity for one of the many stock exchanges. He took offense when I said he was a “finance bro.” Our entire conversation that evening had felt like he was trying to convince me of things that weren’t, or making himself out to be the exact opposite of who he was. He started a conversation making some comment about his age and mine, saying that he felt old compared to me. I told him I understood it didn’t mean much coming from a younger guy not even in his 30s, but that I felt the gay community was too obsessed with age as a number. He said something else self-deprecating, and I told him he shouldn’t do that, put himself down just to compliment someone else. So he switched instead to picking on me, saying maybe I was as immature as my age suggested if I spent any time on TikTok. On that too, I asked him not to make himself feel better by trying to put me down. The topic changed to dating, I was clearly making him uncomfortable. He let me know that he didn’t have a specific type but that the most important thing was that there was “chemistry, or something instant, a physical attraction.”

“Oh yea, so like looks?” I asked.

“No! That makes me sound shallow. It’s just, take me for example, I don’t obsess over that but I try to take care of myself,” he nervously pointed at his core while he said that. Perhaps he tried to puff out his stomach to make himself look flabby, but it was quite evident to me that Manh actually cared a lot about his appearance. “Oh stop, you’re making me feel judged.”

“Well, you can say it however you’d like, but I think you should be honest about what you like and how much you take care of yourself. Hell, when people ask me, I let them know I lift often and run almost every day but that I also like to eat. I don’t expect that level of physical activity from people I date but I also wouldn’t mind it.”

“See, you’re the shallow one and you’re trying to make me sound shallow.”

“If that’s what you’ve gotten from that, that’s fine.” I really had no interest in changing his mind, but I thought the conversation very revealing. I had already commented to Brendan that I found it interesting how, the night we had stayed out till the clubs closed, Manh had told us he felt ugly and unwanted. This same man had found three separate handsome guys to make out with throughout the night. I stayed quiet then too, Christian handled that conversation while I looked for food. Still, returning to this moment and trying to continue the present conversation, I asked Manh his opinion on the Manhattanites. Sadly, he didn’t have much to say and turned the conversation to the skyline, the buildings covered by the sulfurous haze of fireworks just past.

Back in the apartment, Manh told me he didn’t want to wear the shirt we had gotten from the performance troupe out as it made him seem too skinny. I started saying maybe he should eat more but he cut me off to repeat himself and bring up a different boy. I saw that he was on Grindr then and was happy I hadn’t checked the app in a while, so my profile’s location would be somewhere north of Central Park, not visible here in the southwest corner. When I saw that he had put his phone down, I logged onto the application and blocked him as soon as his profile loaded. I was pleasantly surprised to see that all the places we wanted to go to were open and the lines made it clear that few people were staying in on the Fourth to celebrate with their family. We danced for a while, but this time I was intent on going home at the same time as Brendan, so the four of us ended up at a diner some time around midnight.

The next day I was up early again and wandered around the city for a while, looking for a good bagel and a good coffee. I had been so far unimpressed by the bagels the city had to offer. They felt more like they were such a highly esteemed item because they were fresh. In that way, they were like a fresh baguette in France, fresh bolillos and tortillas in Mexico, other fresh breads elsewhere. In other words, special because they were freshly made and regional because the local shops specialized in providing that kind of fresh bread, but otherwise unimpressive. This morning was no different and as well I was again disappointed by the coffee. I headed back to Christian and Brendan’s, noting that just this once I didn’t have to explain who I was visiting or where I was headed to the doormen. We went out for the day, to the east and west villages, saw Stonewall. Brendan told me that he felt that while people headed to LA to try and become famous Hollywood actors or social media influencers, they came to NYC, to the villages, to become artists. I laughed because I was initially excited to finally see people in NYC that looked like hipsters. I considered whether I cared if they were fake and decided no, not really, and imagined a life in the village. From there we made it out to Astoria, a Greek neighborhood.

