Quien Nos Manda: An Autobiography by Itzhak and Gen
This week I wanted to switch things up and have Itzhak chime in on something we talk about a lot during our 3–4 hour FaceTime calls after work every day: our journeys. More specifically, the ways in which we were raised and the crash into reality and adulthood we’ve both had over the last couple of months. The good thing about this is that it’s the same experience in different words: Itzhak and I think very alike, react to things in the same way, and care a whole lot more about things than we care to admit. I could get into how great it is to have someone like this, and how everyone deserves to find their Itzhak, but that would require a display of emotion far too mushy for this post.
We thought a lot about how to structure this, and this is where we ended up:
How do you feel your childhood and the way you were raised impacted the way you carry yourself and your relationships now?
Itzhak: Before going into the question, I wanted to thank you for inviting me onto your blog and for giving me a space to share my opinion and experiences. I’ve never been good at opening up about my feelings, but you’re in luck! I started to use journaling as a coping mechanism to get me through a lot of aspects of my life that didn’t turn out the way I wanted them to.
Genesis: No SUPER lucky.
Itzhak: I was raised by the best mom: she’s my favorite person in the world, and I owe her everything I am today. My mom raised me to be compassionate, loving, caring, responsible, and respectful. I can’t point out a specific thing she did that traumatized me, and I know a lot of people can’t say the same.
But that doesn’t mean it didn’t affect who I ultimately became. I grew up in a small town in Colombia, with my mom and my sisters. We had to work hard to make ends meet because the “man of the house” was non-existent. We had no choice but to give it our all to make a small convenience store work. Long hours, a small profit, but it was our only option. Seeing a single mother struggle caused me to be hard on myself for as long as I can remember. “I need to help my mom as much as I can, I need to take care of my sister, I need to get the best grades…” I just felt like I didn’t have the luxury to be a careless kid.
All this pressure helped me get to where I am today, but also has made me very unhappy at times and incapable of making changes for fear of failure. This idea of the perfect life that I’ve been working to provide for myself and my family has given me so much stress for the past 10 years, and has never allowed me to understand who I am and what matters to me. I recently learned that the perfect life is not money, it’s feeling fulfilled. My childhood created this wall that has kept me from achieving what I really want out of life. I don’t feel like I have a safety net to fall onto if I take risks to achieve happiness. This is an internal struggle I have been fighting in the past four months. It’s exhausting. But I’m glad I realized this when I’m only 23 and still have enough time to make things right.
In terms of relationships, I’ve always felt alone or that nobody understands the pressure I’m under to make it to the other side. I have a hard time being vulnerable. I had to be strong to get through high school not knowing English, helping my family figure shit out in a new country, leaving my comfort zone in Miami to chase a career. All these things closed me up so much, just for the sake of survival, that being my true self in a relationship has been difficult. I learned the hard way that the only way to make it work is to be vulnerable, but I tell myself that it is okay that I lost someone that meant the world to me. I was doing the best with what I had at the time, and we learn from making mistakes. One day I’ll meet someone that gives me enough time and confidence to bring those walls down so we can build a relationship together.
Genesis: My parents also had a small business, and it became my Mom’s responsibility in 2013 when it burned down and my Dad tapped out. She opened it back up in 2014, but before it officially became hers, we were living off very little and depended on my Dad for a lot. My Mom basically put me through middle and high school (Senior year is EXPENSIVE at Doral Academy) on her own. She sold it around this time last year because she was getting too old to handle everything on her own, but the struggle stays with you. I’m 200% confident that if we hadn’t been first-generation and hadn’t gotten a full ride to UF, neither of us would’ve been able to afford college.
I feel like we had to grow up a lot faster than other people. We had to figure out college on our own, and had to learn to do everything a lot faster than other people for the sake of helping our moms. Luckily, living in Miami, there often wasn’t a language barrier. But when it came to the smaller things — translating letters from the bank, switching our addresses more times than I can count with USPS, and filling out FAFSA, to name a few — I had to do it on my own. It made it both easier and harder to leave home: by the time college rolled around, I had more or less figured out how to function as an adult, but I knew I was leaving behind a parent that depended on me for a lot.
Re: relationships. I learned to love from my mom, which has been a double-edged sword. My mom is the very definition of the phrase “setting yourself on fire to keep other people warm.” Watching her give me everything she had, even on days when she might not have had it, taught me to love the same way: giving 100%. When I’m happy, I’m really happy. But when there’s a cut, it feels like a crater. At some point I started to feel like that was the only way to love — that if I didn’t consistently bust my ass to give someone everything I had, it wouldn’t be enough. Like you, I put a lot of pressure on myself to keep other people happy, and at some point along the way forgot to make myself happy.
How and when did you realize you had depression and anxiety, and how has it impacted your lives? How do you get through the average panic attack?
Itzhak: As a Latino raised in Colombia, I was taught to believe that mental health was not a thing. Saying the word depression was worse than saying that you did not believe in Jesus, which says a lot because Colombia is very Catholic. Back then, if you ever felt sad, the reaction from everyone around was “get up, quit playing dumb, and keep going.” There was no time to allow yourself to be vulnerable or to process your feelings. I never got to process the fact that my dad lived in a different continent or that I was a gay kid being bullied at school, but I’m happy to see that mental health is becoming less of a taboo in Latin America. I see family members and friends take it more seriously now.
