For Safety & Sanity’s sake

In times of war, we hide and protect our weak.

Every woman, child, sick, and elderly person is locked away until the sun may shine once more.

A flower lie in wake of war,

It is wrapped away from harm’s way

Behind a wall of stone and distance

It teeters between withering away and prospering,

So isolated from reality, it remains

Infinitely confused and unsure of its fate and future

But still it grows, blossoms, and beams with hope, love, and naivete.

It galvanizes a nation and a cause’s every being.

“As long as you bloom, I can and shall fight for your safety and prosperity”

But even the strongest, most sound, most defined, and most solidified barriers cannot keep pain from oozing in.

Nothing is truly impenetrable

It’s just a shame I had to learn that the hard way.

But mistakes once made, shall not go unlearned.

 

As soldiers do in war, I give your my Achilles’s heel.

Boxed away and entrusted to you, my heart shall lie in a bed of ivory and gold

to admire and access

but safe from me and from attack.

I have at last learned:

I fall too easily, too sincerely, and too quickly.

I trust too many and welcome in all the wrong people.

I devote my life to those I love, (and while I love that about myself),

I recognize that it has left gaping holes that no amount of love can fill.

I desire and deserve more than that, so until that time comes,

until I meet someone worthy of all my love to give,

I trust you alone to protect and care for my heart.

Hold it dear, feed it daily, and help me help myself.

Some wild things are better kept in reins.

❤ life as an agoraphobe

Art work by Tyra Wm (https://tyrawm.carbonmade.com/)

 

Ni aqui ni alla

Ni aqui ni alla:

Me ves como una y otra

pero nunca como yo.

Piensas que podras entender me,

pero nunca tratas.

Hablas y hablas oras y oras “conmigo”

pero nunca podras entenderme a mi fondo.

Try and try as you may,

My very existence confounds you.

I baffle you.

And that bothers and unnerves you to your core.

Que yo–

Una extraña, marciana, pobre sucia, y ingrata

podra levantarse y intimidarte.

Que yo “chiquita” “jovencita”, y “bonita”,

Me atrevo a retarTE

“Como me atrebo! “ me dicen cuando

Tu eres

Gigante, poderoso, y “sagrado”

But my days of comforting and consoling your ego

Are done.

Terminados, finito.

No debere llorar ni darte tiempo

pero me tengo que hacer

MUY CLARA:

No somos amigos, ni comadres, ni “best friends”.

If I make you uncomfortable,

Whether because of my race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, mental illnesses, or because of my personality,

Salve me y at ti el tiempo y déjame ir.

I am not your manic pixie doll,

nor your “woke” best friend,

nor your “representative PoC”.

Be honest and recognize we’ve both outgrown each other

Y reconoce que es mejor asi.

Dear my hurt,

You might not understand or fully be able to unpack everything, but please know that you are of utmost important to me, (pain). You get me to move and not move, you look out for me, and you scare me. As a result, you have left a lasting impact on me that I’m still experiencing. I see the epigenetic legacy of pain and violence that liter my family’s past and seep into my own life, and I work to unpack, heal, and unlearn those patterns. I recognize that this is a work in process that requires a lot of time, effort, and work, but I also refuse to let it “be okay” because violence should never be okay. Yes, I’ve been hurt and my ancestors and friends have been hurt, but reciprocating pain and violence is not challenging or changing anything. Just because someone else hurts you or acts violently towards you does not justify you to enact violence and cause them pain. If someone punches you does not give you the right and justification to punch them right back. It’s not an issue of being moral, it’s a fundamental understanding, empathy, and love for a fellow beings life and quality of life.

Recently, I’ve come to realized how troubling violence is for me. I strive not to enact it on others or myself, but two recent events have made me realize I still need to grow in this aspect a lot. After being with the someone for some time now, I’ve recently realized how normalized violence is in our relationship when they hit me a little harder than usual, and they didn’t apologize immediately. The hit was not terribly painful, but it’s blow left a deep sense of hurt at my core.They tried to reason that I was going to hurt them or that I had in the past, and I found myself looking more and more like my parents, my grand father who beat my grandmother, and the countless others in my life and in the lives of my loved ones that have accepted and internalized violence. Have I truly taken up my oppressors’ tools to continue the cycle? Fundamentally, the answer is yes, and that reality greatly disturbs me.