We had dinner in Astoria and while we ate I ignored my phone. I almost regret that, as we had started dinner late and by the time we finished, most people would have been getting ready for bed, off to sleep for work the next day on Tuesday. I did wander around myself after, Christian and Brendan made their way home sooner as they had to work. I walked to the riverfront and watched people set off fireworks with the backdrop of two rivers and the skyline of Manhattan. I walked to the end of the park and then back through it toward the metro station. At one point, I heard a scooter coming up behind me on the park paths and I figured, this is it. Instead, I was surprised to see as I turned that it was a young mom and her kid on a scooter. I checked my phone, 11 PM, and figured I would really like living out here in Astoria if it was calm enough for a mom to be out riding her scooter and if the men on Grindr were telling of the guys I’d find in this neighborhood. I was trying to find a similar analogue, as Long Beach is to Los Angeles, so too was this indeterminate neighborhood to central NYC.

Before I left to Jackson Heights the next day, I chatted for a while with Brendan. I already mentioned the coffee shop, so staying on the topic of the men of Grindr, in Jackson Heights as in Astoria I was excited by the kind of guys I saw. I felt like I fit in more, for one, more visually similar to these guys than the ripped, smooth torsos of Manhattan and two, I was back to having even conversations on the apps in Spanish. I promised myself I’d come back one day on my own and actually spend time out here, adding to the ever expanding list of places I want to visit alone.

Brendan is thankfully not blind to Christian’s struggle to adapt to their move. My last morning, we finally had a little time to chat while I waited for my laundry to finish. I asked him how many of our conversations throughout the weekend he had been able to overhear. Certainly the first night, well, the first dawn, I figured he would have heard everything given how loud Christian was talking. On the specific issue of the doormen, I agreed with him that there wasn’t much he could do so long as Christian didn’t want him to interfere. I told him personally I would have already complained, would have absolutely had my white boyfriend escalate it if it was bugging me as much as it was bugging Christian. But, I also told him that I don’t know that it would bug me this much, it seemed a specific issue for Christian because he’s always been a little white passing, a little affluent enough to escape some of the attitudes people have against Latinos, and so he expected more even in Manhattan. He told me he felt frustrated though, because Christian didn’t want to explain many of these issues to him. I told him I empathized but also felt it would be better for Christian to just find some queer, brown friends and vent about these things. Most of the issues he brought up seemed more like things you got off your chest and moved on from, annoyances on the long list of things that queer, brown men will experience in life. We were discussing the racial differences and he brought up that he also felt out of place in Manhattan, himself being from a very rural area. I latched onto that, recalling an earlier conversation the three of us had had, noting that there was a certain privilege from growing up in one of the many metropolitan regions that the world centers around. I told him that was a good analogy for the ways in which we couldn’t understand each other, try as we might; Christian and I would never experience being from somewhere as rural as Brendan and would often make gaffes or speak in ways that showed some bias against him. In a similar way, Brendan would never be able to experience being Latino in the US and especially with a partner as unwilling to be open as Christian. I empathized with his frustration, stating that I saw the unfortunate way in which Christian and I were similar, shutting down sometimes rather than explaining. I told him unfortunately, Christian was holding onto that resentment, whereas I was just trying to get to a point where I was able to let go of things I couldn’t change, to make a certain peace with the racist and homophobic attitudes of my coworkers.

There was no solving the issues that Christian was having, but I hoped that Brendan would understand that there were deep issues that he couldn’t solve himself and that Christian was open to therapy. I could tell that Brendan wasn’t happy with that, but I reminded him that so much of Christian’s frustration right now stemmed from having to work as a nurse through the pandemic. Christian wanted empathy and understanding from us, he said as much, but when Christian brought it up I told him he was minimizing what he had gone through if he thought a couple of white collar professionals could relate to what he had gone through. I think by now we have all heard horror stories of nurses watching people die, telling families of Covid patients, day after day. Christian had gone through all of that but wasn’t allowing himself to grieve properly, even as he teared up while telling me this. I reminded Brendan of this again and again, because I could tell a source of his frustrations was a desire to be the one to help Christian out. I’m single, so I don’t know how much of that comes from a healthy desire to help your partner and how much of that was his own desire to be a savior. After our heart to heart, I left, still making up my mind on whether I would grab lunch with Christian or check out Jackson Heights.

