Strength is an unexpected side effect of a challenging life. One is not inherently born with strength. It is earned, and comes at an astronomically high price, but the reward is so worth it.
Recently, I began to open up to someone new about my past. My past is riddled with situations that truly tested my strength and resiliency to continue on this journey of life. The person I show up as in this current iteration of life bears very few physical markers of my past, but if you could look inside, only for a brief second, it would reveal the lessons time has taught me.
I want to preface this blog post by acknowledging everyone has hardships and challenges in their lives and I am not discounting anything or anyone or trying to compare my past with anyone else’s. I also know some readers may have experienced similar or exactly the same challenges, so I apologize if I indirectly awaken any suppressed traumas. Thank you.
I knew I would have to be strong from a very young age. The family I was born into had its own unique challenges, which is not uncommon, however, I had to learn to take responsibility for myself much sooner than most people I encounter. I’ve picked up on cues from other’s when I open up about my childhood that I definitely didn’t have what is considered a “traditional upbringing.” I’ve come to terms with that, but I was not exposed to certain pieces of life at a young age that typically help build the foundation for a successful future. Fundamental needs were met, but as for individual time and attention, I was on my own. I was specially conditioned to understand that when a problem arose, I needed to find the resolution myself, instead of seeking guidance from someone older or wiser. I don’t like to generalize, so I will say there were critical moments where I knew I could depend on someone, however, I began to feel a trend that if my issue did not meet a particular threshold, then it was best to not bother anyone with it. This created it’s own issues, including but not limited to me having what is perceived as a “secretive” life, a sole dependency on myself without a true feeling that I could ask anyone else for help, and an empty space that I had to fill with my own compassion, empathy, and self love. It goes without saying, but you can imagine how many times I had to learn lessons to hard way, fail at things that most find easy, and truly push myself beyond any rational person’s comfort zone. The direct result was independence being prioritized so highly that I didn’t know how to ask for help, and a constant feeling like nothing was going to last and that I needed to always remain hyper vigilant with every aspect of my life. I was a walking ball of anxiety and was explicitly considered a control freak into my twenties.
Let’s step back a bit to a point where my strength was tested as an adolescent. From as early as I can remember, I was constantly reminded of how different I am/was. I’ve known I was gay my entire life. There was a time in the beginning where I didn’t know what to call it, but other people around me did. Picture this, being 6 years old in first grade and someone asking if I was gay. I don’t think at that age the malicious aspect had kicked in yet, but I was being told I was different at a point in my life where the concept of “different” was not solidified in my frontal lobe yet. My uncles had always made fun of me, as I was a little more feminine than their misogynistic mindsets could fathom. They would outright call me faggot or gay and laugh like they had done something impressive. I just remember thinking, what is it about me that they can’t figure out? Am I challenging them so greatly that they must resort to ignorant name calling, even though I am not even directly interacting with them?
Getting the ridicule around family was one thing, but when I would go out in the world, it was even worse. I feared for my life on a regular basis. Walking through the mall, just casually exploring stores, and people would shout slurs at me, completely unprovoked. I would literally be minding my own business, trying to find clothes, and people would yell “queer” “faggot” or some other derogatory statement at me. It made no sense to me, again, I was just trying to live my life and find my place in this world, and I was always reminded of how different I am. I was being told by people who meant absolutely nothing to me that I needed to hear their opinion. I didn’t ask for their opinion, rather, it was forced on me. That’s a level of hatred that I will never understand. Live and let live did not exist in my world. I was challenged to stay strong, walk with my head held high, even though I knew there were threats and it would just take the right moment for someone to take advantage of the opportunity to ruin my life. I was so blessed that no one ever hate crimed me, but there were times where the threat was there, and I knew I needed to escape and hide in order to keep my life. This was real life.
That’s always been my biggest issue with this world. I am just existing, minding my own business, doing the things that make me happy and feel so right in my soul, and yet others feel it’s their duty to call out differences and use derogatory slurs to attempt to belittle or threaten me. The amount of strength that came from being exposed to those situations taught me several things:
Family does not matter. If blood relatives were willing to be abusive and hateful to their own nephews, then they are completely useless to my future.
