Reflections 2023: being grateful

This year could easily have become one of the worst four years of my life along with the black year (1995), the gray year (2003) and the blue and crimson year (2016/2017). I was rejected by three persons who I thought had a romantic interest in me, I stopped talking to several important people, several friends left me or distanced themselves from me for reasons I consider fair; In addition, the cloud that crowned the storm of losses appeared under the death of my best friend: the great engineer Chava.

So, loneliness became the constant emotion again, the shadow that wanders by my side, the lover of that night, of that empty bed: and next to loneliness slept lack of love, the intense hollow feeling in realistic conclusion that I have many flaws, and that I will never be loved because I am ugly, because I am not stable enough, because I don’t deserve it. And I think it’s easy, very simple, like falling into a romance in a bottle, blaming yourself, crying on your knees, embracing hell; because all that is familiar, and human beings cling to the familiar.

It is difficult to see the good, in fact it is even dangerous to always see the good, especially if we have fallen to the bottom of the spiral of the quasi-celestial object that is glimpsed at night. And so, for me, it has always been the most common thing to blame myself, to hurt myself, to think that I am physically horrible, intellectually clumsy, among other detrimental virtues. Wow, sometimes I think that I possess some disorder or that I walk along some spectrum like a ghost that seeks to find the why of a what.

It’s hard to know what’s wrong with you. And in the attempt to know, especially if you lack specific guidance, you get lost in labyrinths of maybes, perhaps, or probably that make you attach labels that serve both to understand and justify yourself. I was falling into that trap while my words fell silent due to the uncertainty of what was happening to me: anxiety, autism spectrum, bipolar, all of those were labels that I clung to to explain to people, especially the women I was attracted to, what the hell was happening with me and the reason for my actions.

At the moment of writing this does not mean that I have realized that I am fine and very normal, or that my actions do not have triggers that cause them: it is just that none of these have justification in words like adjectives that make you feel special in a tragedy lacking empathy, or in diagnoses that contain instructions to explain and share all your behaviors with someone. No, I am not on the autism spectrum even though someone on the spectrum has told me so: now that I remember, that diagnosis was ruled out in the tests they gave me when I was just six years old, and in which I came out only as a shy boy. Yes, anxiety is part of my life, and has been for the last 29 years, but it is not justified by a chemical imbalance, or a bipolar disorder inherited from my paternal side: the root of this is more complex, but it also frees me, for the better, from the label of a particularly misunderstood person.

There is a moment where you have to take responsibility for your actions, but that moment does not occur either by blaming yourself or justifying yourself. One of my favorite words, the one that gave me the first stairs out of the downward spiral of this quasi-stellar object (reference for astronomy fans), is the following: compassion. It not only means accompanying the other, or in this case yourself, in your pain, but also being responsible for your actions: good and bad. Still, compassion is, let's say, only half of the DNA chain, and it requires another piece to have an effect: that piece is gratitude.

I think I know why many people now attend church, synagogue, mosque, jinja, otera, or whatever community religious unit there is. These places, beyond a community, offer compassion, but above all gratitude. Each of the routines, each prayer, each fragment of an act of faith, no matter how false or true, revolves around giving thanks to a god, a Buddha, a kami, nature, good fortune, actions, good lessons, and what life throws your way.

But there is no compassion without gratitude, nor gratitude without compassion. Like anxiety and depression, these two behaviors dance together on the dance floor between the vicious and virtuous spiral. Compassion is required to turn off the external voices that become intense conjugations of the verb duty (you should, you need to, you will, among others) that bind you with a harassment of guilt, of revictimization, from which it is almost impossible to escape. And gratitude is required to see things from another perspective, to see the glass half full, to let that smile not come from a “should” but from realizing what you have achieved, have, and can still achieve without falling into the toxin of positive thought of smiling just because you should.

Now, I realize that I am a closet positive person. If I’m going to eat, I almost never complain about what I didn’t like, and I rave about what I loved. If I see a rehash of a series full of nostalgia, I don’t go to Musk’s land to complain (although I did complain there and on other quasi-social platforms because I thought it was cool and a person I liked blocked me, but that’s another story). And I have always celebrated the video game that I have been waiting for for years, the new anime, the trips I went on, among other things. In fact, that makes me a terrible academic evaluator, although I do my best to find and report on areas of opportunity in what I read.

