This summer, the Immigrant Theatermakers Advocates initiative had its first-ever happy hour — which is a fancy way of saying I bothered my co-founders to do it and they were like “Francisco stop crowding the group chat” so I just booked a place and told our community to come. “Wait, you made a happy hour happen?” you ask. “You as in… you?” Yes, me! And if you don’t believe me, look at the picture above! (Could’ve been generated by AI, but still…) Not only that, but this is the second event I’ve organized for ITA, the first one being an immigrant night for fellow Argentinian Maia Novi’s Invasive Species, also this summer.
I understand your shock: the most famous thing about me is that I hate everything—and that, by extension, usually means I hate everyone. For most of my adult life, I have been the coconut: most people can’t get past my hard shell to get to my gooey center (do coconuts have gooey centers, or is this a bad metaphor? I stole it from someone else). I’ve always described myself as someone who hates groups, does better one-on-one, has a small circle of friends, “you need to get to know me to love me,” etcetera. If life is Mean Girls, I sit with Janis and Damien. If life is the Nature channel (which arguably it is), I am a feral cat, going at it alone, or at most within a small colony. If life is team sports, I’m on the bench — but that’s not because of the social thing, I’m just not good at sports.
So what am I doing hosting immigrant nights and happy hours of sizes bigger than a cat colony?
My first friend ever was a boy called Lucas. We must have met either in church or kindergarten; though we later attended the same school, my first memory of him is in an apartment my family lived in till I was five. I remember being too shy to speak to him on our first playdate; my dad had to play with him for a while (I remember they used my set of plastic cowboy figurines) before I gathered the courage to join. Once I did, though, we became best friends.
We were very different. Lucas was bold, always talking about beating people up and getting excited about stuff like riding horses or going camping, while I talked about computers and Legos and got excited about books. One time, our dads took us to rugby tryouts; I vowed never to come back, while he became a regular player. But in spite (or maybe because) of our dissonant personalities, the friendship worked, and I don’t really recall having other friends in my early years.
As we grew older, however, things started to fall apart. One time, I must have been 7 or 8, I remember being in class, sitting together, me lazily running my hand over his head (I liked the way his short hair prickled my skin, like a brush). One of our classmates clocked it and started singing the Armando Manzanero song “Somos Novios,” a ballad about being in love (which actually exists in English, sung by Perry Como, under the name “It’s Impossible”) — basically calling us gay. Neither of us really knew what being gay was, but the message was still clear: our closeness was bad. We started growing apart, and kept getting into situations where our personalities rubbed each other the wrong way — in particular, because I was a big-time snitch, and he did a lot of snitchable things.
Our distance may have helped Lucas stave off homophobic taunts in his direction, but I had no such luck, and from that point on all my friends were women. I say “all” as if there were many, but I am following a rule that my youngest sister and I came up with when we were kids: “dos son todos,” which would roughly translate as “two is all.” You ran into a person twice? You run into them all the time. Two people liked your restaurant recommendation? Everyone liked it. Two is all it takes. So yes, all my friends were women. And to be fair, sometimes there were more than two — at one point it was four, a group that came together because we all liked Harry Potter. I even remember a teacher held a trivia contest about it in front of the whole class, and we were thrilled (ok sure, I was also not doing myself a lot of favors in the popularity department).
And yet, probably because they were women, we weren’t as close as I had been with Lucas; there was always the question of whether we liked each other (in the school sense) and the possibility of people teasing us for it — the schoolyard is flexible enough to allow a boy to get teased for “being gay” and for “having a girlfriend.” So I ended up developing a rich inner life, mostly fueled by stories, both the ones I read and the ones I wrote. I constantly disappeared into fantasy worlds, like Harry Potter’s, that were much better than my own; eventually, my mom got worried that I might be deaf because of how removed I would seem from people around me. She took me to the doctor (I remember having to move blocks every time I heard a chime through some headphones they put on me) but my ears were fine. The diagnosis was instead provided by my grandma, who said that the issue was that I would sometimes go into a “bubble,” and it was hard to reach me when I was there. (Not surprisingly, I would much later hear that same term, “bubble,” used in my 12-step program to describe the dissociation brought on by addictive behavior).
The bubble was cozy, and it did not allow for a lot of people in it; it got even smaller once my family moved to Brazil, where being an immigrant added fuel to the fire of things I could be teased for. I was much more likely to be friends with teachers and administrators than with kids my age. The situation got a little better in college (alcohol and whatnot); in fact, my oldest friend is from that time — but just one, which goes to show that I had developed a pattern: close friendships or bust. Everyone else would remain at the edges, people I would be friendly with due to circumstances (being in the same class, having the same job). I only allowed a very select few to really know me; the idea of opening up felt (and to some degree, continues to feel) dangerous.
Eventually, this led to co-dependency; tired of being alone, I decided that one person should fulfill all my emotional needs. Spoiler: it did not work out (for a taste of that experience, I refer you to my short story God Mode), and I retreated further into the bubble. Then things got really bad. I don’t wanna get into specifics (though I’ve alluded to them in the past), but my search for connection went awry, and it ended up endangering things I truly care about. So I finally Googled “am I an addict,” and found my way into a 12-step meeting.
Up until then, I had not realized to what extent shame kept me in my bubble. The danger wasn’t completely external: I was the one judging myself on a daily basis — the people who rejected me were just confirming what I already thought. In my addiction, I saw myself as seeking love, but what I had truly been seeking was validation, an external force that could completely change my image of myself and convince me I was lovable. That realization was transformative: it’s like I had been in prison without even knowing, and now I finally saw the bars. As an addict, I know that seeing the bars and escaping the prison are not the same thing; I often confuse my ability to know what the sane thing to do is with my ability to actually do it. But still, realizing how much my fears color the way I perceive the world, down the most minuscule interactions or setbacks, was scary, but also healing: it allowed me to finally surrender to the God I had worshipped all my life but in whom I hadn’t really put any trust.
