When Being You Is Nothing But A Dream

It all feels like a dream when you see how far you are from being the person you want to be.
Reality confronts you in a second, and then you're shocked! You're numb and try to escape from yourself for the truth is to hard to bear.

I've been living too many years trying to be a truthful person to myself and my convictions... and here I am, slave of what happens around me when my motto used to be "circumstances shouldn't control you, you control the circumstances."

I'm failing, and miserably I've got to admit.

I was on my feet reading while the packed bus, screeching all the way, tried to take all the commoners to San José. My concentration was surprisingly good for a Monday morning, specially after a Sunday of sleep deprivation and usual lack of motivation. The world outside kinda blurred for a while, and I was the happiest person living vicariously through the life of Stephen Dedalus when a line of the book stroke me like lightning.

He felt small and weak. When would he be like the fellows in poetry and rhetoric? They had big voices and big boots and they studied trigonometry.

I realized that was my portrait more than the one of the young man as an artist. I was that kid, feeble and afraid with big dreams nonetheless, wanting to have a voice on his own like those authors you read throughout your entire life. I knew I was able to. I knew I could achieve something with my writing, but I was keeping it to myself. I wanted to wear the big boots, but I was afraid they ended up being too tight. The main problem is that I had been the kid for a little bit too long, for enough time to feel that I was shrinking instead of growing. Trigonometry meant the complexity of the world, and I didn't want any of that. I was becoming a bonsai instead of a tree. I needed to bear fruit while I still could.

Now, keeping the tree conceit, I'm aware that I'm not barren. I just feel like I should have been producing for some seasons already. I don't think I'm being blinded by the ideal self; I just want to stop self-boicoting and minimizing my potential.

Just a thought. I don't want to be the shadow of myself, the echo of my voice, a dream of the person I can definitely become.

Ghetto. The Ugly Face.

Add one more notch to my love-hate relationships in life. I really dislike my neighborhood. There I said it, not that it has been a secret for anybody when they naturally ask me where I live. I always spit it with poison, sarcasm, or black humor. The name can't come out of my mouth naturally. "Hatillo" I say waiting for the reaction in the other person's face. In many cases, that has been the end of the conversation.

Facts. My parents traded natural paradise in the north of the country for a sewer in the south of the capital of Costa Rica. In the search for a better life (which only meant more money, and in that we succeeded,) we arrived here ten years ago. In theory, this is the only culture shock I haven't been able to overcome. I came from living surrounded by protective, polite people to a town where you listen the unthinkable coming out of the students of elementary school and where you could be robbed or bullied anywhere. The scenery of greenery was replaced by cement, iron, and tin; the sound of the rain isolating the house from the world was totally displaced by the concert of car alarms, police sirens, street fights, and shootings after midnight; the scent of the dew in the grass totally is gone, and the stench of dog poop and uncollected trash float in the air instead. In this place, you can wake up to discover that a drug addict mounted a cardboard shelter in front of your house. In here, the kids can play in a newly made playground for a week before graffiti of dicks start appearing in the slides. The houses, more than built together, look as if they had been built by an asphyxiating artist trying to make an statement. Fart and your neighbor will know. In here, you get used to the cars passing with their stereos playing reggaetton as loud as they can. You see shirtless guys with baggy pants all the time during the day and a catwalk of hoodies at night. You take a walk and see girls wearing shorts just one centimeter longer to be classified as underwear. You see lots of make up with long earrings in moody faces. You see this boys and girls flirting and fighting openly, starting their cars, roaring their engines, and getting lost for the rest of the night. You see the fat laddies in sandals and old fashioned attires running errands during the day. You see their fat husbands drinking in front of the liquor store and making jokes to the drug addicts. You see the latter staggering, holding their pants in many cases, covered by smog, dirt, and smell of pee. This is a place nobody should live in. This is where I'm bringing the volunteer that is taking my place when I'll be in London. This is where I've lived almost 10 years now.

