Identity

So, let me make a little 12 week plan, starting, I guess, when I finally get around to buying a ticket to Colombia, unless at the last minute I decide to go somewhere else, but I have been excited about Colombia for a long time. When I studied Spanish in school for the first time with Miss Greene I am pretty sure the dialogue in the book went, “Me llamo Elena Ochoa. Soy de Bógota.”

At the time though I had no idea what a cool place Bógota was, or it seems to be, and I never learned anything anout what it might actually be like to go to Latin America from my Spanish classes. Later at a Yale Model UN event where I was very unsocial and I remember actually falling asleep in a bathroom stall and being embarrassed about it one of the fee conversations I remember having was with a girl from Colombia. Then I read something or other about the urban transformation of Medellín and I was fascinated, but Bógota, the Athens of the South, or the Athens of the South South, Athens of Latin America rather, because it is one of thr cultural and intellectual hearts of Latin America. It just sounds like a cool place to be but I am sure it eill be a lot bigger and different than I expect.

Big cities kind of intimidate me sometimes which might be part of the reason I haven’t traveled to Mexico City. It never occurs to me and it continually surprises me that Bógota is almost the same size in population as New Yor City and Mexico City. I always way underestimate the size of places I go, thinking I should be able to get around by foot, no problem. Bógota doesn’t have a subway, yet, but they started constructing one in 2020 and it should be ready by 2028. For now there is the TransMilenio, a rapid bus transit system (with really big stretch buses) with exclusive lanes so they can bypass a lot of the traffic. Fares cost $2,950 Colombian pesos which is about 70 cents in US dollars. One thing I do not understand is why they don’t do the equivalent of a stock split so that things wouldn’t cost so much in terms of numbers. I am sure even in Colombia there is nothing you can buy with one peso. Imagine if the US or Canada threw out dollars as our currency and started using pennies! They are thinking of not even using pennies anymore because they are too small to be useful (but I like pennies, I don’t want to see them go!) and yet in Colombia if you have 40 pesos that is not even quite one penny. Doing the exchange rate is strange because you have to divide a price in pesos by about 4000 to get the equivalent in USD. I wonder if something happened to the currency at some point to make the peso worth so little. If the numbers look high when you buy things in Indian rupees you ain’t seen nothing yet! Even if I only bring $3000 to Colombia that is still $12.5 million pesos!

Colombians seem really friendly and fun and by some accounts their Spanish is among the easiest to understand. I just can’t think if anywhere else to go and it is like a path of least resistance. Oh yeah, I was going to write about my goals for the next 12 weeks, starting ehen I actually book that flight. I want to start stretching. I want to practice Spanish and Japanese kanji and do as much with German as feels good but immersion in Spanish is the priority and it’s going to happen. Maybe I will take a language course or private lessons because I could really use some practice with speaking. I at least want to try some kind of Latin American dance because I think you can’t go to Colombia without dancing! (Like you can’t go to Japan without renting a karaoke booth but you’ve got to have friends with you or it’s no fun!)

I stopped writing to do the first session of a four week meditation course. The meditation was interesting. I am able to get into meditative spaces more easily when I do it with others (especially when the teacher greets you by name). I spend a lot of time sort of meditating lying down and I think I fool myself into thinking I am more aware than I am. I met with a really supportive person and also someone named Lily who of course was inevitably the cutest person in the room. I know we are not supposed to be doing this in meditation courses. I just happened to notice that my hypothesis that people named Lily are at the very least cuter than average most of the time holds. I think my experience more than bears that out but anyway it was just nice to meet a Lily and at the same time to meet with someone who said she was supportive of me. Lily. What even is it about that name?

During the meditation today the thought occurred to me and wouldn’t let go: what if the Buddha had, at some point in his teaching, been captured and suffered prolongued torture Would he still stand by the dhamma? Would he still be himself in any waynat all? But what is self, anyway? This is so confusing.

It was right after an argument with my mother about who knows what. Things have been pretty good but the moment there is a bit of tension it is like all she wants to do is criticise me and blame me. Then after the meditation session my host started yelling at me, that if I don’t get a job by the middle of December he has decided he wants me to leave. I was worried it was something I did; well, it’s that he thinks I have no motivation and that am doing nothing to put my life together. He thinks I lie around all day and stay up all night and do nothing, and a lot of the times, the first part is true. It’s just that he said it in anger which was confusing because he can tell me what he needs from me without either of is getting angry about it. I am just sensitive to yelling though; he very quickly said he didn’t want to talk about it anymore, and that whatever I do is up to me, he just didn’t want to get involved in it anymore. I kind of would have preferred it that way from the beginning. He said he was just up all night upset about how I have accomplished nothing in terms of getting a job, which was his goal for me, not mine; and he just doesn’t understand the things that get in the way and would probably get in my way of doing that even if I tried my hardest. I am not like everybody else, but he says it is absurd I haven’t found something yet. He didn’t want to argue about it anymore after he said his bit and if course neither did I. Right after this he showed me parts of a nature show with spy robots taking videos of whales and hermit crabs and octopuses. Then he showed me how to use the TV.

