I just went through my full first winter ever. Other than the cold (which me and my tropical ass don’t fare well in but I’m sorta more used to now), it was great, with the caveat that the slower pace of life around here is something that is still foreign to me, the foreigner half-Italian that’s still learning the language.
No snow this time around, sadly. That was something I was looking forward to too because it’s one of those pending life goals of mine. Maybe next year now that I’m more “used” to the cold.
The quietness and peace gave me much needed respite to work towards healing myself, both physically and mentally. After another relapse in late January I started work towards improving and to finally break free from the mental shackles of the past so that I can move forward, that much I vowed on January 31, my mom’s birthday.
One of the things I’ve been slowly getting over it is one my eternal mental prisons, the burden that comes with the “what ifs,” which I’m sure many, if not all of you, have had to deal with at some point of your lives — you know, those moments moments, even simple yes/no answers that cascades into what could’ve been a different path or a completely different life.
Long story short, in my case, there are a handful of crucial turning points that dramatically altered the course of my life. Some of them were beyond my control such as my mom getting an offer to work in Florida in late 1992 but having to move back with me to Venezuela after a month following threats issued by my dad, and the untimely banking crisis of Banco Latino that made my grandmother lose all of her savings; or moving from Maracaibo in 1999, which tl;dr led to me becoming the socially inept person that I still am.
In a couple months, I’ll reach the 20th anniversary of what is undoubtedly, the one such turning point of that nature that’s entirely on me. I very much still vividly remember that day, but not the exact date, so let’s say it was around mid-June-August 2005, give or take. What is certain though, is that I had more hair back then, I miss my long hair, that’s for sure.
I was 17 years old, drifting aimlessly without purpose, and devoid of any serious drive or motivation — yet finding enjoyment in the little things, such as Ragnarok Online, posting on 4chan at its heyday, vibing to eurobeat sent through MSN Messenger by some of my online eurofrens, and being fascinated by foreign tales and experiences that I’ll perhaps never get to live now.
I still remember me sitting in front of my old Pentium IV 1.4ghz computer with either 256 or 512mb of ram (forgot if this was before or after that upgrade) and my trustworthy NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440 in all its glory.
I was starting Year 2 of my Ragnarok Online Journey. At the time, me and some friends that weren’t part of my guild (but who went onto becoming longtime online friends and even played WoW and other games with in the future) were checking LimitRO, a private server that temporarily served as a refugee home in the hopes that it could become a new home after our previous server, Dragnarok Online, began its slow but assured death.
I had my high school diploma, but like I said, no plans for the future, no actual drive to study anything and was going through what probably was, one of the first true cycles of recurring depression that I’ve been dealing with pretty much on a yearly basis. A combination of other personal stuff was happening back then, such as my parents restarting their long and drawn out divorce proceedings before things became less amicable, and growing tensions between two of my uncles that resulted in a still ongoing schism on my mom’s remaining side of the family.
My mom always valued the importance of having me and my brother study above anything else, it was the topmost priority. She had no riches or luxury to give us, no money to go through fancy vacation travels or things like that, but she would damn sure make her best to ensure that we had food and education, things that I, perhaps, did not appreciate in its fullest during my adolescence.
She presented me with an ultimatum on that day: Either start figuring my shit up and pick something to study (preferably something that’d start in the impending next semester) or get fucked, to make things short.
Now, this is where the fork in the road came to be for me, this is where I made a choice that cascaded into the man that I am today, for better or worse.
You see, as the son of two doctors, you’d think this would be a no brainer and pick that path, right? Even more so after the fact that my mom, as the Chief of the Pain and Palliative Care Unit of the Perez Carreño Hospital in Caracas had the ability to fast track people into med school at one of Caracas’ main universities. This was because of pre-existing reciprocal agreements between the unit and the university.
No, lol, I didn’t choose that.
My parents never forced me to not become a doctor or were ever against the idea, but instead presented me with the pros and cons of being a doctor in Venezuela, since both had lived and worked through both the public and private sectors — mind you, this was long before the collapse of socialism in Venezuela, and yet healthcare wasn’t exactly at its best. Little did anyone could foresee that it would get much worse, though. And boy… the tales they shared weren’t exactly glamorous.
Naturally, being the child of two doctors meant I grew up accompanying them to hospitals, tinkering with their stethoscopes at home, annoying them while they watched medical mystery shows on tv, glancing through my mom’s anesthesiology notes, or tagging along my dad during his forensic tests, huffing the smell of formaldehyde, or watching him put a brain with a confirmed case of Creutzfeldt–Jakob on a container. I’d steal their lab coats and stuff to run around in the house, you know, all that kid stuff.
As I grew older though, and largely because I became more and more of a recluse in Caracas, I started to deviate from that path, and medicine stopped being less of an interest to me. I could’ve chosen med school and continue, and most certainly be less of a fuck up in life, but I can’t blame that on them or anyone else, this was my “mistake,” I suppose.
The other path, the one I chose, was a trainwreck of my own volition.
My proclivity towards computers as the family’s “computah guy,” and the fact that I had spent so much time sitting in front of that Pentium IV computer for the past four years is what led me to picking to study an “Informatics” course at a nearby private tech institute. I’ve used a computer ever since I was 5 or 6, mashing keys at my dad’s workplace computer, or at Punto Fijo’s anti-cancer society, where they both used to work for a time.
