To My Favorite Skate Boarder:

Dear Dude,

I've never told this to anyone really, but things being how they are, maybe its time...

I've never tried to kill myself.  

Once in my life, though, I tried to make myself go insane...

About 5 or 6 years ago, I don't remember exactly when, I ate an 1/8th of Mushrooms.  For the second night in a  row.  I was working this crappy job, and my Boss at the time made an investment in Mushrooms -- a recession proof stock, really.  I was doing a good job at work around that time and I would frequently get tipped in 1/8th's of Mushrooms.  Back then, I couldn't believe how lucky I was but looking back on it now, it was one of the most dangerous and self destructive periods of my life.

As I have mentioned before, my Mother and I had a ton of issues.  The biggest of which, which you may or may not have heard about before, was when she confessed to me that she had been lying to me my whole life about who my father was.  I did not know how to handle that information.  Any sense of who I was, or what I was supposed to do with my life was gone.  

I had dropped out of college.  I was broke.  I didn't trust anyone or anything.  I was trying to use the people around me to make myself feel better, to understand what the hell was going on around me but all that did was push people away.  That brought on this intense loneliness and depression that I didn't know how to deal with.  I was a hot fucking mess.  I often thought that I didn't fit in, or know how to live in the world that everyone else lived in. 

I thought I was going crazy.  I can still remember those feelings.  When I think about those days, my neck tenses up, my jaws clinch, I start to get nervous and sweaty.

Well, one night, 5 or 6 years ago, I came home from work with my second 1/8th of Mushrooms in as many nights.  I held that 1/8th of Mushrooms in my hand, and I decided that I was sick of being afraid to go crazy.  I was going to take matters into my own hands.  I had eaten an 1/8th the night before, and I knew how strong these things were, but I also knew that they weren't going to kill me -- I was too afraid to kill myself, but I was perfectly OK with making myself go crazy.

So I ate this entire bag of Mushrooms and let me tell you, Dude, it was one of the scariest fucking things I have ever lived through.

For about three hours there, I thought I had done it.  I vaguely remember sitting in front of a television, in my living room, all alone.  I looked outside and I didn't know if it was day or night.  It was rainging, but I didn't know what rain was.  I couldn't understand the languages that were coming out of the speakers on the television.  I was terrified.  I couldn't stop crying, and laughing, and feeling nothing, and crying, and laughing, and feeling nothing.

For three hours I was convinced I was in hell.  

Somehow, 5 hours in, I ended up at my Mom's house at 3 in the morning.  I woke her up, I told her what I had done, I told her that I had gone crazy and that I didn't know what was going on.  I scared her senseless.  We called my Godfather, and I called a friend, I told them both that I was crazy, and that I couldn't deal with reality anymore.  I may have told the friend that I planned to hurt myself, at that moment, it seemed like the only way out. This trip wasn't ending.

My Godfather and my friend calmed me down, Dude.  They walked me back into reality, and gave me some hope.  My Godfather told me to spend the night at my Mom's and that he would take me to the doctor in the morning, which we did.  

That night was one of the worst nights of my life. 

I am sharing this with you, Dude, because you need to understand that you are not alone in feeling the way that you feel.  I want you to know that there are other people that have gone through what you are going through.  I also want you to know this because I hope that you never, ever, ever, live through something like that. 

Never, ever, ever.

You have a strong, loving, amazing group of people around you.  They love you.  So much, they love you.  In time, you will come to see, how I did, that there is strength and hope in that love.  You need to understand that if you ever feel like doing something so hurtful to yourself, you have people around you that understand, and while we may not feel how you feel, we understand.  

We are here for you.  Please, please, please don't forget that.

I won't lie and say that everything was great and perfect the next day.  It wasn't.  For a long time, it wasn't.

5 or 6 years later, though, having lived through all I have lived.  I can say, that things are better.  It took a lot of hard work, and there was a lot of bullshit to deal with along the way, but things are better.  

I have the greatest friends a guy could ask for.  I create awesome works of art, with amazingly talented artists.    I am still broke, but thats ok, haha....More time, more effort...

