There’s Still Pain Hiding Somewhere Inside Of Me

6/6/2025

I spent time today copying some of the journal entries I had in Evernote. There’s a lot more stuff, including clusters of pictures, but I only concerned myself with diary-style notes.

Reading a couple of them, from back in 2018 after I separated from G, my heart skipped a beat and my eyes were on the verge of tearing up. For a brief moment I felt a fraction of the pain I was under at the time, and I felt a little lost.

I composed myself, but I realize now that there is an aged, unresolved pain like a stone in the middle of my chest, camouflaged yet still weighing me down, low key suffocating me. I have clearly not processed my emotions as thoroughly as I should, 7 years after the fact.

 Affect

Friday, April 9, 2021

An interesting thing happened to me today. I have often in my life expressed annoyance as a flash of anger, raising my voice and complaining, often cursing. This tends to happen when I am under stress, and most often with family. It often goes away quickly, but it is felt very intensely.

This morning I finished a particularly taxing mental exercise at work, and had barely 15 minutes to feed the cats before a conference call. When I reached the kitchen I saw they had made a complete mess of some stuff that was on the counter, throwing it on the floor. I move fast to pick up the trash and start to raise my voice at them, then it happened. 

All of a sudden, mid-sentence, I find myself looking at the  performative nature of my behavior as if I were an outsider. A clear thought popped in my head: "You don't have to do this." I stopped talking and realized there was no feeling of anger anymore. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. This wasn't being angry and then calming myself down; this was detachment, as if I had started acting a part and stopped to ask for a script rewrite. And it was all pretty much instantaneous.

 I Was Many Things But Myself

6/10/2018

I was invisible, a fixture, a homing beacon

I was a broadcast, its volume turned off

I was a postcard from home, stuffed in the junk drawer

I was, at various times, a portrait, an exhaust vent, a shapeless blob, background music, an oven, a terrarium

An ideal

An illusion

A security blanket

I was never me

The year of Our Lord, 2024

 I'm dusting the digital cobwebs away. Yes, I'm still here, bitches!

[Insert chirping of crickets here]

Blogging still exists, I'm not naive enough to believe it's completely gone. It's just not what it was back in the early 2000's. And that's OK.

I'm a fifty-something, not-quite-yet divorced, tired af but still plugging along at a corporate career because I have a college-aged/gap-year taking child, woman. I had to take a deep breath after writing that.

Since I last wrote I have been on a spiritual quest of sorts. It began in the pandemic years, a little over a year after my mom died from Alzheimer's. For most of the time this quest was a solitary pursuit, consisting of reading books and Tarot cards, with the ocassional study group Zoom meeting. It wasn't just the pandemic-related isolation. I was not ready to come out of the closet as a spiritual seeker.

In early 2023 I ventured out and attended a local shamanic event I found via the meetup app. I met nice people and learned that there's a Spiritualist church in Houston, where the shamanic meetings are hosted. I also had some interesting sensory perceptions that night of the sort that people would call supernatural.

This event was the catalyst that made spirituality something communal for me, something lived as opposed to read. It hasn't been quite a year yet and I have such a long road ahead, but the way I live my life and what I conceive as spirituality has changed in ways that are deep yet not readily apparent. For that I am eternally grateful.

Yo soy de P-Fokin-R

 No hay más nada que añadir.

Seeking

 My mother, atheist activist extraordinaire, passed away two years ago. Almost a year after her death, we were on lockdown due to the pandemic. Was it COVID-19 or was it freedom from my mom's judgment that got me on the path I am in? Probably the freedom one. COVID-19 got me baking bread, but after being committed for a few months, I have not made bread in a while. 

I also have not been working on my quilting much lately, but that is because my sewing room turned into the overflow room when we did the home improvement projects last year. It's hard to move in there lately.

In the 1990's my significant other was into alternative spirituality. Through his mom I learned about Tarot cards. I even bought a couple of decks, but never really learned to read the cards. By the end of the decade I had a child and a broken marriage. The year 2000 brought the promise of a new beginning, a total Ace of Wands moment (though I had no clue it was such at the time). I crossed over water and moved to Texas, leaving behind my Tarot decks.

Twenty years later, in early 2020 I purchased new copies of the same two decks, and resolved to try to learn how to read the cards. Of the two decks, one continues to be my favorite; the other one is more a memento. I have gotten several more decks since then, along with books and online classes. I use it as a way to understand my path and what do I need to work on.