I eventually made my way to the airport. Brendan and I had had a running joke before the trip that, native to So-Cal, I hadn’t experienced real weather yet. He’s absolutely right, but one habit I had already picked up due to my time in construction was to check the weather. The forecast for the day unfortunately had some troubling news and so, when we boarded the plane finally and it started to rain heavily, I was not surprised. When the flashes of lightning came through the window, I was not one of the many passengers blaming the airline for the thunderstorm. We took off 6 hours later than we were supposed to. Many hours later, two additional flights, I finally touched down in Long Beach and walked out, enjoying the dryer heat although tired and dazed. I had used points for my flights, so that meant accepting some less than stellar routes there and back. Once home though, I showered and went to bed, happy to have visited New York City and wanting to return in the fall, but happier still to have found a place for now that I was comfortable in.  

 

Not so Angry Anymore, Just Sad…

Aguilar

There’s two things that have been top of mind the past week that I wanted to share on here. The first is the subject of a larger post that I wanted to make but was knocked off my groove recently because I’ve started going to therapy again. The second is not just the fact that I’ve started to go to therapy again but the discomfort and perhaps even depression that it has provoked, to hear the sadness echoed back from my therapist and to confront what happened to me when I was a young person. I had gone so far as to outline my next post regarding queer representation in the media and would have been great timing given that Disney’s Loki is their chance to flesh out a queer character, whose queerness is not some modern invention but mythological storytelling. I owe myself to do whichever ends up dominating the conversation, but I don’t want to wallow in the sadness either.

I had known for some time that I needed to go back to therapy, to talk to a professional about what I had been feeling. I already mentioned it although perhaps more specific to dating. Generally though, I could tell that I had not been coping well with the grief I felt from losing my cousin earlier in the year, the grief from my breakup, and have generally been struggling to transition from a time in my life when I had nothing and needed to constantly be hustling, to now when I’ve become somewhat established in my career. I often mention to people that if I wanted to, I could work at this same agency through retirement. I haven’t quite made up my mind on that point, don’t think I need to actually. When I’m in a good mood and working, I do put effort into it. I believe in the mission of our agency and understand its importance to public health, that does more than enough to motivate me to work. But it is far from what I love, which is why I never say I’ll surely retire from it. If tomorrow I won the lottery, I would likely quit.

Part of the reason I’ve been so down post therapy sessions lately is because in these first sessions the focus has been heavy on childhood trauma. I’m not a psychologist, so I’ll trust that we really need to talk this much about what happened. However, there was a distinctly disheartening moment when my therapist confirmed that my parents would have faced consequences had I spoken to the child therapist when I was young. My mom wasn’t completely blind to the things I was going through as a kid, how I always seemed depressed or troubled. I haven’t been able to ask her about this though, because she asked how I had been feeling and I told her I had restarted therapy and that I was feeling something from just the first session, going over the rules surrounding mandated reporting. They included child abuse, I told her, and I asked her if she had considered what would have happened had I told that therapist about the ways she and her mom were whooping my ass. Because of Covid, we had been seated separately from the family and I didn’t feel the need to hold back, although I was polite still, wanting her to hear what I was saying without defaulting to the excuse that she didn’t want to hear the message because the delivery was rude.

