writing – Rodrigo Albarran Art

What DOES it do to your head?

One of my oldest and dearest memories is waking up in my grandmother’s house. The sun light coming through the gaps on tile roof, hearing the creaking sounds of the floor as I get off the bed and feeling the old wood touching my feet. I always felt like the entire floor would collapse onto the corn storage room underneath. As I walk through the door, I can already smell the mesquite burning. My eyes adjust to the blinding light, I see my grandmother in her outdoor kitchen. A little shed made of sticks and fiberboard, the stove made of clay and adobe bricks. Behind the kitchen, corn crops, banana trees, and different kinds of colorful flowers that she took care of as if they were her own children. In the distance, nothing but hills and mountains.

I can’t explain the feeling I get every time I think of those days. It’s always been more than simple homesickness, an existential fear of losing my connection to that place. An irrational fear that one day that place would disappear and I’d have nothing to go back to, and a part of me would be erased. This has been a pattern in my art, my so called writing and my dreams.

I spent quite a few years trying to figure out where home is. I looked for it in many places, in different people. Everything always fell short of the rich surrealism of that place. The ceremonies, the dances, the music. The strange mixture of Catholic symbols and indigenous rituals but above everything, the overwhelming feeling of safety.

For quite some time, I have been trying to decipher what the extreme changes in environment and socio-economic status will do to someone’s mind. I thought it so strange that I could go from a place with no running water or electricity, to writing about my experiences at a coffee shop in Vienna, across the street from the Opera house where Mozart once conducted.
It just doesn’t seem natural. A question started to formulate in my head for some time, and I have been rhetorically asking lately, “What does that do to your head?’ It’s one thing to simply throw that question up in the air, as if it’s someone else’s responsibility to answer it.

But then someone looked right at me, repeated the question: “What DOES it do to your head?” waited for an answer and I did not have one.

I’ve never truly wanted to know the answer.

There was a moment at the Okunoin Cemetery on Mount Koya, where I reached the Gobyō-bashi Bridge, and past that point, you could no longer take pictures. There was a temple at the end, I can’t remember what it was called, but there was a beautiful Shinto shrine inside. I went in like any other tourist, and then I reached a set of stairs going down to a basement. In there I saw a woman, dressed in ceremonial robes doing a ritual prayer, much like Muslim prayer, kneeling down and touching the floor with her forehead then standing up again, perform a kind of adoration with her hands and kneel to touch the floor with her forehead again. In front of her, there was an altar, and something that looked like an eagle talon attached to a staff.
I remember having this strong feeling that I wanted to join her in the ritual prostrations. I did not understand it, but I felt this powerful need to do it. She saw me. She invited me to join her. I felt this strong current of life go through me, as if I was a vessel for some sort of cosmic stream that was compelling me to do it. She insisted again, but something blocked me. I wanted to do it, but something kept me from joining that stream of life. I went up to the upper levels and back to the cemetery. I started crying and I didn’t know why. For a long time, I wondered what all of that was about. At the same time, I didn’t want to know.

That was in 2023. I am now remembering that I fell into a deep depression when I got back from Japan. I’ve always liked to keep little mementos from all of my trips. Train tickets, flyers, tourist guides, and even receipts. I like to keep everything and make scrapbooks, only this time I couldn’t. I left them all on the corner of my bed for almost 18 months. They did not move, and I am almost sure that I didn’t even change my sheets on my bed for that long. It was a dark depression and I didn’t even know that it was happening.

I got caught in a loop of self-destruction. I trained my body into a state of central nervous system fatigue on a regular basis. I found Olympic weightlifting back in high school, and heavy training has been a part of my life since then. Except for the periods of time when I insisted on trying to drink myself to death.
What I did with training during this time was nothing less than torture. There was no set discipline, no routine, no records kept, no progress measured, I was going in for 3 – 4 hrs everyday until my body was so beaten that I couldn’t go on. There were times when I would see the 375 lbs in the rack, about to do squats, and get emotional because I did not want to do it. I would then tell myself that I was weak for not wanting to and do it anyway.
The aggressive training and the extreme diet would push my body into a state of chronic stress. I was even losing hair in chunks. My insomnia was so hostile that I was hallucinating during the day. I could hardly get out of bed in the mornings and I’d show up to work at 11, looking like I was beaten with a baseball bat the night before.