My friend Vlad calls it the ghetto. I stand in the bridge for peasants in the highway, look over the roofs crowded with clothing drying on cables, wires located in all directions and t.v. antennas eaten by rust and I think the name fits the neighborhood well. Had we a wall built around the town and some snow falling, I swear the image would resemble those scenes of the Warsaw Ghetto. Still, this is the place where I live. This is where I will return when the experience in London is over. This is an ugly face of life.

Some things I learned about myself this last week.

I rarely blog about positive experiences, but I need to do it today. Most of what I have to talk about lately is people. I work with humans, I love interacting with them, and, as a socialite and an aspiring novelist, my whole life has a reason to be because of people. However, from time to time, I allow myself to detach from them and discover what is my identity apart from people. International Week at my volunteer association gave me that opportunity. Although I was surrounded by people all the time, manual tasks like painting a tall cardboard Big Ben gave me some time to think. The events inside and outside international week that also happened this week allowed me to have a mirror in front of me all the time -- it had been years since the last time I tried to analyze myself. And boy, have I changed over time.
These are things I found out about myself:

-I can still work under somebody's lead. I thought I was a rebel, but it turns out I can still admire someone enough to follow him. All I need is leader that cares about his collaborators and that is not afraid of being a visionary. Thanks James for the lesson.
-I'm definitely not mainstream. I knew I was unconventional in many of my ways, but lately I see that I keep doing almost everything in a very sui generis manner. This excites me because I always wanted to be effortlessly eccentric, but it surely worries me because I don't think there's going back.
-I can still be so touched and moved by somebody's story that I can keep crying inside of me for some time after the telling is over. I mean, I kept asking myself what I had done to deserve earning somebody's trust. When I think about it, I still don't understand it, but I'm very grateful that somebody saw a trustworthy person in me.
-I need a purpose to keep moving on. I need to be doing something. I have a desperate need of transcending.
- I haven't quite learned my limits. Sometimes I just live feeling immortal, and there's when the chaos start. Feeling in the top of the world also means that if you lose your balance, it is a very long way to the bottom.

I'm glad I can still work in my humanity. What is to change in the following years? I just can't wait to see my evolution.

Perfect people? pff, what's that?

I met a guy, and when I asked him online the next day what he was doing, he replied in the most casual tone:
"I'm here in the computer with my cat, with the t.v. on, and without paying attention to what's on the screen. I know, bad habit."
He had bad habits. That was enough for me to know he was someone worth meeting.

Some days before, my friend Felix had asked me while we were walking in the aisles of the gold museum what my impression of him and our circle of friends was. I thought that I was unable to do so with my friends and was tempted to reply that I do not think about it, but when I came home and thought it over, I realized I do have a profile for every person.
I think about people and characters in a sort of non conventional way. I first list all the reasons why I could dislike them: bad habits, questionable behavior, interaction problems, quirks, etc. The second step would be enumerating all the reasons that I have for liking this person: energy, sparkling personality, cleverness. If the positive outshines the negative, who cares about their defects anymore? The greatest part of many people that I've known is that their positive assets are such that make the bad things about them even look attractive. Kids usually like impeccable characters like superman, who hasn't ever killed a bug. We critical adults prefer people with a little dirt in their nails.

A way of saying someone that I like him or her for me, as atypical as it sounds, could be like:
"You're loud, you rarely filter what you think and say whatever comes to your mind, you find way too many excuses for everything, but you know what? you have a beautiful smile, your sense of humor is terrific and you are good bringing people together." --That's an actual description I have for a friend of mine.

At the end, Felix should not care that much about my judgment. I probably listed the little things I might not cope with and took a look at the remaining goodness to shut them down. The outcome it's a little obvious: I unquestionably like this group of people. I assume they too have a list of the reasons of why they wouldn't like me, but I appreciate their efforts for doing the same that I do and putting the bad things behind.

Real people. That's what I think they are.