if i take one more deep breath, i'll hyperventilate
on surviving 2025, one absurd catastrophe at a time
tl;dr: this year tried to kill me in slow, stupid, expensive ways. iโm still here. barely. but still here. and iโm finally doing something about it.
my therapist tells me to meditate.
i sigh deeply. okay, then.
this is my third week with her, which means iโve known her for approximately twenty-one days longer than i knew my previous therapist was planning to retire and move out of state. that surprisingly tantalizing little detail came up in our last session and it shook me. this was back in april 2025. โby the way,โ she said, casual as someone mentioning the weather, โthis is our final appointment.โ eight months without a therapist it was, then. cool. cool cool cool.
i have a new one now. she specializes in CBT, which sounds like something youโd find from urban dictionary as some sort of sex position, but it actually stands for cognitive behavioral therapy. sheโs been walking me through techniques to manage the anxiety and depression that have been chewing through me like termites sinceโฆ oh, letโs say february, plus the withdrawal symptoms from quitting nicotine after mass chain-vaping geek bars like my lungs had personally wronged me in a past life.
โtry meditating in the morning,โ she says. โeven just five minutes. focus on your breath.โ
fine! fine. iโll try it. iโm a good student, and i want to win at therapy.
so monday morning i sit on my bed in my bleak, dingy apartment with the shit-brown carpet that my roommate has spent years soiling despite my many, many attempts at intervention. i close my eyes. i breathe in, and i breathe out.
i try to be present, to notice what iโm feeling, to let the thoughts pass like clouds, the way the apps and the podcasts and the wellness influencers promise they will if you just breathe deeply enough, if you just center yourself enough, if you just purchase enough monthly subscriptions to guided meditation services.
and you know what i find, underneath all the numbness iโve been marinating in for the better part of a year?
rage.
not clouds. a fucking hurricane. a category five emotional disaster spinning in my chest with tornado arms. the meditation didnโt create it. the meditation just cleared away enough fog for me to finally see what had been churning there all along.
i tell her about it in our next session and she celebrates the fact that i did the meditation at all. it feels a little like being praised for showing up to a house fire with a glass of water, but.. okay, iโll take the win.
โwait,โ i say, because something is dawning on me that i donโt fully understand yet. โitโs anger! itโs rage. and itโs massive, like, a lot. thatโs not good, is it? i feel it in my chest, in my stomach, when i tremble.โ
she smiles the way therapists smile when youโve accidentally stumbled onto something important. โyour acknowledgment of it and your embrace of it is good. having the emotion is not bad. itโs what you do with it.โ
i blink at her. wait. is this a fucking breakthrough? am i winning at therapy? i feel a small dopamine hit, the same one i get when i land a joke at a dinner party or make a stranger on the internet laugh. comedy has always been my survival mechanism, and right now i am barely surviving, so i decide to push my luck.
โyou know,โ i say, leaning into the bit, โsometimes it feels like if i take one more deep breath, iโll hyperventilate.โ
she laughs. actually laughs.
i have made my therapist laugh, and this is genuinely the highlight of my week, possibly my month, maybe even my year, which tells you everything you need to know about how this year has been going. but let me tell you something, and this is so fucking important: that line wasnโt entirely a joke.
because 2025 has been one long exercise in being told to breathe, to stay positive, to practice self-care, to trust the process, to manifest abundance, to regulate my nervous system while the entire house burns down around me and everyone else just keeps insisting the smoke is probably from a scented candle.
at some point, the breathing starts to feel like a con too.
like everything else.
how things are
and i do mean everything else, because if thereโs one thing this year has clarified for me with brutal, unrelenting precision, itโs that we are living in an era of cons so elaborate and so normalized that weโve stopped recognizing them as cons at all. we just call them โhow things areโ and keep scrolling. fabulous.
the trump administration is enacting project 2025 policy by policy, methodically, like a nightmare to-do list being checked off by someone who enjoys their work. DOGE has allegedly exposed our data to god knows who while slashing and dicing the entrails of government until agencies that actually did good in the world just donโt exist anymore. USAID, gone. PEPFAR, gone. and for those who donโt know, PEPFAR was the presidentโs emergency plan for AIDS relief, a program that saved millions of lives across the globe, and it was, i say this with complete sincerity, literally the one thing george w. bush did right. his entire presidency, the one good fucking thing, and now itโs gone too.
meanwhile, near hillcrest, san diegoโs queer neighborhood, my neighborhood, the place i chose to build a life because i thought it would be safe, people are driving around shooting pellets at folks waiting in line outside gay bars. a trans woman was injured.
