My mom told me she no longer wanted to be my mom at four years old, and the subsequent trust issues led to me losing the love of my life because of my deep-seated anger and abandonment issues.
Life is about losing, losing pride, losing ego, losing fear, losing insecurities, losing loved ones, and then the world loses us. But there is also much to gain once we lose all of the above.
I write this as I sit in the waiting room at the hospital. My aunt, the happy-go-lucky one, the one with the bad jokes, the one that made everyone dance, is in the ICU with a brain hemorrhage. The doctors are not optimistic. I drove my mom and my sister here for what could be a final goodbye, and yet, in this heaviest of moments that has grief looming on the periphery, there is still hope!
On this life journey, we yearn, cry, and wonder why. Sometimes, we get stuck in a loop, a broken record of trauma. That is one end of the spectrum of the human experience. There is another. We are also gifted with malleability. We have endless potential. We are the outcome of millions of possibilities. We laugh, we grow and learn, love, and create. Lessons, though, have been hard to learn.
My first experience of abandonment happened when I was four years old—a quick backstory to my origin. My mom emigrated to the US from El Salvador as a refuge from a civil war and a refugee from unrequited love. She came here alone, well almost alone; she had a passenger in her belly, me. She was six months pregnant when she crossed multiple borders illegally to come to the US. She was stuffed in the trunk of a car with six other immigrant refugees, and finally, miraculously, she made it to Los Angeles. She had survived. She learned English and later saved money by cleaning the houses of wealthy Beverly Hills socialites. Through back-breaking work, she was able to bring the rest of her family to America. She passed her citizenship test on the first try. She was the matriarch who took care of everyone and everything except me. I was 4 years old, and I was a hotheaded, stubborn child doing what 4-year-olds do. At that moment, she was struck by that proverbial straw that breaks every camel’s back, and she snapped. She looked me in the face and said, “I am not your mom anymore!” and left. She didn’t have a car, but she had a bicycle, and I watched her roll away as I jumped up and down on the couch, banging on the window, crying hysterically, “I’m sorry, don’t go! Don’t go! I’m sorry!” my wails, my pleas, my cries went unanswered. Whatever you tell a four-year-old, they will believe. I believed she was gone forever.
Trauma is genetic. It is passed down just like eye color or allergies. My family are all survivors of abuse, every version and definition of abuse. But they never learned the word heal. Their wounds, to this day, are still seeping. Their resentment has defined the culture of my family, and the anger festered like a rotten seed.
I could not let go of the rope, and the skin on my hands was torn, hanging by fleshy threads, fresh glistening blood alongside coagulated blood and scabs.
I felt like I died. I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t think the pain was intolerable. I drank to numb the pain, but that numbness only lasted for a few minutes. After that initial buzz, the pain
became a monster, a dragon burning my insides. I cried, I sobbed, I yelled for help, and no one answered. I was alone. During the day, I tried to stay busy; I trained in Muay Thai. At night, the demons came out: the guilt, the regret, the sadness, the grief; it was full-blown depression. The veil came down over my spirit and remained there for 14 years. I had suicidal thoughts. I held an antique dagger to my abdomen, tears uncontrollably gushing from my eyes. I was bawling for hours, alone in my apartment.
I was in slow self-destruct mode. I didn’t care about my life anymore.
At 32, I was diagnosed with Latent Autoimmune Diabetes in Adults, aka LADA. It is a late-in-life onset of type 1 diabetes. And it was triggered by the severe grief reaction I had to her leaving. She was the ‘One That Got Away.’ Her leaving was the catalyst. I had spent years unwittingly building and reinforcing the Great Wall of China around me. It helped me survive the hoard of invaders disguised as family, friends, neighbors, classmates, teachers, and girlfriends. Grief and trauma can cause autoimmune disease, and I have become the poster child of this. After my great wall fell, the flood of 30-plus years of holding back tears came bursting out like a hurricane.
I watched 30-plus years of pride, depression, insecurity, self-doubt, and trauma push away the one person that I finally loved and who, more importantly, loved me. Yet those were two realities I refused to acknowledge and, worse, intentionally shut out and rejected.
I survived depression with anger. Anger kept me alive. Anger made me feel strong. Anger was my go-to. It allowed me to be intimidating and keep people at bay because people hurt me. I couldn’t trust people. Everyone was a potential threat to my heart. So, with my anger sharpened and honed over years of betrayal, lies, and heartbreak, I proceeded into the world intent on living alone. It had a certain amount of dark, brooding romanticism, this existence of the wandering lost soul, this ronin. I felt safe, I felt tough, I felt independent. The anger helped me survive until it became the source of my self-sabotage.
I have since learned it’s about reaching—reaching for the stars, knowledge, and greater patience and compassion. It’s about reaching out and holding a hand that needs comfort, reaching for a broken heart, and reaching for opportunities to connect. It is also about reaching for courage and vulnerability while in that space, reaching into our own souls, and then letting the world reach out and connect with them. While we maintain the effort of reaching, we perpetuate the goodness we all are and seek.
Healing is a matter of staying alive while time does its thing. Healing is about being of service and learning to be generous. Healing is about letting go. Healing is about remembering the innate wonder that we are born with and rekindling it. Healing is realizing we are all connected and we spread the healing. In Lak’ech is a Maya saying that means, ‘You are my other me.’ If I do harm to you, I do harm to myself. If I love and respect you, I love and respect myself.’ I have finally begun to see that the wounds, like the Japanese art of kintsugi, have been filled with gold.
I hoped that there had to be something better besides loss, pain, and loneliness. I had experienced one side of the spectrum and had to see if the other side existed. The side of happiness and fulfillment.
Find an anchor, a connection. It can be a person in nature or a hoped-for future. Find a way to be of service. Realize that the world is still huge and full of beauty, and go out and explore that beauty.
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