My Personal Code of Honor

• Do not care so much about what others think of you

• Live and let others live

• Accept you know very little about life, the universe and everything

• Actively tell your loved ones that you love them, and demonstrate it with actions

• Work to recognize your biases so they do not control you

• Do not allow yourself to get carried away by "woe is me" emotionalism. Instead, try to understand what is at the root of your moods

• It's OK to believe in the spiritual side of life

• Always be there for your daughters when they need you.

Limbo

What are we going to do?
We've opened the door, now it's all coming through...

"How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful", Florence + the Machine



Today I found myself sending LinkedIn invites to old college friends from the Honors Program at the UPR, members of my old tribe. I miss them, or rather the idea of them, the possibility of finding myself through their eyes. Who knows what they would think of me nowadays, if they remember anything at all. They'll probably take one look at my profile and yawn, and no lifeline will pull me out of the fog. They have all gotten PhDs and done interesting, even important things in the same span of time I have failed at two marriages, made a career out of Excel pivot tables and become a master at predicting the immediate past.

As my eyesight has gone south, so has my memory. I can't be trusted to keep all this shit straight. I need friends to tell who I am. But I have no friends. Or rather, the few I have barely know me. I have done a great job of limiting access to what's really on my mind and curating my persona so as to avoid controversy. But the result is that nobody fucking cares, and I am slowly vanishing into the ether. I am becoming translucent. Not long from now, only my cats will be able to see me.One day this specific recipe of neuroses and idiosyncrasies will simply disappear. There will be traces here and there, pieces of a puzzle, mostly in the memory of my girls and my exes.

I should have been paying more attention to building memories, maybe trying to practice some mindfulness, but instead two, perhaps three decades have been lived on cruise control.

Social distancing is easy for semi-hermits

I had the flu at the end of February. I get the flu shot every year in the fall, as most people in high risk groups do. By the end of February, the vaccine's effectiveness must be minimal, as the influenza A hit me like a ton of bricks.

I can't recall feeling sicker in a very long time, perhaps ever. It took me over a week to get back to a semblance of normal. It's scary to think that scores of people lose their lives to the flu every year.

I'm scared of SARS COV 2. I'm scared of catching it and getting the disease. I am barely recovered from the flu. I am struggling with seasonal allergies. I have not done a breathing treatment for asthma in days, but every day is a struggle to breathe deeply. And that is with clear lungs. I don't want to picture the struggle if a lower respiratory illness is thrown in the mix. I've had pneumonia before.

Authorities are asking people to practice social distancing. Our school district has cancelled classes through April 10th. The city and county have ordered bars and clubs closed, and restaurants to close their dining areas and only provide drive-through/pick up/delivery orders. My company has instructed all personnel to work from home, unless their presence in the office is required to perform their job (labs, manufacturing, some customer service roles).

None of this impacts me greatly, except for the madness of crowds hoarding basic goods. My daughter, a teenager, is capable of amusing herself and knows better than to interrupt me during business hours. I've been working from home since the day before I got flu symptoms. I telecommute more than half the time anyway, and have my home office set up for this, so this is not hard for me. I also have a tendency to stay home for the most part when I am off work. Still, everything feels so weird when it is not by choice. It's scary to think every single outing puts me at risk of severe illness or possible death.

Wistfulness

We want to be seen. We recoil at the idea of being invisible. Oh, but we are.
Each year that passes we become lighter, shadowier. We become stronger and clearer about ourselves, just in time to dissolve in their eyes.

Every wrinkle, every age spot carries the entire history of us, even the faintest parts. But only we can see. The book has but one reader.

By most accounts, I live a charmed life. I've worked for the same Fortune 500 company for 22 years (if you count pre-merger and post-separation entities as the same). I have health insurance. I still live in the house I bought 17 years ago. I have two beautiful, strong, amazing daughters who have brought out the best and the worst in me. I get along with both my exes. I get to share my life with an amazing group of cats. I make my own decisions.

It can be exhausting, though, to always be the rock, the strong one, the reliable one. My dad taught me not to depend on anybody, to be self-sufficient. I am grateful for the power that has afforded me, but I sometimes I wish I could let my guard down.

Nineteen years, eight months and counting

The other day I asked myself what ties me to this place I live in, Northwest Harris County, the farther suburbs of Houston, a Tomball zip code.

What keeps me here? Is it my job, the longest tenure I have ever had, longer than my two marriages, older than my daughters? Of course it is. But is that the only reason?

Paula is gone to Philadelphia, living with Pancho and Uqui, working and making music whenever she can. She told me not long ago that she is the happiest she's ever been. I am glad she's found a group of people she fits in with, and someone to love. I miss her a lot, but I am happy seeing her spread her wings.

Home life these days consists mostly of Isabel, the cats and I. On holidays such as Christmas and Thanksgiving, and the occasional Sunday, Gabe and his mom come over for a meal. My birthday is this weekend and he asked me what kind of cake I wanted.

