Hi! I’m back!

Are you guys still around?

This past year, I took a break from the newsletter. It wasn’t intentional. Sometimes it’s just hard to write during a genocide and ICE raids on the news every single day. And at other times, it feels like writing is one of the best things I can do to think and feel my way through this messy, annihilistic world. I am officially back to the writing part of it all.

At the end of November, I was in a fender bender. I was previously involved in a much worse car accident in 2017, but this is the first time an accident was my fault. Even though it turned out to be more of an inconvenience for all involved than a serious accident, I still left the scene feeling horrible. As the days passed after the accident, I kept feeling like I shouldn’t enjoy anything and like I should spend all of my time feeling badly about my carelessness. It was then that I realized that when I make mistakes, I tend to internalize them all as a moral failure rather than judging each individually and reacting accordingly. Like so many other flaws of my psychology, I traced this one back to being an immigrant kid plagued by the overwhelming need to always be perfect. Partly because of family dynamics and partly because growing up undocumented, there are certain mistakes you can’t afford to make because they can mean deportation.

All my life I waited for my movie moment that would just turn my whole life around, in many ways this fender was that. I had to sit with myself and really work through those feelings of shame. Is it bad to be careless while driving even for a second? Absolutely! Does it make me a horrible person? No. It is easy to write it now, but it took a lot for me to be able to say, “No, I am not a horrible person.” What I understand now with new profoundness is that I might be a flawed person, but not a horrible person. I have always been willing to believe the worst things about myself and for the first time in a long time, I am working on recognizing the better things I know about myself. (I still feel guilty about the fact that something good came of the accident for me and I am sitting with that, we are taking small steps!)

The accident also happened close to my birthday. In general, I haven’t enjoyed celebrating my birthday in a long time, but since moving here, I like it even less since the people I wish I could celebrate with aren’t close by. Birthdays also tend to lend themselves to depressing self-introspection. Usually, every year I think about how much I should have accomplished but haven’t. But this past year was, thankfully, a little different. Newly armed with the knowledge of why I punish myself, I decided to free myself instead. It has been hard work these past 6 months, but lately I have been noticing how much more zen and happy I am. I don’t have it all figured out yet, but it feels like I am finally starting to live the life I imagined for myself when I decided to leave NY and move to Querétaro five years ago.

Since then, I signed up for a year-long novel writing class that started this past March. This past month, my cohort started Zoom writing sessions on Sunday mornings and it has quickly become one of my favorite weekend activities. I also seem to have moved past my need for perfection while writing. I say things like, “it doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to get done!” or, “ I can clean later, I should read and/or write now because I know the cleaning will get done eventually.” During writing prompts I don’t overthink whether I am writing a good idea, I just write away.

I also have an easier time working out. Instead of creating unsustainable goals that eventually become too much to keep up with, I am able to do a 15-minute workout instead of a 30-45 minute one because something is better than nothing. This may all sound logical, but this is absolutely bonkers to me. For most of my life, I would sabotage myself by trying to mentally prepare myself to do a 1-hour workout only to not do it at all because the timing throughout the day was never perfect. Now I find myself doing a second 15-minute workout because it turns out, I am not always as tired as I think I am.

I still have my days when I overthink things or when I really am too tired to write or work out, but I no longer feel like the day was a failure or a waste because I didn’t get to it. If I don’t read, write, or workout for a few days, I have an easier time restarting my routine. At 36, I am finally learning the lessons my amazing mentors were trying to teach me when I was 21. Of course I wish I had learned this earlier, but my new zen self understands life is what it is.

A few weeks ago, someone asked me what I would have done differently during my move to Mexico and I sat with the thought that I wouldn’t have done anything differently. And while I wish the past ten years hadn’t been as full of depression, anxiety, and shame as they’ve been, the truth is that I did the best I could do with the energy, knowledge, and survival instincts I had at the time. The best thing I can do now is to not let those last years weigh me down anymore. I am finally ready to look forward and put in the work to make the next ten years something I will one day look back on fondly rather than full of coulda woulda shouldas. How is that for zen?