I was trying to kill something inside me. Living became so unbearable that I had to escape, again, to a different country. This time, I picked Romania. I saw a YouTube video about an old cemetery in northern Romania, and I thought, well, I have to go see that… what is it with me and cemeteries?

I arrived in Bucharest and rented a car. The next day, with horrible jet-lag and the worst insomnia of my life, I drove 10 hrs north, right to the border with Ukraine, to a little village called Săpânța. I drove far, trying to escape myself, not realizing that I was taking myself with me everywhere I went. Now that I look back on that, it was a very dangerous drive. I can’t even be sure that I wasn’t out there looking for an accident. My driving was so reckless, passing semi-trucks on one-way lanes while looking at another one coming straight towards me, imagining what if? There was one really close call. And I think about it every day. It was raining, the sound of the trucks horns at my bullshit maneuvers, and me saying, well, I’m in a hurry. To get nowhere. I’ve had dreams about the headlights coming straight at me through the rain.

What was I trying to do? There were times after the trip when I’d have intense existential moments and wonder if I actually died that day, and what I am living now is an illusion… My therapist would call that dissociation. The entire event was a massive manic dissociative episode and I didn’t even know that it was happening.

I finally reached Săpânța around midnight. I found my accommodations, a small traditional Romanian room and finally passed out. The next day I visited Cimitirul Vesel (The Merry Cemetery). As I walked through the graves and the hand painted crosses I had a realization. This looks very similar to the cemetery in my parent’s village. I thought it funny and absurd that I traveled across the world to visit a place that resembled my own home. I remembered having the same thought driving through the rural regions of Bulgaria, outside of Sofia. I had very special moments driving through both places, having a faint thought that hadn’t yet materialized until I was standing in that cemetery: Home is everywhere. I don’t have to belong to a single place and time, when I belong to the world, I belong everywhere, at any given place and at any given time.

The next day I drove towards the Carpathian mountains. As I went up the Transfăgărășan road, I reached a spot covered by thick fog. I had a strong feeling that I wanted to hike around that area but I kept driving and then I felt it was too late to turn around. Suddenly, I remember having a clear image of a shamanic figure, with antlers, emanating white smoke. The opposite of the black Shaman figure I’ve always dreamed of before. The feeling to turn around overtook me, I did not wanted to refuse the call again as I did in Japan. The fog was so thick that you could barely see what was in front of you. To this day, I don’t know why, I performed a ritual dance that I used to do in my early 20s to Aztec music playing on my phone. I danced until I was exhausted. In the middle of a thick fog. I have now done that in the mountains of Nagano in Japan, the Scottish Highlands, and the Transylvanian Alps. And I couldn’t tell you why. All I know is that for a brief moment I had a renewed interest in life.

In November of 2024, I went back home for Day of the Dead. My sister wanted to take her daughters back home so they could experience the traditions and culture we grew up with. She mentioned she’d like me to go too so I could drive everyone around the city and I hardly need an excuse to book a flight. During this trip, I tattooed Tezcatlipoca’s skin on my left leg. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for quite some time. I had no idea that by doing so I would be inviting something else into my life.

In the oldest Mesoamerican creation story, Tezcatlipoca (Smoking Mirror) along with Quetzalcoatl (Feathered Serpent) descend upon the world, covered by a void that came to be inhabited by a primordial beast, Cipatctli, after the destruction of the fourth era. Their task is to slay the beast, one representing light and the other one the forces of darkness. Shadow and light coming together to create the world. In the struggle Cipactli, part crocodile, fish, and toad—with insatiable hunger and mouths at every joint, catches Tezcatlipoca by the foot and tears it off. By creating this distraction, both Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl were able to vanquish the beast and from its skin they created the world. The Smoking Mirror sacrifices his own body to create something new, so he is always depicted with a missing foot.