I chose that course in the hopes of perhaps, I don’t know, learn programming and do cool shit. Twenty years later, I realize that I most certainly picked that for the sake of answering the ultimatum without thinking of the consequences of my decision.
That decision set me through a path that at first started great, but ultimately ended up being the worst self-inflicted wound in my life after I was once again defeated by my achilles heel: Math. Just like with 7th, 8th, and 9th grade, a simple square root is all it takes to destroy me.
Those days saw a return to the form of the exemplary student that I used to be up until I was 11. I aced every single assignment and subject, except math, where I fared just as bad, if not worse as during high school. I concluded my first semester with high grades in everything except… you know, Math I. I informed my mom of this, and she was justifiably disappointed.
I could’ve taken nocturnal remedial classes, but 17-year old me started relapsing in that recluse autistic form of mine where I didn’t even mention to my mom of the existence of such a thing. Now, come to think of it, if I had taken those classes, yes, I could’ve remedied math and continue on with zero issues — but then again, I would have not been present at home the moment my mom found my brother seizing in his bedroom that early January 2006 night…
In any case, even without the Math I situation solved I kept studying in the following semesters. I kept pretty much acing every other course, just like I used to be as a kid before moving to Caracas, top grades in literally everything — but failed Math I again during second semester.
Because I hadn’t passed Math I I couldn’t enroll in its follow-up ones like Math II, Calculus, Statistics, etc. Try as I might, my high grades in everything else did not matter because I was missing the entirety of that Math course line, so I was effectively locked out of doing a thesis and a subsequent graduation.
By the end of the second semester, the Math I teacher, who looked like the ancient Pool’s Closed meme (something I hilariously informed my peers of), offered me to simply pay him to “fix” my grades — but me in my profound “righteousness” refused to do so.
Notice how I keep fucking myself because of my insistence of doing the “right thing,” see: the past six years of my life and my failed attempts at legally migrating with my brother.
By third semester I said fuck it, and didn’t even enrolled on Math I because I thought I’d “figure how to fix this later,” but that’s a solution I was never able to achieve. Still, great as my grades were, though, I rapidly became disillusioned of the “education” in that place because I was only taught the most simplistic and basic things in programming — through obsolete languages such as BASIC, COBOL, and PASCAL.
I was even ashamed of saying this to my online friends from Jedi Outcast and Ragnarok Online, who used to tell me of all the dope stuff they were learning and doing at their respective colleges but there I was, doing lame shit through ancient languages. That further discouraged me, putting me back in 17-year old angsty mode but now approaching my 20s.
I suppose I wasn’t the only one discouraged, come to think of it, because when I started there were 2 full sections of roughly 50ish ppl each. Every new semester had fewer and fewer ppl, until there were less than a dozen by the time I was in 5th semester.
Hell, I even complied with the socialist regime’s then new-mandated community service stuff through a project proposed by a friend of mine that saw me, him, and others (including someone whom I had a crush with lol) teach elderly ppl from the local community how to use a computer and all that stuff.
Not like it mattered because without the Math problem fixed I couldn’t proceed. This was something my remaining friends told me throughout community service, but by then I just stopped caring. I had made a promise to fulfil the community service stuff, and I went through the entirety of it, but after that I bailed.
How that revelation went through when I told my mom, the other ultimatum she issued because of it, and its consequences, which led to me working as a consular clerk for three years… those are a long tale for another time.
It goes without saying that I kept thinking about the choice I made on that 2005 day over and over as the years went by, and what was once a tiny “what if” minuscule hole became a huge gaping abyss — a void nurtured by my self-influcted mental torture of how different my life would be had I chosen the med school path.
It is very likely that I would not be writing all of this, or even be in Italy as an Italian citizen through and through had I chosen the med school route. It is likely that, because I had instead been a doctor of some kind, I’d be most certainly working in a completely different country, like so many, many Venezuelan doctors and former friends and colleagues of my mom do even to this day.
It got so bad that even me watching House M.D. at the time it was airing made me regret my choice. Yes, I know, television isn’t real life, but it didn’t help either. There’s also the fact that had I been a doctor then maybe, just maybe, there was a faint chance that I would’ve had the resources or contacts to put my mom through proper chemotherapy for her liver leiomyosarcoma, and maybe she’d be alive today…
The reason I’m sharing all of this is that through it, I plan to shut that “what if” void once and for all. Seal the portal, close the gate, throw away the key, bomb it, glass it, whichever you wanna call it.
The past is the past and what I have is what I have: My brother, an Italian citizen, the draft of the first book of a planned fiction series, a bunch of bad memories and experiences from the collapse of Venezuela, and a promise.
Those are the cards that I have, some of which I plan on playing in the weeks to come. I don’t know what the future holds, but come what may, one of my goals is to live a life without regret. When my time comes, I just want to have lived a happy, fulfilling life. To die knowing that I was able to make a difference, little as it all may end up being.
The rest is, I don’t know, extra, so long as I get to have fun and do good deeds throughout the ride.
-Kal