As cheesy as it sounds, it gets better.

Much Luv, Dude,

Chuy

11/23/1947

She was born November 23, 1947.  Tomorrow, she would have been 63.  The last birthday that I spent with her, was two years ago, when she turned 61.

I don't really remember what we did during the day but that night was spent at home, in our kitchen.  We had dinner, I think.  She wasn't feeling to well, she hadn't been for a few weeks.  No one really knew what was wrong.

No one actually thought anything was wrong with her.

The last five years of her life, she had a shit ton of health problems.  She was a diabetic.  She was a smoker.  She was overweight.  She had a useless limb -- her ankle, heel and all of the bones connecting them had been shattered in a car accident.  The useless limb made her mobility pretty much non existent, which didn't help her weight or her diabetes.  She also had ovarian cancer.

Those five years, she had hospital stays of at least a week at Northwestern, Swedish Covenant, St. Joseph's, St. Elizabeth, and St. Mary's.  I was on a first name basis with the staff at some of those places.  We went to the hospital all of the fucking time.

The year leading up to her 61st birthday was very similar to the previous 4 in that regard.  She kept asking me to take her to the doctor.  She wanted a pill that would give her her strength back.  That is all she would ever say.  "Tell him that I feel week, that I want a pill or something to give me my strength back..."  Her doctors having given her ever fucking medicine under the Sun, really didn't know what to say.  They would take blood samples, run tests, nothing of consequence would ever be found.

Ever.

Three months before her 61st birthday, she spent 3 weeks at St. Mary's.  They thought that she had put on too strong a pain patch (she had them because of her foot) and that she had started to get addicted.  That she was weak and her balance was off because was fucked up all the time.

They thought this because I told them that is what I thought happened.

My mother and I had a trust problem.  I didn't fucking trust her.  When I was 18 she revealed to me that the person I thought was my father, was NOT my father.  It was just a name I had, mind you -- I'd never met my father, but I had a name.  I thought I knew who he was.  When that happened, her and I were never quite the same.  In time I would grow to understand, well, reconcile that situation.  As, I saw it, my mother was a person, she made some mistakes, but she always loved me.  Who was I to judge someone that did nothing but love me all of my life?  She asked to be forgiven, but I never did.  I never felt that I had too.

She never did anything to me, but love me unconditionally.  Yes, she lied.  She made that mistake.  But after that, it was Ride or Die, Bitches...  No one had my back the way she did.  No one.

To forgive her was to say that she needed to apologize for loving me...That never felt right.

The thing is, I never really trusted her again.  I tried.  Actually I am not sure that I did.  I hope I did.  It was all just so fucked up at the time.  I don't know.  I do know that the trust was never the same.  Ever.

When I told those doctors that she had taken too strong a pain patch it was because neither they, nor anyone else, at any other hospital, ever found anything wrong with her.  Doubt crept into my head.  I stopped listening to her.  I got angry, frustrated that I kept having to take her to all of these fucking doctors appointments and nothing would ever be fucking found to be wrong with her.  Other members of my family started thinking the same thing.  Maybe she was just getting old.  Maybe she just wanted attention.  Maybe the guilt of her life being exposed just caused her to go insane.  We all thought she might have just lost it.

The night of her 61st birthday, I was at my wits end.  An Uncle came over.  He saw her, saw the way she was acting, and because she had just been released from the hospital, because I was so angry, and we were all so frustrated, we just stopped listening.  I resented that even on her birthday, she couldn't let up this act for sympathy.  That she was just acting this sick and confused to sell the fact that she was sick, when in fact she was fine.

My Uncle and I challenged her, if she felt as bad as she was acting she just needed to go to the fucking hospital.  She refused.  She had been in and out of those places so much she didn't trust them.  I mistook her refusal for not wanting to be found out.  I was so confused.  So angry. She wasn't lying to me.  She wasn't acting.

She was fucking terrified of having to go back to the needles and the nurses and the shitty food and the hard beds.  I had stopped listening though.

Finally, she agreed.  We would go to the hospital the next day.  She wanted to spend the night at home.  It was her birthday, she wanted to sleep in her bed.  In the morning, we would go.

