The very first time I crossed the border from Tijuana into the US, I was 13 years old. I was leaving behind everything I knew, and even though it wasn’t all great, it was ALL I knew. As we made it past the visa inspection and were allowed to enter a different country, a different world, I was surprised by a sight that is probably innocuous to most people. As we drove onto the 5 freeway, the highway opens into 6 lanes, and for some reason I was mesmerized by that. I had never seen a road that big. It’s as if subconsciously I knew I was entering a world that was much bigger than the one I knew. The massive scale of a freeway was enough to let me know that this would be a world I would be swallowed up by. And not by the entirety of it, but only a small section of it would be enough to crush me. I would disappear into a small corner of this giant place, without ever knowing the true scale of it.
When we first came to this country, it wasn’t my whole family that came with me and my dad. It was just my sister and I. Only the two of us were allowed to venture into California at first. My mom and my two brothers would join us eventually.
A friend of my dad rented us a room in her house. A small guest room with a twin bed. Around this time my dad got a VHS copy of The Matrix. He put a small TV/VCR combo on a chair, and we sat on the floor and watched a film in a language that we couldn’t understand. At the end of the credits there was a behind the scenes feature that made me think, one day, I want to learn 3d animation. I had the thought, eating tacos on the floor of that room. A thought I wouldn’t revisit again for almost 10 years until someone believed in me enough to tell me that I owed it to myself to do something with my life.
Years passed and after a long series of terrible life decisions, I was living in an office space in an industrial park. I remember thinking that my life as a digital artist was over… I was 28 years old.
I think now about all the times I wanted to give up. How many times I questioned the motivation for doing anything and what the point of anything was.
In the Odyssey, as Odysseus approaches his home and his long lost love, his will finally starts to break:
“He growled inside, like a bitch guarding her vulnerable pups, ready to fight on seeing a stranger. He growled inside with anger at their evil ways, but striking his chest he restrained his heart, saying: ‘Patience, my heart. You endured worse than this when the Cyclops, with his huge strength, ate my loyal friends: yet you held firm until your cunning released you from that cave where you faced death.’”
Similarly, there is a moment in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov where Alyosha falls to the ground in despair and existential dread. What he knew about the world no longer made sense. Suddenly something in him awakens:
“…with each moment that passed he felt plainly and almost palpably that something as firm and unshakeable as this celestial vault was descending into his soul. Something that was almost an idea took mastery of his intellect – and now for the rest of his life and until the end of the ages. A feeble youth had he fallen to the earth, yet now he arose a resolute warrior for the rest of his life and knew and felt this suddenly, at that same moment of his ecstasy. And never, never for all the rest of his life would Alyosha be able to forget that moment. ‘Someone visited my soul in that hour,’ he would say later with resolute faith in his words …”
I can’t recall how many times I had those moments. Somehow, someway, I was able to pull myself through but every time something in me died. Something was numbed to the pain. I thought it was a great ability, to be able to kill things inside me. Until it didn’t work anymore. I died many times over, but I always neglected the rebirth part. So I continued on for years, inhabiting things that were dead without realizing it.
In 2017, after a long series of less terrible life decisions, I went to Japan for the first time.
I remember lighting incense and candles at every temple and shrine, but especially at the Fushimi Inari shrines. I prayed for my nieces most of all. They were 2 and 6 at the time. The new generation of my family.
I remember on one occasion seeing my oldest niece, around 4 at the time, playing in my living room. She was arranging all her toys in perfect order on her little Disney princess table. Instead of being enchanted by the sight, I had an overwhelming fear take over my soul. For months, I thought, “Oh no, she is getting too comfortable, but life isn’t comfortable, life is miserable, it’s pain, it’s suffering, what is going to happen when she finds out that life cannot be arranged neatly like her little toys?”
I was having an existential meltdown on her behalf. If this isn’t neurotic, I don’t know what is.
I had this crippling fear that the world would be too big for them. A fear that reality would break them.
The world was this immense source of fear for me. When I started traveling, everywhere I went, the scale of the cities and the buildings felt massive to me. The more I returned to some of those places in the UK, Eastern Europe, Japan… there is now a really strange feeling that nothing is as colossal as it felt the first time.
The world became smaller and as a result, safer.
It took me decades to learn this. I wanted my nieces to experience this as soon as possible. So that the world wouldn’t be a scary place for them. This time I did not have to light incense and candles for them. I took them there so they could do it themselves.
I wanted them to experience the exact thing that allowed me to make the world smaller, and, consequently, safer.
They won’t have to be swallowed up by it.