6 months after tattooing the Smoking Mirror’s skin on my calf (the plan was to do the entire leg), I tore all the ligaments on my knee and damaged a meniscus. When I finally got up from the floor, after the sharp throbbing pain had somewhat passed, I sat for a few minutes and wondered if I could still finish my workout.

What followed was a certain type of hell that I was ill prepared for.

In a way, I had my own confrontation with a primordial beast, only this one was inhabiting a void constructed internally through a subconscious death drive that manifested itself through hyper-productivity, chronic stress, depression and a strange sense of having to prove myself, I just didn’t know to who. Who exactly was the audience I was trying to impress when I’ve never cared to impress anyone? Suddenly, the guy that couldn’t sit still, that was running from one place to the next, that was trying to carry more than I could handle, couldn’t move at all.

In the middle of the worst pain I have ever felt, the true torture came from my own mind. My psyche flooded my vision with entire segments of my life I had never fully processed. My mind took me for a rollercoaster ride of all this history, all the unexplored life, grief, real tragedies and imaginary ones, all lodged in dark caves of the psyche and forced me to look at them. Tied to my bed, I couldn’t do anything but to look at all of it.

After Cipactli was vanquished, Quetzalcoatl descended into the underworld to rescue the bones of men, he steals them from Mictlantecutli (Lord of the Underworld), and with them he gives life back to people and repopulates the earth.

I proceeded to do the same. To rescue every single aspect of myself that got stuck in time. Every version of me that did not know how to move on. Every identity I had to create and then abandoned in order to survive the jump into the next stage of life. I collected every one of them, as Quetzalcoatl collected the bones of ancient men, and re integrated them into the present. It became a mission, a purpose I have never had before. Not for my family, not for other people. A rescue mission for myself. I was bringing every version of me that was still hurting, stuck in different timelines, into a fixed point in the present.

I had to learn how to sit still with the memories, how to ask for help, how to walk again. It was then, and it couldn’t have happened any other way, that I finally allowed for these images, memories and dreams to fully enter my consciousness and allow them finally to become an integral part of me.

“The years… when I pursued the inner images were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything was then.” ― Carl Gustav Jung

That’s when the idea hit me for the first time.

I have gone through multiple socio-economic stages in the course of my lifetime and I don’t think the human brain is designed to handle drastic changes like these. Starting off in a rural village in the mountains of Southern Mexico, adobe brick houses, no electricity, not even a toilet. The world of Mexican rodeos, the extreme violence, the traditions, the music. Then the colonial city of Queretaro, the low income neighborhood, but access to private education, high art and classical music lessons in beautiful old colonial buildings and cathedrals.

Coming to the US and being exposed to an entire different language and culture. Starting off as many immigrants do, 14 people in a two bedroom apartment, working at the swap meets of San Diego, going through high school culture totally sedated, playing guitar in death metal bands. Getting sober and discovering a world outside of the Hispanic immigrant cultural bubble.

Teaching myself a skill that eventually would become my career. My first and only job at a high level corporate setting, slowly climbing up the economic ladder, the corporate ladder, and eventually being able to visit 15 different countries to find even more life altering experiences.

Most people live inside one cultural atmosphere, one economic class, one language, one moral code, one cosmology through most of their lives. I have lived inside several worlds stacked together, each with its own laws, gods, language, and survival strategies. And my brain has had to rewire itself every time. The average person would be crushed under the weight of these massive cultural shifts. It seems unnatural. The psyche shatters under the pressure of these constant, painful adaptation demands.

I was forced to evolve at a speed faster than the mind is designed for. Most people can’t do it without breaking, numbing, or becoming violent. I have done all three and somehow, I survived them all.

I had no idea until now just how depressed I was after my last trip to Japan and all that happened in a period of 3 years.
This is a very long story, and I still haven’t answered the original question. What has it all done to my head?

Well, it filled it with an overwhelming sense of guilt. An oppressive, corrosive guilt.