this happened a couple years ago too, and someone i know got hit in the eye, which resulted in them losing their job and their income and their home for a while, and they only just recovered this year with a lot of help from the community. they caught those guys back then. there was fanfare. press conferences. everyone congratulated themselves and each other and then went home. and now itโs happening again. the swastikas spray-painted on the walls of churches, this time.
back in 2023, i helped clean some of that graffiti, scrubbing hate off walls at a cocktail and cleanup event organized by benny cartwright and rick cervantes through rickโs @hillcrestsandiego instagram account. they caught those people too. fines were issued, and we even got funding to keep the neighborhood clean out of it. more fanfare.
and now here we are again, because hate doesnโt stay gone just because you caught a few people and held a press conference about it. hate is emboldened right now. you can feel it in the air, sharp and electric, like the moment before a storm that everyone pretends isnโt coming.
and while all of this is happening, while the political fabric of the country unravels and my neighborhood becomes a target again, everything also costs more, becauseโฆ of course it does. because why would anything be simple or singular when it could be compounding and relentless instead? groceries are up. eggs are up. my vegan food and protein shakes are all up, even fucking vegetables. i paid eight dollars for a cortado in hillcrest last week. eight dollars! for espresso and a splash of oat milk, in a neighborhood where people are literally getting shot at with pellets! the audacity of that transaction still haunts me. the ordacity!
college remains overpriced , while facing steep losses in enrollment. and the biden student loan debt relief was killed by the supremes (the court, not diana) and all the things biden did to make new, less draconian payment plans went out with trump this week.
wages remain stagnant while CEOs post record earnings. AI is ruining everything, while simultaneously making me feel dumber because i keep falling for AI-generated video slop and misinformation on social media. i thought i had decent media literacy, i really did. i prided myself on it, and yet tiktok has been fooling me on a weekly basis, feeding me rage bait to make me angry, hope bait to make me feel inadequate, outright lies dressed up as citizen journalism. and thatโs where most of my following is, which makes the whole thing feel even more absurd. iโm building an audience on a platform thatโs actively rotting my brain and making me question reality.
social media in general has become this machine designed to make us consume and consume until weโre hollowed out, and iโve been watching myself get hollowed out all year. iโve been making room for the slop onslaught. iโve been doom-scrolling until 2am and wondering why i feel empty and anxious in the morning. everything is a subscription now. everything is a service. everything is designed to extract from you until thereโs nothing left, and then to extract a little more, and then to charge you a monthly fee for the privilege.
case in point, and i promise you i am not making this up: my landlord now forces me to pay fifty dollars a month for a subscription to a service called piรฑata.
piรฑata.
what does piรฑata do? well, it reports my rent payments to the credit bureaus, which sounds helpful until you remember that paying rent should just automatically build credit but doesnโt because the system is designed to keep poor people poor. it also gives me โpiรฑata points.โ my half of a bleak, dingy, dark, shit-brown carpet, roommate-dominated 2-bedroom 1-bath in university heights is $1,450 a month. for that princely sum, i earn 60 piรฑata points every month.
and what can i do with these points? well, currently piรฑata is running a contest where you can spend your accumulated points on entries to win a free month of rent. like a lottery. like a game show. like late-stage capitalism dressed in a party hat, handing out confetti while picking your pockets. i spent 520 points on entries this week. letโs see if iโm one of the lucky ones.
the service is also called piรฑata, which feels fitting, because it makes me want to give my landlord the piรฑata treatment.
this is the backdrop. my baseline anxiety and depression is already so fucked. and this is the water weโre all swimming in, whether we acknowledge it or not.
a world of escalating cons, normalized extractions, and the constant low hum of dread that weโve all agreed to call โthe economyโ or โpoliticsโ or โjust how things are now.โ and maybe some of you are handling it fine. good for you. maybe some of you have figured out how to breathe through it, how to meditate your way to acceptance, how to center yourselves amidst the chaos.
i have notโฆ and in february, the chaos got personal.
february
in february of this year, my credit got hit with a collections notice for almost eleven thousand dollars.
it was back rent from an apartment i lived in two years ago with a woman named brianna kelly.
i had known her for about a year before we moved in together, which felt like enough time to trust someone, especially someone who showed up to the same community spaces i did. she was a regular at trans tuesdays, the weekly gathering iโd attend at the dojo cafe with my friends, and weโd chat. and she seemed cool. and when i was looking to move out of a bad living situation, she needed a roommate. at the time i was living at a golden hill apartment with a couple that fought at odd hours of the night in that exhausting two-against-one dynamic that made me feel perpetually outnumbered in my own home. it felt like the universe was providing for me. it felt like community taking care of its own.
the landlord told me, during the application process, that he couldnโt verify she had a job.
she explained to me, and i believed her because i wanted to believe her: she was a student, working part-time at her school, and she was living off a trust fund that was disbursing money for her expenses. she had just bought a new car. she had just gotten plastic surgery. this looked, to me, like official trust fund baby behavior. and listen, a lot of san diegans cosplay poor when theyโre actually rich, so i followed what i saw. i trusted her. she was part of my community. she leveraged those connections, whether consciously or not, and i let her, because i wanted out of that golden hill apartment badly enough to overlook the red flags.
we moved in february 2023. march was free rent, a move-in special. and then april came.
she couldnโt pay her half.
