Destroying my Reality since 1999 - Part One

Sometimes your reality is shattered by an external force, other times by your own will.

A lot of changes have been developing in my life. It’s only been about six years since I came out and began transitioning. It’s only been eleven years since I paid the price to claim my freedom of mind, spirit and instinct. It has been over a decade since I buried some very important people to me. It’s been twenty-seven years since I began my evolutionary arc. I like to describe it as, Destroying my Reality since 1999.

There is too much to retell for this platform. I’d rather put it all into a book. I’ve been asked often throughout my life to write a book, and it is only until my forties where I have seriously considered it. Rightly so, I understand my past a lot better. The guilt I used to afflict myself with has been worked through. The anxiety I have carried for the majority of life still sits in my belly, but I am aware of it now. My body’s movements, and the way I breathe makes more sense. It doesn’t eliminate it, but I somehow manage peace within the chaos. Until I write a book, here are the concise tellings.

Destroying realities takes time, and lots of crying, especially when your reality is emotionally violent

I remember being a boy. I remember what it’s like. Ignorant and testosterone driven, natural hallmarks. Navigating life in my mid to late teens was an interesting transition of it’s own. I wasn’t even aware of what gender was yet, my mind was still youthful and shaped by others. What I was aware of was my looks, my apparent flaws in others eyes, my stature―easy to underestimate, but nonetheless prone to bullies. I was also very aware of constant danger.

Those years marked a period in the nineties where learning social cues was literally life or death. You ever try to navigate nineties Southern California hood-life as a teenager from a very small town?

It’s an autist’s social nightmare.

The nineties in my town was a hot bed of violence. The gangs were old, they were showing their age, and the last remnants of the OGs were still active. My generation were the next ones, the baby ganstas as Gangster Rap called it. To this day it is strange to encounter someone that did not experience this part of Southern California in the nineties. I experienced it within my first year of living here. I saw it. I heard it. I even felt it.

Days of depression and crying with a tough exterior were common occurrences for me. I wasn’t like them, the boys―the men that wanted me to adopt their ways.

Please guys, I only carry a knife on my hip because I’m indigenous! I use it as a tool not really a weapon. Please guys, I like wearing boots, not Nike Cortez, I like frolicking in the thick and the wilderness. Guys! I don’t want to jump anyone. Guys! Vatos! Ese!

At some point, after getting in trouble many times with both the school’s administration and with law enforcement I knew something had to change. I once spoke with an officer as he reviewed my school records. He was trying to figure out how I’d been in so much trouble and yet maintained good grades. The detective looked at me, then looked back down at the photos of evidence. This time they had busted me tagging the new clique. Last time it was for possession of controlled substance. In the future still, I would also get blamed for―as the officer put it “attempted murder.” That’s right. Little ol’ me. A hardened criminal.

Not really. It just looked that way on paper. This officer knew I was not fitting the profile. My grades, my well spoken demeanor, my sharpness, none of it spoke to him as “criminal.” After all, he asked me if I had hobbies. I said, music production.

They let me off with a warning.

I cried in private often, I didn’t want to be tough. I didn’t want to be seen as a criminal, my grandma didn’t raise me this way. She taught me manners, she taught me respect and hard work. So I began to slowly drift away from those friends. I started lifting weights more and then became friends with an unlikely person. A nerdy football jock, if you can even imagine that. The reality I was in, began to show stress. My life was at odds with who I really was.

It was 1999, the world may possibly end, let’s focus on music. Video games. My new jock friend slash closeted nerd.

Sometimes friendships bloom so deep that they change your trajectory and then they’re gone

It was a June. I was already married with two sons and one on the way. I was just beginning to figure out marriage, parenthood, and adulting. My nerdy jock friend would send me letters to keep in touch. I enjoyed those letters. His terrible grammar and handwriting, it made me smile. Somewhere thousands of miles away my friend was still there. He comes through in the form of scribbled out misspellings and water dried paper edges. He blamed his “shitty flashlight” and the damn rain leaking into his “shitty tent.” He was in the army now so it was all “military grade.”