No one in my family or the village that we are from has gone to the places I have gone to, seen the things I have seen, or experienced the things I have experienced. I have never had to work the fields, as the men before me did. I have never had to do manual labor, construction, or even work in a kitchen.

I am an artist.

And for some reason, for the longest time, I have felt utterly and destructively guilty about that. Every time I would put my body through gruesome physical punishment, sleep deprivation, starvation dieting, I was only doing it to compensate for the guilt that I felt over the fact that a long line of people had to suffer immensely so I could have the life I have now. This was the audience I was performing for, they are who I was trying to prove my worth to.

A long line of dead people.

Then the real questions I had been meaning to ask came out. Why would someone who barely escaped dying during a massive earthquake, who almost choked in his sleep from constant throat and lung infections, who was in and out of hospitals as a child, who almost died of a cholera infection, who saw dead men thrown in the back of trucks like ragdolls…

Why would the universe pick me?
Why me of all people?

Was it simply because I refused to die?
Was Death really that impressed?

Is the answer to these questions what I was searching for all over the world? Is that why I made a point to visit all the religious centers of every single city I’ve ever been in? I have been to Eastern Orthodox mass in Bulgaria, Athens, and Romania. I’ve been to Shinto and Buddhist ceremonies in Japan. I have been to Muslim prayer in Istanbul. I have been to Catholic mass at the Vatican and cathedrals in London, Edinburgh, Austria and Prague.
Every time I’ve heard of experiences like this, it was from the typical affluent simpletons looking for themselves after reading banal and self indulgent manifestos like Eat Pray Love.

I was looking for a reason not to kill myself.

As this realization dawns on me, the clear answers as to why I was so beaten and depressed for years and why I escaped to Romania with some sort of death wish in the back of my mind, why I broke my body like those men thrown around like ragdolls at the rodeos where I grew up… I couldn’t breathe.

Realizing that all those times when I held a knife to my throat, during the worst years of my drinking, thinking that it was better to end it all than to continue to live that way; that energy never went away. If I couldn’t drink myself to death, I was going to work myself to death. I was going to disappear somehow.

I was sitting in my garage writing all this and I felt a massive energy about to erupt. My brother was in his room. My nieces were in my living room. I locked myself in the bathroom and I let this accumulation of repressed emotions come out, in silence, locked up in the bathroom. And as if the universe was playing some sort cosmic joke on me, a reminder that not all has been tragedy and mindless suffering, a funny little reminder that everything had a reason in the end: I heard the clumsy violin notes from my niece practicing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” while I was sobbing by myself. Then as if by magic, produced by the hilarious rendition of the children’s song, I started laughing uncontrollably. I couldn’t stop doing both simultaneously.

Finally, I could breathe again. I see now that the first half of my life is over. At the beginning of the second half of my life, I have no other task than to enjoy the life I’ve built. And that’s terrifying. I have no idea what that will look like.

After being forced to abandon home so many times, looking for it all over the world, accidentally, I became it. I became the space I was looking for and I did not even know that it had happened. I became the space in which other people’s lives could safely unfold.

As my nieces grow and I see their little faces transform into adults, I hope that whenever they go through difficulties in life, and they surely will, they can look into their memories and remember all the times that they spent the night at my house and woke up in their grandma’s room knowing that everything in the world was safe.
Maybe that feeling of safety will be enough to carry them through some of the fundamental painful lessons in life.

The power of those memories carried me for long enough.

Cerberos son las Sombras

“Querido padre: Es posible que en el fondo tu problema, como el mío, no haya sido más que un problema de soledad. Y, sobre todo, de no haber encontrado el punto medio entre la soledad y los otros. Hasta ahora cada cual ha venido ocultándolo a su manera, aunque las circunstancias no nos hayan facilitado mucho esta labor.”

-Juan José Millás

I have almost no memories of my father speaking to me while growing up. Or my siblings for that matter. One of the few good memories I have goes back to the days when we traveled around Mexico following rodeos. We could sit in his truck for hours going from city to city and he would not utter a single word. One time I took a little radio with me. It had a cassette and CD player integrated. I remember it was bright red and yellow. I really liked that. That day I casually bought a few bootleg CDs of a popular comedian of the time. I popped one in, and suddenly the 2 – 3hr drive was filled with our laughter. I don’t remember him ever laughing like that unless he was drunk. Every time I traveled with him after that, I always tried to take that little radio with me.