Bullying is a much bigger issue than I have bandwidth to ever attempt to understand. Why do you have so much free time that you are willing to waste it on someone who literally matters nothing to your existence. I have always found my mutual exclusivity to those who belittle me has absolutely nothing to do with me, but 100% to do with them.
I cannot allow my future, my existence, my freedom to be myself to be dictated by anyone. It has been such a difficult life, constantly criticized, always afraid of walking into and out of public spaces wondering if this will be the day someone has chosen to commit a hate crime. I did not choose this life, I did not choose to be this different, this outstanding, this threatening to the generally accepted version of human male. This is just what happened, and I hate that my whole life, I’ve been challenged to defend myself just for being unique, different, and as authentically individual as I possible can be, instead of trying to fit into someone else’s box(es).
Beyond the gay life struggle, life has been rather disrespectfully challenging. I maintain a positive, upbeat outlook on life, always focusing on positive vibes and the notion that anything is possible and people deserve the benefit of the doubt, but know now, that is where my strength is challenged the most. It does not come naturally to be positive and uplifting when you’ve been through the kind of personal life I’ve had to endure. People have shown me on too many occasions how not nice, not kind, not understanding, and willfully judgmental they are. I struggle with an illusion that everyone is accepting, hell, even at least tolerant of things that make us different, but I’ve come to realize that some character traits, some pieces of human nature are too difficult for some people to comprehend. Even though the resources are there to scientifically explain the differences, the willful ignorance is more important to them than treating people fairly and without judgment.
Mother Nature has proven she has the power to throw strategic curveballs at me(us) with some situations that have affected the planet as a whole. If we dive into the 2020 pandemic, there is a sense of compounded strength. That situation challenged me to the core. So many challenges, but lets go through just a few:
Staying alive. The simple idea that people were dying from COVID19 was so threatening that it made me wonder if I would survive. I was a generally healthy person at that point, but there was no way to truly know where it would go, how it would end, what level of damage it would do. Luckily, I made it through, but the strength it took to stay mentally and physically conditioned was a daily practice of endurance and stamina.
To Vaccinate or not. Ultimately, the company I worked for mandated that if I was going to continue to travel to clients, I would need to be vaccinated. That was a tough one for me. How could a corporation know what was in my best interest and set an expectation that if you want to continue to work, you will need to get this vaccine that hasn’t been fully tested over a long period of time. The internal fight over justifying that part was very difficult as I felt I didn’t have a choice, especially when I was getting so much negative feedback from anyone who felt it was not a good idea and that they’d never even consider getting the vaccine. The level of judgment that came along with it was so disrespectful.
People not believing it was real.
No social gatherings. I am an extroverted introvert, but even on my darkest days where I want to be completely alone, sharing a human experience can reignite my positive flame. Without the option to see people, having to quarantine in my home, really set me back. I had curated a really interesting life at the end of 2019 and into 2020, and I felt I was on a path to a really interesting future. When the planet shut down, my positive outlook was shattered, and I found a darkness that challenged me consistently and constantly. My inner strength was trying, but there were still days where I opted to stay in bed and avoid everything going on in the world.
The pandemic was a big enough test, but there were more items to come in 2020. Just as the signs of things getting back to normal began to shine, a devastating hurricane entered the gulf in August, headed straight for my life. I evacuated with my family, but what we came home to was truly life altering. The amount of complete and utter destruction left my spirit crushed and my soul was left asking the question, “am I supposed to want to keep living?” The challenges we faced once returning home were far worse than anyone could have anticipated.
My parents’ house was unlivable, so they, along with my sister and grandmother, moved into my house. My house was 970 square feet, two bedroom/two bath and not enough space for five humans to comfortably live. There were three holes in my roof, some siding had been ripped off, and water had obviously gotten in through the walls as the hurricane blew through. We patched the holes in the roof with tarps and had mattresses in the living room to accommodate everyone to at least have somewhere to sleep.
We didn’t have power for over a month, which meant we had a gas generator connected directly to the house. We would alternate the breaker box, the air conditioner could not run at the same time as the hot water heater, and other things were not able to pull the generator at the same time. We just had to wait for time to pass, for work to be done to rebuild the infrastructure to get power back.