Gabe and I are still legally married and I still consider him family, but we are not a couple anymore. I don't have any blood relatives here, and we lived together as husband and wife for 14 years, so that counts as something. But I wouldn't stay in this place on his behalf.

That leaves Isabel. What will she do, where will she go when she graduates high school? I have told her I would like to be a part of her life in the future. Respecting her need to live on her own (or with a significant other) in the future, if she leaves this area I would seriously consider moving to be close to her. Hopefully she does not pick a place with cold winters to move to.

I have spent over a third of my life here, 39% to be exact. Houston has been good to me. I have no complaints. But I will not hesitate to leave someday.

Stuck in the Sludge

The part of me that thinks life is what you make of it wants to slap this sulking creature, tell it to snap out of it.

Another part of me, the one that knows for most of us success in life is as much due to our hard work as it is the product of a series of accidents and lucky coincidences, fears luck is not on my side on this one.

Chemical aid does not seem to be helping, although without the antidepressant who knows how low I would be right now.

I am tired of the uncertainty and fear. I am angry and resentful. My life as it know it is most likely at an end. I am scared of what my future life will look like. I fear it's only downhill from here.

Craqueá

When I was a kid in Puerto Rico, people used the anglicism "craqueao" (or the female version, "craqueá") as a blanket synomym for the word crazy (cracked-up).

As a kid and a young adult, I never stopped to think about that word, what it conveys. I probably thought it meant the brain was broken and did not work properly.

Now I understand all too well what cracked up means. It means to lose trust in your ability to handle compounding stress; to know yourself to be fragile, broken. You're not whole as a person; there are cracks and your fortitude is seeping away.

Masa amorfa

Don't know who I am anymore.
Can't recognize this person I've become
She's brittle and bland
So long away from home

Translucent shadow
Bloated and shrunken
Stuck in a rootless present
Home as I knew it long gone

Tightly wound and
Stuffed into a box
Yanked from a dusty chrysalis
Dissolved into a pile of cats

This place I walk
Has claimed a third of my life
The place I crawled from
Is someone else's now

BORICUA, first and foremost.

#promesaisajoke
#colonialismexposed

Diaspora growth

I put this together myself from data publicly available here: http://factfinder.census.gov/

Follow this link for background on the history of Puerto Rican migration:
http://centropr.hunter.cuny.edu/sites/default/files/past_events/Jorge_Duany_Puerto_Rican_Diaspora.pdf

This quote stood out for me: Almost 8 per cent of the Island’s inhabitants relocated to the US mainland during the 1990s. Between the years 2000 and 2007, even more Puerto Ricans (some 415,000) emigrated than in the previous decade (326,000). More than two million people have moved from the Island to the US mainland since the mid-twentieth century. The proportions of this exodus are even more staggering when one recalls that Puerto Rico’s population had not reached four million in the year 2007. Aside from nineteenth-century Ireland and twentieth-century Suriname, the magnitude of the Puerto Rican diaspora has few historical precedents or contemporary parallels.

The Honoree

The Graduate

Recap

I have a kid who just graduated high school. I have a kid about to start middle school. I have a mother who is losing her memories. I have family members quarreling with each other. I have other people in the hospital, and people who are a pressure cooker ready to pop. Things are stressful; my body is telling me so every single day. And yet, I know I am better off than a significant number of people, so suck it up buttercup.

Recently I traveled to Puerto Rico, after a four-year absence. I spent time with my brother and my nieces. I miss them. I saw my mom, and it pained me that her Alzheimer's is advancing so quickly. I am staring at my possible future, and it is hard to watch. She is still herself, losing her memories does not change who she is. If anything, the loss of some social filters had rendered her a truer version of herself: sometimes tender and generous, but often her usual emotionally detached self.

I am always a different person on the island, in no small part because I am on vacation. This time felt a little different, though. I was an emotional tourist, a visitor in a rush to trigger remembrances from a distant life. It felt disjointed at times. Maybe it's the fact that it had been four years since my last trip and I am disconnected from the local cultural current (who the hell is that babbling on TV and singing on the radio?). Maybe it's because I have not been a direct victim of the disastrous economic debacle that has unfolded over the last ten years. Maybe I am getting old, maybe my almost 20-year tenure at a big corporation dealing with elevator pitches has caused me bypass flair and emotion in favor of bluntness and pragmatism. Maybe life in the diaspora for almost a third of my life has turned me into a different person. For whatever reason, I felt like an outsider, and I did not like it.

Sometimes I wish I could split myself in two and live in two places at once.