I’m from LA, I wasn’t asked to be born there, I’m not bragging, it just so happened that I was from there. I consider myself a Chicano with a loving family and a somewhat bright future but I’ve had to struggle with a lifelong depression. Up until I reached the age of 25 I dealt with my depression with alcohol then I was introduced to drugs. That took my depression to another level and I almost completely numbed myself because I felt that I was too ‘sensitive’ and/or felt too much (emotions) at one time. I wondered if everyone felt the same. Hip hop helped me understand myself a little more and like Lupe Fiasco ‘Hip Hop Saved my Life through its stories and characters that were closer to my everyday life than pop, or alternative music. Regardless of what I did to stop feeling sad I could not find a way to deal with those feelings until I was introduced to cocaine and then eventually meth. I’m not sure if it was all those times that I felt so close to death, not to take life for granted, that allowed me to be able to enhance the natural abilities and senses that I was born with. But the vibes that I could almost make see visible and the warmth and coldness of a person’s energy was not worth the trouble that I endured. This is not to say that I am not grateful for these abilities, I am just saying that I would have been happier if I never lived with so much misery. For a while the world was lonely and cold. People were distant and at times even heartless but some how I found a way to finish my Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and a Master’s degree in Latin American Studies while at the same time writing an MA thesis on ‘The Social Effects of Deportation and how post-9/11 rhetoric changed Immigration Discourse.’ So, I knew before anything happened that I was capable of accomplishing the goals that I set for myself. But one day everything changed.
Everything was a joke, nothing was taken seriously. Laughter is all I could hear. Everyone was hearing me but no one was listening. I waited patiently for the day that people were finally ready to listen to me but as time passed I grew colder and more resentful. In those last days, if that is what could be said, I remember that I had cried more tears than before. I did not know how to deal with my suppressed emotions that seemed to come out to the surface all of a sudden. There was a clear explanation for why this was happening but, in part, a lot of those repressed emotions were my own and I labeled them as demons. How can I describe the scene/situation that I was in. If you were a visitor, un-announced just passing by you might have thought of me as a jerkoff, literally, but for all intensive purposes in this scenario I must have seemed like a person who was mentally unstable and unable to take care of himself. At first glance this fucked up motherfucker might have caused you to be mentally and physically sick, since everyone is allowed in his private space and the world judges him in the worst ways you gave him no chance and proclaimed his guilt he even had a chance for real justice. Could this scenario play out in the real world? Imagine for a minute a world gone crazy and you, the crackhead trying to make sense of it. Would you be surprised if in the end the crackhead was the one that made the most sense? It might seem impossible and highly illogical but it happened and it is continuing to play out. I decided to write this story because, at the time, I wasn’t sure if I was going to be alive past tomorrow. My intentions were not to get anyone in trouble rather I started to write bits and pieces of the experience so as to be able to make connections between things that these people said to me and past scenarios. Over the years my memory has failed me and I find myself not even having access to my own absolvable thoughts. Patience was something that I learned through the years because before this whole experience happened I had little patience. Even now I find that my patience is limited but I always remember the times that patience was my biggest attribute.
In this highly illogical world where nothing makes sense I was the person that made the least sense because they always saw me as their enemy. Labeled an ‘Outcast Unforgiven’ because no one could understand how I saw the world yet I believed that all I ever did was try to stand up for myself from what I considered an intruder. I remember those first conversations with these people I remembered feeling as if I was connecting with people from another realm and I still remember asking myself ‘if I had gone crazy? At the time I was a drug addict with a depression that seemed to be too much for me. I could not maintain composure without being buzzed, high, or ‘on one.’ Like every addiction I went through different stages and each stage left a different impression on me and of course those people around me. I thought this highly secretive group of individuals was everything from a governmental organization, the police, social workers, cults, and/or a political organization. For my safety I never really wanted to known to much because I really got frightened those first altercations with them. Was I that bad of a person 11 years ago that got me stuck in a real the whole time with people I didn’t like? I remember when a close friend came by one time and I couldn’t remember the reason that ‘they’ hated me. At that point, instead of fighting them I tried more and more to understand their ways but I didn’t know that it was too late.
’Everybody hated me yet everyone wanted to talk to me. Again, imagine having no privacy, living in a world so concerned with your trivial circumstance that as the days past by more and more people came in and as people came by so did any resemblance of sanity. My perspective is unique and is very different from those that actually belong to this group of people because I was on the outside looking in. What would you do If the act that got you in trouble was embarrassing? Would you continue to do it? Or would you stop? What if the people asking you to stop had an immense amount of power? I found out through out the years that almost every single person never stood up to these people and I always wondered why? As if I was the last person with heart. How dare I think of myself as the only person with compassion left. After many years in this place with the same messed up situation I learned that people have families, friends, loved ones, goals, dreams, and aspirations and if presented with an impossible obstacle most people in contemporary society chose to obey and become part of the bigger group instead of going against the will of the higher power who demanded such respect. My mind could only see that people seemed to live in fear which was not too far off from what I was experienced but their experienced must of differed from mines in the sense that they had the ability to close the doors that allowed people to enter their space. On the other hand, I did not have the, often taken for granted, luxury of privacy. As the years went by I was able to understand why people did the awful things that they did to me and my family. I say this with a light heart that both literally and figuratively led me down the road that I took. How could one person seem to perverse yet be able to make sense out of the grimiest situation that could possibly happen to one person. If it wasn’t for my spiritualism and those previous life lessons that I had learned I don’t think that I would of made it this far. But I digress, it is through assimilation that a culture was born that reminded me of old world customs and as one more person was integrated into this cultish organization the more and more they gained power. I recognized the power that they had but for the life of me and I can not explain to people who came along my journey why I stayed doing what got me in trouble. There was laughter, pain, sorrow, and rare happy moments. I wasn’t a criminal, I just did not appreciate someone coming into my private space and trying to talk to me without permission and at the same time talk about me and what made me a ‘messed up’ person’ to the rest of society…..to be continued.