The truth is that I’ve internalized my own pain, so much so, that I’m replicating my oppressors’ cycle of violence. I normalize in how my friends and I “drag” each other around, in how I play fight with my boo thang of the moment, in how I say something hurtful without thinking it through, and in how I am violent towards myself. And while all these have varying degrees of severity and impact, none of them are all that great and are definitely not okay. All of these acts normalize pain and undermine the shared life essence of each one of us. It decenters and corrupts the essence of life by commodifying and devaluing life itself. It’s okay if your best friend says mean things to you because they still love you, it’s okay that your partner digs their nails into your skin sometimes because they don’t mean to hurt you only “play”, it’s okay if you harm yourself because you aren’t dying or trying to kill yourself. None of these are okay, and in no way is violence ever okay. So, I’m going to stop play fighting, verbally dragging friends, and saying harmful things without thinking of their true impact. I am done inviting others to hurt me and done hurting others because this is still participation in a cycle of violence. I refuse to let my trauma and legacy of pain harden me, therefore, I will continue to love and give myself fully to those I love and care for. It may be hard to do so since violence is so second nature to me now, but putting in that extra effort and strain to do so is worth destroying and unlearning a harmful cycle of behavior. I strive to celebrate and center the life that flows through me, my family, my friends, and my fellow beings. Here’s a short poem that further defines and celebrates the Mayan’s conceptions of the significance of life (essence), community, and humanity as a whole.

IN LAK’ECH

Tú eres mi otro yo.

You are my other me.

Si te hago daño a ti,

If I do harm to you,

Me hago daño a mi mismo.

I do harm to myself.

Si te amo y respeto,

If I love and respect you,

Me amo y respeto yo.

I love and respect myself.

(“Pensamiento Serpentino”, Luis Alvarez)

Thank you for reading,

❤ life as an agoraphobe

A few words from a pisces lover

Dear world and self,

As both a Pisces and as a poly-amorous person, love and affection can easily be cluttered for me. Fundamentally, I have a love for all people and humanity as a whole. I enjoy getting to know people, appreciating people from a distance, showing affection to those I am most comfortable with, but more than anything else I love to be bare and genuine with those I chose to keep near. This includes friends, family, and sometimes lovers. But as such an amorous person that says “I love you” to their closest friends, cuddles with their best friends, and flirts a little with everyone without totally meaning to, it’s easy for me to blur that line between friend and more.

There’s truly more than enough room in my heart for all of humanity. I can and do love you all, but it’s not fair to you or myself to love everyone equally.I have neither the time nor all that much energy to dedicate myself evenly (or maybe I do…I’ll get back to y’all after further research), but I also cannot deny my love for more than one person at each time. I am a lover of people, and though they consistently disappoint and hurt me, I still continue to love other beings. I continue to look for the good in people and strive to accept and understand their own inner workings that need growth and extra care. I accept and strive to always see beings as ever changing, inconsistent, contradictory, and complex. As a psychology major, that’s what is most interesting and exciting about people is getting to understand those workings and find common living essence. But I’m going to stop myself before I get all new-agey on you and get to what this is really about.

See the problem isn’t loving multiple people, the problem is what do I want to do about each relationship, to what degree am I actually feeling deep emotional bond to someone, and how do I respect and prioritize others’ feelings, desires, and boundaries as well as my own. To establish this, I tend to be pretty straight forward and up front about when I have feelings for someone and expect the same degree of bluntness and forwardness from others. I set up schedules, dates, movie nights, plans, and times to spend and dedicate to the people in my life, and try desperately to reach all of them and make everyone feel special and important. It’s always a struggle to stretch myself and still take care of myself too, and it’s a learning process. I’ve learned to draw back and give myself time for myself from time to time too and to lock up parts of myself for other times. But I always push for open communication. And even when I may not always know what intensity or certainty I may have feelings for a person yet, I let them know when it’s significant enough that we should address or talk about it. Or so I’ve always done in the past, but now I find myself at a strange crossroads.