We did.  The day after her 61st birthday, I called an ambulance.  For the 3rd time that year, fire fighters, about 8 of them, filled our house, carried her out, loaded her in an ambulance, and then we would rush to the emergency room.

When we arrived, I told the doctor her history, like ever other time.  I knew her medicine.  I would run down our hospital stays, how long, what hospital, and what for.  I would list the various surgeries, for what, when, and where.  I knew what doctors they should speak to at what hospitals to fill in any blanks.  I had this routine down.

This particular time, I told the doctor I was leaving.  "Listen dude, I have to go to work.  I don't know what the fuck is wrong with her, I just can't take this anymore, I need to take off.  Just...Just call me when you don't find anything."

The doctor said, "No problem, Mr. Contreras.  You go ahead.  I just got her blood work back, everything does look normal.  I'm gonna run a few more tests and then I'll call you.  Have a good afternoon."

I left the ER, got in the car, left the hospital, pulled over and called my Godfather.  The closest thing I have to a father.  I broke down.  I was convinced she had gone insane.  He agreed.  Maybe we needed to face the fact that she had in fact lost her mind.  Maybe for the good of everyone involved the next stop, after the ER, was a psychiatrist.  After all, nothing was wrong with her.

The day after her 61st birthday, at about 3:20pm, I found out that her ovarian cancer had spread.

The doctor told me that my Mother had 13 brain tumors.

She died 7 months later.

I work hard to move past her death.  I make an effort to be positive.  To remember the good parts.  To move on and not let this moment in my life define who I am.  I am not entirely there yet.  Fuck, I don't even know that I am close to being there yet.  I do know that I know that I will always miss her.  I know that I loved her, and that she loved me.  I know that she is not suffering.  I know that I am alive.  I know that she would want me to live.  I know that she would want to know that I am not suffering.

Not today though.  Her 63rd birthday is still to close to her 61st.

I will go to the gym.  I will go to work.  I will go to that dinner meeting and talk art.  I will live.  But I will hurt.

I will hurt so fucking much.  A pain that I can't explain. A pain I don't wish on anyone.  A mix of headache and loneliness and body ache, and fuck, fuck, fuck, God Damn it I fucking miss my Mom.  There is no getting around it.  I am human.  This is how it works.

I will also remember though, in that pain, how much she loved me.  How much I loved her.  It wouldn't fucking hurt as much as it does if we didn't love each other as much as we did.

Feliz Cumpelanos, Madre.

Te quiero, tanto...

Tanto...

Tanto.

(If there are spelling error or grammatical mistakes, for give them.  I needed to get this out, I just can't go back and read it right now.)

Change In The House of The Chuy

You often hear, at least I do anyway, that saying, "People never change...".  

That idea terrified me.  No wait, that is a lie.  Not terrified.

Terrifies. 

Besides mice, nothing scares me more.  

Its a crutch that I have used my entire life to stop myself from developing myself .  I knew that, in my case, my life and the way that I looked, were a direct result of the choices I made and the attitudes I held about the world around me -- I just didn't want to admit it.  Instead of realizing I was the reason I was who I was, I chose to ignore that fact.  I made myself a victim.  Things happened to me, never because of me.

Whenever I would hear that saying, "People never change...", it would make me quiver.  Every time, what I heard was, "You live life how you live it because this is what you want.  You will never put the effort into being happy, into living the life you want.  You will always be this way because people never change."  For a fleeting second, that is what I would hear, regardless of the context it was said.  Like the flash on a camera, it would blind me for a second, and then I would dismiss it. 

You see,  I knew that it would take a lot of hard fucking work.  The hardest work I had ever done in my life, to correct the mistakes I had made which resulted in me being who I was.  I had to take responsibility for my actions and realize that I looked how I did, and felt how I did, because I wasn't willing to put in the work to be happy.  (For the record, being happy is hard fucking work.  For some of us anyway.  It doesn't come natural to me, and it is something that I have to develop, have been developing for quite some time now.)