I had started a family at a very young age, and he had gone to the military after we graduated high school. I still remember the day he broke the news to me. After all, he had told me he was going to be a cop or a fireman, not a soldier.

We were standing on the front lawn of my parent’s home. We were a little shitfaced. Tequila. White Sauza. I think. The moon was out. We’re waiting for his dad to come pick him up. We spent the evening drinking and smoking Black & Milds in the garage that had by then become my defacto budget music studio.

My friend leans in, he looked serious, I listened:

So I decided I am going to enlist.

―What! Why?!

It will help me get into a career as a cop easier

I remember not really supporting him, in retrospect I felt bad. I wanted him to change his mind. I cried. I hugged him, I told him I loved him for the first time ever. He looked at me in complete surprise to my reaction. He gave me a big hug. He told me he loved me too. He looked at me, put his hand on my shoulder and said, “this is real, this right here, this is it.” He reassured me, our friendship was something real. We wept.

The moonlight, the weepy eyes, the closeness must have looked unusual to my friend’s dad. By then he had already pulled up, we hadn’t noticed.

When you fags decide you’re done I’m here!

We laugh. Nothing like sweet nineties homophobia to lighten the mood.

__It was June.

I was with my dad and brother at a dog show. We were watching a pitbull drag heavy weights across the park lawn. Their coats so shiny, their muscles so tight and toned. The chains tethered to the weights jangled.

It was June. An unusual phone call on an old Motorola. My dad tells us we gotta go now, quickly. We’re meeting up with family at my home? Why?

I can see my dad struggling. He is not a man of words. He is a man of action, and just like that as he’s driving us, he looks over to me and tells me my friend Lewis is gone. The ride home took decades. My reality devastated.

I learned about divination, and I practiced lucid dreaming because I wanted to see your face so bad

It’s still hard, I wont lie. Even writing that last paragraph hurt. I still miss him. I still miss having a friend like him. I still love him. I cried so hard in my living room. The details were vague. The military tends to do that.

It would be an understatement to say I sank into depression. It broke my world. Reality was staring at me through the cracks of my life. Cracks in my psyche.

I tried to drink it away, but that caused so many problems very quickly for me as you can imagine. I tried sleeping it away, but every single moment of sleep would be filled with dreams. Every single one of them, he was there but I never could see his face.

I often dreamed I was chasing him, or trying to find him. One dream I still remember vividly. It was a dream where I finally found him, and this time he didn’t slip my grasp. He stood there long enough for me to ask him where he’s been.

I could feel myself crying in my sleep. I could feel it. Lucid dreaming was working, but is it supposed to hurt this much?

He tells me, I am so sorry. I have been alive this whole time, but I was on a top-secret assignment, I couldn’t tell you. I’m okay, I’m alive, I’m coming home soon.

I started crying out loud, I was happy, overwhelmed by the information but excited to tell others.

I wake up.

I take a moment. The small light I felt is quickly engulfed in darkness. My spouse, confused, attempting to comfort me. She knew what my dream was about.

By this time, I had already begun writing poetry again. Most of it was train of thought and cathartic. I wrote them as “keys” that would eventually become a layout of writings that would document my emotional and spiritual state during this time. I am looking at the archive as I write this, over twenty years later it is humbling to see my growth since then. The deep pain is still hard to read through. Here is a snippet of [key 5]:

The following month in October after writing [key 5], my son was born who we named after my friend Lewis. His parents gave us the blessing to do so. This reality shattered and tested me. It exposed me and forced me to stand up so I could take care of my family. I realized no matter how sad I was, it would not change anything by holding onto it, it would only harm me and my family. I eventually broke out of the cycle as I found better ways to cope with my grief. I joined a cult.

If you enjoyed reading this, please like and share. I will be working on Part Two this week