โiโll pay you back,โ she said, and i believed her, because what else was i going to do, because i had just signed a lease with this person, because i wanted to believe that the community iโd invested so much of myself into wouldnโt betray me like this.
may came. she still couldnโt pay.
โi promise,โ she said.
every time the landlord threatened a quit-to-pay notice, i used my savings to cover her half. i did this twice. three months of her rent, paid from money i had spent years building up, money that represented my safety net, my stability, my future ability to move somewhere better when the time came. by the end of may, my savings were decimated and i realized, with the kind of clarity that only comes when youโve already lost everything, that she was never going to pay.
i asked her to leave. her name was on the lease. so was mine. the apartment had been approved on the strength of my credit, not hers. i should have known. i should have listened to the landlordโs warning and i should have trusted my gut instead of my hope.
i ended up moving out and she stayed for seven more months. she stayed in that apartment, not paying rent, until october, when she finally got evicted.
the landlord took her to court for unlawful retainer. she got legal aid, god bless the system that helps people who need it, even when those people are the ones who destroyed you. she entered a settlement agreement: one hundred dollars a month toward the debt. i was dismissed from the lawsuit without prejudice. which, for those unfamiliar with legal terminology, is the one where theyโre allowed to sue you later, the one that sounds like mercy but is actually just delayed reckoning.
she never paid. not a single hundred dollars of that settlement. so the landlord petitioned to vacate the judgment. and when a judgment is vacated, everything falls back on the original contractโฆ the fucking. lease. which still had my name on it.
february 2025โฆ almost exactly two years after i moved into that apartment with hope and savings and trust, the collections notice hit all three credit bureaus. it was like fucking a condom full of fire ants del campo, the red ones, las hormigas bravas. juuuuust peachy.
i had just recovered. finally, painstakingly, dollar by dollar, i had saved enough for a security deposit again. i was ready to start looking for a new place, calmly, without the desperation that leads to bad decisions. maybe even find a good roommate this time! someone vetted, someone safe. i was so ready to move forward.
and then eleven thousand dollars appeared on my credit report like a ghost i thought iโd buried.
i challenged the collections online with all the credit bureaus. i submitted documentation of the lawsuit and my dismissal, thinking surely, surely this would be enough to prove i wasnโt responsible. but i didnโt know about the vacated judgment. i didnโt know it had all come back to me like a boomerang made of debt and betrayal.
i consulted lawyers, plural, spending money i didnโt have to hear the same thing over and over. the best they could offer: two thousand dollars to negotiate with the collectors, no guarantees, and iโd probably have to settle anyway. money to maybe reduce the amount of money i owed for something i never should have owed in the first place.
depletedโฆ again?!? back to zero. back to worse than zero, actually.
and you know what really broke me? even more than the money, even more than the credit score cratering, even more than watching my escape hatch slam shut? it was the friends who said, after the fact, when the damage was already done and irreversible, โi knew this would happen, but i didnโt tell you.โ
a friend who watches you walk into a fire and says nothing is not a friend. thatโs not friendship, thatโs spectatorship. that kind of cruelty wears a familiar face, and it cuts deeper than anything a stranger could do, because a stranger doesnโt owe you anything. but a friend? a friend is supposed to be in your corner, a friend is supposed to warn you, a friend is supposed to care more about your wellbeing than about being right after the fact.
que a lo hecho, pecho, my mother would say. whatโs done is done. face it with your chest.
but this wasnโt something i did. and iโm still the one facing it. still the one paying for broken pottery someone else shattered.
that realization, that fundamental unfairness, that sense of being trapped in consequences i didnโt create, is where the spiral really began.
letting myself go
hereโs what happens when you get hit with something like that, something that feels both catastrophic and completely mundane at the same time, something that destroys your stability while the world keeps spinning like nothing happened: you stop trying.
not all at once, of course. because itโs not really dramatic like that.