While feelings for someone begin to surface and have for some time now, I am weary of them because of the dynamic at risk and because of my amorous nature. You’re a vital pillar in my support network, and I love you very much. It’s just I’m not so sure how much I love you anymore. You’ve seen me through thick and thin, through low and high, through mess and disaster. You know me better than I know myself, and you love me enough to tell me what I don’t want to hear when I need to hear it. And I trust no one else as much as I trust you and one other. There’s no part of me you haven’t seen, and chose to love. So it’s why this is so hard to accept and grapple with. What was pure and clearly reciprocal light affection is now turning deeper, darker, more sincere and more vulnerable as our friendship hits its third year. I’ve gone from adoring you in the spotlight to wanting to be absorbed by your every being. Although we fight and consistently disagree, we do love each other very dearly, and I’m beginning to fear I love you more than we may both be comfortable with. So before I run with this and dive into the depths of my love, I’m going to ask you, what are we doing? And is it just me or are we maybe pushing the edge of our friendship? Whatever you say, I can comply with. I more or less easily fall in and out of love, so I can survive whatever you say plus I love you too much too let our friendship die this way. It’s still early enough that I can retreat from my feelings and establish boundaries. So…let me know where you are at.

Your love-eager boo,

Update:I sent this to my friend knowing very well that she did not reciprocate these feelings,and we just laughed and said we are good.Thank you for the writing exercise,and I’m happy we can be so open and honest with each other.Here’s to our friendship may it reign true for years to come. 

❤ life as an agoraphobe

Non binary, and what it means to me

Let me start by saying this is still very much a conversation and area of exploration for myself (and it really ought to be open and fluid), but I’ve been misgendered and subtly judged every time I ask people to use They, them, theirs pronouns for me that I’m writing this article to educate and make myself clear once and for all. ❤

First off, “Genderqueer (GQ) or non-binary or gender-expansive, is a catch-all category for gender identities that are not exclusively masculine or feminine‍—‌identities which are thus outside of the gender binary and cisnormativity. Genderqueer people may identify as one or more of the following:

• having an overlap of, or indefinite lines between, gender identity;
• having two or more genders (being bigender, trigender, or pangender);
• having no gender (being agender, nongendered, genderless, genderfree or neutrois);
• moving between genders or having a fluctuating gender identity (genderfluid); or
• being third gender or other-gendered, a category which includes those who do not place a name to their gender.”

Thanks Wikipedia for that short and succinct way of saying gender identity is on a spectrum! So then the question remains, what is non-binary to me? To answer this question, I think back to my early childhood memories of wanting to be a boy because I noticed I liked girls and thought, “Normal girls like boys, and normal boys like girls. So, to be normal, I need to be a boy”. Later, I realized that wouldn’t fix things for me because gender and sexual orientation were two different things, and I also realized I liked all people regardless of their gender. Plus, I liked wearing skirts and dresses as much as I loved wearing boyish shorts and t-shirts so I stopped thinking about gender and ignored it as best I could. But everything from the color your toys, clothes, rooms, bedding to your preference for sports over dance or the choice of friends you made seemed to suggest otherwise. I routinely remember being force fed gender norms and expectations that never fit. One of my sisters claims I was always trying to be different from everyone else, but it wasn’t that I was trying. I just was different, and I refused to hide it.