I have no memories of him in my early years. Except one. Him yelling at my mother as she sat on the edge of the bed crying. I must’ve seen that through a crack in the door. Then nothing until I was 6 and in every faint memory I have, he was drinking. He laughed when he drank. The problem always was when he was sober.

Whenever he walked into the house an oppressive silence would follow him. An intensity that would suffocate all life out of the room. We would sit at the table and eat in absolute silence, terrified at the possibility that he might explode. These scenarios were not an everyday thing, but they’re all I can remember. We only ever saw him 3-4 months out of the year, not consecutively. The rest of the time he lived and worked in the US. A typical migrant worker story.

The idea of ever wanting to be like him never crossed my mind. Do boys think of being like their fathers? I don’t recall ever wanting to be like anyone to be honest. I don’t really know why that is.

Years later, sometime around my 3rd year of sobriety I became the secretary of an AA meeting where I met a group of people who fundamentally changed the course of my life. By then all of them had moved on to different stages of their lives. I was there to do what they once did when I first looked for an answer to my drinking problem. I sat at the table where I met my first sponsor 8 years prior. I did all the things I saw them do for no other reason than, I did not know what to do with myself. I figured if I did exactly what I saw them do, my life would change. I was 29 years old at the time.

I used to draw a lot during the meeting. The secretary’s pages were filled with names of newcomers, people celebrating sobriety milestones and whatever symbols and creatures came to my mind. My drawings sometimes disturbed people. I always found that strange and funny, these things live in my head so I am used to them. One night however, I drew something that even I was afraid of. Usually I draw the same characters over and over again except this one, this one I drew only once and never did it again. I never even looked at it again until years later.

Recently, I was having a conversation with a friend about this drawing. I was explaining this was my way to pull out contents of the unconscious that had not yet been integrated. I mentioned that I usually make animations of these characters and in a way I exorcise them. But not this one. This one, I said, would freak me out if I saw it move. It’d become real.

I thought about this for a few days. Why would I say that? Why would this little drawing cause that reaction? After all these years, it could only mean that this thing still lived inside me.

I remember telling my therapist once that for the longest time I thought I needed glasses, or that there was something wrong with my vision. I mentioned that whenever I walked into a room or anywhere in public, people’s faces were blurry. I had a hard time recognizing people I had met before because of this. Somehow I believed that I just needed glasses but every time I went to get myself checked I was told that my vision was perfectly fine. Strange. Why then would people’s faces be blurry all the time? I never once thought about the contradiction of seeing everything in my vision perfectly in focus except people’s faces. My therapist explained what dissociation is. I had been living like this since childhood.

It makes perfect sense now why I never wanted to be like anyone. I never learned to see other people. I never wanted to be a part of a group or had a desire for friends. I never thought of being included or set aside or anything. Everything was a blur. My mind always looked past all the chatter and noise of regular interactions and hyper focused on the massive void hovering over everything. Everyone going about their business around me, like a fast paced streak, and all I could look at was the black sun that everyone else seemed to ignore.

Isolation in plain sight. And no one ever recognized it. Even me.

One of the last conversations I had with my therapist was about PTSD. She wanted me to go through some tests for diagnosis and even mentioned adult autism screening. I didn’t think it was important, I believed that I had already made it this far in life without diagnosis so why would I need them now? That seemed perfectly reasonable to me at the time. Then covid came and I never saw that therapist again. I never saw a professional again until recently. 7 years had gone by and I had left all of this completely unaddressed.

During one of my recent travels for AA service, I was committed to go to a conference in Hawaii. Something I had done many times before. I took a book with me called Netochka Nezvanova, and I would’ve never imagined that some of the scenes depicted in this story would unlock repressed memories, more like repressed feeling as the memory was to some degree conscious.