itโs gradual, insidious, a slow leak rather than a sudden break. you stop waking up earlyโฆ because whatโs the point, right? you stop going to the gym because youโre too tired and too sad and the energy it takes to get there feels insurmountable. you stop eating well because cooking requires effort and ordering delivery requires only a thumb and a credit card you probably shouldnโt be using. and in my case, the roommate probably left the kitchen nasty and covered in his dishes and food and greaseโฆ it would take a gargantuan effort to clean it and then cook?
gurl... fuck!
you just fucking stop caring. you stop caring about all the things that used to matter, from the little things to the big things, because now your capacity for caring is fried completely. along with your savings.
i work from home. this is both a blessing and a curse, because it means no one sees you falling apart. that means you can fall apart more completely than you ever could if you had to show up somewhere and perform functionality. monday through friday my alarm goes off at 6am. i used to wake up at 5am, give myself time to ease into the day, shower, coffee, mentally prepare for whatever was coming.
when things got bad, i started waking up at 5:59, rolling out of bed and opening my laptop and logging in with one minute to spare. one minute of dignity preserved. barely. the bare minimum of professional presence while the rest of me crumbled.
and then staying up way too late because sleep wouldnโt come, or because i was avoiding it, binge eating at midnight, two in the morning, dozing off in a haze of weed smoke because iโd been using cannabis not recreationally but medicinally in the worst sense. i was self-medicating my way through each day, numbing myself into something that resembled peace but was really just absence.
hereโs a confession that still embarrasses me: i had been vegan since 2021, vegetarian since i was five years old. thatโs over thirty years of not eating meat and then four of limited dairy at most (with lactaid). and this year, without even really deciding to, i abandoned it completely. started ordering pizza. burger king fries and shakes and pies. mcdonaldโs at 1am for fries, apple pies, and sundaes. late-night runs to the corner store at cleveland and meade, buying massive quantities of candy and diet coke and doritos and ice cream. i did not eat meat, that i did stick to. but i was eating like someone who had given up on their body, and it was because i had! it was because the body felt like the enemy now, something to be numbed and stuffed and ignored rather than cared for.
i will confess, in the interest of honesty and also comedy, that i certainly enjoyed all the dairy. years of deprivation makes a milkshake and a slice of pizza taste like heaven. i say this, even if the indulgence has led to my gastrointestinal fortitude declining precipitously. just ask my toilet.
the weed was constant, daily, sometimes multiple times a day. the geek bars, those sleek little nicotine vapes, were always in my hand, always being pulled on, always filling my lungs with something other than the deep breaths i was supposed to be taking. i even feel like the combination made me dumber, slower, less able to think clearly or feel anything real, like i was experiencing my own life through a fog machine.
i watched the crown on repeat on netflix. all six seasons. multiple times. thereโs something perversely comforting about watching rich british people be miserable in castles, about seeing that wealth and power donโt protect you from grief or dysfunction or the fundamental loneliness of being human. it made my own misery feel almost regal. at least i wasnโt trapped in a loveless royal marriage while the tabloids dissected my every move.
but mostly i scrolled. documentaries, shows, performances, youtube rabbit holes, instagram reels, tiktok for hours and hours until my thumb hurt and my eyes burned and i still couldnโt stop. the algorithm learned what i liked, which is to say it learned what would keep me watching, which is to say it learned how to exploit my sadness and my anger and my desire for connection. it fed me other peopleโs lives to compare myself to, their careers and their bodies and their relationships and their seemingly effortless success. and i consumed it all, letting it hollow me out, and i kept making room for more.
and the whole time, the entire time i was falling apart in private. i was showing up to my kiwanis club meetings in public, smiling. i was vice president. i was reliable. i was the one who made everyone laugh, who brought the energy, who seemed like he had his shit together. the mask was flawless because it had to be, because i knew so many people around me going through worse, economically, health-wise. who was i to complain when at least i had a job? i at least i had a roof, at least i wasnโt being bombed or starving or dying of something incurable.
the mask costs something though. it costs everything, eventually, because you canโt pretend forever, and the energy it takes to maintain the performance is energy you donโt have for anything else. i resigned from kiwanis earlier this month.
iโm tired.
iโm burned out.
my empathy tank is on empty and i donโt know when or how itโs going to refill.
i stopped going to the gym in may. that was when my old therapist left, actually. i just made that connection now, writing this. eight months without therapy, eight months without exercise, eight months of numbing and stuffing and scrolling and pretending.
iโve gained sixty pounds since february. my right leg now starts swelling randomly and i havenโt even gone to a doctor about it because what if itโs something serious and what if it costs money i donโt have and what if i just donโt want to know. i lost my abs, my gains, years of muscle iโd built. i watch my body change in the mirror and feel nothing but a dull shame that isnโt strong enough to make me do anything different. iโve let myself go.