She listened to me explain that the excuse that it’s part of our culture, that Mexicans believe using physical punishment as a form of discipline, was not valid in her case. I pointed out that she wasn’t trying to discipline me in any of these situations, stating a consequence to my actions and following through when I broke those rules. Rather, what happened was she would come home sad, angry, frustrated, or stressed out and if I so much as looked at her funny she would hit me. Then I reminded her what I have always maintained, that if my own mother beat one of my kids the way my grandmother beat me, she would not still be alive, much less being defended when her own family pointed out that they did not like her either. I pointed out that she herself was a victim of abuse and while I acknowledged it, I didn’t want to continue having to butt heads with her because she was so preoccupied with defending her abuser from criticism. She didn’t have much to say except to cry and say she tried her best, which I unfortunately believe she has. I had mentioned some of this in the last post about my family and therapy. 

I don’t recall when my mom started talking about her own abuse, besides the clear emotional abuse my grandmother put her through while we were growing up. Perhaps it was after my last prolonged bout with therapy. In grad school, around 2016, I finally caved, I had been listening a lot to Loveline with Mike Catherwood and Dr. Drew Pinski. So many of the answers to their calls involved some sort of therapy. I won’t deny it was helpful to hear a straight, Mexican man, one who presented as masculine, also be advocating for therapy. I walked into a school counselor’s office with a list of issues I wanted to cover and explained that I needed their help finding a therapist since I didn’t have insurance. The school counselor was very sweet, I let her finish explaining to me that she was equipped to help students with a range of issues involving anxiety around the education process. I remember the way her cheeks blushed when I explained that I appreciated everything she had just said but once I read the list of issues, she quickly came to agree with me that we needed to contact a therapist and, somewhat surprisingly to me, she wanted us to contact Child Protective Services as well. We did call, they noted what was said, but as I was no longer a minor they agreed that they would not be opening a case. I suspect now that it had to do with the same rules regarding mandated reporting… after all, she was just a counselor, she was there to offer general services. I haven’t talked about him on here, but I believe I was with my college boyfriend at the time.

That bout lasted two years and it helped immensely. I spent two years with the same therapist, a gentleman who had switched from computer science to psychotherapy. I really enjoyed that we shared a similar enough background, science and engineering, that I could talk about optimizing feelings, strengthening foundations and reactive forces. If it hasn’t been obvious, I did not grow up in a household that had detailed conversations about feelings, my parents had rather encouraged me to repress mine. So having a common ground from which I could initiate conversations was immensely helpful. During that time, I spoke out about the abuse I had experienced to my parents, how actually, if my violent outbursts were not proof enough, I hadn’t forgotten anything. I suspect that my speaking out about what my father did contributed to his early retirement and decision to return to his hometown in Mexico. It is not correct to say that my relationship with my parents improved through therapy, I actually think it has gotten worse, but they are not so draining anymore as I’m less inclined to prioritize their feelings over my own safety. And, with our relationship less draining, I’m able to stand up for myself without using swear words. It’s not that I don’t enjoy swearing, it’s just that it gives my parents a false sense of the moral high ground and they try to avoid the conversation by saying I shouldn’t swear.  

It’s worth noting that I have felt less angry and less tense. Perhaps the therapist is right and it was all childhood trauma that I still need to process. I don’t know what the end result will look like at this point. I don’t think I want to end the relationship with my parents entirely, not so much for their own sake but because I want to continue seeing my sisters, some who live with them and generally have a better relationship with them. I know my therapist would disagree with this part, but I also intend to help take care of my mom in her older age, when she is ready to stop working. I am aware enough that at this point, it shouldn’t be me taking care of her alone, but perhaps I’ll get to a point where it doesn’t eat away at my soul like it would now. At this point, I firmly believe the path to forgiveness depends on her also going to therapy, but time will tell.

Anxiety Post Hookup

Aguilar

Yesterday I had plans to hang out with a new friend, go out to do some yoga on the bluffs of Long Beach and then walk around. We walked around for dinner, some very spicy Thai food. I ended up needing to use the restroom so we headed back to his place. Over dinner though, he had opened up about wanting to go back to therapy and trying to get ahold of a therapist. There was something inside me that just tingled, instantly finding him more attractive. Then I saw his place and instantly judged how messy it was. I didn’t know him well enough yet to tease him about it, but I wanted to. Instead I found myself helping him clean up.