"People never change..."  also left me hopeless, at times, when it came to how I dealt with people.  Understand that as a human, I have made mistakes.  Many mistakes.  Like a lot of stupid fucking stupid mistakes.  I have said and done things to people, that I care a great deal about, that I know were horrible, hurtful, mean things.

I am human.

Seemed like the right thing to do at the time'n'all that...

As I have grown and matured. Lived.  I have seen the mistakes of the past and learned from them.  Told myself that I needed to address certain things in a different manner.  Adjust my perception of certain situations.

Change.

Then I would remember...."People never change..." and I would get scared.  Frustrated.  What good was changing if people actually believed this.  If I changed, but no one else thought that I had, did I really?   Would people ever see me different.  I would know that I changed, but in the eyes of some else, I never would.  That sucked.  It didn't seem fair.

And then, one day, about 5 weeks ago...I changed.  Well started to change.  

For the better.

Forever.

And now "People never change..."  scares the shit out of me for a completely different reason.

Five weeks ago, when this all began, for the first time in my life, I decided that I was ready.  That I needed to take the reins of my life and take control and put in some hard fucking work and change things.  My mom was gone, there was nothing I could do about that.  I needed to move on.  I was severely out of shape.  I  could control that and I wasn't.  I needed to move on.  I was fucking broke.  I needed to put more effort into getting a better job, work more.  I needed to move on.

I needed to change all of those feelings and emotions.  I needed to channel those emotions into positive outlets, and work towards living the life I always thought was being deprived of.

I am doing that.  I can prove it. 

See that picture to the right?  I look pretty sharp, right?  (Well except for the face I am making.  For some reason, I hate my smile, so whenever I take a picture, I make this stupid face that is really just saying "Umm, I dunno what the fuck to do with my face here, so um, here is a stupid face instead.  Bah.)  But yea, I look sharp.

If you took a picture of me, 5 years ago, it would look exactly the same.  

I wore that shirt, and those pants, in that body, at that weight for three years.  I did.  Its what I wore when I was a property manager, and its what I weighed back then.

The thing is, while the body maybe the same.  The mind has changed.

I feel so different.  I feel so happy.  Not all of the time, mind you, but a lot of it. I looked at that picture and I was amazed.  The same image, taken 5 years apart can be completely different.  It can change. 

So now when I hear "People never change..." it scares me because if it is true, than this is just a flash in the pan.  Something that I am doing for now, but that eventually I will fuck up.  What if I haven't changed at all.

Today, at the weigh in, I found that I lost another 2 lbs.  That brings the total up to 24 lbs lost in the last 5 weeks.  I weighed 313 lbs.  I weigh 289 lbs.  

My body has changed.  However, I dont think that my body would have changed, if I hadn't changed too.  I'll find out soon enough.  

After all, you know what they say...

Bridge

Some days I am not so sure what side I'll end up on.  

Then I remind myself that at the very least I am on the move.

Weigh In 4

I lost 5 more today.

That means 22 for the first month.

Kicking Ass.

Time for Sleep.

A day late...

Yesterday I didn't have enough time to write a post.

• 7:00am to 5:00pm - Getting up for work, and work.
• 5:00pm to 8:00pm - Getting to, and having dinner, with scientist Young Sharpless before Chicago Fusion Theatre's Proof.
• 8:00pm to 10:00pm - Proof.*
• 10:00pm to 5:00am - Getting to and working job two.

Oh well, these things happen.  Time to shake it off and keep going.  This a new attitude for me, by the way.

In the past, if I missed a deadline I had set for myself, I would take it as an opportunity to put myself down, tell myself I couldn't do something and quit.  (I know myself really well, trust me on this.)

Not quiting this time, can't do it.

I felt great at the end of the day, which is also new.

I have had a crazy schedule, working when I can with two jobs for a while now, so I have had days like this before.  In the past, during one of these 22 hour days, I would feel like the walking dead by 3:00am.  Not yesterday, though.  I was sleepy, yea, but physically I felt just fine.

That was great and encouraging. 

Back on schedule Monday, for weigh in #4.  Time to see how the first month went.  (Did you just read that?  The First Month... Its almost been a month.... Fucking. Sweet.)



