This is me

Hello, this is Mike.

At least that's the pseudonym I use to talk in English. My name is actually Miguel, my native language is Spanish. I'm creating this blog to put my ideas in order and tell the experience of my adult life to myself and the world. Although I don't think many people may read this, I think it would be useful for someone with the same kind of issues if they come by it. Let's start then.

You can think of me as Mike. At the time I'm writing this, I'm 28 years old and I still feel like a trainwreck of a person. I'm going through a situation which is lifting my self esteem exponentially, but at the same time, I'm suffering from a little bit of imposter syndrome. The reason I feel like a failure is a combination of situations that led to where I'm standing today. I studied five years in college, approving only courses from year one and two, got a job as a programmer, in which I got fired after eleven months. At the same time, I failed three courses in a semester, all of them for the third time which meant I could not take them another time. I dropped out, I did not search for another job as a programmer as I felt like I was not worth the position, plus, no company would pay me what the job was worth. That lead me to work on a call center in which I was making more money than as a programmer, which is ridiculous. I quit that job to continue studying in college, another carreer, with the help of my parents.

This seems like a short story, and it is, but it happened in the span of eight years. Fifteen if you count my time in high school. In this blog, I will describe why each thing happened each time it happened. This is just my way to cope with what happened in my life, why the path I'm following might be the correct one in the end. I will let you know more in my next entry.

Childhood and High School

So much happened when I was a kid, I forgot most of it. What I know is, I wasn't very popular, not in elementary or high school. It was not the kind of "not being popular" in which nobody knows who you are, in fact, everyone knew who I was. I was the kid you went to when you wanted to feel superior, the one you teased because he wouldn't fight back.

I was never phisically abused. I was never hit by any other kid. In my opinion, it was worse. Every comment I made was made fun of, every joke I told was thrown back to my face, directed to me, receiving a bigger laughter because they were laughing at me. Every time I said anything, it was an opportunity to make fun of the weird kid. I know I may be exaggerating, but that's how it felt, I think I was about eleven years old when this started, and it continued on for years and years, until I was a quiet and shy child. I was never very talkative by any means, I was always very quiet and shy. But this made it worse. This kind of... abuse. It made me think of myself as less than a person, I thought I was not meant to be happy. I thought I was worth less than everybody else. By the time I was thirteen, my grades started to go down. By the time I was fifteen, I was struggling with almost every subject in school. The problem was not that I didn't understand, the problem was that I didn't have the motivation to work. Why would I want to? I was not worth the effort, and if I was, everybody was going to laugh at it anyway so why bother?

This continued on until I was sixteen. I still didn't talk to many people. Most of my friends were online friends, and two of my closest friends I barely talked to in school. I felt like an outcast, but thanks to a teacher who took notice, I was sent to therapy and I was prescribed antidepressants. I took those for about a year, kept going to therapy and got better, but the damage was already done. Chemically, I was better, but in my mind, I was still feeling like my life was not worth the same as any other life. I graduated, still struggling with my classes, and in an attempt to feel at least a little bit better, I took the chance in one of the reunions the school organized to say to everyone "I forgive you". Everyone understood what I was talking about, and some of my classmates even came to me later to personally say "sorry". I thought it was going to be better after that. It wasn't. The looming feeling of worthlessness was already planted in my mind, and the roots were still there, and they staid there for years to come.

College and my first relationship

I was still seeing some of my classmates from school in college. In retrospective, that wasn't a good idea. It felt like the abuse transferred to my new life, in a smaller scale.

When I graduated from high school and went to college, I was very excited. Not only was I going to study a subject I loved, computer science, but I knew I would meet new people. The psychological abuse would not be there, or at least that's what I thought. The reality was something else. Among the people I studied with, more than eighty people, I stupidly chose to stick to the ones I already knew. Big mistake, this people kept filling my life with negativity and criticism. Have I been as confident as I am today, I would have simply stopped talking to them, but no, I thought I would not have been able to make new friends, or at least talk to other classmates or just be alone. One semester went by and everything seemed to go well, but I wasn't noticing the cesspool growing in my mind, telling myself I was not enough, not worthy of love, not worthy of happiness. It was at this time I met Silvia. My first girlfriend. It was a happy accident, for the first week.

Silvia was as troubled as I was to say the least. On top of that, let's just say I didn't even think twice before asking her to be my girlfriend. I attached myself to the first person who showed me a little bit of love, and that was another big mistake that I ended up regretting. My relationship with Silvia lasted eleven months, eleven months full of fights, with her. I didn't break up because I didn't want to be alone, and she didn't do it... honestly because I asked her not to. I was pathetic, but today I'm able to accept it. Having that relationship was a step in the right direction in retrospect, it showed me what someone not meant to be with me looked like, showed me to look for a partner who was compatible with me. Finally, after ending that relationship, I finally got away from the people I got together with in college. It was painful to look at that people, specially since my now ex girlfriend was still going with them and I didn't want to look at her. 

After the breakup with Silvia, I distanced myself from my old "friend" group, met one new friend, who helped me a bunch after that, and finally started my metamorphosis. The process was long and still very painful, but I think it was then when the new me started gestating. A combination of new experiences and failures after this transformed me into what I am today.