I stayed for a while and I noticed that he had a Nintendo Switch system so I asked him about that. He suggested we play Smash Brothers and he ended up posing quiet the challenge. I was winning at first but eventually he took the lead. I could tell I was getting tired and told him so, it was way past my bedtime. But also, the night was just going so great that I didn’t want to really go to sleep. As we played we did that thing where you inch closer to the other person and I mentioned twice how I thought it was hot that he was winning. I also tried to check in with myself and notice if I was letting him win or was actually struggling, but I pushed the thought away and tried to focus on the game. Eventually, we stopped, he had picked up on the obvious and we ended up making out. We were quiet gross from the gym, yoga and walking around, so we didn’t do much, but we did end up in his bed and naked.

Prior to that evening, I had been unsure whether or not he found me attractive, as he is very fit and also seemed a bit reserved. Now I suspect that his reservations are for the same reason as mine, it’s a defense mechanism to keep people away. See, he didn’t give specifics but it was clear there was some trauma there for him, perhaps his recent breakup had also left him a little dazzled.

Certainly mine has. When I woke up this morning I was anxious about having ruined our friendship. It’s possible that I have, after all, ruined our friendship but nothing so far has indicated that and as well, if it has been ruined, we did that together. But… That thought didn’t stop the worry this morning, even as I was dealing with the consequences of that spicy Thai dish last night. I imagine my own wound from the breakup is still too fresh. After all, the circumstances around that breakup managed to dig into deep seated trauma, all of which I’ve brought up in therapy, but none of which ever really went away. And that’s maybe what has me dazzled, spiraling, anxious, terrified to do anything that might approach those deep wounds and tear at them, drawing blood from scar tissue.

At root of some of this anxiety is the lack of certainty from other people. They come in and out of our lives and some stay but most leave. I want to just relax and lean on people, but I can’t yet knowing they can leave. I know that’s something I need to work on though, on learning how to relax, learning how not to panic after a nice evening with a cool guy…

Going Back to Therapy and Generally Spiraling

Aguilar

 

I had been wanting to finish a different piece of writing recently, but I have gotten a bit disheartened by writing since I started therapy. That isn’t the truth, it’s more like I’ve been blocked by what is going on surrounding therapy. Plus, I shouldn’t say started therapy, I’ve restarted it, going back since my old therapist moved on. My mom asked me this weekend why I stopped in the first place and I explained that actually, it wasn’t my choice, my therapist at the time had finished his training and needed to move on.

I restarted therapy because I’ve felt for a while that I needed to be back. Just the other evening, I binge watched the show Feel Good (2020-2021) and had way too many moments where I felt not just empathy, but like my own trauma was on display. When I hear people say they’ve been triggered, that’s what I imagine the serious part of it to be like, because I had to walk away from the television to remind myself to breathe through the pain. I don’t want to recall exactly what scenes were most upsetting, only in part to avoid spoilers. The other reason I wanted to restart therapy is because I can feel, when I go on dates that I really enjoy, I get really into that person and just want them in my life forever, longing for certainty so I can finally drop my guard.

I have to elaborate on that feeling and just be honest, as painful as it will be for me to admit. I met a guy recently and really felt a small connection (both of our parents are Mexican, English is our second language, educated and professional) as well as that physical attraction which is hard to deny. From our conversation, it felt like he was more tuned out though, less interested than I was. I didn’t worry too much about it, acknowledging that I felt an intense attraction but that it was possible he didn’t. After all, I figured it was just coffee, not an actual date. I had even shown up in gym clothes as I wanted to go work out after. So I tried not to make too much of it, tried to remind myself that everyone’s going on about how this is the summer of reopening, we’re supposed to all be out here enjoying ourselves.