Gratitude is perhaps the most difficult step to climb. This individualistic, extroverted world, full of self-help books (even if you have to buy the book or course you saw on TikTok) always pushes you to smile all the time, not complain, not cry, manifest what you want and a thousand simple ways that are as diuretic as the speeches that promote them. For example, one of the most difficult steps you can take is ignored, and because of its difficulty it is almost always uphill, but without it you would never have understood the meaning of gratitude; this is, defeating the orchestra director of the dance between anxiety and depression: resentment; and stopping resentment, or forgiving, does not necessarily imply reconciliation but rather stopping feeling again and again and with the same force those tears that stick like ice crystals in the darkest part of the flesh of your soul.

I think that before painting white, you have to sand all the gray paint that stained the wall of our soul. You can’t skip any steps as you go up because you run the risk of falling. And now, I’m with a wedge in hand removing the last traces of that paint that stained every corner of my interior to start filling with cheerful colors, with more visible changes, this stage of my life; and curiously, this is already reflected in details such as painting my apartment after almost 26 years.

What am I grateful for this year? Excellent question, dear imaginary audience: taco sandwiches, easy answer, they are literally tacos inside two slices of bread. More seriously, I have to think about how my past self from those dark years would perceive the life I currently lead, and I think the first thing I would say, especially that child who always played alone during recess and was sent to do studies on autism because it was not “normal” for a child to be introverted where the extrovert was rewarded, would be: “––So I’m not a fool, I’m studying for a doctorate, I even know English and I have written scientific things in English? Damn, if the teacher from the damned Montini School who made fun of my English and Miss Pilar saw me now they would shut their mouths. Wait, and you write about video games, what the hell are you complaining about?––”.

  This year I broke the ceiling of many impossible things. I wrote my first academic article in English, in a Springer-Nature journal of all things. I had my first reference to one of my works, I gave a seminar session in the Mathematics and Computing department at a university in the United Kingdom, my master's thesis caught the attention of some researchers in Peru, I made my first opinions and academic reviews which fills me with humility, and on top of that (again) they accepted a work of mine on video games. I literally grabbed the broom and broke many impossible ceilings that had been imposed on me; and despite everything, despite all the pain, I saw beautiful places in Japan and shared great moments with my godmother who then wants to split my tangerine when I get intense.

––Wait, no one bothers you, no one shouts at you, don't you have a great adversary who hates you?–– myself from the gray years would ask. And although I am not certain about the situation of where I live, I also do not have the uncertainty and blindness of times past. Furthermore, I must be grateful for the stability that I have often prayed for, and the freedom that many people would like. I would have loved to have a normal ritual where I didn't have to get up at six in the morning to get to work and returned at ten at night between the school ritual, low-paid jobs and eating whatever came my way; in addition to music, that broken wing that re-emerged from my back in the form of a new song and a smile that I thought I lost when playing the guitar.

I did not find love and I was rejected three times, but at least I tried three times. Sometimes the fears that paralyze my heart and make me act badly come back: I called people who did not want to hear from me, I shouted with anger and felt sadness. But I also discovered new things. I learned that forgiving is not the same as reconciling and I stopped hating the ones who hurt me. In the end I understood that being grateful to myself and what I have does not mean pretending that everything is fine. And not everything was bad, because the death of the great engineer helped me to recover a great friend after more than 15 years.

I'm not special, I'm not on a spectrum, I don't have a misunderstood madness. I am just a person who suffered a lot, who has demons that from time to time come out through the cracks of the wounds of a soul that has not heal completely (yet); But still, despite complaining for so long, despite having fear and anxiety from past experiences, I have not stopped fighting, moving forward, climbing those first stairs upwards that are the most difficult to climb. To those who have left, thank you very much because you let me see where I can advance or who I should let go and why; To those who stayed and returned, I hope that we continue this adventure of existing together, although above all, thank you beautiful people who have accepted me with virtues and defects even in those years where I saw everything in black tones.