I get scared when someone yells that their anger is going to affect all interactions from that point on but it was comforting how he treated me kindly after that. I don’t know why he yelled, but he basically just made his point of view known and said that was the last time he was going to talk to me about it. From that point on it is up to me and he doesn’t want to feel responsible for pulling me through this. I said I felt bad if I made him feel like he had to take responsibility for me and I think that is when his tone got gentler. So if I don’t get a job by the 15th of December, he wants me to leave; if I do get a job, he will give me more time to build a nest egg from here. I am so sensitive after what already happened today and I just don’t get why he needed to get upset. He could have just had a conversation with me about his boundaries and said he’d like me to find a way to leave by the middle of December but if I get a job he’ll give me more time. That is more than fair. But I don’t think the job thing is going to work for me unless one of the data entry positions I just applied to pans out, and that is pretty much all I can see myself interested in as far as a job goes. Every single job posting jo matter what it is looks boring to me and it eould probably be super stressful. Then there are people who would tell me to just ‘grow up’, deal with it, or whatever, and I wish I had someone to hold me and to cry into, because if I could just express mysel right a good friend would be so understanding of my differences and unique strengths and that I can’t do life like ai am expected to do it by the world. A good friend would understand without judging the pain it causes me when I get yelled at because it is absurd that I haven’t gotten a job. They say just apply to a million jobs and deal with the rejections, just deal with the stress of interviewing when your heart isn’t in it, just deal with giving away your time so it is no longer your own at a time when you need your time and space to find and save yourself more than ever… but I need to work within the confines of what my nervous system is capable of doing while keeping myself sane. Someone putting me into a mold and telling me, you have to do it this way or that way, is stressful, ajd if I force myself to oblige… or have no other way… I can’t even say how much pressure I have been under. I was so close to having no options at all and not even making it, and ince I lost myself, and got trapped in stressful and traumatizing situations like that shelter with no recourse… I don’t know what would happen to me, but I would never again get to be myself, ir to shine, I would just be broken.

Whether I appear fully capable and someone worth loving or like a loser who has no prospects of anything at all, whether I succeed or tumble all the way down the hill to the bottom, depends so much on such tiny, tiny perameters. Change one tiny thing, like maybe my wallet gets stolen
at the shelter before someone had a chance to offer me safety, and likely it would have been all over for me. I might have never had anchance ever again to show others what kind of person I am capable of being; I would have been nothing but a mess without any space inside me to feel anything but resentment and pain. Forever. Because at a certain point you have nothing at all inside or out that will let you turn it around.

I know full well that is not a person worth anybody’s time to get to know. But I get a little break and all of a sudden opportunities open up to me, I can finally do the simple things that neurotypical and not so highly sensitive folks take for granted: I can feel like my neevous system isn’t being knocked around in a boxing match, I can start to unveil parts of who I am. If I had caught a bad break or even just if no one had helped me out of that shelter, my nervous system would have gotten shot to hell even more than it was, and isolated from anyone who wunderstands me and my story and why things are the way they are for me, isolated from anyone who cares or understands what is happening to me, there is no way I would have survived in any way at all. My body might have survived, for a while, but with no one around to be able to meet my needs and the world being rough as hell and nobody getting anything about my trauma or neurodivergence, what hellish being would I have become!

Everything I take to be my identity, everything I take as essential to who I am that I want to share with others intimately, all of those parts of me would have been dead. The old me would be dead and the new me, well, I might have been nothing more than a psychiatric case, someone with no capacity to express myself and communicate effectively at all. And they would all say, even those I knew in my previous life, oh my, yep, that is the way I really am: disturbed, pathological, certainly not capable of anything at all. And yet such a tiny change in fortune, like the break I was given when I got a chance to stay here, and all of a sudden there is a chance for all that to change, a chance to actually be someone with a heart that matters, not just a pitiful case of a human gone wrong. It is terrifying that these are both potentialities in me: to be actualized (at least a little?) and to just be left as food for the wolves. Either way, people who see me will think the way they are seeing me is accurate, that what they are seeing is who I really am. But it’s all conditional. A slight change in conditions and in the most freaking real way imaginable suddenly I become a person with gifts and talents and a whole lot of love to give; but if I catch a bad break, at a time when I have almost mo pathways to escape the alienation of the world, what am I? Inhuman. Or whether I am human or not is irrelevant because I’d likely either be dead or institutionalized.

My point is, there can be a time in your life when things can go either way, and if I can’t deal with the sudden loss of everything by life was before, and my nervous system is shot and everyone wants me to do things I can’t do and labels me negatively when I can’t do them, and I can’t take the pressure but I can’t set boundaries because I am just too marginalized and out of breathing room, out of ways to make decisions that might improve my life, well… in one possible world I am that decrepit person who everyone just pushes around and the people who knew me will be like, look what they amounted to, and it would all be seen as my fault. In another possible world I get a break and have a chance to be seen in a better light because I have a chance to gain some autonomy over my life again. That, too, would be seen as my own doing, but which identity survives, at certain crucial crossroads in life, might be just a matter of luck. You can roll the dice; maybe I turn out to be something special, or maybe I turn out to be a Gollum like creature without a soul (and not nearly so cute) but either way it is not my doing, at that point, it is the winds of fate.

Of course when I get my power back there is a lot more that might be in control but there is a certain moment when things could go either way and you don’t know which identity will survive and it’s not in your hands but everyone treats you like it is, and no one gets how with changes in conditions as slight as the flap of a butterfly’s wing, you, who are nothing, could have actually been somebody. What is destiny? What is identity?

From this angle it all feels like a matter of luck.

I think I am on the other side of that moment, and I still have things to do in my life, but it is so scary to have even been there at all.