There was debris literally everywhere. 30+ year old oak trees in the yard had been mutilated and some had been uprooted straight out of the ground. It was a disaster area. It was like a bomb had been dropped, but the culprit was Mother Nature. How do you hold Mother Nature accountable? It was the worst internal dilemma because it made no sense. Staying mentally healthy during that time was so incredibly difficult, not to mention my whole family was going through the same mental anguish with no real resolution in sight.
Food was an issue. Most buildings were also impacted, so grocery stores did not get back to business very quickly. We would have to drive up to two hours to restock food, and that was hoping the shelves actually had enough food for us to shop.
I still don’t know how I kept it together during that time. I was not mentally okay. I would meditate and call on my spirit guides to watch over me and my family, even though the heat was exhausting and there was literally nothing to do. Businesses were all closed waiting for repairs, so there was no shopping outlet to take my mind off of it all. These things were not shown on the national media. We were living like a third world country for over a month, and no one knows. I have told my story over and over and people just stare at me in awe with their mouths open, not realizing that this stuff ACTUALLY happens in the United States of America. My strength has been tested the most by Mother Nature by far, on such a monumental scale. I wanted to give in. I wanted to be weak. I wanted to cave and just let my life be over. I struggled so hard with reconciling what I could have done to deserve a hurricane ruining everything I had worked so hard for. Why did it happened? I couldn’t have done anything to avoid it, so I was left to her mercy. I didn’t know how to bounce back. I was broken.
Resiliency is a common theme in my life, and I didn’t ask for it. It lives in my central nervous system. It feeds on challenges and struggles and pushes me beyond what I believe I’m capable of. I never asked to be this strong. I had to evaluate what was left of my existence after the hurricane, and I packed my shit up and moved to Texas. That move had its own challenges and I was pushed to even higher levels of strength to make it through. Learning a new city, learning a new job, learning to live without my family next door, learning to live with a person, and then ultimately learning to live completely alone. I am still surprised and delighted by that experience, as I learned just how much I can tolerate, how to set boundaries, when to say “no,” and who I am.
Beginning the mental therapy journey in 2022 really sparked a deeper understanding of who I am and why I react the way I do to life experiences. I initially began therapy after a diagnosis of PTSD from the hurricane disaster in 2020. Trauma is very tricky and once I touched on one piece of my trauma, a whole slew of other traumas showed up wanting attention. Many different mental exercises were performed, including many months of EMDR therapy to retrain my brain. The largest challenge I faced with therapy is the 45 minute sessions. I have weekly sessions, and 45 minutes is never enough time to even begin to address a matter. As soon as something gets exposed it feels like it’s time to wrap up. I have learned many tools that keep me from having too many traumatic episodes, however, I was conditioned from an early age to be independent. Indirectly, anything that threatens my independence is a trauma trigger, because I’ve had to be so self sufficient that some small things can be perceived by my nervous system as a hostile takeover.
I always want to make sure I show gratitude for all the challenges in my life, big or small, because they have shaped me into this strong individual. The ultimate test of my strength is the constant reminder that I’m almost virtually alone in this world. There are very few people who have the capacity to stand up for me, to show unsolicited support, and to check in and ask “are you okay?” There are many days where I have to ask myself if I’m okay, and that’s not a problem. I’ve always been able to count on myself way more than most others in my life.
I do appreciate the people who show up on a regular basis to be part of my life, and I acknowledge I am responsible for pushing some people out of my life. I live in a mental space where intent is held in hard regard, so if a person intentionally brings positivity into my space, they get to stay. If a person is haphazard with energy and brings manic chaos too many times, I have to ask them to no longer be part of my life. I have had to make terribly difficult decisions with some people in my life who at one time mattered a lot, but growing apart is a fact of life. People either grow together or they grow apart.
In closing, I hope I shared some personal experiences that offer a bit more insight into how strong of a person I am, and what built that strength. I didn’t ask for it, but I can admit that I continue to grow through the challenges and my strength is finely tuned at this point. Many points in my life, I have wondered how my life would have been different had I not had to deal with such significant adversities in my past. Could I have still possessed this strength, but maybe it would have been manifested in a way that would have affected me or others in a more meaningful way, instead of me having to go dark so many times to eventually see the light again. This dimension does not allow for me to see the alternate outcomes, but perhaps it will all be exposed one day. My take on it all is, “if it can be this fucked up on this plane, I can only imagine the possibilities on other planes.”
