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Trying to build structure from survival.
📓 Tuesday, February 17, 2026 — 8:04 p.m.
My parents gave me survival — immigrants from Mexico, forged in work and endurance.
They taught me how to take a hit and keep moving.
But survival isn’t structure.
Structure is something I’ve had to build on my own.
Puff. Puff.
Hold it.
Breathe out slow.
My inhaler was my first training partner.
I was the asthmatic kid who missed kindergarten entirely and parts of first, second, and third grade. Mornings weren’t quiet — they were urgent.
“Why are we going to the hospital? It’s still dark.”
“Because you’re turning purple.” — Mom.
I remember the golden streetlights. The green, yellow, and red traffic signals. Being wrapped like a burrito — sweater, jacket, beanie, two scarves — carried to the car.
As a kid, life felt simple.
But beneath that simplicity, something else was always there:
My dad’s alcoholism.
Arguments that went nowhere.
One night he was drunk and accelerating down the street while my mom begged him to slow down. I was in the back seat yelling for him to stop. He didn’t.
That was volatility.
And volatility didn’t come from nowhere.
It came from trauma. From shame. From polio. From growing up without guidance.
My dad was 21 when I was born.
My mom was 23.
They weren’t equipped.
They were surviving — paying rent, managing addiction, managing a son who couldn’t breathe.
Pain was the main tool they had.
So I learned endurance.
What I didn’t learn was structure.
For a long time, I blamed them for that.
Now I understand something harder:
They couldn’t teach what they never had.
Going back to school in my mid-thirties changed something in me.
A high school counselor once told me, “School might not be for you.”
That sentence stuck.
I failed repeatedly.
By my mid-thirties I had built a version of myself I hated: shitty job, debt, no direction, dumped, embarrassed. I saw myself as a loser.
That’s what kept me going when I went back.
Not passion. Not confidence.
Refusal.
I refused to accept that identity.
School didn’t magically make me smarter.
It gave me a process.
I learned how to break things down and keep moving even when I didn’t feel like it.
And once I learned that in one area, it started bleeding into everything else.
When it rained, I stopped complaining and bought proper boots.
When I realized certain materials actually work (wool in the cold), I tested it.
When my mind looped, I started journaling — not because I wanted to be a writer, but because my life felt stuck.
At first it didn’t help.
Then one night I found myself crying while writing and didn’t know why.
Something was shifting.
As a kid, my dad would build a tent over the bed with sheets and we’d watch Chuck Norris or Charles Bronson on a CRT television.
Films were warmth.
Later, they became language.
If I can’t explain a feeling, I can think of a movie that does.
That’s why films like Possessor stay with me — identity getting overwritten, like old code running without awareness.
I’ve seen that outside of cinema too:
Addiction as coping.
Shame mistaken for personality.
Trauma mistaken for identity.
I used to ask: Why can’t they see it?
Now I understand something else:
Logic doesn’t override feeling.
People don’t live inside arguments.
They live inside emotional loops.
So I don’t want to fix them.
I want to understand the pattern — and build something different for myself.
I’m not trying to run life like I’m the administrator.
I can’t control everything.
But I can control how I respond.
That’s enough.
Structure gives me peace.
Progression gives me meaning.
Independence is the long game.
Not to escape people —
but to stop inheriting unconscious loops.
My parents did their best with what they had.
Now I’m doing mine.
Reader question: What’s one loop you inherited that you’re trying to break on purpose?
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