I realized I had depression and anxiety when I started to process what I had bottled in. I didn’t let myself feel anything until August of this year. I felt like my life fell apart: I was completely alone in a new state, away from my family, friends, and boyfriend at the time. Everything I knew was back in Florida, and I’m working a job that doesn’t give me the slightest sense of fulfillment even though it’s supposed to. It’s moments like this when you’re forced to take a look within to figure out what’s not working. I had to rethink the way I processed my feelings and the way I treated everyone around me. I had to finally be true to myself to discover what matters to me and what makes me happy. I had to re-think my life plans and what I wanted out of a career. I had to start thinking about what my purpose in life is. These are really complicated topics to think about and to be honest I’m completely clueless. I realized that the answers to all of these questions I should have been working on throughout my life, but sadly I never did. I feel lost and have no idea where to start. But knowing that a problem exists is the first step.
I constantly get panic attacks while trying to answer these questions. Feeling lost and not being able to get answers skyrockets my anxiety. I get through them is by FaceTiming my mom, my niece or my best friends. I also try to go on walks or listen to my favorite music. When it gets too intense I have some Valerian pills (not sponsored).
Genesis: Estas…COMICO.
Genesis: This is actually something I talk to my Mom a lot about, the fact that mental health is just not a concept a lot of Hispanics acknowledge. I was honestly really lucky having a Mom that was willing to listen and understand.
I remember really early on, at about 14 or 15, I would stay up pretty late unable to sleep and feeling like I was gasping for air. I had some family issues going on at the time, and my mom got me a therapist, which eventually led to me coming out. The feeling fizzled (I wrote it off as me needing to come out), but I realize now that these were early signs of what would later turn into anxiety, and situational depression. My panic attacks didn’t start until May of last year, and then didn’t really become noticeable — and unbearable — until around January, which made me wary to put a label on it, since it wasn’t constant. I didn’t realize what was going on until I was pretty much drowning. From one day to the next, my brain started moving at about 100 mph, and didn’t really slow down until about a month later. I had all the textbook symptoms of both anxiety and depression: loss of appetite, lack of will to do literally anything other than lay in bed, insomnia, unwillingness to attend social events, increased heart rate. You name it, I had it. You would think as a Psychology major I would have caught it earlier, but I was too busy trying to keep myself alive to play my own doctor.
I finally got on medication, and then went through a period of being on and off of them until I finally accepted it was something I was just going to have to live with for the rest of my life. There are things that trigger my situational depression, but luckily now that I know about it, I can plan ahead for it. I try my best to avoid caffeine, because it makes me jittery and gives the same effects of a panic attack. They’ve become a lot less frequent since moving here, and whenever I feel like I’m about to lose control I breathe it out and take one of my prescribed Xanax pills as a last resort. It’s really become a matter of getting good at talking myself down. It impacts just about every aspect of your life, negatively if you let it. But I’ve learned to accept it as a part of my story, and a part of who I am.
How have things changed over the last year, from living together in an apartment in Gainesville to living in different time zones?
Genesis: I’ll take this one. I don’t think the dynamic has changed. If anything, we’re closer. I think it really helps to have another person — even if he’s in another state — that really just gets it. We’re both going through career changes, so it’s great to be able to pick up the phone and just say “hey, I’m scared today.” Luckily neither of us is really falling apart at the same exact time, so the other person can step up and be the strong one for a bit. It’s hard to watch your best friend go through that, but I feel like I’m two steps ahead of him when it comes to going through specific experiences. What he’s going through right now I went through five years ago. We constantly remind each other that even though it definitely feels like it, everything is not the end of the world. We’re 23.
On a personal level, I’m more of an open book now. I’m more honest with myself and with others. I’m learning to be more patient with myself and to be realistic about what I am and am not ready for. TLDR: I know better.
If you had to do the last five years all over again, what would you do differently?
Genesis: This is a hard one because I feel like the last five years have really made me who I am, so I’m not sure I would really change anything. If anything, I wish I had taken a second to “smell the roses” in a sense and appreciate the happiness I had around me for most of undergrad. I feel like I had ants in my pants for a while there. I couldn’t sit still because I was afraid I was missing a better opportunity somewhere else, a better chance to make my mom proud, a better chance at happiness. Everything else became collateral damage, even if it was other people. I’d tell myself to graduate in 2019, apply for full-time jobs and stick to that for a while. To get out of the program I was in earlier and quit dragging my feet. Above all else, to choose myself more often.
Itzhak: I would have not taken undergrad for granted. It’s the only time of our lives that we get to just focus on learning about who we are and start building the basis of our career. I skipped the time where I had to sit down to think about what it was that I wanted out of a career. I was focused on finishing a major I chose without allowing myself to explore other areas or to take a break to be able to reconsider if what I was working towards was what I really wanted. It is so messed up that we drown ourselves trying to be involved in organizations, trying to complete as many impressive internships as we can, trying to take the max amount of credits allowed, just because that is the expectation and what makes us stand out. Now that I graduated, I just wonder, was all that stress to compete with my classmates worth it? Did I really need to move to Kentucky and Tennessee to complete internships just to have a lengthier resume? Did I really need to move across the country just to work for a company that apparently has some prestige?
If I could re-do the last five tears, I would enjoy my time at UF. I would have explored other majors that aligned more with my personality, I would have volunteered more, I wouldn’t have spent so much time chasing internships, and I would have not moved across the country away from my loved ones. But I guess everything happens for a reason and we learn from mistakes, so I am glad my whole life is just a learning experience. But also, I’m grateful for all the memories and the amazing people I met. I became so passionate about trying to leave the world a better place and I would not be the person I am today if it wasn’t for the amazing Gators that crossed my path.
