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.

Nos están pasando por la piedra

In case anybody has missed this, here are some recent news on what's going on in Puerto Rico:

• The PROMESA bill proposes different minimum wages for Puerto Rico and no participation on recent overtime law changes in the US. What kind of country do we live in where people sit idly while their fellow American citizens get treated like second class citizens? We're in Trump's America already and he hasn't even won yet. We have always been.
  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/juan-c-davila/promesa-puerto-ricos-rest_b_10615610.html

• More than 80% of children in Puerto Rico live in high-poverty areas, according to data taken from US Census studies. No worries, the $4.25 minimum wage will take care of that.
  http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/01/us/puerto-rico-child-poverty/ 

Recommencing

Your sense of hearing can be the strongest altered mood trigger. Listening to music, specifically.

Unplugged versions of messed up punk rock songs can be quite effective plunging one into a crying fit. If it's got a piano and a violin in it, if the lyrics hint at mental illness, if the singer has a plaintive voice, I am screwed.

This is what I choose to write about after a long sojourn in the non-blogging world. Middle-aged female depression. I couldn't help it. I happened to catch the tune as I was re-watching an episode of my favorite dystopian TV show today. It made me tear up.

Not true. I have been listening to it for days. This mood has been brewing. I downloaded four different versions of it, all covers. The original just never did it for me. I even made a playlist for my iPod click wheel. Wow, does that sound retro or what?

The rate at which things evolve, change, become obsolete is increasing exponentially right as I march inexorably into an age where it takes longer to find my bearings. Make no mistake, though, I always find them. I have so far escaped every culling unscathed. But as I see the world I know change to the point of discomfort, as a new generation takes over, all of a sudden I find myself in a mentor position, a walking encyclopedia, a benevolent veteran. I'm not sure I want to accept this role I am being cast for.

This is what I choose to write about after a long hiatus. Me, myself and I. Depression is selfish by force. When you are trapped in your own mind it is difficult to step outside the navel-gazing.

There is so much more I could be writing about. The economy of my native island is falling apart, thousands of my compatriots are leaving the place every month, jumping the puddle into the mainland, looking for jobs and the dream of a better life. Texas, my adopted land, is becoming a popular destination, growing at a faster rate than the top two favorite destinations of the diaspora. Of course, when your volumes are small to begin with, growth rates can look impressive, but we got nothing on Florida or New York yet.

If you happen to stumble upon this blog because you googled boricua in texas, I am sorry that I am not more informative. Or relevant. Search the many groups on Facebook that have sprung up to facilitate a sense of community in this state. It is a big state. Get ready to do a hell of a lot of driving.

I am not THE Boricua in Texas. I am just one of many.

Sometimes I dream of going back, when I'm old, when the kids are grown. I think all of us do at one time or another. Nostalgia is a powerful trap. If I go back I will feel out of place. My slang is hopelessly outdated; I have no clue what a yal is. People were not being propped against the wall, dressed up as boxers, or staged at the domino table for their wakes when I lived on the island. There was no tren urbano. Filiberto had not been killed yet. A woman had never been governor.

I have been here for quite a long time. The experience of living here has changed me. Being a single mom, getting married again, having another child, all that life lived has changed me. My job trajectory has certainly changed me, in ways that surprise me sometimes. I used to love a clever turn of phrase; but living in the land of elevator pitches and corporate buzzwords, I often grow impatient with languid prose.

I would have changed just as much if I was still on the island. Make no mistake. But I would have become a different person than who I am now. We like to think we are a singular consciousness drifting through life, but this is an illusion. We all change, every single day, no matter where we are. However, on the island I would have had the fantasy of a continuity of self, a shared national experience with my fellow boricuas.

So I choose to maintain a tenuous connection to my past life by filling my Facebook friends roster with high school classmates; even the mean girl who spread rumors about me having lice in middle school is my Facebook friend. But these people don't know anything about me. How could they? It has been so long since we were classmates. Many of them have also left the island, and may have nostalgia issues of their own to deal with. And that's OK. We are all trying to come to grips with our evolving lives. Sometimes all it takes to find our bearings is to write.