My Origin Story
Part 1 of 3: A poet is born.
It was the summer of 2010, and I was in such a weird place.
After graduating high school in 2008, I tried to attend community college, and tried to join the Mt. SAC baseball team, but I was not set up for success for either. I didn't know there was financial aid available, I didn’t know I was out of shape and out of practice to compete at the collegiate level, and I didn’t know what I wanted out of life.
At the end of my try out, when the coach said “maybe next year”, I retreated to the garage that I converted into my room, and tried to numb the pain of my disillusionment with women, drugs, and partying.
The disillusionment would always creep back through the next morning though, like the sun rays through the cracks of the makeshift wooden doors to my garage-room. And for the next year and a half it was on to the next temporary relief weekend after weekend after weekend.
I eventually got a job, I eventually re-enrolled into a community college, and I eventually got tired/ bored/ fed up with the same old same old self destructive behaviors the homies and I would partake in night after night.
But I think what did it for me was beginning to witness my homies slowly turning into zombies when prescription pills entered the scene. I didn’t want to be a zombie, and I also realized that if I wanted to take this school thing seriously then I had to decide between studying and reading on Friday nights like a loser, or going to chill in the same spot, doing the same shit with the same people like another type of a loser.
I chose to be the first type of loser, and I never looked back.
At 19 years old, my little brother graduated high school in 2010, and as a graduation present for being the first in our immediate family to graduate high school, my little brother and I visited my Tia in the Basque country of Spain.
My Tia and my Dad were two out of eight children. They grew up in the Central Valley of California, and my Pops came to Los Angeles as soon as he got the chance. My Tia on the other hand, fled to the University of California, Santa Cruz where she met my Basque Tio. Growing up my dad would always refer and reference my Tia, and later their younger sister, as the educated ones. They were the only examples, on either side of my family, of someone who graduated college.
When we arrived in Bilbao, Spain we had to drive through the Basque countryside to San Sebastian. I remember staring out the window unable to comprehend how the world can be so much bigger than the San Gabriel Valley. I remember thinking, “Shit… if a college degree allows you to move to the other side of the world, then sign me up.”
After our jetlag wore off and once we got settled in, my Tia challenged my brother and I to read and finish any one of the books she had displayed throughout her house before our two week visit was up.
I remember pulling a slim spine of a book off the shelf in the room we were sleeping in. It was a college poetry publication from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and there, in the table of contents was my Tia’s last name in print: H I G A R E D A. She told me her poem, about growing up in the Central Valley of California, won first prize.
She asked me if I write. She asked me if I knew who Ernest Hemingway was. Then she told me how he came to Pamplona during the San Fermin festival and wrote two novels about it: The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls.
I don’t know how it happened, but something clicked for me. Maybe it was the combination of my Tia’s name in print, or the beautiful countryside and beaches of the Basque Country, maybe it was Ernest Hemingway, or this incredible sense of freedom I felt away from everyone and everything. Maybe it was the fact that at East Los Angeles College I was learning how to analyze fiction, compose essays, and love dystopian novels. Whatever it was, in the summer of 2010 I believed I could be a writer.
I felt a need to document my existence in the hope that someone would find my writings and would be able to put the pieces of my life back together and figure out when and where humanity went wrong. Perhaps my 19 year old self wanted to be like Hemingway: to travel the world, write novels, and run with the bulls. (It was only a couple of years later when I learned he blew his head off with a shotgun, and being Hemingway wasn’t so appealing anymore.)
Before I left the Basque country, my Tia challenged us to write, learn Spanish, and read those two Hemingway novels. 14 years later, I have yet to learn Spanish, nor have I read those two damn novels, but I have been writing ever since.
The world never looked so big when I returned to the States. One of the first things I did was take my shitty Honda Civic to the beach to search for that sense of freedom I felt overseas. What I realized however, was that the freedom that I felt, can now only be found in the blank pages of my notebooks.
For the first time in my life, I found a way to express myself. Poetry didn’t have any rules and it was the perfect medium to push the boundaries of the page and push my own boundaries to be as honest to myself as I can.
My poems sucked ass. But I didn’t care. I was in love, and then I fell in love. I met my partner in the Fall of 2010 and she opened up my world even wider than Spain. I not only felt comfortable to write shitty poems to her, but I also felt comfortable to be my true self around her.
When she told me she was pregnant, we were in my shitty Honda Civic, in a parking garage. We had just finished watching part one of the last Harry Potter movie, and I remember feeling scared but ready. Everything felt right about this moment. Everything was going to be okay. Deep down I believed my writing was going to be able to support us.
In the summer of 2011, I moved in with my partner. We carved out a home in the back room of her mom’s house. I remember going to the East Los Angeles Library to check out as many books as I could about writing. I would spend hours in the Chicano Resource Center fantasizing about my poetry collection being in between Juan Felipe Herrera and Cherrie Moraga. I would wake up at 5 am and write. I would write in my car. I would write on napkins and on envelopes. I would write about becoming a father, I would write about my father, I would write and try to sell my poems at an off ramp. I would write and write and a year after my daughter was born I would be published in a slim spine of a college publication of my own.
Thank you all again for reading and listening and for all your support! I have yet to find the words to describe the feeling when y’all become subscribers, but it really is a blessing.
Part 2 of my origin story: A playwright is born will be published next week!