In the book, Netochka, a small girl living with her mother in abject poverty is constantly haunted by the erratic behavior of her alcoholic stepfather. There was a scene where Netochka is standing on the stairs leading up to their apartment, after having stolen money from her mother so that her stepfather could continue to drink. Netochka starts crying uncontrollably, standing on the stairs, trying to understand her father’s behavior. A complete and total loss of innocence.

Suddenly my mind replays one of my core memories. My father in one of his fits of uncontrollable rage, picks up a carton of milk and throws it at my mother from across the living room while she was in the kitchen cooking his dinner. Still, to this day, I remember clearly the sound she made as she collapsed on the floor. Then I saw him walk towards her and drag her by the hair. That is when I jumped on his back, tried to hit him and choke him, but I don’t recall having any effect on him. I was 12.

I had always remembered this. I always knew that this happened. But this time, after reading that scene so brilliantly described by Dostoevsky, I remembered the one part of the memory I had left unconscious. The look of my three siblings sitting on the stairs, with a terrified look on their face, crying, as I was hanging off my father’s back trying to stop him.
I never once thought about that part of the memory until that day, while sitting on a flight headed to Hawaii. A thought came to me: I never once had the chance to just sit on the stairs and cry whenever things like that happened. It all caught up with me that day, in the form of a panic attack, 30,000 feet in the air. These have become more and more common as I have gotten older and I no longer have access to the rage that used to muffle the panic.

This event, and many more like it from him, my uncles and even my aunts, imprinted an identity on me that I never knew I had been acting out until recently. The protector. The savior. The one who self-sacrifices to ensure that others live. Albeit an incredibly imperfect one at that. Paradoxically, I also adopted the identity of the enraged man, volatile and yet, completely silent. Isolated in his own muteness, as if my mouth had been sealed shut by sharp rocks. An extreme contradiction.

It was very strange, I thought. I had experienced worse sights at the rodeos where I worked as a child. Men beaten bloody. Fatal accidents before I could even understand the meaning of death. Getting snatched a few times and having to defend myself like a rabid dog or face disappearance. Violence on a large scale. Violation of space and autonomy.

But this one experience. This one memory, had more power over me than all the rest combined.

The rodeos taught me that the world was dangerous. My family taught me that nowhere is safe.

It was easy to resent my father for the way he acted. It’s what I did for a long time. That is, until I had to face the horribly painful task of having to become a man. A respectable man. A man of substance. It was and continues to be one of the most difficult things I have to work on.

Without wanting to, and without noticing, I became my father. The same oppressive silence that followed him, followed me. The same fits of uncontrollable anger, the shouting, the intense vibration that warns everyone around me: do not come close to me. Don’t look at me. Don’t talk to me. Don’t touch me.

With a highly dysregulated nervous system, the temper tantrums of children in my house started to feel like blades going through my ears and lacerating my brain. The family gatherings started to feel overwhelming and my body responded as if in danger. I started to notice a shift in the intensity of these feelings. My walls became thicker and thicker. No one could reach me. With age, with a worsening insomnia, with a debilitating depression, everything started to feel horribly close to a breaking point.

That’s when I understood, for the first time, that all these things that we considered personality traits passed from father to son aren’t traits at all. They are symptoms. Symptoms of an unseen, undiagnosed problem that silently killed all the men in my family.
My aunts have recently told me that when my father stays at their homes, he often wakes up in the middle of the night screaming. Maybe he has reached a breaking point too.

That creature I drew, I always thought it was me, and that terrified me. It is, in fact, an amalgamation of the entire history of trauma of all the men in my family. Some absorbed it more than others, and the ones who didn’t, got to watch the shock absorbers destroy themselves from a distance. Because we couldn’t let the walls come down for long enough to allow someone to tell us that we didn’t have to be stuck living like that. The men in my family were stuck acting out a sickness beyond their control. They never got the chance to understand what was happening to them.

I had to figure it out all on my own. Like everything else in life. And where there used to be bitterness at the path I was forced to take, there is now a dim glimmer of hope, a sense of victory even, at locating the correct term, the correct words, the correct symptoms, and by extension, the correct way to heal.

