I got a rain check for 2016. We’ll start over in 2017. The Gregorian year has only an indirect determinant effect on what happens to us. The only reason it does is that institutional life is regulated by it: taxes are paid by April; end of the year Holidays separate the Fall academic semester from the Spring academic semester; insurance applications are done in the turn of the year; etc. All this can have great impact on anyone’s life, but the dates, themselves, have no causative effect. Stars are burning spheres somewhere far, far away, often in another galaxy. Those pretty bright dots in the sky are just a reflex of something that happened millions or billions of years ago. They can’t help or hurt us.
Still, the year matters. We live in this extremely bureaucratic and institutionalized society and yes, the Gregorian year is very material.
When 2016 was supposed to have started, it just didn’t. My year was supposed to have been a hard struggle of a couple – my husband and I – chasing their dreams. It started upside down, though: Eric was arrested, all – absolutely all plus more – of my financial resources were taken, my siblings took off their benign masks and made a point to humiliate me into self-destruction (but I didn’t). Everything pointed to Eric being a genius con artist, me being a sitting duck, my siblings defending “something”. I build an explanatory model for that, which succumbed to data. I have no idea about who destroyed my life and why.
I was accepted as permanent resident in the United States under the “exceptional ability” (EB-1 visa) provision, managed to find my new self out of the original mess and emerged from nightmares and soul searching as an Oklahoma resident Educator. Yes, with a capital E.
During the last 12 months, I was exposed to the worse and unimaginable in human nature, family, the sports and my sport. My recurrent nightmares put me in the middle of nowhere, with no money or documents, fleeing from something, or being told to have sex with some disgusting man and obeying it, being pushed under the bar in some strange, hostile, unruled platform, or teaching at 7AM at a school operated by a Transnational Criminal Organization. All horrors of my life blended this year and, believe me, it is surreal. There is no other word.
The positive outcomes, though, are so positive that they, too, look surreal.
As many good authors claim, there is nothing as unbelievable as reality and History. No fiction will ever come close to it.
Here’s to chance: for the good and for the horrible.
Here’s to merit, because it is the only chance out of horror.
The following are the chapters of this end of the year review. I’m publishing for the sake of documental record. I’m publishing it as an effort to make sense of the absurd to myself and to those that enjoy a good thriller. And I am publishing this as a warning to my criminal enemies that I figured things out and there is post-mortem evidence out there. It will remain peacefully hidden as long as they leave me alone, forever.
Chapters:
The year that never started: destruction, betrayal and surviving it all – part 2
The deconstruction of a model: what really happened? – part 3
Powerlifting: dishonor, doubt and the first bomb-out. Brewing a new beginning – part 4
The PTSD and suicide risk veteran cause – part 5