hereโs the thing, and this took me a long time to understand: for most of my life, i associated self-harm with cutting, with physical acts of deliberate violence against the body. i would never do that, iโd think. thatโs not me. but self-harm is so much broader than that, and so much sneakier.
self harm is also neglect. itโs abandoning the practices that keep you healthy and sane and stable. itโs binge eating to fill a void that food canโt fill. itโs smoking yourself numb every single day. itโs isolation. itโs letting yourself disappear.
i have been self-harming all year. just slowly. just quietly. just in ways that donโt leave visible scars but leave scars nonetheless.
itโs hard out here for a bitch
and it wasnโt just my body and my habits and my mental health that suffered. somewhere in there, my heart closed too.
i tried dating this year. twice. briefly. disastrously.
the first one, late last year bleeding into early this, was supposed to be casual. just fun. no strings. and then the chemistry hit like a truck and i put her on a pedestal so fast it made my head spin. all the lessons of the last ten years, all the healing and the therapy and the work on self-confidence and self-worth, failed at the sight of someone who seemed to see me. i am consumed by shame in retrospect. i smashed myself to pieces on that one. it was such a self-own, and i knew better, i knew so much better, and i did it anyway.
the second one started in february, right after the first ended, because apparently i learned nothing. i could tell things might develop, and then i started seeing myself falling into old patterns, the same ones i thought iโd exorcised when i left dc in 2021, the same patterns from the complicated eight-year relationship iโd escaped by moving across the country. so i pulled away. hard. probably too hard. definitely too hard.
and now iโm closed. completely, totally closed. i canโt let anyone in. i canโt even let anyone think of me in that way without feeling something like panic, something like violation. the idea of someone finding me attractive, wanting me, feels like too much, overwhelming, almost threatening. i feel like a nun who accidentally took vows she doesnโt remember taking, sworn to celibacy not by choice but by damage. i feel incapable of love, or incorrigible, or both. i donโt know where i would even start if i wanted to try again. i donโt know what i would do.
so iโve pushed it all away. every possibility, every glance, every flutter of interest. and thatโs its own kind of loss, grieving something youโre not even letting yourself have.
hell has a broken tv
and hereโs where the story gets even more absurd.
apparently rock bottom has a basement, and that basement is furnished with a broken television.
albert camus, the existentialist philosopher who spent a lot of time thinking about the absurd, once wrote about sisyphus, the mythological figure condemned to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity, only to watch it roll back down every time he reached the top. camus concluded that we must imagine sisyphus happy, that the struggle itself is meaningful, that accepting the absurdity of existence is the only way to live authentically within it.
the stoics had similar ideas. marcus aurelius wrote about focusing only on what you can control. epictetus taught that itโs not events themselves that disturb us but our judgments about them. this is all very wise and very true and i believe it intellectually.
and yetโฆ
earlier this week, my tv broke.
itโs three years old. i bought it thinking it would last, because thatโs what you do, you buy things expecting them to work for a reasonable amount of time, especially when you canโt afford to replace them. the screen started glitching. lines across the picture. random blackouts in the middle of whatever i was watching. i took it apart like a surgeon, checked every connection, cleaned out all the dust, looked for anything obviously wrong. everything seemed fine.
i went online. found forums about my specific modelโฆ and turns out itโs shit, a known issue. hardware failures that happen right around the three-year mark, like clockwork, like it was designed to die just past the warranty period. planned obsolescence, probably. another fucking con.
and i know, i know, in the grand scheme of things, in the context of everything iโve just told you about, a broken tv is nothing. itโs the most first-world problem imaginable. people are losing their homes, getting bombed, losing their healthcare, their rights, their livesโฆ and iโm upset about a television?
sisyphus would be ashamed. marcus aurelius would gently remind me that this is outside my control. epictetus would point out that my judgment of the event is causing more suffering than the event itself.
but let me tell you something about rock bottom: you donโt get there in one fall. you get there through a thousand small collapses. each one ravages and takes things away from you, corroding you like acid. then something tiny and stupid (something that shouldnโt matter at all, really) becomes the one little thing that breaks you.
because itโs not really about the tv. itโs about everything the tv represents: another thing that doesnโt work, another expense i canโt afford, another system designed to extract from me until thereโs nothing left. another con in a year of cons.
i donโt have money for a new tv right now. i donโt have money for a lot of things. and i sat there, in my bleak apartment with the shit-brown carpet and nasty roommate, staring at the broken screen that had been my primary escape from my own thoughts, and i lost it.
not dramatically. not spectacularly. just all of a sudden, on a random day. and then you lose it in that special little way, when youโre too tired to scream and too defeated to cry. just sitting there, staring at the glitching screen, thinking about sisyphus and his fucking boulder, and whether camus ever considered that the boulder might also be rusted and the hill might be covered in piรฑata points and the whole thing might be a subscription service now.
