Thinker. Dreamer. Lover

No man is an islan entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.

John Donne, 1624

I feel as though I am an island alone in the vast ocean of sea. I feel as though I’ve been abandoned in the desert to try and navigate across this barren land alone facing all the obstacles that such a natural phenomenon can devise.

We are not meant to be alone as human beings. We are individual but we are born into family, society and country. Some of us have had the luck of being born into a wonderful family; to be integrated into our society; to feel a belonging to our country.

Others, like myself, have had less fortune. We become either pillars of strength, learning to withstand of all the challenges and difficulties of life on our own; or we fall in the face of such overwhelming adversity which we are humanely not meant to suffer on our own.

Personally, I don’t know why I developed such inner strength. I think it is intrinsic to my very being. My godmother tells the story of my birth which was a tumultuous and scary time for my mother. I was born in Guatemala in the late 1970’s and as my mother lay in the hospital ready to give birth, the doctor’s discovered that I had managed to get her umbilical cord wrapped around my neck. Essentially, I could suffocate to death before even breathing life. In that time, in that place modern medicine did not exist and could not detect the precarious nature of the situation in time. So whilst my mother entered labor and reported to the hospital on the morning of the 28th June, I was not born until the subsequent evening on the 29th of June. That means I spent more than 24 hours being nearly strangled before they performed an emergency C-section.

My godmother says Eres una luchadora, siempre lo has sido. 

I’ve carried this sense of strength with me my entire life, even saving myself from premature death by suicide at age 22. Even though I am strong, I am still vulnerable; I am still human and I still need to feel that I am cared for.

Yet that is the cruel and yet accurate dichotomy into which my life has entered. The unwonted truth to which I must reconcile myself and that is: when you are a strong individual, when you have had to develop a tough exterior to protect yourself from life, the world and those humans around you are incapable of seeing who you truly are on the inside. They are left only with the impression that you are completely capable of taking care of yourself, and they leave you alone.

This is the great travesty that comes with being not weak, but strong. That although I am capable on my own, I seek and crave the acceptance and care of others. I wish that I could be part of my family, belong to a society and have a sense of identity that comes with a greater group. Conversely, because I do not publicly or openly manifest myself as needing care, neither family nor society nor country ever sees my need or perhaps by the time they do they cannot believe it to be real.

I’ve spent so much of my time developing such a persona, that I have left myself with nobody but myself. I have very little access to my family whom I’ve left geographically at a distance; I have faded and distance friendships with few people who have actually cared to know me for someone deeper than the hard shell on the outside;  I have separated myself from any national affiliation and consequently and significantly void a sense of belonging to anybody other than self. No man is island, but I am at best an isthmus. Connected to humanity by own condition of life, surrounded by deep dark waters that surround me to exile from others. Nobody dare traverse the murky waters toward me, the firm mass of existence that sits amidst and endures on uninhabited.