*If you are in Chicago, consider seeing Chicago Fusion Theatre's production of Proof.  It plays in the super intimate gallery space at The Royal George Theatre (1641 N. Halsted), 5 more times.  Natalie DiCristofano gives one of the 3 best performances I have seen all year.  Totally worth it, just to see that Actor work.  Do it. 

In Flux

"It's a song about life, death, love, hate, wealth, poverty, racism... Just a few things been runnin' through my head..."

On Me:
Its been three weeks.  Things are still going really well, though, I can see myself starting to get bored with it.  I can see myself get frustrated.  I wont lie, only dropping 2lbs last week took the wind out of my sails.  That was to be expected though.  So I am trying not to think about it and just keep doing what I need to do.

Its getting harder to do, the colder it gets.  The new job means that it is best for me to go to the gym in the morning.  I actually enjoy it more, get it outta the way, feel great at work, win, win.   Getting up at 5:30 is a pain though.


On Politics:
These are scary times we live in.  We, as a people, can't seem to stop hating each other.  If this continues, I fear the next act of terrorism will be from within.  There is hope, there are good people.  They are out numbered, though.  I hope things get better before they get worse, I do.  There is no sign of that though.


On Love:
...I got nothing...Just been thinking about it...I always do though...It is what it is....



On Family:
Thanksgiving is coming up.  Its my favorite holiday.  Can't wait to see my Grand Ma, my Weelita.

I miss my Mom.  Yesterday was the Day of the Dead.  The 23rd is her Birthday.  She was diagnosed on the 24th.  I miss her, these days, more than most.



I'm going to bed...I've met this obligation...Tomorrow I have another at 5:30.



...Oh, wait!  One more thing...

Thank you, for reading this blog, for liking my Facebook status' about this blog or my experiment, for encouraging words, of advice, and support, and love.

Seriously, thank you all so much.

I...Its just...Well...

You know...

Goodnight.

I Shot The Stairs, But I Did Not Shoot The Deputy

Over the weekend, I helped a friend move.

Normally I am not a fan of helping people move.  I mean, I wouldn't mind doing it -- I'm always down to help a friend -- the actual moving of the things that friend owned, though,  that I hated.

Especially when flights of stairs are involved.

Stairs and I have never gotten along very well.  They always seemed like a necessary evil.  My ability to fly has not developed as well as I had hoped would happen when I was kid.  (Seriously, I could fly.  You can't prove that I couldn't.)  As such, I was developed a Love/Hate relationship with stairs -- the more stairs there were that had to be climbed, the more I hated them.  The only stairs I Loved, were escalators.  Normally, the very thought of climbing up and down flights of stairs, carrying heavy boxes over and over and over again would make me lose my breath.

I don't do normally anymore, though.

This time the prospect of helping a friend move, from a third floor apartment to a second floor apartment seem like a good challenge.  I was going to turn this move into a test.  I was curious to see how my body would respond to the task.

I am thrilled to report it was the greatest move I have ever been apart of.

The move itself was fairly simple.  There wasn't a lot of stuff to move and there were a lot of hands around to do it, so that was good.  In my mind, the most challenging part was going to be going up and down those three flights of stairs but it wasn't.  Not anymore.  I rarely ran out of breath.  I didn't really break to much of a sweat (certainly not like the buckets that would pour out of me in the past).  When we were done, my body hardly felt sore at all.

All of these things amazed me.  It was so refreshing and energizing to know I could know help someone move without fear that I might have a heart attack an hour into the move.  The more that I went up and down without feeling how I had in the past, the more that I wanted to keep going.  I would have moved 5 apartments yesterday.  I felt so great.  So, damn great!!!

I am starting to redefine the relationship I have with stairs, and everything else really.  Stairs are no longer the obstacle they once were.  Nothing is the obstacle it once was.  From here on out, I am going to run full speed at things that once gave me pause.

I can't explain how amazing that feels.

This is the thought that I am going to carry with me to this Monday's weigh in because regardless what the scale says, I know I won this week.

(I did and you can't prove otherwise.  You can't.)

I'll let ya know how it goes.