People often talk about forgiveness but rarely does anyone speak of understanding. There is no forgiveness without a foundation of understanding. And as I put the last pieces of the puzzle together I understand that to forgive the men in my family seems almost ridiculous. To think I can judge or forgive men who lived and died in circumstances far more traumatic than anything I experienced in life. In a level of poverty I will never know in my lifetime. Drowning in a deprivation and neglect I will never understand. “Forgive without condoning” as the online self-help merchants of bullshit like to say. The shallow, commercialized version of modern “healing” falls apart against the brutal, grinding reality of multi-generational poverty. There is no time for that when you are brought to the world only to survive. Never to live.

It was their lives, however they lived them, that have allowed me to be here, right now, figuring it all out. It has been my responsibility to understand why so I don’t continue to live like them and more importantly, so that I don’t continue to put that energy back into the world.

It is baffling to become a blank slate at 40 years old. You think that happens when you are younger and you continue to reinvent yourself according to what you want in life. You never expect, or at least I didn’t, that I’d have to continue to do that for the rest of my life. And yet, here I am, trying to figure out who I am, all over again.

But with one small advantage I did not have any other time I’ve had to rebuild myself. If I strip my father of the symptoms, I am left with the reality of a man that had an immense determination to get ahead in life despite the poverty he was born into. Who went to work during snowstorms for a family that he barely got to see. Who did the impossible to bring us 3,000 miles away from everything we knew and to a different world for a better life.

That kind of grit, that kind of persistence, and the resolve to beat the odds is really hard to come by in life. He must have been born with all of that. And if he has all those things then I must have them too, because I am his son.

What We Leave Behind

“A person does not belong to a place until they have someone dead under the ground,”

All my dead rest in the same place; the old little village my family comes from. Even now, we are still taking them back there. With every person that passes away, as the life in the village continues to change, the fear of losing my connection to the place increases. It’s hard to go back and see that so many of the people that made it home are no longer there.
I have always feared that I might never see that place again. For as long as I’ve lived in America, I’ve had an irrational fear of losing my place in that world. For years I’ve had recurring dreams where I am heading back to that place. Sometimes I am driving there, riding a bus up the dirt roads, or in the back of a taxi cab. Whatever the mode of transportation, subconsciously, I am always trying to get back.

I can’t help but to think of my grandmother often. I always hear her voice in my head, the way she used to say “My Rodrigo.” She didn’t have a very happy life. She was kidnapped at the age of 14 and forced to have the child of the man that took her. I have heard the stories about men that would come into their village to take girls. That was life in rural Mexico back then. In those days people lived in little huts made of sticks and mud. No justice to be served, no hope of a different life. Two years later her brother tracked her down, rescued her, and brought her back home along with the child she had. My dad’s oldest brother. The prospects for a young girl with a child were less than ideal during that time and place, so her family forced to marry my grandfather, an alcoholic man almost 30 years older than her.

In my early 30s I was able to travel home more often. My new “station in life” allowed me to spend more time reconnecting with my past. I traveled back to the village to spend some time with her, with my uncle who never left that place, and my dad who had decided to move back there. Everything had changed so much. The old houses made of mud bricks were gone, replaced with brick and cement. The rough dirt roads are now somewhat decent stone roads. Almost everyone now has running water and electricity. Everything had changed except my grandma, she was 99 years old and for some reason I don’t recall her being any other age.

When her health started deteriorating she suffered a fall that she was never able to recover from. I decided to go visit to help my dad with a few things but by the time I got there she was in and out of consciousness. One day she started feeling really bad. She was in horrible pain. We had to take her out of the village and to the nearest hospital. It’s only 20 miles away but driving on the dirt roads down the mountain and through the winding, one way road to the nearest city, the 48min drive turns into almost 2hr journey. The deteriorated infrastructure and the general condition of the hospital left me in shock. How does anyone get well around here? How can anyone do anything with such limited resources?