But it wasn’t until I got to college that I gained words and bits of understanding to remedy my Otherness. Though I’d explored and came to understand my sexual orientation early on, trying to define my gender has always been difficult and a sore subject. I don’t want to be angry and hold resentment for societal pressures, misinformation, and genuinely well intended people because this can be a lot for other people to grapple with. So, I’m going to spell it out for you: I do present myself in a very feminine manner (my wardrobe consists of dresses, skirts, and two pairs of pants plus occasional lipstick), but I neither identify as woman or man. I draw from both genders but do not view myself as half this or half that or part either. I feel I’m more outside that dichotomy. I do not wish to transition to another gender or to hugely alter my wardrobe, my style, or myself (because that’s effort, money, and time I don’t have tbh). But I seek to be defined by who I am and not for who I may seem to be. So please use They, them, theirs, and don’t be a jerk! If I make you uncomfortable because I’m not cisnormative, then guess what boo boo you got some internalized shit you probably have to deal with too.

If you wanna read more, check out wikipedia (EDUCATE YOURSELF!!!!!), google stuff, and ask around, and I’ve included a list of links to explore. So knock yourself out! And as always if you have any questions or comments please do not hesitate. Also I’m doing a report for my class that traces back non-binary identities in Mexico and larger Latin American history so if that’s of interest to you or you have links or people I should check out please do share!!!!!

More links!!!!

https://www.bustle.com/articles/109255-what-does-agender-mean-6-things-to-know-about-people-with-non-binary-identities

http://everydayfeminism.com/2014/12/myths-non-binary-people/

http://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/sex/news/a43461/what-is-non-binary-gender/

https://munchies.vice.com/en/articles/cooking-with-muxes-mexicos-third-gender

http://hrc-assets.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com//files/assets/resources/Gender-expansive-youth-report-final.pdf

http://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/beyond-the-binary-what-does-it-mean-to-be-genderfluid-1.2418434

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1550428X.2011.623982?journalCode=wgfs20

Thanks for reading lovelies!!!!

❤ life as an agoraphobe

 

 

Reflection of my first week back

I’ve been asked countless times by many close and not so close peers, administrators, professors, and mental health professionals how being back at my institution has been like. And I’m honestly at a complete lost of words to describe it. I’m neither ecstatic nor bummed out to be back, I just feel like it’s A LOT. Not only was it a lot to pack, mentally prepare to return, travel to, and attend classes surrounded by some all too familiar triggering scenarios, situations, and people, but it’s just a lot to comprehend and wrap my head around being back, what I had to do in order to be back, what shaky unset terms I’m allowed back, an d whether or not I fully understood what it meant to come back in the first place. A part of me feels dazed and confused as if I might wake up one moment to realize it was all an elaborate alternative reality. I’m not sure if that reality is better or worse, is it a dream or a nightmare? But for better or worse, hopefully better terms, we’re here. Lucero and I are back, and we’re set to face a long year of dealing and processing a lot.

I’d like to take this time to express my gratitude to the numerous people who continuously supported and guided me and Lucero in our very turbulent journey. I thank my parents and siblings who teased and annoyed the heck out of me as a form of affection, my close friends who enable and encourage me to blossom, my previous psychologist who guided me in starting to build my foundations and inner fortitude, my old and new psychiatrist who refilled my meds (meds are good things to have), the wonderful DXE family who reminded me that activists are family that you choose, and the three beautiful, caring, affectionate, and encouraging families I nannied for during the summer who reminded me of the importance of being soft, loving wholeheartedly, and opening one’s self to others. While I’m sure there’s many more people I need to thank for their absolutely vital support they offered us, I won’t drag on this post for much longer since I assume you and I both have lives to get back to….maybe.

Above all else, thank you to all my readers and casual browsers for taking the time to read a slice of my life. Every one of you has touched my cold stone heart, and I hope I will be better for your involvement in my life.

❤ life as an agoraphobe

Writing as a way of life

​As a writer, writing is fundamental to my everything. It’s how I process, learn, experience, and understand my own life. What’s more, writing is my way of life. 

I can recall learning to write my last name the first time in kindergarten. My last name was too long and very overwhelmingly heavy on my shoulders, but I wanted to learn how to write it because to me writing was everything. To write something is to own it, to learn it, and to know it. I can even remember writing stories and telenovelas in gibberish before I could legibly write in English. It was my way of leaving something for the world but also my way of figuring out what my life would be. To put it briefly, my history with writing is extensive and while I never write as much as I want to, it is part of me. It’s always allowed me to define myself and redefine what my body and mind has been through.