and then something shifted.
i donโt know how else to describe it. something in me, some small stubborn part that had been buried under months of numbness, said: okay. enough. thatโs a fucking sign to go touch grass.
which is such a stupid millennial phrase, โtouch grass,โ but itโs also exactly what i needed, exactly what the absurd hero would do, i think. acknowledge the boulder. acknowledge the hill. and then go outside anyway.
puerto rico
i went to puerto rico twice this year and both times saved my life in ways iโm still trying to understand.
the first trip was in august, for bad bunnyโs concert, with my tรญa vilmarie. we had a blast. the show was incredible, that specific kind of joy you can only feel when youโre surrounded by thousands of people who love the same thing you love, singing every word, moving together, alive. i hung out with my cousin hector and mi tรญa cathy. i saw my abuelos. i went home.
and i donโt use that word lightly. home. san diego is where i live, but puerto rico is where iโm from, and thereโs a difference, thereโs always been a difference. the inevitable and enticing pull toward la isla that gets stronger every year iโm away from it.
one night during that trip, we went to lote 646 in dorado, a spot where my grandfather plays with his trio los cancioneros. i bought dinner for the whole family. everyone came out, we ate well, drank well, and laughed the way you can only laugh with people whoโve known you your entire life and love you anyway.
the trio that was playing that night, not my grandfatherโs group but another one, invited him onstage to play with them.
his name is ricardo feliu. he founded trio los cancioneros. he plays the requinto, a small guitar with a high, bright voice that cuts through everything and goes straight to your heart. heโs my motherโs father. heโs been struggling with arthritis lately, dimmed by health issues and the constant low-grade pain that comes with getting older. but when he picked up that instrument, when his fingers found the strings, when he started to play.
he played so beautifully.
i sat there watching him, my abuelo, this man who has shaped so much of who i am without my even realizing it, and something in me released. something old and tight and held for so long iโd forgotten i was holding it. i felt it let go. i felt myself, for the first time in months, actually present in my own body, actually feeling something other than numbness or rage.
i reconnected with claribel arreaga during that trip too. she was my teacher in elementary school. more than that, really. she would watch my brother gus and me after school, tutorรญas at their house along with a ton of other kids. weโd be there until our parents picked us up after theyโd get off work. she shaped me, she saw something in me when i was too young to see it myself and she nurtured it. we had a long heart-to-heart over dinner, catching up on years and years of life, and it felt like a homecoming in a way i hadnโt expected, my soul reviving a little.
i came back to san diego feeling better than i had in months.
and then i plunged into an even deeper depression than before, because thatโs how it works sometimes, isnโt it? you touch something real and good, you remember what it feels like to be alive, and then you return to your regular life and the contrast is devastating.
the bleak apartment feels bleaker. the shit-brown carpet feels shittier. the loneliness that youโd been numbing yourself against comes roaring back twice as loud.
so i went back in october for a book launch.
my friend manuel ortega caro wrote a book called no seas pendejo; no pertenezcas. we went to the same elementary school, colegio sagrados corazones in guaynabo, and claribel connected us, because she taught us both. and why not, of course. because the web of people who shaped you when you were young stays connected in ways you donโt always see.
the book is not self-help. manuel is very clear about that. itโs what he calls a โmanual de demoliciรณn personal,โ a personal demolition manual. itโs for people who are tired of living someone elseโs script, tired of the lies society tells us about success and happiness and belonging, tired of being a pendejo who belongs to systems that donโt serve them.
โthereโs a voice in your head,โ the synopsis reads, โthat whispers that this is all a lie. you hear it in the silence of your car. in the shower. in those three seconds of honesty before you fall asleep.โ
i felt that line in my chest when i first read it. i still feel it now.
the launch was at the fundaciรณn nacional de la cultura popular in old san juan, and manuel gave me a chance to speak. i spoke about being non-binary, about being trans, about what it means to not belong to the gender binary in a world that insists you must.
i brought my hillcrest activism back to la isla, spoke openly about things that donโt always get spoken about openly there, and my tรญa cathy and cousin hector were in the audience, listening, and afterward we talked about trans issues in a way we never had before. i think we changed some hearts and minds that night. at least, i hope we did.
my old elementary and middle school teachers came to the launch too. they saw me, the adult iโve become, the person iโve grown into. it was joyful in a way i still donโt really have any words for. but it was beautiful being witnessed by the people who knew you when you were still becoming.