Even so, there is something more embarrassing that I have to admit: I have thousands of scars from traumas on my skin. There is a word that carries a powerful stigma and that I discussed a lot with my psychoanalyst, trauma. Clinging too much to a relationship, sending constant messages, calling at inappropriate times, feeling anxiety about traveling, about leaving my house, about being rejected, about getting sick and having no one to take care of me, among other things. And all that resulted in hundreds of wounds throughout my life (especially in that period where the eyes of that child only sought a caress or a little protection) that accumulated. For example, in my family there are people who laughed when they remembered that when I fell as a baby in my first steps, I started crying and no one came to help me (I don’t blame them, surely something causes them that insensitivity), but that says a lot.

And this, along with insults, nights and days without eating, abuses of all kinds, humiliations, blows, loneliness, comparisons, irrational expectations, labels, a thousand times the word you should, lies, manipulation, blackmail, makes the shadows come out of the disguise and the performance of my behavior in an impulsive action that is difficult to explain beyond a link in which it manifests itself in a simple way. So, I preferred to explain my “acting like this because I suffer from anxiety (beyond the traumas)”. In addition to the explanation, mistaken, of a person who told me that I had autism (without knowing that that diagnosis had been ruled out) because this explained my anxiety and my low capacity to understand emotions, when this is nothing more than a product of fear and absolute distrust rather than of any special condition; in fact, this made me become hypervigilant and not pay attention to what I write, in addition to that voice of a child, and until recently, suddenly broke down, and if I cried when using Chat-GPT for the first time it is because this tool corrects the oversights that I simply cannot see in this voice that is the reflection of my voice in the verb to write.

I am also grateful to my friends. Some left, some came back, but I think I have found a group that has accepted me as I am and that has patience with many of my moments when the ghosts of the past take control of my actions. Friendship is a rare word, it is basically the peak of any relationship, whether romantic, among members of your family and with strangers who become family by transforming into friends; so, I am basically grateful to those seeds watered over time in the form of cousins, aunts, half-crazy brothers, classmates, colleagues, and people who had adventures to the corners of a city where the subway did not run, because without them, and many people who have helped me along the way, I would still be the fearful and shy boy who always played alone at recess.

There is a soul that cannot be forgotten, that must not be abandoned, and that must never be mistreated. As a child, in a moment when I hid when I heard the door, when I went hungry without contemplating the stars, when I cried hugging my legs in front of a loneliness that was as cruel as the company, there was a little black cat that always approached me when I was sad, but to whom in a moment of learned, repeated, internalized anger, I cut off her whiskers. Now, in these last nine years when many tears have occurred, many flowers whose petals fly in the abyss of the dead butterflies, my little Momoka, my beautiful peach cat, has given me her company along with the other two crazy ones: I thank her, but I hope that next year I will treat her better with eternal smiles that will run more as the rocks of pain erode and let my torrent of joy run.

And if you are reading this, first of all your patience deserves the best of awards, keep in mind that I shared it personally with you because I care about you, I like you or I am grateful to you. A long time ago I deleted almost all my accounts on social platforms (except WhatsApp, because otherwise I would be very isolated); I only opened Instagram again because of the dating apps and then deleted it, since I consider that these platforms that feed on our attention do nothing more than generate a very false sense of identity. Additionally, there is something dark about communication like broadcasting, where instead of sharing directly with the people you love, you simply broadcast messages, photos and videos, hoping to get a like for instant gratification (there are several studies on that).

Finally, I will probably spend Christmas and New Year’s Eve alone because of the situation I have with some members of my family. However, that doesn’t matter anymore, because I will play video games, get nervous about the trip to Japan and rest like every Monday. Besides, I’m sure that somewhere in my country, or even in the world, there will be two or three people thinking about me: about this guy with a strange sense of humor, very anxious, and with a personality that despite not falling into the spectrum, accepted that he is extremely rare: I am grateful to them, I love them, and I hope to take another turn around the sun by your side (and yes, engineer Chava, I defeated Ganon while you started your adventure in the skies).