I started getting angry. I was angry at my father because he never told me how bad the situation was. I was angry that he never asked me for help. I would’ve sent money to take her to a real hospital in Mexico City. Anything. Why didn’t he say anything?! Then I had the thought, ‘I never asked him. I never called.’

It was a terrible realization, that I had been so disconnected from her life for such a long time due to my pursuit of success and what it all had demanded of me. An investment of time, money and emotions that left no room to worry about the people I had left behind. I realized I was living the same life my father lived for decades. A life that took him away from us, from his village, and everyone he knew. He had only come back to take care of his mother when there was no time left.

I thought to myself, that can’t happen to me.

I always knew, that I would have to work four times harder than someone born here if I wanted to get anywhere in life. Learning a new language, navigating a different culture, figuring out who I was supposed to be in a world that wasn’t made for me. I thought I had accepted all of this. I really did. I did not know that subconsciously I was paying a price. I was sacrificing parts of myself in order to adapt. I fought savagely to not let this strange world change me, but still, I had to cut pieces of myself off so I could not feel the pain of having to run through a field of thorns. I truly did not know what was happening.

When the reality of my life was too much for me to bear, I drank again. I had been sober for 3 years and I really thought I had it all figured out by then, but I was only 24. What could a 24 year old know about life? I was a child.

After 2 years I came back to sobriety and I realized that the responsibilities I had neglected had not disappeared-they had multiplied. All the men in my family were gone. Drank themselves to death, some got deported over their drunken recklessness, and my father took off to take care of my grandmother, a journey from which he never came back.

I was newly sober, again, staring at the massive responsibilities that had accumulated over a 2 year period. I was now the head of my family and I had nothing to offer. No direction to follow except one thing: I was supposed to take care of my mother. And very quickly that responsibility grew to care for an entire generation of my family.
14 years after that crippling realization, I am not entirely sure that I’ve done a good job or a bad job. All I know is that I have done the best I can with what I have. And in the process of doing this I have come closer to an understanding of the men in my family. Why they chose to seek oblivion in a bottle, to disconnect, or to simply leave.
At times, I felt the desperation to do the same.

“He who has a ‘why’ for which to live can bear with almost any ‘how’.” There were times when I wondered, what keeps me going? Why do I persist in getting up every time I fall, and continue on this road surrounded by a meaningless void. As I grow older I understand that this simple directive “take care of your mother” has been my only Northern Star signaling the path, and I see just what a powerful motivator this has been through the hardest times of my life. I’m not entirely sure how this even formulated at the core of my being but I know that it’s all I’ve ever had.

When the inevitable happened, I went back to Southern Mexico to help my dad with the funeral. By the time I got there my grandmother had already been buried, but more ceremonies followed. It started with nine days of prayer. All my grandma’s neighbors and other people from the village came over to the house, to help, to clean, to cook and to follow the prayers. They do not leave you to grieve by yourself.
At one point, towards the end of the nine days of prayer, my uncle and I had to take sacks of maize and distribute them across different houses in the village. On the last day, everyone comes to your house with meals made from that same corn for a final feast, and to leave you enough food to last you for a few weeks.

I walked up and down hills with 55lbs of corn on my back. My uncle, possibly 30 years older than me, walked around with his sack of corn like it was nothing. I was exhausted. Finally we reached the last house, and the dark clouds that were looming all week, finally released a much needed rain. It was almost perfect, the smell of the wet soil, the trees, the burning wood in the clay kitchens and the houses still made of mud bricks. I stood there, with my empty sack of corn, just looking at the mountains in the distance, taking in the scents of a forgotten life, in a forgotten place.
There were no cities, no highways, just the last remnants of a way of life that was slowly fading away.

At the end, when I was ready to come back to California, back to the routine of my corporate life. My father came up to me, right before I was going to get on the bus and said “I am sorry I was never able to be a normal father, and maybe that’s because my own father died when I was six, so I had to raise myself.” I always knew that my grandfather died before I was born, but I never knew he died when my father was only six years old. As he turned away I felt something rearrange inside of me. The last part of me that still wanted to hate everyone and everything started to disappear.

One of the biggest puzzles of my existence finally made sense.