I pushed it out of my mind and tried to keep busy, which I find I’ve been doing a lot of lately. We kept chatting via text and maybe two or three weeks later he commented that he liked the shirtless pictures I had been putting on my Grindr profile. So yes, this is the point where I admit that I’m vain enough to use shirtless pics on those apps. I wasn’t trying to get his attention, but I’ll admit I was glad he said that. I told him that I liked hairy chests as well and had noticed his chest hair peaking out of his shirt. We decided to grab dinner and drinks and a couple in and over at his place, he told me he was sorry for not following up sooner but that he had actually been busy and then I wasn’t available, at which point I let slip that I felt that I liked him more than he liked me. I wasn’t too sure what he said after that, having sobered up a bit but not enough but I also felt incredibly dorky for having admitted that. We changed the topic, shared a joint and then his bed, I stayed the night and we got brunch the next day even.

Throughout the next week, I tried to ignore him so as to not overwhelm him, again, this entire time I could feel all my feelings threatening to burst forth in word vomit. Closer to the weekend though, I sent him a text asking if he was free Friday to hang out. I didn’t specify, perhaps I should have, that I was planning on being gone all weekend. Well, I didn’t get a response and truthfully, I can’t put into words the anxiety and panic that I was being ghosted. I checked social media for his presence, checked the apps. I considered driving by his place, running by even, but I knew better. Still, even though I don’t really know this guy, I’ve already imagined a life in which he is the perfect partner, the perfect person to stay by my side, because maybe he wouldn’t abandon me or walk out of my life.

It ended up that he hadn’t ghosted, but simply thought he’d hit sent and never responded. I spent the weekend in San Diego to hide from everyone, the anxiety climbing until he texted me on Saturday although I tried to play up my dismissiveness. Which was unfortunate because Sunday while I was out hiking El Cajon Mountain, my phone reset and I lost his and many other contacts. I had to stop by his place and leave a note asking him to text me, although he didn’t see it and just checked in on me anyway and we got dinner. Again, more anxiety on the hike and the entire weekend, a worrying inability to relax and just enjoy the getaway. The irony at this point is that I’m not even sure if I like him or not, but I felt a need to know him and to be assured in his presence.

The intensity of my feelings lately has not been proportional with the situations around me and that’s something that I have been struggling with. I told my therapist in my last session that I felt a sense of gender dysphoria, legitimately wishing I had been born and raised female, so that as a young child, when grown people around me were yelling in my face, someone could have stepped in to stop that. Perhaps, had I been a girl instead, my mother would not have felt as safe leaving me with the male relative that molested me. Perhaps, had I been born a girl… I don’t want to go down that particular spiral again, because it’s still there. Not so much the desire to have been born a girl, no, but rather a desire to avoid conflict, to avoid stress, to avoid life. To only live within a perfect bubble that doesn’t challenge me, doesn’t let me grow, forever resting for life’s big challenges.

I feel like this is the most unstable I have been in a long time and it directly conflicts with the stability of my work life and personal life. It’s true that I’m avoiding relationships for a bit. Sorry, again, the lies I tell people. My mom asked me if I was seeing anyone and I said no, I’m focusing on myself in therapy. But that is without a doubt, not true. I am absolutely open to a relationship, open to finding someone who doesn’t make me feel lonely, open to ending and cutting off the guys who are mostly friends with benefits, even though the ones with which I have some attachment. It’s uncertainty that I am trying to avoid and yet I allow certain men to hang around, us using each other’s bodies but trying to avoid emotional conversations. I can’t relax enough for that, always on the lookout for something. Again, the most unstable I’ve been, teetering every way back and forth internally, afraid it will all collapse.

When I went out on that hike in San Diego, I had the opportunity to just give up and die from exposure. It was a very hot day and though I was prepared to hike for a long time, I didn’t expect to hike for seven hours nor did I expect the heat to be that harsh. I had checked local weather conditions and it wasn’t supposed to be that hot. But it was and there were times I could have given up. I didn’t. I stopped and took a rest three or so times, finding shade where I could and trying my best to keep going. Why is it that I can trust my body sometimes to pull through, to survive, but I can’t trust that I’ll be able to handle life on my own. I am very aware that I am lonely, but the reason approaching relationships feels so charged right now is because I feel like I need to have someone else in my life so I can improve for them, because I can’t do it for myself.