i met hilda curet that night as well, the daughter of tite curet alonso, one of puerto ricoโs greatest songwriters. claribel knew her from their school days. the connections, the history, the sense of being part of something larger than yourself, a chain of influence and care stretching back generationsโฆ it all wove together into something that felt like belonging to me.
and somewhere in there, a word lodged itself in my brain that hasnโt left since. i heard it on instagram, from an account called @infinite.ritual. she was talking about going back to puerto rico after years away. she didnโt say she โreturned.โ she said she โrematriated.โ
going back to the motherland. back to la madre. back to the place that made you, the soil and the salt and the sound of coquรญs at night and the specific quality of light in the afternoon and the way spanish feels different when everyone around you is speaking it too, not as a second language, not as something you code-switch into, but as the air you breathe.
i canโt even get a place here, in san diego. i can barely afford the bleak apartment with the shit-brown carpet. but nonetheless. thatโs my new dream now. return to la isla. go home.
to rematriate.
december
so here i am. december. the year limping toward its end like a wounded animal, and me limping alongside it.
iโm not okay. i want to be clear about that. iโm not writing this from the other side of some miraculous recovery, not offering advice from a place of wisdom and healing.
iโm writing this from the middle of it.
iโm writing this from the fucking stomach of mess, from the ongoing attempt to dig myself out of a hole i didnโt entirely dig but am responsible for climbing out of anyway.
but iโm doing better. and thereโs a difference between those two things.
not okay, but doing better. still in the hole, but climbing.
i tossed the vape, finally. the withdrawal has been awful, the irritability and the cravings and the constant awareness of not having the thing my body has become dependent onโฆ but itโs getting easier, a little bit easier every day. thatโs really fucking nice.
iโm not smoking weed anymore. well, not completely, letโs be realistic, but significantly less. this week, iโve tried out a small edible before bed, controlled and intentional, to help me fall asleep. iโm using it occasionally instead of constantly, every day. instead of becoming a permahigh chimney.
iโve quit drinking entirely, which was easier than i expected because alcohol had become just another numbing agent in a arsenal of numbing agents. cutting it out became one less thing clouding my brain.
iโve started walking, too. 10,000 steps a day. i started monday. today is friday. iโve hit the goal every day so far, which doesnโt sound like much but feels like a revolution when youโve spent months barely leaving your room. thatโs something, right?!? thatโs a start.
i deleted the food delivery apps. all of them. doordash, ubereats, grubhub, postmates, all gone from my phone. that alone will save me hundreds of dollars a month, and maybe some of my gastrointestinal dignity. if i want junk food now, i have to put on pants and leave the house to get it, and that friction is enough to make me think twice, which is all i need right now: enough friction to think twice.
iโm back in therapy, and thatโs a huge triumph. three weeks and counting. weโre making progress, i think, or at least weโre digging into things iโve been avoiding, which is its own kind of progress even when it doesnโt really feel like it.
i started journaling again, too. that was my fuel when i was writing on here regularly. i was writing lyrics, chord progressions, poems, thoughts, feelingsโฆ it was a source, a muse. though i havenโt been consistent, because consistency is hard when your brain is foggy and your energy is depleted and forming coherent thoughts feels like trying to catch fog with your handsโฆ *sighs* but iโm trying. i keep trying.
one of my favorite authors is antoine de saint-exupรฉry, the guy who wrote the little prince. he was also a pilot, an adventurer, someone who understood both the poetry of existence and the practical necessity of putting one foot in front of the other. he wrote this:
โwhat saves a man is to take a step. then another step. it is always the same step, but you have to take it.โ1
set and step. set and step.
thatโs all i can do right now: set an intention and take a step. repeat.
donโt worry about the whole staircase, just take the next step.
i donโt know what to do about the collections. maybe itโs time to stop fighting and just start paying it, monthly, whatever i can manage, chipping away at eleven thousand dollars i shouldnโt owe but do anyway. paying for broken pottery someone else shattered, because contract law is contract law, and brianna kelly is a fraud who will likely never take responsibility.
butโฆ que a lo hecho, pecho! whatโs done is done. face it with your chest.
i donโt know how to open my heart again, ether. maybe that comes later, maybe it doesnโt. maybe iโll be a nun forever, incapable and incorrigible, closed to possibility. or maybe, once iโve rebuilt some of the other things, the body, the mind, the bank account, maybe then iโll have capacity for that too. i donโt know right now. iโm trying not to know everything right now. trying to be okay with uncertainty.
i donโt know how to get to my puerto rico dream yet. i can barely afford san diego, and starting over somewhere new requires resources i donโt have. but the dream is there now, planted like a seed, and even if it takes years to grow into something real, at least i know what iโm growing toward. rematriate. go home.