Nonetheless,  there are things I find harder to write about. There are things I in fact do not and cannot write about, at least not fully yet. But yet, me being me, I push and tug and claw away at those corners of my psyche until the day all parts of myself might see the light.

One day I shall be one with the sun.

❤ life as an agoraphobe

The Problem starts and ends with our view of Blackness

*Trigger warnings: systemic oppression, recent deaths, anti-blackness, hate, bloodshed, and the issue of safety****

Honestly I’m so done. I’ve been teetering this week between falling apart and having the time of my life, and the most recent tragedies of the week have me over the edge. I understand people are all up and arms on all sides of the issue, but fundamentally, this systemic oppression is bullshit. And it needs to stop. Too many lives have been taken due to these mass biases and unwarranted hate of black lives, queer, and people of color. Yes, not all law enforcement and members of our judicial system are bias, hateful, and anti-black (I know some perhaps many aren’t!), but that’s not the issue! This is entirely not about them–the issue is that too many lives have been unjustly taken and will continue to be taken if something doesn’t change radically. The problem is our system is broken, and many lives hang in the desperate balance between life and death because of it. We cannot point at any one party and blame them for the mess that is our nation and our world right now. It’s a systematic, pervasive, subtly instilled message that is put into our minds, the way we navigate and see the world, and in our hearts. And of course change won’t happen overnight, but if don’t begin to see the connections and over-arching problem sooner rather than later, nothing will ever change.

I will still wake every morning with the fear and understanding that my black friends, loved ones, neighbors, strangers, and fellow beings are in perpetual danger and consistently misunderstood.

I will continue to fear that hate (either from others or our own internalized forms of it) might and probably will be the end of me and most my friends with identity markers that continue to not be understood or fully accepted.

And a part of me will continue to weep for mankind because this can’t be it.

But again, none of this is about me, it’s about the amount of blood on our nation’s hands. It’s about a system we’ve failed to demand more from, and from a legacy of bloodshed, pain, and misunderstanding we’ve inherited from those before us.

Please be careful, extra pre-cautious and extra loving towards yourselves in these trying times friends,

May the lives we lost and will inevitably continue to lose not die in vain.

May change persevere

#Blacklivesmatter, #combatanti-blackness, #lovenothate, #systematicchange

Short update as of 07/06

Hello world/my fellow readers/anyone who stumbles across this post,

I haven’t posted in some time, and, for the most part, it’s because I’ve been busy working, doing impulsive fun activities (skydiving happened and pictures will eventually be up I promise), dating (ugh the agony sometimes lol), enjoying turning my body into a lethal weapon (thank you krav maga!!!), and being lazy the other times. In short, life is good. I have almost no complaints aside from the usual frustrations and disappointments with problematic systems in place. However that doesn’t mean my symptoms subside. I am still an agoraphobe who fights their fear of the outside world on a daily basis, a PTSD patient who fears the next moment I might freeze and lose control over my life, and a depression patient who continues to have subtle but powerful suicidal ideation and urges to cut. It’s a struggle I live with, and might always have, and that’s okay. I am not broken. I am not meant to be fixed, and I can and will survive and enjoy whatever life I make for myself. I am me, and that’s enough.

Hope to have some more for y’all to read later this week,

❤ life as an agoraphobe

Writing updates

With everything that has been going on in my life (nannying incredibly emotionally proud children, pride week looming in the background, Orlando events still pulling on my heart strings, the atrocities of Oaxaca, and with family intolerance and frustrations at full blast), I find myself overwhelmed with thoughts and unformed feelings. And when I am in such a state, I do what I do best and write for clarity, strength, and understanding. Welcome two new installations to the story of my body and likely more pieces to come as I further process my experiences.

Art courtesy of my lovely niece who is fascinated by my tattoo