Releasing others from the burden of changing how I viewed myself was, at least at first, paradoxically isolating: once I stopped taking people’s actions personally and accepted them for who they were, I also saw that, in some cases, that also meant we should not be in a relationship. “This person doesn’t do these things because of me,” the thinking went. “This is just how they behave—at least for now—and I can’t be around that.” It wasn’t about cutting anyone off (or, to use a popular term, “going no contact”), but rather releasing them into God’s care and remaining open to the fact that, should things change, we might find a way back to each other. But once that work was done, the more exciting, constructive phase began: reviving relationships I had neglected (such as the aforementioned college friend, with whom I’m now in regular contact) and (scarier) forming new ones. And this is where I found that I am, to my amazement, changing.
Something that informed a lot of my relationship-building for most of my life was my skepticism (if not downright cynicism); people could always count on me for a bitchy takedown. But bitchy takedowns don’t fly too well in the program, where everyone has already been laid low by their addiction. I found myself developing a “program voice”— a softer, lower register laden with “hmmms” and “ooohs” as the other person spoke. Sometimes fellows would tell me “You always sound so calm!” and I’d wonder who they were talking about. Not only that, but another trait of mine—aggressively trying to solve other people’s problems—also started to fade, because addicts hate that shit. In its place, I found myself asking “What can I offer you?”, allowing people to dictate how I should respond to the thing they had shared. Sometimes, even though I thought I had an amazing life lesson to pass on, they chose to have me just listen… and just listen I did, keeping my life lesson to myself (stay tuned for my self-help book).
This all makes sense: the big thing in the program is to Be Of Service, to think of what can we do for others before ourselves. And while on the surface this has always been my practice (Acts Of Service is my top love language), in reality I found that I was often very quid-pro-quo-y in my relationships, keeping track of what I had done for others lest it go unacknowledged and unreturned. But that’s really bad for sobriety, so I had to let it go. And, to the shock and awe of no one, I still found my good deeds were returned—if not by the people I did them to, then cosmically, by others in my life.
I’ve slowly seen this new self seep into other, non-program relationships, and it’s changing my life. You might be thinking, “Francisco, I just saw you the other day and you were a huge bitch who definitely tried to solve my problems and then acted passive-aggressively about the fact that I didn’t ask how you’re doing” and: fair. I said “slowly,” didn’t I? But I do think that this new attitude has made it much easier to socialize. The big barrier between me and the world has always been my fear of being alone, not getting what I needed or, worse, getting hurt. But going in with no agenda, thinking only (or at least mostly) of what I can add to the situation, always helps me relax. Not for nothing have I seen my social self come out in contexts like ITA or the program, where the main point of gathering is to offer support to one another.
The other day, during a meeting, I found myself irked at the attitude of some fellows, and without even realizing, I closed off, laughing mentally at what other people were saying and removing myself in spirit, putting a “I’m too good for this” face on. And then I clocked it and thought “No, don’t leave. Stay. These folks are in pain. Maybe you can help.” It worked. I told my therapist about it and he reflected back that I’m not gonna change overnight (something that, as someone who dabs in black-and-white thinking, I’m prone to believe), and that sometimes my introverted self will kick in just because I’m exhausted. He encouraged me to explore a way to take care of myself without having to alienate others; sometimes, the best defense is just a defense, not an offense. The next time it happened, when someone asked me if I wanted to join a group for dinner and I truly could not bring myself to do it, I just smiled and said “not tonight, but thank you so much for the invitation.” I didn’t act like I was to good for it: I was just tired, and that’s okay.
Truth be told, I haven’t ever struggled to perform publicly. I still remember the day I discovered it, during a class in college in which no one wanted to present their project first so I volunteered. I thought to myself “wow, I’m not nervous about presenting.” And it’s true: I seldom rehearse any public speaking or talkback appearances. I just jump on it and figure it out as I go — the latest example being the Playwrights Realm gala, in which I was supposed to read a short script for the silent auction and instead turned it into an impromptu standup routine about how I’d have to return my suit the next day because I couldn’t afford it and people should bid to help me keep it, which made the audience laugh. But in those cases, I usually dissociate: I mostly have no memory of it once it’s over. The challenge has been to stay in my body, to practice vulnerability not because I will for sure not get hurt, but because I can get hurt and still survive. I wanna remember those moments, those connections.
Talking about this emergence of the social self, my therapist encouraged me to explore other areas of my personality I might also have been taking for granted. He gave me the homework of doing “one thing I hate” that week. As I’ve mentioned before, I hate sports; I was in California with my friend Lilly and they run almost every day, so I told them “I wanna join you on your run tomorrow.” Did I discover that I love running and, by extension, sports? No. But I did run that day (a lot less than Lilly, but still) and then the day after… and now I’m running every week. I hate it, but I also love that I can do it and not die. Maybe one day, it’ll be the same with vulnerability: I’ll speak of the things I’m ashamed of and I’ll hate it, but I’ll live — and in the process, I’ll keep expanding the bubble to fit more people in.
I guess this is just a very long-winded way of saying: I finally took the plunge and deactivated my Instagram, truly living up to the “I’m not on social media” thing I had been spouting for over a year. Granted, I was only posting pictures of Chester on Instagram, not scrolling, but still: I am now truly not findable on the socials. But please know that I am eager to connect, and if you wanna hang (in any of the in-person events I’ve been organizing, or just because), I’d love to have the opportunity to know you better and, hopefully, allow you to get to know me.