I studied hard and pushed myself because I wanted to be a role model for my younger siblings, because I wanted to be able to help them out. And yes, I do enjoy math and science, but that doesn’t mean I did engineering for myself. I did it for my family and now I’m having an emotional crisis, deriving little joy out of my workplace, constantly trying to avoid people and thus doing my job poorly. My mind isn’t the only thing awash, although it is, but my heart as well.

Maybe that’s what I need to focus on in therapy, learning how to take care of my emotions too. My mom asked me how my life was and I let her know I had restarted therapy. I told her what was on my mind, that I didn’t feel great about the fact that, had I told the child therapist everything, she would have been deported and myself and my sisters placed in foster homes. This was not a threat, it was a deeply uncomfortable fact, both of us being forced to recognize that the system here in the US considers what was happening enough of an issue to investigate and prevent; coupled with US’s immigration policy, I don’t think my mom would have been allowed to stay here. My mom asked if I really thought the way she hit me warranted that and I responded by letting her know that the problem is she was trying to hide behind the cultural practice of using force as a disciplinary tool but that she wasn’t recognizing that she didn’t hit me to punish me, she didn’t hit me in response to clearly established rules. She hit me because she was frustrated, or tired, or angry, or any other sort of emotion that wasn’t mine to manage. She began to cry and said something like she recognized that my sister sometimes seems that way too, that she tries to help out as much as possible because she’s worried of what she’s passed on. Although that was nice to hear, although I understand that my relationship with my mother, after a lot of work, after therapy on her part, could one day be something a little more positive, it’s hard not to have that stable relationship in my life already…

On the note of parents, yesterday was Father’s Day. My stepdad finally did what I had told them he should have done from day one, he asked that I be included. I cancelled the plans I had scheduled and agreed to spend the day with everyone. I had several times in the recent years told my parents that if my stepdad had just decided, and if my mom had let him as they’re honestly both to blame, if my stepdad had decided to just tell me he was my dad and tried to include me more from day one, he and I would have had a healthier relationship. After all, he’s been with my mom since I was three. We spent the day together, had breakfast, took his niece shopping, grabbed ice cream with all the family and enjoyed a nice day.

My aunt called me while I was driving from restaurant to home, my mom and one of my sister’s had tagged along in my car so they heard the call. My aunt sounded distressed, acknowledging that my mom had said hi but not really connecting. She asked if I could call her back and I said no worries auntie, you’re not interrupting anything right now. She mentioned that my bio-dad was feeling sad and was asking if I could call him. I gave a non-committal answer, noting internally that I didn’t even have his number. Once she hung up, I told my mom not to try to run interference. She said no, she was going to let me handle it as I’m an adult. But I reflected that I had just told her in the restaurant, one of the other rules, that my prior therapist had told me I couldn’t possibly care for my biodad, there was too much resentment, too much abuse from him for me to safely care for him. In the time since my last serious stint of therapy and now, California appears to have passed a law to try and limit dependent and senior abuse as there was a fourth scenario under which the therapist would break confidentiality and report to the proper authorities.

I didn’t end up calling him and I don’t think I will. In fact, I was going in the opposite direction, thinking of asking my aunts to stop keeping me updated on his life. He didn’t want to be around me as a child or a young adult, now that I am a responsible person of a certain age, now that I am someone he can lean on, he feels comfortable being around. I already feel that pressure from my grandmother and mom, both who at least can say they were involved in raising me and want to reap the grain while denying the chaff of what they have sown. I can’t think about the way my biological father impacted my life and development without wanting to tear that trauma out of me, unlive that past, forget that memory. If I was a drunkard this is when I’d sign off to go for a drink. Instead, having unloaded some of this, I think I can finally go back to focusing, to exercise a bit and get a good night’s rest.