i donโt know a lot of things but i know this: i am so fucking sick of self-harming. of being small. of feeling so aggrieved and so stuck and so numb. of numbing myself into nothing and calling it survival.
i have had enough.
i donโt want this anymore, this half-life, this slow disappearing. and i will change what i can. and it turns out i can do a fucking lot, actually, when i decide to. when i stop waiting for someone to save me and start saving myself.
because hereโs the truth, the one that took me all year to learn: someone needs to show up for me and it might as well be me. it has to be me! the rest will fall in line as i keep building and moving forward, or it wonโt, and iโll adjust, and iโll keep going anyway.
set and step. set and step.
i, too, can command the wind
thereโs a scene in one of my favorite movies, elizabeth: the golden age. cate blanchett, one of the greatest actresses alive, plays queen elizabeth I facing the greatest crisis of her reign.
the spanish ambassador has just confirmed that the spanish armada is coming. the largest naval fleet ever assembled, 130 ships carrying 30,000 men, sailing to destroy england and return it to catholic rule. heโs smug about it, certain of spainโs victory, certain that this woman will be swept away by the tide of history.
and elizabeth, facing annihilation, with something between contempt and absolute defiance and says:
โi, too, can command the wind, sir! i have a hurricane in me that will lay spain bare if you dare to try me!โ
she wins. england wins. the armada is scattered and sunk by storms and english fire ships and the sheer stubborn refusal to accept defeat. history remembers.
i think about that line constantly.
not because i think iโm a queenโฆ though i sure as hell fucking am, haha. and itโs not because i think my problems are equivalent to an invading armada, though sometimes it feels that way, all those ships on the horizon, the debts and the betrayals and the broken systems and the hate crimes and the eight-dollar cortados.
sometimes defiance is all you have.
sometimes youโre outmatched and outgunned and the odds are against you and the only thing you can do is refuse to kneel. refuse to accept that this is how it ends.
and yes, i can make a wind joke now, because it turns out i can also command the wind in other ways, given that the dairy has led to some truly impressive gastrointestinal developments. commanding the wind indeed. elizabeth would be proud. or horrified. probably both.
this little light of mine
and yet, the flame is still here.
thatโs what i keep coming back to, through all of it, through the collections and the betrayal and the spiral and the sixty pounds and the broken tv and the fucking piรฑata points. thereโs still a flame.
itโs the same flame that got me out of dc in 2021, out of a relationship that was drowning me, across the entire country to san diego where i built a whole new life from nothing.
itโs the same flame thatโs kept me in school, working toward something better, even when iโm exhausted and broke and wondering what the point is. the debt goes up some more. the world keeps turning. i still donโt know how iโll pay these loans.
itโs the same flame thatโs kept me writing, kept me creating, even when i havenโt published anything in months, even when iโve been too depressed to string sentences together. itโs still there, underneath everything.
itโs the same flame that got me through this year, somehow, despite everything trying to extinguish it.
itโs burning dimly right now. oh so dimly, so threatened. the slightest wind, the slightest change, could stamp it out. some days i feel that fragility acutely, feel how close i am to just letting it go dark.
but i havenโt, it hasnโtโฆ not yet.
iโm just here trying to shelter it with half a hand, blown to pieces from shielding and blocking the blows. but iโm still sheltering it. still protecting it. still here.
elizabeth won and i want to win, damn it! i want to survive this year and come out the other side and look back at 2025 and know that it tried to break me and failed miserably. i want to pay off the debt and rebuild my credit and rematriate to puerto rico and write things that matter and maybe, someday very soon, let someone love me again. i want to command the wind.
and god, has this year sucked, and not in the way we all hope and dream. i donโt even know where to begin, but i have some ideas.
iโll start by saving myself. by taking a step.
set and step. set and step.
it is always the same step, like antoine says, but you have to take it.
if any of this resonated, and you want to help me rebuild, you can buy me a coffee. no pressure. no subscription. just a one-time โthanks for existingโ if you feel like it.
iโm back. letโs see what happens.
with all my love, defiance, and compromised gastrointestinal fortitude,
edgard ๐งก
p.s. if youโre going through it too, whatever โitโ is for you, i see you. i donโt have advice. i barely have my own shit together. but i know this: youโve survived 100% of your worst days so far and thatโs not nothing. thatโs everything, actually. thatโs the whole thing.
p.p.s. to the people driving around hillcrest shooting pellets at queer folks: i hope your tires are eternally flat and your phone chargers only work at one specific angle that you can never quite find.
p.p.p.s. to brianna kelly: i know youโre reading this. pay your debts, bitch.
iโm really proud of you friend ๐ซถ๐โจ
โฅ๏ธ